by Chuck Wendig
Colleen hurried back up the porch, and as she did she said, “No, no, that isn’t right, Fred, they’re not even at half that—two hundred at most.”
“I read an email said there’s more than we see on TV.”
“You ought not to read every piece of trash comes through your email.” She leaned in, the crow’s-feet around her eyes deepening as her eyes tapered to slits. “Honestly, you ask me, I think it’s aliens,” she said, fast putting an end to her moment as the voice of sanity.
Now of course here came roly-poly Dave Mercer, hobbling his way up the steps on his bum knee. “We talking about the sleepwalkers? I think we’re looking at some kind of invasion, maybe extraterrestrial, but maybe ultra-terrestrials, like people or reptilians from another dimension—”
“That’s not a thing,” Matthew said, but they kept going.
“They’re gonna be here tomorrow,” Colleen said.
“Not here, but close,” Dave said. “News said they might end up in Waldron—or if they go a different way, Milford or even Shelbyville.”
Fred prickled. “I don’t want to become one of them walkers. I want to keep my mind, my faculties—”
“Hey, c’mon, everybody relax.” It was time to intervene. Matthew waved his hands and shook his head. “No one is ever served by jumping to conclusions before all the information is in. Here’s a quote for you, and I think it’s a good one: ‘Your assumptions are your windows on the world. Scrub them off every once in a while, or the light won’t come in.’ ”
Colleen’s face scrunched up. “What Bible passage is that?”
“It’s not the Bible, it’s Isaac Asimov.”
They gave him a puzzled look.
“What? You can read other books besides the Bible,” Matthew said, laughing. “Pick up a novel once in a while. Now go on, go home.”
They left the porch, talking as they went. The cork was out of the bottle, and all the spirits were pouring out. They were animated as anything. Worried. Excited. Confused. He felt it, too. A buzz in the air, like they were all antennae receiving strange signals from those walkers. But he didn’t have time to ruminate on the subject of the sleepwalkers, because as the others left, one remained: Out walked DeCarlo James.
Young kid, African American, sixteen. Hair shorn close to the head. White T-shirt, baggy jeans. He had his chin lifted in perpetual disregard. The cross this one bore upon his shoulders and upon his soul was heroin addiction.
The dubious look on the boy’s face only deepened as Matthew approached him for a handshake or a hug.
“Naw,” DeCarlo said.
“Meeting didn’t work for you?” Matthew asked.
“It did not, Pastor Matt.”
“It was just your first. There’s still time. Care to share why?”
“I dunno.”
“I think you do.”
It took a second, then DeCarlo sucked air between his teeth and let it fly: “Some of that shit you said is bullshit. The twelve steps.”
“Why is it bull?”
“I’m not powerless.”
“Oh.” The first three steps were about being powerless, about putting yourself in God’s hands and allowing yourself to be smaller than Him. “I think faith is very much about trusting in a higher power.”
“I trust in me. I have faith in me.”
“I have faith in you, too. But I have faith that you’ll let God in. Because without God, that’s how you got here. That’s how you got…to this place, to this meeting, to your addiction.”
DeCarlo made a face like someone just pressed a cat turd to his lips, tried to make him kiss it. “So, lemme get this straight. I fuck up, it’s my fault. But if I do right, it’s not really me, it’s God.”
“If you do right, it’s because you made a choice to let God in. The point is that you made the choice to get help, and that it doesn’t have to all be on your shoulders. Let God shoulder some of that weight.”
“You know that the twelve steps are like, maybe eight percent effective, right? And that drug therapy plus psychiatric therapy is ten times more effective than the shit you’re slinging in that meeting room?”
Matthew stepped back, faking like he’d just been punched. “DeCarlo, I don’t agree with that statistic. It’s hurtful. Tell that little fact of yours to Fred, Colleen, and Dave. Tell that to everyone else who’s gone through the Graceful Shift program. Yes, some…falter, but God picks them up again when they reach for His hand.” He narrowed his eyes. “Where did you get your numbers, anyway?”
“Where else? The internet, man. I go to the library.”
“Everything you read on the internet isn’t automatically true.”
“And everything some nice preacher tells you isn’t automatically true, either, Pastor Matt. Listen, when we were up in Indianapolis, my sister Tanesha went through therapy, real therapy, and she’s been good for two years. Got a nice job, cashier at Aldi. Got a little apartment. Doing okay. Then we come out here to the boonies and only thing a court mandates is this place.” DeCarlo scuffed his foot on the peeling paint of the porch wood beneath him. “I wanna kick this thing, but I dunno about your program, man.”
“My program is what’s keeping you out of juvie, DeCarlo. You have to go through it, all the way through it. But…” He looked over his shoulder to make sure the others had gone. “I know somebody. Drug treatment counselor in Bloomington. She’s good.”
“And expensive, I bet.”
“I’ll raise those stakes and bet that if I asked her, she’d come up, work with you on the side for nothing. Pro bono—that means free. How’d that be?”
“You for real?”
“I am. But you have to keep coming here, too. That’s the deal.” Matthew offered his hand to seal the bargain.
DeCarlo looked at the proffered handshake like Matthew might secretly be hiding a tarantula in the palm of his hand. But then he shook.
“Deal.”
“See you, DeCarlo.”
“Later, Pastor Matt. Oh, hey, you ask me, those sleepwalkers—I think it’s like some X-Men shit. Maybe they’re mutants.”
Matthew laughed. “Go on, DeCarlo. Say hi to your mama for me.”
“All right, all right. Thanks, Pastor Matt.”
The kid strolled off the porch toward the road. He had a lift to his steps. Matthew hoped he hadn’t just imagined that—the kid deserved a bit of happiness and hope.
Pastor Matt sighed.
With that meeting over, it was time for another, different meeting.
This one about addiction, too. Of a sort.
* * *
—
ADDICTION. IT WASN’T really that, Matthew knew. He knew he wasn’t being fair to her. Just the same, Matthew felt what he felt, which was this: Drugs were not the answer, not illegal drugs, not doctor-prescribed ones. Not for this. But helping his wife come to the same conclusion was…not easy.
It wasn’t easy because people became addicted to ideas as easy as they became addicted to drugs. And his wife, well, she’d become addicted to the idea of her having some kind of disorder, some mental condition, that couldn’t be solved the way it needed to be solved.
Autumn Bird sat on the corner of their bed, staring out the window. When Matthew came into the room, the floorboards creaking under the fraying, bubbled-up carpet, his wife did not look his way. All she said was, “Hi, baby.”
“Autumn, hey.”
He came and sat next to her. Took her hand in his.
“So, this isn’t a good day,” she said. Looked like she had been crying: Her eyes were puffy and raw. But for now, the storm had passed. He felt terrible, but he was glad to have missed it. When she was in the throes of one of those storms—that’s what she called them, her storms—there was nothing he could do but batten down the hatches and wait it out.
“I know. That happens. We all have good and bad days.”
The look she gave him was one of pity, a look that said, It’s a shame you just don’t get it. And that’s more or less what she told him time and time again, and what she told him now.
“My bad days are not like your bad days,” she said.
“I know. I’m sorry. I didn’t mean…” But the words wilted. “We should talk about the thing you asked me last night. I—”
“You don’t think I should go back on meds.” That sentence, sick with disappointment. “Matthew, please.”
“We don’t have the money. Our health insurance plan is less than bare bones, it’s…down to the marrow. The Zoloft is over fifty bucks a month, and that’s with our insurance, and with us buying the generic brand. And it’s not like the Zoloft didn’t have its side effects, sometimes you seemed like a zombie on that stuff, and then the headaches, and the…the other parts of it.” It made Autumn unreceptive to sex, for one. And two, sometimes she said she had really black, bleak urges. Not suicide, not exactly. But the urge for self-harm. That stuff, he decided, was poison.
Worse, she was mother to their son. Their son needed a mom who was present and stable. Not someone lost in a pharmaceutical forest.
She squeezed his hand.
“I know, but the doctor said there are other medications, we just need to find the one that works with my brain chemistry.”
“The Zoloft made you damn near want to kill yourself, Autumn.”
“No, the depression makes me want to kill myself, the Zoloft just…put an edge on that knife, okay? Other pills could tamp that down.”
“And what will they cost? How many doctor visits will that take? We go up that roller coaster and down the roller coaster and…” He sighed, held her hand tight. “Honey, they’ve shown time and again that prayer and Christ-forward thinking can help conquer this—”
“No, they haven’t shown that,” she snapped, pulling her hand away from his. “Nobody’s shown that. They’ve said it, but they haven’t shown it. Do you think it’s possible to pray away someone’s gayness?”
“Of course not. Pray away the gay doesn’t work, and worse, it’s harmful. People are who people are.”
She stood up. Arms crossed. Completely closed off, now. “And who I am is someone with depression, and that means you can’t just pray it away. It’s not a mood, Matt. I’m not just sad. It’s like I’ve got a hole inside my mind and inside that hole is a…a voice. Sometimes it’s loud, sometimes it’s quiet, but it’s always, always there. That voice tells me that I’m not good enough, and the world is going to hell, and nothing matters. I’ll never be a famous artist. The coral reef is bleached and dead. I’ll never have more kids than the one we have. I’ll die without ever accomplishing anything and it doesn’t matter anyway because global warming is going to boil us or bake us but that only happens if North Korea doesn’t drop a bomb in our lap first, or maybe a plane will crash on my head, or maybe the ground will swallow me up, or maybe I’ll get cancer and it’ll eat me up. And then—then I turn on the TV and everybody’s talking about those walkers and that sends me into a different spiral. What are they? Do they need our help? Do we need their help? Is it a disease, is it climate change, is it…some terrorist group in the Middle East? It repeats again and again, this cycle. I get sad, then I get worried, and then I get helpless. Lost in a…in a fog. I just need something to help clear away the fog. Okay?”
He nodded and reached for her hand again. She did not pull away.
“Okay,” he said. If he had to follow her down this path—even if only to disprove its value—he would. “Call the doctor. Make the appointment. We’ll try something else, a new prescription, see how that goes.”
She watched him, wary.
“Are you sure?”
“I’m sure. We’ll find the money.” Somehow.
He wrapped her up in a hug. They did not kiss. They hadn’t kissed in months. But the hug felt nice, and he hoped it felt nice for her, too.
* * *
—
HE KNELT OUTSIDE, pulling weeds, thinking about Autumn. Worrying about Autumn. It nagged at him. What if he was wrong? What if her point was right? You couldn’t pray away gayness. Maybe you couldn’t just pray away her depression, if it really was that. But he’d known Christ-focused therapy programs that made good on that promise…
He heard a truck rumbling down the road. The diesel grumble vibrated up through his knees and his hands and, as it grew closer, into his teeth. Matthew wiped the dirt on his jeans and plucked the gardening gloves off as the black pickup pulled up. It was an older-model Chevy, lifted high on mammoth tires. The back was piled high with junk: bales of barbed wire, a couple of old dining room chairs, two different toolboxes, a rust-bellied pellet stove. On the side was a logo that read: STOVER JUNK AND SALVAGE.
The truck pulled up, tilting as it eased a front tire into the drainage ditch.
The passenger side opened up, and Bo got out of the truck, jumping over the ditch into the grass. The boy, Matthew’s son, had a mop of greasy-messy hair on his head and cheeks riddled with a volcanic topography of pimples. At fifteen, he was having a rough go of things. It was a hard time, Matthew knew, in any kid’s life. In both body and mind, Bo was halfway between a boy and a man. He had the desires and anger of a grown adult but didn’t have the maturity to process it—plus, the poor kid’s body was like a washing machine full of gasoline. All it took was one spark and then: kaboom.
He started to walk past. Matthew gave him a drive-by hair-mussing, which Bo grumpily retreated from. “Dad,” Bo warned.
The truck’s engine cut out.
The driver’s-side door opened.
This is new.
Out stepped the big man: big in every direction, like an ox bristling with both fat and muscle. The fellow had a beard hanging from his chin that called to mind the root system of an overturned tree. Dark eyes stared out over a nose that had surely been broken many times over. Ship-cannon arms swung by his side as he loped around the front of the truck, a big smile on his face.
“Bo!” the man called, his voice a growling thrum, in many ways more impressive than the roar of the truck he drove. “Don’t you walk past your father like that. You pay him respect.”
No hesitation found, the boy turned heel-to-toe and marched dutifully back to Matthew. He looked up at his father and said, “Hi, Dad.”
“Hey, kid. You good?”
“I’m good.”
“Go on inside, get washed up for supper.” As Bo trotted off, Matthew called after him: “Don’t forget to tell Mom you’re home.”
“Uh-huh,” the boy moped, and then was gone.
And now Matthew was left alone with the big man.
Ozark Stover.
The pastor was not a small man, exactly: At five-foot-ten he was of average height, with a slim build (a build his son inherited). But standing face-to-face with Stover made him feel like a little kid looking up at an angry parent.
Before today, Ozark never got out of his truck. He always dropped Bo off—Bo had been working at Stover’s junkyard on weekends since January, and now with summer here he went there every day to help out—but the big man never got out of his truck. He just dropped the boy off every day, then drove away. Never waved, never said a word. It was what it was. Matthew was not always comfortable with the arrangement, knowing so little about the man, but Bo wanted it, and he felt it was time to give the boy some independence while also lending him a sense of responsibility.
“Preacher,” Ozark said with a curt nod.
“Mister Stover, it’s an honor and a pleasure to see you again—and please, no need to call me preacher. It’s pastor, for one, but I’m good with Matt or Matthew.”
“Hnh.” The man crossed both tree-trunk arms and rested them upon his prodigious girth. “My friends call me Oz or Ozzy.
”
“Well, Oz, thanks for dropping Bo off today—”
“You’re not a friend yet, Preacher. Ozark will be fine.”
“Oh. Ah. Of course, apologies.” He laughed in a self-effacing way. “Ozark, thanks for coming by, is there anything I can do for you?”
“There is.” He sniffed. “You’re a man of God.”
“That is what they tell me.”
Stover leaned off to the side, pressed one finger against his nostril, then blew a snot-dart out of his other nose-hole: the farmer’s blow, they used to call it, though the kids today just called that a snot-rocket.
The man went on as if nothing had happened. “I want to get your feeling on the state of the world today, Preacher.”
Blink, blink.
“Oh. You mean—politics? I know there’s a presidential race going on but I try to keep my concerns to the spirit and soul of the country.” People always wanted to know if Matthew was a Democrat or a Republican, did he vote with the evangelicals, was he a libertarian and if so, what flavor. Did he like sitting president Nora Hunt? Would he back the dark horse of the GOP, Ed Creel? Matthew preferred not to talk about any of that. What he told Stover was true: He preferred to worry about deeper, more moral matters. Politics, despite what some believed, was not morality, nor reflective of it.
Stover sighed. “Politics isn’t the whole of it, though I can’t in my right mind imagine why anyone would vote for Hunt the Cunt. Creel’s right, that bitch’ll chop this country up for parts, sell us to Wall Street who will sell us to China. Time for a change in this country. Creel’s one of us.”
Matthew wasn’t so sure that Ed Creel was “one of them.” He came from one of the richest families in America. President Hunt got saddled with the label that she was some out-of-touch coastal elite, but truth was, her family came from South Carolina, while Creel was born in Boston with a gold skeleton key in his mouth. Not that Matthew cared for Hunt, either—she was pro-choice, which was to him the same thing as being anti-life. He couldn’t in good conscience vote for that. But the hypocrisy even there was keenly felt: Creel mouthed off about how he was all pro-life, but was on the record as supporting the death penalty. And they’d proved that he’d paid for at least three abortions in his lifetime. Not that anyone cared. And not that Matthew would tell Ozark Stover any different. You didn’t change anyone’s mind about politics by hammering away at them—all that did was drive the nail deeper into the wall of their own certainty.