Lies & Ugliness

by Brian Hodge

  “Or how about ‘Christ on a crutch’?”

  “It’s the most beautifully hideous thing I’ve ever seen.”

  And it’s still everything she remembers. Not so with most personal icons; the mind exaggerates, oversells you on your own fuzzy, dimming past. But this? This has remained true to recollection. Time hasn’t diminished it one bit.

  “So was the sculptor drunk, you think, or just really, really bad?” Rik asks.

  “My friends and me, we had this theory that it was done by some relative of whoever’s buried here, and the rest of the family couldn’t say no. But whether or not that’s true…”

  Presumably the statue was intended to represent Jesus. Jesus as the Good Shepherd, come to usher the dead sheep back into the celestial fold. But he’s been made with such incompetent overkill, if the sky opened and beams of light formed a stairway to heaven, he’d have real trouble finding willing company for the walk back.

  From sod and grass to the crown of his head he stands a hulking eight feet tall, with arms outstretched, and maybe on some statues the gesture would appear welcoming. But not this one. Feet as blocky as work boots stray from beneath the hem of a robe as big around as an oak trunk. His hands are chunky, with non-opposable thumbs and crookedly splayed fingers. Rik points to them.

  “So maybe this explains the untold story behind him throwing the money-changers out of the temple,” Rik says. “They broke his fingers over gambling debts.”

  The robe hangs funny, so that what the sculptor doubtless meant to look like natural folds instead give the impression of misshapen anatomy, with lumps and crooked bones. It’s the Elephant Jesus, with a grim, jut-jawed face whose beady eyes sit off-center, one too close to the nose and the other too far away. Worst of all, his skull is flattened and his forehead bulges outward with an apex just right of center.

  “If he’s got water on the brain,” says Rik, “wouldn’t you think he could turn it into wine, and at least look like he’s in a better mood?”

  Claire laughs. Rik is reacting the same way anyone does when first confronted by the Patron Saint of Cranial Deformity. You have to make fun of it, humiliate it, have to, to rob the statue of its latent menace. Put it in its ludicrous place, because the other alternative isn’t much of an option: realizing that should you entertain one stray, sinful thought, here is a Jesus with a thug’s demented face who might pluck you from the ground and crush you in his grizzly bear arms.

  She’s brought her bulky field bag along from the car, heavy with both of her cameras, one a Nikon digital and the other an older Pentax loaded with black-and-white infrared film. While she kneels to open the bag and remove her gear, Rik is circling the Saint, then makes the observation that the name and date on the flat stone sunk into the earth before the Saint’s feet have been obliterated, letters crumbled to rubble and secrecy and never restored.

  “Who’s buried here?” he asks.

  “Good question.”

  “So how long’s this atrocity been standing, then?”

  She shrugs. “As long as I can remember, and probably a lot longer than that.”

  “You and your friends, none of you were curious enough to ask around?”

  “When something’s always been there, you don’t think all that much about it, do you? You just take it for granted.” She’ll start with the infrared; affixes the filter over the lens. “What’s the matter? I thought you historians liked mysteries. Or is it just that you associate-professor-types would rather have it served up neat and already analyzed to death?”

  “Now, let’s put Miz Bitch back in the closet,” he says. “I’m just surprised none of you even thought to ask. I would’ve.”

  “Sorry, Rik. As a teenager it just wasn’t a real priority. But if it raises your opinion of us any, I think a friend of mine named Jeff tried to find out about it, he just didn’t have any luck. You can find people who know about the statue, they’ve been out here to see it or they remember it from a dare or something, it’s just tough finding someone who can tell you where it came from.”

  Rik glances up at the thing’s spread arms and surly demeanor. “Maybe he killed them all.”

  “Yeah, and what better place to hide the bodies. Okay, no distractions now, I have to concentrate.”

  Rik takes the cue and fades away, continuing on ahead to explore and losing himself amidst the trees, the stones, the brightly shining leaves. The Saint duly humbled and just another curiosity to him now, a grotesquerie in rural baroque, and for a moment she watches him leave, drenched by the shadows of the canopy. His long coat is olive-tan, great camouflage for autumn. Breezes play with the flop of hair that she coaxed him into growing longish in front, so he’d look trendier, so the two of them would match for gallery openings and the like, and the last thing she sees him doing is swiping at his nose, because the hair still tickles, he says, he’s not used to it. Rik. Professor Avery. Her eternal fiancé.

  Claire focuses and snaps, focuses and snaps, squeezing everything she can from light and angle and perspective. All right, so she’s not been entirely forthright with him, making it seem like this nostalgic photo op is a happy consequence of introducing Rik to the Saint, when in fact it’s the other way around, and why should it even matter? Claire feeling as though she’s getting by with some clever deceit, pulling one over on him.

  Once she develops the film, these negatives will have Paris written all over them. A one-of-a-kind item she can bring to Gerard Rameau’s table. Yes, she’ll be nothing but a lowly apprentice, yes, she’ll be doing his grunt-work, and yes, she’s going there to be a sponge and soak up whatever technical expertise she can. But one never knows. Would you have a look at this? Of course, Claire, what is it? Oh, just a little piece of hell back home, I thought you might find it amusing. And maybe it will spark his imagination.

  Rameau keeps one foot in old-school tech, where his real alchemy has always been in the darkroom, long after the photographs have been shot. Raw ore, that’s all any negative is to him; base metal, waiting to be made into gold. He combines the seamless, otherworldly enlarger manipulations of Jerry Uelsman with the grimy, unsettling eroticism of Joel-Peter Witkin to evoke a phantasmagoric never-never world of flesh, fetish, and fantasy. She’d be a fool to believe that no one has ever brought to him negatives of their own, hoping for the crumb of a co-credit, briefly his equal, but then the Saint is peerlessly unique.

  She has two rolls in the can and is repacking the cameras when Rik comes strolling back, enough years gone by that he’s developed an uncanny sense of timing about these things. Knowing her a little better than she wants to be known, because from there it’s just one more step to utter predictability.

  “And?” he calls out to her.

  “And I think I got some good ones.”

  “Cemeteries like this, most of the time aren’t they associated with churches?”

  “Yeah, I guess. I don’t know. Probably.”

  He swivels at the hip, waves a hand behind him. “Well, what about that one back through there?”

  “A church,” she says, clarifying. “Through those trees.”

  “Right. Over the river and through the woods. Except there’s no river.”

  Claire doesn’t have any idea what he’s talking about, so she finishes gathering up her gear and slings the bag from her shoulders. Rik leads the way. Just what he needs to turn him smug for the rest of the day, and it’s so male — bring him on-site and he of course gets right to the bottom of things, answers that eluded her and her friends, cretins all, as Rik must surely regard them, too busy back then trying to find a wet hole or something to plug into it.

  Past the cemetery’s northernmost rank of stones, then through a strip of woodland, and there it stands. Sort of. Claire wondering how they had possibly managed to miss it, although even back then it’s unlikely anyone would’ve been around to answer questions. How long has it been abandoned — one generation? Two? It’s a monument of neglect, a stone foundation and the rest clapboa
rd, all the way up to its sagging little bell tower, with scarcely a scrap of white paint left intact, the rest weathered down to the splintered dingy gray of the wood and strewn with scarlet tendrils of ivy. The roof peaks sharply, but it’s otherwise architecturally dull, with that stern Protestant demeanor she has always associated with early New England and autocratic piety.

  “I’d say it doesn’t have a prayer,” Rik says.

  She reaches for the velcro flap on her bag. It may be the first and only time she ever sees the place. Someday she’ll need proof it actually exists, or once did.

  They approach, tramping across shadesparse grass and fallen leaves. And is the air chillier the closer they come to this derelict, or is it just the lateness of the afternoon catching up to them? Perhaps a little of both, but entirely natural, this forsaken sanctuary exhaling cold air from the dimness past its open doorway. No double doors, no hinges; these must have been stripped away for parts ages ago.

  They circle it first, wading through weeds, stopping for a few moments at two piles of scrap wood, side by side. A horizontal pit, bursting with vines, can be seen between the spongy rotten boards of one heap. Claire hits on the obvious: They’re privies, or were, collapsed in on themselves. Charming. This place predates indoor plumbing.

  After making their way around front again they stare up at the sign whose rusty nails are still managing to secure it above the doorway. Faded by wind, by sun, by rain, it’s as hard to read as some of the oldest tombstones back there.

  “‘Abandon all hope, ye who enter here’?” Rik tries.

  “A little redundant, don’t you think?”

  From the black flakes still clinging to the boards they can divine enough letter shapes to start making sense of it. Context helps too.

  THE.

  CHURCH.

  OF…

  “‘Saint’?” she tries.

  “Funny, it doesn’t look Catholic. But I’ll go along with that.”

  The final line is trouble, open-ended. Too many letters and not enough of any of them left intact, with room for eight or nine it looks like. Starts with an L. What may be a U near the end. Lazarus, perhaps? But Rik shoots that one down. No way can they get a Z out of that third letter, unless it’s sideways; it looks more like an N. Maybe that first letter is an eroded B, instead, Rik suggests, and the U is really a C. Saint Boniface. But no. The letters are all capitals, Claire points out, and the last one has curves, not straight lines. A capital S, maybe, instead of a lower case E.

  “Can I buy a vowel?” she asks.

  Rik produces pen and paper and starts reproducing the letter fragments. “Of course it would help if we were up on our saints.”

  “Peter, Paul, and Mary,” Claire says as they crunch past the gritty threshold. “After that it starts getting fuzzy.”

  The place is as austere inside as out, anything of worth long since stripped away, parallel lines of small chipped holes like machine-gun fire left behind where the pews, once anchored, were ripped up by their bolts. No pulpit, no rails around the choir riser. No glass left in the windows. Just leaves and years of dirt and the powdery dried droppings of animals. Footprints through it all, too — those corroded beer cans didn’t get here by themselves, nor that condom shriveled along the baseboard — but the place still sees more life on four legs than two. Deer come to shit on the floor and foxes grind the bones of rabbits in the coat closet, while crows nest in the bell tower.

  In a corner, Rik uses his shoe tip to nudge the topmost of a pair of magazines, pages swollen with windblown rain and dried brittle, edges shredded by the teeth of mice. Rik stoops over to peer more closely.

  “Well now, here’s something some poor farmboy couldn’t risk taking home for Pa to find.”

  They’re smutty, of course, but she’s still surprised by the subgenre: oiled musclemen with butch haircuts and leather chaps and fabulous endowments and what looks to be ferocious pain thresholds. Hurt me tender. It gives her a creepy feeling, the thought of some hulking, dull-eyed kid sneaking off to kneel before these pages, his fist frantic, right where they’re standing now. It isn’t the notion of rough trade itself so much as the secret life implied by this discovery. It feels like walking into the sticky truth behind someone’s lie.

  “Are you ready to go?” she asks Rik, and he says he is.

  Halfway into the woodland, they turn back for a parting look at this humbled wreck of a building.

  “After we get to Paris, one of the first things we’ll have to do is go see Notre Dame,” Rik says. “Now there’s a goddamn church.”

  Stark and cloudy that next afternoon, with testy spittings of rain as they drive out past the east edge of town to see Claire’s grandfather. Grandpa Edgar. She hasn’t said so, but Rik can tell it’s the one obligation that Claire has been dreading most about this trip. Going away for a year, sure, it’s possible she might never see the man again. He’s eighty-seven, after all. But there’s more to it than that.

  Since she’s seen him last, the family has had to move him out of the only home he’d known for nearly sixty years. His eyes have failed him and his joints are turning traitorous as well. He’s in a managed care facility now, his room like a cramped studio apartment that just happens to have a nurse’s aide stationed down the hall, and nothing to cook with, since half of them around here can’t be trusted around open flames. Everybody is fed at once in a communal dining room, stooped old men and bird-boned old women, shriveling in upon themselves inside bland pastel polyester, their hands spattered with liver spots, and as Rik and Claire pace through the lobby and the rec room, where no one actually recreates, they’re nailed by one bright, hopeful gaze after another. A visitor, any visitor, is fair game. It’s worse than dodging panhandlers back in Chicago, and if it isn’t as depressing as a full-blown nursing home, it’s awfully close. Because there’s one of those next door.

  “When did you get to your mother’s?” is the first thing Edgar asks once he knows who’s there. They have to tell him because to his eyes they’re just shapes and movement.

  “Friday evening,” Claire says, and Rik winces — even he knows it’s the wrong thing to say after the way Mrs. Cody has talked about her father all weekend.

  “Friday? Friday?” His hearing is still reasonably good; he’s only repeating it as though he can’t believe what he’s heard. “You’ve been here all this time and you’re just now getting around to come see me?”

  Claire apologizes and moves to hug him, leaning down toward him in his easy chair but he’s not having any of it. Edgar grumbles and shifts to turn a cold shoulder to her and devote his attention to the portable Panasonic TV perched on the dresser a couple of feet in front of his face. Just like a pouting child, with a pot belly and scaly pink scalp showing through what’s left of his hair.

  “I’m sorry, Grandpa,” she says again, hand on his shoulder.

  “Well, you ought to be,” he tells the TV. “Leave me sitting here day after day, afraid to move because I might miss you. I didn’t go for my haircut because if you got here and I wasn’t, I was afraid you’d just turn right around and sashay back out again.”

  Claire placates him, telling him how right he is, that it was mean and she just wasn’t thinking. The old man soaks it up, anybody can see she’s playing right along with his game, and when he finally consents to the hug and Claire leans her head against his shoulder, Edgar raises his own head with a look of smug triumph that he must know Claire cannot see. Of Rik he’s either forgotten, or simply doesn’t care. Can’t move five steps without a walker but it takes him less than sixty seconds to totally dominate his rumored favorite granddaughter.

  According to Claire’s mother, he’s been a real terror ever since they moved him in here, and since she’s the one assuming most of the responsibility for his upkeep, she’s the one who can’t do anything right. When she dusts the furniture, he can suddenly see all the places she’s missed. When she dusts harder, he’ll start to cough because of the cloud she’s stirring up.
Then he’ll complain that it never got this dusty at home.

  Rik looks around, skims a finger over the dresser top. The place is spotless.

  Claire is sitting on the fat arm of Edgar’s easy chair, holding his hand, and now he looks ready to cry and so does she. “I hope you never know what it’s like for your own family to sell your home out from underneath you and put you in a place like this for no reason,” he’s telling her. “But I guess if God forgives them for it, I’ll have to too one of these days.”

  And it’s like this all afternoon, one hour running into two, and surely it’s guilt that keeps her glued to the arm of that chair. If Claire had half the backbone she thinks she does, she would be telling the old man a few things that he needs to hear: that he’s half-blind and half-crippled and has no business living on his own any longer, and if he keeps nursing his grudges he’s going to drive away the very people he should be most grateful to.

  But no. Claire spoonfeeds him just what he wants to hear. She does that with most everybody … acquiesces to their will without realizing it, evolving into what they want her to be because she can’t bear to disappoint them, with plenty of time later to complain about how taxing they were. And families are the worst. It amazes Rik sometimes that she moved away at all, made a new life for herself in Chicago, even if her parents still have no idea the two of them are living together.

  He wonders if this isn’t why he’s really going to Paris with her. It’s all well and good to make-believe that he’s looking forward to a year’s sabbatical from the university, a chance to study the history he teaches on the soil where so much of it took place; to teach a few English language classes every week to international business students while Claire overdoses on the theory and practice of world class photography. Very bohemian, all that. Give them a month and they’ll be wearing silly black berets. And is that really all there is to it? Hardly. He knows Claire. Knows that there’s no other way to make sure she’ll remember who he is over the next twelve months, because otherwise, sure as Gerard Rameau shoots kinky photos would Claire and her long, lean body fall under his spell, or the spell of some other intern who aspires to be just like him.