“I swanny! Maybe the Rapture done come, ” said Fonny Boy, who had heard about the Rapture all of his life. “And we’ve been left ’cause we ain’t fittin’ for Heaven ’cause of all wer sins!”
“That’s silly, ” the dentist replied in frustration.
He was hungry, cold, and tired, and he was imagining all of the watermen out in their bateaus, finding the Tory Treasure. He wondered if the Coast Guard had rounded up all of them and placed them under arrest, or if the watermen had found a way to extort cooperation from the authorities. Plain and simple, Dr. Faux didn’t know what was going on, but he was spooked and wished he had never been so foolish as to pad his dental bills, lie to Medicaid, take advantage of children, and ruin people’s teeth for the sake of profit.
When they eventually reached Fonny Boy’s house, no one was home there, either.
“My mama, she should be in thar raisin’ a fire and renching the dishes. She never goes out after dark, ” Fonny Boy marveled as his fears grew. “I’m of a mind Jesus come down on His cloud and everybody’s gone, save us!”
“Stop it, ” the dentist insisted. “Nobody’s gone up in a cloud, Fonny Boy. That’s a fairy tale. Now there must be an explanation for why the island is deserted, so let’s just get your family golf cart and drive around. I suggest we head over to the airport and see if anything’s going on over there. ”
But the golf cart’s battery was dead, and this just increased Fonny Boy’s feeling of foreboding and damnation.
“I guess we’ll walk, ” Dr. Faux decided, turning around and heading in another direction that cut through a marsh. “I will admit this is strange. If everyone’s out in the bateaus looking for the treasure, then why did we see so many bateaus at the docks when we got off the mail-boat?”
“Shhhh!” Fonny Boy said with a finger over his lips. “I hear a helichopper! It must be the Guardsmen!”
The dentist strained to listen and detected the distant thud-thudding, and he heard something else, too.
“Singing, ” he said. “Do you hear it, Fonny Boy?”
Both of them stopped on the footpath, the brackish air stirring their hair as they listened hard to the faint sound of gospel singing that was carried almost imperceptibly by the wind.
“It’s coming from the McMann Leon Methodist Church over thar on Main Street, ” Fonny Boy said with breathless excitement. “But I don’t have neither notion why. The church, it don’t have neither meetings on Saturday night. ”
Fonny Boy and the dentist began to hurry in that direction as the sound of helicopter blades got louder and they spotted two bright moving lights high up in the star-scattered sky, coming in from the west. Fonny Boy broke into a run and didn’t care if he left the dentist behind.
“Hey! Wait for me!” Dr. Faux called after him. “Well, never mind, I’m heading to the airstrip to see if I can fly the hell out of here on one of those helicopters coming in!”
Fonny Boy ran as fast as he ever had in his life, and was panting and drenched with sweat when he bounded up the church steps and threw open the door. He couldn’t believe what he saw inside. Every single person on the island must have been crowded together in the church, the lights were out, and the Islanders were holding candles. They were singing “Amazing Grace” without accompaniment, and Fonny Boy stood still, staring in confusion and fear. Something terrible must have happened, he thought. Or maybe something wonderful. Or maybe they knew the Rapture was coming for sure and they were waiting for Jesus on his cloud. This was crazy, Fonny Boy silently protested. Why wasn’t everybody trying to find the Tory Treasure, and didn’t it concern them that helicopters were flying in? The sound of their engines was loud enough so that Fonny Boy could hear it inside the church. He pulled his harmonica out of a pocket, cupped his hands airtight around it, made a fish face, and began bending and tonguing, stomping his foot to the rhythm as he jammed the blues.