Read Online A Wolverine Is Eating My Leg by Tim Cahill - Free Book Online Page A

Foundation. As the highway rose, the homes and trailers dropped away, leaving only a few widely spaced roadhouses. If there was a fence around the place, I meant to find a weak spot. I assumed that I could escape overland, avoid the snakes, and come out at a designated point somewhere below.
    But there was no fence, and the Foundation looked exactly like what it was, a converted bar and nightclub once called the Wilson Cafe. The large parking lot held several buses, vans, and cars all painted red, white, and blue and clearly marked as belonging to the Tony and Susan Alamo Christian Foundation. One sign admonished readers to R EPENT OR P ERISH . There was a fire station nearby, and we pulled into the parking lot.
    Cardoso and I worked out a telephone code. If I called and said I was feeling “swell” somewhere in the conversation, I was in no danger. If I said I was “enjoying myself,” I wanted him up there immediately. If I didn’t call within three days, I wanted an all-out assault on the place by local sheriff’s deputies.
    We pulled out of the firehouse and coasted slowly by the Foundation. The hills were green this spring after a wet winter, but in a month they would be brown and bare and choking with dust. They were hills, Susan Alamo was to say later, very like the hills of Galilee, upon which Christ walked. And though she didn’t say—and surely didn’t think it—they were the very hills upon which Charles Manson had walked.
    F our-thirty, Good Friday afternoon. Hollywood Boulevard, two blocks up from Grauman’s Chinese Theater. I’m lounging in the entrance to a toy store, unshaven and looking, I hope, profoundly confused. Page is across the street in the VW, camera at the ready. Two brisk but seedy-looking Alamo-ites are coming my way, tracts in hand.
    My witness was an exceedingly short Christian named Chris who stared up at me with a pair of smarmy eyes that rippled and glittered wetly behind a pair of thick glasses. Did I know that Christ was coming again, that the world was about to end, and that vengeance belonged to the Lord, he said all in a rush.
    I considered the question in silence.
    Apparently encouraged, Chris explained that he wasn’t exactly sure when Christ would make an appearance here on the boulevard, but that it was the “Season of His Coming.”
    “I know that when the trees bloom summer can’t be far behind. Right?”
    “Right,” I said.
    “Well, the Bible gives us certain signs that indicate when Christ will come again.” According to the Bible and Chris, the end would be at hand when the armies of the world were massed around Jerusalem. I nodded. “The waters shall become bitter as wormwood,” Chris intoned, then added reasonably, “that’s pollution.” He paused to let this sink in, then hit me with what I suspect he felt was a boggler. “The Bible tells us that the Second Coming is near when the Jews preach the gospel and … 
the Alamos are Jewish
.”
    The evidence, I had to admit, was certainly piling up.
    I saw a pattern developing: fire a series of soul-rockers, then hit them where they live with a Clincher.
    “The Bible says that Christ is at hand when the cities are enclosed in a smoking haze.” Chris directed my attention to the whisky brown skies of Los Angeles. From the rapt andworshipful attention on his face, I think he half-expected Christ to descend from heaven, then and there, right through the smog in a blaze of glory, to smite the shit out of all the hustlers and the winos and the Godless shoppers of this choking Babylon.
    We talked about the greatest war the earth has known, a war that raged on even as we stood there, in which the Devil battled Christ for the possession of men’s souls. I stared into Chris’s eyes for fully thirty seconds in an effort to determine if he was trying, consciously or unconsciously, to hypnotize me. I think he felt menaced because he took a backward step and stared at the tracts in his hand for several