This is an excerpt from the novel Toward the Bad I Keep Turning, which is available now.

“When the truth is discovered by someone else, it loses something of its attractiveness.” —Alexander Solzhenitsyn

I was fourteen years old and with my father, who at the time was a lay minister and social worker. He was on one of his summer missionary trips to Latin America supported by our church denomination. A sincere, devout, and humble Christian, he was without a devious or unkind bone in his gentle body. He was, as those around me growing up would say, “a Man of God.” His entire life, he devoted to loving his neighbor as himself, doing good deeds, and spreading the hope of the Gospel, the “Good News” of Jesus Christ to those he believed most in need. In my still innocent fourteen-year-old eyes, he was as perfect a human being as God would see fit to put on this earth. I had hoped to be like him.

This mission excursion took us to the Dominican Republic. It was our first time there, though not the first trip to Latin America—we usually went to Mexico or Honduras. My Dad spoke passable, plebian Spanish he’d learned as a kid working on the fruit farms with the Mexican migrant laborers who made the long trek north to Michigan’s western lake counties in the summers for the harvests. With the summers I had spent on these mission trips with my Dad from a very young age, my Spanish was better than his.

Momma tried…tried very hard, that is, to discourage us from going to the DR. She’d been reading about bad things going on there. She pitched a fit when we decided to go. Momma tried. We should have listened to her. Over the years, Dad had traveled to many poor places, some of them not completely safe. Most of them were certainly not comfortable. He went wherever “the Lord called him.” Wherever he went, he shared the poverty and material hardships of the people he ministered to, with grace and dignity. We did not know it when we set out, but this journey would be the last of its kind for both of us.

At the time of this mission trip to the DR, the sadistic and venal Rafael Leónidas Trujillo Molina was President and Dictator-for-life of this Caribbean playground, where gambling and prostitution made up the biggest pieces of his revenue streams. I say “his” because he owned everything worth owning in the country and, as dictators are typically inclined, only cared to share his “stuff” with his family and his closest “friends.” He ruled, as they say, with an iron fist. His enforcers were a cadre of loyal, ruthless yes-men who held nothing back when the serfs stepped out of line. That wasn’t very far or very often, given the brutal proclivities of these gorillas with the green light for open-throttled beatings, a truncheon always handy. To the casual, outside observer, the Dominican Republic was a safe, easygoing, and fun place. In a shocking, painful way, Dad and I discovered the opposite.

One of the more remarkable and ingenious of President Trujillo’s “team building” exercises was to select, from one of his trusted consiglieres on the rise, a comely, pubescent daughter. The girl’s father would then be “asked” to arrange an intimate little “party”—just the daughter and “El Jefe,” as Trujillo was affectionately monikered. In his palace, El Jefe would then “deflower” the unfortunate and unsuspecting maiden, making her Daddy into a knowing accomplice to the rape of his daughter. The monumental betrayal, terror, and depravity of Trujillo’s sexual predations are captured rivetingly in the historical novel La fiesta del chivo (Feast of the Goat), by the great Peruvian writer Mario Vargas Llosa. The novel unravels itself from the beginning as a nightmarish flashback memory through the traumatized experience of one of his adolescent victims. The novel also recounts in brutal, graphic detail the assassination of the “Goat” in 1961 and the orgy of savage revenge-taking that followed in its wake. Not recommended reading for those with a weak stomach or a high estimation of human nature.

Call it “God moving in His mysterious ways” or the worst sort of luck imaginable for a well-intentioned gringo preacher-man and his tag-along, pimple-faced, teenage son doing “the Lord’s work,” as we humbly imagined. Either way, my father and I just happened to be in the DR spreading the Gospel when Trujillo got whacked. The Boss-Man, in his 1957 white Chevy, was on the road from Santo Domingo, where Dad and I were staying, to San Cristobal, where he kept his regular mistress stashed. He was looking forward, no doubt, to a spirited session of “rumpy-pumpy.”

A hit squad had set up an ambush just off the road. Four shooters took El Jefe and his driver out of this world with a sawed-off shotgun, pistols, and a couple of semi-automatic rifles. When the smoke cleared, he was quite a mess. It was a challenge for all the King’s undertakers to gather Rumpy-Pumper’s pieces and put them back together again. The shooters were locals—home grown Dominicans. Their weapons came courtesy of some guy named “Kennedy” from the American government. More on that item of interest and importance a bit later.

All hell broke loose on the island after the hit. Trujillo’s son took charge, chasing down and killing his father’s assassins—with one exception—in an especially, uh, “spectacular” way that was intended to make a deep, lasting impression on these unfortunate islanders. His hirelings occupied themselves rounding up a lot of other suspects—real and imagined—many of whom were subject to “enhanced” modes of interrogation.

My Dad and I scrambled to hide out in the house of one of our host families. We feared that a major shit-storm was about to hit. It did. We had no way of knowing what exactly was going to go down—who to fear, who was in danger, and how bad things were going to get before we could get off the island. The chaos we thought was coming never happened—just sadistic retaliation and brutal repression, a piece of which clobbered the Man of God and his wide-eyed kid.

Trujillo Junior’s goons were searching for and finally found my Dad. Busting into the host house, they pushed me down face first to the floor and pressed a pistol barrel against my forehead. There’s nothing you can imagine like a gun pressed against your face to concentrate your mind and collapse your sphincter. They grabbed Dad, cuffed his hands behind his back, slapped a chunk of duck-tape over his mouth, and yanked a black hood down over his head. Out of the house they dragged him, stuffed him onto the backseat floor of a black Buick, and off they disappeared. They also did quite the number on our host family. They roughed them up badly, including breaking the jaw of the elderly grandfather, Don Armando, when he tried to intercede on Dad’s behalf. They also paused a bit before they left to paw over the beauteous sixteen-year-old daughter, Mariela, with whom in just a few days I’d fallen immediately and hopelessly in love.

The defunct Trujillo’s equally sadistic little Junior was suspicious that Dad’s mission-work was a cover and that he may have had Fidel-inspired Cuban or mainland involvement with the planning of the hit. His goons put him through an intensive three-day interrogation that you might say permanently changed his perspective, generally, on the world and, specifically, on the power of God’s grace and the goodness of Christian love. I floated precariously through a nightmare of terror and fear that was far beyond the reach of what my undeveloped imagination had ever conceived. Those next seventy-two hours were sheer mental agony. I cried, pissed my pants, and agonized over what they were doing to my Dad, wondering if I’d ever see him, Mom, and my sisters again. Terrible, recurring nightmares from this mission-gone-bad would come crashing in upon me in unrelenting waves for many years.

Finally, they turned him loose—filthy, soaked in his own urine, and covered with excrement. Our host family helped Dad clean up. We pulled ourselves together as best we could so that we could make it to an airplane and fly back to Michigan. Mom, my sisters, and our friends met us at the Detroit airport as we, zombie-like, emerged from the plane. They were beside themselves—completely traumatized and in shock. Our homecoming was bitter—an intense mix of relief and immeasurable sorrow.

It did not appear to me that the goons had done lasting physical damage to my Dad, other than knocking out a couple of his teeth. After those three days, they decided that he was actually what he said he was, a simple Pastor on a religious mission. As an American citizen, there was no upside for them to maim or kill him, as that might not sit well with the folks in the U.S. State Department. But it was a month before he could eat much and utter more than ten words at a time. He never told me what exactly they did to him during those three days, and I was always loath to ask. We didn’t talk about it. He was never the same. Neither was I.

His religion dropped away. Not immediately. It ebbed away slowly but perceptibly over several years. One day, there he was, a wholly different man than the one who had years before left his safe, comfortable life to carry his faith to the people of the Dominican Republic: faithless, churchless…and restless. Over the following years, he switched jobs frequently. He’d been a social worker, but that that sort of work requires something inside of you that he no longer had. He tried selling real estate, encyclopedias, and used cars, drove long distance semi-trucks for a while, and attempted, unsuccessfully, to learn to repair TVs. He wasn’t much of a technical guy. Finally, he got a rural mail delivery route for the U.S. Post Office, which he did until he retired. He preferred, by then, to work by himself, driving the tree-lined country and township roads, putting the utility bills, post-cards, and letters in the farmers’ mailboxes. He became a voracious reader—of medieval European history, perhaps in an attempt to locate himself in a long-ago spiritual universe. He even retrieved and improved upon his High School Latin so that he could read the Patristic Church Fathers in the original. My mother suffered grievously for my father, watching the spiritual world of the man she had loved and admired so profoundly gradually and finally completely collapse. He was no longer the “Man of God” I had idolized as a boy; he was a naïve good guy who had haplessly stumbled into the wrong place and gotten raped by reality.