On Route 66 — Jack Fate

On Route 66

Jack Fate

[The following is a work of fiction. Any resemblance to persons living or dead is purely coincidental.]


Just outside Oklahoma City, Reverend Jack Fate whipped souls into the bosom of the Lord every Wednesday night. When the days of summer were hot and the night air was still, you could hear his screaming exorcisms nearly a quarter of a mile away. Out on Parker’s field, Fate’s big white canvas tent sat like a giant mushroom surrounded by crowds of folks from all around, many of them from as far out of town as Houston. As you drove up, they’d all be jitter-jiving to the sound of Fate playing some hard blues number on his guitar while a choir of middle-aged black women sang something like an up-tempo Amazing Grace. It all sounds bizarre, maybe even impossible to imagine, I know, but Jack Fate made it all work somehow, and the final effect wasn’t all that bad.

The first time I attended one of Fate’s services, I admit I wasn’t looking for any kind of salvation or enlightenment at all. I was bunking down with a nurse from Pomona, and she insisted that I go at least once. So I went. More than once.

Jack Fate’s tent must have covered as much ground as a good-sized baseball field. Across one end was a stage set up with a twelve-piece band that included two sets of drums, a variety of brass instruments, a giant Wurlitzer and the other makings of a fairly progressive rock band in those days. Front and center was Fate’s purple Fender Stratocaster. It was embedded with rhinestones that flicked back ribbons of light from the hot pot spots that beamed from towering obelisks of speakers on either side of the stage.

The value of sheer entertainment never escaped Fate’s reckoning, but there was more to the Wednesday revival meetings than music and song. This was no religious rock 'n' roll show. Fate knew the real money lay in saving souls. And so, his call for confession and prayer came back from the repentant masses in waves of voices and the sound of loose change. Who would have thought so many had so much sin in them? Or, for that matter, so much spare cash? On an average night, Fate took in over $5000.

The highlight of every show was always around midnight when Fate would discover someone in the audience with such a great sin that it manifested itself as a physical affliction — someone blind, deaf, crippled — one of those sorts of things. Through the power of prayer and the laying on of his hands, Fate would miraculously cure the poor victim of life’s shortfalls by “driving the devil out and sending old Satan packing to the swamps of Louisiana.”

Up until the night young Corkie Dubois stepped to the stage, Fate’s stay in the midst of the cornfields of Oklahoma was an uninterrupted success. Fate would prance and dance and rant and rave until even the meekest crowd would be stirred into a frenzy of charity. While the band and the choir poured out gobs of soulful music, common, everyday working folk would pour dimes to dollars into overflowing baskets of money that would pass down the rows. By the end of the night, the blind would see, the deaf would hear, and the crippled would walk. We’d all go home happy and reassured that the Lord had descended through Fate that night and touched off the fuse of a miracle or two. We’d all go home to bed and feel uplifted and full of love for one another.

They say Corkie Dubois was a mild-mannered young man, at 19 years just a boy, really, who followed Fate from the outskirts of Miami, Florida to Route 66. No one knows for sure how much pain the boy was holding pent up in his soul, but it must have been plenty. Some say he carried more than just pain. Some say he wore the devil’s badge, was born into the Satan’s army of death, and from his very first breath, was destined to be Fate’s nemesis.

The skies were wild with anger that night. Thick murky clouds hung suspended so low you could feel the electricity inside them if you held your hands skywards. Just down the road in Springfield, twisters touched off a line of destruction so wide that the governor called out the National Guard, as if a pack of boys in military costumes could stop the wrath of nature. Jack Fate knew better. When he appeared on the stage that night, his first words were as loud and angry as the fury outside the tent. “I’ve come to stop the apocalypse,” he roared to the approval of the congregation. And some say he did just that. Some say that the moment he stepped out on the stage, the air cleared, and the billowing, black funnels of destruction dissipated.

What Jack Fate couldn’t stop was the slug of lead that Corkie Dubois sent his way just before the midnight miracle.

Many people say Fate died that night, but I’ve heard that he’s an all-night radio announcer for a country music station in Chicago these days. His time in Oklahoma was short-lived, but then so are a lot of things in life.

That nurse I told you about? She ran off with some fellow to upper state New York to work in a state facility near Attica.

Me? I just headed on down the road.

The Back Story:

This was the fourth story in a collection of stories that I wrote about people whom I met or imagined I met along Route 66, that famous highway that runs from Chicago to Los Angeles.

This story was inspired by a poster that I saw when travelling from Tuscon to Los Angeles. On that poster was an advertisement for a religious revival meeting in Needles, a small town in California, close to the border of Arizona. Three preachers were being featured on a particular night, with one of them being a snake healer. Of course, I was immediately fascinated with the notion that one could use snakes as a means of healing.

The first version of this story had Jack Fate charming his audience with the healing power of a variety of snakes, but after writing the story, I realised that I had no idea what I was writing about. So the snakes got edited out, and Jack Fate became a more typical evangelist who travelled from town to town under a giant tent for the purpose of saving souls and augmenting his monetary savings to boot.

The name "Jack Fate" comes from Bob Dylan's movie, Masked and Anonymous. I'm not sure why I stole the name. There is really no connection between the character of Jack Fate in the movie and the character in my story. Perhaps, it was just my way of offering a nod to Bob, but I suspect that I thought the name to be a fitting one for a travelling saviour of souls.

I knew from the first word of the story that Jack Fate would be shot and killed, because all great "saviours" die. The possibility of his resurrection as a radio announcer in Chicago might seem a poke aimed at the Christian ideology of Christ's death and rebirth, but I did not mean any criticism of Christianity or even evangelism, except when religious fervour is used to exploit people, the reality of which Jack Fate was clearly guilty.