Nimrod's Tale

Prologue August 1983 On a summer afternoon when the heat had settled into the grass and refused to move, Rodney Wilcox, still Rodney Junior then, still RJ, lay flat on his back on the trampoline behind the house and stared at the sky. The trampoline sagged just enough beneath his weight to make him feel held, cupped like a palm. Above him, the blue went on forever, broken only by the slow drift of clouds and the sharp, stitching movements of birds. Somewhere far off, beyond the neighborhood and its trimmed hedges and vinyl siding, a train passed. Its horn was faint, almost polite, as if it knew better than to interrupt whatever was already happening.

Inside the house, the voices had begun.

They moved in waves: three women, rising and falling, slipping in and out of language. Tongues first, liquid and urgent, then English, clipped and declarative. His mother’s voice was the one he could always pick out, not because it was louder, but because it carried a certain practiced authority. The other two women followed her lead as they moved from room to room, sanctifying the house with their words. Doorknobs. Window sills. Light switches. Picture frames. Every surface became a potential hiding place, every object a suspect.

“In the name of Jesus,” they said again and again, commanding, rebuking, sealing.

RJ listened without moving. The trampoline springs creaked slightly when he shifted his feet, but otherwise, he stayed still, letting the sounds layer themselves over one another: the women inside, the birds overhead, the train dissolving into silence. He knew the rhythm of this kind of day. He knew not to ask questions yet.

The prayers traveled down the hallway, into his room and his brother’s. He imagined them standing before the shelves and walls, hands hovering over baseball trophies and Little League plaques, rebuking Satan out of plastic helmets and gold-painted figurines frozen mid-swing. He wondered briefly how evil might get trapped inside a trophy, whether it crawled in through the base or arrived already factory-sealed.

“In Jesus’ name,” his mother said, sharper now.

RJ squinted against the sun. The sky felt enormous, indifferent. A bird cut across it and disappeared behind the maple tree.

Eventually, the back door opened, and the voices spilled outside. The women continued their circuit, sanctifying patio furniture, lawn ornaments, the hot tub, the grill. RJ recognized the other two women from church. One of them was the mother of kids he played with sometimes, a woman who smiled too easily and laughed at the wrong moments. The other, he knew this without knowing how he knew it yet, would matter more. She was the mother of a girl whose name he did not yet attach to destiny, only to a vague sense of anticipation that sat low and humming in his body.

They reached the trampoline.

“RJ,” his mother called, softer now, but no less firm. “Come here, honey.”

He sat up, the trampoline rocking beneath him, and swung his legs over the edge. The grass was warm on his feet. The women gathered around him, hands already lifting, already reaching.

They laid their hands on his head, his shoulders. Someone pressed a palm flat against his back. Their voices rose again, tongues unfurling like ribbons, then snapping back into English. They rebuked Satan from him—out of him, off of him, around him. They prayed protection, purity, calling, purpose. RJ closed his eyes, because that seemed like the safest thing to do, even though he recognized this as eyes-open kind of praying.

As they prayed, the woman—the other mother, the one whose daughter would later press him into the carpet of a basement on a Sunday before Labor Day, three years from now, after evening service, when he was fifteen and thought he understood consequence—began to speak differently. Slower. Measured.

“I see,” she said, “the Lord using you.”

Her hand tightened slightly on his shoulder.

“You will preach,” she continued. “You will speak the Word with power. People will listen. The Lord has set you apart.”

RJ opened his eyes just as a bird landed on the metal ring of the trampoline, inches from his head. It tilted its head, one eye fixed on the strange circle of women, the murmuring, the heat, the stillness. It did not seem afraid.

For a moment, RJ felt something like awe, or maybe confusion dressed up as awe. Was this what anointing felt like? Was this how it began: hands, heat, prophecy, a bird appearing right on cue?

The prayers ended as abruptly as they had begun. The women sighed, smiled, hugged his mother. The bird took off, offended or bored, RJ couldn’t tell.

He lay back down on the trampoline after they went inside, the sky reclaiming its place above him. He wondered why they had come today, of all days. He replayed fragments of conversation he’d overheard earlier, his mother’s tight smile, her comments about enthusiasm, about performance, about George Greenwood and his relentless cheerfulness on the worship stage. RJ understood enough to know there were rivalries even here, even in holiness.

The trampoline rocked gently as he shifted, and his thoughts wandered, toward the train tracks beyond the neighborhood, toward the girl whose mother had spoken his future aloud, toward the strange possibility that his life might already be spoken for, named, decided.

Above him, the birds continued their business, unconcerned with prophecy, with prayer, with trophies or tongues. The sky remained wide, blank, and waiting.

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RJ Wilcox Jr. was born into a world that came preloaded with spiritual enemies. He came of age during the 1980s Satanic Panic the way some children grow up during war or political unrest, learning early which shadows to fear, which sounds to distrust, which questions not to ask out loud. In that decade, fear had a touring circuit, and it stopped regularly at churches like his.

They arrived in station wagons and RVs: traveling evangelists armed with slide projectors, cassette tapes, and the unshakable confidence of men who believed they had decoded reality. They spoke with urgency, like weather forecasters announcing a storm already overhead. Rock music, they warned, wasn’t merely rebellious; it was ritualistic Satanism. Queen was decadent. KISS was an acronym for Knights in Satan’s Service. Alice Cooper didn’t just wear makeup; he trafficked in gender confusion, which itself was proof of demonic influence. Masculinity and femininity were divine borders, and eyeliner was a violation.

The lectures expanded. Once RJ accepted that Satan hid messages in guitar riffs, it wasn’t a leap to find him everywhere else. The Smurfs were suspected of Satanic activity as they were blue-skinned collectivists living under a wizard. Dungeons & Dragons wasn’t a game; it was a training manual for occult initiation. Dice became portals. Imagination itself felt dangerous.

Conspiracy was presented as catechism. Procter & Gamble’s man-in-the-moon logo wasn’t branding; it was allegiance. The stars weren’t decorative; they were coded. UPC barcodes had nothing to do with groceries and everything to do with prophecy, early scaffolding for the mark of the beast, a coming universal financial system that would render cash obsolete and souls traceable. And JFK who was shot, mourned, and buried, wasn’t dead at all. He was alive at the Vatican, waiting. Revelation 13:3 was cited with the calm assurance of a footnote: One of the heads of the beast seemed to have had a fatal wound, but the fatal wound had been healed. There it was. Case closed.

RJ absorbed all of this the way a child absorbs climate. Fear wasn’t a feeling; it was the atmosphere.

There was Michelle Remembers, passed around as testimony rather than text. A recovered-memory horror story disguised as documentation, it taught that Satanic cults were everywhere—especially where children gathered. Which made the daycare scandals of the era feel less like news and more like confirmation. Headlines about accusations, ritual abuse, secret tunnels, unspeakable acts, slotted neatly into a narrative already in place. The shock wasn’t that these things were happening. The shock was that anyone seemed surprised.

Then there was A Thief in the Night, the Assembly of God film that did more to shape RJ's eschatology than any sermon. People vanished mid-conversation. Clothes lay empty on beds. Those left behind screamed and begged and took the mark to survive. He watched knowing the altar call was coming, knowing fear was the point.

Church newsletters from the headquarters in Springfield, Missouri reinforced the perimeter. Warnings about the gay agenda arrived folded into bulletins, sometimes illustrated. RJ remembered images of the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence, bearded men in habits, makeup exaggerated into blasphemy, presented as proof that Satan now mocked the sacred openly, brazenly. He didn’t know what satire was. He only knew terror. If Satan could twist holiness into parody, what chance did he have?

Is everything Satanic? he wondered sincerely, almost scientifically. Music. Games. Cartoons. Logos. Numbers. Clothes. Feelings. Was curiosity Satanic? What about doubt? What about joy that arrived uninvited?

And what about the men at church?

There were mean, surly old men who didn’t fit the lectures but somehow escaped scrutiny. Tony Cambria was one of them. He enforced rules no one could clearly articulate and punished infractions no one could name. Sometimes he pulled RJ out of children’s church and sat him alone in the foyer, a small exile, until he could deliver him to his father with the line, “He knows what he did.”

He didn’t.

Later, he told his dad he honestly didn’t know. There was no hidden sin to confess, no memory to recover. Just confusion. And then there was the watch.

In Sunday school, the children were promised a watch if they memorized a certain number of Bible verses. Salvation quantified. Incentive theology. RJ memorized them. He reached the goal. Shortly after, Tony quit teaching Sunday school. The watch never came. It was a small thing, but it lodged itself in RJ like a splinter.

Tony had lied.

At The Domes—Caldwell First Assembly of God—he began to notice how common lying was. Not the dramatic lies of Satanic conspiracy, but the small, structural ones: white lies, convenient omissions, promises reframed as misunderstandings. Christians, who claimed the highest moral ground, seemed especially fluent in them. Truth was elastic when authority needed it to be.

Everyone lied, he learned, especially those most invested in appearing righteous.

The Satanic Panic eventually burned itself out, as moral frenzies tend to do. The evangelists moved on. The slide projectors were shelved. Some accusations were overturned. Others quietly forgotten. But the damage lingered in subtler forms: anxiety without object, guilt without cause, a reflexive suspicion of pleasure, art, and ambiguity.

RJ grew up believing Satan was everywhere and goodness was fragile. It took years to realize that fear itself had been the most powerful force in the room, and that it wore a cross, not horns.