Revival: A Novel Page 23

  Bree had tracked the Pastor Danny Jacobs Healing Revival Tour from Colorado to California, ten stops in all. Together we had watched the new YouTube vids added to the website’s Miracle Testimony page with the avidity of marine biologists studying some newly discovered species of fish. We debated the validity of each (first in my living room, later in this same bed), eventually putting them into four categories: utter bullshit, probable bullshit, impossible to be sure, and hard not to believe.

  By this process, a master list had slowly emerged. On that sunny August morning in the bedroom of my second-floor apartment, there were fifteen names on it. These were cures we felt ninety-eight percent sure of, culled down from a roster of almost seven hundred and fifty possibles. Robert Rivard was on that list; Mabel Jergens from Albuquerque was on it; so was Rowena Mintour and Ben Hicks, the man in the Norris County Fairgrounds tent who had torn off his neck brace and tossed his crutches aside.

  Hicks was an interesting case. Both he and his wife had confirmed the authenticity of the cure in a Denver Post article published a couple of weeks after Jacobs’s traveling show moved on. He was a history prof at the Community College of Denver with an impeccable reputation. He termed himself a religious skeptic and described his attendance at the Norris County revival as “a last resort.” His wife confirmed this. “We are amazed and thankful,” she said. She added that they had started going to church again.

  Rivard, Jergens, Mintour, Hicks, and everyone else on our master list had been touched by Jacobs’s “holy rings” between May of 2007 and December of 2008, when the Healing Revival Tour had concluded in San Diego.

  Bree had begun the follow-up work with a light heart, but by October of 2008, her attitude had darkened. That was when she had found a story about Robert Rivard—no more than a squib, really—in the Monroe County Weekly Telegram. It said the “miracle boy” had been admitted to St. Louis Children’s Hospital “for reasons unrelated to his former muscular dystrophy.”

  Bree made enquiries, both by computer and telephone. Rivard’s parents refused to speak to her, but a nurse at Children’s finally did when Bree told her she was trying to expose C. Danny Jacobs as a fraud. This was not what we were doing, exactly, but it worked. After being assured by Bree that she would never be named in any article or book, the nurse said Bobby Rivard had been admitted suffering what she called “chain headaches,” and was given a battery of tests to rule out a brain tumor. Which they did. Eventually the boy had been transferred to Gad’s Ridge, in Oakville, Missouri.

  “What kind of hospital is that?” Bree had asked.

  “Mental,” the nurse said. And while Bree was digesting this: “Most people who go into Gad’s, they never come out.”

  Bree’s efforts to find out more were met by a stone wall at Gad’s Ridge. Because I considered Rivard our Patient Zero, I flew to St. Louis, rented a car, and drove to Oakville. After several afternoons spent in the bar nearest to the hospital, I found an orderly who would talk for the small emolument of sixty dollars. Robert Rivard was still walking fine, the orderly said, but never walked any farther than the corner of his room. When he did, he would simply stand there, like a child being punished for misbehavior, until someone led him back to his bed or the nearest chair. On good days he ate; during his bad stretches, which were far more common, he had to be tube-fed. He was classed semicatatonic. A gork, in the orderly’s words.

  “Is he still suffering from chain headaches?” I asked him.

  The orderly shrugged meaty shoulders. “Who knows?”

  Who, indeed.

  • • •

  So far as we could tell, nine of the people on our master list were fine. This included Rowena Mintour, who had resumed teaching, and Ben Hicks, whom I interviewed myself in November of 2008, five months after his cure. I didn’t tell him everything (for one thing, I never mentioned electricity of either the ordinary or the special type), but I shared enough to establish my bona fides: heroin addiction cured by Jacobs in the early nineties, followed by troubling aftereffects that eventually diminished and then disappeared. What I wanted to know was if he had suffered any aftereffects—blackouts, flashing lights, sleepwalking, perhaps lapses into Tourette’s-like speech.

  No to all, he said. He was fine as could be.

  “I don’t know if it was God working through him or not,” Hicks told me over coffee in his office. “My wife does, and that’s fine, but I don’t care. I’m pain-free and walking two miles a day. In another two months I expect to be cleared to play tennis, as long as it’s doubles, where I only have to run a few steps. Those are the things I care about. If he did for you what you say he did, you’ll know what I mean.”

  I did, but I also knew more.

  That Robert Rivard was enjoying his cure in a mental institution, sipping glucose via IV rather than Cokes with his friends.

  That Patricia Farmingdale, cured of peripheral neuropathy in Cheyenne, Wyoming, had poured salt into her eyes in an apparent effort to blind herself. She had no memory of doing it, let alone why.

  That Stefan Drew of Salt Lake City had gone on walking binges after being cured of a supposed brain tumor. These walks, some of them fifteen-mile marathons, did not occur during blackouts; the urge just came on him, he said, and he had to go.

  That Veronica Freemont of Anaheim had suffered what she called “interruptions of vision.” One had resulted in a low-speed collision with another driver. She tested negative for drugs and alcohol, but turned in her license just the same, afraid it would happen again.

  That in San Diego, Emil Klein’s miracle cure of a neck injury was followed by a periodic compulsion to go out into his backyard and eat dirt.

  And there was Blake Gilmore of Las Vegas, who claimed C. Danny Jacobs had cured him of lymphoma during the late summer of 2008. A month later he lost his job as a blackjack dealer when he began to spew profanity at the customers—stuff like “Take a hit, take a fucking hit, you chickenshit asshole.” When he began shouting similar things at his three kids, his wife threw him out. He moved to a no-tell motel north of Fashion Show Drive. Two weeks later he was found dead on the bathroom floor with a bottle of Krazy Glue in one hand. He had used it to plug his nostrils and seal his mouth shut. His wasn’t the only obit coupled to Jacobs that Bree had found with her search engine, but it was the only one we felt sure was connected.

  Until Cathy Morse, that was.

  • • •

  I was feeling sleepy again in spite of an infusion of black breakfast tea. I blamed it on the auto-scroll feature of Bree’s laptop. It was helpful, I said, but also hypnotic.

  “Honey, if I may misquote Al Jolson, you ain’t seen nothing yet,” she said. “Next year Apple’s going to release a pad-style computer that’ll revolutionize—” There was a bing before she could finish, and the auto-scroll came to a halt. She peered at the screen, where a line was highlighted in red. “Uh-oh. That’s one of the names you gave me when we started.”

  “What?” Meaning who. I’d only been able to give her a few back then, and one had been that of my brother Con. Jacobs had claimed that one was just a placebo, but—

  “Hold your water and let me click the link.”

  I leaned over to look. My first feeling was relief: not Con, of course not. My second was a species of dismal horror.

  The obituary, from the Tulsa World, was for one Catherine Anne Morse, age thirty-eight. Died suddenly, the obit said. And this: Cathy’s grieving parents ask that in lieu of flowers, mourners send contributions to the Suicide Prevention Action Network. These contributions are tax deductible.

  “Bree,” I said. “Go to last week’s—”

  “I know what to do, so let me do it.” Then, taking a second look at my face: “Are you okay?”

  “Yes,” I said, but I didn’t know if I was or not. I kept remembering how Cathy Morse had looked mounting to the Portraits in Lightning stage all those years ago,
a pretty little Sooner gal with tanned legs flashing beneath a denim skirt with a frayed hem. Every pretty girl carries her own positive charge, Jacobs had said, but somewhere along the way, Cathy’s charge had turned negative. No mention of a husband, although a girl that good-looking must not have lacked for suitors. No mention of children, either.

  Maybe she liked girls, I thought, but that was pretty lame.

  “Here you go, sugar,” Bree said. She turned the laptop so I could see it more easily. “Same newspaper.”

  WOMAN IN DEATH JUMP FROM CYRUS AVERY MEMORIAL BRIDGE, the headline read. Cathy Morse had left no explanatory note behind, and her grieving parents were mystified. “I wonder if it wasn’t somebody pushed her,” Mrs. Morse said . . . but according to the article, foul play had been ruled out, although it didn’t say how.

  Has he done it before, mister? Mr. Morse had asked me back in 1992. This after punching my old fifth business in the face and splitting his lip. Has he knocked other ones for a loop the way he knocked my Cathy?

  Yes, sir, I thought now. Yes, sir, I believe he has.

  “Jamie, you don’t know for sure,” Bree said, touching my shoulder. “Sixteen years is a long time. It could have been something else entirely. She might have found out she had a bad cancer, or some other fatal disease. Fatal and painful.”

  “It was him,” I said. “I know it, and by now I think you do, too. Most of his subjects are fine afterwards, but some go away with time bombs in their heads. Cathy Morse did, and it went off. How many others are going to go off in the next ten or twenty years?”

  I was thinking I could be one of them, and Bree surely knew that, too. She didn’t know about Hugh, because that wasn’t my story to tell. He hadn’t had a recurrence of his prismatics since the night at the tent revival—and that one was probably brought on by stress—but it could happen again, and although we didn’t talk about it, I’m sure he knew it as well as I did.

  Time bombs.

  “So now you’re going to find him.”

  “You bet.” The obituary of Catherine Anne Morse was the last piece of evidence I needed, the one that made the decision final.

  “And persuade him to stop.”

  “If I can.”

  “If he won’t?”

  “Then I don’t know.”

  “I’ll go with you, if you want.”

  But she didn’t want. It was all over her face. She had started the assignment with an intelligent young woman’s zest for pure research, and there had been the lovemaking to add extra spice, but now the research was no longer pure and she had seen enough to scare her badly.

  “You’re not going anywhere near him,” I said. “But he’s been off the road for eight months now and his weekly TV show’s into reruns. I need you to find out where he’s hanging his hat these days.”

  “I can do that.” She set her laptop aside and reached under the sheet. “But I’d like to do something else first, if you’re of a mind.”

  I was.

  • • •

  Shortly before Labor Day, Bree Donlin and I said our goodbyes in that same bed. They were very physical ones for the most part, satisfying to both of us, but also sad. For me more than her, I think. She was looking forward to life as a pretty, unattached career girl in New York; I was looking forward to the dreaded double-nickel in less than two years. I thought there would be no more lively young women for me, and on that score I have been proven absolutely correct.

  She slipped out of bed, long-legged and beautifully naked. “I found what you wanted,” she said, and began rummaging through her purse on the dresser. “It was harder than I expected, because he’s currently going under the name of Daniel Charles.”

  “That’s my boy. Not exactly an alias, but close.”

  “More of a precaution, I think. The way celebrities will check into a hotel under a fake name—or a variation of their real one—to fool the autograph hounds. He leased the place where he’s living as Daniel Charles, which is legal as long as he’s got a bank account and the checks don’t bounce, but sometimes a fella just has to use his real name if he’s going to stay on the right side of the law.”

  “What sometimes would you be talking about in this case?”

  “He bought a car last year in Poughkeepsie, New York—not a fancy one, just a plain-vanilla Ford Taurus—and registered it under his real name.” She got back into bed and handed me a slip of paper. “Here you go, handsome.”

  Written on it was Daniel Charles (aka Charles Jacobs, aka C. Danny Jacobs), The Latches, Latchmore, New York 12561.

  “What’s The Latches when it’s at home with its feet up?”

  “The house he’s renting. Actually an estate. A gated estate, so be aware. Latchmore is a little north of New Paltz—same zip code. It’s in the Catskills, where Rip Van Winkle bowled with the dwarfs back in the day. Except then—umm, your hands are nice and warm—the game was called ninepins.”

  She snuggled closer, and I said what men of my age find themselves saying more and more frequently: I appreciated the offer, but didn’t feel myself capable of taking her up on it just then. In retrospect, I sure wish I’d tried a little harder. One last time would have been nice.

  “That’s okay, hon. Just hold me.”

  I held her. I think we drowsed, because when I became aware again, the sun had moved from the bed to the floor. Bree jumped up and began to dress. “Got to shake. A thousand things to do today.” She hooked her bra, then looked at me in the mirror. “When are you going to see him?”

  “Probably not until October. Hugh’s got a guy coming in from Minnesota to sub for me, but he can’t get here until then.”

  “You have to stay in touch with me. Email and phone. If I don’t hear from you every day you’re out there, I’ll get worried. I might even have to drive up and make sure you’re okay.”

  “Don’t do that,” I said.

  “You just stay in touch, white boy, and I won’t have to.”

  Dressed, she came and sat on the side of the bed.

  “You might not need to go at all. Has that idea crossed your mind? There’s no tour scheduled, his website’s gone stagnant, and there’s nothing but reruns on his TV show. I came across a blog post the other day titled Where in the World Is Pastor Danny? The discussion thread went on for pages.”

  “Your point being?”

  She took my hand, twined her fingers in mine. “We know—well, not know, but we’re pretty sure—that he’s hurt some people along the way while he was helping others. Okay, that’s done and can’t be undone. But if he’s stopped healing, he won’t be hurting anyone else. In that case, what would be the point of confronting him?”

  “If he’s stopped healing, it’s because he’s made enough money to move on.”

  “To what?”

  “I don’t know, but judging from his track record, it could be dangerous. And Bree . . . listen.” I sat up and took her other hand. “Everything else aside, someone needs to call him to account for what he’s done.”

  She lifted my hands to her mouth, where she kissed first one and then the other. “But should that someone be you, honey? After all, you were one of his successes.”

  “I think that’s why. Also, Charlie and I . . . we go back. We go way back.”

  • • •

  I didn’t see her off at Denver International—that was her mother’s job—but she called me when she landed, frothing with a combination of nerves and excitement. Looking forward, not back. I was glad for her. When my phone rang twenty minutes later, I thought it would be her again. It wasn’t. It was her mother. Georgia asked if we could talk. Maybe over lunch.

  Uh-oh, I thought.

  We ate at McGee’s—a pleasant meal, with pleasant conversation, mostly about the music business. When we had said no to dessert and yes to coffee, Georgia leaned her considerable bosom on the table
and got down to business. “So, Jamie. Are you two done with each other?”

  “I . . . um . . . Georgia . . .”

  “Goodness, don’t mumble and stumble. You know perfectly well what I mean, and I’m not going to bite your head off. If I had a mind to do that, I would have done it last year, when she first hopped in the sack with you.” She saw my expression and smiled. “Nah, she didn’t tell me and I didn’t ask. Didn’t need to. I can read her like a book. I bet she even told you I got up to some of the same doins with Hugh, back in the day. True?”

  I made a zipping motion across my lips. It turned her smile into a laugh.

  “Oh, that’s good. I like that. And I like you, Jamie. I did almost from the first, when you were skinny as a rail and still getting over whatever junk you were putting into your system. You looked like Billy Idol, only dragged through the gutter. I don’t have anything against mixed-race sweeties, either. Or the age thing. Do you know what my father gave me when I got old enough for a driver’s license?”

  I shook my head.

  “A 1960 Plymouth with half the grille gone, bald tires, rusty rocker panels, and an engine that gobbled recycled oil by the quart. He called it a field-bomber. Said every new driver should have an old wreck to start with, before he or she stepped up to a car that would actually take an inspection sticker. Are you getting my point?”

  I absolutely was. Bree wasn’t a nun, she’d had her share of sexual adventures before I came along, but I had been her first long-term relationship. In New York, she would move up—if not to a man of her own race, then certainly to one a little closer to her own age.

  “I just wanted that out front before I said what I really came here to say.” She leaned forward even more, the rolling tide of her bosom endangering her coffee cup and water glass. “She wouldn’t tell me much about the research she’s been doing for you, but I know it scared her, and the one time I tried to ask Hugh, he about bit my head off.”