Читать книгу The Resurrection of Mary Mabel McTavish - Allan Stratton - Страница 15

K.O. Doyle and Co.

Bright and early the following morning, Brother Floyd had surveyed the damage to ministry assets. It was calamitous. The generator and trailer were write-offs, ditto the lights and supports. As for the canvas, the cost of repair would be prohibitive.

“Hot diggity!” Floyd crowed. This would lay to rest any hopes his partner might have harboured for their ministry’s resurrection. Good thing he’d kept up the insurance payments. Brother Percy’d urged him to drop the policy and put their fate in God’s hands. “Trust in the Lord and He will provide.” However when dealing with God, Floyd had preferred to keep one hand on his wallet.

His caution vindicated, he savoured the wreckage, then skipped to a telephone where he placed a call to their underwriter. He was promised that an adjuster would be up from Toronto on next morning’s train. If God were as helpful as the United Dominion Insurance Company, Heaven would have a lot more takers.

Visions of Easy Street filling his head, Floyd made his way to London General Hospital to visit his partner. In the past evening’s upheaval, the poor man had broken his jaw. With the wires and swelling, he was in no condition to answer back. What better time to rub in the good news?

Floyd cataloged the carnage with glee. “The Almighty’s will is writ large,” he concluded. “He wants us shut down pronto.”

Percy was beside himself, his attempts at interjection digging metal into bone, tissue, and nerve ends. “Aaaa! Aaaa!” he howled in pain.

“Why, Perce, is that the glorious sound of rejoicing?”

“Aaaa! Aaaa!”

“Aaaa! Aaaa! Aaaa-men!” Floyd winked to the heavens. “Thank you, Jesus.”

Brother Percy grabbed the Gideon Bible on his nightstand. He was about to pitch it at his partner’s head, but Floyd cocked a fist. Percy cowered.

“Blessèd are the meek,” Floyd reminded with a grin.

Floyd stopped grinning with the arrival of the adjuster, Mr. Fischer. In the view of the United Dominion Insurance Company, the destruction of ministry property fell under the clause dealing with Acts of God. (“A subject about which you’re no doubt familiar.”) Floyd blanched. Dreams of a lucrative settlement were up in smoke, but so were plans to market tent squares. Without a final tour, how could they pitch the merchandise? And without the tent, truck, and generator, how could they have a tour?

Complicating matters, work on Percy’s jaw had taken a bite from their reserves. Released from hospital that afternoon, the evangelist stooped to a dingy room in the cheapest digs he could find, the C.P.R. Hotel, a.k.a. The Ceeps. Floyd likewise swallowed his pride, and had management squeeze in a cot at the foot of his partner’s bed.

After supper, while Percy prayed to the Almighty for deliverance, Floyd toddled downstairs to the hotel tavern to worship at the altar of Jack Daniels.

The kid at the end of the bar was one cocky bantam. Vest open, tie loose, slick hair parted in the middle, he left off talking to the bartender, and plunked himself down at Floyd’s table. “K.O. Doyle,” he stuck out his paw. “I hear you’re Floyd Cruickshank, brains behind the preacher man.”

“What’s it to you?”

“I’m looking for a Mary Mabel McTavish. You know her?”

“What if I do?”

“I’d like to jog your memory,” Doyle said. He was with King Features Syndicate, a Hearst operation, up from Buffalo for a peekaboo. “A tousle-haired all-American tyke, right out of a Norman Rockwell, dies and gets brought back to life. The story’s a four-star wank-yer-crank, ’specially if the dame’s got stems.”

“News travels fast.”

“I got sources.”

Doyle’s source, courtesy of King Features, was the telegraph operator in Wichita, Kansas, who took the cable Uncle Albert sent his sister.

TIMMY HAD A DUST UP WITH MOTHER NATURE. THE FREE PRESS SAYS HE DIED AND GOT HISSELF RESURRECTED. HORSE FEATHERS. GRACE SENDS HER REGARDS. SHE IS HAVING A SPELL. ALBERT.

A call from King Features to the Free Press confirmed the article. The paper offered to sell its copy, but the skeptical syndicate opted to send up a staffer for an independent fact check. After all, “Canadian news” was a contradiction in terms.

Doyle had hit town that morning. Like travelling salesmen and other ne’er-do-wells, he’d checked into The Ceeps because it was cheap, next to the station, and came with a bar. After dropping off his bag — a change of underwear and a toothbrush — he went in search of the gal of the hour. According to the Free Press, Miss McTavish worked at the local private school. Doyle traipsed over, only to be confronted by the headmistress. “That damn Gorgon tore a strip off me,” he sputtered to Floyd. “Her butt’s so puckered, I’ll bet when she farts, she hits high C.”

From there to the hospital. Doctor Hammond refused comment, but his broken nose told a tale, as did the shaken demeanour of a certain Nurse Judd.

Doyle had better luck at Bethel Gospel Hall. The pastor was a hayseed with breath that would strip linoleum, but he was four-square behind the miracle; he also tipped Doyle to Tom and Betty Wertz. The couple made shy, but Doyle got past the front door when he said he was a lawyer come to offer his services cheap, on account of he’d heard the good doctor planned to charge Tom with assault.

Last port of call: Timmy Beeford’s. Aunt Grace had the house sealed up tighter than a nun’s panties. But she’d overlooked Timmy’s upstairs bedroom window. Doyle lured the little nipper onto the verandah roof and got what he wanted with a couple of lemon sours.

With enough for a column, Doyle skedaddled back to the hotel bar, phoned in what he had to King Features, and tucked into supper: a pickled egg washed down with a pail of suds.

“You Canucks brew it strong,” Doyle told Floyd. “Then again, you gotta be pissed to live here.” He excused himself for a leak.

“I couldn’t help but overhear.”

Floyd looked up into the florid face of the drunk from the far corner. A big guy with a lumpy nose, the drunk slapped Floyd on the back. “Scoop Jones from Scripps-Howard. I got a quart of Four Roses in my room. Ditch the kid, come up for a nightcap. Give Scoop the scoop, get double for your trouble.”

“Sorry, pal, I gotta hit the hay,” said Floyd, rising unsteadily from his chair.

“A rain check then. Scoop Jones. Room 202.”

As Floyd lurched to the elevator by the front desk, he heard the clerk say to the new arrival in the rumpled fedora, “Scratch Micallef, Associated Press? I must say, we’ve been getting a lot of newsmen lately. The bar is that way.”

Wobbling down the hall to his room, Floyd felt a spot of envy. Some young missy’d grabbed the spotlight he and Perce had dreamed of. She’d be rich. Damn. There was nothing so cruel as the good fortune of others.

However, Floyd was a visionary, not long for regret. By the time he fumbled his key into the lock, he’d had a flash. By the time the door swung open, it was a full-blown inspiration. And by the time he switched on the overhead light, he saw his career resurrected in glory. He was going to hitch a ride on Mary Mabel’s star, be her manager, be a millionaire.

“Perce,” he cried, “get your ass in gear. If you want to save that damn ministry of yours, get on your knees and pray for God to bring us Miss McTavish. Tell Him to make it snappy. Given the shit He’s flushed our way, it’s the least He can do.”

Percy tumbled out of his sheets. If this could save his pulpit, he’d get cracking like eggs at a diner.

A few hours later, Percy prayed out and Floyd passed out, Herschel MacIntosh of the London Parks Department came pounding on their door, fresh from chasing lovers out of the fairground. “There’s bums in your tent. Any trouble, there’ll be hell to pay.”

The evangelists got to the site in no time. In the cab of their truck, they found a tramp in a dress. Percy was outraged when Floyd took up flirting. No way is that whoremonger going to fornicate at the foot of my bed with some hoboess, he fumed, as he checked the glove compartment for theft. That’s when he heard Floyd say the magic words: “You’re Mary Mabel McTavish?”

Mary Mabel McTavish! Lo, the Lord had delivered her unto them, just as Percy’d prayed! The reverend’s eyes filled with tears. He had a direct line to the Almighty after all.