The Churchgoer

by Patrick Coleman

  “That’s a good thing?” I asked.

  “That’s a good thing, man. A good. For damn certain.”

  He smiled at me broadly, and then something gave out in him. He sat down cross-legged on the carpet and began to weep. It wasn’t like the tears he’d shed during worship. They weren’t beatific, weren’t symbols of joy after hardship, weren’t anything anyone could take inspiration from. They were pitiful and plain.

  I didn’t move or say anything. I was sitting on the couch with one ankle propped up on the other knee like this was the goddamn Oprah Winfrey Show, feeling like the asshole I’d be if I were on there, and still I couldn’t get any part of me to budge. Finally, I managed to say, “I’m sorry, Sam.”

  His lower lip hung loose, his jaw slack, a line of spit reaching down to connect with a hibiscus on his shirtfront. He looked at me. “No, man, it’s not your fault. You had your own fucking downward spiral. It’s too bad we didn’t do it at the same time. It would have been fun to have your company heading to rock bottom. Especially you. But,” he said, pooling snot in one sleeve of his shirt, “don’t get the wrong idea. I never turned my back on God. Couldn’t do that, never got that bad. So that’s where maybe you’re more fucked up than me.”

  “Yeah, maybe,” I said, looking to pacify. But he gave me an apologetic look and said he was sorry for being a jerk, so I’d done a poor job hiding what I thought of his suggestion.

  “I don’t mean to be like this,” Sammy said. “Things have just been a little emotional lately.”

  “A little emotional,” I said. “I can see.” Maybe I couldn’t help myself either, because I added: “You know, maybe figuring things out gets a little simpler when you don’t have plague hanging over your head and fire looming under your feet every moment.” Whatever I’d intended, which must have mostly been a mislocated impulse to protect myself, it did get Sammy to stop crying. He laughed derisively and gave me a long, leering sort of stare. “Maybe it’s just me,” I added.

  “Just you,” he muttered, and started laughing again. He laughed for a while to himself, deliriously, with it rising into a little apex when he seemed to think of a new, humorous facet to what he was perceiving in me. I could imagine well enough what these little peaks were—he, as wracked and ruined as he was, preaching to his lapsed preacher being first among them. Then he stopped the laughing and I could hear his teeth grind again. “What’d Andy tell you about me?”

  “Not much,” I said. “But I met this other guy, this kid at the beach, and he knew you, too. He said he’d come to some parties out here with you that were better than Fantasia on acid.”

  “Part of business,” Sammy said coolly, no trace in his voice of the weeping that had welled up in him only a few minutes before. “Have to make certain people happy, you know—gotta serve somebody.”

  “Sure,” I said, not wanting to take that bait. “He also mentioned seeing a girl out here, a girl I’m trying to find.”

  Sammy raised an eyebrow—more properly he raised one half of a unibrow—a gesture that, due to his sickly skin, came off looking more grotesque than anything else. “We’re all trying to find a girl, man. Trying, trying. Except the fags, I guess.”

  “Not like that,” I said. I took a swallow of water. It was lukewarm and had a sedimentary taste. “I’m worried about this one.”

  “What a hero.”

  I winced. “Not like that either,” I said. “But the kid at the beach said you guys were friends, he thought.”

  “You pretend you’re different,” Sammy said with a snide condescension that irritated me, “but God—you’re still doing it.”

  “Doing what, exactly?”

  He stood and wiped his hands on his shorts, leaving streaks on the nylon. Still seated, I felt constricted and emasculated, like a schoolkid roughed up before he can untangle himself from his wrap-around desk.

  “How long are you going to try to save this one, Haines?” he said bitterly. “A couple months? A few years? When’s the expiration date? Because there is an expiration date. You’ve got a formula buried in your funky, twisted brain for calculating it, for figuring out when you’ve gotten enough out of it. And then one day it goes bad, and it’s time to find some more freshly wounded bird.”

  An angry calm came over me, that placid clarity of rage. What did this tweaker know, even if most of those jabs had made contact with tender points? This was insult by horoscope, and he already knew I was a Pisces. Of course some of those would land. But that wasn’t why I’d come. Sammy wasn’t why either. I tried to stay focused on that. “Believe whatever the fuck you want, Sammy,” I said, “but I never meant anyone—I never meant you—any harm.”

  “No,” he said, sucking on his teeth and appraising me in a way that abraded like sandpaper. “This isn’t about belief, man, and it’s not about harm. But like usual it’s about you. Why didn’t you call after you quit the church? I called you. I left messages. I’d done the addiction thing before. I wanted to help.” His anger faded into a tender tone that took me unsuspecting. The concern of it, the earnestness of his wish to have done some good for me back then. That hurt some—hurt a dusty corner of the cold, charred meat I called my heart. I tried to will the feeling out of that deadened muscle, but it didn’t work. “I would have done that, Haines,” he said. “Maybe that would have been a good thing for me, too.”

  My limbic system shuddered as I tried to shake it loose from its connection to my brain. “I couldn’t do it,” I said. “I could make my choices, but I was a leader of the church. I wasn’t going to lead you or anyone else down the way I was going.”

  That’s what I said, but in my mind I was back in the hospital, wearing pajamas with drawstrings removed, taking messages from the receptionist and depositing them directly in the garbage. I was sitting with Dr. Khan, in much the same way I was sitting here but with the tongues of my shoes flayed open, laceless. He was worried that I had no recollection of my suicide attempt. The only trace of it in my memory was a big, redacted blank with a single image hovering in the middle: Aracely, in her frilled pajama shorts, placing the phone in its cradle. The pills I’d swallowed could only account for so much memory loss and none of my sudden atheism, which the doctor questioned. I explained how the absence of God was the same as the feeling of absence I had in the first year after my sister’s death, of there being a chance when the phone rang of it being Ellen. Ellen, beyond where I could reach her, beyond where I could help, or anyone could. What I didn’t tell Dr. Khan was that it wasn’t just her. Everyone had slipped beyond my reach. Gabby, Aracely, Sammy, too—all too far to be helped by any of my weak, selfish, useless grasping. I didn’t tell that to Sammy either, but that was why I’d never called him back. His help wouldn’t have been any help at all. It was contingent on God, and I didn’t want it.

  “I couldn’t call, Sammy,” I said. “I just couldn’t.”

  Sammy folded his arms. I studied the coffee table, the mold growing under the bevels of glass where it slotted into varnished pine. How much later I don’t know he touched my shoulder, and I started.

  “Jesus Christ—sorry,” he said. “Don’t cry, man. I just get going. I can’t help myself.” I didn’t think I was crying, but I felt my face: he was right. “Just forget about it, okay? I’m just a fucking asshole.”

  Forgetting is what I do best. “We’re all fucking assholes,” I said, erasing the feelings that had overcome me and replacing them with bitterness and distance.

  “The girl,” I said to change the subject. “The one I’m looking for, that the kid at the beach said you were friends with. She told me her name was Cindy but he thought her name was Emily. Tallish. Short black hair. You know her?”

  Sammy studied me, his face held together by surface tension like a framed and hung puzzle, with its secret impulse to fall and return to pieces. His eyelids began twitching. “Oh, yeah. Emily. She lived here awhile,” he said breezily while his hands fidgeted with his shirt, always resettling it farther back on his sh
oulders. “She was a cool girl.”

  “How long ago?”

  “Maybe a year. Maybe two,” he said. “She needed a place to crash, so she helped out around the house. A woman’s touch. You know. Drifted in with a few kids who were working with me and asked if she could stay.” He turned to study the base of a fern, dipping his hand into the soil and rubbing the moist earth between his fingers. He was making me nervous. For an instant, I thought the plant was where he hid his firearms, but I dismissed it as me getting overheated, an overactive imagination. I waited. Sometimes silence is the best way to get more information, being present and silent and paying attention. Another of my old tricks.

  “Seriously,” Sammy said as if I’d accused him, “that’s all there is to it. She was going with one of my boys awhile, and then she left. Maybe about a year ago, I guess. Said she was going to Seattle, God knows why—said she wanted to live somewhere with lots of rain. The opposite of a desert, she said.”

  I nodded. It sounded like her, and she had drifted out to Oceanside, where I found her trying to hitch a ride north. But Shaw had seen her a few months ago, here, and Sammy was lying. I just didn’t know why he was doing it, or how to get at it.

  “You haven’t heard from her since then?”

  “Nope. Nothing. So long. Thanks for all the shoes.”

  “Did she have any other plans?”

  “Not that she told me,” Sammy said, “but that’s like having heart-to-hearts with your housekeeper, you know? Doesn’t work that way, really.”

  “Your place does look like it’s hurting for some TLC.”

  What was I doing? I didn’t know what else to say, or what I’d hoped to find out by coming here anyway. Did I want the truth of Emily—I guess that was her name—the truth of her time with Sammy, if he had taken advantage of her in the way Shaw said? Was I trying to make sure that her leaving wasn’t my fault? All I’d accomplished was making my insides feel raw.

  Then there was a thump from the back of the house and a woman’s voice cursing.

  Sammy stared through me. He looked stern, apprehensive. I didn’t move while we both waited for another sound. It was quiet for a moment. Then came a voice: “Sammy, can you get me some ice?”

  It was Cindy’s voice, or Emily’s—whatever her real name was, for whatever good knowing names does, though not knowing my grandson’s had certainly tweaked me enough. Sammy stopped seeing the wall behind my head and locked onto my eyes. I tried not to let on that I recognized the voice, but for all I knew my hair had gone white and a bolt of lightning had reached down into my skull.

  “One sec,” Sammy called to her, without taking his eyes from me.

  “Sammy,” I said, and there was that tone of paternal disappointment again.

  “Look, man,” he said with the sudden command of a military officer and the diction of a teenager. “It’s complicated. It’s not your thing, and it’s complicated. But you need to trust that I’m not being a bad person and go.”

  I felt able to stand and did. Once vertical, though, my legs went liquid. It was the fear, but it was also the fear that kept me talking, the need to keep moving in some form or another or else collapse. I took one step toward him and said, “I can’t—”

  He moved toward me and jabbed one of his bony palms into my chest, holding me at a distance. “Just go, Marky Mark. Just fucking go.” His fingers pressed into my chest, almost tenderly, and then gave a small push. I let myself stumble back a step.

  From the back of the house came her voice again, all incomprehension. “Did you hear me? What’s going on?” Sammy whispered to me under his breath, “Just go, just go, just go.” Then, from the hallway, from out of the ether like breath on the water, there was Emily. She wore the same yellow shirt as the day I met her and gray sweatpants rolled over on themselves at the waistband. She was rubbing a spot on her elbow, and when she saw me she stopped dead.

  “Oh,” she said. Her eyes were red, blissed out, bleary. All the vital theatricality in her demeanor was gone, replaced by sordid dreariness, an exhausted presence. Darkness shadowed the undersides of her eyes. Besides the red spot where she rubbed her elbow, her skin was dry and pale, bone-like.

  Then Sammy was pacing toward her. She raised her arms like she was expecting to get hit. My anger rose in me, sidestepping my brain and going straight to my muscles, and I started after him. Sammy laid his hand on the small of her back, pointed down the hallway, and hectored her like the bad parent of an unruly child, “Stay in the back, like I fucking said. This is personal, so mind your own goddamn business.” Emily looked between us with confusion etched on her face, though for a moment I thought I caught a flicker of something else beneath it.

  “But I know that guy. Haines, what are you doing here?”

  Before I could answer, Sammy was pushing her down the hallway. I was two steps behind him. He shut her in a back bedroom and surprised me with how fast he turned and had my throat in his hand. By the pinched esophagus he marched me back down the hallway. The shift in direction made it hard for me to get leverage, and I stumbled backward, choking. He got me into the living room. The backs of my knees caught the coffee table and I went over, onto the ground.

  Sammy stood over me. His face was beaming and twisted with rage, but his voice was as cool as aloe when he said, “You’re going to leave now.” I struggled to breathe. It burned worse than a lungful of cigar smoke. “Reunion time is over. You’ve gotta get back to your life. And I got mine, and she has hers, and we’re all going back to that.”

  My voice returned but came out dry and bitter, like the taste of raw sage. “I thought you said you didn’t get lying.”

  “Fuck you, Haines,” he said quickly. “You’re good at leaving. Go where your gifts lead you. That was always your advice. I’m following it. So just leave and forget all about this.”

  I didn’t like getting pegged so squarely by a tweaker. I scrambled to stand up and hit him. By the time I got to my feet, Sammy had a decent-sized pistol in his hand—from where I don’t know, a houseplant, maybe—and pointed it at my chest. My anger soured. I imagined the hole, not psychological this time but physical, being ripped through the center of my body. I thought of poor, dead Mike, damn dead Mike.

  “I’m not going to shoot you, Haines. But I work with people who will. That’s not a threat. That’s just part of the lay of the land. The topiary, man. You need to forget about me, forget you ever came here. Forget Emily, too. She’s better off if you do.”

  “What I heard was you were whoring her out,” I said, despite the feeling of ice and bile running through the muscles affixing skull to jaw.

  “You don’t know the fuck of it, man,” he said, voice rageful and showing no sign of cracks. His pistol hand lifted, and I found myself jumping, turning, hollering, holding my arms out as if I might catch the bullet he was thinking of sending my way. It never came, but somehow I ended up back on the floor. The gun barrel cut the air, occasionally making the hollow note of a beach bum’s Corona bottle. “It all gets so complicated. You wouldn’t understand. I don’t fucking understand, most of the time. It all gets too huge and complicated. But I know you like it simple, so let’s keep it simple, man. Get the fuck out of here. Don’t call the cops or tell anyone about any of this. That’s the only way you get to keep up your full calendar of surf sessions and breakfast burritos, my friend.”

  “Friend,” I said.

  “This is my way of looking out for you. Get up. Get out. It’s more than you did for me. Don’t die because of this. It’s not worth it. We both know which way you’d go, and it isn’t up.”

  We stayed like that for a while: me on the ground, bruised, breathing raggedly; him holding the gun pointed toward my body without his own betraying hesitation or doubt. I couldn’t see any good way of calculating worth in this moment. I couldn’t see any way forward other than leaving.

  “Okay,” I said. “I’m going.” I got to my feet slowly, keeping my hands raised. It’s strange to think how naturall
y this came to me, down to the slight stoop, the slow steps, the seething resentment.

  As I backed my way toward the door, Sammy said, “I mean what I said.”

  I reached behind me and opened the door. The dry desert air hit my neck and cooled in the sweat. A deep shiver crawled down my spine. I felt like an ice cube cracking in a hot whiskey that someone had puked in. “I don’t doubt it,” I said.

  Sammy lowered the gun a couple inches and made a nodding motion with the barrel to shoo me down the driveway. “Bullshit, Haines. You doubt everything.”

  Outside now, the sound of the gas flames in the lamps whipped like tiny flags in the wind. He watched me backpedal all the way to the street. Then he shut the door. At that point, I turned and walked like a semiprimate should.

  The fear was fading. If he was going to shoot me at this point, it was my time.

  Maybe that was bravado talking. Maybe it was a good way of reorienting myself, a new context for an old habit. When I was in high school, my sister, Ellen, had tried to help me deal with the hell of being seen by other teenage people by focusing on God—that it was God who determined my worth. She said I had nothing to be ashamed of or to apologize for if it was acceptable in the sight of God. I tried it, walking to classes or across the quad, a vertical band of illumination spotlighting me in the sight of the absolute, the living beings around me cast into the shadows of outer darkness. It stuck so much that it wasn’t until Ellen died that I ever approached a full consideration of another’s thoughts, the weight of them—and that their judgment of me might be important and necessary.

  The comfort of that beam of light, of being perceived by a single, omnipotent gaze, that’s what having Sammy’s gun trained on me felt like. It took everything else off the table. And the ghost of that being in the sky, that’s who I must have been imagining when I told myself it was perhaps my time to go—that there was some out-of-time deciding force instead of all this very mundane, capricious mess making—that there’s a time to go, and not just going.