Part Forty Five

When they got into the little dusty town, all three of them placed telephone calls. Dylan to his agent, Cass to her office manager, Preacher to the Major. The two who had been missing a week spent longer on the phone explaining the situation than the one who'd been missing for five years. All of them had money wired to the local bank. Even though their rescue would arrive in a few hours. But neither Harding nor Finch had any ID, and the bank wouldn't give them their money (although the teller recognized Finch well enough to ask for his autograph.) Haywood, with his expired Florida license, was able to get his money when the two multi-millionaires could not. He rented a motel room so they could all take long hot showers and he went to the town's only barbershop for a haircut, and shaved his beard off. The three of them sat in the town's only diner and ate cheeseburgers and Preacher made them laugh with a story about being a gunslinger at a dude ranch.

It takes roughly six hours to get to Gethsemane from LA, maybe seven from San Francisco. There is no place in Gethsemane to rent a car, that's for damn sure, and no municipal airport or even a usable landing strip. Fresno is probably the nearest big city, as the crow flies, but because there's no good highway through the Sierra National Forest it takes almost five hours to drive there. It's only about two and a half hours to Tonopah, Nevada, however. Cass Hardesty's office manager was smarter than Dylan Finch's agent. She chartered a flight to Tonopah, went to Cass's apartment, packed a bag for her boss, watered her plants, flew into Tonopah, rented a car, drove to Gethsemane, and got there two hours before Finch's people arrived from LA in his agent's new Land Cruiser.

Haywood politely declined her heartfelt entreaties to return to San Francisco with her, but promised that he would visit her soon.

He had a couple of beers with Finch after that and then politely declined both Finch's, and Finch's manager's, heartfelt entreaties to return to Los Angeles; in fact, much to the chagrin of Finch's manager, Preacher requested that neither his name nor his face be associated with the story that the manager had shopped to People Magazine all the way up the road from LA. Even more to his chagrin, Finch agreed -- you can milk the story, he said, and even mention that I was rescued by a hermit, but his name and face stay out of it.

For the five hours back they worked on their client, tried to get him to relent. He didn't. The story made headlines for a little while -- there are a lot of clippings in the archive -- and Haywood isn't mentioned by name in any of them. An intrepid tabloid reporter tracked down both the teller and the waitress in Gethsemane but since Haywood paid cash for the motel room there was nothing with his name on it there.

For the next few months Preacher drifted slowly southwest toward San Diego -- the same trip he ostensibly began when he left Virginia four years earlier -- working a few days here and there as a day laborer or a busboy or a janitor. He later recounted that he was uncertain about jumping back into human society. He said "I slept alone, said little, kept my head down, and avoided crowds." He also spent a lot of time in libraries, reading voraciously, not just trying to make sense of what had happened to him in the desert but also -- and this is so typically him -- catching up on the pop culture he missed. ("Do you realize," he told someone much later, "that while I was... absent, Uncle Tupelo disbanded?") He was in no particular hurry, which is why it took him until late April of 1999 -- almost eight months -- to show up just 250 miles to the southwest. In Bakersfield, California.

Bakersfield, California, is the Richmond, Virginia, of the West. Without all the flash and glamour. I would never have been there voluntarily except that I had to speak to the men and women of Pacific Athletic Surfaces. To take their life stories and turn them into footnotes in the biographical archive of Preacher Haywood.

Their life stories were no more tedious than mine. Certainly they deserved to better than footnote status. The Glassings and the Clarks had turned a failed tennis court repair company into a successful business. And I'm sure the story of Marvin Clark's and Keith Glassing's inter-racial friendship, dating back to the first grade, could form the basis of some inspiring movie-of-the-week story in its own right. But neither of them managed to escape Kern County for long and both of them now work on other people's tennis courts all day. In the end that doesn't get you your own biopic. If it wasn't for the accidental hiring of Preacher Haywood it wouldn't even get them this footnote.

At the end of the day Haywood's primary appeal was that he was a legal US resident. That's the beginning and the end of it. And now I find myself having to do what I'd hoped to avoid, which was discussing the Pacific Athletic Surfaces business model.

So, with a sigh: most of their work came from working on country clubs and public courts, schools, parks-and-rec fields, things like that. From Bakersfield north, because there was a lot of competition from LA south. Which meant (a) they had to be low bidder and (b) much of their work came when school was not in session, which in turn meant (c) it had to be done fast, because summer was when people wanted to play tennis. So they had a hard time handling contracts more than an hour's drive from Bakersfield. Which meant there wasn't enough business. So Sandy Glassing, Keith's wife and the brains of the operation (she had an AA in business from Bakersfield College), developed this plan wherein a series of contracts moved the operation from one job to the next, day after day, all summer long. They could cover the entire northern and central state in one long road-trip that lasted all summer. Keith and Marvin (whom everyone but his wife and mother called Boom, a nickname from his days as a fullback at Stockdale High School and later as a defensive end at UCLA) would take Keith's brother Jimmy and an equipment operator and in each new town they would hire a few day laborers and get the job done, then move on to the next contract where Sandy would have everything from motel rooms to diesel fuel ready and waiting for them.

That was the plan and it worked well for a few years and then the state started cracking down on using illegal immigrants to perform state contracts. Which meant that the school districts and recreation departments suddenly wanted all kinds of paperwork for the day laborers. Who didn't have it. The State of California's insistence that its tennis courts could only be properly patched by people born in the U.S. threatened to sink the little American success story that was Pacific Athletic Surfaces.

But everyone had to rebid under those rules, and they got their contracts, and Sandy (who apparently is some sort of logistical idiot-savant) put together a road-trip, and all that remained to be done was to hire enough legal laborers to haul around with them from job to job. Wanted: people willing to engage in back-breaking work for long hours in the summer sun, living out of motels and not seeing their families for three months. Mediocre pay, no benefits. US citizens only, please.

Haywood wandered into Bakersfield, a few weeks after leaving the desert, two days before the P.A.S. road trip was supposed to start. Saw the want ad. Walked to the industrial park where PAS was located, into the low cinder block building, and got the job. Boom drove him to the DMV so he could get a valid California driver's license. They were that desperate. They were so desperate they rehired a drunk named Roger Michaels, who had been their equipment operator a few years earlier. Michaels promised to stay sober the length of the road trip. Neither they nor Michaels actually believed that he would. They also had Robert Redcloud, a Yokuts Indian (he hates the term "native American," for reasons he probably would have explained if I'd cared enough to ask him.) With Jimmy and the two principals that was six men, when they needed (and budgeted for) eight, and had hoped for a minimum of seven.

So they rolled out of Bakersfield and started working on these jobs. Note for prosperity: having a bodhisattva on your construction crew boosts productivity in the short term, but in the long term leads to some East Coast intellectual like me turning your life into a footnote.

While all this was going on, I should note, Dylan and Cass were back in Los Angeles and San Francisco, respectively, trying to make every act an act of worship. With limited success, although they apparently phoned and e-mailed one another often for support in their spiritual quests.

Anyhow, Jimmy Glassing was a little bantam-rooster of a man who, at one time, was a big fan of hair metal and Federal Schedule I, II, and IV Controlled Substances (he skipped Schedule III entirely. I don't know why.) Now he's still a small, wiry man, but he's renounced his prior devotions and instead focused his attentions upon his wife and the Lord Jesus Christ. Not necessarily in that order. When Haywood was in the crew, Jimmy was going through what his sister-in-law refers to as a "phase" with a roll of her eyes. That "phase" entailed trying to convert everyone he met to his particular brand of born-again nuttiness. It had gotten so bad the year before that Redcloud had threatened to split his head open with a shovel, so Keith had forbidden him from proselytizing on company time.

Thus when this road trip started Redcloud asked to share a room with Michaels, leaving Preacher and Jimmy as road roommates. That Robert Redcloud would specifically ask to bunk with a racist drunk as indifferent about his hygiene as Roger Michaels told Preacher that there was something even worse about Jimmy Glassing.

The second day on the job he was working next to Redcloud. "How was your night with Reverend Jimmy?" Redcloud smirked. Haywood chuckled and shook his head. "He try to convert you all night?" Redcloud pressed.

Haywood laughed out loud. (By this time he'd been out in the real world long enough that he was, apparently, able to carry on a normal human conversation). "All day long yesterday I was trying to figure out what was wrong with Jimmy that nobody wanted to room with him," he said. He never stopped working as he spoke. "So I came out of the shower with a towel wrapped around me and he's sitting on the edge of the bed with a Bible in his hand and he says to me, 'have you accepted the Lord Jesus Christ as your personal savior?'"

Redcloud laughed at this, having endured the same thing the summer before.

"So I took the towel off," Haywood continued, "because in my experience nothing discombobulates an evangelical like the sight of a penis. But it didn't work. He just sat there patiently waiting for my answer."

"There's nothing you can do to shut him up," Redcloud said, laughing. "Each night he would kneel there praying at the top of his lungs, mostly things like 'Jesus, help Robert Redcloud find you.'"

"Yeah, well," Preacher said, "I figured as much, so I tried to circumvent all that. I said to him 'don't you really mean, have I found the oneness with God that Christ promised we could attain through him?' He wasn't expecting that. So we talked about the Bible for a little while and he calmed down some." Preacher shrugged. "It'll take him awhile before he figures out there's a difference between agreeing with him and not disagreeing with him."

That conversation is mostly second-hand fiction, I should point out. Redcloud told it to me pretty much the way I related it to you. I doubt he remembered it verbatim. But then again he's not the sort who would use the word "discombobulates" on his own. In fact that sounded more like something I would say.

So they toured middle- and upper-California, fixing tennis courts and discussing pantheism. And today they all agree (except for Roger Michaels, who is dead, which is a pity, because I wanted to get a fellow drunk's perspective on Haywood), when asked years later, that Preacher Haywood was a hell of a nice guy and worked his ass off and...

Keith told me: "You know, there was something about the way that guy thought, something about the way he approached life... you just felt a little better being around him. I mean you wanted to work harder. I didn't think anybody worked harder than me and Boom, I mean, hell, it was our company, but Haywood never seemed to get tired and always did everything so... effortlessly. Like it wasn't even work. Like it was... it was..." He couldn't finish the thought, but told me that he got everyone on the crew working harder and faster and better by the end of the trip.

Boom told me: "He used to say that working a shovel was like cooking a meal, which was like singing a song, which was like saying a prayer of thanksgiving. That sounds kind of dumb when I say it but it sounded pretty good when he said it, and dumb or not, it's something I've always carried with me since."

Of course. While I am always studiously objective and clinical and detached when I interview people, I was extra-careful not to let any of my personal feelings about Haywood show when interviewing Boom Clark, because twenty years after his playing days were over he still looked like he could have snapped me like a toothpick. I understand -- from those who follow such things -- that Clark was very good and would have gone to the NFL except that he blew out his knee in his senior year at UCLA. It was while rehabbing his knee that he met his future wife, another college athlete of some renown, a basketball player for the University of Tennessee. She teaches high school history now. She read two of my books. She said.

And she said "they were... different, somehow, when they got back. I couldn't really put my finger on it. More relaxed. A little... gentler, in a way that only someone who knew them really well would notice. Marvin had lost weight, something I could never get him to do at home. Keith was reading The Mapmaker's Dream. I'd never seen him read anything more philosophical than the technical specs for composite compound before that."

Haywood was 32. They all thought he was in his 20s.

Close enough.

He worked with his shirt off on some of those hot summer days and I relate this not to add a homoerotic air to the whole tale but to point out that none of his coworkers recall there being a scar from when he was shot.