“We haven’t had a wedding in years, and funerals could be held at the funeral home,” Doreen said. “We could use the parsonage for everything else.”

  Sam was beginning to wish that whoever had killed the bats had driven over to Doreen’s and knocked her around a bit.

  47

  Did you see the way everyone was avoiding me?” Charles Gardner said to Gloria on their way home from worship. “Oh, sure, everyone said hi, but after that they didn’t want anything to do with me.”

  “You’re just going to have to come right out and say you didn’t do it.”

  “Nope, not going to do it. My character speaks for itself.”

  Old men were the worst, Gloria thought. They were so stubborn. Would it kill him to stand during the announcements and put everyone’s doubts to rest? Just say he didn’t kill the bats, and be done with it. People would believe him. He was the minister’s father, for crying out loud. Of course they would believe him. But no, he had to be proud, had to act as if declaring his innocence were beneath him.

  “I’ve got half a mind to turn in my membership and never go back,” Charles said.

  “You are not going to do that to our son. Think how that would make him feel, his own father quitting the church. You can’t do that.”

  They rode in silence the rest of the way home. Charles settled in his recliner and was soon asleep. Gloria folded some laundry, then went online to look at bicycles. She’d been to Riggle’s Hardware to buy another one, but Charley Riggle had promised Sam he wouldn’t sell her another one. So she’d gone online to Amazon and had ordered a tandem bicycle so Charles could ride with her. He was spending all his time in his recliner, and getting fat, to boot. He could hardly bend down to tie his shoes. His belly lapped over his belt. She was going to whip him into shape if it killed her.

  She’d been tracking the package. It was arriving by UPS the next day. She’d read the reviews people had written, noted that some of the reviewers mentioned having to assemble the bike, so had asked the man next door, who seemed to be a reasonably handy sort, if he minded doing that for her when the bike arrived. Not at all, he’d said. He’d be happy to help.

  If she had asked Charles, it would never have gotten done.

  The insurance company had settled quickly, hoping she wouldn’t sue, writing her a check for a thousand dollars to buy a new bike, which had cost only five hundred dollars. So she bought two bicycle helmets, matching, and two sets of funny clothes she saw bicyclists wear, also matching. One for her, and one for Charles. They’d arrived the past Friday and she’d tried hers on while Charles was taking a nap. They were made of stretchy fabric, which she appreciated, even though it made her look like she was wearing sausage casings. She had a hundred and fifty dollars left over, so had bought a bicycle computer that clipped on the handlebars and showed how far she’d ridden and where she was and where she wanted to be. She was tired of getting lost and having to ask people for directions.

  She’d be darned if she was going to spend the rest of her life sitting on her butt staring at the TV, then having a stroke five years from now and drooling on herself in a nursing home until her heart gave out. Strangers mashing up her food and feeding it to her a spoonful at a time. Girl Scouts coming in at Christmastime to sing carols. Loud preachers coming in on Sunday afternoons, talking about the end of life and how nice heaven would be, and having to listen to them, because the aides would roll her wheelchair down to the community room whether she wanted to go or not. No sirree, Bob, not for her.

  Charles would have a cow and refuse to go anywhere near the bicycle. He’d say she was ridiculous and there was no way he was going to cram himself into those bicycle clothes and climb on some stupid bike and ride around town so everyone could laugh at them.

  She’d probably have to cry. It was the nuclear weapon of marriage, crying to get her way. She’d only done it twice. Once, when Richard Nixon had resigned and Charles had thought it was the end of all that was good and decent in America and had wanted to move to Canada. He’d started talking to Realtors and was a day away from putting their house on the market, when she let go with the tears. It’d taken three solid hours of crying before he came around. The second time was in 2007 when the New England Patriots had been caught spying on the New York Jets and hardly anything happened to them. They’d paid a little money, little for them, a slap on the wrist, and Charles Gardner ranted and raved and talked about moving to Norway, where people were honest. She thought it was just his usual ranting, until he signed up for an online class in Norwegian, and had applied for a visa. It took an entire day of crying then, off and on, every now and then breaking down into histrionic sobs. He’d finally caved in, late at night, and she’d made them eggs and toast for supper and he never mentioned it again, though she’d once found a magazine about Norway hidden under his side of the mattress.

  But he’d flip out over riding a tandem bicycle with her. She could hear him now. “You’re trying to get us both killed, is that it? You want us to end up in the hospital with all our bones broken, stuck in wheelchairs the rest of our lives? Is that what you want?”

  What Gloria Gardner wanted was to have a life. She’d spent the past fifty years in the same small town, with the same people, doing the same thing day after day, the years grinding away, one after the other. She wanted to see new things, if only from a bicycle. Ride up and down unfamiliar streets looking at the houses, maybe eating somewhere they’d never eaten, maybe even riding to a nearby town. That was the only reason she’d moved to Hope, that and being closer to her sons and grandsons. The move hadn’t quite met her expectations. Sam was always busy and the grandsons were gone, one in the army and one at college. Summers would be better. Barbara would be on vacation from school, and they would do things together. She liked Barbara, even felt sorry for her a little bit, having to put up with Sam. It wasn’t that Sam was cruel or hateful, not at all, just that he was satisfied with so little, satisfied to stay close to home. Barbara would never see Paris, for that matter neither would she, them being married to Gardner men.

  She pushed back from her computer and went downstairs. Charles was still asleep, but he’d be hungry when he woke up. They’d talk about what to eat for supper and settle for eggs and toast, their usual Sunday evening fare. She was pretty well fed up with eggs and toast, too.

  48

  When Lester Hickam finished preaching, a voice cut in over the organ music, inviting the faithful to join them in Chattanooga, at Lester Hickam’s Evangelistic Center for a weeklong revival, whose purpose was to bring America back to God, but it cost money and they couldn’t do it by themselves, so if people came to Chattanooga and made a love offering, God would bless them and return it tenfold.

  Leonard Fink looked at Wanda and said, “We’re going. Pack your bag.”

  A half hour later they were loading their Impala and on the road to save America.

  They’d never been south of Louisville, so were nervous. Wanda began repeating the twenty-third Psalm, then moved on to the book of Revelation, which got them through Louisville and all the way to Nashville. Chattanooga was a downhill run from there, the traffic was light, and they were starting to relax.

  The Finks had never been ones for vacations, a trip now and then to visit relatives in Illinois, a drive north to see the Amish in Shipshewana, but that was about it. To travel 450 miles in one day was unthinkable, unless one were saving America, then it was possible. They stopped for supper at a Big Boy, used the restroom, and were back on the road in an hour.

  Neither one said anything about the bats, though they thought about them a great deal. Wanda wondered if Leonard might receive the death penalty for killing them. She didn’t think so, but you couldn’t be sure these days, what with Christians under attack and all. As for Leonard, he was thinking about his run for the school board and who he might get to head up his campaign. He was hoping to talk to Lester Hickam himself about it. Maybe Lester knew of someone who might help, him being close, personal friends with several governors and three candidates for the presidency. Surely one of them would see Leonard’s potential and come to his aid.

  “You don’t think you’ll be arrested for killing the bats, do you?” Wanda finally asked, thirty miles from Chattanooga.

  “Not if they don’t find out,” Leonard said. “Besides, they were our bats, to do with as we pleased. God said so himself.”

  Wanda had been thinking about that. While God had given man dominion over the animals, that probably didn’t include clubbing them with a two-by-four. She was beginning to think maybe Leonard shouldn’t have done it, and that maybe the time had come for him to phone the DNR lady and tell her what he’d done. She had raised the subject with him the night before, but he had grown angry, telling her the only way to fight big government was to stop cooperating with it.

  She was beginning to worry about Leonard. He’d always been mild-mannered, but after retiring had been watching news programs on television and had become disgruntled and paranoid. The year before, he’d bought a gun, certain the president, who he knew for a fact didn’t believe in God, was going to outlaw them any day. They’d driven out in the country one winter day, he’d rolled down the window and fired the gun into a snowbank to see if it worked, which it did, nearly blowing out their eardrums in the close confines of the car. Then came the trips to Walmart to stock up on food and water that he stored on shelves in their basement for when the monetary system collapsed and you could buy food only if you had the mark of the beast on your forehead.

  Several times in the past few months, lying awake at night, Wanda had worried that maybe something was wrong with Leonard, that maybe some kind of disease had attacked his brain and made him loopy. She had even suggested he make a doctor’s appointment for a physical, which had sent him into a tirade against socialized medicine.

  She was also starting to have her doubts about Lester Hickam, not that she’d ever said so aloud. But in the thirty-plus years they’d been listening to him, he’d predicted the return of Jesus on four separate occasions, and had been wrong each time. She and Leonard had never discussed it, even though the first time they’d sold their house and given their things to nonbelievers, who would be sticking around and not going to heaven.

  One week, the month before, she had even caught herself agreeing with something Sam said in a sermon. It was a strange feeling, agreeing with her pastor, and she wasn’t sure what to make of it, but there it was—the realization that Sam might have something to teach her. She’d tried shaking the feeling, since dismissing him was so much easier, but the feeling persisted.

  She’d begun doubting Lester Hickam after reading a magazine article at the beauty shop she frequented about televangelists and their houses. For some reason, she had always supposed Lester Hickam had lived in a 1950s ranch, just like them. That was the thing about him, he seemed so much like them, so ordinary, so down-to-earth. His wife Luella seemed just as common. She didn’t have the big hair and wear the heavy makeup like the other televangelists’ wives. She looked like someone you’d see in Kroger checking a tomato for its ripeness, someone you could walk right up to and chat with about produce.

  But there was a picture of their house in the magazine, with a swimming pool and tennis courts and a gated entrance. That was just their home in Chattanooga. They had a villa on the beach in Hawaii, and a photographer had gotten close enough to the Reverend Lester Hickam to take a picture of him rubbing suntan lotion on a woman’s back and the woman didn’t look a thing like Luella. Wanda had never really gotten over that. Every time she saw the reverend after that, it was all she could think about, those hands touching another woman. She’d mentioned it to Leonard and he’d blown up, screeching about Photoshop and trick photography and how they could make a picture of anyone doing anything these days. But she was still pretty sure it was Lester Hickam with another woman, certain enough that she had stopped sending Lester Hickam the twenty dollars a month they’d sent for years.

  49

  The UPS man delivered Gloria Gardner’s tandem bicycle at nine in the morning on Monday. Charles had taken to spending most of the morning in bed. That was another thing that drove Gloria crazy, Charles sleeping his life away. The neighbor man was home, and had the bike assembled and tuned up by lunchtime. Charles was still in bed, so the neighbor man and Gloria took it for a spin around the block. Gloria steered, while her neighbor supplied the muscle. He was pushing eighty, and didn’t have much muscle to supply, but the street was level, the pavement smooth, and it was a pleasant spring day, so they rode another half hour, up and down the streets, past the school where Barbara worked, then pedaled by Riggle’s Hardware and Drooger’s Food Center. They turned the corner and headed toward home.

  Charles was up when they arrived, and wondering why his wife was riding a tandem bicycle with a man she barely knew. This had been his one reservation about moving to the city, the depravity of it. He’d heard of it before, God-fearing people moving to the city from small towns and before long they were drinking in bars and starring in porno movies and riding tandem bicycles with complete strangers who’d slit their throats and toss them in a ditch somewhere. What in the world was Gloria thinking?

  The neighbor seemed harmless, at least at first. He and Charles had chatted a few times and his wife had brought them over a casserole the day they moved in, but a lot of serial killers did that.

  “My Lord, what are you wearing?” he asked Gloria.

  “My bicycling outfit. Like it?” she asked.

  “That’s our bike?” he asked, changing the subject.

  “You bet,” she said. “Yours and mine. And we’re going to ride it together, starting now. Whether you want to or not.”

  “I’m not getting on that thing.”

  “Charles Gardner, you’re getting fat and boring. We are going to do something together, so get used to the idea.”

  “I’m always inviting you to watch TV with me,” Charles said.

  “Watching television is not doing something together. We’re going to start bicycling together. It’ll be good for us.”

  When they had first married, some fifty-odd years before, he’d had all kinds of energy. They’d hiked and camped and rode bicycles and played on the church softball team. After the boys came, they’d kept it up, then the boys left home and Charles Gardner hit the couch. He had been fifty years old and was married to the couch, except to attend antique tractor conventions.

  She had hoped that buying an old house would get him moving, that he’d get up off the couch and start working. It had worked for a while, for six months or so, but now he was back on the couch.

  In that moment, she realized he could never have killed the bats. It would have required work, sustained effort, and initiative. There was no possible way he could have done it. What had she been thinking?

  “Charles Gardner, you will put on your bicycle clothes and your helmet, get on this bicycle, and go for a ride with me, or I’m never going to cook for you again.”

  “Bicycle clothes? What bicycle clothes?”

  “The bicycle clothes I bought you to wear,” Gloria said. “And the helmet, which you will wear. I don’t want to spend the rest of my life visiting my brain-dead husband in a nursing home.”

  Charles groaned. “All I want is to be left alone to do what I want to do. Is that too much to ask?”

  “Yes. Your bicycle clothes are in the bottom drawer of your chest. Your helmet is in the garage. We’re leaving in fifteen minutes.”

  Despite his shortcomings, Charles Gardner had a few things going for him, one of them being his ability to realize when his wife meant business, so he went inside, peeled off his pajamas, took a quick shower, toweled off, stared at his fat in the bathroom mirror, then went into their bedroom, opened the bottom chest drawer, and was horrified to see a bright yellow shirt and black shorts, made of stretchy fabric, that would nevertheless require a winch to pull on. He struggled into the outfit, his fat lapping and bulging in pudgy bands. He dug around in his closet for a pair of tennis shoes, squeezed them on, checked himself in the mirror, and was pleased to see that some of his stomach fat had been pushed north to his chest. Maybe this wasn’t such a bad idea after all.

  He walked out to the garage, where Gloria was standing, his helmet in her hand.

  “I rode a bicycle every day of my life until I was eighteen, and never once wore a helmet. I don’t need one now.”

  “That’s fine,” Gloria said. “What did you plan on making us for dinner tonight?”

  The helmet fit perfectly, as if she had measured his head while he’d been sleeping, which she had in fact done.

  It had been thirty years since Charles Gardner was on a bicycle, but he took to it quickly, and even began enjoying it, though he didn’t say so. Gloria steered, while Charles pedaled from the back, shouting instructions. They bickered the first several blocks, then began to relax, finding a proper cadence, weaving in and out of the neighborhood streets.

  “Let’s go by and show Sam,” Charles yelled out from the backseat.

  Five minutes later, they turned down the meetinghouse lane and were pulling into the meeting’s parking lot noticing a half-dozen DNR trucks and cars parked in the parsonage driveway. Sam was standing on the sidewalk, surrounded by a group of officers. While Sam had never been deeply tanned, he was paler than usual.

  The DNR lady, Gloria recognized her from the week before, was waving a sheet of paper in Sam’s face.

  “This is a warrant to search your yard,” she said, pushing Sam aside.

  “Hold on there,” said Charles Gardner, who had not missed an episode of Law & Order since 1990. “Let me see that warrant.”

  He studied the warrant carefully. “This warrant’s no good. Sam doesn’t own this property. It belongs to the church, but the church isn’t listed as the property owner. And it doesn’t say what you’re searching for.”

 

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