The Adventures of Isabel by Candas Jane Dorsey

Author:Candas Jane Dorsey [Dorsey, Candas Jane]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: ECW Press
Published: 2020-10-20T00:00:00+00:00

81. Soul on Patrol

But Thelma too was hesitating, uncharacteristically in fact. “Um, can I say something else first?”

“Sure.” I braced myself for more dreaded thanks, or, more acceptable, recriminations for not going to the Starship Enterprise sooner, but she had something else in mind.

“I know you mock my faith,” she said, “and sometimes I have nights of doubt too, but I really do believe in the things I believe.” Again, a silence so long I felt forced to break it.

“I know you do, Thel.”

She sighed. “But I know there are people . . . who make a mockery of the faith from inside it. They give us Christians a bad name.”

I waited.

“I’ve decided,” she said, “that I am going to make a change in the way I profess.”

She couldn’t see my wrinkled forehead. I made a minimal-encourager noise — I was on social worker full alert by now — and waited.

“It was Christians who beat you up,” she said. “Because they believed.”

“Skinheads,” I said.

“Christian skinheads,” she said. “Soul Patrol. Active wing. They do it on purpose!”

“Thel, what’s wrong? Where is this going?”

“Jesus,” said Thel furiously, “talked to prostitutes and Samaritans and lepers and everybody. He didn’t hit them with baseball bats. He didn’t post a website that said God hates anybody. I’m taking that . . . that . . . that darned . . . no, that damned T-shirt right back to the Reverend and telling him a few things about the Soul Patrol!”

“Calm yourself! Just tell me.”

“The inner council of the Soul Patrol,” she said bitterly, “dedicates itself to patrolling for sinners and punishing them. Homosexuals. Jews. Jesus was a Jew, for Heaven’s sake. Prostitutes. Sexual deviants, as they call them — people who live together outside wedlock, people who go to those clubs —. Anyway, they find them, and they beat them up. They don’t preach, or minister, or profess — they beat them up! And they take what they call ‘holy joy’ in it!

“Christians! They call themselves Christians!”

“Thelma,” I said. “You are a marvel. Thank you.”

“What? For what?”

“Well, I’m not sure,” I said, “but whatever it is . . . let’s call it a breakthrough.”

“Well, maybe it is if you think they were the ones to kill Maddy,” she said, “but according to them, they want their victims alive to ‘suffer and repent’.” I could hear the quotation marks from here, knew that she was making little hooks in the air with her manicured fingers.

I wasn’t going to strike her when she was down, but I figured that next time she came over I’d lend her What the Bible Really Says about Homosexuality. I’d have to get it back from Denis. He borrowed it to read up while he was deprogramming a kid whose parents had him kidnapped and given some bogus religious “therapy” for being gay. Its sleep deprivation and electric shock protocol had only made the kid scared, broken, runaway, and determined to stay gay. He’d been troubled by fear of God, though, so Denis had worked more on that than on coming-out issues.

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