So, after I left the Golden Cafe, I started walking down Highway 23. The sun was rising to mid-morning, and I carried my guitar in my left hand and slung my duffle bag over my right shoulder. The load and the heat made me ooze various secretions--sebaceous, apocrine, gonadal, and God knows what else--so I was feeling moist and oily. Massage in Candy's funk with my own, and I was riper than a china berry tree in the backyard.
(I kind of want to tell you a secret, but I don't think I can. Not yet. Funny how you can bury a memory so deep, you think it'll grow a wall around it like a cyst or a splinter and so be sealed away, but all the while it's festering with pus and swelling red, and someday you're gonna have to drain the damned thing and dig out the wall with a penknife and swab the hole with methylate. But I'm not ready to do that, not yet.)
The edge of the road was littered with cigarette butts and candy wrappers and bits of glass, while the ditch to my right blossomed with daisies and butterfly weed and some white flowers I didn't know; on the other side of the ditch was a rusty barbed wire fence, and beyond the fence were cedars and sumac and then a green field sweeping up to a wooded ridge, and on the ridge was a row of sporadic houses, some built to look like pagodas and others like chalets and a couple like castles, houses of exotic design begun, apparently, with middling resources that gave out too soon, so the whole hillside looked like an abandoned theme park. Up ahead was a billboard that said, REPENT AND SIN NO MORE, but somebody had spray painted beneath it, REPAINT AND THIN NO MORE, an old joke but still funny, or at least I thought so. I was still considering it when a station wagon pulled over in front of me, and a woman on the passenger side stuck her head out the window and called, "Would you like a ride?"
My answer to that question is always "yes," so I started running while the driver got out and opened the trunk of the car.
"Just put your bag in here," he said.
"Yes, sir. Thank you." I threw in my duffel bag, and he slammed the trunk closed. In the back window were two small faces craning around to see who or what I was. I waved, but the kids didn't wave or smile or anything.
"You'll have to ride between the children," said the man. "But don't worry, they won't bite." He laughed like no one had ever said it before.
"Yes, sir." I kind of leaned over the little girl sitting on the right and tumbled in between them. "Sorry."
The little boy said, "That's okay," and the little girl asked, "What's your name?"
"Otis. Who are you?"
"Abigail. That's my brother. He's Malcolm."
"Hi." Malcolm had a sack of potato chips between his legs, and the pages of his comic book were smudged with oil.
"Where you headed, Otis?" The father was looking at me in the rear-view mirror. He was one of those fellows whose beard starts growing the minute he finishes shaving, and he smelled of Brylcream and Listerine and Old Spice, like a preacher or a politician.
"Uh, Onyx. It's somewhere by the Buffalo River. I think."
"You think? Don't you know where you're going? I never heard of it myself, but we're from Illinois! This is my wife, Louise--" Louise turned around and fluttered her fingers over her shoulder "--and I'm Teddy!" Teddy said everything with an exclamation point, as if he embodied good will and self-confidence and unending enthusiasm.
"Where are you going?" I asked.
"Eureka Springs, Arkansas! Our old pastor, the Reverend Gerald L.K. Smith, settled there, and he's recreating the Holy Land. He's a fine man, finest man I ever met! And he doesn't kowtow to the Catholics or the Jews either. You're not a Catholic or a Jew, are you?"
That seemed like an odd question and forward, too, so I thought I'd mess with him a little.
"Yes, sir."
Again, Teddy looked at me in the rear-view, "What? What do you mean?"
"I'm a Catholic and a Jew. I'm Jewish Catholic."
In a low voice, Teddy asked Louise. "Is that possible?"
And Louise said, "I think a Catholic or an Episcopalian could be a Jew; I'm not sure. None of them believe the Bible, so they're all going to hell."
There was a momentary pause, when Malcolm asked me, "Are you really going to hell?" I looked down, and Scrooge McDuck was diving into a swimming pool full of gold coins.
"Don't you think that would hurt? Diving into a bunch of coins?"
Malcolm said, "Yeah. It would hurt a lot."
"But to answer your question, I don't think so. I hope not."
Abigail said, "You said you are a Catholic Jew, so you're going to hell all right."
And Malcolm said, "I think it's because he smells funny."
In that snotty voice of little girls who know they're right, Abigail said, "It's not because of that. It's because he doesn't believe like what we do. We know the truth."
This was getting fun, so I said, "Well, hang on, Miss Know-It-All. I'm Pentecostal, too."
The car got quiet. Then Teddy's eyes in the mirror again. "Where do you go to church, Otis?"
"I was raised in the Full Gospel Jewish Catholic Church in Abracadabra. It's just north of Orenogo. Have you ever heard of it?"
I could tell Teddy was still trying to sort it out because he asked me next, "Have you accepted Jesus as your personal Lord and Savior, Otis?"
Hmmm.
Now, that was a serious question, and I wasn't quite sure how to answer it.
Once when I was a kid, my buddy Jeddo asked me to go with him to church camp. They had this barrel-gutted, sawed-off stump of a preacher with slick hair and horn-rimmed glasses, and he whooped about Jesus and waved his Bible over his head and shouted about a hole some oilmen drilled in west Texas, a hole so deep the oilmen could hear the screaming of the damned, and that preacher scared the bejesus out of all us kids--including Jeddo who'd been saved more times than he had been swimming--so when he asked who wanted to be saved from being tossed into the lake of fire, we stood as a single entity from our folding chairs and went forward. That preacher has us pray out loud about what terrible sinners we were and how all of us deserved to burn forever, but God loved us so much that he sent his Son to die for us, but God didn't love us so much that if we got confused or maybe had doubts he wouldn't send us to hell anyhow. Then we knelt beside one another, and our counselors came to us and put their arms around our shoulders, and we all wept together and repented together and rose together as one. As a result, I could never quite make out whether Jesus was my personal savior or if he saved the whole bunch of us together, and I could never understand why it mattered anyhow. It was the "personal Lord and Savior" business that confused me. I was fine with Jesus; I still am; I always will be. But it's all the stuff people say about Jesus that gets me muddled:
"Are you washed in the blood of the Lamb?"
What could that possibly mean?
"Have you been born again?"
Huh?
"Is Jesus your personal Lord and Savior?"
Well, now, that's exactly what I'm trying to figure out.
"Are you sorry for your sins?"
Yes, some of them. But I'm not sorry for what Candy did to me back in her Jeep, not at all, and was that, in fact, a sin? Who's to say what's a sin?
The Bible!
There it is--the insurmountable, incontestable, indisputable Word of God. What does it matter that there are forty thousand denominations, each of whom thinks they got the Bible right (and everybody else has it wrong), and maybe twenty thousand of those denominations are different kinds of Baptists and all of them saying, "It says in my Bible . . ." before they spout some dogma they claim is crystal clear, but everybody else is too stupid, blind, and stubborn to see it the way they do? Yes, the words on the page don't change--I get that. Everything is right there in King James English--I get that, too. But what people say about those immutable words is as changeable and vaporous as clouds passing over the moon.
And, of course, that's the problem. Even at seventeen, I knew that unless I said everything exactly the way Teddy wanted it said, I would get a big talking to, and Louise would be there beside him moving her lips in silent prayer, and I would feel like I'm seven years old again and fending off a stump-high preacher with horn-rimmed glasses--"Oh, Lord, we beseech Thee on behalf of this sinner who even now sits between our precious children, etc., etc."--and the children would be listening to their Daddy saying things that made them feel smug.
So, I said, "Yes, sir. I gave my heart to Jesus at church camp."
"Was it a 'Jewish Catholic' camp?"
"No, sir. I went with a friend of mine to his church camp. It was Baptist, I think."
"Well, that's good. How old were you when you accepted Jesus as your personal Lord and Savior?"
Apparently, you have to say it just that way.
"Seven."
"Seven years old?," Teddy was astonished. "You hadn't reached the age of accountability, Otis. You weren't old enough to make a decision for Christ."
Shit! I thought. Here we go.
"The age of accountability?"
"That's the age a person has to be to make a decision to accept Jesus Christ as his personal Lord and Savior."
"How old is that?"
"Most Christians agree you have to be eight years old."
"Otherwise?"
"Well, otherwise, you aren't really saved."
"You mean, like Abigail and Malcolm back here."
"But they are innocent children. Of course, they're saved."
"Thank God!" I said. "I knew there was no such thing as original sin!"
"What do you mean? Of course, there is original sin. 'In Adam's fall, we sinned all.'"
"Uh-oh. So, now you're saying if I leaned up there and jerked the steering wheel, and we had a head-on collision with that semi coming at us, and little Malcolm and Abigail here died a horrible death, they'd go to hell? Because they're guilty of Adam's sin though they had nothing at all whatsoever to do with it? Does that seem fair?"
Teddy's expression in the rear-view mirror wasn't quite as affable after I raised this prospect. Also, I think he finally realized that I'd been putting him on the whole time.
"Perhaps you'd better get out, Otis."
"I'm sorry; I'm just trying to sort out the logic here. If I wasn't saved at seven, then these little guys aren't saved." I asked Abigail, "How old are you?"
Abigail said, "I'm six. He's five."
Teddy said, "But that's not my point! My point is, are you saved now? Today?"
"Well, answer me this: Will I know more when I'm twenty than I know now?"
Silence.
"Will I?"
"Yes. Of course."
"How about when I'm thirty? Or forty?"
Silence.
"All I'm getting at is that the age of accountability, as you call it, seems to me a lot like moving the goalposts. So, right now, today, I'm seventeen years of age. Is that old enough to qualify me for the age of accountability? Should I burn forever because of the decisions I make at seventeen, even though I'll know a lot more at thirty and be more mature to make decisions? See what I mean?" I figured it didn't matter if I was making sense or not because the whole conversation didn't make sense. Anyhow, I doubled down on where I was headed: "Maybe I should wait until eighty to accept Jesus as my personal Lord and Savior because by then I'll really be mature enough to make a decision."
Silence.
Then, I rode that pony into the barn. "Besides, can you show me where the age of accountability is in the Bible?" To be honest, I didn't know if the age of accountability was in the Bible or not. I just figured you can't lose with the Bible ploy. If Teddy said, "Well, Paul writes in Amphibians 9:23, 'An eight years child must profess his faith lest he burn forever,'" then I'd concede the point and learn something in the process. But if the Bible doesn't say anything about it, I'd win the debate.
Louise stopped moving her lips in prayer. Malcolm was looking at his comic book. Abigail asked, "Do I have to wait until I'm eight to be saved, Daddy?" And all the while, Teddy gripped the steering wheel and glared at me in the rear-view.
Then Abigail started singing, "Jesus loves me, this I know, for the Bible tells me so. Little ones to Him belong; they are weak but He is strong."
So, I started singing with her, "Yes, Jesus loves me."
Then Malcolm. "Yes, Jesus loves me."
Then Louise, "Yes, Jesus loves me."
Everyone except Teddy.
"The Bible tells me so."