The Last Good Guy

36

The next morning I decided to have another look at Pastor Reggie Atlas and headed to the Cathedral by the Sea.

Melinda, Frank, and I walked across the parking lot toward the church. We were on the early side because the Four Wheels for Jesus website had warned of an overflow ten a.m. service. Three golf-shirt-and-chino-clad SNR men stood outside the entrance, feet wide, hands folded in front of them, wraparound shades in place even though the morning was cloudy.

Up ahead of us was a young black couple. I saw that they drew the attention of the SNR men, who had three oddly similar expressions on their three oddly similar faces. The couple slowed and the woman whispered something to the man and they stepped away to let us pass. I caught the expression on the woman’s face as we went by — uncertainty and resolve. Then brief words rippling among the SNR men, impossible to hear from this distance, but I could sense that the words concerned the couple.

When I turned a moment later, the man and woman were heading back toward their car with some purpose, the man’s arm light on the woman’s arm, her back straight and her head high.

“I just hate that so much,” said Melinda.

A chuckle from the security men as we passed by.

As Reggie Atlas took the stage, a bar of morning sun broke through the coastal clouds and streamed through the cathedral glass. I sensed subterfuge in this but couldn’t imagine how Reggie could manipulate sunlight. A countrified rock band played an intro, some good pedal steel guitar. Reggie stopped halfway to the pulpit, raised his arms to the crowd, smiled The Smile. His usual wardrobe: white shirt, open-collared and long-sleeved, pressed jeans, white athletic shoes. His blond mop was purposefully styled.

Melinda — the healing, less garrulous Melinda — sat on one side of me, writing in a small leather-bound notebook that she had begun to carry. She was still running insane distances throughout the hills and valleys beyond my house, but she was looking up and behind her far less than she had before her confession a few evenings earlier. I respected the terror in her soul and the energy with which she tried to fight it. As I respected all the thousands of people caught in the same storm of bullets that night. How were they managing their fear? What about the ones who didn’t have Melinda’s willpower and gumption?

To my left sat Frank, enjoying his morning off. He had just added a regular Sunday-afternoon account, which meant a six-and-a-half-day workweek. On our drive to the cathedral, he had told Melinda and me that one of his sisters back in El Salvador had told him to watch out for an old friend of his — Angel Batista — who was rumored to be in the San Diego area. Frank explained that Angel was never a friend. He was a scrawny ratón who had turned into an MS-13 soldier and went by the nickname El Diabolico. Frank’s sisters feared him and his friends, and if Angel was in the San Diego area Frank hoped he wouldn’t show up in Fallbrook. For Angel’s sake, he said. Frank had no fear of him at all that I could see.

Off to one side stood a large screen devoted to Pastor Atlas. He was gigantic but detailed. In spite of this, many of the worshipers around us were tuned in to fourwheelsforjesus.com on their smartphones. I did likewise, watching the live-stream Reggie on the small screen doing everything that the actual Reggie was doing, just in a jerkier, slightly delayed kind of pantomime. I turned the thing off and put it in my pocket.

As before, Atlas welcomed his “family,” asked that we all hold the hands of the people next to us and close our eyes for prayer. He praised Jesus our Lord, and gave thanks for the life and love around us. He mentioned several people by name who were in need of special prayers this morning due to illness and accidents.

After Amen, he asked each of us to stand and introduce ourselves to anyone nearby we didn’t know. “None of us are strangers,” he said. “Remember who the disciples met on the road to Emmaus.” I met Dane and Tina, Sophie, Jim and Linda. After we had sat back down, Reggie reported that this past week the Onward Soldiers Fund had donated well over $2,300 to U.S. military deployed worldwide, the most in any week since the Cathedral by the Sea had opened.

Today’s sermon was “Jesus Is Action,” which Atlas began with a story of a revelation he had at the age of seven. He had been out in his tiny backyard, playing with his puppy, Sparky. Reggie saw that the puppy was happy but only interested in his chew toy. Reggie started wondering what made Christians different from any other religion if all they did was go to church on Sundays, sing some songs and pray some prayers, dropped a few dollars into the offering plate, but never did anything to make the world a better place.

“If all they were interested in were their toys? And I decided as a seven-year-old that being a Christian is not what you say but what you do. What. You. Do. And what does a seven-year-old Christian with a puppy do? I vowed to find a home for every dog and cat in the Creek Valley Animal Shelter in town!”

Melinda looked at me and smiled, then wrote something in her notebook. Frank sat up straight, hands folded, sleepy-eyed.

So did I. Drifted off a little, as I always do in church. Every once in a while my parents took us kids to a service. Usually Easter Sunday, Christmas Eve, or Memorial Day. A different church each time. Mom was especially suspicious of churches getting their hooks into you, telling you what to believe, with whom you should congregate, and charging you for the advice. Dad always sat with his eyes closed, fragrant with aftershave. A good suit and shoes. I realized I had just shaved for church, too, and put on a suit and shoes I’d had for years but that still looked new.

Reggie humorously recalled taking the dogs from the animal shelter one at a time, walking each on a leash, and pulling a wagon filled with cans of dog food and donated used dog leashes behind him, door-to-door, neighborhood-to-neighborhood, until he talked someone into taking the animal, a few free cans of food, and a complimentary used leash.

As before, Atlas was self-deprecating and self-amused, and it was easy to picture him forty-plus years ago, hustling his shelter rescues door-to-door. I tried my best to reconcile that seven-year-old boy with the staggering evil that Penelope saw in him. It was hard to age the puppy savior into the child rapist he had allegedly become.

It was also hard to believe that sweet, daft, smart, and lovely Penelope Rideout was a chronic liar, or worse.

I let my church-drowsy mind wander from one questionable Penelope Rideout story to the next, like a dinghy drifting from one island to another. From her Navy Top Gun nonhusband to her faked family pictures to her vaguely referenced jobs to her ceaseless moving from one city to the next across the continent to her half a lifetime of telling her own daughter she was her sister.

And I wondered again exactly where her accounts of the pastor’s seduction and rape landed on the cold, hard scale of truth.

As I tried to assign answers to these mysteries, Reggie Atlas continued with his theme that Christians don’t just talk, they do. Jesus in action. Jesus is action.

I remembered Penelope’s words:

Over the next month, young Reggie had rescued eight of twenty-one dogs, three of nine cats. His takeaway from this was: Plans sometimes don’t come all the way true, but don’t let perfection become the enemy of action. What if Jesus had cursed the loaves and fishes as not enough, the water into wine as insufficient? I liked that idea. Melinda slashed a big exclamation point on a blank page of her notebook and showed it to me.

We left the cathedral a few minutes later, under a humid blue sky and white thunderheads rising in the south.