Coffee and Sugar

by C. Sean McGee

CHAPTR ELEVEN

  “Wake up,” said The Bishop, shaking at Joao’s legs.

  “What is it? What’s wrong?” asked Joao.

  “Time to do the lord’s bidding,” said The Bishop.

  Joao unclamped his eyelids from their encampment, letting the virgin light of dawn attend to its retinal battery as he adjusted his focus as best he could, seeing The Bishop; or the outline of The Bishop, dressed neatly in his Sunday suit, seated at the table that Joao had bought, folding pieces of paper and making a neat stack just beside his leather case.

  “Come on Joao before we give the devil the start he needs,” said The Bishop, speaking in a light joviality that Joao had never heard.

  Joao lifted himself from his mattress and stumbled blindly towards the sink by the curtain to his makeshift room. He ran some cold water through his hands, feeling the tips of his fingers tingle before falling numb and he stayed there transient, feeling only the weight of something pressing against his hands as his mind drifted into dream, pulled overboard from his conscious vessel as he tried in vain to reel in his tiredness, finding himself thrust outside of his waking body and running instead, through the fancy of his desire.

  He stared into the greasy mirror that hung precariously from the brick wall where a brown rusted screw wound itself from the top of a splintered wooden frame whilst peeling away from the crumbling brick work, hinting at the inevitable effect of disregard.

  His eyes fell past the rusted screw and drew past his own reflection where behind him, he could see a row of trees lining a gravel path and as his eyes focused, he could see through the rustling of the leaves and branches, the hand of a girl pushing out into the light. First one and then another, reaching out and parting the leaves so that the light of day shone onto the lire of Charity who sat in the darkness, crouched low under the hanging trees, parting the leaves and smiling at Joao, her eyes inviting him to escape.

  “We’ve a big day today Joao,” said The Bishop, resting his two hands on his shoulders.

  Joao didn’t quite know how to react. He had never felt this sentiment from his father. His custom had been; like a disciplined pet, to cower in whatever shadow would keep him from obstruction whilst listening to the slapping of his father’s heels against the tiles in their house as he paced about with his leather case draped over his shoulder, sweating an air of insolence.

  Joao had learned to spread his vine lightly over the crest of his family; careful, should his simple flower be torn from its roots out of a fit of boredom from his bullying siblings or his brutish mother. He had often tried to find some condolence in his father; when he was younger, of course, for they swept along the same paths and breathed the same unspoiled air away from the burdens of physical task, but it was like an ant trying to cozy up to a landslide.

  “Good morning sir,” Joao said in his usual defense.

  “Don’t call me sir. Call me Bishop or, better yet, you can call me dad. How does that sound?” he said smiling, looking anything but the disheveled mess that had been taking refuge in its own dejection, buried under a mount of blankets and soaked in degrading tears.

  Instead, he stood with his head high, his eyes brimming with exuberant fire and a consistent sniff that had him attend to; unendingly, some dust or something caught in his nose.

  “Yes sir, dad, sir,” said Joao, feeling very strange, like that same disciplined pet, eating from its master’s plate.

  “I thought we could start from the top of the hill and work downwards, door by door. It will be better and we’ll cover more ground if we split up and take house by house. I made some flyers, look” said The Bishop handing a dirtied napkin to Joao with a gallant accomplishing smile on his face.

  “But this is just a napkin. A flyer should be on paper with colours, like what the people hand out near the café. This isn’t a flyer” said Joao.

  “Does it have the name of our church?” asked The Bishop.

  “Kind of. Is this it here?” asked Joao pointing out what looked like either blotched ink or tomato sauce.

  “Here, look, The World Church of Jesus Christ’s Eternal Glory. And here is the address and email” said The Bishop.

  “What’s email?” asked Joao.

  “I don’t know exactly. Don’t ask stupid questions Joao. What do you think? I had a friend help me” asked The Bishop.

  “You have a friend? Really?” asked Joao surprised.

  “She told me about putting an email on the flyer,” said The Bishop.

  “She? It’s a girl? Does Mother know?” asked Joao.

  “Don’t be stupid Joao. It’s not like that. And don’t you tell your mother. She worries enough about you to have to inherit me in her thoughts. She’s just a friend, that’s all” said The Bishop, his cheeks turning from off white to a bright pinkish red as he constructed the last word in his lie.

  The Bishop collected a pile of napkins and gave them to Joao who put them neatly into the pockets of his suit; straightening his jacket as he did and tucking his shirt firmly into his pants.

  “I’m glad you are happy too” said Joao as he followed The Bishop out of the church and onto the street where about them, junkies brushed off the morning chill from the hairs on their arms and haggard looking whores on every corner welcomed the morning sun with their arms outstretched, yawning out the hours of abuse from their spent bodies while; fumbling drunkenly at their metal buckles, scores of addled men escaped the honest bridging of the sun, pulling their pants back up around their waists, abating their molesting wealth for the polite reserve of day that was waking from the shadow of eve and exposing their disgraces unto themselves which; under the veil of night, they had easily disguised as the norm and festivity.

  “Excuse me, mam,” said Joao approaching one of the prostitutes that were lighting up a cigarette.

  “My shift’s done buddy. I’m all worn out. Come back in a couple of hours, ok honey?” said The Harmonious Whore.

  “Oh no mam, I’m not looking for, well, can I ask you a question? Do you have a personal relationship with Jesus Christ?” asked Joao, expecting her eyes to light with exhilaration at the thought of pondering the wonder of god.

  “I remember you. You got into a little scuffle the other night yeah? How you doin honey? You gotta watch those boys. They got tempers” The Harmonious Whore said, leaning in close to Joao’s ear and like a worn exhaust, spitting clumps of thick smoke and light phlegm towards his ear.

  “Oh, that’s ok mam. I remember you too. You stood up to those men for me.”

  “I did? Well, that explains the bruises” she said, rubbing at a tender spot on her bottom, wincing and kicking her leg in the air as she scratched her elongated fingernails against grazed skin and a deep black bruise.

  “Did you know that Jesus kept the company of a, well a girl like…”

  “You mean a whore, like me? And I aint no girl honey” she said, lifting the slither of fabric she called a skirt, tucking her hand inside her stained, once silken panties and pulling a scabbed and swollen penis out into the morning light.

  Joao was shocked, estranged and scientifically puzzled, taking one step back in apparent surprise but looking dumbfounded in obvious wonder. He didn’t know if he was a she, or if she was a he, and if such a thing could even be.

  “You stare any longer and you’re gonna have to pay me twenty,” The Harmonious Whore said.

  Joao immediately turned his head away, pulling his hands over his eyes, apologizing as he walked off towards his father, further on up the hill.

  “I’m sorry mam, I mean sir. Have a good day” he said, stuttering through a polite exit.

  “Don’t you wanna talk Jesus honey?” she yelled, shaking her scabbed and swollen penis in one hand while the other gripped firmly to a crevice in the rock face beside her, steadying her impending gravitational descent as she threw her joviality and her centre of balance into insulting the delicate reserve of the shy boy, kinking her legs as she swung her hand and fought to stop the pull of the cigarette fr
om her blistered lips to the floor below.

  Joao dipped his head and held his sight toward the floor as he quickly shuffled his feet and wearied himself away from the stream of prostitutes and their drunken, bastard lovers that spilled from the back seats of cars, dirty garages that posed as bars and brothels and even from the cracks in the earth, once saved only for rats, vermin and the vespertine disease.

  “It’s not too late to save yourself. The way is in Jesus Christ, in his heart, in his love and in his word. His arms are whole enough to carry you home” said The Bishop.

  “This is my home mother fucker. You see this body?” The Angry Prostitute said, shaking her rickety hips and running her manly thick bulbous index finger in her mouth, over her chapped lips, down along the stubble on her chin and down along the curve in her enormous breasts and finally slapping and mean spirited hand against her rump, winking at The Bishop as the sting rippled through her body and the slap echoed in the morning air.

  “This body is god damn, mother fucking di-vine baby” she exclaimed.

  The Bishop kept a caring informed look in his eye and he stared directly; with kindness and understanding, into the glassy eyes of The Angry Prostitute, ignoring the desperate defense that slapped against her thigh and instead focusing the warmth of his compassion and ready ear upon the tired and scared little girl that lay confined within this temple of abuse that; should he look long enough, would have her lift up her hand and will him to help pull her out and into the arms of our lord.

  “Jesus Christ can suck my dick” she said, grabbing at her genitals and sneering at The Bishop who; with a wealth of faith in his heart, kept searching for the little girl or little boy as it may be, inside this wreck of a human being; looking for a slight tremor in the prostitute’s eyes to see if the child that he believed could be saved, was actually alive.

  Joao watched from a sure distance as The Bishop raised his arms into the air, rattling the palms of his hands, light but very brisk as if he were brushing off the drops of water that lingered from his washed hands or shaking an imaginary Tambourine as the rhythm of god fed like a current of electricity from the soles of his feet through his believing heart, shining from his eyes and yearning to burst out of his fingertips.

  “Praise be to our lord Jesus Christ, our saviour, the son of god, the king of kings” he sang, his voice booming; the only thing louder than the sound of belt buckles sliding into place and the jingle of loose change that hummed through the air.

  He stamped his feet on the spot, one after the other as if he were making his pitch on a bed of molten lava and he shook his arms and hands like two great heavenly branches while he canted with his eyes wildly widened and his voice; at first warm and according, inviting the wounded bird to show its broken wing and then; when the bird hobbled off of its perch and tumbled about, out of reach, blossoming into a coarse and abrasive instrument of divine, oral detention.

  “God has a place for you,” he said, waving his black book back and forth, “where rivers of fire sear your tainted flesh and demons and devils molest and degrade your spirit for an eternity. An eternity of suffering and torment and misery, unless you repent to god now. Yours will be the worst suffering yet, you sick denigrate. You, you homosexual” he yelled at the top of his lungs as The Angry Prostitute ignored his plight and staggered off down the hill in the stream of indecency, cackling and cursing and pointing over their shoulders as they spread into the passage of day below, onto footpaths, onto buses and into the back of taxis.

  The Bishop was furious. He turned to Joao with his face red and enraged, his knuckles white from the strain of his clenching fists, his veins popping out of his neck and his eyes, bulging like a poisoned cat.

  “It’s not your fault you know. Fatts says nobody here can be saved. You can’t bring heaven where it doesn’t belong. You can’t save what god has already condemned” said Joao.

  The Bishop said nothing. He took a pile of napkins from his pocket and gave them to Joao, pushing them into his stomach with enough force that had his much smaller son gasp with the wind being stricken out of him.

  “Save your breath for where it counts donkey. You’d better start earning your worth around here or you’ll be right back on that farm, swishing flies off of horses’ arses. Do you hear me, boy? If you disappoint me, I’ll set an example of you” The Bishop said jabbing his thick club like index finger into Joao’s chest.

  Joao started knocking on every door, taking to the battered and boarded houses or wooden shacks; as they could be better titled, tapping gently against the splintered door frames and clanking rusted metal chains against the large bars in which they married, sending an awful screeching sound through the light sleep of whoever was making permanence of these shabby looking dwellings.

  He knocked hard on a door several times, wanting to agree with the immediate silence and allow whoever might be mandating their absence, to continue their private residence.

  When he moved to turn away; feeling horribly uncomfortable with every inconsiderate knock, he would be caught by the disapproving stare of The Bishop who; with wretched sweet breath and a stained glass in hand, was engaged on one hand in some distracted banter with a greasy fat truck driver while keeping one disciplining eye on his idiot son who; like a typical country mouse, was fumbling his way through a crack in the kitchen wall, petrified about anything grander than his own shadow; at least, this is how the drunken bastard saw his son.

  The Bishop squinted his eye, lowering his thick mono brow and hinting for the boy to wait and Joao understood every inch of his mocking decency, turning back to the door and lifting his little pebble-like fist to tap against the metal frame on the heavily bolted front door.

  He banged three times with enough tempered flare for someone awake to know that he was there, or for someone asleep to not be too riled.

  “Fuck off” yelled a low booming voice behind the door.

  Joao looked over his shoulder only to have the disciplining eye of his father whisk him back around to address his responsibility.

  He knocked again.

  “Whatta you want?” yelled the low booming voice behind the door.

  Joao cleared his throat trying to steady his pitch and edge out the fear that curdled in his stomach and clung to the roof of his mouth.

  “Uh, good morning, my name is Joao and I…”

  “Fuck off Joao. I aint got nothing you can buy and I got nothing you can borrow, but I do got a really big gun, though. And I will shoot you if you keep a talkin” shouted the low booming voice behind the door.

  Joao held his breath, turned away, caught his father’s now drunken stare, turned back, released the breath, clenched his pebble like fists, took another breath, closed his eyes, wished for a moment, thought of Charity puling aside a host of branches to invite him into her solicitude, took another breath; this one loud and describing and merely a murmur compared to the breath he expelled; sounding out an obedient sigh like an injured calf having served its purpose well, making the hunter know that this was hardly a game, with the sound he exhaled, carrying from his heart and soul, the full weight of the last drips of his waning hope.

  He took another breath and spoke in machine gun spread.

  “DoyouhaveapersonalrelationshipwithjesusChristandwouldyouliketodiscussthewonderandlightofourlordandpraywithusinourchurch?” he said.

  Click, click.

  ‘Have a nice day” said Joao backing away from the door, ignoring the eye that was gnawing away at the back of his head.

  Joao moved from house to house and at every door he was met with defensive rage and the clamor of hostility but at every door, he quietly kneeled to the floor and slid part of every napkin through tiny gaps in their doors, leaving a small tail of white flicking in the light breeze so The Bishop himself could see that Joao had tried.

  But try as he may, Fatts was right.

  The people who frequented this hill came here with the intention of bedding with sin, not cleansing themselves. Here they
could exercise the demons that itched at their moral skin, begging to burrow into their domesticated hearts where it would split the fiber of their being should they not pick it from their sweaty pores and vanquish it in drunken orgiastic splendor upon the black veil of night. This was where the foul beast was abetted to stretch its legs, to run free and to have no worry.

  These souls were not to save. They were being saved and the whores who hobbled about with infection drawn upon their skin and tragedy upon their youths were merely cunting priests whose moral servitude was to invite the devil between their thighs and gaping mouths and to swallow whole; like an open drain, the residue that built upon normal men, threatening to colour them badly, of which they must scrape off of their skin and cleanse the avenues of their minds in a storm of debauching indecency.

  The whores were tainted angels and the drunks, the junkies, the perverts and the estranged, they came here to pray. Their lives may have been better for it; their children more loved, their wives more endeared, their neighbours more acquainted and the rules of social standard and heavenly tenure, more adhered.

  But behind some of these doors; the one’s that conspired with secrecy and were weighed with heavy locks, were the ones who made their homes in this refuse, having no choice but to shut their eyes as they washed their skin in the run off of human degradation, keeping a silted eye open as their heads sank into their stained mattresses and their ears fought to silence the whoring moans, the abusing seduction and the violent altercation that leant against their weighted doors, threatening to spill over onto the thin sheets that kept the foul air from their aging sore skin.

  These people needed to be saved.

  “Good morning my name is Joao and I would like to talk to you about the love of our lord Jesus Christ. Do you have a relationship with god?”

  Silence treated him like a dear friend, creeping up to his arm so that it shivered lightly as it took him in its embrace, squeezing the surety from his soul so that fright would warn away from the door and so that he paid no debt to god; not with his own life, not at this house, not today.

  As he had done in the other houses, Joao leaned down to the floor and pushed the tip of a napkin through a crack in the door and something ripped it from his hands and swallowed it whole. He panicked and fell backwards awkwardly, his bum hitting the ground hard and his arms twisting under his body.

  He stared at the tiny hint of darkness where a corner of the door was broken away and imagined to himself the worst kind of devilry, impregnated within the darkness.

  He wanted to run, but something had him stopped and mesmerized and so he watched and listened to the sound; which was barely there, of a hand scratching at something; paper, skin, hair, clothes.

  “Donkey,” yelled The Bishop, now heavily drunk, “here, now.”

  Joao turned slowly, not wanting to pitch his absence and distraction to the tiny black hole in case the devil should jump upon his back and devour him like it had, the small napkin that was ripped from his hands.

  As he lifted himself off of the ground he heard a hiss coming from behind the door, like the scoffing of a new idea; nothing loud or abrasive, but he heard it nonetheless and from the tiny atramentous hole between him and whatever lurked behind the door, flew the white napkin that had been ripped from his hands. He followed with his eyes and his trembling heart as the napkin fell by his foot and then the hiss upon which he trained his ear; fell quieter as it became the molecular darkness in which it made its home.

  He leaned down and picked up the napkin and scrunched it into the pocket of his jacket and then quickly turned and ran away from the rows of civic squalor towards the church where The Bishop stood; swaying in the light breeze, his teeth stained like the empty glass that sat perched near his greedy hands and his eyes filled with disgusting venom that Joao knew, would soon shower upon him with guileful ferocity.

  “Get over here donkey. What did you do? Nothing? Fucking nothing. You disappoint me. You disappoint your mother. That’s why I’m cursed with you. You had no use, no worth on the farm and you have no worth here. You’re a disgrace. There’s not a kind word to be said about you. You’re proof that even the best of us, even me, good people make mistakes. You were a mistake, Joao. You should never have been born” said The Bishop almost choking on the last word, collapsing onto a plastic seat and dropping his head forwards against his chest in drunken surrender.

  Joao straightened The Bishop’s legs and settled him better in his chair so that he wouldn’t fall should the earth or his heaving belly tilt just a fraction. He then went and poured himself a coffee and looked over the mess that had surmounted on the floor, between the cracks in the tiles and up along the length of the walls.

  They could hold neither a service nor a filth laden drug riddled orgy in this mess. Even the whores and crack addicts snubbed their noses as they stumbled on by.

  Such a thing, to be less than zero.

  Joao spent the rest of the afternoon on his hands and knees, scrubbing and scraping and clawing and scratching at the marks and filth and dirt and grime and soot and stains and smudges and smears and urine and vomit and cachaça and beer, loosening with bleach and a few of his tears and throwing the full weight of broken promise into every sweep of his hand.

  Family is a cruel and depending appendage.

  “Get over here little donkey. Look at him; doesn’t he look just like a donkey? Long useless arms, hands like a little girl. And look at those fingers; they’d snap just trying to grip a toothbrush. Hey donkey, bring your daddy a drink” The Bishop said in a drunken slur to Joao whilst chafing some passers-by, rocking waywardly on his white plastic chair; the thin legs bending under the strain of his heaving upper body that twisted and turned with the eschewal of his foul exuberance.

  Joao stood near his bed, staring at the hanging mirror, looking beyond his frail impression and seeing in the outline behind him; Charity, holding a brush of leaves with one arm raised high above her kind adoring face, her congenial smile inviting him into her safe sacred place, far from the light of his familiar hurt.

  He looked then to his right and saw a photo of his mother; a gargantuan woman, sitting alone and unemotional on a wooden bench where behind her, the arid and barren land soliloquized the ravages of drought, its cant; invisible to his ear but the words to its poetic dismay were etched in the long, drawn and desiccated stare of his mother, a look that thirsted one of their hope and felicity.

  His father was yelling something from outside. It could have been an insult or an order. Either one would have been spelt the same had it been written down on paper.

  Joao continued to stare at the image of his mother and where once he felt a desire to belong; to find some meaning and purpose, now it felt as if he were looking at an x-ray of a tumor that was suffocating his soul, one that had always been a part of him, one that was responsible for the who he was, the way he thought and the way that he felt.

  A tumor of which he had to efface.

  He thought then of Charity and he felt a tingle through his body, a warmth somewhere near his heart and he forgot about the parts of himself that were uneven. He felt special and cared if having only the thought of her alone in his life were enough for his soul to be attended.

  “I’m coming daddy,” he said, tucking his shirt once again in to his pants and adorning his jacket, preparing for an evening service that would not come.

  Joao stepped out of the room feeling different.

  The Bishop looked him up and down with an unapproving eye and a grimace as if some wild beast had just passed wind in his direction. He grunted to himself and exhaled in dissent.

  “Fix you’re tie,” he said, “you look like a catholic.”

  Joao pulled at his neck tie, pushing the thick bulb tight around his neck so that it hurt every time he gulped a breath of air.

  “How many people did you talk to? How many confirmations did you get? Well?” asked The Bishop.

  There were no answers that would be suffici
ent. None that were true anyway. Joao shrugged, feeling useless and stupid, having been armed and educated with his father’s impotent knowledge and now having to report the failings of such and have to garment these failings as somehow being his own.

  If his father’s effort was only to make the boy feel poor and useless, then the entirety of his work and knowledge was golden and the effect of his magic was pure show.

  “Nobody would answer their doors. And the others, they’ll not come” said Joao.

  “The whores only come for money and even then, they’re just pretending,” said The Bishop.

  “I tried dad, I really,” said Joao.

  “What did you call me? You never stop calling me sir, ever. Insolent little slug” said The Bishop sternly.

  “I’m sorry sir. Earlier, this morning you asked me to call you…”

  “Are you calling me a liar or stupid, which is it?” The Bishop screamed, lifting his hand high into the air and striking the back of it hard against Joao’s cheek so that he fell backwards against the giant statue of Jesus, stinging his skin and bruising his ribs.

  “No sir. I’m sorry sir” he said weeping.

  ‘Stop your fucking tears. It’s embarrassing. Sit up. The service is about to begin” said The Bishop, leaning down to the table where between two statues was a small mound of cocaine that he swished about into three thick lines and like a diver hungry for their first breath of air, The Bishop snorted every grain of white powder in three foul swoops, licking his fingers and patting his nose as the symptom of his morning cheer and constant cold became evident.

  “God is great” he screamed.