church members sat and listened to their pastor as he gave them the latest message from an angry God. They left the sanctuary certain that Calvary Baptist and Reverend Peterson were the only things standing between them and an eternity of suffering in hell. Calvary’s parishioners fully expected that, like Noah, they would be waving goodbye to everyone in Plainview who didn’t go to Calvary Baptist when Jesus shipped them all off to join Him.
When Reverend Peterson finished, the crowd was in an uproar of shouting, amen-ing, and speaking in tongues. The church nurses, in their starched white uniforms and white gloves, rushed through the tent to tend to women who had collapsed with the Holy Ghost.
In spite of the barn-busting sermon Reverend Peterson delivered that night, Clarice surprised herself by thinking that maybe it was time she left some of this bad news and rage behind. Sitting there listening to the angriest choir in town as they spat out “It’s Gonna Rain,” she thought that maybe she should branch out and give something else a try.
Having ended his sermon, Reverend Peterson made a plea to the unrepentant sinners in the crowd to come forward and receive the Lord’s blessing before it was too late. He walked back and forth in front of the wailing choir and warned, “It won’t be water, but fire, the next time.” As he returned to his lectern to introduce the next speaker, there was a commotion in the back of the tent.
A woman’s voice shouted, “Let me testify! Let me testify!”
Clarice and everyone else in the front row turned around to look, but there were too many people standing and gawking for them to see all the way to the back. The tent grew quieter and a wave of soft murmuring spread slowly from the rear to the front as the woman moved up the center aisle toward Reverend Peterson.
She was young—around twenty-five, Clarice guessed. The woman’s gravity-defying cleavage hovered above a neon-green tube top that was just wide enough that it wasn’t illegal. Below her exposed navel, she wore tight-fitting vermillion shorts that were so revealing Clarice imagined the woman had borrowed them from an emaciated eleven-year-old. The tube top and the shorts she wore were both made of shiny, wet-looking latex. With each step she took, the movement of latex abrading latex caused a high-pitched squeaking noise to pierce the air. Her hair was pulled back from her face into a fall of glossy black ringlets that hung down to the middle of her back.
Clarice leaned close to Barbara Jean and whispered, “Hair weave.”
She replied, “Implants.”
The woman staggered and stumbled up toward the stage and Reverend Peterson. His bushy, silver eyebrows climbed a little closer to his receding hairline with every step she took in his direction. Clarice wasn’t sure if the woman’s staggering was due to her being drunk or due to the fact that she was only wearing one shoe and had a thick layer of mud up to each ankle.
When she reached the lectern, the woman snatched the microphone away from an astonished Reverend Peterson. “I just had a miracle happen and I need to testify.” She yelled her words into the microphone and feedback from the sound system caused everyone to clamp their hands to their ears. “Just a little while ago, after my shift at the Pink Slipper Gentlemen’s Club, I was doin’ a private performance out in the parking lot in the back of a Chevy Suburban when I heard a voice. Clear as a bell the voice said, ‘You are a child of God.’
“Now, at first I just ignored it ’cause I thought it was my customer. He’s one of my regulars and he carries on like that—always God this, Jesus that, Sweet Lord the other.”
Reverend Peterson’s face registered panic and he made a grab for the microphone. But the stripper was faster. She hopped away from him and continued her testimony.
“The voice said, ‘You are a child of God. Stop what you’re doing.’
“I still thought it was my customer, so I got up off the floor of the Chevy and said, ‘Fine. I don’t gotta keep doin’ what I’m doin’? Just give me my damn money and I’ll go home.’
“But then, I heard the voice again. This time it said, ‘Your sinful ways will bring a storm of hellfire down upon you. Come to the Lord and you will be saved.’
“I knew then that it wasn’t my customer at all. It was an angel