Church of the Path of Least Resistance

By V Mark Covington

When John Wye receives a cryptic phone call for help from Mike Compari, neither suspects they will encounter bumbling hitmen, a communist-hating old lady who looks like Yoda, or rescue a refugee – and a rare book – from a book burning let alone enlist a group of Civil War reenactors to bring down a cult with nefarious ties to the Federal Government.

The truth about John’s ancestor, a Civil War captain, comes to light along with the lost Confederate gold, a lusty piratess, the invention of margaritas, hush puppies, mud wrestling, a treasure hunt and an amorous dolphin.

The two tales come together in this runaway romp with an eclectic cast of characters and hilarious twists and turns along the way.

• Language: English
• Publisher: V Mark Covington
• Release date: Feb 26, 2013
• ISBN: 9780620548199

V Mark Covington

Mark Covington was born and raised in Ruther Glen, Virginia. He attended Caroline County public schools and Benedictine Military School in Richmond. He holds a Bachelors degree in Organizational Behavior from Averett College in Danville, VA and a Masters degree in Industrial Psychology from Springfield College in Springfield MA. Mark has worked as a Banker, a College Professor, a Management Consultant, an Ice Cream Truck Driver, a Cemetery Plot salesman and a State Government Bureaucrat and an Information Systems Project Manager. He currently lives in Richmond Virginia Museum District. with his wife Beverly and their two Australian Shepherds, Journey and Opal, where he writes novels exploring the cosmically comical nature of the universe, the purpose of which is to create someone who lives in Richmond, Virginia and writes novels exploring the cosmically comical nature of the universe. You can contact Mark at [e-mail]

Book preview

Chapter One

Wednesday morning. Having to get up after only a few hours sleep was worse than no sleep at all. It left him feeling small and confused. He wanted to be back in bed with another two hours between him and having to deal with the Washington Beltway. Two more hours respite from weaving his Mercedes through rush hour tangles, trying to tie his tie while traffic ground to a standstill, making jackrabbit lane changes to close the gap in front of him before a car from another lane zipped into it.  Sipping a cup of coffee and listening to Howard Stern interview some drunken angry dwarf. Two more hours to curl up beside his softly-snoring wife in their nice warm bed and dream of Caribbean beaches, turquoise water, white sand and bikini-clad girls strolling along the waterline.

Come to think of it, the beaches in his dreams had been a lot warmer of late than his bed.

Instead he was standing in line at the 7-Eleven on a cold predawn March morning, smelling coffee and rancid hotdog grease wafting from behind the counter. He realized he had been transfixed, hypnotized as if he were still partially asleep, staring at the hotdogs, watching them roll over and over on top of the heated metal cylinders, when an icy gust of cold wind rushed through the door and shocked him back to reality. What the hell was he doing standing in line to buy coffee at 5:45 in the morning?

He stared out of the big 7-Eleven window as cars sped, fishtailed, and slowed in the dusting of snow on Connecticut Avenue. Damn snow, it was wonderful when it started falling in December, tolerable in February when the heaviest snows fell and closed down the city for a day or two, but in late March it was simply a nuisance. He shook his head in amazement that so many people were awake and slipping along on the snowy streets at this time of the morning.   

John Wye was not a morning person. Moreover, he was just not a four o’clock in the morning person, which was when the call had come.

At first he hadn’t recognized the name.  The woman on the other end of the line said she was Helen Compari, and she’d sounded upset.  When his brain kicked off the fuzzy, wool blanket of sleep, the name sounded familiar. Helen Campari, Mike Campari’s mother. Once his mind made the connection he bolted upright in bed, shocked awake by the realization that if Mike’s mother was upset enough to call him in the middle of the night, something very bad must have happened.

John, Helen had said with a quivering voice, Mike called fifteen minutes ago.  He wouldn’t tell me where he was or what was going on and he tried to be calm and not to worry me but I could hear in his voice that he was scared.  He said he couldn’t talk for long, and he asked me to call you and give you a message.  I don’t understand it but I told him I’d call you. 

What was the message? John asked, now fully awake.

It was strange. He said to tell you to remember the song that was playing when you met Rachael. Then he said ‘Flight 1421.’

Fucking Mike, John thought, he was always into codes and secret words. He remembered the song. It started with the death of the chicken man in Philadelphia by explosion, and the singer instructing his girlfriend to apply cosmetics and coiffure her hair. The refrain referred to entropy or reincarnation or something, but the title was what Mike wanted him to get. Atlantic City. He flashed back to that night at the bar when Rachael had walked in. He hadn’t been able to take his eyes off her and Mike had razzed him until he mustered the nerve to walk up and talk to her. Atlantic City.

John and Mike had been good friends in school, together with the third musketeer, Jimmy Keyo. John remembered the night Jimmy got into such deep shit. 

Jimmy had sucker-punched the Head of the Judicial Board back in college after that asshole had lobbied the rest of the board to give Jimmy a semester’s suspension. Everybody had girls stay over in the dorm for weekends – Jimmy just got caught. The smarmy little head of the student disciplinary board had leaned into Keyo’s face and said ‘That little bit of tail will cost you a semester smart boy’ and Keyo had hauled back and decked him. Jimmy had never been one for taking a lot of crap from anyone. 

A small, tightly-rolled joint fell out of Jimmy’s shirt pocket when he drew back to punch the head of the board.   As the punch followed through, his eyes, as well as the eyes of the rest of the board, went from the bloody nose of their co-prosecutor to the small, almost toothpick-sized joint rolling across the floor. When Jimmy realized what had happened he bolted from the room, down the stairs and into the parking lot. John smiled as he remembered the sound of Jimmy’s old Mustang crank up and tear ass off campus.

They’d talked about what Jimmy had done over dinner in the cafeteria and all the guys at the table had laughed like hell, until the already awful cafeteria food was so cold it was more trouble than usual getting it down. Two days later John had a call from Jimmy’s mother, to relay a message from him. The message was, ‘The keys are a breeze.’ 

After a lengthy discussion John and Mike had decided that Jimmy had fled to the Florida Keys.  That’s when Mike had said, ‘If I ever get into something I can’t handle you can bet your ass you’ll get a call from my mother.’  And John replied, ‘And the same goes for me.’

That was the last time Mike or John had seen or heard from Jimmy Keyo. He’d dropped off the planet. Each rumor about him was different and grew more elaborate over time.

Now, fourteen years later Mike’s mom had made a call to John. 

As soon Mike’s mom hung up he had called directory assistance for Dulles International Airport. The information desk at the airport said there was no flight 1421 from D.C. to Atlantic City, New Jersey. But when John called the information desk at Reagan National he learned that there was indeed an American flight 1421 from D.C. to Atlantic City leaving at 9:45 that morning. 

As he stepped into the shower, John compiled a mental list of things he needed to do before he could get on the road to Atlantic City. First, he had to pack some clothes and stuff them in his suit bag. At least Rachael had an early meeting downtown this morning and would be too preoccupied to question John too much.  He didn’t want to explain to her why he was packing up and heading out of town at such short notice. Then he had to call the office and let the boss know he would be taking a few days off. He would also have to remember to hit the ATM for some cash.

But his first stop would be the 7-Eleven on the corner. He needed coffee.

John was brought back to the here and now standing in line at the 7-Eleven as he became aware of another smell, underneath the hotdog smell, subtler and sweeter  … damn those doughnuts smelled good but one would cost him an extra mile on the treadmill tonight. Well hell, he didn’t know if he would be home tonight, much less get a chance to work out. No, he’d settle for coffee.

As John moved up the line toward the cash register he remembered when Mike had asked for his help once before, the year after they had graduated from college. Again, it was his mom who had called. Mike had been working on some kind of water purification project or something for the Peace Corps in Sierra Leone, on the West Coast of Africa.

For some reason, and against the strong advice of his supervisor, Mike had ventured into the countryside away from the capital city of Freetown, visiting the villages, getting to know the country people, as crazy as that sounded, and he had been picked up by a patrol as he walked down a rural village road. The only thing that had saved Mike’s ass from a shallow grave, beside some dirt road, was that somehow Mike had made the guerilla colonel believe he had a rich father back in the States who would pay a king’s ransom for his safe return.

The fat colonel with the gold braid draped over his sleeves slapped a cell phone in Mike’s hand and said with an impenetrable accent, ‘Ca’yaPappa,’ which Mike assumed meant his father.  Mike had called John, and John had placed a call to another old friend in Foggy Bottom, who had coordinated Mike’s rescue through the Peace Corps. In twenty-four hours the cavalry arrived in the form of six Airborne Rangers. Mike was back in the States by dinnertime the next day.

As they stuffed the colonel into the back of an armored carrier Mike had stuck his finger in his face and shouted ‘Didn’t your mother ever tell you not to pick up hitchhikers?’ The rangers had thought that was funny as hell.

John and Mike had kept in touch off and on over the years, Mike had been John’s best man at his wedding and they exchanged Christmas cards for a while; over time they had drifted into their own lives. John hadn’t thought about how Mike was doing for years.

Hey, buddy, whacha want? There’s people in line behind ya. John was brought back to the 7-Eleven, eye-to-eye with a middle-aged, olive-skinned man with a three-day stubble and a toothpick dangling between his lips. John shook his head to snap out of his reverie. Coffee and … what the hell … one of those chocolate-covered doughnuts.

The last John had heard of Mike Campari was that he was living in Philadelphia, at least that was the return address on the last Christmas card – what was it, three or four years ago? The card had said that Mike loved living in Philly. So why was Mike having him fly to Atlantic City? He guessed he’d find out in a few hours. After John poured two packets of sugar into his coffee he punched in his office number on his cell phone.

John prided himself on becoming organized in a hurry, if necessary – getting the job done and done right – with machine-like efficiency. It was a talent that had served him well and allowed him to rise in the organization in a short period of time to senior systems analyst at the Exchequer Savings Bank in downtown Washington D.C. At thirty-two, he was the bank’s expert in network design, the analyst everyone else went to when the system crashed and burned or locked out most of the users for an hour for no apparent reason.

If John had to use one word to describe himself it would be ‘organized.’ He was the type of person who would plan a trip from the den to the kitchen to get a beer, which included tasks to be accomplished on the way there and on the way back like emptying the trash can or unloading the dishwasher. He even timed these trips so he would be back in front of the T.V. as the commercials were ending.  When people met John they would never guess that he was a systems expert, he didn’t look the part at all. He didn’t have the nerdy look of the average systems expert; no plastic pocket protector or black, framed glasses and there was no Star Trek uniform hanging in his closet. His large green eyes were speckled with gold flecks; he had a sprinkling of freckles over his nose; tousled, deep auburn hair and a semi-toned body on his six-foot frame. To look at him you would guess he was a bookish divinity student rather than a computer guru or a banker. He wouldn’t call himself handsome, maybe above average good looks.  And throughout his life he’d been nervous talking to women. He never knew what to say; he’d be tongue-tied and blush. No, he wasn’t prince charming, more like prince introverted. And he was no Mike Compari.

Mike was another story. In the thirteen years that John had known him, Mike had never planned anything beyond the upcoming weekend, and when he did attempt to think ahead, the most planning he did was minutes in advance. Mike had relied on his looks and charm to avoid responsibility or anything associated with a normal day’s labor. Over the years he had managed to charm his way out of quite a few dangerous situations and to con other people into doing his work for him.

What infuriated John was that it worked.

Back in college, whenever Mike had a term paper due, some moon-eyed girl would show up, a stack of books in tow, looking for Mike’s room. The evenings when something either unsavory, or flat out recognizable, was being served in the dining hall, Mike would have an invitation to dine at a lady friend’s house off-campus, often an older woman who owned her own house, or whose husband was away on business. His laundry was picked up and delivered on Fridays by a member of the cheerleading squad and he always had a key to some rich girl’s daddy’s car in his pocket.

The reason was simple; he looked like Titian’s ‘Adonis’ come to life, and even though he was from Queens, New York, he had an almost European demeanor. He was what Benjamin Franklin called the civilized barbarian. Mike would put on a show whenever he introduced himself to a lady. Taking her hand and bowing from the waist, he would turn her hand over and kiss it, just a brush of his lips in the middle of her palm.  He would raise his eyes slowly up her body, while a cockeyed grin danced on his face, until they locked eyes. To John, this act seemed as sincere as one of Eddie Haskell’s compliments to June Clever in an old episode of Leave It to Beaver. Women, however, never failed to be moved; with a vacant look in their eyes they blushed right down to their toes.

The next day Mike would be driving around in her car.

Well, John thought, Mike must have found himself in a situation this time where that damn Compari charm didn’t work. For the first time in his life he was looking forward to a trip to New Jersey, if for no other reason than to see Mike sweat for a change. And, once John had helped Mike out of whatever jam he was in, laugh like hell at his miserable ass.

All else aside, John figured he owed Mike whatever help he needed.  Mike had helped him out of a jam or two back in college. John knew he tended to be a smart ass. He had been in a few bars where Mike had stepped between him and some guy who wanted to tear John apart for some comment or other. John had never suffered fools well and wasn’t shy about telling the fools they were insufferable. Mike on the other hand was cool in tense situations. He stepped back and surveyed the situation, worked the angles before rushing in. John supposed it was his background.

John sipped his coffee and informed his boss, Jim Harkness, the Information Systems Division Manager, that he was taking vacation for the rest of the week. Jim raised holy hell about taking unplanned vacation. He went on and on about system reconfigurations, network installations and software testing, but John could tell most of his wrath was contrived. Jim had to raise a little hell, if only for show, but he knew John hadn’t taken off more than a couple of hours in the last six months and had worked quite a few nights and weekends on various system crashes and other sundry emergencies. When Jim finished his tirade he took a deep breath, paused for a few seconds and said OK, John, go on and do what you have to do, but be quick about it and get your ass back here on Monday.

It was after eight by the time John pulled into the satellite parking lot at Ronald Reagan International airport. The snow had been falling since four in the morning and had slowed the usual bumper-to-bumper traffic to an inch-by-inch crawl through stagnant clouds of engine exhaust and freezing, smoke-stained, gray slush. John had a stroke of good luck in that a few folks had failed to check in for the 9:45 a.m. Gambler’s Special shuttle to Atlantic City. John guessed this was because of the snow and he was able to get a seat on standby. While he sat in the boarding gate waiting to be called to his flight, he took out his cell phone and punched in Rachael’s office number. Rachael, honey he muttered to himself as he punched in the number, try to be understanding for once.

Although any traveler in the passenger lounge who cared to eavesdrop would have heard just one side of John’s conversation, the other side left little to the imagination.

Yes, Rachael, I know I was out of town all last week.

No, I haven’t forgotten that I have to be in Atlanta for that systems administrator’s conference next week.

I don’t know when I expect to have time to discuss our relationship. I know you have something you need to discuss … I don’t have the time now and I am running out of tolerance for this situation. All I know is that the neighbor’s dog has been more affectionate than you have been in the last few months, and that little shit tries to bite me every time I walk by.

Yeah, OK, I’m sorry, that was mean, but you have to admit we just don’t have the passion we used to.

Yeah, I know, that is part of what you want to discuss. I’ll be back soon and we will sit down and talk about it.

No, I’m not sure why I have to go to New Jersey except that I’m needed there. Well, no, it’s not exactly business … it’s more like helping out an old friend.

What do you mean what’s her name? It’s … John started to say Mike Compari, then remembered how much Rachael disliked Mike and stopped, not wanting to start another heated exchange.

He remembered how inebriated Mike had been as best man at their wedding. Mike had handed John the ring and then thrown up all over the minister with gusto. Rachael had never forgiven him for that. Shit, he thought, I’d be better off telling her it’s some girl than telling her it’s Mike. 

Listen, John spoke fast into the phone, not giving Rachael time to react that’s all I know and they are calling my flight, so I have to go, I’ll call you when I know more. Goodbye.

John stared out of the airplane window watching Washington D.C. become smaller and smaller. With each minute he ascended he was feeling a little better until he lost sight of the city with satisfaction. He admitted to himself that if he never saw D.C. again he would be a much happier man.  It wasn’t just D.C. It was his whole lifestyle.

His marriage had started out with such hope and promise but had turned into two passionless people just passing each other in the hallways and getting through another meal in silence. The job at the bank had become routine and the commute back and forth from the suburbs was taking years off his life. He wasn’t sure just where things had started going off track.

In fact, there wasn’t any one time when it went south: he and Rachael had just drifted in different directions over the last year or two. She was finishing grad school and devoted a lot of time to schoolwork, in addition to her full time job at a beltway consulting firm.  Her career was starting to take off and all she seemed to talk about these days was the office, this project, that presentation, while John pretended to listen and just stared off into space wishing he was somewhere else, doing something else, with someone else.

John felt a wave of deep sadness, almost emptiness, wash over him as the pilot announced they would be landing in Atlantic City in a few moments. At that moment John didn’t care if the plane landed intact or plummeted to the ground in a ball of flame. When the plane touched down and taxied to the gate John’s thoughts turned back to the reason why he had come. Mike.

John’s flight arrived in Atlantic City at 11:05 a.m. after circling the airport for what seemed like an hour. While the plane circled, John thought back to the first time he and Mike had met, some fourteen years earlier. They had both been freshmen at Georgetown, but that was where the similarities ended. 

Mike was from the North, New York City and part of a large Italian family. He sometimes hinted about a connection to the Mafia but was always vague. He grew up in Queens and learned how to survive on the street pretty early – a little too street smart and a little too early, according to him. He’d been in quite a bit of trouble when he was a kid, involved with the wrong crowd, and wound up doing a stint in juvy hall.

That was why he had gone into social work; a counselor had taken an interest in him in juvy hall and turned him around. He came out of juvy hall on a mission to help other kids who were taking the wrong path in life: he wanted to pass on the favor the counselor had done for him. He turned his life around, studied hard and went on to college, the first in his family to escape the old neighborhood.

After graduation, he did a tour with the Peace Corps and then took a job as a counselor at a juvenile detention center. Three years later he was running the juvy center himself.

Mike was also a liberal, a democrat and a Luddite. He hated anything electronic, he wouldn’t own a computer or a cell phone, and would probably never trade in his VHS and tape player for DVDs and CDs.

John on the other hand was the southerner, born and raised in rural Virginia. In the South ‘I’m going to kick your ass’ meant just that, not ‘I’m coming after your whole family’. And in the South guys were quick to throw a punch but just as quick to have a couple of beers together when the fight was over and end up slapping each other on the back and calling each other Bubba.

He grew up on a corn, tomato and tobacco farm and when he left the farm, he never looked back. Because he grew up without all the modern conveniences (the TV had a total of three channels, and one of them was PBS) he now embraced technology. He was from an old Virginia family, one of the first families of Virginia, FFV his mother called it.

His ancestor, William Wye, had received a royal land grant for close to a thousand acres of prime Virginia farmland and brought his own boat over from England in 1668. Most of the original thousand acres had been lost or sold over the years and John’s father had inherited just over two hundred from the original thousand. John was proud of his lineage and could list each of his ancestors back to the 1500s in England.

At college, John had double majored in systems technology and finance and gone into the banking business after graduation. John was a capitalist and a libertarian; he believed that the worst thing you could do for poor people was give them money, especially his. Mike and John had stayed up on many nights in college, until the sun rose, debating political issues, doing point-counterpoint, Mike taking the left and John taking the right. But no matter how heated the discussions had been they ended by agreeing to disagree. 

John expected Mike to be waiting for him at the arrival gate; he’d better have a damned good explanation for dragging me out of bed at dawn, and bringing me to New Jersey in the middle of a snowstorm, he thought. And the explanation had better include an apology and an invitation to kick back a few bottles of Black & Tan.

He panned the crowd of other people’s friends and relatives.  He had the sense that he could feel the eyes of the people waiting at the gate, scanning the passengers coming off the plane, searching for someone. The scrutinizing gazes were tactile as, for a second, each looked for recognition and finding none, moved onto the next passenger. He’d had the same feeling many times, on many out-of-town trips, when no one was waiting for him at the arrival gate of a strange airport in a strange town.

John wasn’t prepared for the spark of recognition in the piercing blue eyes of someone who looked to be the twin brother of Grizzly Adams. Well, he didn’t look exactly like Grizzly Adams but he looked enough like him to make John look around for the bear. He stood next to the ticket counter with his thumbs hooked into his suspenders, grinning through a shaggy, blond beard that ended midway down his huge barrel chest.

The mountain man look-alike swaggered over to John, extended a huge paw and drawled a two-word question You John? John nodded. This here is for you. The bearded man grinned while he pumped John’s right hand up and down. He produced a scrap of paper in his left hand and pressed it into John’s shirt pocket.

In the two or three seconds it took John to retrieve the scrap of paper from his pocket and read the address scrawled across it, the bearded figure was gone. John scanned the concourse in all directions but the Grizzly Adams look-alike who had been standing arm’s length from him moments before had vanished. 

Jumping Jesus on a pogo stick, John muttered under his breath, "what the hell IS this all about?"  

It took fifteen minutes and two twenty-dollar bills for John to convince the cab driver to take him to the address on the scrap of paper.

The cabby kept refusing over and over, saying things like, You don’t want to go there! You got no business in that part of town. I ain’t taking my cab down there!

As reluctant as the cabby was, John was just as determined. John’s determination – and the twenties – convinced the cabby. OK, buddy, the cabby sighed, shaking his head, "I’ll take you down there, but when you see that neighborhood you ain’t gonna want to stop. And if you do, I ain’t stopping my cab in that neighborhood for long. Maybe I’ll just slow down enough for you to jump out." 

John settled into the back of the big checker cab and gazed out of the window through the cold late-afternoon rain as the neighborhoods went from blue-collar row houses to tenements and projects, to what London must have looked like after the Blitz or Baghdad after the bombings. As John stared out of the window he twisted his pinkie ring.

When John was nervous he absentmindedly twisted the ring he wore on his left pinkie around and around. The ring was a family heirloom, once owned by his great, great, great, grandfather, Captain William Beauregard Wye, who was lost at sea at the end of the Civil War. The coat of arms engraved into the ring showed a shield divided into four quadrants: the upper two depicted the single-headed eagle of William the Conqueror and the double-headed eagle of the Romanoff family; the bottom two quadrants depicted a snake and a sheaf of wheat.

Twisting his ring around his finger Mike gazed at the windows of the burned-out houses and boarded-up shops and offices – even the pawnshops and plasma centers were boarded up – he entertained two possible conclusions. 

First, whatever had caused Mike to take refuge in this urban disaster area – an area that made Brooklyn look like Central Park – was a lot more serious than a paternity suit or a jealous husband.

Second, Mike had better come up with something stronger than Black & Tan. He’d better damn well have a bottle of single malt scotch and a box of Jamaican cigars. At the thought of cigars, John reached into his jacket pocket, plucked out his old Tilshead briar pipe, a half-empty pouch of Captain Black Gold tobacco, and leaned back in the seat to enjoy what, considering the neighborhood he was entering, could possibly be his last smoke.

John stuffed the pipe full of sweet, vanilla-flavored tobacco and dug in his pocket for his lighter, ready to fire it up when the cab stopped. Before he could locate his lighter, the taxi stopped with such force it slammed John into the backrest of the front seat and he came to rest with his knees in the floorboard.  

"Here it