“What about this purty little part down here? Is that a winda into God’s mind, too?”
“Has to be. It all is. Think y’kin read it?”
“It says your heart line’n fate line is seriously crossed up, but it don’t matter none on accounta how splendrous it is.”
“Yes. And how sad.”
“Don’t see that part. But here, lemme use my tongue’n turn a page…”
“Oh…!” We are, she thinks, making darkness our home tonight, and a warmth creeps through her, and another shudder. “Yes…”
“It’s suppertime. Hungry?”
“No…”
When Sally Elliott suggested they bring their pizzas out here to the lakes, Billy Don had no objections. Neither did he object to the two six packs of cold beer Sally picked up at the liquor store around the corner. They took Sally’s folks’ car rather than his old pea-green Chevy, which they left parked at a broken meter back in Tucker City to save Billy Don gas money, and he appreciated that. He has appreciated everything. It’s a gorgeous evening, sliding easily into twilight. The lake water is unruffled and the birds are singing and the crickets are doing their hiccuppy thing and the pizza is delicious and he’s pretty sure he is in love, though he’s new to the idea. Probably she could kick him in the shins and he’d appreciate that, too. He has filled her in on the arrest of her aunt Debra, which upset Sally a lot, and her sadness made her seem prettier somehow. Behind a man’s frayed white shirt, open down the front and buttoned at the cuffs as protection against the mosquitoes, she is wearing a T-shirt tonight that says GIVE ME A HUG – I’M AT THAT AWKWARD STAGE BETWEEN BIRTH AND DEATH. He’d like to do that and maybe he will if it’s not too late (it probably is, darn it), but she jokes a lot and he’s not sure she really means it, and he’s even less sure she means it for him. She’s friendly, but not friendly in that way, though maybe it’s just the way she is with everyone and she really likes hugging and is trying to tell him so and he should stop being such a coward. It would help if she wasn’t so smart. Tonight it has been how any dumb notion, no matter where it comes from and especially if it can be pictured, can become what she called a motif (he asked her to spell it) and then get borrowed and used around the world, notions like messenger birds and human sacrifice and magical virgins and holy mountains, which become the common currency of religions everywhere and contribute to the universal madness. Not everything catches on, of course. Back in the Dark Ages, she tells him, they used to celebrate midsummer with cat-burning rituals, and those aren’t so popular anymore. When he tried to change the subject to something more in the hugging line by remarking that he felt like tonight was almost like living in a dream, Sally said that, yes, life was a kind of dream all right, but it’s mostly a dream dreamt by others—the hard thing being to figure out how to wake up. He had told her about Glenda Oakes’ dream interpretations, more or less in the same clumsy sentence, and she said that’s what preachers and theologians were: charlatan dream interpreters.
Now, over pizza and beer at the lakeside picnic table, listening to the crickets and birds, distant boat motors, the occasional floating voices out on the lake, the dry crackle of firecrackers at other picnics, he has shown her Darren’s latest newsletter to the church membership. It’s the copy intended for Reverend Hiram Clegg, which he plucked out of the bagful before mailing them this afternoon. Reverend Clegg has problems of his own right now and is probably even in jail, so they may not even have the right address. “Sometimes I think Darren is completely crazy,” he says, watching Sally read, squinting in the dimming light, “and sometimes I think he’s the only one who knows.”
“Right the first time, Billy D,” she says around a mouthful of pizza and she punches open another can of beer. He sips his slowly, it being the first he’s had since before Bible college; Sally has just finished off, with a wink, her third one. When she calls him Billy D, he doesn’t know if that’s a putdown or a come-on. “The ‘remarkable prophecies of the brilliant young visionary evangelist Darren Rector’ as revealed in all modesty by the brilliant young visionary himself.”
“Well, the letter is from Mrs. Collins. Or, you know, that’s what…”
Sally only smiles, lights up another cigarette, sets it on the edge of the table, and takes another bite of pizza, and with a happy shrug, so does he, trying to keep his moustache out of the melted cheese, and he also finishes off his beer and reaches into the ice for another one. He’s sure she wants him to hug her. “Darren is living in the realm of the supernatural,” she says. “The natural has dying in it, the supernatural doesn’t, it’s as simple as that. Dying is too much for most people. So what are you going to do if you don’t live in the majority’s crazy made-up world? Steer clear if you can and duck when they have guns in their hands. Speaking of which, any more attacks on the camp?”
“No, but everybody’s pretty nervous. Including me. I had the watch last night with Welford Oakes and he said he thought he heard something and told me to sit tight until he got back. I suddenly heard all kinds of noises and thought I saw a whole army creeping around out there in the trees and I mighta fired off a shot but I was hunkered down behind a thick bush and didn’t want them to know where I was. Besides, it mighta been Welford. I thought he’d never come back, and when he did he was smoking and humming to himself and said it was just some animal, rooting around down in the vegetable patch.”
Sally is laughing. He likes to hear her laugh, even when she’s laughing at him. It’s a lot better than making him feel like an idiot just because he’s a Christian. “Would you ever shoot someone?” she asks.
“I think I already did. Just buckshot in his rear, though.”
“Got him while he was running away, hunh?”
“Well, I didn’t know that. It was dark and the bullets were flying and I was hiding behind a tree and shooting backwards over my shoulder.”
Sally laughs again (that wasn’t exactly true, but he wanted to hear her laugh), takes a long drink, then belches noisily like a boy. “Whoo!” she says, and belches again. “I think I need some powdered toenails!”
“What?”
“Powdered toenails. Just the thing for heartburn. Grandma Friskin told me. Like chewing the bark of a tree struck by lightning when you have a toothache and eating twenty crickets with wine to cure asthma.”
“I guess that would cure most anything.” He’d like to know what works for a near-fatal case of raw throbbing horniness. Well, he knows what works…
“Mmm. Listen to the little buggers sounding off. It’s like a mass protest. Maybe they think we took their name in vain.” He’s trying to figure out how to get back to the hugging idea, when Sally rubs out her butt on the sole of her sneaker, scuffs it into the earth, lights up another, and says, “Best folk-wisdom healer of all, though, is water. Especially on a night like tonight. A midsummer night’s dip heals everything.”
“Like baptism,” he says. “Another, what you call it, motif.” The word feels funny in his mouth but he’s glad he can say it.
“Right on, Billy Don. So what do you say, after it gets dark, just for our health, we go for a little skinny dip?”
Her faith is in question, her heart is full of doubt. It is a faith that has sustained and protected her since she reached the age when she could think for herself, and now she is unsure of it. As it is the only faith she has had, she has become, she recognizes, something of a fundamentalist. She has trusted it absolutely as other people thoughtlessly trust their God, a kind of unconditional first principle, and she is losing that certainty. He arrives in his colorful golf clothes, carrying an overnight bag, and asks her to join him in the shower, and she hesitates, never having hesitated before. Undressing, knowing his eyes are upon her, she wonders if her apostasy is transparent. But under the cool spray and lathering hands, that sense of oneness with the universe common to all mystical religions returns, and she gratefully surrenders to it, lets her tears flow with the waterfall, and tries, eyes closed, to think of nothing but
this unique sudsy moment of existence. After they dry each other off, he walks her over to the window, ostensibly to gaze out upon the fading midsummer evening, but in reality to gaze upon each other sweetly costumed in that soft light. He turns her to face away from the window and kisses her slowly from nape to heels, nipping her buttocks in his teeth as he passes by them, his large strong hands squeezing them gently, passing between them, his tongue licking at her anus and the backs of her knees, and what she sees in the full-length mirror across the room is her shadowy silhouetted presence, like someone only half-formed, the framing window glowing like a nimbus, the man she loves behind her, his features softly lit by her body’s reflective glow, kneeling to kiss her feet before rising slowly to repeat the ceremony from heel to nape, his hands caressing the parts in front. He murmurs, as he kisses his way up her body, how exquisitely beautiful she is and how much he adores her and needs her, and she knows the reply to this but is silent for once. She has always thought of her first principles as something that came spontaneously to her—by inspired insight, as it were. But she probably had to learn them. All religions are learned, Sally said. To escape them, they have to be unlearned. Most people don’t want to do that. She doesn’t want to do that. Sometimes this unlearning comes from personal effort, what Sally calls the hard work of waking up. Sometimes it just happens.
“What does anything mean if dying’s at the end of it?” asks Guido Mello, still feeling loose from his after-hours beers on Vince Bonali’s porch and unwilling to go to his unhappy home yet. He is sitting at a lackluster round of four-handed penny-ante poker up at the Eagles Social Club with Cokie Duncan and Buff Cooley and one-armed Bert Martini, and they’re blowing off about Dave Osborne’s suicide. There is a pile of laceless shoes rescued from Dave’s store on the table next to them, but none of them match. So it’s a kind of memorial instead. They are all ex-miners and knew and respected Dave, and Bert has just remarked that suicide sucks all the meaning out of life and he doesn’t understand why anyone would do that. “Thing is,” Guido adds, “thinking about dying can be worse than the thing itself. So, only two ways out: buy into some God-and-Heaven bull or knock yourself off. Anything else is chickenshit.”
“God and Heaven ain’t bull and you oughtn’t talk that way,” Bert says angrily.
“Count me in with the chickens,” says Cokie Duncan, who rarely says much of anything at all, and spreads his hand, which has a jack and two kings in it. “Here’s Jesus and his two fathers,” he says morosely.
“I will say, if I ever did such a thing, and I wouldn’t,” says Buff, tossing his cards into the pot in disgust, “that I wouldn’t waste the occasion. I’d take a few bigwig assholes with me.”
“Why, Buff?” asks Guido, his nose still smeared with auto grease from his long day as a slave at Lem’s garage. It’s rumored that Guido’s wife is pregnant again and he doesn’t know how she got that way, though her own old man is a prime suspect. “You’d just be trying to paste meaning onto where there fucking ain’t none.” If he had the words for it, he’d say: Pure suicide is a mere cancellation of the self as a solution to an otherwise insoluble problem. But he doesn’t have the words for it.
Just when they’re feeling their most miserable and wordless, Georgie Lucci turns up with six or seven other disreputable drunks, including Stevie Lawson, whose stag party night this turns out to be, and some boxes of hot pizza from the Palazzo di Pizza. “Enrico give us these for the party,” Georgie says, and they open up the boxes and screw the top off a new bottle of rye whiskey. They learn that Lawson is marrying one of Abner Baxter’s girls tomorrow, though no one, including Stevie, quite knows how this has come about. “We’re making the rounds. Rico’s joining us when he turns off the ovens. Plan to end up in Waterton and get Stevie laid by three whores at once. It’s our wedding present. Cheese has set it up.”
Johnson grins, showing his scatter of teeth. His hair has been chopped back. He’s bathed, shaved, and is even wearing a new silk shirt, gift of one of the Waterton ladies of the night. Johnson is famous for the graffiti he painted on the bank wall today and they all compliment him for it. “It was me and Jesus,” he says, and they all laugh at that though they don’t know what he means exactly, never having thought of him as a religious-type person.
They toast Lawson and his bride. “Is she good lookin’?”
“Well, there’s plenty of her,” Lawson says, and they all laugh again. They figure he must have got her pregnant somehow when he was working out at the church camp for Suggs. He doesn’t deny that and they make jokes about the physical hazards of fucking holyrollers when they got the spirit on them. They aren’t funny jokes, but everyone snorts just the same.
“I hear the place to be tonight is the Blue Moon Motel,” Buff says. “They’re recording them hillbillies live.”
“We been there,” says Stevie Lawson, his speech already slurring. “They throwed us out.”
“We’re letting the show out there get revved up and then we’re going back with a squad big enough to open that door like Moses parted the red-ass sea,” Georgie says with his usual me-ne-fotte grin. The Eagles Club is redolent with hot garlic and bakery aromas and nobody is thinking about suicide. “Give ole Duke and his lady some background hooting and hollering that’ll drown out how bad they’re singing. You guys come along. We got booze should last us till dawn.”
“Grace is not something you die to get, it’s something you get to live!” Ben Wosznik is singing, his guitar slung over his weary shoulder. Such a sadness in him these days; but his song is not sad. “Of all God’s gifts, the gift a grace is the greatest He can give!” It’s his new song using Ely Collins’ famous line, and it’s a good night for introducing it, for they have seven of their old Nazarene friends in their midst, all of whom were church members in Ely’s day and loved him as man and pastor, and it makes them feel more at home. Clara has been speaking regularly with the Nazarene elder Gideon Diggs, and as they have been without a pastor for some years now and share close confessional ties, these seven have decided to join their fellowship in the Gospel and become Brunists, most of them asking to be baptized with light. Other old friends are known to be attending services led by Abner Baxter, so there is still hope they will all be together again someday. With the light lasting so long these days, the Brunists hold their evening prayer meetings, weather allowing, down here by the dogwood tree. Its blossoms are long gone but have been replaced by bright red berries—like drops of Christ’s blood, some say—that help to feed the camp’s population of squirrels and birds. The sky is a softer eventide shade of aqua blue now, wearing like a ghostly mask the waning moon, already palely risen, and a golden light has settled in as if the whole world were being haloed. The seven new Followers are a welcome addition tonight (Darren has invited them all to the consecration of the two graves on the Mount of Redemption on the fifth of July and they have all said they will be there), for several of their own camp regulars are missing—both Dunlevys, for example; poor Sister Debra, for whom they have all prayed; Welford Oakes (missing at supper, too; after the service Bernice will check to see if Welford has a problem she can medicate); Hunk Rumpel, who has a training session with the Christian Patriots this evening, which is probably where Travers Dunlevy is, too; also the gospel singers, Duke and Patti Jo, who are committed to a recording session tonight of Duke’s new song, which may not be a completely Christian one; and young Billy Don as well. Maybe it’s the good weather: not always worship’s best friend. Billy Don’s absence seems to have got Darren’s dander up, probably because he needs help in coping with Colin, who has been more or less out of control ever since the arrest of his mother. When the song is finished, Clara walks over to Ben and takes his hand in both of hers and thanks him, and they all thank him and bless him, and then, with apologies and a prayer that the grace Ely spoke of and Ben sang about be granted, she takes her leave to return to their trailer to watch over Elaine. Poor Sister Clara has been badly beat down by recent events, but there a
re heartening signs of renewed life in her now that her daughter is back home and beginning to eat again. In her wake there are spontaneous prayers for her and Elaine, who, their Nazarene friends are told, may be demonically possessed and needing all the prayers they can offer up. Gideon Diggs says he once knew a Hungarian lady over in the next county who did exorcisms and he’ll try to find out if she’s still around.
The Nazarene visitors are startled by a noise out on the periphery that sounds like repeating gunfire just as Ben is about to lead them all in singing a verse or two of the hit parade tune “Whispering Hope” (“If, in the dusk of the twilight, dim be the region afar…”), and Wayne explains that vandal-types have been driving by all week and tossing firecrackers and cherry bombs into the camp; it’ll probably tail off after Independence Day. Meanwhile, Colin keeps crying out that he wants to confess. “Not out here under the tree, Colin,” Darren urges. “It’s not right.” “I got something here to calm him down, Darren,” Bernice says in a whisper that carries everywhere, indicating her patent-leather handbag, “but it has to be done with a needle, so if you can—” That sets the boy to screaming hysterically and running off toward the cabins, Darren chasing after to be sure he doesn’t harm himself. Some of the women exchange knowing glances with Mabel Hall, for in her reading of the tarot cards before supper she turned up cards that meant either the destructive use of fire by the clash of opposites (Glenda asked what kind of fire was meant and Mabel said all kinds) or else chaotic unmanageable energy and loss of direction provoked by new family or community arrangements created by exigencies beyond their control, and they know now which was the right one. That’s how it is: mostly bad news in the cards these days. Well, they can only hope…
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