Salvation City (15 page)

The pandemic had caused major interruptions in the production and distribution of goods, and that included the illegal ones. At the same time, it had created hordes of unprotected boys and girls. As a growing number of these children—many more girls than boys—began to disappear, it was clear that they were falling into the hands of human traffickers, whose own numbers kept growing now that other illegal trades, like drug dealing, had become much harder to ply. Evil, too, has to eat. The traffickers kept their eyes on the children’s homes, and runaways were sometimes overtaken within yards of their own front door. Sometimes the foxes didn’t wait for the chickens to fly the coop. In Boston, a man, his wife, and their teenaged daughter all volunteered to work in the same children’s home with the purpose of procuring minors for a porn ring.

Long after the last case of pandemic influenza had been diagnosed, the bodies of young people would keep turning up, victims of hunger, exposure, various infections, murder, and (more and more) suicide. But the pandemic had inured people to the sight of young corpses. Far scarier to many Americans were the living: kids of all ages who’d banded together and were surviving by their (criminal) wits, often under the head of one or more nefarious adults. Fierce and sometimes murderous gangs that had come to menace every city and suburb and many small towns, where they often outnumbered police.

In the wake of the pandemic, there was no shortage of places to hide out or squat. Houses and buildings and sometimes entire streets stood abandoned. The flu had even turned some rural villages into ghost towns. There were plenty of ordinary citizens who’d survived the virus but whose lives had been ruined by the pandemic in one way or another and who now found themselves squatting side by side with criminals. Those who’d seen the slums and shantytowns and refugee camps in countries crushed by warfare or poverty compared the new settlements to such places.

Though their house, like their income, was small, Pastor Wyatt and Tracy would have liked to take in more than one child. But, as Tracy put it: “The authorities keep banging us into walls.” In fact, they now considered it a miracle they had managed to get Cole. Even in his case, there’d been so many questions and hesitations that Pastor Wyatt had lost his temper—only to be shouted down by a child welfare official who informed him that, bad as things were, they weren’t so bad yet that people could just drop in and pick out a kid like a puppy.

“And let’s face it,” he told Pastor Wyatt unapologetically. “It wouldn’t exactly be the first time a man of God turned out to be a you-know-what.”

Boots Ludwig, though he was past seventy and had eighteen grandchildren, wanted to adopt “a whole football team and all the cheerleaders.” He spent a lot of broadcast time thundering against the system. “Let my children go!” It was a matter of urgency in more ways than one: many of the orphans were unsaved.

“If it weren’t for those godless pigheaded fools, we could get those kids right with God before it’s too late.” In which case, they would be spared the great tribulation.

 

 

 

Boots Ludwig liked to say the reason he loved radio so much was that he was too ugly for television. In fact, it wasn’t so much that he was ugly as that he looked as if he’d been slapped together in a rush: one of his shoulders was higher than the other and he had tiny dark eyes, like coffee beans, stuck unevenly on either side of a nose that had been broken in boyhood and had healed askew. He always dressed Western, from the boots that gave him his nickname to his hat, and he wore several chunky rings, like brass knuckles, on each hand. Of all the people Cole had drawn, drawing Boots was the most fun. PW said Boots was only joking about the reason he preferred radio. The truth was, both men regarded it as the superior means of spreading the Word.

“The idiot box has a way of putting everything on the same superficial plane. Plus the remote encourages a short attention span.”

Contempt for TV was one thing PW and Cole’s parents had in common.

“Televangelism,” said PW. “To most folks today it’s a dirty word. I can’t tell you how much I hate the word myself. Oh, I can see how it looked like a great idea at first, preacher’s dream, beaming the Good News into millions of homes—where’s the downside? But just look what happened. Greed, theft, false testimony, megalomania, cult of personality. I’m not saying Satan created TV, I’m just saying he really knows how to work it.”

Also like Cole’s parents, PW thought people would be better off with a lot less “e” and “i” in their lives.

“I’m all for Christians connecting online, sharing stories and music and videos and such. But remember, it’s always better to be together, in church or some other safe place, worshipping or doing Bible study or community service—whatever—than to be sitting home alone clicking away.”

Cole had always thought it was lame the way so many ordinary people wanted to post pages with photos of themselves and lists of all their favorite things and have everyone follow their every dumb move—like, who cared? He’d never kept a journal, but he was sure if he ever did he wouldn’t want it to be where the whole world could read it! What would be the point? Still, it was way strange at first, living in a house where the only computer you were allowed to use was in the breakfast nook (he was still in the hospital when he learned that his laptop, along with his parents’ laptops and everything else of value, had been looted from their house in Little Leap) and set up so that every site you browsed could be checked by someone else. His parents had never done that, but they would have approved of PW’s preaching a gospel of a less noisy and distracted life. They would have given an amen to his call for the need to break the hold the Internet had on people’s lives, especially young lives. Say what you would about the pandemic, at least it had helped slow down the rat race. It had also got people thinking more about the world to come. In communities like Salvation City, life had become simpler and more purpose-driven. People were sticking closer to home, spending more time with their families. And everywhere church attendance had soared.

According to Pastor Wyatt, what Christians had needed to figure out was that they’d had it right
before
. Dirtying their hands in politics, trying to influence the government and change the laws—all that he and many other Christians now declared a mistake. “We only made fools of ourselves. Everyone seemed to forget the saying that politics is the art of compromise, and that’s just not where our church is at. What do we care how we look to the rest of the world? What matters is how we look to God. Why should we waste energy trying to win other folks’ respect? Don’t we got a more important job than that? I want my flock to care less about what secular folks are up to and more about their own spiritual lives.”

It was said that when the Antichrist came he would make use of the Internet to lure people from the true path. Certain hidden codes were said to be already in place, waiting to be activated.

But why was it the Antichrist who got to use the Net? Cole wanted to know. Why wouldn’t Christ use it, too?

When Cole asked about this in Bible study, Mason’s one eye twinkled and he said, “Who’s to say he won’t use it, little bruh? Maybe he will. Maybe he’ll decide to have his very own blog. Wouldn’t that be dope?”

But PW said, “Jesus won’t need the Net nor any other worldly tool. He’ll be on his white charger, he’ll be wearing his blood-red robes, he’ll have his sword and his army of angels and saints. All the trumpets will be blowing.
Behold, he is coming with the clouds, and every eye will see him.
Revelation, my boy! The King of kings! Say now, why would my Lord need a blog?”

 

 

 

Boots Ludwig and Pastor Wyatt were good friends, but that didn’t mean they always saw eye to eye. When Boots and his wife, Heidi, came to dinner, the two men often argued, as they often argued when they were on the air. They argued about more or less the same things all the time.

Boots accused PW of being too soft. He made it seem easy to be a Christian, Boots said, when being a Christian was never easy and was never meant to be. These days, too many preachers made the church sound like a warm, cozy nest where all you had to do was curl up and be loved. At heart everyone was a good little boy or girl, and however they might have strayed, the good Lord, like some soft-touch daddy, was happy to forgive them.

“Oh, I hear you, Boots, and I know what you want. You want me to put a little more fire and brimstone into it. Use scare tactics. Send folks home with their knees knocking and their teeth chattering in their heads. But you know, nowadays, the last thing I want to do is foment fear. I think we’ve already seen enough of the damage
that
can do. You know as well as I do, when folks get scared, that’s when ‘What would Jesus do?’ tends to go right out the window.”

“Well, I’m the kind of man, if there’s something that doesn’t sit right with me, then you know I got to speak out—”

“And I am listening, my friend. Aren’t I listening?”

“—and I don’t like coming out of worship service and seeing every kind of expression on people’s faces but the appropriate one. Seems to me, leaving church, you ought to have some mighty sober thoughts inside your head. It shouldn’t be the same as if you were leaving a ball game or a party. People shouldn’t be yakking away about what’s for dinner, and why hello there, Mrs. Ludwig, you do look fine today, is that a new dress, and so on.”

Speaking of Mrs. Ludwig, Tracy often did just that after listening to one of Boots’s tirades, and usually it was the same two words:
Poor Heidi
.

Heidi Ludwig was amazingly fat—globular—a circus fat lady. Even her scalp was fat. She hadn’t taken a plane anywhere in years, but the last time she’d flown, Cole was awestruck to hear, the airline had made her pay for two seats. Cole would have loved to sketch Mrs. Ludwig, but he didn’t think it was possible to draw her as she was without seeming mean. He’d had the same problem with Mason, but then Mason himself had insisted he wanted Cole to draw him. Cole had done his best, but he simply could not get the scarred part right, and Mason had come out looking like a pirate.

Boots said, “I can’t help feeling sometimes when you talk about sin it goes in one ear and out the other. Maybe it’s because you’re always smiling.”

“That’s what happens when I get filled with the Spirit.”

Another thing Boots couldn’t stomach was the praise songs of the church’s worship band. “What’s wrong with the old hymns? ‘Victory in Jesus,’ ‘His Eye Is on the Sparrow.’ Those are songs you could sing with your head high! And don’t give me the same old argument about changing times. Nothing sadder than a bunch of Christians trying to prove they’re every bit as hip as the lost—unless it’s a bunch of Christians coming up with an idea like Testamints. I tell you, when Christ Almighty comes, he’s gonna go after those who dare to sell things like breath mints in his name like he went after the sheep traders and the money changers—with a scourge!
My father’s house is not a place of business
.”

“Boots, you know I don’t like Jesus junk any more than you do, but maybe you need to lighten up.”

“Now Heidi tells me the gals are starting a Knitting for Jesus group. I got nothing against knitting, but you know well as I do it’s just another coffee klatsch. They’re not knitting for the Lord any more than those Testamints are ‘Christian’ candy. And you know it gets to me, hearing the way some people jabber on about the end times. I mean, we are talking about Armageddon, the mother of all battles, like every WMD on the planet going off at the same time, and these gals—just listen to them. It’s like they’re planning a big shopping expedition or some kind of holiday.”

Had the flu been a plague sent by God as a pre-Apocalyptic punishment? Boots thought so. “We know from the Bible that when a society violates God’s laws he will punish that society long before Judgment Day.” And when listeners to
Heaven’s A-Poppin’!
are invited to call in, most of them say they think Boots is right.

But PW said nobody could know for sure, just as no one could know for sure what would happen to children in the rapture. PW believed all children who were too young to have accepted Jesus would be saved, but Boots insisted this was contrary to Scripture.

“The children of the saved will surely be raptured with their parents. But the others, well, take a look at the Flood. Take a look at the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah. God didn’t spare the children then, not even babies in the womb.”

“But we know that Jesus loved children above all,” argued PW. “We know that he is coming to destroy evil and bring perfect justice forever, and I cannot see him casting babies into the bottomless pit because their parents turned their backs on his gift. I can’t wrap my mind around our just and merciful savior doing this cruel and monstrous thing. I admit in this case there’s no crystal-clear verse. But I believe that although everything in the Bible is true, that doesn’t mean every truth is revealed there. We have to accept there’s a lot we don’t know. God may have some special plan for these children that we won’t find out about till the end.”

One evening, as the two men argued straight through dinner, Heidi fell asleep in her chair. With a sigh Tracy got up and started clearing the table. Starlyn, who lived with her divorced mother in Louisville, happened to be visiting for the weekend, as she did once or twice a month. She, too, left the table and followed her aunt into the kitchen. After a few minutes Cole picked up his plate and carried it into the kitchen, where he found Tracy clutching her middle, all flushed and teary from the effort to contain her laughter. Before her stood Starlyn, a metal colander clapped upside down on her head and a wooden spoon in her hand. Hitching one shoulder higher than the other, she flourished the spoon like a drum majorette, silently moving her lips as Boots’s voice boomed from the dining room.