What Looks Like Crazy on an Ordinary Day by Pearl Cleage

part of the condition of his long probation. The judge who sentenced him must have seen too many Andy Hardy movies.
Send the young man to the country! Get him some fresh air and sunshine! Make sure he goes to Sunday school! He’s still young enough to turn his life around! Of course, he’s practically illiterate, couldn’t get a job if there were any around to be gotten, and has no idea how the world works, but hey! He’ll probably get a great tan out of it anyway!
    When the announcement was made about the robbery, Tyrone and Frank looked at each other and snickered like the idea of a terrified old lady sleeping through what could have been something really dangerous was the funniest thing they’d heard in ages. After service, they circled the church yard like lions waiting for a distracted antelope to separate itself from the herd long enough to be vulnerable. A couple of girls giggled in their direction, but nobody made an approach.
    I felt sorry for them. I’d seen boys in my Atlanta neighborhood grow into swaggering young men who were suddenly scary until you looked into their still baby faces and realized who they used to be, but I also knew how dangerous they were. I’d seen Frank hit that girl like he didn’t care if he broke every bone in her face. I’d seen Tyrone smoking dope right behind his grandmother’s back. It was tempting but foolhardy to focus on their vulnerability instead of your own.
    When we got there, the front door was unlocked and we could hear the sound of some pretty tortured hunt-and-peck typing coming from the church office. Gerry was sitting behind an Underwood upright frowning at the keyboard as if somebody had mysteriously rearranged it. When she looked up and saw us, she smiled and held up her hands in mock surrender to the ancient machine.
    “I told the Good Reverend if he doesn’t hurry up and find us a new church secretary,
he better!”
    Joyce and I were still standing in the door, and for a minute she just looked at us. The intensity of her smile’s wish to be believed always gave her face a brittle appearance, and the complete coldness of her eyes didn’t help matters.
    “I’m here for the meeting,” Joyce said. “This is my sister, Ava.”
    “We met the other day,” Gerry said. “Such an unusual name. Does it run in your family?”
    I wanted to say,
Only if you believe my mother’s tale that Ava Gardner was a mulatto second cousin of ours, once removed, who had managed to
pass
her way into the movies and was therefore worthy of having children named in her honor,
but I just shook my head no.
    “Well, come in, come in,” Gerry said. “Our little group is going to be just the three of us, I’m afraid.”
    She motioned us toward two wobbly straight-back chairs and settled herself behind the pastor’s desk as if she belonged there.
    “Isn’t Reverend Anderson coming?” Joyce said in a tone that carried just a whiff of warning. Joyce has calmed down a lot lately, but her reputation as a firebrand had probably preceded her. When she was in high school, she chained herself to the church front door to protest the war in Vietnam. Of course, that was long before the Andersons got here, but it was too good a story for somebody not to have shared it in the normal recitation of local
who’s who.
Joyce even got her picture in the Lake County paper.
Idlewild Teen Protest Reflects National Mood.
I was so proud of her, I took it to school for show and tell.
    Gerry smiled again. “As he and I prayed together earlier in preparation for this very meeting, he received a sign from the Lord,
praise him!
He rose and went immediately to work on his message for next Sunday morning, understanding, as he must, that divine inspiration is not under any obligation to petty cares and earthly schedules. He’ll try to stick his head in later.”
    Sure he will.
Joyce had been right about the Rev. He was a preaching somethin’, but when it came to doing the dirty work, Gerry was definitely