The Supremes at Earl's All-You-Can-Eat

Chapter 28





Each spring, Calvary Baptist Church held a tent revival. It was a tradition that Richmond’s father started during his years as

the pastor of the church, and it continued after he moved on. The revival was famous in Baptist circles throughout the Midwest. It

attracted a huge crowd of the faithful every year and provided a boost to the church coffers during the long drought between

Easter and Christmas. Clarice couldn’t remember a year of her life that she didn’t attend.

The revival always began on a Friday night with the raising of the tent. A makeshift stage was set up for the choir. Hundreds of

folding chairs—ancient, splintering, torturously uncomfortable things Clarice believed had been designed to remind the

congregation of the suffering of Christ—were brought in. Then there was a prayer service to get everyone worked up for the

thirty-six straight hours of preaching, singing, and soul-saving that would follow. The revival culminated in a mile-long

procession from the tent site on the edge of town back to Calvary.

Richmond’s status as both a church deacon and the son of the revival’s founder guaranteed that he and Clarice always had good

seats. On opening night that year they sat in the front row. Richmond was in a snit that day over Clarice’s continued refusal to

come back home, so Clarice sat between Odette and Barbara Jean and gave James the honor of sitting next to Richmond. The

arrangement had the effect of further worsening Richmond’s mood. He sat with his lower lip poked out and only looked in Clarice’

s direction to scowl at her.

Clarice still saw plenty of Richmond now that she had moved out. He stopped by the house in Leaning Tree a few times a week.

“Where’s my orange tie?” “How does the oven timer work?” “Where do I take the dry cleaning?” He always seemed to need

something.

If he was on good behavior—not too whiny or argumentative—Clarice would invite him in. Richmond was good company. And she loved

him. She had never loved any man except Richmond. Well, there was also Beethoven, but he didn’t really count. The problem was,

just as soon as Clarice started to think about Richmond’s good points—how charming he could be, how he made her laugh—he would

switch into seduction mode. His midnight eyes would flicker on and his voice would take on a quality that made her imagine that

she smelled brandy and felt the heat of a roaring wood fire.

But whenever Clarice thought about having Richmond stay the night—a pleasurable thought—an image came into her mind that made

her push him out of the door. It was that picture in her head of James trying, and failing, to style Odette’s hair. That image

just wouldn’t allow her to step back into the life she had lived for so many years.

It was nearly midnight that first night of the revival and Reverend Peterson was wrapping up his sermon. Reverend Peterson always

spoke first on opening night before handing off the podium to visiting preachers. His sermon that night was a good one. He told

the terrifying story of the Great Flood from the perspective of one of Noah’s nonbelieving neighbors. The speech climaxed with a

vivid description of the doomed neighbor, knee-deep in swirling, filthy water, banging on the side of the ark and begging Noah to

let him in. Reverend Peterson added color to the story by imitating the squawks, neighs, and moos of the animals. Of course, Noah

could do nothing but wave goodbye to the terrified sinner as he sailed away with the righteous and the noisy animals.

The Noah’s Ark sermon was typical of the Calvary Baptist experience. It was not a gray-area kind of church. Every Sunday, church

members sat and listened to their pastor as he gave them the latest message from an angry God. They left the sanctuary certain

that Calvary Baptist and Reverend Peterson were the only things standing between them and an eternity of suffering in hell.

Calvary’s parishioners fully expected that, like Noah, they would be waving goodbye to everyone in Plainview who didn’t go to

Calvary Baptist when Jesus shipped them all off to join Him.

When Reverend Peterson finished, the crowd was in an uproar of shouting, amen-ing, and speaking in tongues. The church nurses, in

their starched white uniforms and white gloves, rushed through the tent to tend to women who had collapsed with the Holy Ghost.

In spite of the barn-busting sermon Reverend Peterson delivered that night, Clarice surprised herself by thinking that maybe it

was time she left some of this bad news and rage behind. Sitting there listening to the angriest choir in town as they spat out “

It’s Gonna Rain,” she thought that maybe she should branch out and give something else a try.

Having ended his sermon, Reverend Peterson made a plea to the unrepentant sinners in the crowd to come forward and receive the

Lord’s blessing before it was too late. He walked back and forth in front of the wailing choir and warned, “It won’t be water,

but fire, the next time.” As he returned to his lectern to introduce the next speaker, there was a commotion in the back of the

tent.

A woman’s voice shouted, “Let me testify! Let me testify!”

Clarice and everyone else in the front row turned around to look, but there were too many people standing and gawking for them to

see all the way to the back. The tent grew quieter and a wave of soft murmuring spread slowly from the rear to the front as the

woman moved up the center aisle toward Reverend Peterson.

She was young—around twenty-five, Clarice guessed. The woman’s gravity-defying cleavage hovered above a neon-green tube top that

was just wide enough that it wasn’t illegal. Below her exposed navel, she wore tight-fitting vermillion shorts that were so

revealing Clarice imagined the woman had borrowed them from an emaciated eleven-year-old. The tube top and the shorts she wore

were both made of shiny, wet-looking latex. With each step she took, the movement of latex abrading latex caused a high-pitched

squeaking noise to pierce the air. Her hair was pulled back from her face into a fall of glossy black ringlets that hung down to

the middle of her back.

Clarice leaned close to Barbara Jean and whispered, “Hair weave.”

She replied, “Implants.”

The woman staggered and stumbled up toward the stage and Reverend Peterson. His bushy, silver eyebrows climbed a little closer to

his receding hairline with every step she took in his direction. Clarice wasn’t sure if the woman’s staggering was due to her

being drunk or due to the fact that she was only wearing one shoe and had a thick layer of mud up to each ankle.

When she reached the lectern, the woman snatched the microphone away from an astonished Reverend Peterson. “I just had a miracle

happen and I need to testify.” She yelled her words into the microphone and feedback from the sound system caused everyone to

clamp their hands to their ears. “Just a little while ago, after my shift at the Pink Slipper Gentlemen’s Club, I was doin’ a

private performance out in the parking lot in the back of a Chevy Suburban when I heard a voice. Clear as a bell the voice said,

‘You are a child of God.’

“Now, at first I just ignored it ’cause I thought it was my customer. He’s one of my regulars and he carries on like that—

always God this, Jesus that, Sweet Lord the other.”

Reverend Peterson’s face registered panic and he made a grab for the microphone. But the stripper was faster. She hopped away

from him and continued her testimony.

“The voice said, ‘You are a child of God. Stop what you’re doing.’

“I still thought it was my customer, so I got up off the floor of the Chevy and said, ‘Fine. I don’t gotta keep doin’ what I’

m doin’? Just give me my damn money and I’ll go home.’

“But then, I heard the voice again. This time it said, ‘Your sinful ways will bring a storm of hellfire down upon you. Come to

the Lord and you will be saved.’

“I knew then that it wasn’t my customer at all. It was an angel sent from heaven to tell me to change my life. So I got out of

that SUV and I followed a light I saw off in the distance. I crossed Highway 37 and went through a patch of trees, even lost a

shoe walkin’ across a muddy field. But I kept goin’ until I found this here tent. Now I’m here and ready to give up my sinful

ways like that angel’s voice told me to. If that ain’t a miracle, I don’t know what is.”

The crowd erupted in praise of the stripper’s miracle. People shouted, “Amen!” and the choir started to sing out twice as loud

as they had before.

Encouraged by the response of her audience, the stripper went on with her testimony. “The second I walked into this tent,

somethin’ changed inside my heart. All of a sudden, I started to think about all the fine things God had done for me. I started

to think maybe He seen me safely through all the dangerous, sinful things I did for a reason.

“And believe me, there’s a lot of scary stuff out there. Hell, you go out for one night’s work and you could end up with the

herpes, the AIDS, the syphilis, the Chinese chicken flu, or the Ebola virus.” She poked long, crimson nails into the air as she

used her fingers to count off the diseases.

Reverend Peterson made another attempt to snatch the microphone away from the young woman, but again she was quicker. Like the

performer she was, she gave her audience more of what they wanted. She said, “And I tell you, the way some of these men are, they

don’t care about protectin’ themselves, you, or their wives and families. They only care about their own pleasure. They wanna

act like it’s thirty years ago, before shit got so serious. I’m tellin’ you, you gotta be a safety-first kinda gal if you wanna

live long. You know what I do when some a*shole tries to talk me into doin’ something stupid? I look him dead in the eye and say,

‘Honey, you think we’re gonna f*ck ourselves right back to 1978? This is some magical p-ssy all right, but it ain’t no damn

time machine.’ ”

On that note, several people moved in to restrain her, allowing Reverend Peterson, at last, to retrieve his microphone. The

stripper was promptly helped off the stage by one of the church nurses and two representatives of the New Members Committee. As

she was led past Clarice, Richmond, and their friends, the woman stopped for a second, turned toward Richmond, and said, “Hey,

Richmond, you getting’ saved, too, baby?” before stumbling away with her keepers.

Everyone near the front of the tent, except for Richmond, who had buried his face in his hands, turned to stare at Clarice to see

how she would react to the newly saved stripper greeting her husband like an old friend. But Clarice had something else on her

mind. She was thinking about the miraculous voice that had summoned the stripper from the back of the Chevy behind the Pink

Slipper Gentlemen’s Club with the all-too-familiar words, “You are a child of God. Stop what you’re doing.” Clarice wondered

how long her mother and her bullhorn had been back in town.