by Travis Smith
Strange sounds echoed and emanated from the caverns within. By the time a small horde of abysmal creatures emerged from a distant tunnel and accosted the stranger at the other end of the rail yard, Patrick had already disappeared into the darkness.
The Cave:
Part 1
“W elcome to Hell,” the man with the strange voice said.
The Stranger glanced once again behind him for the tar pit into which he had moments before been descending, but there was naught save for the dark cave’s hard floor. “Who are you?” he asked.
“Chris,” the man said, extending a thin hand to be shaken.
“Who?” The Stranger asked, still overwhelmed with bafflement about the whole situation.
“Christopher Cross,” he said with a dopey grin. “No jokes!” he warned, his face twisting in mock sternness.
The Stranger closed his eyes in exasperation and shook his head. “You needn’t concern yourself with that.”
“Who are you?” Chris asked in kind.
“It doesn’t matter,” The Stranger said, allowing himself to lean against a rock wall and slide to a seated position, his eyes closed, still breathing heavily from the upset moments ago.
Chris stared for a moment and tilted his head in concession to The Stranger’s valid point. “It might.”
“It doesn’t.”
“Are you The Devil?” Chris asked.
“I don’t think so,” The Stranger said, only partly paying attention anymore.
Chris paused for a moment. “Then you’re right. It doesn’t matter.”
“I don’t understand any of this,” The Stranger said, more to himself than to Christopher.
“I know, I didn’t expect dying to be like this either,” Chris agreed.
The Stranger looked around the dark cave and shook his head.
“To be honest,” Chris continued as he sat down beside The Stranger, “what I’m most pissed about is that apparently the Christians were right, and I was wrong.” The man spoke casually and appeared to be without a woe in the world, but his final lamentation seemed to snag stubbornly in his throat.
“I haven’t the slightest idea about what you’re saying,” The Stranger said dismissively.
“What about it?” Chris asked.
“None of it!” he snapped back.
“Geez. Well, lucky you. I had the shit shoved down my throat from the moment I was born. I thought Christians were everywhere. Where are you from?”
The Stranger observed the odd man with wary confusion. “Reprise,” he said at last.
“Reprise,” Chris repeated. “Where is that? Europe? Is that what your accent is?”
The Stranger narrowed his eyes and shook his head slowly. He understood only about three-quarters of the words the man was saying.
“We don’t get much world history in my neck of the woods. I grew up in Tennessee.”
Chapter 3:
Tennessee
1
“B ut the Scripture declares that ‘the whole world is a prisoner of sin, so that what was promised, being given through faith in Jesus Christ, might be given to those who believe.’ Galatians 3:22,” Reverend David Oswald Goodwin reminded his flock. The verse was met with emphatic nodding and raising of hands by the aging men and women lining Reverend Goodwin’s pews. “And I will leave y’all with this,” he concluded. “‘Whoever believes in the Son has eternal life, but whoever rejects the Son will not see life, for God’s wrath remains on him.’ John 3:36.”
A murmur of amens and hallelujahs and praise Gods emanated throughout the crowd like tiny waves sloshing to and fro in a jostled bowl of Jim Jones’ punch.
“And, as I always say, Evil may pursue you, but the Good will always win!” Reverend Goodwin flashed his charming, immaculate smile to the usual eruption of applause and bowed his head before stepping away from the podium. He wore a $2,000 black suit to match his perfect black GQ hairdo that boasted just a dash of salt-and-pepper above the temples.
His next thirty minutes or more would be spent standing at the door to the East Tennessee Baptist Church of Christ shaking hands and smiling his wolf’s grin into a sea of naivety—his sheep’s faces. Would any one of them suspect what lay beneath his polished surface? Of course not. They never did. If anyone asked, “Why isn’t a handsome man like you married?” or, “Why didn’t you ever have any kids?” he would wave his hands and invoke the name of their lord Jesus, amen. How he spent his alone time would not serve well to promote his public image, and he had two separate but equal divine decrees: Lead the masses to God; and smite the unholy with a heavenly wrath.
When he finished bidding his many members farewell, Goodwin made his way to his car and drove straight home. His house remained the sole property at the end of a modest dirt road. It was just off of the main routes but still secluded enough to assure the reverend of his continued privacy.
February snow lined the streets, and when he turned onto his dirt road (now in fact a packed-snow road), Reverend Goodwin murmured in disdain for the coming spring that would leave the terrain soggy and muddy for a month or more. Icicles hung from his roof all the way around the house and dripped casually in the midday sun. Goodwin parked his car and approached his front steps. He inspected several of the icicles before tapping on four of them to knock them loose. He collected the four, which were each greater than eighteen inches, and made his way inside to put them in his otherwise empty freezer.
After, he made himself a sandwich with a heap of fresh meats he’d picked up at the market a few days prior. With this lunch, he walked through the dark kitchen into the darker den and sat down at his desk. He withdrew a bottle of pills from the desk drawer and placed a lithium tablet onto his tongue. After swallowing the tablet dry, Reverend Goodwin opened the web browser on his computer and began his daily search.
2
As endorphins flooded his brain, Christopher closed his eyes. In the moments during which he faded to nothingness, he was not visited by comforting illusions, but a season-finale recap of his sad life—a series of slights that had shaped him and driven him to this tragic point.
—
A twelve-year-old Christopher Cross stepped off the school bus in Huntsville, Tennessee. The bus dropped off six or eight kids each day at the end of Main St. in the old-fashioned part of town. They split apart and each walked to their respective homes as the bus pulled away. By the time Christopher reached the old Five and Dime variety store, only two other kids were still walking in the same direction.
“Hey, fat shit!” a voice called from the empty parking lot in the alley beside the Five and Dime.
Christopher saw three high school boys smoking cigarettes and grinning savagely in his direction. He averted his eyes and continued walking home.
The older boys trotted over and flanked Christopher on either side. “Where ya headed off to so fast?” one asked.
“He’s tryin’ to run off some o’ that fat!” another exclaimed.
“Runnin’ back home to momma so she can pick you out a new outfit? What the fuck even is that shit?”
In truth, Christopher’s mother played little role in his attire, and that is likely what made him stand out to others as an easy target.
He kept his mouth shut—like always—and swallowed hard against the sting of frustrated, helpless tears in his eyes. His only aim at that point was to make it home before he started crying. If they saw the damage they could inflict, they would never stop.
“Look at his hair,” one of the boys said. “What a fuckin’ faggot.”
Christopher tried to conceal his cowlick by combing his dark hair over, but, at a certain length, the hair would curl as it dried and make his neatly combed hair droop atop his round face. He ran a thick, sweaty palm across his hairline and hoped it would flatten his bangs down above his forehead.
The boys laughed at his futile attempt, and one planted a steel-toed-booted foot into Christopher’s ass, causing him to stumble forward.
Th
e other kids from the bus had hastened their pace and created a gap between themselves and the spectacle behind them. Christopher winced and tried to walk faster without making it too noticeable that he was doing so.
3
A gust of wind drove bits of snow and ice against the window, stirring Faye Anne Garrison from a heavy sleep. She opened her eyes groggily and struggled to blink away the blurring of her vision and the spinning of the unfamiliar room in which she lay.
“Shh—iit,” she slurred, attempting to sit upright. The last thing she remembered was being out drinking with her friends. They’d smoked a little pot and taken some pills, but she usually didn’t let herself reach this point.
A candle flickered in the corner of the dark room and intensified the sensation that the room was spinning around her.
“I hear the voice inside my head,” a strange voice whispered.
Faye Anne snapped upright and looked around the room, her heart blasting the grogginess out of her system more and more with each pump.
“The voice of Christ, alive and dead,” the voice continued.
“Who’s there?” she demanded to the apparently empty room.
It seemed to be the middle of the night. She was in what looked like a cabin room that was minimally furnished. The bed in which she lay, an empty night stand, a small rug upon hardwood floors, and a table holding the lit candle were the only objects with her in the room. There was one door and three windows.
Faye Anne carefully stood up from the bed and tested her balance on her feet.
“It’s led me places that I’ve been, to rid the world of vice and sin.”
She looked around the room and through all three closed windows. There was no discernible source of the voice. Wind gusted again outside, peppering the windows with dry snow.
“What is this?” she asked, not bothering to keep her voice from shaking. It rose to a frantic crescendo as she ran for the door.
The door was locked. She pounded on it twice and screamed. “Help!”
“It tells me things I ought to do,” the voice said.
Faye Anne turned and ran to the window. She pounded on it and screamed again and tried to lift it. Locked. No latch.
She made her way to the second window and yanked it upward; it rose without hesitation, sending a blast of freezing night air into her face and blowing her disheveled hair back out of her face.
“And now it’s led me here to you.”
She crawled through the window without looking back and fell flat on her face into the snow. As she stood back upright, an unimaginable blow struck her on the side of the head. It felt as though she’d been walloped with a baseball bat made of glass. As she crumpled to her knees in the snow, an explosion of tiny ice shards sprayed from the side of her head and against the house’s outside wall.
4
High school treated Christopher no better than middle school. By the time he was in ninth grade, greater than half the school already knew him by his unfortunate nickname, Rip Van Tinkle. He’d earned the title after wetting himself when he slept over at a friend’s birthday party over the summer. Fourteen-year-olds just don’t deal in decency and discretion when it comes to the embarrassing personal matters of their friends.
“My boyfriend watches porn and masturbates.”
“What a pig!”
Christopher was sitting behind two junior girls in the gym’s bleachers before a late-fall pep rally. He’d been listening to one ditzy blonde complain about her boyfriend’s “perversions” for half an hour now, but he couldn’t help but feel the actions she was describing were normal.
“I think most guys watch porn when they masturbate,” he finally offered, trying to sound casual rather than confrontational.
The blonde girl turned to face him with a disgusted grimace that could have put a horror actress to shame. Her friend didn’t even turn. Christopher saw her eyes cut toward him, but she clearly couldn’t bear to face him directly for fear she may projectile vomit.
“Uh, who asked you, perv?” the girl said with genuine revulsion.
“I’m just saying,” Christopher backpedaled, “it’s not about you … I think it’s just … a guy thing.”
“Okay, well you need to get help.”
“Yeah!” her friend agreed.
“No,” Christopher stammered, “I wasn’t saying that I do.”
“Right, you probably came on yourself and had a wet dream and had to piss everywhere to cover it up.”
The blonde girl’s friend dropped her jaw and brought her hands to her open mouth in a feigned attempt to conceal her gasp and laughter.
“Actually, bitch, I was trying to make you feel better about the fact that your shitty boyfriend isn’t attracted to your flat, white ass. And just because you’re too stupid and naive to understand the complexities of sexuality doesn’t give you the right to condescend to everyone else around you.”
That’s what Christopher wanted to say. Instead, he locked his eyes on the gym floor beneath them and resisted the burning heat that was working its way up the back of his neck, hoping against hope that not too many people around him overheard the exchange.
5
“I hear the voice inside my head,
The voice of Christ, alive and dead.
It guides me when I’ve gone astray
And keeps my evil thoughts at bay.
When I can’t stand to life’s demands,
He comes through me to guide my hand.”
Darkness. The whirring of water rushing through pipes and pouring into the kitchen sink. The noxious smell of bleach and lye stinging and burning the back of his throat. A deafening crash that echoed throughout his cramped quarters and caused him to jolt painfully. His knees pinned to his chest as he struggled not to call out while silent tears streamed down his face.
“Again!” his mother screamed from the kitchen as she slammed her foot against the latched cabinet.
She was standing in front of it, rubber gloves extending above each elbow, frantically scrubbing each individual toy in the house.
“They’re covered with germs,” she would say. “I can feel ’em crawlin’ on me when I have to put ’em away for y’all two.”
She scrubbed those toys in bleach and lye until the paints faded and the plastics corroded and the chemicals built up to lethal levels. Even after young David Goodwin’s little brother put their plastic truck in his mouth and had a fatal seizure in his sleep, their mother continued bustling about the house with her cleaning supplies, obsessively lamenting over every speck of dust, compulsively scrubbing every open surface.
David was six years old when his younger brother passed away, and his mother’s denial only redoubled her obsessive-compulsive tendencies. His father had never been a real part of his life, and the Sunday School class at his church tip-toed around the topic of death and mortality. Thus, David was cast along a lonesome and damaging path of coming to understand and cope with the tragic death of a loved one.
After lunch his mother had looked out the kitchen window to find David prodding disconsolately at a dead squirrel in their driveway with a stick. She had flung open the front door and snatched her remaining son off his feet and dragged him into the kitchen. She crammed him into the empty cupboard below the sink and latched it from the outside.
“Say it,” she’d demanded.
“I hear the voice inside my head,” David began. He trembled in his dark confinement and glanced toward the wall separating this cabinet space from the empty one on the other side where his squalling brother used to find himself. “The voice of Christ, alive and dead …”
“Again!” Ms. Goodwin screamed when he finished the verse.
David struggled to steady his young, quivering voice as he recited the verse his mother taught him again. He looked again, uncomprehending, toward where his brother’s cabinet was and could hold back the sobs no longer.
“Don’t you dare start that squallin’!” his mother yelled, kicking the locked c
abinet again. “You know it grinds my gears.”
By now David had learned not to say, “I’m sorry,” anymore, but to just continue with his mantra.
“Don’t apologize to me!” his mother would say. “Apologize to your Father!”
So David only continued. “It guides me when I’ve gone astray … And keeps my evil thoughts at bay …”
6
By his junior year of high school, Christopher’s adolescent chunks evened out as his bones lengthened. He had grown from a short, round, greasy-haired kid into a lanky young man who never left the house without product in his hair. But people still didn’t like him—it seemed there was more than just his weight that had made him a target for ridicule around northeastern Tennessee.
“Prom is such a joke,” he told his friend Richie over lunch. “We should get drunk at my place and go to Earl’s Diner.”
“Can we wear tuxedoes?” Rich asked.
Christopher laughed. “If you really want to drop a couple hundred on a pair of tuxes, I’m in.”
“No, no, we can wear PJs for all I care. That sounds way better than what I had planned to do tonight.”
“And what was that? Jerk off watching HGTV?”
“Fuck you very much,” Richie said with a grin.
“Oh! Now we’re on the same page!” Christopher said.
Richie shook his head with a smile, dismissing his friend’s crass sense of humor, as he often did.
Later that evening, after 10:30 PM, Richie and Christopher sat across from each other in Earl’s Diner. Christopher’s mother had gone on a date with some new asshole named Dale. Chris had observed her pattern for years now, and she and Dale were just a few short weeks away from the moving-in-together phase, at which point they would yell at each other and drink heavily every night until the animosity turned physical. That would mark the downhill-phase that lasted a week or two until the guy moved out and was never heard from again. But for tonight, Christopher and Richie had the house (and the fridge) to themselves, and they had been drinking and playing video games since the end of the school day.