A DJ reported the top local stories—a burglary at the Alto bowling alleys, an outbreak of hepatitis in patrons of a Chinese restaurant, a proposed raise in county real estate taxes, an upswing in the weather; nothing about a break-in and murder in Willimette.
* * *
“There’s a real pretty little church up ahead that’s never locked. I know because a guy brought me out here one time on his motorcycle and showed it to me. He said he used to go to it regular until his wife and son died in a car wreck and he stopped believing, but he would still go there once in a while late at night, mostly when he was plowed, and sit in a pew and stare at the stained glass being hit by the moon. It’s got real neat stained glass.” Florence finished the beer she’d been drinking and carefully replaced the empty can in the carton at her feet. “With the sun being so bright today, I bet it would be something to see.”
“You want to see it?”
“I wouldn’t mind seeing it. I love churches, even if I don’t go to them often.”
“I’ll take you there and you can see it.”
“I want you to see it too.”
“I can tell what it is hearing you talk about it.”
“That ain’t the same.”
“Well, it’s as close as I’m going to get to seeing it.”
“You don’t like churches?”
“I don’t care one way the other about ‘em. I just don’t want to go in one.”
A horse galloping along the shoulder opposite them carried a woman with the blonde hair and busty build of a woman Rankin suddenly remembered Little Charlie strangling after he’d strangled the guy whose face Rankin had seen instead of his own reflection in the lenses of his sunglasses at the AM-PM Minimart.
Rankin slammed on the brakes.
He jumped out of the car. He stood mid-road, watching horse and rider, until they’d disappeared around a bend a few hundred yards on. He listened to the animal’s footsteps fade away. He considered how neither the local newspaper nor the local radio station had reported a double murder or a murder at all last night. The thought struck him that Little Charlie had not killed anyone in Willimette, that Rankin’s memories of him doing so weren’t but his memories of another one of Little Charlie’s bad dreams.
He got back in behind the wheel.
Florence said, “See somebody you know?”
Rankin didn’t say if he had.
He put the car in gear. He started driving again.
* * *
Pastures, dotted with cows and horses, between wooded hills, in fading fall color, showing patches of snow at their highest elevations; fields of stubbly cornstalks, mowed timothy, weeds and briars; farm houses, double-wides, a dilapidated trailer park flying a tent-sized American flag; a school looking as isolated and drab as a prison; a creamery, stinking of whey, exuding putrid smoke; a pure white church, a crow plague darkening the sky above it.
“Pull in here,” said Florence, waving at a drive leading to the building’s rear.
At one end of an empty paved lot hidden behind the church painted lines made a basketball court; the hoop fronted a small grassy area containing a slide, a swing set, a horseshoe pit, around an engraved plaque on a metal pole. A few feet left of the hoop, Rankin shut down the Tranny. “Go see it,” he told Florence.
“In a minute,” she said, then she inclined at him, put her lips on his, and, opening her mouth, forced her tongue into him.
Rankin pulled his mouth back, but, still locked with his, her mouth followed him; he pushed his tongue against hers as if at a creature invading him; she stuck her tongue deeper into him; her hands fumbled at his belt. Rankin experienced her as a sweet-tasting succubus. She got his fly undone, and a hand on his penis, and started moving the hand up and down. The back of Rankin’s head hit the window. He yanked his mouth free of hers.
Little Charlie’s harsh pants, with every punch, kick, lash, like the death pants of a small, incapacitated animal being devoured, limb by limb, by a larger animal.
He shoved on Florence’s shoulders, propelling her hard into the passenger door.
Little Charlie wondering all the while where his mother was at (in what corner of the room or small apartment she was trying to hide, her eyes squeezed shut, her hands over her ears) why she was only ever there for him, loving him in her special way, when no son of a bitch was loving her.
Florence, raggedly breathing, reached down, took her sweater’s hem in both hands, and stripped the sweater off over her head, making herself naked, her breasts small, firm-looking, the lips between her legs wetly glistening, her sex absolutely hairless.
“I ain’t interested,” said Rankin.
LuAnn leered mockingly at him.
“It never just does for me the way it ought to,” Rankin told her.
“It never just does that way for nobody.” Rearing back, LuAnn slapped his face, the sound reverberating in the car, as the effect of its pain to Rankin reverberated in his head. LuAnn slapped him again, splitting his lip. “Everybody comes at it different.”
Rankin closed his eyes, in pain the more for looking at her.
He felt the sting of another slap, then another, against his cheek, the rush of blood to his groin. “Open your eyes, tough boy.”
Rankin did, then opened his door, stepped out, strode around to the other door, opened it, and jerked LuAnn out of the car. He pushed her upper body face first onto the Tranny’s hood, kicked her feet apart, forced open her cheeks, and went hard and deep into her. Buried in her, he saw, not in pictures, but in shades as dark as the crows now flocked in the tops of the trees ringing the church, the hideous creature the sons of bitches had made of Little Charlie and then he saw, in even darker colors, the horror Little Charlie had wrought (or Rankin had dreamed) last night.
* * *
Waking one morning to the memory of Little Charlie smashing a claw-hammer into Chester Rhimes’s face as Rhimes, hours earlier, had slept next to Rankin’s mother; Chester Rhimes screaming, groping at the hole where his right eye had been; little Charlie bashing him again, taking out Chester Rhimes’s left eye; a third blow snapping Chester Rhimes’s front teeth, shattering his jaw; Chester Rhimes, trying to cry, scream, beg, emitting only frothy blood bubbles; Little Charlie taking the hammer to Rankin’s mother, still struggling awake; whacking her sixteen times (Little Charlie counting each blow aloud as he administered it) turning her features into formless red pulp; the twentieth and final blow (Little Charlie bringing the hammer down with all his strength from as high over his head as he could reach) crushing Chester Rhimes’s Adam’s apple to make him as mute as he’d once made Little Charlie.
Rankin, that morning ten years ago, believing he could smell their blood from where he lay.
How free, how powerful, he’d felt.
How deflated, how absolutely helpless, minutes later to hear them beyond their bedroom door fucking, arguing, showering, to see them come out of that room as alive and healthy as they’d ever been.
* * *
From his wallet he took a five spot, then tossed it into the air. He watched the bill land and, in the slight breeze, flutter across the lot toward the church.
In a thin stand of pines bordering an open field behind the swing holding him, a squirrel chattered, a cardinal chirped, a pine cone came to ground with a dull thud; two giant oaks facing him shuddered from the fluttery movements of the birds blackening them; a jet, in his eyes smaller than him, noiselessly spewed exhaust.
A spell is what he felt he was under, as if someone—Buddha, is who—owned a key to his mind and could unlock it when he wanted, could put into it thoughts, visions, dreams, could make Charlie Rankin act mad when he didn’t want to be mad, act vicious when he wasn’t vicious, see people he didn’t know as people he did know, believe his niche was to be a cold-blooded killer when he didn’t want to be a cold-blooded killer, when he wanted just to be rid of what in his head made him mad and vicious.
He emptied the beer he’d been drinking onto a small ant hi
ll in the patch of worn dirt between his feet, wondering if the world would have been better off if he had slit Buddha’s throat and gotten life for it than it was having Charlie Rankin out in it, running loose; he speculated that, the way he’d tapped into Charlie Rankin’s recurring nightmares, the way he’d connected with Little Charlie, Buddha might be God and Satan at once. The church door opened.
Stepping into the doorway fifty feet left of him Florence waved at him to come to her.
Rankin shook his head.
“You should see this, Samson. Come on!”
Rankin pictured himself running through a maze of corpses after Little Charlie and Little Charlie running faster and faster, increasing the distance between them. “I told you already. “
“If you’re scared because you never been in one, Samson, forget it—it’s just a quiet, peaceful spot. And beautiful.”
“I’m not scared of anything in there. I’ve seen the sun shining through windows before.”
“Not through windows like these.”
Rankin glanced above her at the bell tower in the church’s steeple, its metal flashing catching the sun, putting spots in his eyes. “You got no idea all I’ve seen.”
“I can guess, though, a lot of what you ain’t seen, which I’d say from fucking you”—Florence nodded at the Tranny’s hood—”is not much of anything just for the beauty of it.” Not angry, spiteful, hurtful, her tone was as matter-of-fact, thought Rankin, as that of the judge who, noting Rankin’s history of petty lawlessness, had dropped five years on him.
Rankin said, “You didn’t act to mind it much.”
Florence took from behind her ear, then put in her mouth, a cigarette. “LuAnn likes it about any way. Or makes it look like she does.” She lighted the cigarette with matches from her sweater pocket. “And, to please her man, Florence’d go along with whatever gets him off.”
Rankin abrupdy stood up. “All of it fit together better inside.”
“What all you talking about?”
“How I was gonna get on top a things when I got out.”
“Once you’re dead, living’ll likely make more sense too.”
“I hope to hell so. It don’t now.”
“Do you believe you got a soul, Samson?”
“I don’t know if I do.”
“You do. And a good one. It ain’t old, though, like mine. It’s young. I know about things like that.”
“This con I said about before—Charlie Rankin”—Rankin eyed a hawk flying circles above the church—”he’d look in the mirror and see nothing but the air the rest a the world walks, talks, blows smoke, shits, and pisses in. Until Buddha finally made him see himself in it.”
“What’d he look like to himself?”
Rankin walked at her. “A guy due something back from this world.”
“Due what exactly?”
Rankin stopped before her, capturing under his right boot toe his five-dollar bill, picturing Little Charlie strangling that woman on the horse, the way he saw it now to get her attention, to get her to see him. He told Florence, “You’d be smart to get clear a me.”
“I wasn’t born smart, and I hear it don’t come to you later.”
Rankin ground his foot into the bill, saying, “If you’re right on me having a soul, it’s nothing against how wrong you are on it being a good one.”
“I’d say my take on it, given how mixed up you are, is at least as good as yours.”
Rankin’s insides began to tremble. He was reacquainted with a feeling as if something alive and dangerous and too big for the space holding it was pulsing in him, wanting out of him. Struggling to contain the thing, he deliberately crouched down, slipped the bill from beneath his foot, and got back to his feet, experiencing the sun, in its many reflections, as a dagger trying to penetrate to the blackness at his center. Having no idea why, he handed the bill to Florence.
She looked oddly at it. “What did you moosh it for?”
Rankin’s trembling externalized, affecting his fingers, then his right cheek, and the eye above it; the feeling in his stomach intensified. He clutched his hands to his mid-section, groaning. Florence wrapped an arm around him. “Come inside with me and take a blow,” she said, leading him across the short space to the church’s back door. “It’s a great place to. You’ll see.”
* * *
A sense that the air, as still as it was, had been frozen; a weighty, substantial feel to his body, contributed to by the resounding of his footfalls on the wood floor; a sensation similar to what he’d felt (petrified over being caught and grateful for the attention paid him by a nice lady cop who gave him a Mars Bar while transporting him downtown) being apprehended red-handed breaking into a parked car, at the age of eleven his first arrest.
They sat on a pew in the middle of the chapel.
The multi-colored windows to either side of them etched with stars, a manger scene, old, bearded guys seemingly studying on them, a moon shooting exaggerated beams, a kneeling crowd, their heads bowed, their hands upraised at a face (God’s face, guessed Rankin) in the sky.
The entering light, through the dyed glass, at once muted and magnified.
Rankin remembered his mother declaring (though she’d never gotten around to doing it) that someday she’d have them both baptized, this after attending with Rankin their one Communion Service, at which it was explained to them that only those cleansed of original sin (unlike the two of them) were meant to partake of the bread and grape juice circulating.
Paintings on the walls of angels, hard-looking cases laboring to hoist upright an empty cross, a man crying over another man’s severed head in his lap, the Virgin Mary, stern-faced and beautiful, Jesus lifting a wine goblet above several men sitting at a long rectangular table, a small gang rolling a rock away from a cave’s entrance.
On the hardwood pulpit, an open Bible, a chalice, a microphone; behind it a life-sized depiction of the Cross with Jesus on it, bleeding from His hands and feet, sores covering His body, gashes on His cheeks, His head lolling to one side, His eyes wide open, hurting beyond belief before the world, the pain showing in His every fiber.
Rankin imagining that his guts were growing too big for his body from eating him from the inside out, that he was getting nauseous on his own flesh. The quietness, more complete than any quietness he could remember, as if the room were the belly of a giant creature holding its breath around him, magnifying his own bodily sounds, his breathing, swallowing, blinking, inward churning. “The things He went through.”
Rankin experienced Florence’s voice as a shout reaching him through the flesh he imagined imprisoning him. He looked at her.
She shook her head before the Crucifixion scene. “For the likes of us.”
“Someone good enough at it”—Rankin, scarcely aware he was speaking, heard his own voice struggling to make it through the same barrier hers had reached him through—”can convince you of anything you always halfway wanted to be true.”
“You talking about preachers?”
“I don’t know no preachers.”
“Who you talking about then?”
“Maybe I dreamed it all what happened. I hope I dreamed it all.”
“What do you hoped you dreamed, Samson?”
Rankin, instead of answering her, clutched again at his midsection that suddenly felt as if it would explode. Florence draped an arm around his shoulders. “Take some deep breaths, then let ‘em out slow.”
Rankin did as she told him to, and felt somewhat better, though he still had the sensation that something inside of him was expanding by devouring him.
“You ain’t ate all day.” Florence wiped sweat from his brow. “That must be the problem. Or else you’re coming down with something.”
Rankin raised his eyes to Jesus on the Cross.
“What proof you got of Him?”
“I got nothing without what I feel. I feel Him, Samson, like I feel your good soul.”
“What’s He feel like?”
“When I feel Him best, He feels like love, not the kind between a man and a woman, but the kind that’s got nothing to do with sex.”
“What’s that feel like?”
Florence looked at him sadly. “You ought to get down on your knees, Samson, and ask Him to put some of it into you, to show you how it feels.”
She grasped him at the elbow, got him to kneel down with her between the pews, Rankin feeling in her grip like a small child pulled from a body of water he’d swallowed a gut-full of. “Talk to Him, Samson.”
“What about?”
“Tell Him you haven’t got an appetite and that your stomach hurts and why it hurts and ask Him what to do to make it stop hurting.”
“I don’t know why it hurts.”
“He can spot a kernel of bullshit, Samson, in a cornfield.”
“My whole life, what I remember of it”—Rankin felt as if he were but a bodiless voice floating inside of the huge creature he pictured as having swallowed him—”I’ve had urges to hurt and kill people and been dreaming realer than life dreams I was doing it. When I was a kid the dreams would make me feel better till I woke up.” He closed his eyes. “They were my secret. Then I told Buddha about them.”
“Now tell God, Samson, it ain’t your dreams that are giving you a bellyache”—her voice more discarnate words mingling with his inside the creature’s belly—”tell Him you can’t figure out how you could of dreamed coming by the money you’re holding and those cuts on your face and your sore back.”
Rankin opened his eyes.
“Tell Him, not me, Samson. Tell Him how your belly—your whole self—pains so much that if not for your fear of burning in hell for all the bad you’ve done you’d kill yourself to stop hurting.”
He looked at Florence, recollecting that he was on his knees with her in a church and that he hardly knew her and wondering why she seemed to know so much about him and was angling to learn even more and how much already Rankin had told her. He said, “You ain’t but a Bible thumper.”
Florence laughed. “All you seen from me in scarcely a day? I know where to turn at near the end of my rope’s all, Samson, and it ain’t to anyone walking and talking.”
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