The Man Who Ran for God (pt. 11)

XIV. …And Be Content with What You Have

Three years before the Tanzania affair, Gideon Dodd thanked the man at the hardware store as he dropped two copies of a key into the preacher’s hand.

He paid for the discounted wood scraps in his cart — they’d make nice whittling — and turned onto the road that led out of the city.

In his two-seater sports car, he wound up and down hills, listening to contemporary Christian music, humming along. About twenty minutes away from the nearest gas station, he turned onto a gravel drive and led up a steep incline into an unpaved parking lot. He parked, put on the emergency brake, and stepped out into the muggy summer air.

Breathing it in, he smelled lilac and fresh-mown grass.

Whistling, the wind ruffling his collar and short sleeves, Gideon walked past a weathered and cracked sign reading CHRIST SANCTUARY NON-DENOMINATIONAL CHURCH. While he tucked his aviators into his breast pocket, he didn’t even look at the rented yard banner that said WELCOME AND GOD BLESS OUR NEW PASTOR, G DEON D0DD.Continue reading “The Man Who Ran for God (pt. 11)”

The Man Who Ran for God (pt. 10)

VII. Therefore My Harp Is Tuned to Mourning

“Who died?”

In America, five years before Gideon Dodd would don the very same outfit to honor his deceased wife, he straightened a black tie and practiced a somber punim in the mirror of his grandiose dressing room. A woman at the mahogany door spoke to him as though she didn’t see he was wearing headphones. But she saw.

Most would not have even registered the brief flicker of Dodd’s eyes up, left, and back down to the silky wad in his fumbling hands. But Maria Gutierrez was more observant than most. She knew he saw her. She knew he recognized her.Continue reading “The Man Who Ran for God (pt. 10)”

The Man Who Ran for God (pt. 9)

III. Weep Bitterly for Her Who Goes Away

Six days after Gideon Dodd’s sermon about Truth — and about his wife Tamera’s infamous interview with Maria Gutierrez (not yet Stenson) — he returned home late from an elders’ meeting.

He was hungry. He was thinking about playing catch with his boy, maybe, after dinner. (Not that James had yet caught anything, or thrown much.)

Humming a hymn, he opened the door on an empty house. In houses as big as Gideon Dodd’s, emptiness like that can almost be a punch in the gut.

There was a note.Continue reading “The Man Who Ran for God (pt. 9)”

The Man Who Ran for God (pt. 8)

SELAH: III

There is a stomp, a shattering of glass, and blood.

The bridegroom collapses into a heap upon the bunched train of his newly-minted wife’s gown. Flat red flowers bloom on the white of her dress from under her man’s heel, where shards of a wine vessel sparkle in sunlight from the dirt — and from their jutting positions in the sole of his foot.

“Oy, I’m dying! I’m bleeding out!”

The bride turns to her mentor, her hero, who stands with hands clasped over the Torah at his crotch, stone-faced.Continue reading “The Man Who Ran for God (pt. 8)”

The Man Who Ran for God (pt. 7)

III. …But with Many Advisers They Succeed

“What was that horseshit? ‘Bad muchacho?’ Did you hear yourself out there?”

Inside the Doddville bus, Kratz leaned against a crafting table, shaking in his mauve Adidas windbreaker. With the back of a hand he knocked a squeeze-tube of adhesive paste into an unreachable crevasse under the console.

“That’s expensive,” Dodd said.

Kratz’s reddening face appeared over his shoulder from the nose up. “Why didn’t you use my cards?” he said.

Dodd’s shoulders sank. “I did use your cards.”

“Not all of them.”Continue reading “The Man Who Ran for God (pt. 7)”