God Is Dead

by Ron Currie Jr.

  “And before that? Who were you before?”

  “I don’t know,” the boy said. “I’ve forgotten.”

  Guilt gathered in God’s throat and formed a lump there. He realized with sudden certainty that this boy, or any of the people in the camp—the men suddenly alone in their old age, the young women with disappeared husbands and hungry children—were as deserving as Thomas of his apology, would serve just as well as the altar for him to confess his sins of omission and beg forgiveness. God slid from the cot and stooped on his knees before the boy, like a Muslim at prayer. The unfamiliar twinge of tears stung his eyes, and he was about to speak when the boy crouched and put a hand on his shoulder.

  “Please,” the boy said, “get on your feet.” He cast frightened glances around the tent, as if expecting Ismail and the soldiers to appear at any moment.

  God looked up. “I’m sorry,” he said.

  “Please,” the boy said again, tugging urgently at the shoulder of God’s dress. “If you show weakness, it only makes them angry.”

  Several hours after Powell departed, taking the boy with him and promising to return, God removed the IV from his arm and staggered outside to seek relief from the stale air inside the tent. He gazed out toward the eastern horizon and spotted the first plane, a tiny blemish on the sky. Soon it was joined by a dozen more, all drifting around one another in tight slow circles like a swarm of tsetse flies.

  Most of the camp’s inhabitants had taken shelter in their lean-tos or under tamarinds to wait out the hottest part of the day, but as news spread of the odd spots in the distance, people began to stir. Mothers looked at the sky as though checking the weather, then roused the children and gathered their belongings as an ominous wall of dust formed in the east and the planes drew nearer, flying now in attack formation.

  God crouched on his haunches, pulled the blanket tight around his shoulders, and waited. The Dinka scrambled with mounting urgency. They rushed to the well for a last drink of water and untethered the few goats and donkeys in their possession. One woman lost a sandal in her haste, but rather than stop to remove the other she hobbled as fast as she could, clutching the wrist of her young daughter and pulling her along. Those who were late in rising simply got to their feet and ran, leaving behind everything they owned.

  Sunlight glinted off the planes’ wingtips. From the wall of dust, trailing slightly behind the planes, God heard the first faint bursts of automatic gunfire. The ground began to tremble minutely.

  Time and again the people still in the camp, realizing they were now trapped, called to God in a hundred different dialects. He laughed and cried at once. He had so many names, yet could not answer to any of them.

  The planes flashed overhead. They pitched forward and dropped their payloads. God did not look up. He watched the dust storm, where great black horses materialized like wraiths, their coats slick with foam, their nostrils angry and flared. The men astride these horses swung wicked blades and took aim with their rifles. Their faces were hidden in checked scarves. The bombs whistled down, down. The ground shook. God closed his eyes and wished for someone he could pray to.

  The Bridge

  There will be signs in the sun, moon, and stars.

  —Luke 21:25

  Dani Kitchen drove the usual route home to her mother’s, through the overgrown fields that stretched to the horizon on either side of Route 201. The sun rode fat and high even in late afternoon, and the two-lane blacktop in the distance shimmered like spilled gasoline. Tall grass, reeds, and cattails bowed in a mellow breeze, interspersed with strawberry patches and plots of juvenile corn, which was now only waist-high but by the end of August, when she was gone from here and starting school in Chapel Hill, would stand eight or ten feet tall.

  For once Dani was not in a hurry, and actually stayed under the speed limit at a leisurely fifty miles per hour. Wind from the open window blew her hair into a tangled mess. A blond swatch lapped at her cheek, then found purchase in the moisture at the corner of her mouth and clung there. Rather than pull the strand out and tuck it behind her ear, Dani laughed and gathered the hair with her tongue, sucked on it, tasting the slight bitterness of shampoo that hadn’t quite rinsed out of the ends that morning.

  In the backseat of her Grand Am, in a crumpled pile, sat her shiny white graduation cap and gown. Her diploma had fallen to the floor and lay, already forgotten, among the Pepsi cans, an overdue movie rental, crusts of dirt left over from the previous winter.

  She passed the Shores’ farm, where she picked up meat for her mother twice a month—Carol, the old man, sold steaks and freezer pigs, white cheese and sandwich ham right out of his barn. All slaughtered, cut, cured, and decanted on the premises. He’d been at it since he was a boy, had inherited the farm from his father, and now was in his mid-seventies. Rumor was that he might be selling out to a developer who wanted to turn his pastures into a Wal-Mart. The place smelled like shit and murder, but Dani liked it there, liked Carol’s slow, jokey personality, how he sort of was the farm instead of just the guy who ran it. Dani called hello to the cows, honked the car horn at them, but they took no notice of her, just went on with the slow, ponderous business of grazing.

  She laughed again and drove on.

  With one hand she tapped out a beat on the steering wheel. With the other she reached for the pack of cigarettes in the console between the bucket seats. She lit one and inhaled deeply and without guilt, for Dani was a girl (a woman, she reminded herself, she needed to begin thinking of herself as a woman, a college woman, and perhaps along the same line of thought it was time to consider referring to herself, and asking others to refer to her, by her full name) who believed, deep down where she held her strongest and most intuitive convictions, that nothing bad would ever happen to her. She was smart enough to know that this made her not terribly unlike every other eighteen-year-old who had ever driven too fast or taken up smoking. Still, there it was—she believed in her clear skin, her white teeth, her strong slender legs. The world hadn’t yet given her reason to doubt them, and until it did she was invulnerable, and behaved accordingly, and didn’t really give it a whole hell of a lot of thought one way or the other.

  A week ago, for example, while in the damp and still somewhat awkward clutches of sex, she could feel Ben’s shoulders tighten and tremble as he neared his orgasm, and he slowed down and held off and said in her ear, “I want to do it inside you.”

  Dani shifted her body underneath him and said, as if she didn’t know, “Do what?”

  Embarrassed, bashful as always, Ben tucked his chin against his chest. “You know.”

  “Yeah,” she said. She lifted his chin with one hand, forcing him to meet her eyes. “But I want to hear you say it.”

  “No,” Ben said. “Never mind.”

  Touched by the boy’s shyness, Dani felt her heart swell with an affection that was more maternal than erotic, and she said, “Oh, Ben, you do whatever you want to, baby.”

  And, thus encouraged, he did. Dani’s mother would have called this careless, a word she often used to describe her daughter’s behavior. But Dani didn’t worry. She knew things, and she wasn’t going to end up like her mother, saddled with a baby and on her own before her eighteenth birthday. Even in the midst of Ben’s orgasm, she could feel the muscles inside her working, forcing him out, gently but firmly. When he finished and collapsed on top of her she pushed him off, her lips brushing his forehead, and stood to go to the bathroom, and before she even placed her hand on the toilet paper roll the fluid was running out of her and down the inside of her thigh, turning cold, impotent, harmless—just a little mess to wipe up and be done with.

  When she came back she did not lie down, but instead sat on the edge of the bed and folded one leg up underneath her butt. Ben stroked her back with his fingertips. He mentioned something about a bonfire, a party up at the water tower, but Dani wasn’t listening; her mind had wandered to thoughts of the coming fall, moving to North Carolina for college, her life beyond a
nd after this place, and she could not think of a single thing here that she would cry for.

  And while her girlfriends would have spent the next few days waiting for the worst, hoping for the twinge and flow that would let them know they had gotten away with their carelessness, Dani went about the business of the last week of high school without a moment’s worry. She attended marching practice and the senior talent show. She filled out her last will and testament for the Panther Press, and got drunk and kissed someone who was not Ben at Matt Bouchard’s senior campout. And when her period came she hardly noticed at all.

  Dani turned off the pavement onto a fire access road, heading for the first of two stops she would make to cap off this day of ritualized symbolic transition. The gravel road wound along a downward slope toward McGrath Pond, made slightly steeper and more treacherous each year by the erosive flow of spring runoff. At several spots the road turned sharply, weaving between trees and rough-hewn granite boulders, and Dani pressed the brake most of the way down. After half a mile the trees parted and the pond came suddenly into view, its water the color of a propane flame. Modest whitecaps, kicked up by the breeze, dotted the pond’s surface. Dani pulled into a turnoff near the public boat landing and put the car in park.

  She got out, came around to the back, and unlocked the trunk. It sprang open with a pop, and she removed a plastic grocery bag, heavy with mementos, then closed the trunk again.

  To the left of the boat landing, under a stand of slender white birches, was a makeshift and illegal fire pit ringed with blackened rocks. The rocks were piled on one another in a semicircle. In the pit were the remains of a fire from who knew how long ago—a bed of ash, sodden and muddy from the previous night’s rain, on top of which lay half-burned sticks of wood, a few scorched beer cans, and the melted ruins of a pair of sneakers. Dani reached into the bag and removed a squeeze-tin of lighter fluid, then upended the bag and watched the bits and pieces of her life up to this point fall into the pit. Without hesitation or malice—without much feeling at all, really, except for the warm and constant sense of anticipation she’d felt all day long—she squirted half the tin onto the photographs and baby shoes and certificates of achievement, struck a match, and tossed it on the pile.

  But this wasn’t the movies; the match went out before it hit the fluid. Dani struck another. She cupped the delicate flame with one hand, kneeled, and touched the matchhead to the fur of a stuffed panda bear. The lighter fluid caught instantly, and she jumped back as the entire pile went up.

  Dani lit a cigarette and watched her things burn, glancing occasionally out on the pond, where two loons swimming alongside one another dove in sync, disappearing seamlessly beneath the water. She was reminded of the time when, as a little kid, she’d seen a man in a speedboat chase a loon around this same pond. For some reason the bird had been unable to fly—perhaps she had a broken wing. But she’d seen the boat coming and ducked under the water, resurfacing a minute or two later fifty yards away. The man went after her again, and again the loon dove. Dani remembered the noise of the engine, how it idled with a predatory grumble as the man waited for the bird to surface, then roared when she came up for air, the sound carrying across the water to where Dani and her mother lay sunbathing. She remembered the glinting diamond of sunlight from the chrome light fixture on the bow of the boat, bearing down again and again on the harried bird. This went on for an hour, with the loon tiring, spending less and less time underwater, moving shorter and shorter distances from the boat before resurfacing, until finally she came up one last time, and the man gunned the outboard, and the bird was too tired to dive again, and that was the end of her.

  It was the only time Dani could ever remember crying, as a kid. Why, Mama? she’d howled over and over, and her mother, gazing dry-eyed out at the man in his boat, shook her head a little and said, I don’t know, hon. Some men are just that way. And Dani couldn’t understand, still did not understand why her mother didn’t shed even one tear for the bird, or for her daughter’s grief.

  This, though—the willful destruction of the keepsakes of her young life—her mother would shed a tear or two over this, Dani knew. The thought gave her no pleasure; it was something she had to do for herself, and how it might affect anyone else really didn’t figure into it. Besides, her mother would never understand that for Dani, this was a joyous act, a sloughing off of things old and worn and useless—her way of giving the future a big welcoming hug.

  But something was missing. She wanted to wake up tomorrow completely new and unfettered, and somehow the things she’d set ablaze, most of which were now burned down to embers and ash, weren’t enough. So she walked back to the car and took the cap and gown and diploma from the backseat. Again without hesitation, she tossed them on the fire. The cap and gown disintegrated, casting off a tremendous chemical stench. The diploma, in its faux-leather binding, took longer to burn. Dani poked at it with a stick. She knew that her mother would do more than cry over her burning the diploma, would, in fact, curse her daughter for it, having been unable to finish high school herself after getting pregnant with Dani. Her mother considered the diploma an end in itself, while for Dani it was just a means to a greater end—that of college, and all the doors it would open. The piece of paper itself held no real meaning for her, although she did put great stock in symbols and symbolism, signs and premonitions.

  This day, for example—this perfect, beautiful day. The bright sunlight and warm breeze, the cows and their lazy grazing, the matched pair of loons—all of it an unmistakable sign of something good. Dani rarely if ever needed cheering up, but she welcomed it all the same.

  Just as the diploma burned down to flaky glowing ash, the loons emerged again from the pond’s depths. Bobbing among the waves, they shook themselves dry, head to tail, then unfolded their wings and began to skim across the surface of the pond, picking up speed, lifting themselves until just their thin black feet still skittered through the water. They lifted their feet like the landing gear on a jetliner, tucking them into their downy underbellies, then rose steeply and made a wide turn overhead, disappearing over the tree line.

  Watching the birds, Dani thought again about just leaving for North Carolina immediately. Why not? Why stick around here, working at the House of Pancakes all summer long, when she could leave right away and be in Chapel Hill, with a new apartment and new friends, well before the fall semester started? It was the sort of impulse, Dani knew, that would give her girlfriends hives, not to mention her mother. Just picking up and going, with only a few hundred dollars and no real plan? To a place she’d never been and where she knew no one? So much uncertainty and risk! Yet where uncertainty and risk gave others pause, they only excited Dani. Besides, were there no jobs in Chapel Hill slinging greasy breakfasts? Were there not people she could love, and who would love her?

  It was another of her epiphanies, spurred by a sign: What in the world was keeping her from leaving this place tomorrow?

  The answer, of course, was nothing. Not a thing.

  And like that, Dani made her decision. So now her second stop, at Bob’s Drive-In at the Benton bridge to meet the girls (which was what they were, still—God love them, but they were still just girls) would not be a casual post-commencement gathering, but a good-bye. Maybe Ben would be there too, with some of the guys, pretending to just hang out, playing it cool and casual but hoping to catch a glimpse of her and maybe, if he were lucky, talk to her some, even though he had to know it was over now, really over, with him having another year of high school left, and even if he hadn’t had another year in this place it was over anyway, because as much as it saddened Dani to admit it to herself, let alone to Ben, she just didn’t love him. Things really were that simple sometimes, despite all that people did and said to complicate matters.

  She got into her car and drove back up the access road, spinning gravel under the tires, excited now about her decision to leave even though she didn’t want to see Ben and have to tell him; it would be easier, she
thought, if he just heard about it tomorrow or the next day from one of her girlfriends and had time to sort it out on his own. That kind of grieving was best done in private, Dani believed, away from friends and family, and especially from the person who caused the hurt. She knew Ben loved her, but she also knew what his love wanted to do to her—make her the wife of a millworker, with five kids and bad hair and nothing she could call her own except the blown-out veins in her legs. A small part of her hated Ben for that. And she knew that his suffering would be less and shorter-lived than her own would be if she gave in to his love, became what he wanted.

  She reached the main road and continued east, toward Bob’s Drive-In. Off to the left, just over the hills on the other side of the valley, she saw two black specks receding against the glowing blue—the loons, still together, still gliding up and away from here, gone almost completely now.

  Dani smiled and thought about what she should bring with her, and what she should leave behind.

  She would go straight home from Bob’s and get to packing. It wouldn’t take long. One suitcase, jeans and blouses, socks and bras and panties, a few short skirts for the hot Carolina summer. Her journal, a few magazines, the worn and much-loved copy of A Tree Grows in Brooklyn. Bathroom stuff, toothbrush and deodorant, hair ties, contact case and solution. Her mother would ask, What are you doing? And Dani would tell her: I’m leaving, Mama. I’m a woman now, and today all the signs are pointing due south. Simple as that. And her mother might be sad, and a little scared, her baby going away. But Dani thought she’d be equally happy and proud. Get going, girl, she might say after a moment’s thought and a tearful hug. Get out there and do all those things I never did.

  I’m already gone, Dani thought to herself in the car, under the sun, among the waving fields of corn and cattails and strawberries.