Salvation City - By Sigrid Nunez Page 0,71
saying nothing. Cole noticed he kept his hand in his jacket pocket. A log lay across the path. As he stepped over it, Cole saw, sprouting from the bark, one of those fleshy brown mushrooms he’d flashed on before, and he heel-stomped it.
The first time he looked back, Cole could see nothing except for trees and brush. But farther on, after a sharp curve, he looked back again and he saw them. They had climbed up onto an outcrop, where they stood in a row, facing downhill. Cole caught just a glimpse of them before another curve in the path made them vanish again. Because of the angle of the light, the three men had appeared as silhouettes against the sky. Their faces were indistinguishable, but whoever was in the middle had his rifle propped horizontally across his shoulders. The echo of Calvary sent a shock through Cole. But later, when he was working on a comic strip about the whole event, he’d wonder if his eyes had played a trick on him, or if he’d somehow imagined this part entirely. PW, who’d kept his own eyes straight ahead and never once looked back, could not confirm it.
They came to where a huge dead tree lay alongside the path, a spot at which they’d stopped before, to rest on the way up. PW sat down on the hollow trunk, letting out a short blast of air as if he’d been swimming underwater. He reached for Cole, pulling him down beside him. “Well, well,” he said. “How do you like them apples?”
Now that he wasn’t afraid anymore, Cole was bursting with questions. “Were those guys real soldiers?”
“Maybe one time.”
“You think they live up there?”
“Could be.”
“Do you think they were brothers?”
“I think they were queers.”
Cole knew that PW didn’t really think this. He’d just wanted to say something really bad about the men. He had heard PW use the word queer like this before, though when he preached he always said “homosexual.” (“There is no such thing as a saved homosexual.”) He never said “gay.” Instead of “gay marriage” or “same-sex marriage” he said “unnatural union.” Sometimes, when he was repeating something some man whom he disliked had said, he’d use a falsetto voice.
Suddenly, an unwelcome picture of PW at around his own age rose to Cole’s mind: a boy on a bicycle, almost running another boy down. Outta my way, fag-boy!
Was that the kind of kid he had been?
A reptile child.
These thoughts knotted Cole’s stomach. They made him feel guilty and disloyal. Realizing that PW was staring sideways at him, he said, “Why did they make us turn around?”
“Don’t know, exactly. Maybe they got something back there they didn’t want us to see. Used to be moonshine stills you’d stumble on. Then it was marijuana crops. Now it’s meth labs. Or maybe it’s already on to something new.”
“Why didn’t you tell them you were a preacher?”
“Wasn’t sure how they f-felt about p-preachers.”
Cole didn’t understand what there was about what had just happened to put PW in such a good humor.
“Do you think they’re believers?”
“Do believers usually take the Lord’s name in vain?”
Cole hesitated before his next question. “Didn’t you want to try and save them?”
PW laughed so loud Cole was sure it could be heard as far as gunshots would have been.
“What, you think it’s like some kind of magic formula I carry around? You can’t convert the pagan without the power of the Holy Spirit. I was praying hard up there, and looks to me like Jesus heard. But the Spirit never took hold.”
But before they started walking again, PW did offer a prayer for the men: “Father, may they come to find you and know you and choose life.”
Later that day, they drove home. By then the encounter with the three men—which PW pointed out had lasted probably all of five minutes—no longer felt like such a big deal. Cole would have been glad to forget what now seemed to him a cowardly overreaction on his part.
They stopped for dinner at a Dairy Queen. The sun was low but still bright, so they ate their burgers and fries at a picnic table outside.
“By the way,” said PW, “what happened this morning? With the Three Stooges back there? No reason Tracy’s got to know any of that.”
Just then a minibus driven by a man in a black baseball cap pulled up and about a dozen boys jumped out. The boys were all somewhere between the ages of eight and fifteen,