Signs and Wonders

Signs and Wonders

a short story

Wesley Doyle

I am going to tell you how I helped rob a man of God, and I'm going to tell it to you from a kitchen table with good morning light on it and the woman I don't deserve cracking eggs into a skillet behind me, so you'll know before we start that it comes out all right. I've no patience, at my age, for the kind of story that keeps you wondering whether the crooked get to keep what they took. They don't. Not in this one. That's the whole reason it's worth the telling.

My name is Roy Sutter, and for the better part of my life I was a confidence man, which is a polite way of saying I made my living convincing decent people to hand me things they'd have been wiser to keep. I'm not proud of the years, but I'm not going to sit here and lie about them either, because the one honest thing a liar can do at the end is quit lying, and I've been practicing.

I want to be clear about the kind of man I was, so the rest lands right. I was not a good man who fell on hard times. I was a coward with quick hands and a warm voice, and I had learned young that the warm voice was the whole of the trade -- that people don't get taken by the smart, they get taken by the kind, or by what sounds like it. I worked alone. I liked working alone. A partner is a person who can testify.

Then I met Nadine Poole, and she took me before I got my hat off, and I have spent every year since trying to deserve the robbery.

* * *

She ran a game on me in a hotel bar in Tulsa that I will not describe in detail because I still can't think about it without admiring it, and when it was done and my wallet was lighter and I had figured out how, I did the only thing a man in my position could do with any dignity. I found her, and I bought her a drink, and I said, "I don't want it back. I want to know how you did the thing with the ring." And she looked at me a long moment, the way you'd look at a dog to see if it bites, and then she laughed, and that was the beginning of the best and only true thing in my crooked life.

We worked together after that. I'll spare you the catalogue. We were good, and we were careful, and we had one rule between us that I'd never had before, which was Nadine's rule, and it was this: we only took from people who had it coming. Cheats. Bullies. Men who'd already robbed somebody weaker and called it business. Nadine said a con run on a good person is just cruelty with a script, but a con run on a wolf is the closest thing our kind gets to grace. I thought it was sentiment, at first. I came to understand it was the only thing keeping either of us human, and that she'd worked it out long before I came along, alone, the hard way.

And the reason she'd worked it out -- the reason there was a Nadine Poole who took strangers' wallets in hotel bars at all -- was a man named Reverend Asa Godbold.

* * *

You've seen his kind, or his kind's grandchildren. Godbold ran a healing crusade up and down through the dust country in a caravan of white trucks, a tent the size of a circus, a choir, and a voice that could make a widow believe the mortgage was a test of faith. He healed the lame and the blind and the cancer-ridden, on a stage, under lights, for a love offering -- and the love offering was the whole machine. Seed money, he called it. You planted a seed into the ministry, the bigger the better, and God returned it thirtyfold, and if He didn't, well, that was the seed you'd failed to plant in faith, wasn't it, and here was the bucket coming round again.

The healings were real in the way a card trick is real. He had a man ahead of the crusade, a fellow with a clipboard who'd work the prayer line an hour before the show and collect the names and the ailments and the room numbers, and Godbold wore a little flesh-colored earpiece under all that anointed hair, and the Holy Spirit that called out "a woman named Alma, with a trouble in her spine, who's come a long way tonight" was a radio.

Alma was Nadine's mother.

She'd had cancer in the spine, and she'd had eleven hundred dollars, which was everything, the sum total of a life of piecework and thrift, and Godbold's crusade came through the county the spring she was dying, and she gave him the eleven hundred as a seed, because he'd stood her up out of her chair on that stage and she'd walked six steps in front of the whole town on legs that hadn't held her in a year -- six steps, on adrenaline and stage lights and the most powerful drug the Reverend sold, which was hope -- and then she'd gone home and planted her seed and waited for God to return it thirtyfold and heal her, and instead she'd died in a county bed nine weeks later, still certain it was her own faith that had come up short.

Nadine was nineteen. She'd begged her mother not to give the money. She'd sat in the back of that tent and watched a radio in a fat man's ear turn her mother's death into a testimony, and she had walked out of there and never once in the years since had a straight job or a full night's sleep, and I want you to understand that when Nadine said we only take from wolves, she was not talking philosophy. She was talking about one wolf. She'd been hunting him her whole life. She just hadn't been big enough yet.

By the time she told me all this we'd been together three years, and we were big enough.

* * *

I won't give you every wire of the machine we built, partly because some of it I'm still fond of and partly because the statute of limitations is a thing I respect the way a sailor respects weather. But the shape of it was this.

A wolf like Godbold can only be robbed through the one door he never guards, which is his greed, and greed's a lock that opens from the inside. So we did not try to steal from Reverend Asa Godbold. We arranged for Reverend Asa Godbold to try very hard to steal from us, in front of witnesses, with his own hand and his own voice, and then we simply held still what he did.

Nadine became a widow. Not a poor one this time -- a rich one, Mrs. Vandaveer, old oil money out of Bartlesville, dying by inches of a wasting illness, terrified, and looking, as the rich and frightened will, for a miracle at any price. I became her driver and her late husband's cousin and the sole heir who stood to lose a fortune if the old lady gave it all to a preacher, which made me exactly the obstacle Godbold would expect and exactly the man he'd want to get around. We let his advance man find us. We let the clipboard fellow overhear, at a diner, that Mrs. Vandaveer was prepared to plant a seed of two hundred thousand dollars into whatever ministry could stand her up out of her chair -- and that her tightfisted cousin was fighting her on it tooth and nail.

Two hundred thousand dollars will bring a wolf ninety miles in the rain.

He came to the hotel himself, which we'd hoped for but not counted on -- that was greed doing our work for us -- and he sat in that suite and held Nadine's frail ringed hands in his two soft ones and prayed over her with tears standing in his eyes, real tears, he could cry on a dime, it was a gift. And I played the cousin, and I argued, and I let him beat me, because a wolf needs to feel he's outsmarted somebody or he won't believe the meat is real. By the end of the hour he had "prayed through" to a private healing service -- just the Reverend, Mrs. Vandaveer, her cousin, and God, no crowd, no cameras, the seed to be planted by cashier's check the moment the old woman rose from her chair.

He thought he'd arranged a quiet fleecing of a dying woman with no witnesses.

He'd arranged to be alone in a room with us. Which is a different thing.

* * *

The service was set for a Sunday night. And on the Saturday night before it, in a rented room with the swamp cooler ticking in the window, Nadine took off the widow's gray wig and the widow's careful face and became herself again, and turned around, and looked at me in a way she hadn't in the weeks we'd spent being other people, and I understood we were about to stop working.

"Tomorrow I bury him," she said. "Or he buries me. I've waited nineteen years to find out which." She was quiet a moment. "I don't want to spend tonight being Mrs. Vandaveer. I've been somebody else so long, Roy. I want to be Nadine in front of somebody, just once, before the biggest night of my life. I want you to see the girl who sat in the back of that tent. She's still in here. I'm tired of nobody ever seeing her."

I have been asked for things in hotel rooms before. I had never once been asked for that.

I told her I'd been seeing her since Tulsa. I told her I'd seen her the whole time, under every wig, and that Mrs. Vandaveer had never fooled me for a second because I knew the girl running the con behind the old woman's eyes and I'd been in love with her for three years and hadn't said so because a partner is a person who can leave you, and I'd been too much a coward to hand her the wire that could pull me apart.

She crossed the room and put her hand flat on my chest, over the coward's heart, and she said, "Say it now, then. Be a fool once. I'll catch you."

So I said it. And then there wasn't any more need for saying.

She undressed by the lamp, and she did it slow, and she watched my face the whole while she did it, and I understood she was doing the very thing she meant to make Godbold's tent do the next night -- standing bare in front of somebody and daring the look to be cruel. It wasn't cruel. I looked at her the way I look at the one thing I'd run into a fire for -- the lamp-gold along her collarbone, the small scar on her hip she'd never explained and didn't have to, the whole warm truth of her after all the paint -- and whatever she saw come into my face was the thing she'd been checking for, because the steel went out of her shoulders and something better came into them.

"There she is," I said. "There's Nadine."

"You looked kind," she said, wondering at it, like a woman testing ice that held. "You went and looked kind."

I put my mouth where my eyes had been, and she made a sound like a rope going slack after too long a strain, and her hands came up into my hair. We got me out of my clothes between us, clumsy, laughing once when my belt fought me, and she pressed her palm to a scar on my side I don't explain to folks and didn't have to explain to her, and bent, and set her mouth to it, and I near came apart at that alone -- a grown con man, forty-some years old, undone by tenderness set on an old hurt, which no mark had ever shown me and which I had spent a lifetime making sure nobody got close enough to.

She was not shy and she was not in a hurry, and so I wasn't either. I took my time with her, my hands and then my mouth lower, until she had a fist knotted in the sheet and no name in her mouth but mine, said soft and then not soft at all. And when she drew me up and guided me into her she took my face in both her hands and made me look at her while we moved -- the very thing she'd make that room full of a preacher's lies do the next night, only this was for me alone, her eyes open and wet and holding mine the whole way through. I had spent a long string of years making certain no one looked too close at Roy Sutter. She looked the entire way in, and did not flinch from the view, and that undid me more than the pleasure did, and the pleasure was considerable. When it took us it took us near enough together that we laughed about it after, breathless, forehead to forehead in the lamplight, two liars who had finally, with each other, run clean out of anything to lie about.

She lay with her head on the arm that had done a lot of things I regret, and she said into the dark, "Whatever happens tomorrow. You saw me. Somebody saw the girl from the back of the tent and what came into his face was tender." She was quiet. "I can walk into that room on that. I can walk into anything on that."

I did not sleep. I lay there and held her and did the one kind of praying I'd have any right to, which was not a prayer to be spared anything, only to be steady. Let my hands be quick tomorrow and my voice be warm one last time in a good cause. Let me hold still what that man does. Let it be enough.

* * *

I'll give you the end quick, because the best part already happened in that lamplit room and everything after was just plumbing.

Godbold came to the Sunday service fat with anticipation, and he brought his advance man to run the earpiece, and he did his whole show for an audience of three -- the wasting widow, the beaten cousin, and God. He stood Nadine up out of her chair. She'd promised him she'd feel the healing, and she was the finest actress I ever saw, so she rose, and she took her six steps, and she wept, and Godbold wept, and he had the cashier's check in his soft hand before her sixth step landed.

What he did not know was that the advance man feeding him Mrs. Vandaveer's private medical particulars through that earpiece had been ours for a week, bought for less than you'd think, because even a wolf's own men get tired of the smell of him. What he did not know was that the hotel's Sunday-night manager, a decent tired woman whose own mother Godbold had seeded down to nothing two towns back, was standing with three sheriff's deputies and a newspaperman in the connecting room, listening to every word of the Reverend Asa Godbold coaching a dying woman on exactly how to fake her own miracle so he could bank her fortune -- because a man who's sure he's alone with his meat will say the truest things he owns.

We didn't take his money, in the end. That was Nadine's call, and it was the right one, and it's why I can tell you this from a clean kitchen. Taking his money would've made us the story. Instead we held still what he was, and let the law and the newspaper have it, and let the eleven-hundred-dollar Almas of four counties read over their coffee exactly what had been done to them and by whom, in his own recorded voice. The crusade folded inside a month. The white trucks went to auction. Godbold himself drew a sentence for fraud that I'm told he is still, at this writing, serving, and I hope the Lord he sold visits him there, because I'd like Him to get a good look.

Nadine took one thing out of that room, and one only. On the table where he'd laid it to pray over it theatrically was Godbold's own ledger -- the seed book, the record in his own hand of every desperate soul he'd bled and how much, going back years. She took it. Not for evidence; the recording did that. She took it because eleven hundred dollars of it was written there in his hand next to the name Alma Poole, and she wanted the one page, and she burned the rest so no lawyer could ever turn it into anything but what it was, which was a list of the robbed. She kept Alma's page. It's framed in the front room. Alongside it is the only photograph that exists of the two of us, taken by that same tired hotel manager the morning after it all came down, on the courthouse steps, both of us squinting and grinning like fools who've gotten clean away with something, which we had. We'd gotten away with being seen.

We quit the life the same week. You can't run a con on a stranger once you know what it's like to be looked at all the way in; the trade loses its flavor, and anyway I'd found the one mark I wanted to spend the rest of my hands on, and she'd caught me when I fell, exactly as promised.

She's set the eggs down in front of me now and she's reading me the part of the paper she thinks I'll like, and the light's good on Alma's framed page, and forty years on I still go quiet and grateful when I hear her voice come into a room.

That's the whole of it. The wolf lost. The girl from the back of the tent got seen, and got even, and got loved, and not one of those three in the order she'd have guessed.

I told you it comes out all right.

The End