Let’s Exorcise the Pentagon

I’d been working at Stella’s bowling alley (12 lanes - 24 hours) for about a year when David George came back. You might remember how he got us both fired from Alvin’s Speedy Lube and Parts after he convince me to help him disinter the body of President Lincoln. He’d gone into hiding after he tried - by his own self, mind you – to dig up the bones of Geronimo. I might not be bright, but I try to not make the same mistake twice. David George though, he gets an idea in his head and he can’t shake it loose till he’s tried, and usually failed. My therapist, Dr. Schnabel, says that’s an “ideomotor response.” Me, I don’t think David George’s an idiot, but he does get some weird ideas from time to time.

Anyway, after the trouble with Geronimo’s bones, David George disappeared for a while. Sheriff Jackson came round a couple of times to ask me if I’d seen him. If I had to guess, I’d say he went back home to Enid, Oklahoma but I didn’t say none of that to the sheriff.

Like I said, I was working at the bowling alley; I’d just finished fixing the pinsetter machine on lane eight. It’s funny: David George always said I wouldn’t know a wrench from a wrestling match, but I was doin’ all right there at the bowling alley. A steady job and regular paycheck and all. I was wiping the grease from my hands when Stella came into the back and said, “Go ahead and take your break, Judge. There’s a fella at the bar looking for you. Just be back in fifteen minutes. Trash needs emptied.”

“Holt,” he said as I sat down next to him. That’s me, by the way. Judge Allen Holt.  It’s my name, not a title. Like that actor guy. “Holt. How’s it hanging?”

“David George!” I said. “Man! I haven’t seen you since…” I looked around. Sherriff Jackson and his deputies bowled there sometimes. “I ain’t see you around since… you know,” I whispered.

“Yeah,” he grinned. “That was a bit of a mess, wasn’t it? But that’s all behind me now,” he said.

“No more trouble?”

“Nope.”

“No more crazy plans?” Maybe I should have known better. He just sat there grinning, and I knew it would be something.

“Listen, Holt,” he said and leaned in real close to me.“You and I both know that whatever trouble we’ve gotten ourselves into, it’s still the black hearted politicians and dead heart stringers that are spreading blindness in the city.”

Now, I didn’t follow this too good. David George is always sayin’ stuff I don’t quite understand. But it ain’t the stuff I don’t understand that gets me in trouble usually. It’s the stuff I do understand – like what he said next.

“What we need to do is perform an exorcism at the Pentagon. If we want to save the country, we have to drive the devils out of the government – starting at the Pentagon.”

“Didn’t someone try that already?” I asked him. “One of them poet types back in the sixties…

“I don’t know anything about that, Holt.”

“Yeah. The poet and Doctor Spock.”

“From Star Trek? Judge Allen Holt, you don’t make no sense sometimes,” David George said. “This ain’t no hippy crap or science fiction garbage. What we’re going to do is perform an honest-to-God exorcism to drive the demons right out of the Pentagon. We’re going to do it, and we’re going to do it right, Holt. Honest-God, a real old school exorcism using one of the Latin texts from the Vatican.”

“But,” I interrupted, “we don’t read Latin. You know I barely read English so good.”

“This does present a problem,” he said, but David George never dwelled long with a problem. “But not an insurmountable one. There are plenty of other reliable texts we could use.”

“Where are we going to find a reliable exorcism ritual, David George?”

“That’s the easiest part of the whole thing, Holt.  My sister has one.”

“Your sister, Rosemary, has a copy of a workable exorcism ritual… in English?”

“Sure,” he grinned. He never stopped grinning when he had an idea. “She took a parapsychology course at the community college last summer.”

Now this is where I should have said no. I know that now. But there are natural fluctuations in all things – in ages and in wages. David George explained that there are unusual magnetic fields caused by strong currents of water near the Pentagon and that the push and flow of tidal adrenaline pools affected the course of national events. He said it was a sort of silent alarm, and that a truly silent alarm is heard by no one. He explained it all to me.  “Like Shakespeare said, ‘it’s easy to mistake a bush for a bear.’”

I don’t know what any of that meant.  But we did get that ritual book from his sister and we did hop a Greyhound bus for Washington D.C. And standing outside the Pentagon in the employee parking lot we did read it.  Out loud and everything.

And this is where you’ll ask me if the Pentagon building began to vibrate and turn orange?  Did evil emissions spiral up into the air in a swirling black vapor of death? Did ill-omened effluvium spill out over the walls? Did the world hear the silence of cancelled screams?

No. There was nothing. Nothing at all.  The security guards drove round to us in a little electric golf cart and told us to leave. So we left. Took the next bus home. Most of David George’s ideas are crazy and get us into trouble. But I couldn’t help hoping that this one would be different. I suppose the fact that we didn’t get arrested this time is different, but still it was disappointing.

Back home, I went to the Catholic church my mom used to drag me to and I asked the Father what it failed. “Father, why didn’t it work? Why couldn’t we drive the demons out of the Pentagon?”

He answered me: “The demons in the gospels responded to Jesus’ commands to be gone because they knew and believed, and what is more, they feared his power. You and your friend failed at the Pentagon because the demons that work inside that building neither know nor fear the power of Christ.”