Dry Heat by Jon Talton Page B

stuff I picked up from the Sunday
New York Times
. The homeless were without much of a voice in history, or so the faddish new historians would say. Dan Milton didn’t have much use for fads.
    “Very good, professor,” Card said. “But you make it sound so goddamned nice and academic. Look around you. What do you see? Addicts. The mentally ill. People with HIV. The disabled. The elderly. Young runaways. The ones who live paycheck to paycheck, and then the paycheck is cut off. Weather’s nice in Phoenix, so they come here. They hang out downtown, sleep behind billboards, camp down at the riverbed or beside the freeways. The kids go to Mill Avenue. The saddest of all come here.”
    As he talked, I pulled up a wobbly folding chair and sat at the table. He handed me another cup of ice, and I dutifully ate the crystals.
    “I give them ice,” he said. “It doesn’t make them want to work a nine-to-five job, or take away the years of abuse and neglect, or end the hallucinations. I do what I can.
    “They’re not really like you and me,” he went on. “That’s why it’s easier for society to abandon them. The homeless problem got worse under Reagan. Then it got worse again under Clinton. Here in Arizona, we refuse to fund social services, and the homeless haven’t gone away and gotten jobs. Nobody knows what to do.
    “And yet…” He swept his arm to take in the humanity seated and standing around us. “Christ is in them. ‘Inasmuch as you have done it unto one of the least of these my brethren, you have done it unto me.’” He let his arm drop. “I don’t mean to make you uncomfortable, Professor. Bible quoting is an occupational hazard where I come from.”
    “So this is your church?” I asked.
    He laughed without humor, his huge eyes closing into slits of artificial mirth. “I was a United Methodist minister for thirty years,” he said. “For the first five years, I was a street preacher in the Deuce. You know what that was?”
    I nodded.
    “I didn’t feel like I did a damned bit of good. So I ended up pastoring rich, white churches—and they thought it was so goddamned exotic to have an Indian minister. ‘Native American.’ I could have been a bishop, but I couldn’t stand the politics. Every Sunday, I’d try to get them to care about people like this. But I couldn’t push too hard. That would have made people uncomfortable. Shit, thirty years. I felt like such a failure.
    “So,” he continued, “I took my savings and I bought this old warehouse. I open it every year from April through the end of October. It’s the worst time of year to be on the street. I lean on some rich old bastards who owe me a favor to give a little money to keep it going.”
    “No soul saving?” I asked, trying to avoid falling out of the barely serviceable chair.
    He narrowed his dark eyes, boring into me. “You believe in an unseen world, Mapstone?”
    “Doesn’t everybody?”
    He snorted. “In my services, everybody prayed, ‘Thy will be done.’ But nobody wanted that. I want
my
damn will to be done. We don’t want God loose in the world…That would scare the shit out of us.”
    He pulled out a cigarette and lit it, loudly drawing in the smoke. “When I was ordained, I was twenty-five years old and it was the happiest day of my life. I felt called, Mapstone.” Card’s face was remade with emotion. Canyons cut their way into his cheeks. His eye sockets deepened further. “I would preach the forgiveness of my Savior and Lord to penitent sinners. I would comfort the heartbroken and the dying.”
    He studied the orange tip of the cigarette and added, “I didn’t know how perilous the borderlands would be…”
    “Borderlands?”
    He gave a sacramental wave of his Marlboro. “It’s where we all live, Mapstone.”
    I cautiously asked about Weed.
    “The old man with the Levi’s jacket,” he said, half to himself. “I haven’t seen him in awhile. He used to come by here. Said his teeth hurt too much