Aids: No Place to Die

By Luther Butler

The Reverend Nick Fielding was sure AIDS was sent to kill all gay men. When asked to use his powerful broadcasting network to educate the public on the spread of the horrible disease, he refused. Nick was not the typical evangelist. He grew up in a reform school after he maimed and killed customers of the sexual insatiable, Nancy, the girl he not only pimped for but loved enough to marry. Trained in chemical warfare in the detention home, he served in World War II, in a highly-skilled special unit. Drunk and disorderly at the end of his rope, a miracle changed Nick the drunk to the Reverend Nick Fielding. Told in flash backs, Nick suddenly used his broadcasting system to help combat AIDS. Was it God who changed Nick, or was it something more sinister?

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: Oct 5, 2000
• ISBN: 9781462833641

Luther Butler

Luther Butler was born of southern parents in Alamosa, Colorado in 1929. He holds degrees from Eastern New Mexico University, Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, and Tarleton State University. He served in the US Navy and has ranched, worked in a mental hospital, in inner city slums, and was with the Texas Department of Agriculture for 23 years. He is married to Jo Butler and has one son. Other novels by the author can be found at Luther Butler’s Bookstore http://www.erath.net/butler/

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Copyright © 2000 by Luther Butler.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the copyright owner.

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to any actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

This book was printed in the United States of America.

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Contents

CHAPTER ONE

CHAPTER TWO

CHAPTER THREE

CHAPTER FOUR

CHAPTER FIVE

CHAPTER SIX

CHAPTER SEVEN

CHAPTER EIGHT

CHAPTER NINE

CHAPTER TEN

CHAPTER ELEVEN

CHAPTER TWELVE

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

CHAPTER NINETEEN

CHAPTER TWENTY

CHAPTER TWENTY ONE

CHAPTER TWENTY TWO

CHAPTER TWENTY THREE

DEDICATED TO THE ONE WHO

TOLD ME PARTS OF THIS STORY.

CHAPTER ONE

Big Nick Fielding was a hard man sixty-six-years old. Large, he would weigh at least three fifty on a frame over six feet tall. When he stood before the crowd, eyes turned when he thundered out, Brother, if you continue defying the ways of God, you are condemned to Hell and brimstone. I tell you, no Sodomite, nor one who satisfies the lust of his brother in anyway shall enter the Kingdom of God.

His audience sat under the large steel girders in Will Roger’s Coliseum in Fort Worth. Eyes turned downward, closet homosexuals and bisexuals found themselves half ashamed to listen to this one who thundered out a message of condemnation against this practice between those of the same sex. Some were driven to this practice in times of temptation. Others were secretly engaged in never-ending clandestine affairs.

God made us male and female and not lovers of the same sex. Sodom and Gomorrah were as this modern generation. Men seek men and women seek women to relive their desires. I tell you Heaven and earth shall not pass away until those who continue in this vile practice shall be struck down with AIDS.

He sought for a dramatic ending for his message he was so sure was right. AIDS shall take the unrighteous from the righteous until there are none left but those who lay man with woman. Oh God, this is a perverse generation who forgets His ways so soon.

He had held forth for an hour. Even though attendants stood with push brooms awaiting to sweep the vast meeting place so they could be paid and go home, he still had his audience’s attention

Brother, I tell you, find you a pretty little thing and marry less you face the wrath of God. Some morning, if you continue in your sin, there will be blotches on your skin. You will dream, and sweat shall soak your sheets. Soon your body will grow emancipated until pneumonia shall ravage you. You shall go to your grave in the torment of cancer.

He still had not brought his sermon to a dramatic conclusion, for he knew he had not reached the peak of his message. And your people will have to pay your debts while you lie in hospital beds crying out for a glass of water no one will bring you because of fear. Fear of the disease God brought down on your perverse generation, Big Nick’s deep baritone reached a crescendo of vibrations when he shouted.

My brother, I tell you, it is the wrath of God visited down on this perverted earth. An earth full of disease and suffering, because man is too sinful to do God’s will. There are too many people on this earth. Man has grown exceedingly wicked. This is God’s way of depopulating the earth.

He peaked with his sermon. Now he was packing it up to frighten a hundred or more down the sloping steps to make a decision for Jesus that night. If there were no decisions, there would be no more money from the vast television audience for him to carry on his evangelistic crusade. Some were already critical of his lambaste stand on this new disease. It was causing fright to ordinarily heterosexual men who strayed recently with a boyhood friend, or a close neighbor who was either homosexual, or like themselves, bisexual.

The prospect of being left without pensions and medical treatment was enough to scare them out of their minds. A few already committed suicide, and more were contemplating this honorable way out of a few minutes of casual sexual relief. Because of his ability to bring men to a conversion experience, some of the faithful still watched Big Nick.

Sweat falling down his forehead, he turned from a message of fear to one of hope. In conclusion, he said, Jesus, he said it long and stressed each symbol in a voice of compassion, Jesus is here tonight calling you to come home. Jesus, Oh, precious Jesus, he died for you. Accept him and come home tonight. Friend, your sainted mother is waiting for you in Glory. ‘Glory’, became a two-symbol word trilling to an abrupt crescendo of sound.

He had to finish it up. Big Nick Fielding felt the glory that night. He felt the glory when he told about God’s love after holding sinners over a roaring fire. It was close to a sexual feeling. Intense religious fervor caused him to stand up in the bright lights with the television cameras on him. His message went out over the airwaves into countless homes across the nations.

After the crowd left, he stood alone grappling with his shed suit coat. He had shook the last sinner’s hand and made his way down an aisle beginning to grow dark. The maintenance men turned it off after another big one. On his head he wore a gray bibbed cap matching his expensive tweed suit and gray silk tie. He checked his thousand dollar Rolex. It had turned to ten p.m., the hour when he liked to have a relaxing bourbon and water before he went to bed.

Although some of the men who stood by with brooms would mock the speaker shortly, none did it now. It was not fear. It was a holy respect they had for this man who looked like an old heavyweight boxer leaving the ring. His three hundred and fifty pounds rested mostly in his tremendous belly that overshadowed his patent, black leather shoes.

Later, Big Nick would find sleep by a cold wife. For now, there would be thoughts and remembrances. It was always his humiliation after a successful sermon.

He drove his black Cadillac hard through a thin traffic where the hot summer tar made swishes. His new radials made expensive sounds when he headed for the big white mansion overlooking Eagle Lake. Thankful the offering was a big one, he stopped to look at reflections of light in the water.

Once on his way home, he even thought of his forty-five-year old son, who was called plain Nick. His thoughts turned to a prayer. Tonight his son was still incarcerated in maximum security at the state prison in Huntsville. My God, he said when the thought hit his religious-fervored mind. My God, he said again when tears came into his eyes. I am a preacher, and my son is in prison for running drugs.

He knew he must hurry home. Tomorrow he was to fly to Washington and address a Congressional committee to dissuade them from giving money for the treatment of AIDS. It was the wrath of God, and to try and treat those so afflicted would only thwart the will of God. Money spent on vaccine research would only bring a worse disease down on those sinners who were bringing America to destruction.

It was his honest conviction the world population had reached a saturation point. With the aid of a new disease, God was going to thin them out. Those he intended to do away with were those who practiced homosexual acts of Sodomy and oral perversion. To try and stop this ravishing disease was to thwart the will of God. Those in the medicine profession who helped these lost souls would die themselves. He heard a pricked finger, a bit of semen or blood, and the medical people would soon die with the disease they were treating.

A fear infested the world unlike anything since the Black Plague of another era. Europe’s population was decimated by a death even more deadly. Those so afflicted died in pools of blood while they lay boarded up in the castles and hovels where none would come to see about them. In the preacher’s mind, both diseases were the wrath of God coming down on the ungodly.

It was funny how Big Nick knew God’s will for everyone and everything including himself. Messages from Nick’s Redeemer did not come in small voices. They came in blocks written in red against the sky burned by a bolt of lightning. Once the message was so dynamic he went into a trance from which he was brought safely out by a nip from the small flask he carried in his coat pocket. Now, he used whiskey strictly for medicinal purposes and as a relaxant at night. At one time, he used it for other reasons.

The voices from the past were beginning to fill his head. Before he wore himself out to fret into a dreamless sleep, he would cover many years and miles. He wished it was not to do.

Clean white sheets and his wife’s heavy breathing turned his visual mechanisms into a television set that played his life over and over before his eyes. Most of the time, his remembrances were in vivid Technicolor usually accompanied by voices from out of the past.

Some of those who experienced conversion under his dynamic tutelage told they were freed of all former thoughts by the cleansing of God. It was not that way at all for Big Nick. God brought Nick’s past sins before him daily, or usually nightly.

Nights were when reality came. Days were a blur of wakefulness with fantasies drifting in and out of his tired brain. Most times when he was not preaching, his mind was going over and over his life before he was so dramatically converted.

CHAPTER TWO

It always began in an apartment over a hell-raising saloon in Minnesota, up where little towns had nothing but two gas pumps in front of a wooden building. They contained a drinking place where a man could get crabs on his pubic hair in the public John. Most did not get them there.

He would lie awake at night listening to the roar of beer guzzlers and drunken sots below him.

At the age of four he and girl companions played, Hide the wiener, only they called his undeveloped sexual organ, a weenie. Of course, they giggled and laughed about the strange looking thing only boys had. It was always his wiener they hid, and found. Even at four, it was a pleasant experience he did not want to forget.

When he went to sleep, it was always with the sounds of the jarring, blasting of the multicolored jukebox. It stood by the small crowed dance floor over which hot, muscular farm boys led their lusty dates over the bare board floor until a fight broke loose.

Sometimes when the noise grew to a crescendo of breaking bottles and shrieks of knives cutting through the cigarette-filled air, he would get up and sneak to the foot of the stairs and watch the wild scene.

His red crew-cut stood straight up. He listened to a cursing barroom full of people trying to beat each others brains out. Even at his tender age, the violent, brawling caused a thrill to run up and down his spine. He waited for the day when he also could try his fist at the pugilists who drew and threw punches. They fought across the bare bloodstained floor.

Once he grew so engrossed in the fight he failed to duck when a bottle of Old Crow smashed him directly on the forehead. An hour later, he regained consciousness with the taste of hard liquor in his mouth.

The rivulet of alcohol awakened a taste in him that haunted him until the present.

When he was in the first grade, Fran, his oldest sister, slept in an adjoining room. A steady stream of customers climbed the vine-covered trellis. Coming through his window, they crossed stealthily across to the opposite bedroom through his moonlit room.

Many nights, he lay awake listening to their giggling and her protesting in loud whispers. Then there were the violent sounds of bedsprings creaking and usually silence.

Then the male visitor would come back through his room, crawl through the window and depart. Usually, the sleep-starved boy was not conscience by this time.

Each morning after such a night, Nick would awaken with a head bursting. His mouth was dried by tobacco smoke floating through the contaminated room.

Nick, his mother would come over and sit on his bed and stroke his forehead. You are going to have to get up and get ready for school.

In this world that was berserk most of the time, his mother offered stability. He often heard her say to Nick Fielding, his beerbellied father, „We are ruining our children bringing them up in this place."

„Can‘t help it, Minnie. There is nothing else to do. Me an Irishman among all these ferriners. Swedes and Norwegians, they get the good jobs."

„You could shovel wheat during harvest and drive tractors. In winter, there is lumbering. How about working on one of the boats?"

„You realize the pay? We couldn‘t eat."

„Rather live in a hovel than have the children raised like this." Always, she lost the argument. Mainly, it was because she also secretly liked the fighting and excitement of a public saloon. She washed glasses and joked with the burly customers. while she drew beer and poured jiggers of hard liquor in a depressed state of mind.

Nick usually dragged out of bed and went off to the small white-painted, wooden schoolhouse. The teacher waited knowing this student would be listless and unreceptive to her teaching. More exciting things went through his head.

„Unresponsive. Does not care," were the most often remarks she made on his six-week report card. Nick did learn to read and write before he had to leave public school in the eighth grade.

Early, he learned girls had something men would pay good, hard cash to use. It was a year later he hid in a load of wheat with ten years old Nancy. While the driver was waiting to unload, he found out what it was really about.

„Nick, you would not understand not being a girl. There are those of us who have to have a male, or we would go crazy. You bring me boys, and I will let you have first shot every afternoon after school."

With Nancy, there was a steady stream of customers waiting soon as she came out the schoolhouse door an hour after Nick‘s class got out. Some of her male-paying customers had already dropped out of school.

By the time he was nine, he was pimping for three other girls. It was always Nancy he came to for his own desires. He never charged her the customary ten percent he charged the other girls for protection. Finding customers was no problem after the first time, but keeping the customers from getting abusive, was.

Nick found an abandoned blackjack. His father substituted a steel pipe wrapped in rubber to cure those who caused trouble in his place of business. The boy secretly oiled the dry leather until again the weapon of brutality was flexible. Twice he used his weapon.

His first time on the football field, Nick first learned besides for pimping, his weight could be used against formidable foes. In a one-room school situation, from the first grade on, he had to compete against boys much bigger than he.

It was not only brute strength that aided him. His agility and speed in running were to his teams advantage. Somehow the boys were able to find ways to visit other villages and towns for athletic events. When he became famous at not only football, but baseball and basketball, fathers hitched up their work teams and took the boys wherever they wanted to go. Fathers were not interested in their sons‘ athletic ability. They were interested because the western wheat-growing village of Alton, Minnesota could make money by winning.

Gambling among the Catholic and Lutheran raised grown-ups of the flat plains country was frowned upon by both churches. Still, fathers who could pick up five or ten dollars betting on their sons‘ school, caused a great deal of home-grown fervor every Sunday afternoon.

When it was not one of the recognized sports they attended, it was ice hockey on frozen water. The adults drank tremendous amounts of alcohol straight out of the bottle to keep their bodies warm in sub-zero weather.

Nick‘s first victory on the football field was in the third grade. The older boys found they could let him have the scuffed ball. They formed a phalanx of runners to carry him out past the main defense of the opposition. Then they let his superior speed carry him across the goal line.

„You were great, Nick, Nancy told him. He finished his sexual act before he unlocked the steel door. The other boys came into the grain crib behind Miller‘s granary one at a time. „It was beautiful watching you run like that. Guess three touchdowns will make a hero out of you forever, she said with a doe-like softness in her eyes from sex and hero worship.

It was that afternoon he used the blackjack the first time. Red Swanson was his name. An orphan his old maid aunt was raising, Red tore Nancy up with a sliver of glass he attached to himself. Nick was busy settling the other three girls down when he heard the accusations.

„You whore, Red shouted at Nancy, „You charge me my money and then make me lose it too soon. It ain‘t hardly worth coming in here.

Nancy tried to calm her customer. „Red, it ain‘t my fault you cannot act