Precious Blood(11)

“Maybe it’s just as well if I don’t go to prayer meeting anyway,” she said. “I’m dead on my feet.”

“No, you’re not,” Joe said happily. “Look at your middle. The twins are doing the frug.”





[6]


It was two-thirty by the time the two robotic little men from Mark Candor’s All Christian Good News Gospel Network left Barry Field’s main studio, and by then Barry was close to a nervous breakdown. Or what he thought was a nervous breakdown. That was one of the few things that had not changed in his life when he accepted Christ as his personal savior: the way he responded to pressure. Some people, like Judy Eagan, did better when they were under the wire. Barry Field did nothing at all. As soon as he got nervous, he began to feel stiff in mind and body. As soon as he got scared, he shut down altogether. He was a bad person to have around in an emergency, because he was just like that hoary old rabbit caught in the headlights of an oncoming car. When the going got tough, he turned into a statue and let the tough turn him into a road kill.

Still, he thought, coming back upstairs after seeing the two space aliens out, his conversion had been a good thing. His life as a Catholic had been a trauma of epic proportions, a Ring cycle of guilt and confusion. There were so many rules. As soon as you thought you were keeping one, you realized you were breaking another. You certainly never had any assurance that you were doing the right thing, even though that was what the Catholic Church was supposed to be for. And if you confessed your fumbling, as the nuns had taught you to do, you found you had committed yet another sin, called scrupulosity. Barry had never understood scrupulosity. It seemed to him it was just a fancy name for an honest conscience.

Now, of course, he understood that it was all a racket. The God who had always been so important to him was not an ogre bent on driving men to despair. His rules were clear and simple and very few in number, and He had sent Christ to make their interpretation plain. Finding Christ had released Barry from a lifetime of fear and self-loathing. He could barely stand to think of the way he had been before he’d got his soul free of the Catholic Church. He didn’t feel any better thinking of all the people still trapped within Her. That was why he did what he did, and that—no matter what anybody said—was why getting a spot on Mark Candor’s All Christian Good News Gospel Network was so important to him.

Barry let himself into his office and found Andy Walsh where he had left him, slouched into the club chair near the window, his hands folded together on his chest, his eyes closed. Andy had been his guest on the Witness Hour this afternoon, something Barry had arranged precisely because the robots were coming. Andy Walsh’s disquisitions on the perfidies of the Catholic Church were a big hit with the Reverend Mark, maybe even the reason why he was interested in Barry Field. Barry believed absolutely that God did all things in His own way on His own time, but there was still enough of the Catholic left in him so that he also believed he had to cooperate with grace. Cooperation in this case meant giving the public what it wanted.

Barry closed the door with a little click. Andy looked up.

“The cast of Dawn of the Dead is gone, I take it,” he said.

“I put them into their car myself.”

“Are you sure you want to work for these people, Barry? They remind me of those guys who end up blowing away everybody in the local mall with a Uzi.”

“I wouldn’t be working for them. I’d be working for Reverend Mark Candor. I’ve met Candor. He’s a nice man.”

“He’s also a rich man. He could make you rich, too.”

“I thought we were talking about Cheryl Cass.”

Andy leaned forward, and Barry looked away. They’d had this discussion innumerable times over the past few months, ever since Barry had told Andy that Candor was interested in picking up this little local Christian show for his nationwide cable network. Andy was a cynic. When he heard Mark Candor’s name, all he thought of were dollar signs, toll-free numbers and tax-free contributions.

“We were not exactly talking about Cheryl Cass,” Andy said. “I was telling you she came to see me today.”

“That doesn’t constitute talking about?”

“Well, you hadn’t said anything at all. Let’s say I was making a speech.”

“Okay.”

“So.” Andy smiled. “Cheryl Cass came to see me today. In feet, according to her, she came all the way to Colchester just to see me. She’d seen my picture in a magazine and decided to look me up.”

“Wasn’t that a little odd? She can’t be living anywhere close to here. One or the other of us would have run across her before this.”