Here's another chapter from "The Baptized." I'd also like to encourage both the curious and anyone/everyone else out there to let me know what they think of it and its (apparent, to date) themes so far. I will get back to you, honest. I can be reached at mosleynovelist@gmail.com. Thank you and have a wonderful Spring and, if you celebrate in this fashion, a very rewarding Passover or Easter as well..
Chapter
4
I
suppose I should thank you, Lord. It’s a lot of money. It’s something to do.
So
here we go. This goes beyond mere gratitude, after all.
Our
Father, who art in heaven, hallowed be….
No,
it’s not working. Let’s start again.
Wait a
minute. Wait a minute. If I take this job, if I take Alec Walling’s money, does
that obligate me? To him? To You? How
can I best serve you, my Lord? Shouldn’t that be the real question? Is
shredding to shit the pathetic-sounding story of one of your servants by
another, one of the humblest, going to do any good? Is making the Lapotaires
seem ridiculous to the world at large, to the so-called intelligentsia, to the
non-believers out there, going to amount to a hill of beans compared to the
feelings they clearly arouse among people who reverence your name every day?
Simple as they may be by my standards, as silly as they seem to act - with
the Reverend Almon Floyd Fielding and his minions leading the charge out there
in Lancaster County - don’t they deserve something better than my
scorn?
Yes,
Lord, the truth is, as if You didn’t know, I’m beginning to think, once I
research thoroughly and file my report to Walling, which pro forma will debunk
his niece and her prop of a shrink and spouse, that I should also write this up
as a book. As a case study of credulity among what H.L.Mencken called the
“boobosity.” It will sell. It will have my prestige behind it, Pulitzer Prize
winner strikes again. And I will thus probably make a shitpot of money. The New
York Times Book Review will love it, especially if I couch my disapproval
behind sympathetic-sounding clucking that “these poor people” aren’t taken
seriously enough by the rest of us more enlightened souls. I will hit the talk
shows, Matt Lauer will squint and try hard to understand my arguments, I will
shake up people’s mornings and I will show up in any independent bookstore or Barnes
& Noble that’ll have me.
But
how does that benefit You? Will it help Your purposes? Does dumping on your
believers, no matter how coarse they may seem to be compared to say,
upper-class Episcopalians, help the ultimate cause here? The First Cause? And would a rip-roaring, trend-chasing
magazine journalist from someplace like “Rolling Stone” or “Entertainment
Weekly” even care about these things? So why should I?
Our
Father, am I doing the right thing? I’m sleeping better, yes, I’m benefiting my
daughter’s family and its future, I’m actually looking forward to getting up
and going out the door lately.
But
I’m not happy about it. If this is doing the Lord’s work, it sucks. I am going
about my Father’s business, but with great, roiling unease.
Still,
there’s always the money.
I was
walking the streets of Clermont, New Jersey, the very suburb that Marianne
Lapotaire nee Walling had identified as the epicenter of Satanism in New Jersey
as she was growing up, when something very interesting occurred. Something
hardly “Satanic” in nature, but surely indicative of declining standards of politesse
in one way or another.
A
motorcyclist, bearded, grossly overweight, in greasy denims with a long grey
braid tied up by several rubber bands in neon-bright colors bouncing behind his
back, went by on his Harley-Davidson, and as he did a police car passed going
the other way. The cyclist was wearing
on his head, presumably to existing state and federal highway safety codes, a
helmet that just 20 years ago would have been dismissed by most sane citizens
as strongly resembling one worn by the Wehrmacht during WWII, all it was
missing was a Waffen SS rune on one side and a divisional badge on the other,
perhaps for the Leibstandarte Adolf Hitler regiment. Today, of course, as what
you might surmise was evidence that Hitler has truly won even if it took him
lo! all this many years since his death, both the US armed forces and SWAT cops
wear the same kind of helmet. So fascism crept in through the back door,
through its most logical adherents and armed enforcers. Sieg style.
And
the cyclist gave the police car “the arm” as he passed, clearly, in no
uncertain terms. And he grinned as he did it. And the cop in the cruiser didn’t
so much as blink, he didn’t put on his flashers and wheel round to give chase,
he didn’t even yell an obscenity back. Instead, he pulled over near where I was
walking, got out and walked into a convenience store to buy a bottle of Poland
Spring Water.
I
looked him over. He was tall, good-looking in a kind of blandly predictable way
and probably too young to have ever even had a father who’d been in WWII, had
also probably never been in the service himself, looked like he’d be happier at
an arena rock concert as a screaming patron than as a security guard
confiscating bottles, cans and cameras. And his shoes weren’t shined, unlike
the Harley-Davidson which had just gone by which had gleamed brilliantly in the
muggy Jersey sun. He came out of the store and as he opened his water bottle he
smiled and nodded hello to me. I felt no safer for his feigned affability, and
I had no difficulty picturing this young cop in his own Wehrmacht-style helmet
should there be cause to call out the local tac team in Clermont.
I was
tempted, however, to go up to him and to empathize, to start by saying
something like “I saw what just happened, Officer, and back in my day…” But
then I realized, this is my day, it had been ‘my day’ since the 60’s and back
then was when I started noticing a general lack of respect towards the police.
The more education among their critics, the more dismissive said critics were
of the police as a sociological force. The less educated, of course, the cruder
the comments about the cops, too. But given my socio-economic level, where I’d
worked, what I’d done for a living, who my
friends were, antipathy towards cops was both endemic and systemic. And on a
warm Jersey afternoon, it had all boiled down to some scumbag on a motorcycle
sneeringly telling a cop to go fuck himself. I wasn’t sure this quite
constituted progress.
It had
been over a month since I’d landed in Clermont and made it my base of
operations, since I’d sublet a one-bedroom garden apartment, since I’d started
asking questions, since I’d gotten the go-ahead, of sorts, from Philippe and
Marianne.
And I
had learned, fundamentally, nothing more than they’d put in the book.
The
neighbors in the area I’d spoken to, to be sure, all remembered the Wallings.
As a lovely, loving family. And Marianne as an especially lovely girl, a little
reserved, but friendly enough, with a genuine complement of friends. She’d gone
to the local high school, worked on the yearbook, was in the French and drama
clubs (that might have been a clue right there), had even been a cheerleader
through her junior year when she’d quit to try and focus on her grades for college.
There was definitely nothing in the prosaic public record to suggest a future
Satanic priestess in training. Nor, in the former family home which a wildly
talkative local real estate lady had shown me while assuring me it was “priced
to sell” (and it was, by Philippe and Marianne), was there any evidence that
there’d ever been any pentagrams painted on the cellar floor or that the den
walls had been painted with murals of orgies full of slobbering suburbanites
swiving each other in every conceivable formulation.
When
I’d asked the real estate lady where the orgies Marianne had realized in
therapy that she’d witnessed had occurred, she tittered, played nervously with
the clunky “ethnic-style” necklace composed of beaded discs that hung round her
neck and matched her earrings. “Well, there is a hot tub out back on the deck,
but it apparently needs some work. Not a lot, perhaps, but at least some
checking out by a spa professional. It hasn’t been used in years, that I know.”
She smiled, sensing a selling point.
The
thought of those bubbling waters awash with sperm and spermicide somehow
repulsed me, although Marianne and Philippe’s book had never mentioned a hot
tub. The thought of hopping into such a tub with the local real estate lady,
who’d pointedly and coyly mentioned both her “three years ago yesterday”
divorce and her proficiency at cooking Thai
food as we were talking back in her office, was even worse.
“I’m
sorry, home spas just aren’t my thing. I’m not even sure that homes are
anymore.”
“Well,
I’m sure we can find something if we keep looking,” the real estate lady, whose
name tag identified her as ‘Jan Van Peenen Muntz’ so I knew she hadn’t changed
her name back post-divorce, replied. “So we’ll just keep plugging at it.” She
put on her plucky suburban real estate face, I scowled back.
“Look,”
I said, “how come this house isn’t moving? It’s big, it’s on a nice-sized piece
of land and it’s got a certain notoriety.”
Jan
Van Peenen Muntz frowned. “The taxes in town are high, the commuter trains are
crowded. Some people consider those things drawbacks. But compared to the great
school system, the easy commute into Manhattan, the sheer variety of ethnic
restaurants in town, I say buy! And buy now!” She smiled widely and I suddenly
found her very attractive, could imagine finding her sexy.
“But
of course I always say buy,” she added.
“But
the notoriety?”
“You
mean the book?” She peered intently at me. “It was a best-seller, and even some
of my lady friends read it, but those things never happen in real life, they’re
just out of the Middle Ages or something, I honestly never hear people talking
much about the book’s ridiculous claims here in town, and I’d never heard talk
about the devil in town before the book and I’ve lived here 26 years, since
even before I was married.” She decided that needed some explanation, so she
bit her lip and continued. “David and I lived together a bit before we tied the
knot. In an apartment, while we looked for a house. Because this was the town
we’d chosen, it had everything. It was what young people did back then,” she
concluded by way of apology.
“And
then at some point you learned Thai cooking.” I smiled at her. It was a guess.
A good guess. Well, you’ve got to do something if you’re out of the local
Satanist loop, I figured.
She
brightened. “Yes, that’s it. Although we do have two very fine Thai restaurants
in town, and one of them even specializes in Thai-French cooking. It’s fusion
cuisine.” Another selling point, she
apparently felt.
“One
of the great, beneficent legacies of colonialism, no doubt, this fusion of
culinary styles.”
“Well,
Clermont is a great town to raise your kids in, it’s multicultural.” And she
was totally clueless. But appropriately, resolutely, perky.
It
went like that, or close to it, with so many people I talked to. I got nowhere.
Yes, people remembered Marianne Walling, such a nice family. Quiet but nice,
and wasn’t it a shame that her parents died of cancer within months of each
other sometime after Marianne’s book had made those outrageous charges? And
they also remembered Dr, Philippe Lapotaire before he’d “run off with” his
patient Marianne - “run off with,” despite its archaicism, was,
amazingly, slightly more common usage around Clermont than “had an affair with”
or even “fucked in contempt of the normal marriage bonds” - had dumped his wife
and two kids, gotten divorced and remarried. He’d been a very good therapist,
the consensus ran, had done a lot of good for people with assorted drug and
family problems. A nice guy, an even nicer wife and kids, and as soon as the divorce
went through she’d sold her house in town and moved to nearby, and probably
even more upscale, Millburn. It was all just so weird, so crazy, people told
me, and then she meand Marianne and he, meaning Philippe, had to go and write that damned book, why the
hell couldn’t they just have been happy screwing each other without also
screwing over their families and by extension their town and their longtime
friends and neighbors?
And
that was about it. It was certainly about what I’d expect people to say in a
town that had been blasted in print, with millions of copies supposedly sold,
as Beelzebub’s New Jersey HQ. What else could they say? The book had been a
distinct unkindness visited upon wonderful Clermont, someone actually said to
me. Well, if putting you on the mental map of so many Americans can be termed
an “unkindness,” okay. Myself, I thought it was pretty neat, gave kids
something to brag about to roommates when they entered college, allowed them to
brag that they actually hailed from hell’s New Jersey outpost.
I’d
had one ominous-sounding call from Alec Walling, beginning with him blandly inquiring
“How’s my report going?” And I’d told him it wasn’t going quite yet, and he
made sympathetic noises and told me to stay in touch and that my $100,000
retainer check had in fact gone out that very day, but that “It would be nice
to hear regularly from you. Regularly and reliably.”
I’d
also spoken on the phone to Marianne and Philippe twice in the last few
weeks - their corporate entity was
named, quaintly, “Satanic Awareness, Inc.” and had a suite of offices in
downtown Philadelphia, although the happy couple returned my calls from “on the
road” both times - and they’d, logically enough, asked me what
else did I expect? Had I never theorized about community collusion, they
needled, about people who most likely weren’t themselves Satanists covering up
anything deleterious that could affect real estate values? Or drive away
qualified school teachers from the local system? That would so besmirch
Clermont, home as it was, after all, to literally thousands of writers and
people in the media industry? So fundamentally, they’d laughed in my face.
Which I rated as a most un-Christian sort of response.
Anyway,
there seemed to be so little of real substance in the book. Memories. Just
memories, the recovered kind, and we all know how shaky they can be. And there
was nothing in the book that really explained to me why a respected shrink
would suddenly go off the deep end professionally and throw it all away by
having an affair with someone who, no matter how fetching she genuinely was,
sounded otherwise like an unregenerate loon. I mean, if you told me that you
could guarantee I’d make a pile of money by writing such a book, yes, I’d do it
myself, especially since Marianne was so bloody striking. But that was the
point, that no one sane could make such a guarantee.
And
then I asked myself, well, who the hell ever said God was sane? And He was
certainly wired in enough to things to make such a guarantee.
Only one
thing in the book, in fact, even raised semi-questions in my feverish but quite
greedy little mind. Marianne had claimed that at age 8, she’d fled some kind of
Satanic ritual, had run screaming down local streets and straight into the
emergency room of the local hospital, where she’d been treated for burns. At
that time, so her book claimed, the police had come to interview her. But they
wound up believing her parents’ story that she’d burned herself somehow fooling
around in the kitchen and she was released back into their custody in those
pre-wariness about child abuse days.
Interestingly -
maybe I mean unsettlingly - hospital records indicated that Marianne
Walling had in fact been treated for unspecified reasons at age 8. But those
records were scanty since the local hospital had been folded years ago into a
larger, national sort of operation, and they certainly said nothing about
Marianne showing up in the ER in a white robe and wearing an upside down cross
made out of some heavy black metal round her neck, as her book claimed. Even
the company she’d claimed had been her family’s health insurer at the time,
whose own records should have indicated both diagnosis and treatment, along
with when payment for same had been made, had conveniently been merged out of
existence long ago; their successor company told me, politely but firmly, that
records for that time from but one of many since-absorbed companies were deep
in storage, probably under some mountain in Utah heavily guarded by fanatical
Mormon descendants of Brigham Young’s very own hyper-loyalist and gun-happy
Danites, was my guess, and thus no
longer available. And naturally the hospital chain had no idea, since personnel
records didn’t go back that far, who the ER personnel on duty that evening when
Marianne was 8 might have been, although they did assure me that no one from
that era was still on the payroll.
And
there everything lay. Nowhere.
I
eventually moaned about all of this to the one sympathetic listener I’d met so
far in Clermont, a police lieutenant named Carl Doyle. He was sympathetic but
unhelpful, someone who’d cautioned me right away that “Nothing that the
Lapotaires claim in their book can be verified through police records. But then
you’d hardly expect devil worshippers to have a lot of purposeful contact with
the cops, now would you?”
I
shook my head. I liked Doyle, who listened to me, so he said, because he cared
about his city. Coming from a family where his grandfather had been Chief and
his father had been the Captain of the Detective Bureau and his brother had
been a county Prosecutor’s Office narc who had in fact been killed in the line
of duty in a still-unsolved killing resulting from a drug buy gone bad, this
made sense. Doyle, who resembled the actor Treat Williams and had a nice,
cheery manner, was someone who was always more than happy to “talk Clermont”
with me, as he put it.
“Even
if it’s sometimes a struggle to keep a house here with the local taxes so
high,” he told me over coffee in his office, “it’s worth it. I believe in
Clermont. I believe in taking part in its daily life and in helping make it
better. Both me and my wife graduated from local schools and she even went to
the local state university branch for her teaching degree. Our three kids go to
local schools and seem to be doing well. It’s a good life. I enjoy helping
maintain it for others as a policeman.”
H
leaned over his coffee. “Yes, John, we have our share of scumbags. You just
haven’t noticed too many of them yet. But Clermont is also, and damn well
remains, a pretty good town. A bit full of itself at times, I’m sure you’ve
read all those self-congratulatory stories in the local weekly paper about our
artists and our cultural groups and the rest of that suburban liberal bullshit,
but basically a good place to live in. And I hope my kids feel the same way
when they’re grown and decide where to live themselves. And I hope that then
they can afford to live here, because as I keep saying, hey, taxes are a bitch
and the county and the Feds and the state too all have their own arms in.”
“You
sound happy here. I must strike you as an interloper, someone here to bring
chaos.” I’d informed him of the circumstances of my employment, although not of
its actual price.
He
shook his head. “Not as an interloper,” he said, eying me steadily up and down
with what I’d have to characterize as his ‘cop face.’’ “But, rather, as someone
who might bring some order to this whole sad situation that stems from one
lousy book. Think of it. We’ve been checked out peremptorily at best by the
tabloids, by the TV boys and girls with ironclad hair, by the magazine hacks.
Nobody looked real hard or deeply, nobody gave us a clean bill of health.
Instead, at best, they stood outside either the old Walling house or this
police station and said, well, who really knows? But a well-regarded reporter,
someone with your kind of professional credibillity, this would help. Someone
like you, who really knows, who’s known to believe in God, who doesn’t sneer
outright at these things, John, you can clear stuff up like nobody can.”
This
was giving me more credit than I really deserved. Still, it was nice.
“Which
is why I want to really help now.”
“But
you have helped.” I thus doth protested too much.
“Not
enough. You know what you really need to make your inquiries?”
“What?”
He
grinned. “Well, you don’t need a well-meaning local cop who really can’t afford
to endanger his job any more than he already has by helping you. John, you do
understand that the boys upstairs, the local brass, the last thing they want is
a spotlight of the kind you’re carrying in your pocket to be shined on
Clermont, yes?”
“Then
what do I need? What do I really need here?” This was my Rubicon. Right here.
Alea jacta est est est est. God fucking help me.
He
looked both sincere and smarmy for a brief moment, like so many preachers of so
many faiths I’d met in my life.“You need, for want of a better term, a ‘good
bad guy,’ someone who can, well, bend the rules. Maybe even ignore them
altogether. Someone who has nothing to do with ‘good’ Clermont, either, someone
sort of on the outside but also always knows the score and how to rearrange it
if necessary.”
“And
do you have someone like that in mind?” Yes, I was curious. Not hooked yet, but
curious.
“Yes I
do. He’s a Demon. He claims to be a retired Demon, but I’d still rate him as a
Demon.”
“A
demon certainly sounds appropriate here, but if it’s all the same to you, I’d
prefer to avoid contact with the legions of hell if possible. You’re kidding,
right?”
He made a playful, ‘mannish’ swat at my head. “I love how
dumb you journalists can be at times,” Doyle said with apparent conviction.
“John, when I said a Demon, I meant one with the ‘D’ upper case. A member of
the motorcycle gang of that name. Bikers, you know? Vroom, vroom? Fuck ‘em and
leave ‘em?”
“You
mean like Hells Angels? That would be appropriate for this matter but….”
“It’d
be more than appropriate, John, it’d be perfect for your purposes. His name is
Richard Colangeli”
“Is he
at least a good demon?,” I asked, reluctant in my own head to use the capital
D.
“Oh,
he’s the best. He’s very, very good at what he does.”
“And
what do Demons do?” I was willing to go with the capital letter if it’d make
Doyle happy here.
“Whatever
people like you and me are scared shitless to do, and I do mean whatever.”