Killing the Buddha Read online

  “I’m not running the church anymore, Twin.”

  “You think I’m talking for my health? You got to do something.”

  “What?”

  “Shit, man, I don’t know, you’re the preacher.” Twin grabbed her jacket and struggled into it. Carl showed her to the door. “So what, now?”

  “I don’t know yet.” He desperately wanted her out of his apartment, if for nothing else but to rinse his mouth out. She left, and Carl ran to the bathroom, collapsing over the toilet, only to heave and heave for naught. After an hour, the only thing his stomach could produce was bright green bile. He had done too much, he thought. Given and given, neglected his own sons, and still they had forsaken him. He slid to his knees and reached for the towel on the sink. Tourists? Germans are in the church? He tried to stand up and found that he couldn’t. And Jasper, that fucking Jasper was shaming the profession by letting the deacons take control. What in the devil was a medieval liturgical chant, anyway? Twin was right, I am the preacher. “But without my church,” he said aloud, sarcastically.

  He had told them not to cast him aside. Not in those words, of course, he had used King, but then…he couldn’t allow himself to finish the thought. Laying full length on the bathroom floor, Carl saw the Scriptures rolled out before him, a parchment of sin and bitterness: This new king will take your first sons, your best daughters…and take…and take…And ye shall cry out in that day because of your king, whom ye shall have chosen for yourself; and the Lord will not hear you in that day.

  Carl spent the better part of the afternoon in the bathroom.

  “Carl, dinner’s on.” He struggled to his feet and sat at the head of the dinner table, pale gray. Regina had made catfish dipped in buttermilk and cornmeal and hush puppies, dirty rice, warm green bean salad, and watched it all grow cold on her husband’s plate. His sons, Pepin, Jackson, and Daemon, squirmed in their seats, uncomfortable because of their father’s clenched fists resting on the table. “I was chosen, yet shamed.”

  “Excuse me, Carl?”

  “Never mind, Regina.”

  He dreamt again that night, except this time instead of torment, it filled him with solace. God was real, and His Scripture a living thing. I said indeed that thy house and the house of thy father should walk before me forever, but now be it far from me and they that despise me…. Behold, the days come, that I will cut off thine arm, and the arm of thy father’s house. The Lord kill and maketh alive. He will keep the feet of his saints and the wicked shall be silent in darkness. The adversaries of the Lord shall be broken to pieces; out of heaven shall he thunder upon them: The Lord shall judge the ends of the earth; and he shall give strength unto his king, and exalt the horn of his anointed.

  Carl woke the next morning with the words And this shall be a sign…echoing in his mind.

  Gasoline is an unstoppable perfume. Sickly sweet, it permeated through its containers and into Carl’s clothes before he unscrewed the caps. He wondered what to do with them afterward. Regina and her meticulous nature would miss them as soon as she laundered. Goodwill, he thought.

  Slipping inside the back the door, he headed for the deacons’ offices. On a Thursday night, the church was barren. Carl had decided long ago that everything needed a day of rest, even the Ethiopian, so no programs were ever planned for that day. At least they let me do that. When he reached their offices he twisted off the top, ready. The twelve men shared two offices, six cubicles in each room. The carpet soaked up the gas, and he danced out, leaving the door ajar, spilling a trail around the corner, down the hallway, and repeated the process in the choir, conference, and Sunday school rooms. When he reached his office, he barely recognized it. The walls were covered with honorary degrees from various universities, citations of honor, doctorates for programs whose names Carl was unable to pronounce. A large bronze bust of Booker T. Washington filled a corner of the office, and the desk was littered with photos of Hass and the deacons shaking hands with Ed Koch and Jesse Jackson. Sons-of-guns managed all that in thirty days, he thought as he poured the lighter liquid over Booker T.’s head. The smell was almost overpowering as Carl staggered into the Ethiopian’s sanctuary.

  He created intricate paths along the side aisles, pausing as he rained gas over the pews and almost weeping as he drenched the relief of the Last Supper. The only thing left was the pulpit. Standing behind it, he suddenly doubted his convictions; maybe if he had given them more time, the deacons would have come to their senses and asked him to return. He put the can of gas down beside him and prayed. “I’ll stay my hand, Lord. Give me a sign and I’ll walk away. Open every door and window on my way out.”

  There was nothing but the soft patter of gas dripping off the pews.

  “It’s mine to do with whatever I see fit. Mine to run. Mine to lead, Lord. And they forgot to ask me for the keys.” The “they” grew arms and multiplied. They, the deacons, they, the officers, they, the very parishioners who had thrown holy fits until they deciphered the sound of his voice and cast him aside. Swayed by clever photo ops, they didn’t deserve to receive solace in his wooden sanctuary. Where were the couples he had married and counseled? Or those whom he had baptized? They should have clamored at his door, risen against the deacons, something. He had led them to a promised land, but then they turned, and with their silence said they could manage the rest alone.

  As he left by the back door, he dropped a lit match.

  The fire was a pyrologist’s dream. The secrets of a patchwork wooden church were revealed in an uncontrollable blaze. The fire split into two, making quick work of the side panels that weren’t solid but compressed wood shavings. Exxon unleaded behaved as paint thinner would in some places, eating away at cheap shellac and exposing the pine pews to the flames. Following Carl’s path, fire blistered down the aisles, leaping into every pew. The floors began to groan. Shouts of discordant music rang out as the organ surrendered to the flames. The blaze in the back offices was mundane by comparison. With nothing hardy to munch through, the fire melted the deacons’ cubicles down into black plastic bubbles.

  There should have been nothing left, nothing able to escape as the Ethiopian’s supporting beams buckled and the entire structure crashed into a smoldering heap. But even godly bitterness couldn’t maim what had been recently purchased. The deacons would pick up their skeleton and start anew, anoint what remained blemish-free and send what Reverend Carl had loved best to the junkyard.

  The Italian marble baptismal pool remained in the middle of the ruins, unscarred. It rose from the rubble, clean as bones.

  Broward County, Florida

  Who knows the power of your anger?

  PSALM 90:11

  MY daughter was a virgin!” Dawnia Da Costa’s mother told us. It wasn’t an assertion, it was an accusation. How could the Lord take an innocent? How could the Lord take one who’d not yet been blessed by love? God’s will. She spat the words out and ground them into the floor.

  We sat silent, staring at them. We’d come to the southern tip of Florida looking for Santeria, the Cuban religion of African gods doubling as Catholic saints, of chicken bones and love candles and goat blood on the streets outside the INS building every morning, prayers to the Virgin Mary and her Yoruba alter ego, Ochun, to let a brother or a sister, or a daughter, come to the promised land. Instead we’d found Dawnia’s mother. She didn’t need candles, she didn’t need chicken bones; all she wanted was blood.

  “A virgin!” Dawnia’s mother said. “Lord, how she felt!” She spoke of the last time she’d seen her daughter alive, before Dawnia left for church one Friday night three years ago.

  “Are you a preacher?” Dawnia might have asked that night, the lilt of Jamaica in her voice as much of an enticement as the curves of her hips and her breasts. And Lucious Boyd would have smiled. In his reply, she would have noted the erudition of his tone, his long American vowels. “Yes, I am a preacher,” he might have answered; and from what the witnesses tell us about the dark-skinned girl who climbed
into a church van with the light-skinned black man, how she wavered before getting in as if on the edge of faith, we know she was excited, and afraid.

  Faith is dangerous. Friday night, 2:00 A.M.: Dawnia just now coming home from church, Faith Tabernacle Pentecostal United, a church of Caribbean exiles making good in America. She’s a big girl, handsome, known for her bright laughter and her powerful lungs. She loves Jesus, she loves her church. Friday night, nowhere else she’d rather be. She’s twenty-one, going to be a nurse, so God-fearing she won’t even wear slacks; but she loves to party, loves to pray, loves to sing. She’s an alto. She sings solos.

  Friday night, her throat is itching. She wants to let it loose; she wants to pray; she wants to sing; she has the solo. “There is power, power, wonder-working power, power in the blood of the lamb!” It’s a song, it’s a prayer, it’s a vibration in her bones.

  The clock creeps into the morning. The choir decamps to a Denny’s, where they drink coffee and laugh about life back on the islands; then they shift to the parking lot, short bursts of song escaping their lips between good-byes like hiccups of gospel. Dawnia gets behind the wheel, alone with her solo. She cruises through the warm dark Florida morning, her windows down while she sings. There is power in the blood. Her voice shakes the car so hard she doesn’t notice it sputtering. Then it rolls to a stop. She’s run out of gas.

  Faith is dangerous. Dawnia walks down the highway in the dark, cars whiz by, nobody stops, just as well. She keeps company with the Lord. She sings to keep herself safe. “There is power in the blood, power, power, wonder-working power!” She comes to a ramp, exits the highway on foot, walks out of the dark, into the white light of a gas station. She sees a turquoise van. A church van, “Generation of Hope” written on its side. In it is a man with broad shoulders and dark eyes; they spot her wandering and he rolls up beside her. His eyebrows are raised, his lips are set in a careless smile.

  “Are you a preacher?” Dawnia might ask. The man would laugh. No, not really; but he does give sermons at the funeral home he runs with his family. He’s a businessman, but solace is his trade. Isn’t that about the same thing? Dawnia gets in the van.

  Faith is dangerous. Three A.M. Dawnia’s gone. Her mama’s awake. She wants her daughter. Dawnia, her eldest, Dawnia, her strongest.

  “She is physically strong,” her mother told us, sitting in her beauty parlor between a pawnshop and a gun store, making a fist out of her daughter’s strength. “She is always with me,” she said. Three years later, she still saw Dawnia nodding to Lucious Boyd’s pious words; felt her daughter’s shoulders tensing as he drove past her car without slowing down; heard her praying—Oh my God help me!—as his hands pushed her down to the floor of the church van—Jesus help me!—as his face came from above like the maw of an animal—God—as he tore into her like the Beast himself—Please!

  “I pray for him to suffer,” Dawnia’s mother said. “May the Lord make that so.”

  Dawnia’s church prayed with her: “Let him suffer,” they prayed, a chorus of hate so deep it didn’t so much stain their faith as transform it. Even before they knew his name, the day the police found Dawnia’s body, naked, raped, stabbed, run over, and oddly, tenderly, wrapped in a shroud of bedsheets, they prayed for him. The day the police caught him they prayed for him, every day of his trial they sat in the back of the courtroom and prayed for him, the day the jury said guilty they prayed for him, and now, the Sunday after the verdict, a new holiday they called Victory Day, they prayed for him. Let him suffer, thank you, Jesus; give him the chair, thank you, Jesus; make him bleed, thank you, Jesus. They were a prayer in a red dress, a red suit, red suspenders. “It’s the color of Jesus’ blood,” said the Reverend of Faith Tabernacle, as if that explained why he and his church had chosen it as the special color of their celebration. “Today we’re celebrating Jesus,” a congregant said. “Today we’re wearing red for justice.”

  Red is the color of their prayer. Red is the color of blood. And there is power in the blood, that’s what they sang. A choir forty-five strong at the front of the church, the band bursting out of its corner, the women in the pews sizzling in their seats until like popcorn they hopped into the air. Thank you, Jesus! That’s an s like a z, Jee-zus! That’s a red bloody Jesus; say it again! A boy in a black suit over a red shirt put his hands in the air and let his fingers flutter like butterflies until the spirit filled them and they turned into talons. There is power in the blood! The soloist wore a red skirt suit and a red hat shaped like that of a pilgrim. “There is power!” she sang. “Power! Power! Power!”

  From somewhere in the choir loft tambourines rose up and rippled across the singers like a school of silver fish. The drummer banged his way past the Plexiglas shield designed to contain him; the piano player, a teenage boy, splashed across the keys as if skipping stones on water. Two rows ahead a tall man with the heavy jaw and thin frame of an undertaker rocked back and forth, his arms glued to his sides, his hands like paddles.

  Then the bass simmered. The choir quieted. The Reverend preached. “She has been justified!” He was the biggest man in the church, his legs alone taller than the full height of a boy, his head as wide and thick as the dark mouth of a cannon, his words shaped like an Englishman’s. “My God,” he said. “We can rejoice!”

  Later, we’d sit with him in his office, lost in deep leather chairs, straining to see him behind the bronze eagle that swooped from a pedestal over his neatly piled sermons. His God, he said, was a loving one, and His love was like a lion, like a fighter plane. The Reverend loved fighter planes, he loved his new country’s F-16s. “Do you understand,” he asked us, one hand in a fist pressed against the black marble of his desk, the other stroking its sheen, “what this nation, under God, can do to God’s enemies?” If we hadn’t before, we did then, under the anger of the Reverend’s glare.

  In the pulpit, the Reverend roared his adopted American creed: “You can run, but you can’t—”

  “Hide!” his congregation shouted.

  “Let us sing!” the Reverend commanded.

  The soloist shook her head hard and her red pilgrim hat punched the air. In her hand there was suddenly a red handkerchief like a splash of blood. “We won!” she sang. Red scarves burst into the air around the church like so many gunshots. “We won! We won! We won!”

  In the front row, a half dozen white men, detectives and a prosecutor, special guests for Victory Day, nodded their heads; they knew this song. The lead singer pumped her hands: “We won the war! We won the war! We won the war!”

  “Yes,” said the Reverend. “Yes!” The choir subsided, folded up into twitching quiet like wings behind his shoulders. “Did we not know it would be so?” The guitar player twanged, warned, played a blues. “The wise man Solomon says in Ecclesiastes, ‘But it shall not be well with the wicked, neither shall he prolong his days!’ ”

  “Yes!” The congregation shouted with joy.

  “St. Paul tells us in Romans, chapter twelve”—“Tell us!” screamed a woman in the back pew—“St. Paul tells us in Romans chapter twelve, verse nineteen, ‘It is written, Vengeance is mine, I will repay, sayeth the Lord!’ ”

  The congregation roared. “Jesus!”

  “And does it not say, in Galatians chapter six, verse seven”—“Oh yes,” the congregation said, women crying and men dancing—“ ‘God is not mocked! For whatsoever a man soweth! For whatsoever a man soweth, that he shall also reap!’ ” A flurry of keyboard and a burst of rumbling bass followed the words. The Reverend waited. He looked at the pews, his congregation of exiles and immigrants, Jamaicans and Antiguans, their skin so dark, their souls washed white in the blood of the Lamb. The Reverend did not know what it meant to be “black” until he came to this country. He wished not to know. He was not black, he was a man. Just like, he’d told us—especially like—the white men who filled the first pew. The detectives. The prosecutor. These powerful men, who had listened to the power of the Lord, heard the power of Faith Tabernacle. Th
e Reverend stared at the white men. “I am well pleased,” he said, “with what God has done. With what God is about to do.”

  “Isaiah!” a man in the back shouted his prophet’s name.

  The Reverend ignored him. “I will say now that we have the blessing of dignitaries among us.” The white men shifted in their seats. “These men,” said the Reverend, “who have done”—he paused—“so much. I have not seen one flaw in these men. If it exists, I am not looking. I have not seen one such flaw—such as racism.” The prosecutor nodded.

  The man in the back again shouted his prophet’s name, like a bullet fired at the altar. What did he mean? Nobody cared. Why did people say the sheriffs shot black people as if they were dogs? Nobody knew. Why didn’t they put Lucious Boyd away when they thought he’d killed a black whore? That didn’t matter. What mattered was power. The power of prayer, the power in the blood, the power of Faith Tabernacle to make white men do their will.

  The guitar thrummed and the red handkerchiefs waved. At the Reverend’s invitation, the prosecutor stepped up to the pulpit. He was nearly as big as the Reverend, with dark hair going silver, boyish cheeks, narrow-set eyes that beamed concern. And teeth. Bright white teeth.

  “I’m seeing a whole lotta red out there!” he shouted. The guitar leapt up behind him. “Can you hear me?” he called. “Yes!” “Can you hear me?” “Yes!”

  He reminded them he’d been there before, campaigning. Two years ago, didn’t even know what church he was in, when the Reverend had pointed a finger at him and demanded, “What are you going to do?”

  “Only then did I realize that I was in Dawnia DaCosta’s church. And when I knew that, I came up—you remember?—I came up to the pulpit and I said, ‘I will do everything in my power to make sure justice is done!’ ”

  “Thank you, Jesus!”