The Holy Heist: An Apocryphal Tale of Spiritual Seeking

By Michael Havelin

A hilarious satire that follows the adventures of the not-quite-reverent Reverend Alistair Gibbon, his paramour Fancy Griswold (the former Miss Serpentine Belt), and their crew as they try to "plant" a church in a rural town in America's Bible Belt. What some people will do...

• Language: English
• Publisher: Michael Havelin
• Release date: Jan 10, 2016
• ISBN: 9781310599699

Michael Havelin

Michael F. Havelin has worked as a musician (Bougalieu, Old Pros, Cacti Delicti), author ("Photography for Writers"; "Practical Manual of Captive Animal Photography"), photographer (nature, motorcycle roadracing), publisher ("Shooter's Rag" photography magazine; "Dialed In" motorcycle roadracing newspaper), teacher (computers, sign language, photography), lawyer (un-civil), woodworker, and interpreter (ASL). Havelin is a Mensan and runs a mystery writers critique group (wncmysterians.org). A Yankee by birth, he now lives and creates in Asheville, North Carolina.

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The Holy Heist

An Apocryphal Tale

of Spiritual Seeking

by

Michael F. Havelin

by

Michael F. Havelin

Copyright 2015

All rights reserved.

Written, designed and published

by

Michael F. Havelin

Asheville, North Carolina, USA

ISBN: 9781310599699

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Table of Contents

This Book is Dedicated…

Acknowledgments

Meet the Players

Sinners Awaken...

The Lord Provideth

Not Yet a Church

The Women Plot

Thieves in the Night

I Had a Dream

Caesar Comes A'calling

Everyone Gets a Second Chance

They Shall Take Up Serpents

The Women's Committee Decides

Serpent Bid'nes

Words of God

Seeking Manna

Vinegar

The Mark of the Beast

Questions Unanswered

The Gold of Ophir

The Law is An Ass

Fillamon's Anger

Confrontation

Holy Snakes

La Mordida

The Investigation

The Beast Himself

The Women's Committee Plans

The Bible Thumpers

A'Tenting We Will Go

Preparation

Dedication

Purification

Appendices

Dope

Gold Coins

Weapons

About the Author

This Book is Dedicated:

To Charlie Green, my friend.

To every religionist on our benighted planet. May your superstitions prove out and your fantasies come true for you in the next world, but leave me the hell alone in this one, dammit!

Acknowledgments

The Internet, for in-depth research from home on anything I need to know.

WNCMysterians.org, my mystery writers' critique group in Asheville, North Carolina. Thanks for keeping my writing on track with your helpful insights.

Meet the Players

•Rev. Alistair Gibbon – Preacher. Strong fundamentalist believer but incompetent in many ways. He thinks everything he does is divinely inspired. If he has an idea, it has to have come from God.

•Fancy Griswold – The former Miss Serpentine Belt. Now somewhat chunkier, somewhat more bleached. A woman of appetites.

•Beasley Conover – A biker wannabe nicknamed Beastly by other motorcycle riders. Beastly is a petty criminal and incompetent thief who comes up with lots of ideas for petty crimes. His follow-through is weak. To fill out his self image, he had LOVE/HATE tattooed on his knuckles.

•Frank McDonough – An out-of-work drifter who was camped out in the run down country store.

•Elmira Sammon Viggers – A true type: a bone-thin country girl. A proud sharecropper's daughter from Alabama with fundamentalist religious views. Never had nothing and don't want any. Never begged nobody for nothing. Nonetheless, she accepts the help the Reverend Gibbon gives her in the form of food, sometimes shelter, an occasional roll in the hay.

•Vinegar Fillamon – Painville’s most successful dope dealer. He is an extremely bright high school dropout who would have succeeded at anything he tried he life. He chose a course of least resistance.

•Belle Swinbourne – Tolliver’s wife with airs. Married up into an aristocratic family, then too late discovered that the family was broke. She believes she was deceived and never forgave her husband or his family.

•Armand Nelson – Professional snake handler from West Virginia. Dedicated to his work, but a danger to himself and others.

•Sheriff Rap Soddy – A county sheriff with one part-time deputy. He is dedicated to protecting his county from the clear and present dangers of the times. He believes one must keep one’s ethics flexible, which makes him always on the lookout for an extra buck.

•Otto Pfaff – A German immigrant with bad English and arrogant Aryan thinking. Otto feels he is a better type of person than others in the strata of society he moves in. He is, after all, from Europe, where civilization began… even if the war was lost.

•Uta Pfaff, the butcher's frau. Large but pinched and dour, she is faithful to the end.

•Tolliver Swinbourne – Scion of an aristocratic Southern family on its uppers.

•Orlando Santangelo – A small time lawyer who handles minor criminal cases for people like Beastly.

•Solomon Goldberg – Painville’s most successful lawyer. He owns the town’s pawn shop.

•Musicians in The Bible Thumpers band

-Zero Blevins – Drummer. His parents named him after comedian Zero Mostel, but his father later said the name was appropriate for someone who would never amount to anything. Zero is the band’s leader and handles all their business.

-Amos Figg – Bass player. A dullard who thrives on loud, thumping bass lines.

-Donny Wills – Guitarist. Talented and obsessive, he took up guitar in high school to attract girls. He became skilled in both endeavors.

-Antonio Rumelato – Keyboard player. Antonio is hard-of-hearing and wants to get a hearing aid but can't afford it. He’s from Painville’s only Roman Catholic family, but nonreligious. Instead he declares I'm a musician!

Sinners Awaken...

...the sinners shall be together... Isaiah 1:28

The sun's early rays cut through the trailer's fogged windows. Morning birds screeched their cat warnings and crystalline love songs in the trees and bushes scattered throughout the mobile home park. Two mobiles over, an obsessive Jack Russell terrier barked its usual shrill enthusiastic greeting to the local bully pussycat on patrol.

The not very reverend Alistair Gibbon grimaced and rolled onto his stomach, dragging a pillow over his spinning head. An empty vodka bottle clattered from the bed to the floor.

He hated waking up still drunk from the previous night's reveling, but there he was, again. He'd done it to himself. He had no one else to blame for his behavior. And God was punishing him for it. Sometimes he felt that God was out to get even with him for sins he'd barely considered committing.

A low moan caught Gibbon's attention. He peeked out from under his protective pillow and saw...

Flesh! Womanly flesh. A woman's back, a bit puffy and somewhat too fleshy, but a woman nonetheless. Wha? Who? What had he done this time?

It was hard to remember these days. Too many blank periods, as if his mind was protecting itself by wiping away the things he'd done. It sometimes worried him, but if he didn't remember what he'd done, he couldn't feel guilty, could he? The up side was that, not knowing what he'd done, there was no way he could atone for his sins. It was a simple but clever strategy his subconscious mind had worked out for him. He couldn't have thought it up even in his clearest working moments.

And if it had been given to him that way it had to be divinely inspired, like so many of his other best ideas, even if most of them had come to nothing in the end. Which meant that God was looking out for him, taking care of him, helping him through the rough parts of his life because God had a special mission for him. He'd always known it, since he was a little kid. He was special. Even his mamma told him so, and she was smart. She'd always kept the family together and the home running smoothly when poppa was off somewhere on another drunken adventure.

He reached out and laid the palm of his trembling hand in the curve of the woman's back just above her hips. She was warm and soft, maybe even a bit too soft, but he felt himself getting excited. It didn't take much these days. She began to roll, turning towards him. He recognized her. He knew who she was. But no, his head hurt too much. He couldn't perform in his current condition... not well anyway.

He swung his legs off the bed in an attempt to stand but his right knee gave way under him and he didn't quite make it. He grabbed for the floor lamp that stood next to the bed, but it went over instead of supporting him. They both hit the floor with a crash.

What the... Fancy Griswold sat up abruptly in the bed wrestling to pull the tangled sheet over her exposed bulk. What are you doing?

I was trying to get up without awakening you, Fancy. I guess I didn't succeed.

You certainly didn't. She ran her tongue over her teeth. They felt furry. Her head hurt. Is it morning already? What's for breakfast? The former Miss Serpentine Belt was a woman of formidable appetites.

Another day in paradise had begun.

Fancy Griswold had a winning smile. It was the type of smile that could light up a room at night when the shades were drawn. From the time she was little and through her teenage years, she'd learned to use her smile as a lever to move mountains, or at least to move men's hearts. She would flash her even white teeth and men would do most anything she wanted.

As she matured and her baby fat disappeared, her gangly teen body took on more womanly dimensions. Fancy Griswold evolved into a natural knockout.

So when it was announced that Pipes-n-Cams Auto Parts and the state's Department of Transportation were sponsoring a beauty contest for Miss Serpentine Belt, well, she knew she could win... if she could just get to the capital for the judging. The contest was going to be on television, too. She could become famous overnight.

And that's exactly what happened. Fancy put her thumb out, among other body parts, and hitched a series of rides to the capital. She had several unsettling adventures en route with the men who picked her up, but she arrived in time, more knowledgeable about the world and not a little appalled. On stage that afternoon, Fancy won the day and the title of Miss Serpentine Belt. It was her moment in the sun.

Over the intervening years, Fancy had put on a bit of weight, but not too much. She was at the point where she needed to get control of it or it would get out of hand. She still had her good looks, an undeniable sensual voluptuousness, and that winning smile that broke hearts and got her most anything she wanted.

Alistair Gibbon thought of himself as a man of the people. He did good deeds. He gathered food from the local markets for people in need. He counseled people in their troubles. He visited the sick. He spoke forcefully and inspirationally at prayer meetings. He knew many people by name, for even though he had a hard time remembering his drunken crawls, he remembered individuals.

Drunken crawls, indeed. Hell, every prophet and religious figure through history had a flaw of some kind. Just look at... at what's-his-name. What made him any different? He was no better or worse than the best or worst of them. That was his humility. He owned up to the facts of his drinking and whoring. That proved he was a mortal man like any other. He was proud of the knowledge of his flaws, proud of his humility.

But in the face of it all, the personal and financial burdens that he bore, the troubles of others that he took onto himself, he was faithful to doing God's work here on earth.

Every so often he would have a message directly from The Lord Himself. He would hear in plain English exactly what God wanted him to do. And sure as Hell Fire, he