Rescue

just kind of subconsciously wanting to come down to the sunshine, but the circular gave me a reason to do it, so I left my wife—we didn’t have much of anything going, tell you the truth, even without the S.A.D.—and I moved to Miami first, make some money after her lawyer took me for all of mine. After a month or so, I got to feeling better, but I didn’t know why, so I thought I should still check out the Church. I went down to Mercy Key with some cash in my pocket and started going to the tent meetings. By now, I was feeling better and better every day.“
    “But because of the sunshine, not the Church.“
    “Right, right. Also, I think, because the pace on Mercy was just a lot slower. But at the time, I didn’t know that the religion stuff wasn’t really the reason I was feeling better. Not until I started getting deeper into the Church and notic ing things.“
    “What kind of things?“
    A pair of women down the bar signaled for another found. To me, Olsen said, “Hold on a minute.“ He got their drinks, served them, and came back to me.
    I said, “You started noticing things?“
    “Yeah. Like the Church was taking in a lot of money. Hell, the tent meetings alone must have grossed thousands a night, and the TV and radio? Millions, I’m guessing. But I didn’t see where it was going.“
    “What do you mean?“
    “Well, you visit the Compound, and it’s just okay. I mean, everything’s new and all, but the features are kind of… spartan?“
    I thought that might have been one of Dawna’s words.
    Olsen said, “I worked construction back in Milwaukee when I wasn’t tending bar—got me into the sunlight in the good weather was probably why I liked it, but I didn’t know that then, of course. Anyway, I worked construction, and all the stuff in the Compound is bottom of the line. Faucets, light fixtures, even the structural things. And the food in the dining hall—Wyeth called that ‘the Table of the Lord’—was real sim ple and cheap. Even the infirmary was just like a first-aid station, not a real hospital.“
    “Why would they need a real hospital, though?“
    “I don’t know, except that Wyeth kept going on in his sermons about how we had to be ‘independent of the heathen secular world around us’—his way of saying it. We had to ‘resist the Devil’s temptations made through his minions,’ and so on. But in the Compound itself, you’d see things, and once I was over my own depression from the S.A.D., I was kind of able to look at the Church separate from what I thought it was doing for me, and I could see what it was starting to do to me.“
    “To you?“
    “Yeah. Like all of us in the Compound being expected to tithe twenty-five percent of our income to the Church.“
    “Twenty-five percent?“
    “And this from a lot of folks can barely pay their taxes as it is. Because you don’t really get to live in the Compound full-time. It’s more a place they bring you for—I don’t know, kind of a ‘booster shot’ of religion, like they used to give us as kids against polio?“
    “I remember.“
    “Well, that’s what it felt like. And I started noticing the other people around me, how they were acting.“
    “Which was?“
    “Artificial. Strange. Dawna saw it right off, soon as she was with me there on a visit. Like everybody’s being too polite because they’re afraid that if they’re not, they won’t fit in, and the Reverend’ll ask them to leave.“
    An old-timer at the end of the bar called for another draft. Olsen drew it, then came back to me, grinning.
    “Something strike you funny?“
    “Kind of. I was just thinking about the Reverend’s show.“
    “Television?“
    “No. The live kind, in the tent.“
    “I went to one of them.“
    “He still have everybody sing, ‘Jesus, the Cross I Bear’?“
    “The people in the white shirts, anyway.“
    A grunt. “First time I heard that, I didn’t have a hymnbook in front of me. I kept trying to figure out why they were singing about ‘Jesus, the Cross-eyed Bear.’ “
    I laughed. “You ever hear about something called the Center for the Study of Sin?“
    Another grunt. “The ‘Sinstitute’?“
    Having thought the same thing the first time I heard the phrase, I just looked at him.
    Mack said, “That’s supposed to be where a lot of the money’s being spent—the money the Church gets, I mean, from donations and so forth. But I got to tell you, I never saw anybody who looked like a scholar coming