Bucky looked up. There in the pulpit stood the whey-faced Simon P. Stone, sanctimonious pastor who’d done nothing—his piety deaf to cruelty—to keep Bucky from being the butt of his confirmation class two years before. The knuckles of his thin right hand were white with terror as he clutched, unconscious, a fistful of gilt-edged Bible pages. His surplice hung like a shroud from his taut gaunt shoulders, a tasteful Pontiac gray, sheen and all. A lime-green tippet trailed like an untied tie down the sides of his chest.
“Come down, Satan,” said Bucky, hearing sirens in the distance through the bloodpulse of his anger, “come down to the altar and call your flock of demons to you.”
“No, Vernon, I won’t do that.” Pastor Stone’s eyes were teary with fear—he of little faith not ready, no not after decades of preaching, to meet his Maker.
Bucky looked around through the sobbing, saw crazed eyes turn away from him, saw between pews the sculpted humps of suited shoulders like blue serge whales stuck in waves, saw—yes! saw Mrs. Irma Wilkins, her red velvet hat a half-shell really with black lace crap on it, her gloved hand dabbing a crumpled hanky to one eye. “Mrs. Wilkins,” Bucky said, and her head jerked up like a startled filly, “come here!”
Her lids lowered in that snippy way, but she rose, a thin frail stick of a woman, and sidled out of her pew. And as she neared, Bucky was back at the church camp five summers before, out in the woods, holding one end of the crossbranch from which depended the iron kettle, its sole support him and another kid and two badly made and badly sunk Y-shaped branches, and the wind shifted and the smoke of the fire blew like a mask of no-breath into his face and clawed at his eyes no matter how hard he tried to blink past it, and he turned away and let go of the branch saying “My eyes!” and the rude blur that was Irma Wilkins rushed in to catch the branch and to sting him with her condemnation, even now as she approached in this church he could hear her say it, “Your eyes? OUR STEW! ” as if the fucking food were more important than Bucky’s vision and to her it was and that voice of hers, that whole put-down attitude reduced Bucky to nothing; but Bucky knew he was something all right, and he saw her pinched little lipless mouth as she came closer, by God it looked like a dotted line and by God he’d oblige her by tearing across it now with his widdle gun, better that than live his whole life hearing this nasty woman’s voice reduce him to nothing; and he opened up his rage upon her, rippling across her face with a rain of bullets until her head tore back at the mouth like the top of a Pez dispenser thumbed open, shooting out a stream of crimson coffins, spilling gore down the front of her black dress like cherry liqueur over dark chocolate, and mean Irma Wilkins went down like the worthless sack of shit she was, and Bucky felt damned proud of himself, yes he did, happy campers.
Bucky swung back to Pastor Stone. “Bring ’em all to the front of the church and I won’t harm a one of ’em,” he said.
“But if you refuse, I’ll pick ’em off one at a time just like I did Mrs. Wilkins here.”
Rest of them had ears. They needed no coaxing, but coaxed instead their whimpering kids out of hiding, out into the aisles and up the red runners to the altar, where Pastor Stone, trembling like unvarnished truth, raised his robed arms as if in benediction, as if he were posing for a picture, Pastor Simon P. Stone and his bleating sheep.
The muffled squawk of a bullhorn turned Bucky’s head to a tall unstained window at his left. A squat man in blue stood on the grass at the near edge of the parking lot, legs planted firmly apart, elbows bent, face and hands obliterated by a black circle. “Vernon Stevens,” came his humorless voice, “lay down your weapon and come out with your hands raised. We will not harm you if you do as I say. We have the church surrounded. Repeat. The church. Is. Surrounded.”
The bullhorn squawked off and the black circle came down so that Bucky could see clearly the ain’t-I-a-big-boy-now, pretend courage painted on the man’s face. Glancing back, Bucky saw bobbing blue heads through the two small squares of window that let onto the narthex, a scared rookie or two, the long stems of assault rifles jostling like shafts of wheat in a summer breeze.
Doubt crept into him. And fear. His finger eased off the trigger. Tension began to drain from his arms.
FINISH THE JOB! came the voice, like a balloon fist suddenly inflating inside his skull, pressing outward as if to burst bone. LOOK AT THEM, BUCKY! LOOK AND REMEMBER WHAT THEY’VE DONE TO YOU!
And Bucky looked. And Bucky saw. There was Bad Sam in his Sunday best, frog-faced pouting young tough, a lick of light brown hair laid across his brow, freckles sprayed on his bloated cheeks, Bad Sam who’d grabbed Bucky off his bike when Bucky was nine, slammed him to the cement of the sidewalk by Mr. Murphy’s house and slapped his face again and again until his cheeks bruised and bled. And through his tears, he could see Mr. Murphy at his front window, withdrawing in haste at being discovered; Mr. Murphy who’d always seemed so kind, tending his tulip beds as Bucky biked by, and now here he was in church along with his tiny wife and their daughter Patricia in a white dress and a round brimmed hat that haloed her head. And next to her stood Alex Menche, a gas jockey at the Exxon station, corner of First and Main, whose look turned to hot ice whenever Bucky walked by, who never blinked at him, never talked to him, but just stared, oily rag in hand, jaw moving, snapping a wad of gum.
And back behind Alex he caught a glimpse of Mr. Green the janitor, who’d yelled at the lunchbox crowd in second grade to Shut up! even when their mouths were busy with peanut butter. And odd Elvira Freeborn, New Falls’ weirdo-lady, who laid claim in good weather to a corner of the city park across from the town hall and had conversation with anyone who chanced by and lingered there—even weirdo Elvira had come up to him one day when he’d been desperate enough for company to go seek her out, had come up all smiles, her hair wispy gray and twisting free of its bun, and said, “My, my, Vernon, you are one fat ugly thing, yes you are, and if you were mine, I’d sew your mouth shut, I would; by God I’d starve that flab right off your bones and I’d see about getting you a nose job for that fat knob of a honker you got on your face and—” on and on and on, and now her eyes were on him here in church, off-yellow glaring cat’s-eyes like a reformed witch having second thoughts. And beside her was Sarah Janeway the organist, who’d laughed and then tried to hide it when Bucky auditioned for the children’s choir at the age of eight, a no-talent bitch with her wide vacant eyes encircled in wide glasses rimmed in thin red and her hair cropped short as her musical gifts and her absurd flowered dress poking out of the shimmering-green choir robe down below, and she was standing there white-faced and whiny, and then the bullhorn bullshit started up again, and Bucky brought his one true friend up to his chest and let the surge of righteous wrath seize him.
He made them dance, every last one of them.
He played the tune. They tripped and swayed to the rhythm of his song. Wounds opened like whole notes in them. Sweeping glissandos of gore rose up like prayers of intercession.
Behind him he felt a flood of cops rush in to pick up the beat and join him, to judder and jolt the music out of him with music of their own. Bucky, tripped out on giving back in spades what New Falls had so unstintingly bestowed upon him over the years, turned about to spray death into the boys in blue at his back. But there were too many of them, and a goodly number were already in position, rifles beaded on him.
Then pain seized his right knee and danced up his leg in small sharp steps, like invisible wasps landing on him, fury out. Needles of fire watusied across his belly. Two zigzags of lead staggered up the ladders of his ribs and leaped for Bucky’s head. Something impossible to swallow punched through his teeth, filling his mouth with meat and blood.
And then his brain lit up like a second sun and all the pain winked out. The terrible thunder of weaponry put to use went away, only to be replaced by organ music so sweet it made Bucky want to wet his pants and not give a good goddamn about the consequences.
He felt himself drift apart like a dreamer becoming someone else.
The cops froze, caught in mid-fire. About him, the church walls roiled and wowed like plaster turned to smoke.
But it wasn’t smoke. It was mist, fog, clouds. They billowed down into the church, rolling and shifting and swirling among the corpses. Bucky glanced back at the altar, saw the bodies of his victims posed in attitudes of death, saw Pastor Simon P.
Stone, his robed arms out in crucifixion, veed at the waist as if he’d just caught the devil’s medicine ball in his belly.
But right behind Bucky, close enough to startle him, was his own body, bits of flesh being torn out like tufts of grass at a driving range, shoots of blood looking like hopeful red plants just coming into sunlight. He circled, by willing it, about his body, feeling the cumulus clouds cotton under his feet, soothing his soles, as he gazed in astonishment at his head, pate cracked open all round like the top of an eggshell, hovering a foot above the rest of it in a spray of blood and brain. He reached out, touched the stray piece of skull, tried to force it back in place, but it was as if it were made of stone and cemented for all eternity to the air. Likewise the freshets of gore issuing like bloody thoughts from his brain, which, though not cold, were as stiff as icicles.
The music swelled, recaptured his attention. Looking about for its source, he saw emerge from each tiny cloud a creature, all in white, all of white and gold, delicate of hand, beatific of face, and every one of them held a thing of curves in its hands. Their angel mouths O’d like moon craters. Thin fingers swept in blizzards of beauty across iridescent harps.
And yet their music was neither plucked nor sung, but a pain-pure hymn rolling out in tones richer than any man-made organ.
They made the bloody scene beautiful, sanctifying it with their psalm. And now their bodies swerved as though hinged and they raised their eyes to the dioramic massacre before the altar and up past the huge golden cross even to the white plaster ceiling above it, beyond which the spire lofted heavenward. With a great groan, as if angelic eyes could move mountains with a look, the top of the building eased open, sliding outward on invisible runners to hang there in the open air. And down into the church descended a great blocky bejeweled thing, an oblong Spielbergian UFO Bucky thought at first. But then he saw the sandals, the feet, the robes, the hands gripping firmly the arms of the throne like Abe Lincoln, the chest bedecked in white, and the great white beard, and he guessed what he was in for.
But when the head came fully into view, Bucky had to laugh. Like Don Rickles trapped in a carpet, the face of an angry black woman grimaced out from behind the white beard and mustache of God. Her cheeks puffed out like wet sculpted obsidian, her dark eyes glared, and just in front of a Hestonian sweep of white hair, a tight black arch of curls hugged her face like some dark rider’s chaps curving about the belly of his steed. The white neck of the deity was stiff and rigid, as if locked in a brace.
“Bucky Stevens,” She boomed, Her eyes moving from him to a space of air in front of Her, “you’d best be getting yourself up here this instant, you hear?”
“Yes, ma’m,” he said, drifting around his exploding corpse and sailing up over the bloody crowd at the altar. He could still sense how fat he was, but he felt as light and unplodding as a sylph. “You sending me to hell?” he asked.
She laughed. “Looks to Me like you found your own way there.” Her eyes surveyed the carnage. “First off, young man, I want to say I ‘preciate what you did for Me. I like sinners who listen to My suggestions and have the balls to carry them out.”“That was You?”
“Does God lie?”
“No, ma’m.”
“Damn right He don’t, and I’m God, so you just shove those doubts aside and listen up.”
“Um, scuse me, ma’m,” said Bucky, shuffling his feet in the air, “but how come God’s a black woman? I mean in Sunday school, we never—”
“God ain’t a black woman, Mister Bucky, leastways no more He ain’t. He’s been that for a while, oh ‘bout three weeks or so.” She smiled suddenly. “But now He gets to be a fat white boy named Bucky Stevens.”
Bucky brightened. He didn’t doubt for a moment what She’d said. He couldn’t. It speared like truth into his heart.
“You mean I get to… to take over? There’s no punishment for killing all these people?”
God chuckled, a high-pitched woo-wee kind of sound.
“That ain’t what I said a-tall.” She did a stiff-necked imitation of a headshake as She spoke.
Bucky was mystified: “I don’t get it.”
God leaned forward like She had a board strapped to Her back. “I’ll be brief,” She said, “just so’s you can hustle your fat butt up here quicker and let Me come down and do My dying.
I killed me a whole officeload of people three weeks ago, got blown away by a security guard after I hosed those heartless fuckers at Century 21. Same sorta miracle that’s happening to you now, happened to me then. Only God was this unhinged lunatic I’d seen on Dan Rather the week before, some nut who went to O’Hare and picked off ground crew and passengers not lucky enough to be going through one of those tubes. He got blown away too, became God, then talked me into wiping out my co-workers when they gave me the axe. So I did it, and coaxed you along same’s he did me, and here we are.”
The music was doing beautiful things to Bucky’s mind.
He grew very excited. “You mean I’m going to be in charge of everything? I can make any changes I feel like making, I can stop all the misery if I want to?” God ummm-hmmmed. “But why would anyone, why would You, want to give that up?”
She looked agitated, like She wanted to laugh and cry and holler all at the same time. Instead She said, “As My momma used to say, young Master Stevens, experience is the best teacher a body can have.” She glared at him suddenly and Bucky felt himself swept forward and up.
He windmilled his arms, struggling to find his center of gravity, but found himself fluttering and turning like an autumn leaf, tumbling spout over teakettle toward the great black face, toward the crazy brown eyes. He headed straight between them, fearing he’d smash on the browbone, but instead doubled and split like a drunkard’s vision and fell and swelled into the black pools of God’s pupils. In the blink of an eye, he inflated. That’s how it felt to him, like his head felt when they stuck his arm and taped it down, knocking him out for an ingrown toenail operation when he was ten, only all over his body this time and he didn’t lose consciousness. He unlidded his eyes just in time to see the stocky black woman wink at him before she put her hands together as if in prayer, sang out “So long, sucker!” and swan-dived into his shattering body.
Bucky gazed about at the angels on their clouds and felt guy-wires coming from their O’d mouths as if He were a Macy’s Day balloon and they the marching guardians who kept Him from floating free. The throne rose slowly and the angels with it. Bucky took His first Godbreath and felt divine.
Like Captain Kirk, He was in command now, He sat at the helm, and things by God were going to fly right from here on out.But then, as He lifted above the church and its roof clicked into place, time unfroze and, with it, the pain of those inside.
He felt it all, like a mailed fist slamming into His solar plexus again and again: Simon Stone, small and mean inside like a mole, gasping for one final breath; Sarah Janeway, two months pregnant, trying in vain to hold back the rope-spill of her intestines; kind-hearted Elvira Freeborn, in so many ways the sanest person there, who let her dying fall over her like a new sun dress, a thing of razor and flame. And even the dead—Coach Hezel, the Atwoods, Irma Wilkins and the rest—even from these, Bucky felt the echoes of their suffering and, transcending time, seeped into their dying a thousand times over.
And then He rose over New Falls, did Bucky Stevens, feeling His holy tendrils reach into everyone that wept and wandered there. He knew at last the torment of his parents and the riches they’d lost inside themselves, and it made His heart throb with pain. Bucky rose, and, in rising, sank into every hurting soul in town, spreading Himself thick eve
rywhere.
And all was painful clarity inside Him. It grew and crackled, the misery, and still He rose and sank, moving like Sherwin-Williams paint to engulf the globe, seeping deep down into the earth. Bucky wanted to scream. And scream He did. And His scream was the cause, and the sound, of human misery.
He tried to bring His hands to His face. To puncture His eardrums. To thumb out His eyes. But they clung like mules to the hard arms of the throne, not budging, and His eyelids would not shut, and His earflaps sucked all of it in like maelstroms of woe. Pockets of starvation flapped open before Him like cover stories blown, and each death-eyed Ethiopian became unique to Him—the clench of empty stomachs, the wutter and wow of dying minds.
Like dental agony, layer beneath layer surprising one at the untold depths of it, Bucky’s pain intensified and spread, howling and spiraling off in all directions. And after a while, it didn’t exactly dull, nor did He get used to it, but rather He rose to meet it, to yield to it as the storm-tossed seafarer gives up the struggle and moves into the sweep of the sea. He was the pincushion of pain, He was the billions of screaming pins, He was the billions of thumbs pressing them down into flannel.
He suffered all of it, and knew Himself to be the cause of it all.
Caught in the weave, He was the weave.
He almost smiled, it was so perverse; but the smile was ripped from His face by new outrage. There seemed no end to the torment, no end to burgeoning pain. As soon as He thought He’d hit bottom, the bottom fell out. He began to wonder if the black woman had lied to Him, if maybe He was trapped in this nightmare for all eternity. While He watched with eyes that could not close, new births killed young girls, new deaths tore at mourners, new forms of woe were kennel-bred and unleashed. Bucky was fixed in His firmament, and all was hell with the world.
Plunged down the slippery slope of despair, He cast His great eyes about, sought for pustules of resentment, found them. The seeds of His redemption they were, these seething souls. The black woman—Miriam Jefferson Jones—had, like her predecessor, been nursing others along, and now Bucky reached out to them and took up the whisper in their ears, the whisper momentarily stilled at the shift in deity. Heavens yes, Sean Flynn, he assured the young man leaned against the stone wall, huddled with his mates, it’s only proper you elbow under their fuckin’ transport at night, fix old Mother Flammable there, crawl the hell out o’ there, give it the quick plunge, watch all them limey bastards kiss the night sky over Belfast with their bones. And yes, Alicia Condon of Lost Nation, Iowa, it’s okay to take your secret obsession with the purity of the newborn to its limit, it is indeed true that if you could wipe out a whole nursery of just-delivered infants before they hit that fatal all-corrupting second day of life, the Second Coming of My Own Sweet Son would indeed be swiftly upon the sinning race of mankind. And yes, oh most decidedly yes, Gopal Krishnan and Vachid Dastjerdi and Moshe Naveh, you owe it to your respective righteous causes to massacre whole busloads, whole airports, whole towns full of enemy flesh.
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