Baptism in Blood (13 page)

Gregor scooped up his maps and his books and his newspaper clippings and sat down in the aisle seat. The train had begun to shudder and rattle, the way trains did when the tracks under their wheels got complicated. Out­side, Gregor could see the start of a small industrial center, the smokestacks and metal-sided buildings, the warehouses and big flat parking lots full of heavy trucks. Gregor got his briefcase off the floor and stuffed the mess into it. Then he got the still unopened diet Coke out of his pocket and de­cided he didn’t want to drink it after all.

Really, Gregor thought. I don’t know anything at all about the New South. I don’t know anything at all about North Carolina. It’s not only wrong to judge by stereo­types, it’s stupid, especially when you’re involved in a mur­der case.

Out beyond the tracks, the warehouses gave way to billboards. Some of them advertised HBO and termite extermination services. More of them advertised cigarettes and Jesus Christ. It was as if the only way to save your soul was to die of lung cancer while praying.

I have to stop this,
Gregor told himself.

Then he stood up and began to get his luggage down off the overhead rack. The train was swaying so much, he nearly fell twice.

Out on the tracks, a billboard with Jesse Helms’s face on it appeared out of nowhere, fat and round and big enough to swallow Detroit.

T
HE FIRST THING GREGOR
noticed about North Carolina was that the women there dressed in brighter colors than the women in Philadelphia. Where train stations in Philly were full of brown and black and beige, this one was over­run with pastels and primaries. Gregor saw a woman in a lemon yellow suit and lemon yellow shoes, and another in a dress that must have been fuchsia. She had fuchsia shoes on, too. Then there was the hair, and the makeup. Bennis Hannaford went weeks without wearing makeup. Gregor didn’t think Donna Moradanyan had ever worn any makeup at all. These women all seemed to have eye shadow coordi­nated with their nail polish—and their nail polish wasn’t chipped, either. How did women learn to do things like this to themselves? What did it mean that they did? Gregor threaded his way carefully through them, realizing, after a while, that he had started to be much more polite, and much more tentative, than he usually was around women. Maybe that was supposed to be the point, but he didn’t think Bennis Hannaford’s thoroughly feminist soul would like it any.

David Sandler was waiting for him at the place where the platforms spilled their passengers into the main con­course. It wasn’t much of a concourse, not like the one in Philadelphia, but it was bright and clean and cheerful. Even David Sandler was cheerful. Gregor was used to him in his Columbia University professor mode: tweed jackets, dark ties, dark slacks, black leather shoes. This David Sandler was wearing a pair of battered-looking chinos and a bright orange T-shirt. He was carrying a sky blue windbreaker in his hands. Obviously, Gregor thought, whatever it was about colors that had infected the female half of the North Carolina population had infected the male half just as much.

Gregor excused himself to a young woman in a green-and-white-striped skirt and three miles of curling dark hair and waved to David Sandler with the hand he was holding the briefcase in. David held out his own hand and captured the briefcase.

“There you are,” he said to Gregor. “I didn’t recog­nize you. You look depressed as hell.”

“Thanks a lot,” Gregor said.

“I’m the one who’s supposed to be depressed as hell,” David said. “I guess I am, most of the time. But it was a good ride up here. North Carolina is a beautiful place.”

They were headed out of the terminal into the parking lot. All Gregor could see were cars and billboards.

“Is Bellerton far from here?” he asked. “I tried to look it up on the map, but all I got was confused. You get down to the coast and it looks like you run out of road.”

“You do, sort of. Bellerton’s not on any kind of main thoroughfare. It’s on the water.”

“I know that, David.”

“Yeah, well. There are advantages to being out of the way like that. Things you wouldn’t necessarily think about. Like drugs.”

“Drugs?”

“Right.” David was leading them across the parking lot, threading them through cars and pickup trucks. “The two big drug routes on this side of the country are 95 and 301. Anyplace with access to either of those highways tends to be absolutely full of dope. Why not? You’re going to run a shipment up to New York, you might as well stop off in a few small towns on the way and make a fast buck or two. Drugs.”

“And Bellerton doesn’t have drugs,” Gregor said carefully.

David snorted. “Of course Bellerton has drugs, Gregor. Two-bit elementary schools in Montana have drugs these days. Bellerton doesn’t have as many drugs as, say, Raleigh itself. Or Chapel Hill. Anyway,” David said, “it isn’t only the drugs. It’s the tourists. We get tourists. We get a lot of tourists. I started out down here as a tourist. The thing is, we don’t get the kind of crowds you get in places like Hatteras. It’s quieter that way.”

Gregor thought of all the clippings in his briefcase. “I wouldn’t think it was very quiet now. With the Oklahoma City thing on hold for the moment and nothing new hap­pening to O.J., you people seem to be the biggest game in town.”

“I know. I find myself wishing that something awful would happen to somebody else, so I wouldn’t have to watch the media invade Rose’s gift shop anymore. But there you are.”

“Is Rose one of the people I’m supposed to meet?”

“You’ll have to meet everybody,” David said. “Small towns are like that. And this small town is an absolute hotbed. It makes
Peyton Place
read like children’s litera­ture.”

“You didn’t put any of that in your letters.”

“I didn’t want to. Christ, Gregor—and I use the word ‘Christ’ advisedly—you wouldn’t believe the kind of thing that goes on. Even I didn’t know about most of it until all this happened and people started talking to me.”

“I would believe it,” Gregor said. “But what kind of thing are you talking about? Sex?”

“Of course I’m not talking about sex. Sex would be normal.”

“Sex isn’t always normal.”

“In Bellerton, sex isn’t always sex,” David said. “But it isn’t sex I’m talking about. It’s religion.”

“Do you mean cult religion? Like these devil wor­shippers the Raleigh paper is always talking about?”

“I mean religion, Gregor. Plain old ordinary religion. Christianity, just like we all grew up with, except people who are lucky, like Zhondra Meyer, who grew up as Jews.”

“I think there are several hundred thousand Moslems in the country now,” Gregor said, straight-faced.

David Sandler stopped dead in his tracks. “Gregor, listen. I have spent my life campaigning against religion. I don’t believe in God. I do believe that most of the worst things that have happened to the human race have been the result of believing in a God who isn’t there, because there isn’t any God anywhere and we all know it if we’re honest with ourselves. I’ve written articles full of scare stories about the religious right and felt I was doing the right thing. But do you know what, Gregor? I thought I was exaggerating. I thought I was
exaggerating.
”

“And?”

“And I wasn’t. Hell, I was understating the case. I’m telling you. You absolutely won’t believe what’s going on down here. You couldn’t have the faintest idea. This is the car,” David said.

David put his hand down on the hood of a purple Ford pickup truck. Gregor felt the bottom drop out of his stom­ach. The bed at the back of the truck was filled with lumber and fertilizer. Gregor didn’t think he had ever ridden in a pickup truck before.

“Where’s your car?” he asked David, trying not to sound panicked. “You don’t drive this thing in New York.”

“I don’t drive anything in New York. I can’t get insurance I can afford. I’ve got a regular car down in Bellerton, Gregor, but I had some things I had to pick up. You’re not worried about riding in a truck, are you?”

Gregor was silent.

David got his keys out of his chinos. “I’ve got one of those Darwin magnets for the back of this thing, but I took it off to come up and get you. They’re always telling you how suffocating and intolerant small towns are, Gregor, but I tell you, I’d much rather be driving around with that thing on my car in Bellerton than here. No Christian Nazis in Bellerton.”

Gregor didn’t think David should call anybody a “Christian Nazi” while he was standing in the middle of a parking lot in the Bible Belt. Gregor put his foot up on the silver steel footboard and tried to haul himself up. It didn’t quite work. David took the luggage.

“You’ve got to grab on with your hands and pull,” David said. Then, instead of helping Gregor in, he went around the front of the truck and got in himself.

Gregor grabbed onto the sides of the doorway and pulled. He tried to remember what it had been like to climb into a tank when he was in the army, but he had only done that once, and the experience wouldn’t come back to him.

“You all right?” David asked him.

Gregor knew David didn’t really want an answer. The truck’s engine was already humming. Gregor leaned half­way out of the cab and slammed his door shut, and as soon as he did the truck began to back out of its parking space. Gregor fumbled frantically for his seat belt. The sides were tangled up in each other.

“It’s a nice ride down to Bellerton.” David spoke over the roar of what Gregor thought must be a defective muffler. “You wait and see. I’m going to move down here permanently when I’m ready to retire.”

Like talking about “Christian Nazis” in the parking lot, Gregor thought this was probably a bad idea. City boys did not move easily into the country. Gregor knew that from his own experience. David was something more exotic than a simple city boy, too. He was a true intellectual, one of the last in existence. Heresy was a necessary ingre­dient in the very air he breathed.

They were out of the parking lot now and bumping along an in-town potholed back road. The road was lined with billboards, almost all of them about cigarettes. The Marlboro Man had taken up residence right next door to Joe Camel. In the distance, Gregor could see crosses lit up with neon, glowing red even in the clear light of day.

“I don’t know,” he told David Sandler. “Somehow, this wasn’t the way I’d imagined you’d want to retire.”

A
CTUALLY, IT GOT MORE
and more like a place Gregor could imagine David retiring to the farther and farther they got from the Raleigh-Durham-Chapel Hill triangle. Com­mercial buildings and tightly packed housing developments gave way to open country. Closely crowded billboards gave way to well-spaced ones that appeared like surprises in a birthday cracker along the sides of the road. There was something comforting about the gentle flatness of it all, and the temperature that was neither too hot nor too cold, and the breeze that blew in through the windows of the truck, never too sharp or grating or strong. What was really sur­prising was the utter emptiness of it all. Sometimes the billboards were the only signs of life for miles. What houses there were were few and far between and very small. Gregor never saw any people in them. There were very few other cars on the road, too, and those there were all had out-of-state license plates. This was one of the main routes to Orlando and Disney World. People came through with their car packed solid and their children crying in the backseat.

After about twenty minutes, David turned off the main road onto a two-lane blacktop. Gregor looked right and left and saw, finally, the South he remembered from so many years ago. There were a few of those solid-looking new brick ranch houses he had seen from the train, but there were also the wooden shacks with their swaybacked roofs and their sagging porches, the washes hung out on lines, the cars missing tires in the side yards. Every once in a while, he saw children, but not many of them. It was the middle of a fall day. The children would be in school. Ev­ery once in a while, he saw an old person, sitting on a porch step. These old people were almost always male. David leaned forward and turned the truck’s radio on to a country station. A singer Gregor didn’t know was singing something apparently called “Pickup Man.”.

“I was beginning to think all that about the New South was true,” Gregor said. “This certainly looks like the old South to me.”

“All that stuff about the New South is true,” David said. “It’s just that it applies where it applies and it doesn’t apply where it doesn’t apply. I doubt if half the people who work in the Research Triangle even know all this stuff is here.”

“Don’t they have to drive through it every once in a while?”

David shrugged. “Maybe. They probably just don’t pay attention. Why should they? Take a good look at it, Gregor. This is the real dung heap of history. All that high-tech stuff in Raleigh is the future.”

“If that’s really true, I’m not going to qualify for the future,” Gregor said. “Is Bellerton like this?”

“This poor, you mean? No. It never was. It was turned into a kind of resort by old Meyer the Robber Baron, if you know who I mean. It’s always been a kind of upscale stop­ping point for weary society people. That’s how we ended up with Zhondra Meyer and her women’s retreat. Which is what started all this, as far as I can tell.”

“Zhondra Meyer is the woman who runs a camp for lesbians,” Gregor said, trying to make certain he had it all sorted out in his head.

David made an exasperated gesture in the air. “She’s playing radical hostess to a bunch of women who are more sinned against than sinning, if you know what I mean. I mean, some of them may actually be lesbians in the classic sense, by which I mean they were born with a sexual orien­tation in that direction, but most of them are just worn out. Their husbands beat them or threw them out. Their children have no respect for them. They don’t have much education and they haven’t got much in the way of employment records. Stray cats.”

“And Zhondra Meyer collects stray cats?”

“Something like that. I think it makes her feel good about herself, which is what everybody’s after in life these days.”