I said, “What the hell are you doing here?”
He said, and I’ll swear to it, “God sent me.”
“Dunston, if you don’t leave Kerry alone—”
“She is my wife.”
“She is not your wife!”
“ ‘Bone of my bones, and flesh of my flesh. Therefore shall a man leave his father and his mother—’ ”
“You quoted that one before. Try a new one.”
“Heathen,” he said.
“Crackpot,” I said.
We glared at each other for about five seconds. Then he turned on his heel and stalked off, and I turned on mine and went inside and upstairs and whacked on Kerry’s door so hard I jammed my wrist doing it.
She opened up, took one look at me, and said, “Oh God, you ran into him.”
“Literally.” I pushed past her, massaging my wrist.
“You didn’t do anything to him?”
“No, I didn’t do anything to him. But I might have if I’d had a straitjacket handy.”
“I didn’t let him in,” she said.
“Good for you. Did he tell you God sent him?”
“Yes. Among other things.”
“Me too. He’s driving me as crazy as he is, you know that?”
“You think he’s not driving me crazy?”
“This is the last straw,” I said darkly. “Tomorrow we quit pussyfooting around. Tomorrow we put an end to this one way or another.”
“How?”
“By paying a visit to the Church of the Holy Mission,” I said. “By having a talk with the Right Reverend Clyde T. Daybreak, with or without God’s permission.”
Chapter Eighteen
I don’t much like San Jose.
This is no reflection on the people who live there—not on most of them, anyway. Everybody’s got to live somewhere, and in California these days, with the economic situation being what it is, your options are pretty much limited to areas with a reasonably high employment rate. There are some nice little communities near San Jose—Los Gatos, for instance; I have nothing against those. Just San Jose itself. It’s like a big overgrown kid who sprouted up too fast, seems bewildered by his sudden wild growth, and doesn’t quite know what to make of himself. It can’t make up its collective mind if it wants to be a big metropolis or a small city, or if it’s really just a little country town at heart. It has no real identity because there are too many opposing components in its makeup: part agricultural, part industrial, part Silicon Valley hype, part Mexican barrio, part Vietnamese refugee resettlement center, and part mindless, tasteless urban and suburban sprawl. It has some cultural attractions downtown, and the local Yuppies have begun renovating and restoring some of the old mid-city Victorians; but the downtown area is just a pocket surrounded by slums, industrial areas, cheap apartment buildings, and seemingly endless strings of tract houses and shopping centers. The city also has a high crime rate and harbors more than a few bizarre institutions, not the least of which are the Winchester Mystery House, a model of lunatic construction built by the widow of the inventor of the Winchester rifle, who believed she would die if the house was ever completed and therefore kept adding on things like doors that open on blank walls and stairways that lead nowhere; the Rosicrucians, a leading candidate for the Weirdest California Cult award; and now the Church of the Holy Mission, not to mention the Moral Crusade, the Reverend Raymond P. Dunston, and the Right Reverend Clyde T. Daybreak.
When Kerry and I got to San Jose a little past noon on Sunday, it was the first time I’d been there in more than a year. It seemed much more sprawling and congested than I remembered it, even on a Sunday—not that that surprised me any. I took the downtown exit off Highway 17, and we drove around for twenty minutes looking for Langford Street; if Kerry were a better map-reader we’d have found it in ten because it was not far from either City Hall or the San Jose State University campus. The neighborhood was neither well-to-do nor shabby: Langford was that vanishing breed, a lower-middle-class inner-city residential street shaded by leafy trees and featuring a dozen different architectural styles, from wood-shingled cottage to big gabled Victorian.
The biggest lot and the biggest Victorian on the fourteen-hundred block belonged to the Church of the Holy Mission, which announced its presence by means of a six-foot, billboard-type sign on its front lawn. It was three lots, actually, on a corner; in addition to the Victorian, freshly painted a sedate white with blue trim, it contained a low modern wing, a separate box-shaped outbuilding, and parking facilities for maybe thirty cars. The parking area was full at the moment, although it wouldn’t be for long: services must have just ended because people were streaming out of the modern wing, most of them young, some with small children in tow.