The Rising(72)

“I’m Kit,” Alex said, beating Sam to the punch again, paraphrasing the name from the imaginary friend to whom Anne Frank had addressed her diary. “And this is Anne, my girlfriend.”

The Reverend Billy Grimes reclaimed the steering wheel with his fingers and Sam noticed that a single letter had been tattooed on each of them, just below the knuckle:





THEND COMES


He didn’t have enough fingers on his left hand to spell “the end” out all the way, so he must have improvised.

“Let’s get this show on the road,” Reverend Billy said, jerking the old van into gear and fighting it back onto the highway, where its bald tires stumbled and stammered before finding pavement.

And off they went.

*

“We shouldn’t be here, none of us,” Reverend Billy resumed. “We should be in His house on this holy Sabbath, so let’s make of it what we will, shall we?”

Alex turned and met Sam’s eyes, the message in his matching her thoughts exactly, before finishing in a shrug and a frown that said, Let’s grin and bear it.

“Are you a preacher?” Alex asked him.

“In a church with no name to anyone with the wisdom to listen to my word. I’ve seen things, children, things I wouldn’t wish on another human being. Things that make you question the very nature of man and humanity, although I don’t expect you kids to be able to relate to such a thing.”

“Well,” Alex began, shooting Sam another gaze that came up just short of a wink, “you’d be surprised.”

But Reverend Billy wasn’t listening. “See, before I came to be what I am, I served as a military chaplain in war zones. Think of the worst things you’ve heard about those wars and multiply that by about a hundred and you’ll have an idea of what I’m talking about. There’s so much of it I’d give anything to unsee, if that were even possible, and I won’t bore you with the details. Suffice it to say, you know when you see all the truth of the world laid bare? When you look into the eyes of a dying man. Lord God, so many of those eyes belonged to mere children little older than you kids. I was the last thing far too many of them saw and I do believe a little of me died each time. So by the end of it I had no choice but to be reborn.”

He spoke with his eyes fixed tightly ahead and hands gripping the wheel so tightly that the letters imprinted on his knuckles seemed to stretch. Sam thought she saw the man’s eyes glistening with the start of tears and was relieved beyond measure when Alex reached down and grasped her hand in his.

“Problem was,” Reverend Billy continued, “the womb of the world had gone sour, so what emerged lacked the normal mechanisms to cope with the awful realities we all must face—that being hope and dreams. I have neither, children, because I’ve seen the world for what it really is, exposed to the core. I’ve seen the true depths of depravity to which man can sink, and in the eyes of dying men I saw the world’s fate as only they could show it to me.”

Sam squeezed Alex’s hand tighter, hoping he’d just tell Reverend Billy to pull over so they could start the whole hitchhiking process anew. Maybe land a ride with someone who smelled better and listened to talk radio.

But Reverend Billy cocked a gaze their way before Alex had a chance to say anything. “I saw there is no hope. No reclamation or redemption, either. Wish I could tell you why the Lord chose me to be the bearer of His word, I truly do. Why not the pope or the president, instead of some nobody that no one would ever give credence? The kind of man you stop on a street corner and listen to, only to walk away shaking your head and grinning at his madness.”

Reverend Billy sucked in some breath and seemed to chew on his lips.

“Then I realized that was His point. That nobody was going to listen to this truth, this message, anyway, so it didn’t matter who was delivering it, did it? So, Anne and Kit, I am indeed a preacher, but one without a flock. I pass out my Bibles to anyone who’ll take one in the hope they’ll find some message I must’ve missed along the way. But I know they won’t because it’s not there, since whoever wrote it only put down what God wanted us to know to spare us the truth of our being and essence. See the dashboard?”

Alex and Sam looked in unison, noticing a patchwork of torn wires emerging from a rectangular slot of a hole where the radio should have been.

“I ripped that out so I could be alone with my thoughts during these drives, hoping maybe, just maybe, He might choose to let me hear the truth of His word. Then I finally realized I never would because that word hasn’t been written yet. I wish I could say what this overriding truth truly is but all I see when I ask for divine guidance is the face of man himself, not God. As if we made ourselves, while He sat back and watched. And how can that be, children? I ask you, how can that be?”

His question rang with restrained desperation. Sam realized Reverend Billy smelled vaguely of moss and fresh earth, on top of the weed and dried sweat, and thought she glimpsed strips of vine reeds sticking out of his mismatched hair. She pictured him sleeping outdoors at night, nothing between him and the stars. A man who spent his time digging holes into the earth, never finding exactly what he was looking for.

“You really think the end’s coming?” Alex asked Reverend Billy, no whimsy in the question at all.

“I’m sure of it, son, just as sure as I am your name’s not Kit and hers isn’t Anne. But it’s not going to end the way we expect, the one the Bible portends, no. It’s like we’re still gonna be us but not us, at the same time. It’s like it’s all gonna change with the turning of the sun, the world a whole different place when we wake up one morning than it was when we went to bed the night before. It’s like there’s a purpose we’ve been prepared to fill since time immemorial and everything else, what passes for glory and goals, are nothing more than illusions we’ve tricked ourselves into believing are real.”