Chapter 2: Behind The Magic Lantern

The old SPOT Venue, of course, had changed forms by that year; it was now known as the Magic Lantern, though SPOT signage still fronted on Brainerd Road. Now was spring twilight, now was green grass breaking through cracks, now were redbuds and dogwood hovering in among the gray trunks of trees.

Up the hill houses, still inhabited, were falling down. Along Brainerd Road most businesses had closed, though a few junk stores, barber shops, and soul food places still thrived. The Christian Paupers’ Militia held the Brainerd Tunnel; their tolls were moderate and they gave you a hand-lettered tract, some of great artistry, most rain-splattered, for your fee.

We were deep into Trumplandia by that year, though it’s hard to tell you whether we lived in a police state or in gentle anarchy. The government searched for dissidents, but apart from that quest police only patrolled neighborhoods rich enough to hire them — business districts, mostly — so in many areas the streets felt safer than ever before, as long as you were ready to empty your pockets to all comers. Gentle chaos. Turf wars solved by poetry. Hunger, but not fear. At least not here in Olde Towne and Tunnel. Further off east, the evangelists were getting what they wanted and were angrier than ever; their hunger had become insatiable. A valley over to the south, a Christian white men’s militia patrolled the Georgia line. But they didn’t come down Brainerd Road too much. If they did, it was in convoys of armored cars or pickup trucks. People knew they were coming, and got out of the way.

Gospel dipped her brush in a can of chartreuse and started back at the scene: a forest bestiary of the bizarre. Chagall on crumbling brick. A peaceable kingdom punctuated with shout-outs to her favorite poets, denunciations of police, odes to her latest beloved. She adorned a grove with spray-painted koi slipping through the trees and then pressed two hands against the foliage, more for the effect of the green on her palms and forearms than any effect on the slapped-on trees.

“Hah!” she said.

Brush work took more time than hit-and-run tagging with a spray paint can, but no one ever came back behind The Magic Lantern, and the proprietors didn’t care what Gospel painted. She became more absorbed in her work as dusk deepened. Too dark now to see color. She shook a can of black and began outlining tree trunks, shadows —

Something happened, too quickly to process. Someone came at her from behind, caught her neck, hooked her back, bent her leg with a quick boot to the back of her knee, and threw her down. She saw stars but rolled and hopped to her feet, more mad than afraid. A rival tagger, she thought.

But it wasn’t a tagger, it was a big fellow in jeans and a button down shirt, open at the neck to reveal a $$$  necklace.

“What,” he said, “too fancy to answer when a gentleman says ‘Good evening’?”

Gospel backed up, toward the wet wall. Door, locked, to The Magic Lantern to her right. To her left, a broken stoop and a boarded-up door. In front of her, this big guy in his plaid shirt. She didn’t even look at his face. She wanted to stare him down, but she couldn’t. She saw his belt buckle with a picture like a silhouette of a bombshell girl that you see on the mud flaps of trucks, and that was enough. She looked past his left shoulder. There were no leaves on the pecan tree, tiny birdlets of green fluttering on a willow. Two levels of pavement tiered above her, behind him, once parking lots, now half-overgrown with dock and nettles and broken glass and roots gnarling the concrete. There was nowhere to run. Somehow out of her peripheral vision she saw yellowing discharge gummed around his left eye. Her stomach fell right down through her nethers. She tightened her hands on the can of black, ready to pop off the lid and spray.

If he stepped closer, she thought.

But maybe he wouldn’t, she thought.

Do something! her mind hollered at herself.

But she didn’t do anything and he stepped closer and then suddenly a high, rather affected drawl split the alleyway and he turned and a stocky person dressed in black was saying, loudly, resonantly enough to draw echoes out of the brickwork and opposing hillside: “What is going on? What is going on here?” and he turned and started walking and then hustling and then he left, up the hill and down again to where he’d parked a truck by the side of the road.

Gospel gawped after him. Then she turned with almost equal trepidation to check out the stranger. What if he was just as bad as the first one? Rescuers, she’d learned, could be incredibly entitled.

But the newcomer stood calmly where she’d stopped, a handful of yards from Gospel. She — definitely wearing a floor-length skirt, fluffed out over a wealth of crinolines but still dragging the mud and gravel — was leaning back a bit to examine Gospel’s painting. She had a rather alarming face, with staring black eyes, arched black brows and a Ricardo Montalban profile. Over her skirt she was wearing a black shirt with a clerical collar; on her head she wore a Victorian-looking bonnet, also black, with a green veil thrown back away from her face. She was carrying a stout cedar staff, crooked at the end, into which was set a green stone. Her iron-gray hair lay loose on her shoulders.

On first glance the stranger looked like something out of a fairy tale, almost glimmering. But then Gospel’s knees gave way as she cottoned to the idea that the stranger probably wasn’t dangerous and her body realized it was safe to feel faint. Gospel sat down hard on her behind and the strange woman came closer, tentatively, and Gospel saw that she was, well, pretty ground-in, and that her black gear was covered with animal hair. She smelled like sweat and violets, and her shirt was stiffened with sweat under the arm holes.

“I think he’s gone,” said the stranger, squatting on  her heels. She still had the high, nasal, rather affectedly Southern accent, but her voice had lost its power and seemed wispy, diffident. “Looks like we’re OK now.”

“Thank you,” said Gospel.

“Is that painting your work?”

“Yes ma’am.”

“It’s beautiful.” The stranger looked at it a long while before she turned back to Gospel. “Can I get you a Coca Cola or anything?”

Gospel nodded. She realized that sugar, and lots of it, was exactly what she needed.

The stranger rose and stepped back to let her stand up. Gospel stood and held out her hand. “Gospel Grimes.”

“And I’m Pastor C. Beatrice Alcatraz — Pastor Beah,” said the stranger. She placed her hand in Gospel’s, limply, like she expected it to be kissed. Gospel drew back in consternation. But Pastor Beah was already stepping toward the door of The Magic Lantern. It was a metal door with a small sliding panel where someone inside could look out a window of reinforced glass to see who was outside. THE Magic LANTERN was painted in well-tagged, almost obscured, art deco style letters, and beside the words, a rather lurid green female djinn was swirling up from a cocktail glass. Pastor Bea pulled a big iron key out of her pocket and turned the lock. The door opened.