Coffee and Sugar - C. Sean McGee (mystery books to read .TXT) 📗

just stuff that you see, is it? It’s the truth. You see the truth in people and you show it to them. I’ve been asking around. There’s a lot of people talking about you, about what you do. They’re calling you a witch” said The 13 Apostle in an indicting manner with his words ejected short and sharp like a pointing finger.

“I’m not a witch” said Joao, “it’s just coffee” he said desperate as he had to The Nervous Lady, unsure why people were reacting as they were. “Why can’t people just see that? It’s just coffee.”

“That’s not entirely true now is it? I’ve had your coffee and it’s not just coffee, in fact, it’s not like anything else. It doesn’t taste like any coffee I’ve had before and trust me, I’ve tried everything” he said with a lizard’s lick of his tongue.

“I swear, I’m not a witch. I’m just me. Am I in trouble?” he asked worried.

“No Joao, you are not and I don’t think you’re a witch. I don’t believe in witches or fairies or wizards or goblins but I do believe in the light of our lord and I believe that he’s shining his light through you and I believe that we need to point that light onto the right stage” said The 13th Apostle.

“You want me to make you a coffee?”

“Me? No, not just me. My congregation. The city. The world” said The Apostle, lifting himself; like an inspiring emperor to a spiring stance as his chest heaved and his arms stretched out wide with his palms curled and rising upwards as if some great invisible weight were being held in his hands and kept from crushing the world below and he didn’t speak his words, he expulsed them out as the heavens would a thunder bolt or a mother would, her new born child.

“I don’t know if I can” said Joao.

“Of course you can my boy. Jesus chose you for a reason. Those people on the hill, the one’s that cannot be saved, the one’s that cannot find their way down; with your light shining on my stage, they will find their way and together, we can save them” said The 13th Apostle, falling once again to one knee and resting a kind and gentle hand on Joao’s shoulder, speaking in a softened, congealing tone, less like a mongering emperor and more like the consoling and assuring father speaking without threat in his voice; finding a better approach.

“What if it’s not good for them?”

“You’ve seen how the people react. How could it be anything but?”

“I’ve seen them change too. They become angry and they scare me. They only offer their want and need as payment, giving me their guilt, their sadness and the bad things that will happen if I don’t help them. They frighten me with their prayer and I get so sad thinking that they might do something bad if I don’t listen to them, if I don’t answer their prayer.”

“I know exactly what you mean Joao. And Jesus; he knows what you mean too. Our work is not easy, to have to attend the prayer of many, but it is our work. We never chose this work, for it was the choice of god that we were chosen” said The 13th Apostle, inviting Joao into a spell of confusion.

“I used to pray to Jesus. At first on the farm for him to bring rain, for him to make Mother happy, for him to make my brothers and my sisters happy and less cruel and now, for him to find my daddy cause I can’t’ see my daddy in those eyes anymore. He’s good and happy only when he uses the drugs and I pray to Jesus every day that if we can’t save these people, if he can’t help us build a good church, if daddy can’t be famous like you then if he can only do one thing for me, if only one of my prayers can get through, I pray that he can help my daddy. Do I sound like them when I pray? Am I a beggar? Does Jesus run away like me? Is that why he doesn’t answer? Is he hiding behind a fence on a deserted street, somewhere in heaven?”

“Jesus hears every prayer. He doesn’t just change things. He fills your heart with love and belief, to give you the courage to change things yourself.”

“But I don’t think I want to change anything, not anymore. You change something; someone and they just change right back. Maybe not straight away, but they always change back and then they come back hungrier and angrier and they want you to change them again. They’re like babies” said Joao.

“But this is our work; it is the nature of our trial. They will come to us hungry and weak and we will feed them and when they are fed, they will go off and starve themselves again until they can’t take no more and then they come back hungrier and hungrier. They can’t feed themselves. They; and god, need us to portion Christ’s heart, his passion and his forgiveness.”

Joao looked spent and defeated as if he had accepted there were no fight in negating his promise and use.

“There will be a place for you here, in this congregation, when it is done. Your work is here, with me” said The 13th Apostle.

“But the reason I am here is to help my daddy, with his church, with our church, on the hill.”

“Nobody will ever step foot in that church. Do you understand?”

“What about my daddy, The Bishop?”

“Bishop what? What is his name? Bishop John? Bishop Valdemir? Bishop?” asked The 13th Apostle with his massive brows raised, his suspicious eyes wide with the white around his iris lighting up the room as much as when he smiled.

“The Bishop” said Joao simply.

“The Bishop, just that? The; as in, the one and only? We’ll see. Bishops are a dime a dozen in my pocket. It’s you though Joao, who are special, who is chosen.”

Joao felt an odd sensation engage with his mind and swim through his blood, filling his veins and lifting his stare.

It was pride.

“I want to show you something. It’s yours if you want it.”

The 13th Apostle took Joao under the expanse of his branching arm and they; with the dog in tow, stepped around the construction and passed the men in plastic hats who hammered nails into wooden boards and passed the men in blue collared shirts, who shouted orders at the hammering men and they passed the men in suited clothes, who read off of charts and documents and pointed their fingers and waved their hands around the site, expertising tasks of which they had no comprehension and even lesser dialect, but of whom, a stroke of their pen could re-assemble, re-arrange and re-structure so as to resemble whatever may be that the suited man might wish then to see .

They entered an area of the construction that was being plastered, painted and even furnished; a room in the back of a long hallway unto which The 13th Apostle lead the pair, pointing and smiling triumphantly.

“This can be yours, if you wish of course, to come to the side of the lord and ruffle your feathers from his divine perch” said The 13th Apostle.

Joao stood in amazement. He had never been invited into a room of this stature with such fine belongings hanging from the walls, leaning against the backs of chairs, nestled upon such glistening tables, draping across polished wooden floors and poured into glasses of which one alone could fend off their style of poverty for an entire year.

There was so much wealth here and he felt uncomfortable, constantly vexed, thinking as if he may lean against something and it might fall to the ground and smash into pieces, that he may brush against something and the disparity from his fingertips might just leave a stain that could never be cleaned and that the room alone, seemed poorer simply with him being in it.

“Sit here” said The Apostle holding his massive hands on the back of a leather bound chair that could have kept a giant in abiding comfort and regality.

Joao sat in the chair and disappeared. His back was hunched, his head low, his hands pulled into his lap and hanging limp over the tips of his wobbly knees. The Apostle rested his hand on Joao’s shoulder and lifted his head up lightly so that he caught his own reflection in the mirror in front of him.

He saw himself looking back.

Nervous.

“You belong here” whispered The Apostle in Joao’s ears as he stepped away from the chair, flicking a switch on a radio that sat on a table and pardoning himself from the room.

Joao, gripping the handles of the chair dumbfoundingly, yelled out loud but not a sound at all escaped from his gaping mouth.

The radio was playing a news broadcast. The broadcaster spoke in a heavy country accent. Joao thought for a second that it might have been someone he knew but then he thought, what would be the odds of that?

He sat back into the chair and waited uncomfortably while the news played out, trying to ignore the flight in his mind by concentrating on something that was bigger than him but at no point as real as the height of his current dilemma.

He tried to casually focus on the football results as if they mattered and concern himself with the reports of a travelling psychopath kidnapping and murdering single men throughout the country.

He stared at his reflection.

He looked miniscule and almost ridiculous in this massive chair. Understandably for someone like The Apostle who was so grand and marvellous and whose wavy hair was always more like a storm cloud, so high up above his head, catching his wandering, desiderate attention.

Joao took a breath and thought of Charity lifting that brush to guide him into her retreat and in his mind; as his fearful self longed and willed her to invite him away, she; under the loosely hanging branch, pressed her finger against her lips and shushed away his concern, smiling at him infectiously so that as she lowered her arm and closed herself off to his imagination and returned him to his dreaming, heavyset stare, his temperament changed.

He put his hands firmly on the arm rests and pushed out his chest and started to pose and turn his face to the mirror, blowing air into his mouth to push out his cheeks and fill his face, then making concerned and adoring expressions, imagining himself as being admired and worshipped and important and affecting and belonged.

And as he moved his body around in the chair and fed the belly of his ego, the newscaster sounding out of the radio beside him debated the effect of social conditioning with a well-credentialed psychiatrist who believed entirely that this type of sexually violent, predacious serial murder is an extension of the sensuality of a moralised conditional society and that we were watching; in scathing audacity, the starved and weakened lioness mauling on a stray calf and; though in apparent debate, the broadcaster ummed and aahed in a manner that assumed he were shaking his head in feigned and mythical understanding so as not to pepper his sweet presentation with a less than knowledgeable defence of his listeners who took to his voice as the truth because after all, it was spoken from the radio, just as the truth could also be found written in a book.

The broadcaster wanted to baste the profile of the serial killer as some kind of immoral beast that could be wrestled into submission, of whom wore scars and markings and of whose existence was but a trial of humanity’s growing condition in a world beset upon by the devil’s ideals and moral findings.

He used the words monster and devil, and used adjectives like lone and forsaken and immoral and ungodly and decrepit and he made his case that even though this killer was the effect of god not being in every home, he willed his listeners to calm in knowing that this monster was not in every home for it was a monster and not a man, whereas the psychiatrist wanted to paint that every man is a monster and has yet to hunger enough to stumble upon his wandering calf.

Then; as the radio fizzled with scathing debate, a golden handle lightly clicked as it slowly turned and the door pushed open.

Startled, Joao blew out the air in his expanding cheeks and sat upright in the chair, looking down at his hands once again pressed between in skinny legs and then, sheepishly tilting his head to the left to see a beautiful woman; a seductress, dressed scantily in black, lace bra, panties and suspenders and carrying in her hand, an empty, black porcelain cup with the word Jesus painted in white along one side, the side that faced him as he sat in