Miracle at St. Anna (Movie Tie-in) by James McBride Page B

and I’m collecting tickets! Don’t be left out. Don’t wait! Leave your money home, but bring your soul! All aboard! Get what you need! Get God! I got what I need! How ’bout you?
    The money poured in like magic, and more people came. Bishop rented the plumbing supply store, and the congregation grew. They called him Walking Thunder, and when he preached he was so good at making the lightning come that at times he actually believed in God. During those moments, fright would cover him like a blanket and he would disappear from his congregation for a few days and drink joy juice till the feeling passed. He was in the flow, he had it good, he had found his niche. But the Army wanted him, and he made the mistake of showing up at the induction center thinking they wouldn’t sign up a Negro preacher—they made preachers into chaplains with the rank of captain, he was told, and even a fool knew that no white man wanted a nigger being a captain and telling him what to do. By the time he figured the game was played by the white man’s rules, that captains, even Negro chaplains, had college and divinity school degrees, he was doing push-ups at training camp. Now his new church back home was just a dream, and here he was trying to collect his fourteen hundred dollars, staring at a white man’s church in a white man’s land in the pouring rain with a nigger who was carrying a white man’s son who was gonna die, and they’d be blamed for that, too—if the Germans didn’t smoke them first. He needed a drink.
    Hector, in the lead, slowed as the others gathered around him at the side of the road and stared at the church. “That’s where the Germans would be if they were near here. Camped inside,” he said.
    â€œDon’t see no Germans,” Stamps grunted. “Just keep goin’.”
    â€œThis is close enough,” Hector said. “We don’t need to walk in the front door and get our asses shot off. There’ll be Germans around here soon enough if they’re not here now.”
    Stamps was exhausted. “We stay in there or out here. One or the other. You and I’ll go take a look. You take point.”
    â€œShit no,” Hector said. “Point or not, it don’t matter who’s got the point if there’s a whole regiment in there having dinner and there’s only four of us. If you and me get hung up there, who’s gonna back us up? Them two?” He pointed to Bishop and Train. “I say we go together.”
    Stamps felt his command slipping from him, but there was nothing he could do. He was so tired he wanted to lie down right in the rain and rest forever. “Shit, it don’t matter. Let’s all go.”
    Hector moved forward slowly, crouching, advancing to the edge of the road. He lay on his stomach and peeked around the curve. He lay there for what seemed like an hour, then finally got up and motioned for the others to follow as he dashed across the road and took cover in some bushes on the other side.
    Train felt himself going invisible again, and he fought the impulse. Invisibility, he felt, always brought problems. He had not wanted to get the boy and he would not have done so had he been visible and in his right mind, angel or not. He would not have waded into the Cinquale had he been visible. He would not have done any of those things. But they were done now. The boy was his responsibility now. He still owed Bishop money. He still did not know where he was. Everything needed clearing up. If the boy stopped breathing, he thought, that would be a disaster. The notion began to terrify him, that the boy would die. Train had seen dozens of kids dying before, in Lucca, in Naples, starving, begging, their wounds wrapped in gauze, big pus-filled sores on their feet and legs, but they were not connected to him, them being Italians and him being colored. But this one was different. He had felt it. How to explain to