Excerpt from Matches in the Gas Tank

CHAPTER ONE: The Betrayer

Feast of Trumpets 1967

I fidgeted in the brown Samsonite chair.  I had no padding in my bony twelve-year-old body to cushion the hard metal surface.  The morning service had lasted two hours and twenty minutes.  After an hour-long lunch break, half of which was spent waiting in line to pay for and fill our plates at the church’s buffet lunch, we were back in the cavernous auditorium listening to a sermonette.

Mother sat in an aisle seat, her long skirt covering her legs, with a Bible open in her lap, taking notes in a steno pad.  Eight-year-old Steve was positioned between Mother and me, within pinching distance.  He was behaving at the moment, drawing cars in a Big Chief tablet with a fat pencil.  Dan, who was almost three, was asleep on a tattered quilt folded on the rough concrete under our feet.  Who knew where Dad was or what he was doing.

I clipped a ballpoint pen to my spiral notebook and laid them on the empty chair beside me.  My middle finger had a blister above the first knuckle, and it hurt to write.  Besides, I’d heard this stuff a hundred times. I didn’t need to write it down again.

I took in as much of the room as I could by moving only my eyes.  If I turned my head or body, a deacon might spank me for failing to pay attention.  There were no signs that this was a church.  No crosses.  No stained glass, altars, candles, or chalices.  Ministers didn’t wear religious vestments; the choir didn’t wear robes.  The only seating was row upon row of double-hinged folding chairs.  The air wasn’t fragrant with incense.  It smelled of East Texas sweat and dust and pine.

The building was prefabricated steel: a two-story rectangular box the size of a football field with a gabled roof.  Windows set high above the sight line provided filtered light.  The interior walls were wavy sheets of metal, mounting bolts exposed, sprayed with gray insulation. Industrial light fixtures hung from the beams. Solid-steel double doors were placed along the perimeter.  Large fans circulated the muggy air.

A young preaching elder was speaking on a stage containing a podium, a Steinway concert grand, choir risers, and enormous bouquets of pastel gladiolas.  God’s message boomed out from massive stereophonic speakers mounted on the walls.

"This is the first day of the month of Tishri.  We sound a trumpet, just as the Israelites sounded the shofar, to celebrate the time when Jesus Christ will return to fight the followers of Satan and establish the Kingdom of God."