Baptism in Blood(2)
David coughed. Tiffany turned her head to look at him and smiled. Ginny looked back over her shoulder and then swiveled her chair around to face him.
“Oh,” she said. “Dr. Sandler. Is there something I can do for you?”
David walked into the room and took Tiffany out of her chair. Tiffany was the first baby he had ever known, and he liked her enormously. When he picked her up, she curled against him, soft and warm and breathy.
“All the weather news is bad,” David said. “You shouldn’t be here this late. Even I shouldn’t be here. There’s going to be a hurricane.”
Ginny waved this away and turned back to her typing. Her hair cascaded down her back in a curling ponytail. Her hands were full of rings, so full that her only real one—her wedding ring—seemed to get lost.
“There isn’t going to be a hurricane for hours yet,” she said confidently. “I know. I’ve been through them. I’ve got plenty of time to get this done before I have to head into town.”
“I’d still feel safer if you headed into town.”
Ginny tapped impatiently at the computer. “Besides,” she said, “you know what I’d have to do if I left here now?”
“No.”
“Go up to that camp,” Ginny said. “That’s what I’d have to do. I promised that Miss Meyer. Ms., she wants to be called. My husband says they’re worshipping the devil up at that camp. Did you know that?”
“No,” David said. “I didn’t know it. I don’t think it’s true, Ginny. They’re not devils up there. They’re just a lot of middle-aged women whose lives haven’t worked out so well.”
Ginny wrinkled her nose. “They won’t let me put my pictures up out there,” she told him. “My cross and the picture of my Lord. They won’t even let me use my own pencils because they have Jesus’ name written on them. Their hearts are hardened against the Lord.”
“Their hearts are hardened against a lot of things, I expect.”
“They’re lesbians, too,” Ginny said. “They say so right out. They don’t care what anybody else thinks. Homosexuals are an abomination in the sight of the Lord.”
“Somehow, I have a hard time thinking of Zhondra Meyer as an abomination. A nag, maybe, but not an abomination.”
Ginny looked back over her shoulder again and grinned. “I know,” she said, giggling. “They’re just like a bunch of old maids up there. It’s terrible. But Bobby’s the one who went to Bible college. He’s the one who knows. So he must be right about it, don’t you think?”
Bobby was Ginny’s husband. David shifted Tiffany from one shoulder to the other. Tiffany was asleep.
“Right about Zhondra Meyer?” he asked. “Well, Ginny, I don’t know. By now you must realize that I don’t put much credence in—”
“Put what?”
“That I don’t believe in God,” David said.
“You just say you don’t believe in God,” Ginny said quickly. “It’s Ms. Meyer who really doesn’t believe in Him. You let me keep my pictures up. You even let me listen to the PTL Club when I stay late. They don’t even have a television up there at that camp.”
“They probably can’t afford one.”
Ginny turned back to the terminal screen and frowned at it. “Bobby says it’s a dangerous thing, denying God and worshipping Satan. He says it can get out of hand and start affecting everybody. And I know what he means. I went to college myself for a while. Out at North Carolina State. I went for two years.”
“You should have stayed.”
“I saw it in some of the people I met out there,” Ginny went on. “It’s a terrible thing, to lose your faith in the Lord. People get—crazy.”
“People get crazy with the Lord just as well as without him, Ginny.”
Ginny shook her head. “Bobby says people don’t really think about Hell anymore. That’s the problem. If we really thought about Hell, if we really understood what it meant, we’d never do anything wrong. We wouldn’t want to risk for even a second going down to the fire. The fire that lasts for all of eternity.”
“Ginny—”
“But some people actually like Hell. Bobby says that’s what most people don’t understand. Some people get committed to Satan, and then when they do they like Hell, it makes them happy, and it makes them happiest to see souls in torment, you know, souls that haven’t been saved but haven’t been committed to Satan, either. Do you see what I mean?”