Mean Woman Blues

neither with much money, none with any love of the police. He’d stocked it with canned goods, so he didn’t have to go out much, but the place was disgusting. After a few days he got on the road, figuring as long as he didn’t get stopped, he was safe.
    He needed to stay in the South, because that way he’d mend better, and he needed to stay in fairly big towns so he wouldn’t stick out. The Redneck Riviera ought to be about perfect; everyone looked the same and talked the same, and no one cared what anyone else was up to; they were too busy falling all over each other trying to make their money disappear.
    So he headed for the Mississippi Gulf Coast where he found any number of losers hanging out in casinos and bars, two of his least favorite kinds of places, yet better cover for it. These were people who needed help, people to whom the Reverend Errol Jacomine could have given direction and purpose. People whose money he could have saved— his followers didn’t gamble because it was forbidden, and it was forbidden because it wasn’t smart. Jacomine was known as Daddy, and it wasn’t for nothing. Daddy didn’t let people throw away their lives and their money. That was for suckers, and that was what most people were. They needed to be taken care of, and Daddy was a natural-born caretaker. You just treated them like children, that was all: set boundaries and didn’t let them cross. They toed the line, or they got punished. If they did right, they got rewarded.
    But he needed a bigger canvas to get his message across. It wasn’t any big unusual thing, just that God was love and people who did right and followed His laws would be saved. Everybody knew that anyway.
    The thing about Daddy was, he had a unique talent for saving them. It was like— he didn’t say it much, only to his very closest associates— but it was like he was the one who’d been sent by God to get everybody saved. He felt the power; he knew that was his mission. Not just everybody for a few miles around. Everybody in the world.
    Things at the start of the millennium were not going so well, and all of a sudden nuclear weapons were in the news again. Somebody had to do something. In his heart of hearts, Daddy knew the somebody was he; he just wasn’t sure yet what the something was. But he did know that, in this period before he could call Rosemarie, while he was lying low and pretending to be a loser, he would be given a sign and he would know what to do. And then he would find Rosemarie, and she would help him do it.
    For the moment, he just wished he could get these dumb fucks to quit gambling their lives away. It made him sick to see corporate gangsters taking these poor people’s money this way. He read up on gambling, so he knew just how much the odds were stacked in favor of the house, and now and then he’d tell somebody but never in a casino and never if it wasn’t a pretty loose situation.
    Nobody cared. Nobody was interested. But he knew it was all a matter of the way you put it. When the Lord was in him, Daddy could convince a cat it was a dog. He couldn’t wait to get back to his calling.
    During those grim and gray days, Daddy watched a lot of television. It was a good alternative to throwing his money away, and the more he sat in his room out of sight, the less chance he had of being recognized.
    The Lord spoke to him while he was watching television, though not in one single blinding-white moment. The message came gradually and surely, the way an idea starts from a germ and refines itself. But since Daddy had prayed for a message and since God often spoke to him, he was able to recognize the divinity of this one almost as soon as it was given to him. What he had prayed for was divine guidance regarding God’s future plans for him.
    Daddy had never thought highly of televangelists, finding them rather slick and transparent, but he tuned in from time to time because he felt it was part of his job to keep up with the competition. One Sunday morning, as he was watching one of his least favorites, the kind of thought came to him that for various reasons made him uncomfortable:
This guy is an amateur. I’m a million times better than this guy.
    Having had the thought he almost immediately forgot about the preacher and went into a reverie about envy and the Biblical prohibition against it. It occurred to him that when you had a thought like that, even if it happened to be true, other people at the very least would take