by Jake Hinkson
“You’re married?” I said.
She nodded.
“You don’t have a ring,” I said.
“We were married by God, not by Man,” she said.
“Oh. And then what happened?”
“We left and went back to the river. The next day, or maybe two days, I don’t know, the man came down to the river.”
“Why?”
She shook her head. “He wanted to take me away from the Revelator.”
“He wanted to take you where?”
She shook her head and looked at the Revelator. The Revelator was asleep.
“Where did he want to take you?” I asked.
“To hell. He wanted to stop the Revelator from finishing his work. The Lord hath decreed that the Revelator should take his bride and hasten the second coming.”
I nodded. “And what would happen if you were taken away?”
She sat up very straight in the chair. She paid so little mind to her swollen stomach it was as if she wasn’t aware of it. “The Revelator and his bride are one body. No one shall separate the body without destroying it. The Lord hath decreed the bride of the Revelator should burn in the lake of fire with the Deceiver if she be taken away from him. The bride’s family should die the deaths of the heathen and darkness should fall on the face of the earth.”
I looked at the Revelator. A line of spit was running down his chin. There looked to be a little blood in it.
She said, “The evil man wanted to take me away, to men with guns. The Revelator struggled with him, but the Deceiver was strong with the man and he” her voice cracked “he hit the Revelator with a pipe.”
“What did you do, Rita?”
She shook her head.
“Please tell me,” I said. “What did you do? The man hit the Revelator with this pipe, hit him on the head it looks like.”
“Yes,” she said, wiping her tears. “Several times. Hit him.” She shook her head and put her knuckle to her mouth. “I didn’t know what to do. My mother…”
“You were afraid the man with the pipe was going to take you away from the Revelator.”
“Yes. And the Lord hath decreed that the bride’s family should die the deaths of heathens if she be taken away.” She sighed again. “Or run away.”
“So you protected the Revelator?”
“Yes. We had a knife in our bag. It was long and thin. I drew it across the evil man’s neck as the Revelator had taught me.”
“You’d done this before?”
“No,” she shook her head. “But the Revelator showed me how.”
“I see. Then what?”
“I put the man in the river. But” she choked up again and touched the Revelator lightly, almost maternally, on the arm “but he wasn’t…right. He’d always said we should avoid the heathen and their places but, but I was so hungry. I was so hungry, and the ravens never came to us.”
I nodded. I picked up the paper and opened it and slid it across the table.
It was yesterday’s paper. Under a picture of Rita, taken some years earlier when she was clean and young and smiling at the camera like she was thinking of what she was going to wear to prom, a headline read, “Karen Nelson, Missing for Three Years from Church Youth Trip, Seen in Texarkana Two Days Ago. Police: ‘This is the Best Lead in Years.’” Next to the text of the article was a picture of Rita and the Revelator standing at the counter of a gas station in Texarkana.
Rita looked at it. Behind her I saw four uniformed officers walk in. I was impressed with how quickly they’d responded to my phone call. One walked over to the kitchen window. The drunks and homeless souls sitting at the tables all stiffened up. Betty, her eyes wide with alarm, pointed the cop to my office. Her hazel eyes met mine, and I tried to smile reassuringly.
“There are people here,” I said. “They want to talk to you, Rita. They’re going to take you and the Revelator to the hospital. He needs his head looked at where the man hit him with that pipe. And you need your baby looked at.”
She regarded her stomach for the first time. “I don’t want them to take my baby away from me.”
“They won’t,” I said. I stood up. The cops were at the door. One, a handsome, silver-haired guy, came in slowly.
Rita turned and when she saw them she screamed. The cops poured into the room and tackled the Revelator. They threw him to the ground, and he kicked a little. He wasn’t really even awake, but they held him down despite his lack of struggle. One of the cops was a stocky blonde with a hard mouth. While the guys subdued the unconscious man on the floor, she put some handcuffs on Rita before I could see her do it.
“She doesn’t need those,” I barked.
“Back up, ma’am,” the cop barked back.
The cop with the silver hair jumped up and clapped his thick hand on my shoulder. “You need to calm down, ma’am,” he said.
Betty was in the doorway. Her hair was pulled back in a scarf, and sweat beaded her face.
I took a deep breath. Rita had crumbled to the floor. I said, “I am calm sir. I think the girl is already very agitated, and she doesn’t require handcuffs.”
The cops were pulling the Revelator to his feet. Rita was turning red. “Don’t hurt him,” she said.
I knelt down next to her and put my arms around her. She sunk into me. “He’ll be okay, Rita,” I said.
The silver-haired cop knelt down. His voice was soft, and he seemed to be following my lead now. “Ma’am,” he said.
“Don’t hurt him,” she said.
“We won’t hurt him,” the cop said. The others had pulled the Revelator up and put him back in the chair. “I need to ask you some questions.”
The girl wouldn’t look at him. Her face was buried in my chest.
“Are you Karen Ann Nelson?”
She shook her head.
“Tell him the truth, Rita,” I said.
The cop said, “Are you Karen Ann Nelson of Arlington, Texas?”
Rita drew her head up and looked at me. “That was the name Man gave me,” she said. “God hath given me another name in heaven.”
“Good Lord,” Betty said.
The cop frowned and looked at me. Then he pointed at the Revelator and asked Rita, “Who is this man?”
She stared at the drooling old man and touched her stomach. “The flesh of my flesh,” she said.
R ANDY’S PERSONAL LORD AND SAVIOR
I can’t remember anyone proselytizing to me before I moved down to Arkansas. I knew Catholics who dabbed ashes on their foreheads once a year, and Jews who wore yarmulkes, and Muslims who fasted during Ramadan, but I never met anyone who really took it upon themselves to show me the light until I moved from Chicago to Little Rock. That’s where I met Randy.
We met as galley slaves down in the customer service bowels at Alltel. Our cubicles sat across from one another. Geek shit decorated mine: a couple of plastic doodads from Happy Meals, a Princess Leia Queen of Hearts from a long lost deck of Star Wars playing cards, a small Batman poster.
Randy’s cubicle contrasted mine in nearly every way. Whereas scattered forms covered my desk like pieces of a puzzle I needed to finish, his papers were stacked, his computer screen never had a dust mote on it, and his walls were bare except for two things. He had the exact same Batman poster as me, and he had a bumper sticker stuck in the top corner of his wall, where everyone who passed could read: Ask Me About Jesus.
My first day at work we shook hands and said hello and didn’t have time for much else. I was still learning the ropes, so I kept my head down and concentrated on the job. Randy didn’t have much time either because he was Mister Employee of the Month. Sitting ramrod straight at his computer, headset clamped tight on his blond buzz cut, he performed customer service like it was his life’s highest ambition. At lunch he shot me with thumb and forefinger as I was heading to the break room, and when I got back an hour later he was still at his computer, straight as a statue saying, “Well, thank you, ma’am. We always appreciate the call.�
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A week or so after I started there he leaned against my cubicle one day and said, “Batman poster, huh?”
“You bet.”
“Got the same thing, dude.” He jerked his thumb over his shoulder.
“Yeah, I saw. Pretty cool.”
He nodded.
I nodded back.
Randy straightened up and rotated his thick shoulders. “Back’s all tensed up. This work’s tough on the ole trapezius. I used to be in the Army, and they worked us hard, but this sitting at a desk is its own kind of complaint.”
I nodded.
He said, “You find that to be true, man?”
“I slouch,” I said. “Compensates. Evens things out a little.”
Randy smiled. “Yeah. Okay, buddy, I got to jump back on the phones. Let me know if there’s any way I can help you adjust.”
I said I would, and we went back to work.
Three days later I was passing him a box of staples when, for the hell of it, I jerked my head at his Jesus sticker and said, “So Randy, what can you tell me about this Mexican?”
“Sanchez in accounting? I think she’s Catholic.”
“No,” I said. I pointed at his sticker. “This Jesuś guy.”
He stared at me for a second before he smiled. Then he shook his head. “Be happy to share with you all I know, man.”
“Hit me.”
I don’t know why I brought it up. For as long as I can remember I’ve always suspected that religion is just the illusion of certainty, a security blanket in an insecure world. But there’s nothing more dangerous than relieving people of their illusions, and, besides, I wasn’t nearly presumptuous enough to want to set Randy straight on his worldview, anyway. I suppose I just wanted to hear his pitch. I mean, he had the sticker. He obviously wanted to give people the pitch.
He spread his palms out. “Jesus is my personal lord and savior.”
“As opposed to impersonal?”
“Yep,” he said. “Totally personal.”
“Custom made?”
Randy smiled and shot me with his forefinger. He knew I was riding him a little, but he was too good a salesman not to use that for an in. “All custom, dude. Like your relationship with that special lady in your life. It’s a beautiful thing, right?”
“Sure,” I said. I’d been bereft of a special lady for a while, but why burden Randy with that?
“Same with Jesus, man. He’s looking for that totally personal, totally unique relationship with you. You and only you.”
I nodded. We were quickly getting to a point in the conversation where I was going to run out of anything to say that wasn’t more sarcastic than the last thing I’d said.
“Well, that’s cool.”
“Listen,” Randy said, “this isn’t a small thing. I’m telling you right now that Jesus turned my life around. I was out there stumbling in the dark like a fool and he picked me up and turned on the lights. Jesus made it happen for me.”
“Yeah,” I said. I turned a little in my chair and lifted my hand to gesture at my desk. Well got to get back to…
He didn’t notice. He was too locked in, and now I was getting nervous. I could feel myself becoming embarrassed, though I would have been hard pressed to explain why.
“There’s stuff to tell, dude,” Randy said. “I was wicked. I was a bad guy, really and truly, out there doing things I’m not at all proud of.”
I could see Randy wearing a bra on his head at a kegger with his slobbery frat brothers, stocking up on all the guilt he’d need to become born again someday. I smiled and nodded. Mister Understanding.
He just rubbed his hands together. “I’ll tell you all about it someday, dude. You’ll see. Jesus done turned my thing all around.”
***
After that we didn’t talk about the whole Jesus business for a while. Randy was, as always, at the computer, taking calls and firing off emails and faxes. I suppose I was doing the same thing, but at a more casual pace.
Then in early December we found ourselves being surly on the same couch at the company Christmas party. I was surly because I was at a company Christmas party, which was more or less mandatory. Randy was surly because everyone was drinking.
There were a few hundred people there, nobody too important or too high up the food chain, and we were all crammed into the main lobby of the building. There were long tables set up with cold cuts and punch, a couple of desserts, and a stock of mediocre wine.
I wasn’t drinking because I don’t really like wine. Randy leaned over and asked, “You don’t drink?”
I shrugged. “Beer’s about all I can handle.”
He nodded.
“You?” I asked.
“Naw, man. Jesus weaned me off the grape. Drinking a bunch of alcohol ain’t what the Lord intended.”
I said, “Come on, Randy, how do you know what God intends?”
“Holy Spirit, dude.”
“The Holy Spirit?”
“Totally. Bible says the Holy Spirit makes all things known.”
“All things being known, shouldn’t you be shift supervisor or something?”
He leaned back into the cushions, crossing his legs. His tie was loose, his thick, tan neck exposed. “I don’t claim to know everything. If that came off as arrogant it’s not how I meant it. I just meant that the Lord makes his mysteries known to us, a lot of them anyway. The things I don’t know are things I don’t know because I’m not righteous enough yet to grasp them. That’s all I’m saying.”
“We could be getting drunk right now,” I pointed out. I was rethinking my no-wine policy.
“Go ahead, dude. I ain’t touching it. Can’t believe they’d serve it at a company function. At a Christmas party even.”
I scooted to the edge of the sofa. “Last chance,” I said. “Just one?”
“You ever see that movie The Passion of the Christ?” he asked.
“No,” I said. “That’s the real violent one, right?”
“Yeah,” he said, “and Jesus didn’t take that kind of butt whooping so I could sit here getting sloshed at his birthday party.”
I got up and grabbed a plastic cup of some cheap red. When I got back over to Randy he was looking at the bottom of his shoes.
“Have you ever taken a drink?” I asked, sitting down.
He picked at the shoe with his fingernail and nodded. “Time or two.”
“How’d that work out for you?”
“Not too well.”
I looked at him. He looked at the bottom of his shoe. I said, “You seem depressed all the sudden.”
He shook his head. “Naw. I’ve fought depression before. Had it bad for a while. This is just me being bummed out that the world ain’t what it should be.”
“When were you depressed?”
“Couple years ago, about the time I come back from overseas.”
“Where were you stationed?”
“Germany.”
“How was that?”
He shrugged. “It was okay. I’m not much for foreign places. I like America, you know?”
I took a sip of wine. It wasn’t mediocre; it was bad. I drank some more.
Randy said, “Had a crap job over in Germany, man.”
“Which was?”
“Which was me and this other dude had to escort the coffins off the planes when the bodies came in from Iraq.”
“Really?”
“Yeah. It was like a little funeral every time. Depressing, dude. Gets you down.”
“I bet.”
He nodded.
“So that was why you got depressed?” I asked.
He shrugged. “I guess. I tried to deal with it in unproductive ways. Me and this other dude, Daniels, we would go out drinking after work, and, I mean, those Germans like the booze, man. Me and Daniels would just be drunk twenty-four/seven when we weren’t working. It’s all we did. Kind of. I mean a lot of times we’d be out looking for young ladies. Only we didn’t call them that, young ladies, and w
e didn’t think of them that way. We only thought of them as girls we were trying to pick up. And we did. We did pick them up.”
“German girls?”
“Not usually. Usually they were military chicks—young ladies, and we’d just use them.”
“So you were getting drunk and getting laid. Sounds like nearly every military guy I’ve ever known, Randy.”
He rubbed his face. “That’s no kind of excuse though, man.”
I finished my wine. I stood up to get some more but first I told him, “Most women know the score, Randy. You can’t be used by someone unless you let them use you. And, also, it goes both ways. Those girls were using you, too. Think about that.”
I left him thinking and went and loaded up on some more wine. I hit the snack table, got a plate of carrots and celery, and headed back to Randy.
I offered him a carrot and he waved it away. “No thanks. But here’s the thing, man, we did use those girls.”
I ate some celery. “I’m not saying you weren’t being a douchebag, Randy. I’m sure you were being a colossal douchebag, but women are equal to men—up to and including their ability to decide who they drunkenly fuck in the backseat of a jeep. Or wherever.”
He looked at the bottom of his shoe again and picked at it like a scab. I sipped some wine. He said, “What if they didn’t decide?”
“What do you mean?”
He shook his head. “Nothing,” he muttered.
“What do you mean? How could they not decide?”
He took a deep breath. “There was this young lady in artillery named McKenty. She was this big-hipped redhead from Durham, North Carolina. Real cute. Had a thing for ugly guys, though. Dated every ugly joe on the base. Uglier the better it seemed like.
“So one night me and Daniels run into her at the bar. She’s there drinking alone, which was kind of odd because McKenty usually had somebody with her. The guys were all over her all the time.” Randy clicked his teeth together. “That must have been annoying.” He shrugged. “Anyway, she usually had some dude hitting on her cause she was pretty much a sure thing. You know what I’m saying?”