” OWW, OWWW, let go! Police! POLEECE! ”
“Only policeman apt to be on this block around now would be Officer Benzyck, and he’s already given me my nightly ticket and moved on. By now he’ll be in Dennis’s, having a pecan
waffle and double bacon, praise God, so I want you to think about this.” There came a cracking sound from behind Mr. Lincoln’s back that set Callahan’ts teeth on edge. He didn’t like to think Mr. Lincoln’s thumb had made that sound, but didn’t know what else it could have been. Mr.
Lincoln cocked his head skyward on his thick neck and let out a long exhalation of pure pain —
Yaaaahhhhhhh!
“You want to give me hallelujah, brother,” advised Rev. Harrigan, “or you’ll be, praise God, carrying your thumb home in your breast pocket.”
“Hallelujah,” whispered Mr. Lincoln. His complexion had gone an ocher shade. Callahan thought some of that might be attributable to the orangey streetlamps which at some point had
replaced the fluorescents of his own time. Probably not all of it, though.
“Good! Now say amen. You’ll feel better when you do.”
“A-Amen.”
“Praise God! Praise Jee-eee-eee- esus!”
“Let me go . . . let go of my thumb — !”
“Are you going to get out of here and stop blocking this intersection if I do?”
“Yes!”
“Without any more fiddle-de-dee or hidey-ho, praise Jesus?”
” Yes! ”
Harrigan leaned yet closer to Mr. Lincoln, his lips stopping less than half an inch from a large plug of yellow-orange wax caught in the cup of Mr. Lincoln’s ear. Callahan watched this with
fascination and complete absorption, all other unresolved issues and unfulfilled goals for the time being forgotten. The Pere was more than halfway to believing that if Jesus had had Earl Harrigan on His team, it probably would have been old Pontius who ended up on the cross.
“My friend, bombs will soon begin to fall: God-bombs. And you have to choose whether you
want to be among those who are, praise Jesus, up in the sky dropping those bombs, or those who are in the villages below, getting blown to smithereens. Now I sense this isn’t the time or place for you to make a choice for Christ, but will you at least think about these things, sir?”
Mr. Lincoln’s response must have been a tad slow for Rev. Harrigan, because that worthy did
something else to the hand he had pinned behind Mr. Lincoln’s back. Mr. Lincoln uttered another high, breathless scream.
“I said, will you think about these things?”
“Yes! Yes! Yes!”
“Then get in your car and drive away and God bless you and keep you.”
Harrigan released Mr. Lincoln. Mr. Lincoln backed away from him, eyes wide, and got back
into his car. A moment later he was driving down Second Avenue — fast.
Harrigan turned to Callahan and said, “Catholics are going to Hell, Father Don. Idolators, each and every one of them; they bow to the Cult of Mary. And the Pope! Don’t get me started on
him! Yet I have known some fine Catholic folks, and have no doubt you’re one of them. It may be I can pray you through to a change of faith. Lacking that, I may be able to pray you through the flames.” He looked back at the sidewalk in front of what now seemed to be called Ham-marskjold Plaza. “I believe my congregation has dispersed.”
“Sorry about that,” Callahan said.
Harrigan shrugged. “Folks don’t come to Jesus in the summertime, anyway,” he said matter-of-factly. “They do a little window-shopping and then go back to their sinning. Winter’s the time for
serious crusading . . . got to get you a little storefront where you can give em hot soup and hot scripture on a cold night.” He looked down at Callahan’s feet and said, “You seem to have lost one of your sandals, my mackerel-snapping friend.” A new horn blared at them and a perfectly amazing taxi — to Callahan it looked like a newer version of the old VW Microbuses — went
swerving past with a passenger yelling something out at them. It probably wasn’t happy birthday.
“Also, if we don’t get out of the street, faith may not be enough to protect us.”
FOUR
“He’s all right,” Jake said, setting Oy down on the sidewalk. “I flipped, didn’t I? I’m sorry.”
“Perfectly understandable,” the Rev. Harrigan assured him. “What an interesting dog! I’ve never seen one that looked quite like that, praise Jesus!” And he bent to Oy.
“He’s a mixed breed,” Jake said tightly, “and he doesn’t like strangers.”
Oy showed how much he disliked and distrusted them by raising his head to Harrigan’s hand
and flattening his ears in order to improve the stroking surface. He grinned up at the preacher as if they were old, old pals. Callahan, meanwhile, was looking around. It was New York, and in
New York people had a tendency to mind their business and let you mind yours, but still, Jake
had drawn a gun. Callahan didn’t know how many folks had seen it, but he did know it would only take one to report it, perhaps to this Officer Benzyck Harrigan had mentioned, and put them in trouble when they could least afford it.
He looked at Oy and thought, Do me a favor and don’t say anything, okay? Jake can maybe
pass you off as some new kind of Corgi or Border Collie hybrid, but the minute you start talking, that goes out the window. So do me a favor and don’t.
“Good boy,” said Harrigan, and after Jake’s friend miraculously did not respond by saying
“Oy!’ the preacher straightened up. “I have something for you, Father Don. Just a minute.”
“Sir, we really have to — ”
“I have something for you, too, son — praise Jesus, say dear Lord! But first . . . this won’t take but a second . . .”
Harrigan ran to open the side door of his illegally parked old Dodge van, ducked inside,
rummaged.
Callahan bore this for awhile, but the sense of passing seconds quickly became too much. “Sir, I’m sorry, but — ”
” Here they are!” Harrigan exclaimed and backed out of the van with the first two fingers of his right hand stuck into the heels of a pair of battered brown loafers. “If you’re less than a size twelve, we can stuff em with newspaper. More, and I guess you’re out of luck.”
“A twelve is exactly what I am,” Callahan said, and ventured a praise-God as well as a thank-you. He was actually most comfortable in size eleven and a half shoes, but these were close
enough, and he slipped them on with genuine gratitude. “And now we — ”
Harrigan turned to the boy and said, “The woman you’re after got into a cab right where we had our little dust-up, and no more than half an hour ago.” He grinned at Jake’s rapidly changing expression — first astonishment, then delight. “She said the other one is in charge, that you’d know who the other one was, and where the other one is taking her.”
“Yeah, to the Dixie Pig,” Jake said. “Lex and Sixty-first. Pere, we might still have time to catch her, but only if we go right now. She — ”
“No,” Harrigan said. “The woman who spoke to me —inside my head she spoke to me and clear as a bell, praise Jesus — said you were to go to the hotel first.”
“Which hotel?” Callahan asked.
Harrigan pointed down Forty-sixth Street to the Plaza-Park Hyatt. “That’s the only one in the neighborhood . . . and that’s the direction she came from.”
“Thank you,” Callahan said. “Did she say why we were to go there?”
“No,” Harrigan said serenely, “I believe right around then the other one caught her blabbing and shut her up. Then into the taxi and away she went!”
“Speaking of moving on — “Jake began.
Harrigan nodded, but also raised an admonitory finger. “By all means, but remember that the God-bombs are going to fall. Never mind the showers of blessing — that’s for Methodist wimps
and Episcopalian scuzzballs! The bombs are gonna fall! And boys?”
They turned back to him.
“I know you fellas are as much God’s human children as I am, for I’ve smelled your sweat,
praise Jesus. But what about the lady? The lay- dees, for in truth I b’lieve there were two of em.
What about them? ”
“The woman you met’s with us,” Callahan said after a brief hesitation. “She’s okay.”
“I wonder about that,” Harrigan said. “The Book says —praise God and praise His Holy Word
— to beware of the strange woman, for her lips drip as does the honeycomb but her feet go down
to death and her steps take hold on hell. Remove thy way from her and come not nigh the door of her house.” He had raised one lumpy hand in a benedictory gesture as he offered this. Now he lowered it and shrugged. “That ain’t exact, I don’t have the memory for scripture that I did when I was younger and Bible-shoutin down south with my Daddy, but I think you get the drift.”