Rantings of an Arranged Mind

Calla and I enjoyed a lazy Sunday morning. We slept in, and didn’t even get out of bed right away when we did wake up. Then we savoured an extra-long shower, which left us both glowing and relaxed. We lounged in the kitchen over cereal. I was wearing just boxers and a bathrobe, while Calla looked stunning in one of my t-shirts.

She was doing the crossword while I read a different section of the paper. Calla idly drew her toes up and down my calf as she worked. I smiled over at her every once in awhile. I was catching up on world events. I couldn’t believe I’d been unaware of everything. I needed to cover for my loss.

I sipped my orange juice slowly, taking my time to make this morning last as long as possible. There was this atmosphere, like we were on vacation. No worries.

“You seem to be having fun,” I said to Calla when she peeked up and grinned at me.

“Oh, I like crosswords. Piecing together clues, solving a puzzle. There’s a logic to it, if you can just figure it out.”

“I never have the time to just sit and do one, I guess.” I shrugged.

“Sometimes they’re easy. Like this one, ‘do some prestidigitation.’ That’s three down, and the answer is ‘prediction!’ See, easy.”

I took a look. “So then what?”

“I’ll see if it helps me with other clues it’s attached to. You never do these?”

“I don’t see the fun. It’s not like the final puzzle tells you anything, or the clues relate to each other. Someone should make like a bigger mystery, where all the clues pay off in the end.”

“That sounds fun.” Calla turned back to her puzzle. “Do this one with me, just for this morning? Then, you can come up with ideas for your super-mystery.”

“Okay.” I pulled my chair up beside her, putting my chin on her shoulder. She smiled and we got to work.

“Here’s on for you – the ‘villain of the Alamo.’ You’re good at history.”

“That would have to be Santa Anna, the Mexican general who attacked the fort.” I checked and it fit.

We worked on it for a while, figuring out clues and laughing together. I think it helped that we were snuggled up close. I could feel her warmth against me, and it was natural to put my arms around her as we worked. Calla fit perfectly, and kissed my cheek.

“Who are ‘James and John?’ Do you know that one?” Calla asked. We only had a few left, and they were all kind of tributaries around forty-one across. I took a look.

“I don’t know, James Bond and his kid brother? It’s not a reference I know.” I counted letters. Thirteen spaces. The fourth one was the “S” from “Santa Anna.” The second one was the “O” from “prediction.”

We worked on the clues around it. Some of them were just as obscure.

“Is it cheating to look up stuff on the Internet?” I asked. “For instance, I have no idea what a ‘matador’s assistant’ would be called. I don’t speak much Spanish, for that matter.”

“You can’t cheat. You just solve what you can, and guess where you can, and hope you guess right.”

Some of them were just too hard. I shook my head. I didn’t like leaving them unsolved, and decided to look them up later, just so I’d know the answer. But forty-one across was bugging me because it was so general. James and John were common names. What would make them important enough to put in a crossword?

“If that was John and Paul I’d be thinking of the Beatles,” I said, pointing at the clue again.

“It’s way too long for something like that,” Calla said. “It’s thirteen letters. We’ve got some of them.”

I looked again. We had _ O_S_ _ TH _N_ER.

“Is it one word or more than one?” I asked. “How can you tell?”

“Yeah, they don’t put spaces when there are multiple words,” Calla said. Then she exclaimed, “Turgid!”

“Huh?”

“It solves twelve down.”

_O_S_ _ TH_NDER.

“I think the last part is ‘thunder,’ right there.” I said. I felt a slight chill. “See if ‘Sons of Thunder’ fits.”

“It totally fits! And I think it let’s me figure out some of these other ones, thanks!” Calla kissed my cheek again. “I wonder what it means?”

“I don’t know,” I said, feeling cold. “John and James, the Sons of Thunder. Is it a band? I’m not up on current music.”

“You hate not knowing, don’t you?” Calla grinned. “Go ahead, I know you want to look some of these up.”

She kissed my lips and turned back to the puzzle. I shrugged and slid off my chair, walking to the den. She was right. I did want to know.

I logged onto my computer and went onto the Internet. I did the simplest thing, I typed “John and James, Sons of Thunder” into Google.

The very first website was the La Vista Church of Christ, with a passage from Mark. I read the passage first and found this, Mark 3: 14-19:

13 And He went up on the mountain and called to Him those He Himself wanted. And they came to Him. 14 Then He appointed twelve, 4that they might be with Him and that He might send them out to preach, 15 and to have 5power 6to heal sicknesses and to cast out demons: 16 Simon, to whom He gave the name Peter; 17 James the son of Zebedee and John the brother of James, to whom He gave the name Boanerges, that is, “Sons of Thunder”; 18 Andrew, Philip, Bartholomew, Matthew, Thomas, James the son of Alphaeus, Thaddaeus, Simon the Cananite; 19 and Judas Iscariot, who also betrayed Him. And they went into a house.

John and James were two of Jesus’ disciples, sons of Zebedee, and Jesus called them “Boanerges.” The Sons of Thunder. La Vista Church’s page attributed the nickname to their zeal and courage as disciples. I wasn’t a “church” person, so I had to take their word for it.
I was really curious about this, despite my lack of a church background. Of course, the “Sons of Thunder” reference stood out. I wondered why Zebediah had chosen that for his terrorist organization? For that matter, “Zebediah” was pretty close to “Zebedee.” I opened another window and looked the two names up on Babynames.com. I found them both to mean the same thing in Hebrew: Endowed by God.

I wondered if Zebediah was some kind of religious nut, who believed God chose him for some great purpose. It would certainly explain a lot about his attitude.

The next link on the Google page led to Redland Baptist Church and a 2001 sermon on James and John. I skimmed it, not particularly interested in the writer’s personal anecdotes or preaching. I skipped down to the parts about John and James, who wanted to call down fire from heaven to destroy an unfaithful village.

The preacher went on to write about how John and James were zealous but also over-confident and prideful, and eventually became great disciples, displaying compassion and humility. James was the first martyr for the faith, apparently, and John lived the longest of all the disciples and was responsible for the book of the Revelation.

There were certainly parallels between the Biblical story and what I had seen Zebediah do in Kansas. He had amazing powers. They were clearly scientific, similar to the capabilities I’d seen Agent Johnson display, only on a grander scale. Zebediah even caused temporal disruptions, which affected the FBI’s time portal.

Did he think his powers were God-given? What a maniac! He certainly had his own crazy vision of what the future should be, and was doing his best to bring it about. I wasn’t all that surprised to find out that maybe Zebediah’s terrorist motivation was religious. After all, most terrorists had that kind of twisted ideology, taking a belief to an extreme.

I wondered if insight into religion would do me any good in dealing with Zebediah. I’d have to give that some serious thought after I stopped running the company. Maybe I could drop by that bookstore and find the Episcopal priest I’d met there, he might be able to fill in the gaps on my religious understandings. Finding a way to understand Zebediah might give me an idea on how to beat him.

The next link down from the first two was just the verses from Mark again, but the fourth page was an info page specifically on the “Sons of Thunder” nickname. The author actually sat down and worked out the context for “thunder” in the Bible. He found every verse and did the statistics on how the word was used. In metaphors it was used to describe God speaking, and actual weather phenomena were attributed to God in the Bible anyway.

Thunder was God speaking, so the author of this page maintained that the nickname “Sons of Thunder” was Jesus renaming James and John, the way he renamed Simon as “Peter.” So, the nickname really meant “Sons of God’s Word,” and the author pointed out that John himself called Jesus “God’s Word,” throughout his gospel and letters and even the Revelation. So, the disciple called “Son of God’s Word” wrote about Jesus, “God’s Word,” the most. Like he was the most devoted follower, a spiritual son.

“Wow, you must really be interested in those crossword answers,” Calla said from the doorway.

I smiled as I looked up at her. “Yeah, I just got busy reading about that first one, the Sons of Thunder thing. It’s Biblical.”

“Oh?” Calla said, coming into the room. I gestured for her to come closer so she came and sat on the edge of the desk, where she could see what I was doing.

“Yeah, it’s like a nickname for James and John, who were disciples. Some people say it’s because they were like impetuous and angry, but this guy says it’s because they followed God’s words the most closely in their lives. It has more to do with God speaking in the Bible than it does with like anger or pride.”

“I didn’t know you were at all religious,” Calla said.

“I’m not. I think I only went to church once in awhile, like Christmas or weddings, growing up. I just got reading because of your crossword puzzle. It was interesting.”

“Yes, but why the sudden interest?”

“I don’t know. It bugged me not to know the answer, and reading about it just took up some time. Sorry about that.”

“No biggie. We have all day to do whatever we want,” Calla smiled, taking my hands in hers.

“Yeah, I don’t have anything planned until tomorrow. I’m all yours.”

“What’s tomorrow?” Calla asked.

“Besides Monday? I was planning to go to the bank.”

“I’m off this week because of Thanksgiving. What bank are you going to? I have to make some deposits myself. And I need a new ATM card. I broke mine.”

“How did you manage that?” I asked.

“Oh, it was old and starting to bend, so it snapped when I used it at a store. Pretty silly, I guess, but I forget little things like that. Should have replaced it ages ago.”

“Well, whatever bank you’re going to, I can go there too,” I said.

“Oh?”

“Yeah, my dad did business with basically all of them. He wanted to know managers, have a sense of how each one did business. He has safety deposit boxes all over the city, in case of emergencies. I’ll go where you go.”

“I like the sound of that.”