Reverend America: A Journey of Redemption Read Online Free

Fox News. Casper’s forehead ached. America felt like a building primed for demolition—and having slept in several of those over the years, he knew the feeling well. 
Nation shall rise up against nation, and kingdom against kingdom, and great earthquakes shall be in divers places, and famines and pestilences and fearful sights and great signs . . .
 Then on the TV—chickens exploding from too many hormones. He pulled out one of his Medicine strips.
    BOY GETS NEW SKULL
    Whenever the welter of information from the outside world got too much for him, he consulted his Medicine Bag. An old Navaho man called Hercules (with two teeth as purple as Navaho corn) had taught him about Medicine—how you had to make it or find your own. This appealed to him over his Reverend America Bible, for he knew so many of those words too well. 
The secret things belong unto the Lord our God, but the things which are revealed belong unto us.
 He’d shuffle up the Medicine strips like fortune telling cards, and it was uncanny how they seemed to shed new light on the situations he found himself in.
    Old issues of the 
World Weekly News
 were his inspiration. He liked reading about baby dragons preserved in formaldehyde—or the Bat Boy of the Lost World Caverns. He felt it was important to know that a panel of experts had proven that goblins lack genitals and that a World War II bomber had been found on the moon. Read in conjunction with the Holy Bible, his tabloid Medicine strips created a curious harmony. In one text, you had merpeople—in the other, a generation of vipers. It was actually hard to tell the Scriptures apart. He particularly liked the stories where people had pieces of their severed bodies reattached.
    GRIZZLY BITES MAN’S HEAD OFF, DOCTORS SEW IT BACK ON
    Wasn’t that just like Jesus healing the man with the withered hand? His Medicine strips were his pearls of great price—his Book of Uncommon Prayer.
    But the magic didn’t work every time. The message about the boy getting a new skull at first lifted him. Then it brought back the images from the Oldsmobile.
    If he felt the message of the Medicine was too strong or not clear enough in its offering, he thought it was acceptable to consult the oracle another time.
    JEALOUS HUBBY BLOWS AWAY SIAMESE TWINS FOR ROMANCING HIS WIFE
    That was better. Specific mention of gun violence. A clear signal about retribution. Those Siamese Twins had it coming. This was an interpretation he could live with. He didn’t feel that flaming coals would be heaped on his head. Not for what had happened that morning. If God were still looking down, then he also knew what had been done to him. He stuck by his Medicine Bag, just as the 
WWN
 had stood by the women from Euclaw, Wyoming who’d given birth to demons.
    The only other thing that made him as happy as his Medicine Bag was Black Jack Gum. He didn’t chew it himself—but he liked the 
thought
 of it. It had a distinctive smell. He knew exactly the first time he’d ever caught a whiff—the Gascozark Hills Resort in Hazelgreen, Missouri. There was a biting, bittersweet quality to the flavor. He didn’t like the taste—but later, in small town dusty libraries, Black Jack showed him that all things fit together, if you can just find the Ikey Heyman. (He learned that term from his would-be father—the name for a hidden friction brake on a wheel of fortune game.) Like Cameron Blanchard, he was a treasure hunter in libraries, but he had to keep his collection sized to fit in his knapsack. “You can only hold so much water in your hand,” Old Joe said.
    Black Jack gum all went back to the notorious Santa Anna, soldier, revolutionary, dictator, turncoat and opportunist, who was the man to bring chicle to the United States when in exile as the former President of Mexico. Chicle, a natural gum from a Central American evergreen, had been chewed for pleasure and energy by the Mayans. Santa Anna ended up selling his load, hoping to