Welcome to Fred (The Fred Books) (26 page)

Dad was still looking at me. The glasses were off, the smile was gone, but the twinkle was back. I decided to ignore the second voice. Any voice that said, “No harm, no foul.” was asking for it, in my opinion.

“Meaning . . . ah, well . . . yes, uh . . . maybe the scientists aren’t the only ones who look for answers that match their prejudices. Like hearing ‘Elder’ and assuming it’s a title and not a first name.”

The twinkle in Dad’s eye froze and shattered like an icicle dropping silently into the snow. His eyes narrowed slightly and his look grew harder for a second, but then grew vacant, as if he were thinking of something else.

The silence seemed suddenly ominous. “A rather unusual first name,” I added, lamely.

My addendum roused Dad from the reflection he seemed to have fallen into. “So, you dare to suggest that the emperor is underdressed?”

“Huh? I mean, what?”

“It seems you have given this a lot of thought. The Grand Canyon, I mean. And other things, apparently, but for now, we’ll stick with the Grand Canyon.”

“OK.” That was fine with me. I feared I had gone too far with the Elder comment.

“So, what exactly are you saying?”

I slapped my hand down on the Grand Canyon book like Pastor Bates closing in for the kill amidst a crowd of heathens. “OK. So, we have these scientists who are all pretty smart, even if they might be too smart for their own good, and their job is to figure out how things work. Right? So, they have thought about this thing for a long time, and they figure it took millions of years to make the Grand Canyon. OK, so maybe they see it this way because they want to, or maybe they see it that way because that’s what really happened. Don’t people who believe this Bishop Ussher guy also have prejudices? Can’t they also decide that the Grand Canyon didn’t take long to make because that’s the way that fits their prejudices?” It was all coming out in a rush, and I didn’t want to stop for fear of what I might hear, so I kept babbling on.

“Even this yom thing might be seeing the things the way we want to. I mean, people who study ancient Hebrew think that when people back then used this yom word, they meant only twenty-four hours. They’re really only guessing, right? What if the scientists are right and the people who study ancient Hebrew are wrong? Maybe Moses, or whoever it was that wrote Genesis, didn’t necessarily mean a twenty-four-hour day. Maybe he just used that word because they didn’t have a word for ‘geological age.’”

I came to an abrupt end and dropped the book on the table. There it was, all out in the open. And then there was the other thing. The one I didn’t want to mention.

Dad had listened to my diatribe quietly, but with interest. “But they did.”

“Huh?”

“They did have a word that meant ‘an era’ or ‘a long time.’ It’s olam. So if Moses had meant an era, don’t you think he would have used olam and not yom?”

That’s the danger of going to the play-offs where the other team has the home-court advantage. Sometimes I just can’t get a break to save my life. I had one round left in the chamber, but I was afraid to use it. I felt like I was using a musket against a grizzly bear. Against some targets you should shoot to kill or don’t shoot at all. But I had spent two years wrestling with Twain’s Stranger, and I was gorged with questions like a seedpod about to burst open. The time had come. I pulled the trigger.

“So, what if Moses was wrong? What if the earth is really billions of years old but that idea didn’t fit Moses’ prejudices, being from a very practical people, and so he wrote it in the only way he could understand it, even though it didn’t really happen that way?”

Dad looked at me thoughtfully. “So, what you’re really asking is, ‘What if the Bible is wrong?’”

“Yeah. I mean, yes, sir.”

A silence grew, stretching out like a tendril from a vine crawling across a wall. Dad looked at the Grand Canyon book, then at me. “That’s an even better question.”

“It is?” Of course, I thought it was, but I was surprised that he thought so too.

“Yes. It shows you’re thinking, not just following along. That can be dangerous, but it can also be good.”

“OK, but what if the Bible is wrong?” Now that I had the question out, I wanted an answer. Two years is a long time to a teenager.

“Then we among men are most miserable.” I looked at him, uncomprehending, but didn’t say anything. I figured he would eventually explain himself.

“Deciding if the Bible is true or not is not really an intellectual question; it is a spiritual question. When we get home, I can drop a stack of books on you that will list all the factual and historical reasons why you should take the accuracy of the Bible seriously. It’s entertaining if you like that sort of thing, which I do. But it’s really nothing more than a different kind of crossword puzzle.”

I continued to look at him blankly. I figured I would prefer Bradbury and Asimov to whatever books he had in his library. And I wasn’t getting it.

“The real issue is not what scientists say, or what layer in which you find a fossil, or what word Moses used in Genesis. If you want to find out if the Bible is true, you should ask Parker Walker. Or Sonia.” He sat silent for a moment. “Or maybe,” he added, quietly, “the daughter of Pastor Jordan, if you could.”

I wasn’t following him, but I figured I had asked enough questions for one session. I picked up the Grand Canyon book and resumed my reading.

CHAPTER THIRTY
That night I lay in the belly of the Beast, canvas angling above my head and netting on three sides, daring sleep to overtake me to the lullaby of eighteen-wheelers growling down Highway 57. I reflected on the vacation. The breakdowns and counting it all joy, the fiasco of Fate and the counterculture, the majesty of the Canyon, however it was dug.

All year long this trip had haunted me with the assurance that my destiny awaited me in California. I thought of earlier times, of nights lying in the dark in Ohio, where the AM radio whispered nebulous promises of another world in my ear and visions of sugar cubes danced in my head. I thought of my first steps toward Camelot, picking out the right color of paisley shirts with M. And the untimely death of that dream.

I thought of the netherworld of culture where I had spent the last half-decade in free fall, adrift in the doldrums and finally tacking against the prevailing winds as I caught a glimpse of that long forgotten vision of Avalon. Of the vacation that had rekindled the hope deferred.

I had expected Fate to usher me into a new existence, to finally be accepted for who I was and not what I was expected to be. I had been vigilant, examining every moment for the possibility of enlightenment. Boldly I rode, and well, to the dunes of the beach, plunged in the freezing spray, mine not to question why, although someone had indeed blundered.

The haunting laugh of a girl in a yellow microbus had slapped me back to my senses. In the bathhouse, despair had poured over me like the water that washed away the salt of the sea and of my own tears. I knew the chance would never come again, and even if it did, it didn’t matter. I would never be more than a pale, skinny preacher’s kid, standing on the outside looking in.

I was startled back to consciousness by a realization. I had actually challenged one of Dad’s ideas. And instead of accusing me of blasphemy or rebellion, he had taken what I had to say seriously. He hadn’t demanded that I snap to attention and march in lockstep with him. He listened and offered his perspective, but he also allowed me to come to my own conclusions. Stunned, I realized that Dad’s approval was more important to me than the acceptance of all the Flower Children in Eden. The meeting that Fate had for me wasn’t on a beach with a willing and nubile nymph in hip huggers and a headband. It was under an orange-and-yellow umbrella with my own dad. He had been the one to accept me for who I was and not what I was expected to be.

Not that he agreed with me, but he wasn’t making me walk back to Texas. At least he didn’t say anything about it before we went to bed. He could be saving it as a surprise.

Awake again, I wondered what he meant, that I should ask Pauline Jordan if the Bible was true. I thought about the scene at Pastor Jordan’s church. I had finally learned the contents of the letter. I thought about it in the light of my discovery. It looked as if she had been seeking the same thing: her dad’s approval. But she had discovered something more. Even though her dad had banished her along with Vic, she said there was nothing to forgive.

For years I had wondered about her death. When she rushed out of the alley with a knife, I was certain she intended to kill the man who had stolen her son. But instead, she died saving his life. The tortuous paths of her ramblings were hard to follow, but I thought I might have finally discovered the secret to her confusing end. Could she have forgiven Vic? Or maybe come to the startling revelation that there was nothing to forgive? Could her forgiveness have been the act that had saved his life and ended hers?

For the first time, I wondered how Vic had dealt with her sudden appearance. He probably had not realized she was stalking him, probably had not even given her a thought for years. Then, on an innocuous spring night, he was plunged into a nightmare of violence, only to see the woman whom he had so egregiously wronged appear from the shadows and give her own life to save his. Had it changed his life?

An image of Parker kneeling amidst broken glass, head buried in Mac’s lap, flashed into my mind, followed by a picture of Sonia’s bruised face wet with tears, overwhelmed with the discovery that the Harmons still loved her like a daughter. Dad’s advice had been to ask Parker, Sonia, and Pauline if the Bible was true. I didn’t follow him then, but now I saw the scarlet thread that joined them all. It seemed I had been surrounded by stories of redemption and had been too dense, or self-absorbed, to realize it.

I reached up to wipe tears from my face and only then realized I was crying. In my mind I saw the Mysterious Stranger, perfect and aloof, with his message of despair and abandonment. I sensed I was at a crossroad. I could accept his rational but bitter interpretation of the seemingly mindless machine of nature, or I could embrace the image of God, tortured and bleeding, hanging on a cross in a desperate attempt to communicate an incomprehensible message of love and forgiveness.

I quietly groped in my suitcase, extracted
The Mysterious Stranger
, and slipped out of the Beast. The box of matches was next to the grill where we had cooked our supper. I watched the flames, feeding in pages until the last one crumbled into black ash. I then returned to bed, turned the AM radio to a low volume, and put it under the pillow like I used to do so many years ago in Ohio. I fell asleep to the Staple Singers promising me they would take me there.

The next morning we retrieved the car, hooked it to the Beast, and shook the dust of California from our feet. The return trip was anticlimactic. Spurning all those sights we had wondered over when driving west, our one goal, contrary to the instincts of most of the population, was to arrive in Fred as quickly as possible. We sped as swiftly as the stall-outs would allow us, like nomads fleeing a distant evil.

With a literal cheer we crossed the Texas state line; traversed the vast expanses of West Texas, as well as the rolling hills and black dirt of Central Texas; and had reached East Texas when our final adventure befell us. Somewhere around Madisonville, the Galaxy blew out a tire. The right rear tire. If that tire sounds familiar, it should. It was the one that had been replaced only days before in a shop that used air tools. Dad and I emerged from the car and began to change it. The lug nuts were incredibly difficult to remove. We had to jump on the tire tool to turn them. After Herculean effort, we removed all but one.

Dad, always inventive in the face of insurmountable odds, used a Craftsman socket and a break-over handle to no avail. He added an extra length of pipe for more leverage and got a split socket for his pains. An extended survey of our options left us with one choice. Dad fished the cold chisel and a hammer from the toolbox and began chipping away at the nut, cursing (in an entirely wholesome and family-appropriate fashion) the inventor of impact wrenches.

For those unfamiliar with the wholesome, family-appropriate form of cursing, it went something along these lines: “A pox on the miserable cur who in a drunken frenzy of iniquitous pride ever blasphemed the Name of all that’s holy by inflicting the innocent and unsuspecting saints with such a diabolical device as the impact wrench.” This was sometimes followed by a string of inarticulate, guttural sounds, reminiscent of a bobcat chewing on a porcupine while caught in a wolf trap, which I took to be groanings too deep to be uttered.

We took turns cursing and chiseling, and succeeded in peeling the nut from the lug after only an hour in the baking roadside heat of a Texas July. We took pictures to commemorate the event and proceeded on our way. Three weeks after our departure, we rolled into the greater Fred metropolitan area. We had survived yet another Cloud vacation, one like no other. I was confused by my emotions, never dreaming that I would be happy to return to Fred.

Our last stop was the gas station, for a fill-up and a lug nut. Mr. Johnson recognized the car and came out to welcome us home. “Well, now, Preacher, I see yer finally decided to come back.” He faltered, his gaze arrested by the three-weeks’ growth of facial hair on the pastor of the big church.

“Well, knock me down and chop me up for cord wood,” he muttered. “Preacher’s done gone off to Californie and turned into a dang hippie.”

Yup, we were back in Fred, all right.