THIRTY GRAND
by 
BILLINGTON
|
Posted: Saturday, September 27, 2014 Word Count: 4954 Summary: A MODERN INTERPRETATION OF AN ANCIENT BETRAYAL, WITH A SYMPATHETIC TAKE ON THE ROLE OF THE TRAITOR |
Content Warning
This piece and/or subsequent comments may contain strong language.
This piece and/or subsequent comments may contain strong language.
A modern depiction of an ancient downfall , betrayal and death, with a sympathetic interpretation of the role played by the betrayer.
I'm hesitating. I read someplace that before the rope goes tight you should take a deep breath and hold it. The pressure on the carotid artery will put you out before suffocation begins. But it's one thing to read about it, another to do it. They've got the thirty grand back. Word is they're gonna build a new morgue for all the nameless ones that pitch up dead in the city. I know I'll be seen as the bad guy, but I had my reasons.
*
I was at my usual table on the sidewalk when the car pulled up. I made them as cops by the way they parked on the yellow. The car waited while the passenger got out. We knew each other. Detective Sergeant Hawk is the wrong side of fifty, but you wouldn't want to mess with him. Half Cree Indian, he's built like Rushmore with a face of stone and fists to match. The sports jacket hides a Government .45. He's known, I guess inevitably, as 'Tomahawk'. He sat down and we stared at each other in that intimate way it is sometimes between the law and the criminal. Wasn't the weather nice? I allowed it could be that way in an Illinois spring. Then he got down to business.
Manny was gonna get busted. He slapped a copy of a city weekly on the table. I didn't look at it, I'd seen it already.
“OREGON FAITH-HEALER FIXES ALLBRIGHT'S DAUGHTER”.
*
Allbright.
The Reverend Senator Aloysius Allbright. My erstwhile employer. Tall, silver haired and holy. A man who governed, walked with the Lord and made millions from it. His union block votes along with the money secured him a place in the Senate. Allbright and his fucked up daughter, whose miracle cure, ironically, had ensured the shit hit the fan. The Tomahawk continued. They wanted someone who'd testify against Manny and I was that someone.
*
Manny.
Emmanuel Zimmerman. Abandoned as an infant, he left the orphanage at sixteen to become an apprentice steel worker. Three years later, he was welding boilerplate on a freighter moored in Portland roads, when the wash from a passing ship rocked the vessel, causing the torch to turn in his hand, the white-hot flame eating his skin. Manny dropped the torch, and fell from the cradle. As he went he hit his head on the steel hull before plunging into the water. He floated and they picked him up with third degree burns and concussion. He was in a coma six weeks. When he woke up in Portland General, he told them he felt different.
At first they laughed. Then a junior named Coral came in to change the burn dressing. She wasn't beautiful and she had a harrowed look on her pale face. Manny told her she had a headache. Coral, while surprised, admitted this. It was a migraine. Manny reached out with both hands and took Coral's head gently in his hands, fingertips pressing her temples. And the migraine stopped. At first she couldn't believe it. She'd been cursed with them, and other problems, she elaborated, once a month ever since puberty. But the migraine was gone, never to return. He warned her not to tell anyone. And she didn't, except for her best friend who worked in ER.
The friend suffered from disc lesion. The next day she came to see Manny. Afterwards, she explained to a trusted friend that Manny had placed both hands (“with my smock still on,” she was careful to add) on her pelvic girdle. She'd felt a 'warm electric shock', and then it was gone and with it the pain. She was, she added, sworn to secrecy. Within a week, nurses with various ailments were fighting to get on the rota that looked after Manny. A week after that he was discharged, but Coral 's brother was a cub journalist on a city weekly. When the story, headlined 'The Welder Who Fixes People' broke, Manny was suddenly famous, attracting not only the sick but also groupies and assorted crazies. He started touring, accepting only the money that he needed to live. After he appeared live on a Portland TV show, Allbright, who happened to be some eighty miles south in Eugene, contacted him, and suggested he appear that night.
*
At the thought of Allbright, I raised my eyes. Wearily.
“Allbright's behind this?”
Tomahawk's gorgon stare was all the answer I needed. But he ordered a root beer and fired up a Lucky. He was being polite, giving me time to think. I'm small time, mostly police informant and pickpocketing. The cops and I know each other and we get by. It was an error of judgement which had landed me in Allbright's clutches and my present mess.
*
Allbright ran his own church, The Truth And The Light, which he'd started back in the sixties, when JFK was dead, the death toll in Vietnam mounting, and the country's youth, with long hair and LSD, out of control. A lot of solid, baffled, decent and angry folk needed something traditional to cling to. A young and entreprenurial Reverend Allbright saw the way to provide it, and make a fortune. The old-style religious services proved popular. By the millenium, aided by his own TV station, he had churches in twenty-eight states, with an income running into millions. He still affected the cracker-barrel style, traveling with just his entourage and a tent. His seat on Capitol Hill seemed assured. And now an unholy, or rather holy, combination of faith healer and his daughter was close to upsetting this golden road to heaven.
Gloria Allbright's mother, an oil heiress, had conveniently drowned when the car which her husband was driving went inexplicably out of control while crossing a flat bridge over a flooded Okenofee. With nothing but suspicion and circumstance to go on, the cops put it down to accident. Their three month old baby girl, at home on the night in question with a nanny, had grown up a lonely, only child. When her father was home, which was seldom, he preached at her. When away, a succession of expensive governesses took over. An overweight, neurotic teenager, she looked for solace elsewhere. At seventeen, she was enjoying illicit cocktails and cigarettes. At eighteen, she graduated to marijuana. By twenty-one, she was experimenting with amphetamines. She also developed a taste for men, possibly the wrong sort. A termination, set up in haste and secrecy, was badly handled by an expensive but incompetent surgeon, whom Allbright didn't dare sue for fear of publicity. For the rest of her life, Gloria was informed, she would suffer from painful and bloody discharge.
*
Tomahawk stubbed out the Lucky, lit another.
“Still thinkin', Jude?”
“Yeah.”
He glanced at his watch, shrugged, but didn't make to leave. I sipped my espresso, thinking hard.
*
When Allbright's circus came to town it drew crowds. Crowds are where I operate. The first night I cased the joint. The second night, I operated like Robin the Hood, targeting the wealthy-looking when they came out, happy, holy and relaxed. The casual body contact could have drawn a knife downtown. Here it drew a smiling apology and I made over four hundred dollars. But I broke my rule of not working the same place twice running. I went back for the last night. Allbright had a band of assistants, twelve in all. It was a big SOB called Pete, an ex-dipper himself, who nailed me.The robberies from the night before had been reported. It takes one to recognise one, so I wasn't hard to spot. The mark got back his wallet. Pete, with a distinctly un-Christian armlock on me, marched me into the tent to meet Allbright.
*
Up close, he was even more impressive than on TV, the only place I'd ever seen him. Tall, silver haired, with that rich southern voice. He didn't waste time. I was to be saved from eternal damnation by giving to his church whatever I'd made on the previous evening, and coming to work for him. He needed a replacement truck driver. The money was little more than my keep, but it was that or face the Chicago PD. It was how he'd recruited most of the others. I didn't have a choice. The cops knew me but I was small time and had nothing to plea bargain a felony rap. I'd draw a five to ten and with no friends on the inside my chances of survival were zero. I accepted. I drove my truck, wore my new hat as a repentant crook, and moved around the country. Then Manny happened.
*
We were in Eugene, Oregon, awaiting a miracle. The Iraq thing was going bad, people were generally pissed, and takings from The Truth And The Light were declining. Allbright had been searching hard for some kind of gimmick to get people back to God and spending.
I met Manny before the show started. He didn't look like a miracle worker, but it was there all right, when you looked into the deep set eyes, and felt the aura of power that emanated from the scrawny body. His slight physique accentuated his personality like that hellraiser Jagger. It also accounted for his female followers, who occasionally rushed the stage. Allbright conducted his usual service, then introduced Manny.
His delivery was low key, but his voice got them right away. He talked for a shade over twenty minutes. Then he invited people up on the stage. He explained he only wanted people with problems. He made a public call for prostitutes, drunks, and assorted criminals. He got them. Or people who were claiming such. He asked them to relax and imagine themselves clothed in 'shimmering white'. Then to picture themselves walking with angels. A light hypnotic trance technique, he wasn't playing it for laughs. After three minutes he blessed them and they filed back down. It was quiet, but you could sense dissatisfaction. As if the audience, like me, were wondering if that was all. It didn't last long. In the front row sat a lady, with a kid in a wheelchair.
*
You've seen that sort of kid. White faced, eyes unnaturally large through long, chronic illness, wasted legs enclosed in ugly braces. Manny pointed to the lady and asked her to bring him up on the stage.
My skin tightened into goosebumps. Nothing could fix that kid. He didn't need sermons. He needed a goddam miracle. I looked out over the bleachers. Everyone was staring as the wheelchair rolled forward. I went down and helped, but I couldn't meet the woman's eyes. What was she expecting? We crossed the stage and parked the chair. Then I moved back from the spotlight. Manny was standing facing the boy, his eyes tight closed, as five thousand people watched.
In the dead silence Manny knelt in front of the pathetic, wasted figure. He asked the boy's name. It came out quietly as 'Robert Weston'. Then Manny was stretching his arms out towards those thin sickly legs, touching them, gripping the skinny calves and protruding joints. Time stood still as he knelt there. I saw his body jolt, as if he'd touched a live wire. It wasn't anything like that phony Toronto blessing, where the sucker pretends to collapse. Just one tremor. He leaned forward and started undoing the braces. He remained kneeling and spoke.
“Now Robert, you won't be able to walk yet, so don't try, but you can stand. Let me help you.”
This was the moment of truth, and failure. I bet five thousand other minds were thinking the same. Yet something powerful had surrounded us on that stage. You could feel it. Manny rose, extending both arms, and Mrs Weston fainted as her son, wheelchair bound since the age of four, stood up.
*
Manny healed all sorts. Blind people, crippled people, people with things wrong with themselves that you couldn't see, like cancer. Some of them of course were fakers, publicity-seeking hypochondriacs and downright liars, or so it was later claimed. Manny never challenged any of them. But the Weston cure was genuine, attested to by his mystified consultant. It got noticed.
*
The pharmaceutical establishment is powerful and self serving. At first I couldn't figure it. Manny had healed a little boy, given him his life back. He should have been getting official encouragement to try it with every polio case in America. What else was important? That was also Manny's attitude. Were we ever naive.
The medical profession, well, it took them four hundred years to admit that scurvy could be prevented by a daily shot of lime juice. After the Weston sensation Manny took a break. Those miracles took the strength out of him. That gave the establishment time to prepare.
Around a month later, word had spread. In the front row sat no less than ten kids in wheelchairs. God knows what would have happened that night if all ten had got up and walked. They never got the chance. Manny was just getting going when sirens were heard. State police cruisers pulled up in the sports ground where we were pitched, led by one Arthur J Roscoe, Attorney at Law, representing the DA's office. He slapped a lawsuit on Manny there and then, for fraudulent practice. The police ordered Manny to stop, and when he refused, he was arrested.
He was immediately sprung by a horrified Allbright. All those years of peddling faith and when it worked, this happened. He knew how the drug companies, some of whom sponsored him, viewed miracle cures, genuine or not. He also knew the power of the media. He cut us loose, and headed off back to the The Truth And The Light HQ. He left us the tent and vehicles, hoping for a clean break. But he'd reckoned without his daughter.
*
Gloria Allbright had lived with booze, dope and permanent bleeding from a botched abortion for twelve suicide-prone years. Soon after the Weston sensation, she gathered her courage together. Manny still operated, in defiance of authority. As he walked in, the crowd boiled around him and he suddenly stopped, held up his arms for silence. He said someone had touched him. I saw Pete and Johnnie exchange exasperated looks. Five hundred people pushing and shoving and this dude had asked who touched him. But it was Gloria. She told us later she would have been too embarrassed to reveal her condition in public, and to a man. The first to recognise her was Pete, as she knelt in front of Manny. He stretched out an arm, helping her gently to her feet, and from that moment her problem, and all the substance abuse, ceased. Once more the name of Allbright was brought into national and unwelcome prominence. It was Manny's death warrant.
*
Fraudulent medical practice is a federal rap. Manny could go down for decades. While the DA was deciding whether there was a case to answer, I asked Manny why didn't he just quit. He said he couldn't. He'd been given his gift and was duty bound to use it. But he frequently massaged his temples, saying you got nothing for nothing. Some mornings he looked like a sick child himself. When I asked him where all this was going, he replied simply, “They're gonna get me.”
But he wouldn't stop. He couldn't. And he wouldn't slow down. The word was that the DA would decide any day now and it was likely to be bad news.
*
Tomahawk cleared his throat. I'd used up my time.
Did any of the group carry guns? I said no, which was true. OK, so here was the deal. The raid was going down tonight when the show got started. I would be set up with Roscoe priming me on what to say in court. And would be paid for my services. Thirty large up front. That was when I started to smell a big, fat, dollar-wrapped rat. It wasn't that I didn't trust the Hawk. Him and I had been doing business for years and he never welshed. A deal was a deal. But paid after the event. And never this amount.
Thirty grand.
Tomahawk sat there a couple minutes, watching my face. My thoughts must have been as clear to him as writing on a wall. Then he spoke in that white man-speak-with-forked-tongue rumble.
“Jude, sometimes a guy has greatness thrust upon him. This is one of them occasions. Ever ponder the meaning of life? Like, for you, it's gonna end up maybe one of three ways. If you're lucky, stacking shelves someplace in Florida, just another wrinkly with arthritis. Two, in jail, when we decide we don't like you no more. Three, whacked by the Mob, the day you overdo it as a stoolie.”
He was right.
“Deal?”
I looked at him, then at the unmarked Crown Vic waiting illegally at the kerb.If I said no, that car would be moving in under a minute, heading to police HQ downtown. And it would have an extra passenger. By the time it arrived, that passenger would be busted. Narcotics, most likely. Probably a baggie, worth around a grand street value, and fifteen years. That's how the cops sometimes work. The Tomahawk doubtless had it right there in his pocket, all ready to plant on me. The whole thing stank, for a variety of reasons. I didn't want to go against Manny. And I felt the Tomahawk didn't want to bust me. But, facing retirement on a pension he needed, he had no choice. And I knew I didn't either. My eyes left the table surface and came up to meet his.
“Deal.”
*
I paid the check as soon as the car disappeared, got a load of quarters in change. Then I did some serious phoning. I got plenty contacts. The one I wanted worked right there in the DA's office. French-Canadian, nice kid, said I reminded her of that Aznavour dude. Elise and I were pretty close at one time and who knows where we might have gone together. But I never encouraged her, knowing that marriage and kids wasn't gonna be my style. Pity. I got her on the phone and she agreed to do some digging. I should ring her back around four. I waited, sweating. There wasn't much time. On the dot of four I rang back. Elise answered the phone and her information amazed me.
“Your boy's clean.”
Clean?
“You mean no prosecution?”
“Not from here.”
“How come?”
“Maitland's washed his hands of it. Doesn't want to know. I guess because he's running for office in a couple of month's time.”
What had stunk before was now beginning to smell like a dead polecat. And yet it made sense, in a screwed-up way. Maitland, District Attorney, and career politician, wasn't gonna be seen going up against anything connected with religion. Especially with an election coming up.
“How long they known about this?”
“From the start, pretty much.”
From the start.
So the Tomahawk musta known Manny wasn't gonna be indicted. Which explained why his tent show hadn't been busted again. If the DA wasn't gunning for him, then who was? And the only answer to that had to be the pharmaceutical establishment, assisted undercover by Allbright.
Big pharma is big. Global, rich, powerful, with more people getting rich out of cancer and AIDS than there are people dying of them. Maitland knew that. Doubtless, like Allbright, he was big into their stock. This way, he could keep his political career clean, while doing the dirty on Manny by proxy. I thanked Elise and hung up, somehow feeling it was goodbye for good.
*
I took the subway back to the sports ground where the tent was pitched, checked in with the boys. Maybe it was the knowledge I possessed, the deal I'd been forced into, but the atmosphere had changed. Manny looked sick and scared. The boys could sense there was something up. They were nervy, restless, and smoking more than usual. Then Manny said it was gonna go bad. It was the first time he'd opened up like that. Pete said he wasn't doing the business any good, talking that way. Manny just looked at him, as if he knew there were things going on that Pete would never understand.
“When the crunch comes, there ain't one of you gonna stand up for me.” It wasn't said in a tough or bitter way, but with sad knowledge, and it provoked a hot response from Pete.
“Hey Manny, don't you go putting me with everyone else.” Manny shook his head.
“Time'll come when they'll try and link you with me, Pete. You'll say you never knew me. Once, twice, however many times they ask.” Pete stormed away. Manny watched him leave, then dropped his bombshell.
“Guys, I'm living on borrowed time. I'm being set up, and whoever did it is standing right here.”
He was looking at me as he said it and snakes came to life, twisting hot in my belly. I kept my face expressionless.
“You talking to me, Manny?” He couldn't possibly know, but he merely replied;
“You said it, Jude.” I almost cracked then. I wanted to tell him about the Hawk, the money and the threat to my freedom. But I couldn't. I was as much locked in and helpless as he was. We all stared at each other in an atmosphere of suspicion, broken only by one of the boys.
“Hey boss! There's a bunch of guys setting up around the tent. Looks like some kind of traveling fair.”
*
The Winnebago emptied. Johnny was right. Men and lorries occupied the space around the big tent. It looked like a cheap traveling fair, with hoopla stalls and a carousel. We walked over to a stand advertising dogs and burgers, with the smell of onions frying. The guy doing the frying looked like one of his burgers, mean, grey and round.
“Good evening,” said Manny politely. The guy ignored him.
“You got a license?”
“Get lost, I'm busy.”
I could see Pete and Johnny getting riled. So was Manny.
“Gimme a dog. Extra onions with mustard.”
“No deal, friend.”
“Why not?”
Dogmeat looked at Manny for the first time.
“Look Mack, we're waiting on the crowd that's coming to the freak show in the tent. They ain't bums. They pay special prices. Now beat it.”
“I'm trying to help folk and all you're interested in is bleeding them dry?”
Dogmeat reached under his fry-slab and came up holding a billy. He never got a chance to use it.
“Damn you, you unholy pig!” Manny reached over the counter, grabbed him and dragged him out. He hit the ground in a heap.
“Go boys! Take them down!”
His shout galvanised the group and suddenly we were all shoving against the side of 'Temple Dogs & Burgers'. The rig went over, scattering grease and hot onions on its owner. Then, led by Manny, we charged the small fairground which was poaching our territory. It was a joyous release for small time crooks who were bored with the straight and narrow. We wrecked the whole thing, Pete grabbing a tent pole and downing everyone and everything he could find. It lasted maybe ten minutes and it was Manny who cooled it first, yelling for order and pointing. We looked, expecting to see cops.
But it was only the usual procession coming through the makeshift gateway to the grass parking lot. A quarter of seven. The show, and my betrayal, was under an hour away.
*
Back inside the Winnebago I saw Manny reach for a bottle, pouring himself a glass and one for me.
“Celebration time?” He eyed me.
“Yeah, kind of.” He paused, then went on.
“I wasn’t but a day old when the police found me inside a Sears bag in a bus station with a note naming me and asking I should be brought up in the Jewish faith. Which I was, although I ain't done much of it lately. But it's something to cling to, you dig? Like take today's date.”
I checked my watch. April fourteenth, 2014.
“That's significant?”
“Tonight, at sunset, it's Passover. And maybe somewhere there's a woman putting out the matzos and thinking about a son she never saw grow up.”
He took a bite of a cracker, saying he wasn't eating no bread that contained flour. And no beer nor whisky, nothing made from grain. I nodded at his glass of Californian red.
“So what about that?”
He managed a sick nervous grin.
“Wine's legal.”
“No shit.”
“Yeah.”
The phone rang and I picked it up. Josh and Simon said it was time to head for the tent. I looked at Manny and realised he was as scared as me, looking desperately for a way out. But there wasn't. I was surprised to see Pete and John asleep, stretched out in armchairs. Manny got real pissed and shook them awake, telling them they had no business sleeping at this stage. Then we headed for the tent.
*
It was packed. The buzz dropped to silence as Manny entered and you could have cut the air like pizza. He held out his hands, then bowed his head for the Lord's prayer. We all prayed with him and for me, for once, it was genuine. He finished and I opened my eyes, gazing out over the crowd, trying to spot the police team. I couldn't. Then we started our ritual of embracing. Manny reached those skinny arms around me, looking into my eyes, and I think what I saw there, for the first time in my life, was love.
“Goodbye, Jude,” he whispered, “God bless you.”
I knew then that he knew. Then men came out of the crowd. They closed in on Manny, and the two groups confronted one another. Booing started as a dick held out a warrant card and a chair was thrown as a mob rushed the stage. The cop with the warrant went down under three or more men, including Pete. There was a flash of steel, and screaming, and the cop rolling on the stage, grabbing under his jacket for a gun, the other hand clamped to his ear. I never seen so much blood, his whole right ear was just about off. Pete backed off and the melee, inside a circle of drawn Smith & Wessons, was over. I'll never forget Manny, holding them at bay, with arms outstretched.
“Why the guns?” he kept saying, “Why the guns?” And then someone nailed the cuffs on me and they got me outside and into a black and white. It was over.
*
I'm finishing this off on a Dr. Pepper crate by the dim light of a Seven-Eleven.
I remember how it was downtown, when they brought Manny in, on a trumped-up vagrancy rap. And I remember how he looked just before his death, and how the rest of them looked, Pete especially. His nerve had gone and he was busy denying he'd ever been involved.
I say Manny's death, because six hours later he was. Dead in police custody of a stroke. The cops must have been relieved. They hadn't beat him to death. He just died. I remember what he said about the healing taking it out of him, how he was forever rubbing those temples.
You get nothing for nothing, Jude.
*
There will always be controversy over what Manny did. Could he cure? Sure, I saw it happen many times. Although he attracted his share of crazies there were a whole bunch of genuine ones they couldn't pass off as fakes. Maybe when Weston, or any of the half dozen other kids, are grown up, they'll tell about it.
And what about what happened down at the morgue? For three days, after I was released together with a briefcase containing thirty grand in cash, I walked around in a daze. When the phone rang I had this crazy idea that it would be Manny, but it wasn't. It was a guy who was on morgue duty when Allbright, putting a churchy gloss on the whole thing, arrived to collect Manny's body. But Allbright was palmed off with a John Doe. Manny's body had just plain disappeared.
Then Pete phoned. He hadn't been charged. Once Manny was locked up, no one seemed to care about the rest of us. Pete told me he'd seen Manny. He sounded scared, but adamant. He'd been clearing the site and Manny had appeared and told him 'so long'. He was smoking a cigarette. Then he'd walked into the tent. When Pete followed him inside, there was nobody there, just a butt smouldering on the grass. And the curtain of white linen which formed a backdrop to the stage had been somehow ripped from top to bottom.
*
I don't know what I helped kill, but I know that I have to die too, before someone comes for me. This afternoon I saw the Tomahawk. I told him I didn't want the money, threw it on the floor. He shrugged and said it wasn't nothing to him, but it wouldn't be long before we met again. So I think my death will suit him just fine. I'll hold my breath and hope that's the right way to do it. They'll find this envelope in my pocket.
Do it, Jude. Do it now.
I'm hesitating. I read someplace that before the rope goes tight you should take a deep breath and hold it. The pressure on the carotid artery will put you out before suffocation begins. But it's one thing to read about it, another to do it. They've got the thirty grand back. Word is they're gonna build a new morgue for all the nameless ones that pitch up dead in the city. I know I'll be seen as the bad guy, but I had my reasons.
*
I was at my usual table on the sidewalk when the car pulled up. I made them as cops by the way they parked on the yellow. The car waited while the passenger got out. We knew each other. Detective Sergeant Hawk is the wrong side of fifty, but you wouldn't want to mess with him. Half Cree Indian, he's built like Rushmore with a face of stone and fists to match. The sports jacket hides a Government .45. He's known, I guess inevitably, as 'Tomahawk'. He sat down and we stared at each other in that intimate way it is sometimes between the law and the criminal. Wasn't the weather nice? I allowed it could be that way in an Illinois spring. Then he got down to business.
Manny was gonna get busted. He slapped a copy of a city weekly on the table. I didn't look at it, I'd seen it already.
“OREGON FAITH-HEALER FIXES ALLBRIGHT'S DAUGHTER”.
*
Allbright.
The Reverend Senator Aloysius Allbright. My erstwhile employer. Tall, silver haired and holy. A man who governed, walked with the Lord and made millions from it. His union block votes along with the money secured him a place in the Senate. Allbright and his fucked up daughter, whose miracle cure, ironically, had ensured the shit hit the fan. The Tomahawk continued. They wanted someone who'd testify against Manny and I was that someone.
*
Manny.
Emmanuel Zimmerman. Abandoned as an infant, he left the orphanage at sixteen to become an apprentice steel worker. Three years later, he was welding boilerplate on a freighter moored in Portland roads, when the wash from a passing ship rocked the vessel, causing the torch to turn in his hand, the white-hot flame eating his skin. Manny dropped the torch, and fell from the cradle. As he went he hit his head on the steel hull before plunging into the water. He floated and they picked him up with third degree burns and concussion. He was in a coma six weeks. When he woke up in Portland General, he told them he felt different.
At first they laughed. Then a junior named Coral came in to change the burn dressing. She wasn't beautiful and she had a harrowed look on her pale face. Manny told her she had a headache. Coral, while surprised, admitted this. It was a migraine. Manny reached out with both hands and took Coral's head gently in his hands, fingertips pressing her temples. And the migraine stopped. At first she couldn't believe it. She'd been cursed with them, and other problems, she elaborated, once a month ever since puberty. But the migraine was gone, never to return. He warned her not to tell anyone. And she didn't, except for her best friend who worked in ER.
The friend suffered from disc lesion. The next day she came to see Manny. Afterwards, she explained to a trusted friend that Manny had placed both hands (“with my smock still on,” she was careful to add) on her pelvic girdle. She'd felt a 'warm electric shock', and then it was gone and with it the pain. She was, she added, sworn to secrecy. Within a week, nurses with various ailments were fighting to get on the rota that looked after Manny. A week after that he was discharged, but Coral 's brother was a cub journalist on a city weekly. When the story, headlined 'The Welder Who Fixes People' broke, Manny was suddenly famous, attracting not only the sick but also groupies and assorted crazies. He started touring, accepting only the money that he needed to live. After he appeared live on a Portland TV show, Allbright, who happened to be some eighty miles south in Eugene, contacted him, and suggested he appear that night.
*
At the thought of Allbright, I raised my eyes. Wearily.
“Allbright's behind this?”
Tomahawk's gorgon stare was all the answer I needed. But he ordered a root beer and fired up a Lucky. He was being polite, giving me time to think. I'm small time, mostly police informant and pickpocketing. The cops and I know each other and we get by. It was an error of judgement which had landed me in Allbright's clutches and my present mess.
*
Allbright ran his own church, The Truth And The Light, which he'd started back in the sixties, when JFK was dead, the death toll in Vietnam mounting, and the country's youth, with long hair and LSD, out of control. A lot of solid, baffled, decent and angry folk needed something traditional to cling to. A young and entreprenurial Reverend Allbright saw the way to provide it, and make a fortune. The old-style religious services proved popular. By the millenium, aided by his own TV station, he had churches in twenty-eight states, with an income running into millions. He still affected the cracker-barrel style, traveling with just his entourage and a tent. His seat on Capitol Hill seemed assured. And now an unholy, or rather holy, combination of faith healer and his daughter was close to upsetting this golden road to heaven.
Gloria Allbright's mother, an oil heiress, had conveniently drowned when the car which her husband was driving went inexplicably out of control while crossing a flat bridge over a flooded Okenofee. With nothing but suspicion and circumstance to go on, the cops put it down to accident. Their three month old baby girl, at home on the night in question with a nanny, had grown up a lonely, only child. When her father was home, which was seldom, he preached at her. When away, a succession of expensive governesses took over. An overweight, neurotic teenager, she looked for solace elsewhere. At seventeen, she was enjoying illicit cocktails and cigarettes. At eighteen, she graduated to marijuana. By twenty-one, she was experimenting with amphetamines. She also developed a taste for men, possibly the wrong sort. A termination, set up in haste and secrecy, was badly handled by an expensive but incompetent surgeon, whom Allbright didn't dare sue for fear of publicity. For the rest of her life, Gloria was informed, she would suffer from painful and bloody discharge.
*
Tomahawk stubbed out the Lucky, lit another.
“Still thinkin', Jude?”
“Yeah.”
He glanced at his watch, shrugged, but didn't make to leave. I sipped my espresso, thinking hard.
*
When Allbright's circus came to town it drew crowds. Crowds are where I operate. The first night I cased the joint. The second night, I operated like Robin the Hood, targeting the wealthy-looking when they came out, happy, holy and relaxed. The casual body contact could have drawn a knife downtown. Here it drew a smiling apology and I made over four hundred dollars. But I broke my rule of not working the same place twice running. I went back for the last night. Allbright had a band of assistants, twelve in all. It was a big SOB called Pete, an ex-dipper himself, who nailed me.The robberies from the night before had been reported. It takes one to recognise one, so I wasn't hard to spot. The mark got back his wallet. Pete, with a distinctly un-Christian armlock on me, marched me into the tent to meet Allbright.
*
Up close, he was even more impressive than on TV, the only place I'd ever seen him. Tall, silver haired, with that rich southern voice. He didn't waste time. I was to be saved from eternal damnation by giving to his church whatever I'd made on the previous evening, and coming to work for him. He needed a replacement truck driver. The money was little more than my keep, but it was that or face the Chicago PD. It was how he'd recruited most of the others. I didn't have a choice. The cops knew me but I was small time and had nothing to plea bargain a felony rap. I'd draw a five to ten and with no friends on the inside my chances of survival were zero. I accepted. I drove my truck, wore my new hat as a repentant crook, and moved around the country. Then Manny happened.
*
We were in Eugene, Oregon, awaiting a miracle. The Iraq thing was going bad, people were generally pissed, and takings from The Truth And The Light were declining. Allbright had been searching hard for some kind of gimmick to get people back to God and spending.
I met Manny before the show started. He didn't look like a miracle worker, but it was there all right, when you looked into the deep set eyes, and felt the aura of power that emanated from the scrawny body. His slight physique accentuated his personality like that hellraiser Jagger. It also accounted for his female followers, who occasionally rushed the stage. Allbright conducted his usual service, then introduced Manny.
His delivery was low key, but his voice got them right away. He talked for a shade over twenty minutes. Then he invited people up on the stage. He explained he only wanted people with problems. He made a public call for prostitutes, drunks, and assorted criminals. He got them. Or people who were claiming such. He asked them to relax and imagine themselves clothed in 'shimmering white'. Then to picture themselves walking with angels. A light hypnotic trance technique, he wasn't playing it for laughs. After three minutes he blessed them and they filed back down. It was quiet, but you could sense dissatisfaction. As if the audience, like me, were wondering if that was all. It didn't last long. In the front row sat a lady, with a kid in a wheelchair.
*
You've seen that sort of kid. White faced, eyes unnaturally large through long, chronic illness, wasted legs enclosed in ugly braces. Manny pointed to the lady and asked her to bring him up on the stage.
My skin tightened into goosebumps. Nothing could fix that kid. He didn't need sermons. He needed a goddam miracle. I looked out over the bleachers. Everyone was staring as the wheelchair rolled forward. I went down and helped, but I couldn't meet the woman's eyes. What was she expecting? We crossed the stage and parked the chair. Then I moved back from the spotlight. Manny was standing facing the boy, his eyes tight closed, as five thousand people watched.
In the dead silence Manny knelt in front of the pathetic, wasted figure. He asked the boy's name. It came out quietly as 'Robert Weston'. Then Manny was stretching his arms out towards those thin sickly legs, touching them, gripping the skinny calves and protruding joints. Time stood still as he knelt there. I saw his body jolt, as if he'd touched a live wire. It wasn't anything like that phony Toronto blessing, where the sucker pretends to collapse. Just one tremor. He leaned forward and started undoing the braces. He remained kneeling and spoke.
“Now Robert, you won't be able to walk yet, so don't try, but you can stand. Let me help you.”
This was the moment of truth, and failure. I bet five thousand other minds were thinking the same. Yet something powerful had surrounded us on that stage. You could feel it. Manny rose, extending both arms, and Mrs Weston fainted as her son, wheelchair bound since the age of four, stood up.
*
Manny healed all sorts. Blind people, crippled people, people with things wrong with themselves that you couldn't see, like cancer. Some of them of course were fakers, publicity-seeking hypochondriacs and downright liars, or so it was later claimed. Manny never challenged any of them. But the Weston cure was genuine, attested to by his mystified consultant. It got noticed.
*
The pharmaceutical establishment is powerful and self serving. At first I couldn't figure it. Manny had healed a little boy, given him his life back. He should have been getting official encouragement to try it with every polio case in America. What else was important? That was also Manny's attitude. Were we ever naive.
The medical profession, well, it took them four hundred years to admit that scurvy could be prevented by a daily shot of lime juice. After the Weston sensation Manny took a break. Those miracles took the strength out of him. That gave the establishment time to prepare.
Around a month later, word had spread. In the front row sat no less than ten kids in wheelchairs. God knows what would have happened that night if all ten had got up and walked. They never got the chance. Manny was just getting going when sirens were heard. State police cruisers pulled up in the sports ground where we were pitched, led by one Arthur J Roscoe, Attorney at Law, representing the DA's office. He slapped a lawsuit on Manny there and then, for fraudulent practice. The police ordered Manny to stop, and when he refused, he was arrested.
He was immediately sprung by a horrified Allbright. All those years of peddling faith and when it worked, this happened. He knew how the drug companies, some of whom sponsored him, viewed miracle cures, genuine or not. He also knew the power of the media. He cut us loose, and headed off back to the The Truth And The Light HQ. He left us the tent and vehicles, hoping for a clean break. But he'd reckoned without his daughter.
*
Gloria Allbright had lived with booze, dope and permanent bleeding from a botched abortion for twelve suicide-prone years. Soon after the Weston sensation, she gathered her courage together. Manny still operated, in defiance of authority. As he walked in, the crowd boiled around him and he suddenly stopped, held up his arms for silence. He said someone had touched him. I saw Pete and Johnnie exchange exasperated looks. Five hundred people pushing and shoving and this dude had asked who touched him. But it was Gloria. She told us later she would have been too embarrassed to reveal her condition in public, and to a man. The first to recognise her was Pete, as she knelt in front of Manny. He stretched out an arm, helping her gently to her feet, and from that moment her problem, and all the substance abuse, ceased. Once more the name of Allbright was brought into national and unwelcome prominence. It was Manny's death warrant.
*
Fraudulent medical practice is a federal rap. Manny could go down for decades. While the DA was deciding whether there was a case to answer, I asked Manny why didn't he just quit. He said he couldn't. He'd been given his gift and was duty bound to use it. But he frequently massaged his temples, saying you got nothing for nothing. Some mornings he looked like a sick child himself. When I asked him where all this was going, he replied simply, “They're gonna get me.”
But he wouldn't stop. He couldn't. And he wouldn't slow down. The word was that the DA would decide any day now and it was likely to be bad news.
*
Tomahawk cleared his throat. I'd used up my time.
Did any of the group carry guns? I said no, which was true. OK, so here was the deal. The raid was going down tonight when the show got started. I would be set up with Roscoe priming me on what to say in court. And would be paid for my services. Thirty large up front. That was when I started to smell a big, fat, dollar-wrapped rat. It wasn't that I didn't trust the Hawk. Him and I had been doing business for years and he never welshed. A deal was a deal. But paid after the event. And never this amount.
Thirty grand.
Tomahawk sat there a couple minutes, watching my face. My thoughts must have been as clear to him as writing on a wall. Then he spoke in that white man-speak-with-forked-tongue rumble.
“Jude, sometimes a guy has greatness thrust upon him. This is one of them occasions. Ever ponder the meaning of life? Like, for you, it's gonna end up maybe one of three ways. If you're lucky, stacking shelves someplace in Florida, just another wrinkly with arthritis. Two, in jail, when we decide we don't like you no more. Three, whacked by the Mob, the day you overdo it as a stoolie.”
He was right.
“Deal?”
I looked at him, then at the unmarked Crown Vic waiting illegally at the kerb.If I said no, that car would be moving in under a minute, heading to police HQ downtown. And it would have an extra passenger. By the time it arrived, that passenger would be busted. Narcotics, most likely. Probably a baggie, worth around a grand street value, and fifteen years. That's how the cops sometimes work. The Tomahawk doubtless had it right there in his pocket, all ready to plant on me. The whole thing stank, for a variety of reasons. I didn't want to go against Manny. And I felt the Tomahawk didn't want to bust me. But, facing retirement on a pension he needed, he had no choice. And I knew I didn't either. My eyes left the table surface and came up to meet his.
“Deal.”
*
I paid the check as soon as the car disappeared, got a load of quarters in change. Then I did some serious phoning. I got plenty contacts. The one I wanted worked right there in the DA's office. French-Canadian, nice kid, said I reminded her of that Aznavour dude. Elise and I were pretty close at one time and who knows where we might have gone together. But I never encouraged her, knowing that marriage and kids wasn't gonna be my style. Pity. I got her on the phone and she agreed to do some digging. I should ring her back around four. I waited, sweating. There wasn't much time. On the dot of four I rang back. Elise answered the phone and her information amazed me.
“Your boy's clean.”
Clean?
“You mean no prosecution?”
“Not from here.”
“How come?”
“Maitland's washed his hands of it. Doesn't want to know. I guess because he's running for office in a couple of month's time.”
What had stunk before was now beginning to smell like a dead polecat. And yet it made sense, in a screwed-up way. Maitland, District Attorney, and career politician, wasn't gonna be seen going up against anything connected with religion. Especially with an election coming up.
“How long they known about this?”
“From the start, pretty much.”
From the start.
So the Tomahawk musta known Manny wasn't gonna be indicted. Which explained why his tent show hadn't been busted again. If the DA wasn't gunning for him, then who was? And the only answer to that had to be the pharmaceutical establishment, assisted undercover by Allbright.
Big pharma is big. Global, rich, powerful, with more people getting rich out of cancer and AIDS than there are people dying of them. Maitland knew that. Doubtless, like Allbright, he was big into their stock. This way, he could keep his political career clean, while doing the dirty on Manny by proxy. I thanked Elise and hung up, somehow feeling it was goodbye for good.
*
I took the subway back to the sports ground where the tent was pitched, checked in with the boys. Maybe it was the knowledge I possessed, the deal I'd been forced into, but the atmosphere had changed. Manny looked sick and scared. The boys could sense there was something up. They were nervy, restless, and smoking more than usual. Then Manny said it was gonna go bad. It was the first time he'd opened up like that. Pete said he wasn't doing the business any good, talking that way. Manny just looked at him, as if he knew there were things going on that Pete would never understand.
“When the crunch comes, there ain't one of you gonna stand up for me.” It wasn't said in a tough or bitter way, but with sad knowledge, and it provoked a hot response from Pete.
“Hey Manny, don't you go putting me with everyone else.” Manny shook his head.
“Time'll come when they'll try and link you with me, Pete. You'll say you never knew me. Once, twice, however many times they ask.” Pete stormed away. Manny watched him leave, then dropped his bombshell.
“Guys, I'm living on borrowed time. I'm being set up, and whoever did it is standing right here.”
He was looking at me as he said it and snakes came to life, twisting hot in my belly. I kept my face expressionless.
“You talking to me, Manny?” He couldn't possibly know, but he merely replied;
“You said it, Jude.” I almost cracked then. I wanted to tell him about the Hawk, the money and the threat to my freedom. But I couldn't. I was as much locked in and helpless as he was. We all stared at each other in an atmosphere of suspicion, broken only by one of the boys.
“Hey boss! There's a bunch of guys setting up around the tent. Looks like some kind of traveling fair.”
*
The Winnebago emptied. Johnny was right. Men and lorries occupied the space around the big tent. It looked like a cheap traveling fair, with hoopla stalls and a carousel. We walked over to a stand advertising dogs and burgers, with the smell of onions frying. The guy doing the frying looked like one of his burgers, mean, grey and round.
“Good evening,” said Manny politely. The guy ignored him.
“You got a license?”
“Get lost, I'm busy.”
I could see Pete and Johnny getting riled. So was Manny.
“Gimme a dog. Extra onions with mustard.”
“No deal, friend.”
“Why not?”
Dogmeat looked at Manny for the first time.
“Look Mack, we're waiting on the crowd that's coming to the freak show in the tent. They ain't bums. They pay special prices. Now beat it.”
“I'm trying to help folk and all you're interested in is bleeding them dry?”
Dogmeat reached under his fry-slab and came up holding a billy. He never got a chance to use it.
“Damn you, you unholy pig!” Manny reached over the counter, grabbed him and dragged him out. He hit the ground in a heap.
“Go boys! Take them down!”
His shout galvanised the group and suddenly we were all shoving against the side of 'Temple Dogs & Burgers'. The rig went over, scattering grease and hot onions on its owner. Then, led by Manny, we charged the small fairground which was poaching our territory. It was a joyous release for small time crooks who were bored with the straight and narrow. We wrecked the whole thing, Pete grabbing a tent pole and downing everyone and everything he could find. It lasted maybe ten minutes and it was Manny who cooled it first, yelling for order and pointing. We looked, expecting to see cops.
But it was only the usual procession coming through the makeshift gateway to the grass parking lot. A quarter of seven. The show, and my betrayal, was under an hour away.
*
Back inside the Winnebago I saw Manny reach for a bottle, pouring himself a glass and one for me.
“Celebration time?” He eyed me.
“Yeah, kind of.” He paused, then went on.
“I wasn’t but a day old when the police found me inside a Sears bag in a bus station with a note naming me and asking I should be brought up in the Jewish faith. Which I was, although I ain't done much of it lately. But it's something to cling to, you dig? Like take today's date.”
I checked my watch. April fourteenth, 2014.
“That's significant?”
“Tonight, at sunset, it's Passover. And maybe somewhere there's a woman putting out the matzos and thinking about a son she never saw grow up.”
He took a bite of a cracker, saying he wasn't eating no bread that contained flour. And no beer nor whisky, nothing made from grain. I nodded at his glass of Californian red.
“So what about that?”
He managed a sick nervous grin.
“Wine's legal.”
“No shit.”
“Yeah.”
The phone rang and I picked it up. Josh and Simon said it was time to head for the tent. I looked at Manny and realised he was as scared as me, looking desperately for a way out. But there wasn't. I was surprised to see Pete and John asleep, stretched out in armchairs. Manny got real pissed and shook them awake, telling them they had no business sleeping at this stage. Then we headed for the tent.
*
It was packed. The buzz dropped to silence as Manny entered and you could have cut the air like pizza. He held out his hands, then bowed his head for the Lord's prayer. We all prayed with him and for me, for once, it was genuine. He finished and I opened my eyes, gazing out over the crowd, trying to spot the police team. I couldn't. Then we started our ritual of embracing. Manny reached those skinny arms around me, looking into my eyes, and I think what I saw there, for the first time in my life, was love.
“Goodbye, Jude,” he whispered, “God bless you.”
I knew then that he knew. Then men came out of the crowd. They closed in on Manny, and the two groups confronted one another. Booing started as a dick held out a warrant card and a chair was thrown as a mob rushed the stage. The cop with the warrant went down under three or more men, including Pete. There was a flash of steel, and screaming, and the cop rolling on the stage, grabbing under his jacket for a gun, the other hand clamped to his ear. I never seen so much blood, his whole right ear was just about off. Pete backed off and the melee, inside a circle of drawn Smith & Wessons, was over. I'll never forget Manny, holding them at bay, with arms outstretched.
“Why the guns?” he kept saying, “Why the guns?” And then someone nailed the cuffs on me and they got me outside and into a black and white. It was over.
*
I'm finishing this off on a Dr. Pepper crate by the dim light of a Seven-Eleven.
I remember how it was downtown, when they brought Manny in, on a trumped-up vagrancy rap. And I remember how he looked just before his death, and how the rest of them looked, Pete especially. His nerve had gone and he was busy denying he'd ever been involved.
I say Manny's death, because six hours later he was. Dead in police custody of a stroke. The cops must have been relieved. They hadn't beat him to death. He just died. I remember what he said about the healing taking it out of him, how he was forever rubbing those temples.
You get nothing for nothing, Jude.
*
There will always be controversy over what Manny did. Could he cure? Sure, I saw it happen many times. Although he attracted his share of crazies there were a whole bunch of genuine ones they couldn't pass off as fakes. Maybe when Weston, or any of the half dozen other kids, are grown up, they'll tell about it.
And what about what happened down at the morgue? For three days, after I was released together with a briefcase containing thirty grand in cash, I walked around in a daze. When the phone rang I had this crazy idea that it would be Manny, but it wasn't. It was a guy who was on morgue duty when Allbright, putting a churchy gloss on the whole thing, arrived to collect Manny's body. But Allbright was palmed off with a John Doe. Manny's body had just plain disappeared.
Then Pete phoned. He hadn't been charged. Once Manny was locked up, no one seemed to care about the rest of us. Pete told me he'd seen Manny. He sounded scared, but adamant. He'd been clearing the site and Manny had appeared and told him 'so long'. He was smoking a cigarette. Then he'd walked into the tent. When Pete followed him inside, there was nobody there, just a butt smouldering on the grass. And the curtain of white linen which formed a backdrop to the stage had been somehow ripped from top to bottom.
*
I don't know what I helped kill, but I know that I have to die too, before someone comes for me. This afternoon I saw the Tomahawk. I told him I didn't want the money, threw it on the floor. He shrugged and said it wasn't nothing to him, but it wouldn't be long before we met again. So I think my death will suit him just fine. I'll hold my breath and hope that's the right way to do it. They'll find this envelope in my pocket.
Do it, Jude. Do it now.