| ZYGOTE IN MY COFFEE.COM |
| ***BIO*** Savannah Schroll Guz is author of The Famous and The Anonymous (2004) and editor of Consumed: Women on Excess (2005). She's currently at work on a novel, from which this excerpt comes. Find more of her world at www.myspace.com/savannahschrollguz. |
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| © 2008 zygoteinmycoffee Ink. |
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| Patent Leather Sidewalk Evangelist |
| by Savannah Schroll Guz |
| It was after five when David got off the bus along K Street. He figured he would walk the rest of the way home. It wasn't far.
Even before both feet hit the pavement, he heard a voice issuing from a megaphone: “James, Chapter 5, versus 1-5 says weep and wail, rich man and rich woman, over the miserable fate descending upon you...oh yes. You have fattened yourselves for a day of slaughter. Here on earth! Oh yes. There will be redemption, my children. Redemption for the righteous from all of mankind’s rapacious evils.” The voice, David saw, came from a thin black man standing on the corner of Mount Vernon Square. He was dressed in a brown suit with caramel colored pin stripes. From his breast pocket bloomed a blue silken handkerchief. And on his head, was a matching brown fedora with a wide, caramel colored grosgrain band. He was waving an impractically long index finger in the air. Around him, on the square’s wooden and concrete benches, were half a dozen homeless people, most of them dozing. A panhandler stood at one corner, hoping to receive monetary runoff from the passersby who might be shamed by the evangelist’s words. The black man continued, now shaking his fist and slowly building to a kind of singing vocalization. He even added his own emphatic responses. "…because Jesus said we should struggle—struggle!—to enter the Kingdom through the narrow door. Oh yes. He said that the road to hell is wide. It has ample—oh yes!—ample room and most people, they go that way. But the door of the righteous is small and, I tell you, children, the path is rocky and narrow. You know—oh yes, you know—only a few find it. Few will find their way into the true Heaven.” The man turned his body to follow the movements of an obese woman, who was passing near his make-shift pulpit, “You, sister, must practice temperance. Temperance will get you through the narrow door that leads to the Kingdom of Heaven! There’s still time. Yes there is! Relinquish your desire for worldly things! Oh yes! Reject gluttony and renounce hedonism!” The woman passed by without acknowledging him. But before he turned back to continue his sermon, he caught sight of the panhandler collecting change not 300 yards behind him. He turned his megaphone in the panhandler's direction. “What are you doing, son? Are you collecting for personal gain off the words and the wisdom of Jesus Christ?” The panhandler ignored him, and continued to shake his ball cap. The sign in front of him said, “bad back trouble. Cant work. PLease. $$ for food.” The preacher turned off his megaphone, and set it atop his amplifier and walked down the sidewalk towards the panhandler. His rich dark brown patent leather shoes gleamed as he moved. “I said listen, boy, and you ain’t stopped. Are you trying to make money off the words of Jesus?” Still the man did not answer, but he looked at the black man and grinned, showing that he was missing three of his front incisors. The black man grabbed the cap and wrenched it away from the panhandler. Coins jumped and scattered. The preacher saw there were bills in the cap, but nothing larger than one dollar denominations. “Where’s the rest of it?” The man shook his head, put down his sign, and got on his knees to pick up the scattered coins. “I said, where’s the rest of it? You got more than this pitiful haul. I know you did!” When the man didn’t respond, the preacher got closer to him, bending at the waist. “I said you got to give back to the church what you taken from it.” The black man raised his finger heavenward. “It is from the bounty of the Lord Almighty that you’ve stolen! Taking wealth in Jesus’ name. It is a sin! A sin to seek the surfeit of other guilty sinners.” The preacher wadded up the dollar bills that had been inside the cap and stuck them in the breast pocket of his jacket, behind the blue silken handkerchief. He watched the man scuttle after far flung coins. The panhandler crawled towards K Street to snatch back quarters that had rolled towards the storm drain. And the preacher, close behind him, also moved forward. Within seconds, the panhandler was in the street, his torso caught under the front tire of a passing bus. The preacher stood silent, staring. He looked across the street and made eye contact with David, who stared back at him. Silence momentarily settled on the block before the bus driver, a woman, came bounding out of the bus shouting, crying and pulling at the beads in her hair. David saw office workers come to their windows on the upper floors of adjacent buildings. As people realized what had happened, as they turned to see the remnants of the man on the asphalt, two women screamed, one right after the other. Cell phones went to ears, others were irreligiously held aloft to capture the image. The police came shortly afterward, their sirens slicing through every human expression of grief, shock, and upset. “You,” said a cop, looking in David’s direction. “You see anything?” David shook his head, “No. I didn’t see anything at all.” The officer gazed at him for a second, and then moved on to another wide-eyed onlooker, who began talking so rapidly that the paramedics had to fit her with an oxygen mask before she could give her statement. David saw the black man talking to a policeman. He was also shaking his head, but slowly, his fedora moving back and forth in an expression of noble resignation, “…but I suppose that’s what happens when a man tries to gain monetary profit from the Lord’s word.” David, who stood in the same place as the first time he had made eye contact with the preacher, saw the black man glance at him again. He smiled at David, a smile that bore a period not a question mark. So David moved away, up the street, and he continued to follow the bus route. And no one stopped him. |
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| Feb. 2008 |
| 102 |