Soon the Light Will Be Perfect

by Dave Patterson

Isaac pulls back the bedsheet that covers the window; we all squint. A large man lies on the bed taking heavy breaths. A shiny new oxygen tank sits next to the bed on the plywood floor.

  “Like the image of Mary in the desert,” the man says.

  My mother laughs but is cut short by a coughing fit. When she steadies herself, she says, “How do you feel?”

  “Like shit. I just keep waiting to die, but here I am,” he says. He’s covered up to his neck in a tattered afghan. His large body bulges underneath the fabric.

  “Well, if you’re alive then you’re going to eat,” my mother says.

  The man smiles. His oxygen tank hisses quietly.

  “I made lasagna.” She turns to me and I hold up the pan.

  Glenn nods. “You’re too much,” he says. “And how are you? Looks like you’re not dead yourself.”

  “Still kicking,” my mother says. She takes her sunglasses off. “We’ll leave this in the kitchen,” she says.

  “Stay for a bit,” Glenn says.

  I can tell by the strain in her eyes that my mother’s tired again, but she says, “Okay.”

  “It will do me some good to be with someone else fighting to stay alive,” Glenn says. “Show him where to put the lasagna,” he adds to Isaac. “You boys go outside and play.”

  I wonder how this man living in this trailer knows about my mother’s sickness. I give my mother a look, letting her know that I do not want to go outside and play with Isaac.

  “I’ll just be a minute,” is all she says.

  Isaac brings me to the kitchen, and I place the pan on the rusted stovetop of the two-burner stove. Even the mildew stink of the trailer cannot subdue the warm marinara smell.

  In the yard Isaac picks up rocks from the lot and hurls them against the battered steel of an old pickup truck on rusted rims. The clank startles me each time. I pick up a smooth rock and rub it between my fingers. When I heave it at the decaying vehicle, Isaac shakes his head and drops the stone in his hand, wandering behind the trailer. I chuck a couple more stones at the truck, then, not sure what else to do, I follow Isaac.

  Hills rise in the distance beyond the trailer. A rock cliff catches the afternoon light. I get an unsettled feeling from the way the cliff feels at once close and far away.

  There’s another shed just at the edge of the gravel lot.

  “What’s in there?” I ask.

  “It’s our shit,” Isaac says.

  “Shit?”

  Isaac nods and walks into the tall grass at the edge of the lot. I stare at the shed piled with shit and remember hearing my mom talk about this family after church one Sunday. She had told someone that a family she delivers food to goes to the bathroom in plastic bags and stacks them in a shed.

  The wind dies down and the stench becomes so strong I think I might vomit. I run to catch up with Isaac. When I find him, he’s crouched above a small pile of rocks. The stones have been cut into triangles. They look like they’ve been polished.

  “What are these?” I ask. I reach for one, and Isaac slashes at my arm with the rock he’s holding.

  “Mine,” he says. “You can’t have them.”

  On my forearm the slash from the stone darkens before drops of blood bubble out of the wound. “What the fuck?” I say.

  “These stones are mine. They’re arrowheads. I find them everywhere,” he says. “You can’t come here with food and take these from me. I know who you are.”

  Larry Anderson flashes in my mind, hanging from his leather belt in his trailer, recently laid off and cursed from entering the Native burial ground. Blood droplets stain the arrowhead in Isaac’s fist.

  “Mine,” he says. He slashes at me again with a cursed stone, this time grazing my ribs. The cotton fabric of my T-shirt is sliced open. Isaac stands and raises the polished stone at me.

  “I know you—from school,” he says. “You can’t have these.” He raises a black arrowhead gripped between his thumb and forefinger and pulls his arm back as if to slash at me again.

  Before he can act, I lunge forward and shove Isaac in the chest. He lands on his back, gasping. I don’t wait for him to get up. I sprint through the tall grass and past the shed filled with shit. The rock ledge looms in the distance.

  I let the metal trailer door clang behind me as I crash into the kitchen. My mother and Glenn laugh in the back of the trailer. I want to grab my mother and tell her we need to leave, but I haven’t heard her sound this happy in weeks. I wonder how she can find happiness here.

  In the kitchen the lasagna rests on the stove. My forearm throbs in pain. A trickle of blood slides down my skin from where Isaac has cut me.

  My mother laughs again, then starts to cough. Glenn laughs, too. In the yard, I see Isaac, bare-chested, arrowheads jutting from his closed fists. His eyes dart around the yard looking for me, before settling on the trailer.

  He starts to move, and I go to the kitchen and grab the glass lasagna pan off the stove. My mother laughs. Glenn coughs. Someone bangs against the wall in another room. Isaac stomps up the trailer steps. I examine the shiny foil of the warm lasagna pan suspended above the plywood floor. Blood streaks down my forearm. In a final offering to end the curse upon my family, I open my fingers and the pan begins its miraculous descent.

  V

  The ball knocks against the house. It’s relentless, savage. Knock. Pause. Knock. Pause. Knock. The rest of the house is quiet, except for my dad, who makes noise in the garage. Knock. Pause. Knock.

  My mother sleeps in her room. Nothing can wake her from her chemo dreams. She even sleeps through my father’s new habit of talking to her about the layoffs at work and something to do with defective guns while she snores softly. The ball knocking against the house can’t wake her. She doesn’t make a sound now. And I am listening. My ears are attuned to the world. I listen for anyone coming down the hall toward my bedroom. I listen for the phone to ring or the television to sound. I listen for the seven trumpets of the apocalypse Father Brian talks about in his sermons.

  But all I hear is the knocking of the tennis ball as it leaves my brother’s hand and raps against the clapboard siding of the house. Hot air comes into my room through the closed curtains. I am not deterred. I hold my breath to listen for any sounds beyond the knocking. Satisfied, I reach under my bed and pull out a shoebox. From inside the cardboard box, I remove a towel. I unroll it to reveal the eggshell blue bra.

  Knock. Pause. Knock.

  I press the padded fabric against my face and breath in. The sweet smell of laundry detergent burns.

  Knock. Pause. Knock.

  I take in deep breaths of the bra. My breathing quickens. The metal underwire digs into my cheek. I only mash it harder against my skin.

  The ball knocks more rapidly against the house. Knock-pause-knock.

  I am beholden to the nylon rubbing against my skin. The synthetic scent overwhelms. Acting on animal instinct, I shove the padded cups into my mouth and bite down. Knock-pause-knock-pause-knock. Faster and faster. I am choking on my euphoria. I try not to look at the rosary beads dangling from my bed frame, but of course I do. The feel of fabric against my gums produces goose bumps up and down my body. I push the bra into my mouth until the underwire tears at my lips and then I keep pushing. This is all new; I’m delirious with the ecstasy of shame and desire. Knock-pause-knock. Knock-pause-knock.

  I collapse on my mattress, rattling the rosary beads against the wooden bedpost. A yelp escapes my throat but is caught by the lacy cups pressed against my tongue. My gums are dry. I pull the bra out of my mouth. It’s darkened from saliva.

  Knock-pause-knock-pause. Pause. Pause. The sound of a muffled voice in the yard startles me.

  I fold the bra and place it in the nook of the towel. In my ritual, I roll the towel and place it into the shoebox. I slide the box under my bed and throw a sock into my hamper. The electricity o
f it all burns in my veins. This has to be part of God, I think, but it’s a part I must fear. My breathing fights to settle.

  The metal clang of our front door sounds. I jump.

  In the kitchen my brother pours Kool-Aid from a pitcher. Welfare juice we call it. I pour a glass.

  “Why are you sweating?” he asks.

  I wipe sweat from the bridge of my nose. “It’s summer,” I say. On a shelf by the telephone, a statue of St. Anthony holding Jesus as a child glares down at me.

  My brother takes his Kool-Aid to the living room.

  There’s a bang from the garage. Our father starts to swear but catches himself. I look out the side door and watch him hold planks of wood to see if they’re straight. Finding perfect boards to build our table torments him. A small pile of wood rests on the cracked cement floor.

  He looks up from the board he’s inspecting and motions for me to come into the garage. I wipe sweat from my neck and obey.

  “It’ll take weeks to finish, but this—” he motions at the planks of wood on the bench “—will all be transformed into a table where we’ll eat our meals.”

  I stare at the unfinished boards.

  He explains how to be sure a board is square, how he’ll have to measure and cut, how the urethane will protect the surface, how the wood will take shape over the summer, and I nod. Though what I want to know is how the chemo will shape the tumors in my mother, I settle for the answers he has.

  “I’m going to bring these boards back to the hardware store,” he says. “They’re not straight.”

  I help him load the wood into the back of our car. The ends hang out an open window.

  In the yard, my brother starts again with the tennis ball against the side of the house. My father looks at him over the frames of his glasses. He starts to say something but stops. We all know it won’t wake my mother. Nothing can. With a yank, he tightens a rope around the boards, pulling it snug. The sound of the rubbing nylon rope gives me goose bumps and makes my mouth dry. There’s a phantom sound of trumpets.

  “I’ll be right back,” my father says. “Stay outside so you don’t disturb your mother. Keep your brother outside, too.” He gives me a wide-eyed look, though he knows I can’t control my brother.

  “Sure,” I say.

  Gravel crunches underneath car tires; he drives away with the boards sticking out the window. I sit on the front steps. An ant crawls up my leg and I flick it off with absolute authority. Knock. Pause. Knock. Pause. My brother holds the ball for a moment. He tosses it up, catches it in his palm and inspects the frayed wool shell.

  “Do you believe in hell?” he asks without looking up at me.

  “Of course.” I can’t imagine an existence without the threat of eternal damnation.

  He thinks for a minute and says, “It’s true, you know. Hell exists and we’re all an abomination.”

  I study his face to see if he believes his words. His expression is flat as he stares at the tennis ball. I wonder if he knows what I was doing in my room.

  “You better be righteous when He returns,” he says. “Don’t be doing anything sinful when the trumpets sound.” He must know. How? He stares at me, unsmiling, then he laughs, nearly falling over. After a few exaggerated moments, he stands upright. “You’re such a sucker,” he says and laughs again. “Do you really buy that shit?”

  I taste laundry detergent in my mouth. I can’t shake the synthetic burn. I spit on the steps and watch an ant flounder in my saliva.

  “Abomination,” he laughs, shaking his head. Knock. Pause. Knock.

  Without looking at him, I run into the house. I don’t care if he believes or not. I do. In my room, I pull the shoebox out from under my bed. I tuck the box under my arm. Outside my parents’ bedroom, I press my ear to the door and listen for the faint hum of my mother’s breathing. The muffled whir of a fan drones.

  I slip out the back door and sprint across the backyard, the box securely clutched in both hands. I’m over the wire fence in our backyard and into the forest. I run and run. Sweat develops beneath my T-shirt. I weave through saplings and thick maple boughs. I run until my lungs hurt, until the laundry detergent scalds every membrane.

  I kneel in the pine needles. Sunlight punctures holes through the canopy of leaves above. Tears brim in my eyes. A bulldozer roars from the junkyard in the distance. I drop the box, lift the lid, unroll the towel and reveal the bra. The fabric is still wet from my saliva.

  Powerless, I shove the bra back into my mouth. Tears roll down my cheeks. My sobs are muffled by the nylon cups. The underwire rips at my flesh. The full wattage of desire runs through my veins down to my fingertips. Every muscle in my body contracts and relaxes at once. I bite into the fabric until my teeth hurt.

  The eggshell blue bra had called to me from the clothesline. My brother and I tossed a football in the yard while my father set up our old kitchen table for the woman from church whose husband fled to Montreal with another woman. I shouldn’t have stolen it, but it stirred slowly in the naked breeze, and I snatched it from its clothespin and shoved it in my back pocket when my father called for us to leave. The woman is younger than my parents. At mass she stopped receiving communion, because she’s filed for divorce. When we line up for the body and blood, she crosses her arms for a blessing when she approaches Father Brian. I love her for that.

  I rip the foam cups out of my mouth by the back straps. I marvel at the power of this fabric. As if shocked by the bra’s voltage, I drop it to the forest floor. I cover the eggshell blue fabric with dried pine needles. The edges of the fabric still show. I tear the cardboard shoebox into small sections. My heart knocks in my chest. With the cardboard on top of the brittle pine needles, I pull a book of matches from my pocket. I strike a match and savor the sulfur stench. It coats my lungs. I drop the match. At first nothing, then smoke. Finally yellow flames rise. The fabric burns until it blackens. I have the urge to reach into the flames to retrieve the bra and shove the burning fabric back into my mouth. But I resist. I am a sinner. This is my offering.

  A tennis ball brushes past my leg. Behind me, my brother smiles. He stares at the flames. He sees the charred underwire glow with heat. He catches a glimpse of the eggshell blue fabric as it burns. His smile widens across his face.

  He knows what this is. He was the one who had pointed out the bra on the clothesline as we played in the yard while our father assembled the table. He had said, “That is so fucking hot.”

  Now he says, “You dirty sinner,” and smiles.

  I turn away from him and see that the fire has spread across the forest floor. I don’t move. My brother pushes past me and stomps on the fire to put it out.

  “Get up!” he screams. “Put out the fire.”

  I jump up, and we dance our wild dance over the fire. It licks at our legs and melts the plastic of our sneakers, but we trample the flames.

  Standing back, we examine the smoldering earth. The ground is blackened. A flame ignites from the smoke, and my brother stamps it with his foot.

  Neither of us speaks as we wait for more flames to appear. When none do, he says, “I didn’t think you had it in you.” He sounds proud.

  “I didn’t know, either,” I say.

  “It’s in all of us.”

  We walk back in the direction of the house before our father returns with the wood for the table and our mother awakens from her medicated sleep to make us dinner in the microwave. I look back over my shoulder at the smoking forest floor. The underwire of the bra winks as it catches the sun.

  VI

  We collect sins. Venial sins. The sins we are told we are going to commit anyway, so why not commit them on purpose? Sins that can be forgiven by Father Brian sitting behind a screen. Four Hail Marys, three Our Fathers, a couple Glory Bes and poof.

  O my God, I am heartily sorry for having offended Thee...

  We steal S
wiss rolls from the cupboard. Lie about our homework. Steal cigarettes from the carton my mother still keeps in her closet. Sneak into the neighbor’s yard to peek in her window.

  ...and I detest all my sins because of Thy just punishments...

  We think unclean thoughts. All the time. Sometimes on purpose, sometimes not. My brother tells me it’s natural. I try to embrace his erotic ethos, but I clutch at shame and watch the scars calcify over my soul. In church, images from porn movies my brother has shown me flash in my head like an untracked VCR. I try to shake them and not get hard when I ring the bells during the consecration of the blood.

  In confession we learn the nuance of language. If we imagine the feel of a woman’s bare spine until the bliss of it pushes us beyond ourselves to someplace new, we tell Father Brian we had unclean thoughts. He never presses for specifics.

  “You must try harder to push these thoughts away,” he says.

  “Of course,” we lie, knowing we’ll keep thinking these thoughts whether we want to or not, leaving the confessional with one sin in the bank for next time.

  ...but most of all because they offend Thee, my God, Who are all good and deserving of my love...

  We savor each sin. Feasting on the sweet flavor of lying to our father when he gets home from work. Eating a carton of ice cream meant for our mother after chemotherapy. Watching the static thrum of our television when we should be cleaning the bathroom so our mother won’t have to. Sticking our noses into the steel container of urethane in the garage, breathing in until the cold edges of the world go blank.

  ...I firmly resolve, with the help of Thy grace...

  We compare our stash of sins, bonded briefly by our treachery even as we drift apart with age. We inspire each other. Give each other chills with the inventiveness of our misdeeds. We take notes. We ready ourselves for the next delicious transgression. All the while growing frightened of each other and ourselves.

  ...to confess my sins, to do penance and to amend my life. Amen.