True Believers(98)

Now he stood patiently at the desk and let the woman officer count out his personal things, naming each one, as if it mattered if she spoke the list aloud.

“One black leather wallet,” she said. Her voice had the flat-bottomed drone of central Pennsylvania. “Fifty-four dollars in bills. Seventy-six cents in change. One American Express gold card. One driver’s license. One bank card.”

“Reverend Phipps doesn’t believe in credit cards,” Fred said. “He says it’s the way Satan seduces us into slavery.”

The woman looked up. Then she looked down again and went on counting. “One copy The Pocket Bible, King James version. One set of keys on a cross-shaped key chain.”

Fred looked at the floor, and the ceiling, and the walls. Roy could see that he was so ashamed he could barely breathe, and he seemed to be coming out of his suit, bursting the buttons as they stood. The suit was wrinkled, the result of a night in the tank and the fact that Fred had bought it at JC Penney’s. Roy didn’t know why the suits always bothered him so much, but they did. It seemed to him that he had been better than this, even in the days when he had had no money and had had to bus dishes to make his walking-around money.

Of course, maybe he hadn’t been. The trouble with memory was that it played tricks on you. That was what had happened to him the one time one of his brothers had come up to see him in Philadelphia, when he had just started to make a name for himself as a preacher. He would have said, before that, that he knew his brothers’ faces as well as he knew his own. He saw them in his sleep. He saw them in his nightmares. Then this huge hulking man had appeared in the doorway to his church, and he hadn’t had the faintest idea who it was.

“That’s it,” the woman officer said. “Will you sign this, please, attesting to your agreement that your property has been returned to you.”

Roy took the paper she handed him and bent over it. He never signed anything without reading it. That included things like this, which were just copies of things he had signed before. The officer looked annoyed. Fred shifted his weight from leg to leg. Roy thought about protesting the use of the phrase “in the same condition”—nothing was ever in the same condition; wear and tear and misuse damaged all things—but then bent down and signed. There were times and places to make scenes. This was not one of them.

He handed the paper across the desk to the officer. The officer handed him his things. Roy put them back one by one in his pockets. It was quiet in this police station at this time of day, although out here the neighborhood was no longer very good. Last night, when they had come in, the place had been pandemonium.

“I sent Carl out to get a cab,” Fred was saying. “It didn’t work too well. Cabs never seem to like to stop for Carl. So I sent him home.”

“We don’t need a cab,” Roy said.

“I thought maybe you’d rather ride than walk,” Fred said. “I mean, you know, in case they’ve got press people around here, with cameras. And that kind of thing. I thought maybe you wouldn’t want for it to be on television, you coming out of jail.”

“It’s been on television before.”

“Well, yeah, I know. But I thought that was different. The protests, I mean. It wasn’t like this.”

“What’s so different about this?”

“Well,” Fred said.

They had come out onto the front steps. The day was cold but clear, not quite as dark as it had been in the last few weeks. Roy snapped up the collar of his coat and drew his scarf more tightly around his neck. It really wasn’t a very good neighborhood. Some of the buildings were either abandoned or close to it. They had windows boarded over with plywood and trash on their front steps. The gutters were clear, but that was only because the police station was there and the garbagemen didn’t want to annoy the cops. Roy pulled on his gloves and headed down the stairs.

“I don’t see why this arrest should be any different than any other,” he said. “Why do you think it is? Because the homosexuals behaved like the animals they are and made the blood flow in the streets?”

“No,” Fred said. “No, that wasn’t it.”

“Then what was it?” Roy had them headed to the left, back to their own quiet street. “Have the newspapers been blaming it all on me? There’s nothing new in that. They always blame it all on me. I never start the violence. They always say I do. So what?”

Fred started looking around again, up and down and sideways. Then he reached under his own coat and brought out a newspaper. “This,” he said, handing the paper over.