True Believers(15)

Now he stood feeling the steam of coffee rising into his face from a very full cup and watched Will Lawton the atheist get into his truck and turn on the motor. Edith Lawton the atheist was standing in the doorway of her house, barefoot, as if she didn’t have to care if her toes fell off from frostbite. He had been watching them all this week, and he was fairly sure that they were either not talking to each other at all, or only talking barely. He would have to pay attention. The members of this church were fascinated by the two atheists on their own block. Roy had had to warn them more than once not to go down there to gawk. That was all they needed, under the circumstances—a few members arrested for “harassing” the heathens, a big black-and-white picture in the Philadelphia Inquirer of a few Christians being led away in handcuffs for practicing “hate.” It wasn’t that Roy Phipps had anything against hate. In fact, he heartily approved of it. God hated the wicked, and he expected the righteous to hate them, too, and to tell the world the truth about what was becoming of it. God hated lies, which was what the apostate churches trafficked in, all the time, day and night, as if their members could escape their eternal destiny in the agony of hell by merely being bored to death. If there was anybody Roy envied, it was that pastor out in Kansas who had put up the website called www.godhatesfags.com—but then, come to think of it, he didn’t. It was the “fags” that were the problem. Like The Other Word for Negro, Roy never used it—not because it was derogatory, but because it was slang. There was the influence of the Princeton University English Department for you. Roy Phipps, son of a seldom-employed coal miner and a dedicated slattern, raised on roadkill and dandelion greens, valedictorian of his class, could not use slang.

The door to the study clicked open. Roy put his coffee cup down on his desk next to the silver-framed photograph of a small group of no-longer-exactly boys in front of an elegant pseudo-Gothic building. He noticed himself and paid no attention. He noticed Dan Burdock and almost smiled. He thought—not for the first time—that he might be pushing his people too far to make them come out to this street to go to church. This was a street, after all, that reeked of everything they were afraid of. This was a street that reeked of money.

The man who had come in was very young and very badly dressed: Fred Havers. Like a lot of just-about-fat men with no sense of taste or proportion, he wore suits and shirts a size too small for him, so that he looked as if he were strangling himself. Still, he was dressed, and at this time of the morning, too. He was even wearing a tie. It was the first thing Roy stressed to his people. Self-discipline was the key. Character was destiny. It was the one thing they didn’t know and the one thing they needed most desperately to hear.

Fred came up to the desk and cleared his throat. He was still in his twenties, but so badly out of shape that he looked older than Roy did, if looking older meant looking aged. In some ways, Fred would never look older than anybody. He had the face of someone who is permanently, irretrievably clueless, an expression that veered spasmodically between dazed surprise and embarrassment. He had managed to get through the General Studies course at some high school on the outskirts of Philadelphia without, as far as Roy could tell, learning anything at all.

“So?” Roy said.

Fred cleared his throat again. “I just got back. You know. From over there. St. Stephen’s.”

“And?”

Fred shrugged. “I don’t know. Maybe I wasn’t looking for the right stuff. They were praying, is all I could see. And some of them were just sitting. In the pews, you know, and then the casket was in the front in front of the altar.”

“And?” Roy said again.

“And nothing. That’s what was happening. His mother is there. The guy who died. And so are a lot of men. Gay men, I think. At least, some of them were. They were, you know, kind of funny.”

Roy took a long sip of coffee. It was impossible to explain to somebody like Fred that not all homosexual men behaved like flaming queens. There was a piece of slang Roy could use, at least in the quiet of his mind. He put down the coffee cup and stared at the far wall, over Fred Havers’s shoulder. His bachelor’s degree from Princeton was there, framed. So was his master’s degree from Harvard, in history. If he had done what they all wanted him to do, he would have gone on for his doctorate and be teaching in some history department right now, and probably have had tenure before he was thirty-five. He tried to remember when he had had his first vision of hell, and couldn’t. The story he told to new parishioners, and to the media when they bothered to ask, was that he had been lying on a mattress on a floor in an apartment in Cambridge when suddenly the hardwood underneath him had disappeared and he was engulfed by flames. That was true enough, but he had a feeling that it had not really been the first time, only the most dramatic in a series of times when hell had seemed very close to him. It seemed very close to him now.