Salvation City Read online

  “Many folks pray for a sign from the Lord. I hadn’t done that but the Lord sent me one anyway. I knew that I had been called to be a fisher of men. After that it all came—I won’t say easy, because the Lord’s work is never easy—but it came natural. I was just obeying Isaiah: ‘Raise your voice up like a trumpet! Tell the people they have sinned!’ And I was following Paul, bringing the Good News straight to the people by teaching in public, testifying repentance toward God and faith toward our Lord Jesus Christ.”

  Of course, he was not the only street preacher in Louisville.

  “But it seemed like most of the time folks would just walk on by without paying those preachers any mind at all. With me it was different. People would slow down and stop. I started to draw crowds. I got them to listen.”

  At the same time, he started working as a volunteer at a rescue mission.

  “And that’s where I really preached my heart out. These were the poorest folks in town, the hungry and the homeless and the really hurting. Lots of them were addicted to one substance or another. Some had done time and didn’t have much hope of ever finding any employment. Helping them with practical needs was the easy part. But I also had to make them believe that no matter how much trouble they had, they were not forsaken, that it’s the lost sheep that are God’s most beloved, and that they were the blessed of the blessed.”

  At the mission he got to know several pastors, one of whom invited him to preach at the Church of Hope and Joy, a nondenominational congregation of about sixty people. He accepted, and a year later the number of church members had nearly doubled. Hope and Joy moved to a bigger space, Pastor Wyatt was given more worship services, and the congregation kept growing.

  Among the parishioners was a very pretty young woman suffering from cancer, who always sat with her family down in front. By this time, Pastor Wyatt was well on his way to becoming a church leader and a popular Louisville figure. (“First time I ever saw WyWy was on the hospital TV,” Tracy was fond of recalling.)

  Though pleased with his success—a kind of success that had never entered his mind before—Pastor Wyatt was not without doubts.

  “I didn’t know why, but I just wasn’t as fulfilled as I’d been preaching in the open.”

  The unsettling feeling that he was being watched, that someone somewhere was mocking him, that some kind of trap was being laid for him—what could it mean?

  “I started worrying I was basking too much in all the attention. It wasn’t that I was losing my faith, but there was a line there that I felt was getting blurry. Was I in it for God or for my own ego?”

  Mysteriously enough, the more doubtful he became, the more effective was his evangelizing.

  “If the purpose was to win souls for the Lord, there’s no denying that was being accomplished.”

  So why did he have the nagging sense that the Lord wasn’t happy with him?

  Meanwhile, Delphina had filed for divorce.

  “Again, I was stupid. I thought I could handle my problems all by my lonesome. I should have sought advice from church elders, I should have been more open with my flock. I only saw the truth later on: I was too proud. I’d put out the welcome mat for the devil, and sure enough the old boy showed up.”

  One night he found himself in his car, speeding toward Lexington.

  “I guess maybe I was thinking now that I was some kind of big dude Delphina would have to change her mind about me, to heck with that old restraining order.”

  In this case, being drunk turned out to be lucky. Well before he reached Delphina’s door, he jumped the car like a horse over a guardrail and plunged down an embankment. The car was wrecked but, as sometimes miraculously happens—and even though he wore no seat belt—PW walked away.

  “Like they say, drunks don’t break, they bend. The real crazy thing was I didn’t feel grateful.”

  He might not have been physically hurt, but the accident had jarred something loose in him; he fell into a gloom that would not lift.

  “I was mad, too—hopping mad at the Lord. I felt like he’d set me up somehow.”

  He spent a month in the university hospital psych rehab ward, where his side of shouting matches with God shook the padded walls of the Quiet Room.

  When he was himself again, PW went back to preaching. The people kept coming; he’d lost none of his gift. But he longed for a change. He was his father’s son. He was tired of cities. It wasn’t of the big time that he dreamed. A simple life was what he believed God had always intended for him. He felt this even more strongly after his year’s mission service in Kenya.

  And so, when the pastor of a small church in a small town in southern Indiana was called home, Pastor Wyatt did not have to think long before accepting the offer to replace him.

  It would not do, however, to begin his new life alone. He was now legally single again, and as a friend and frequent dinner guest of Ronnie and Priscilla Wegner, he couldn’t help being aware that their lovely younger daughter had a crush on him.

  There was something almost saintly about young Tracy Wegner.

  “I looked into her eyes and saw the innocence of a child and the might of a lion.”

  Tracy would have followed him anywhere, but how nice that it was only across the river, not too far from family and friends. The wedding was a low-key affair—the bride had not yet fully recovered from her illness—and three weeks later they moved into their new home.

  Of course they both wanted children, but neither was in any big hurry. There was Tracy’s health to consider, and also they wanted time to get to know each other. The better they knew each other, the more they loved each other. Tracy’s cancer was cured. They were researching adoption programs when the flu broke out.

  IT WAS THAT TIME OF YEAR when going between sun and shade can feel like a change of season. They kept peeling off their jackets and shrugging back into them. Their first hike, they were caught in a brief but heavy shower. When the sun reappeared it was brighter than it had been before, and the sky held not an arc but a kind of rainbow-colored cloud that was like stained glass. Within seconds it had vanished.

  Already much of the woods was dense with green and there were clouds of insects so thick in places if you took a deep breath you’d start coughing.

  Once when they were resting, lying in the sun by a creek they might have been swimming in if the water hadn’t been still winter-cold, Cole thought how upset his mother would have been that he wasn’t wearing sunscreen. And what would she have said to PW driving without a seat belt?

  It was the middle of the week, and they did not meet many other campers. These days people were wary about going too far into the woods at any time. The plague before the flu had been a ravaged economy, enough already to swell the population of survivalists, and as the disease spread, many people had tried to escape infection by fleeing into the bush. Not all of them had returned. Now places like the Kentucky hills were said to be hiding large numbers of people who believed that either the end of the world or, at the very least, new and horrible disasters were on the way. They were said to be mostly men and to include many ex-cons, waiting it out in their bunkers and caves, loaded shotguns on their laps.

  But PW scoffed at stories like this, calling them way exaggerated.

  “I’ll protect you, son,” he said, grinning. And Cole wasn’t afraid. In fact, it only excited him when they came across certain signs: a mattress airing in the fork of a tree, a broken rocking chair, trash well beyond the usual backpacker’s litter, like an economy-sized box of laundry detergent. It was Cole who happened to spy, well camouflaged though it was, a fantasticallooking structure, like part of a wooden boat growing out of a hillside. He wanted to climb up and investigate, but PW held him back, and not till they’d left it far behind did he say anything to Cole about the eyes that had been watching them from the surrounding brush.

  Now and then Cole startled at the sound of gunfire, but according to PW the shooting was always much farther away than Cole thought it was. “Yo
u’d know that if you’d been raised around guns like the rest of us.” The memory flashed of Mason asking, “If Jesus’d had an AK-47, would he have mowed down the soldiers before they could crucify him?” and Clem responding no. “Without the Crucifixion, mankind couldn’t be saved. And the whole reason God sent Jesus in the first place was to save us.”

  Cole had known this was the answer, too. But it had always troubled him that the Crucifixion hadn’t been Jesus’ idea, that it was his father’s idea, though his father wasn’t the one who had to go through it.

  Cole was surprised that they weren’t doing any Bible study on this trip. They had brought pocket Bibles with them, but they would never open them. Of course, they prayed first thing in the morning and before they ate and again before they went to sleep. But, except to comment each time they came upon another great view that a person had to be insane not to believe in the Creation, PW appeared to be giving religion a break.

  And once they’d reached the camping site, PW appeared also to have lost interest in reminiscing. No more stories about his family. (And not a word about Delphina, ever.) Some of the trails they hiked were steep enough to make conversation impossible anyway, and PW set a fast pace, with Cole sometimes having to struggle to keep up. Cole was amazed at how fit PW was, especially since he almost never got any exercise. In spite of his size he moved with a lightness that made it easy for Cole to pretend they were two braves walking Indian file.

  Even when they rested or sat by their fire at night, they tended not to say much. The silence didn’t bother Cole. You missed a lot if you talked in the woods, he recalled his camp counselor saying. He liked not having to talk, not having to listen to anything but the birds and the tramp of boots, the snap of twigs underfoot (what was it about that sound that made it so satisfying?). Hearing a waterfall long—surprisingly long—before you saw it.

  The tune to “O Lonesome O Lord” kept coming into his head, and once, at the exact moment this was happening, PW started whistling the very same bars. Ha! Two people didn’t have to be talking to be on the same wavelength.

  But it struck Cole that, away from home—or at least here in Kentucky—PW was a different person. Not just quiet but often so absorbed in his own thoughts he might have forgotten anyone else was there. The trip didn’t seem to be so much about Cole’s birthday anymore, which was fine with Cole. For one thing, it made him less worried that the dreaded subjects of sex and adoption were going to be mentioned. And the thought that PW could relax and be himself around him made Cole glad—even proud.

  He thought about how, on the road down, he’d started wishing the two of them could run away together. And there had been other days when he’d wished that everyone around them would go away so that he could have PW all to himself. When he was younger, he’d felt that way at different times about each of his parents: why couldn’t the one disappear and leave him alone with the other? And there’d been times when he’d wished they would both disappear. But his wish to be an orphan had always meant fun and excitement, great adventures in which he was the star, the darling of fascinating and admiring people. Never once had he pictured himself miserable, cast blindly among the shrieking, reeking, starving, heartless kids of Here Be Hope.

  It occurred to Cole that, because of where they were, PW might be thinking about a time when his own parents were still alive and he was still a boy. It was always hard for Cole to imagine any grown-up as a child, except maybe Tracy. Then another wish came to him, the wish to have known PW—or at least to have known what he was like—when he was fourteen.

  A reptile child, he’d called himself. Meaning what?

  The nights were cold. After hiking all day they were both ready to bed down as soon as the first stars appeared. They lay side by side in their small dome tent. But long after PW had fallen asleep, Cole was still awake, his thoughts in tumultuous motion like the dance of the insects drawn to their campfire.

  Alone, he could have—would have—rolled onto his stomach and massaged the tension away. But the fear that PW would wake and catch him in the act kept Cole lying as if at attention, rigid and filled with shame.

  “It wouldn’t be the worst thing,” PW had told him, “if a person could masturbate once in a blue moon. But if you don’t fight it every time, it turns into a habit. That’s when it becomes a distraction from the Lord, and also more likely to lead to worse sin.”

  Whenever he’d start to drift off, some change in PW’s breathing or posture would jerk Cole back to full consciousness. Once, he was shocked to realize he’d been thinking about his mother and PW together.

  He knew it was wrong to have impure thoughts about Starlyn. He knew that dwelling on what he’d seen in the upstairs hallway was inviting sin. What could be said, then, about imagining his mother and PW in Starlyn and Mason’s place? Probably there didn’t exist a word bad enough to describe the kind of person who’d do such a thing. Add to this the guilt of betrayal—for he knew he could be accused of this, too: betraying his father, betraying Tracy.

  Yet even as self-loathing clotted his throat, the idea stayed with him. His mother would have found at least a hundred things wrong with PW. The way he smiled all the time would have got on her nerves. The way he said things like “good eatin’.” A Jesus freak. A preacher with a manicure and a handgun—his mother would have made so much fun of him!

  But in Cole’s fantasy Pastor Wyatt swept Serena Vining off her feet. And she would have done what Tracy had not been able to do: make him forget Delphina.

  The man dropped to the earth like a bobcat that had been watching them approach. They barely had time to take him in—straightening up from the crouch in which he’d landed, dressed head to toe in cammies, his cap and dark beard and mirror shades hiding most of his face—when two other men entered the scene from behind trees, one stage left and one stage right, like actors at the same cue. Same costume.

  Each of the men was over six feet tall, slightly hunch-backed, and rail thin. Brothers? The first people Cole and PW had run into who were toting rifles instead of backpacks.

  The one who’d dropped from the tree had a broad fleshy nose that reminded Cole of one type of mushroom he’d noticed sprouting in the woods. Cole was fascinated to see himself reflected so clearly in the man’s shades. It was like watching a video on a phone screen. PW was in the video, too, standing close behind him. They were both breathing a little hard from walking upslope.

  The man spat an oyster onto the dirt between them, and when Cole jumped he knocked into PW, who placed a hand on his shoulder.

  “Y-you b-boys lost?”

  Besides the stutter, the man had a voice like a congested toddler. Growing up, he must have got laughed at every time he opened his mouth. Laugh at him today and he’d b-blow your b-brains out.

  Before they could answer, one of the other men, who’d taken his cap off to reveal blond hair so dirty it was almost brunet, said, “You’re a good ways off the main trail.”

  “I know that, sir,” said PW. It was his preacher’s voice: loud and firm. “There’s a knob up yonder overlooking a couple caves. We thought we might see some bear.”

  “B-bear?” The first man shook his head. “Nossir. Y’all won’t see no bear.”

  “No?”

  “Like I said.”

  “They still sleepin’,” threw in the blond, though he must have known this was false. He scratched his head vigorously before replacing his cap. “Law says you can’t hunt them anyhow.”

  Cole didn’t understand what had made the man say that. The only gun they had was the pistol PW had brought along. At night he slept with it near his head. The rest of the time it was in his right jacket pocket.

  A movement in the sky drew Cole’s eye upward. Red-tailed hawk, gliding. He was waiting for PW to explain that they weren’t on a hunting trip, but PW said nothing. Now the stutterer was looking up at the hawk, so Cole couldn’t see PW’s reflection anymore. But the hand on his shoulder had grown heavy as a saddle.

  That
morning there were only wisps of clouds, the kind people called God’s whiskers or angel hair. But suddenly it became much brighter, as if a cloud that had been covering the sun had moved on. In that light every tiny thing jumped out, leaf or pebble or acorn—every separate pine needle—as if under a magnifying glass.

  Cole was having trouble breathing. For also magnified and microscopically clear was the fact that although he didn’t know these men and had done nothing to hurt them, that didn’t mean they would not hurt him. Such things didn’t happen only in movies. Murder didn’t happen only when there was a good reason for it to happen. Or any reason at all.

  The blond pulled his cap off to scratch some more, and Cole wondered if he had cooties.

  “They always warn folks should stick to the main trail.” Without raising his voice the man managed to sound terrifying. A bitter taste flooded Cole’s mouth. Not like this, he was thinking. To be terminated, for nothing, by strangers, by total fucking creeps. It must not be allowed to happen. And in the midst of his fear he had time to be amazed that he had ever thought it would be cool to die. “I was you,” said the man, “I’d turn ’round now and head back. This ain’t nowhere to be after dark.”

  As if dusk weren’t ten hours off.

  No one spoke for a few beats. Cole fought a vision of himself throwing his arms around PW’s neck and screaming like a girl. He braced himself for the shoot-out. Saw PW in one smooth movement whipping out his gun and knocking him out of harm’s way.