“The service is about to start,” he says.
You think of Dora, how she would say it, how she would spray it. “The thervith is about to thtart.” You find a good seat behind a girl with long brown hair tied in a red ribbon. Her hair is thick and gives off an odor of strawberries. You’d bet your entire Barbie collection she’s from Wyndham-on-the-River, and that’s when you notice Asperger’s Alex sitting right next to her. You wonder if they might be brother and sister, but she doesn’t go to your school. You’ve never seen her before. You’re mesmerized by the girl’s ponytail, how it seems to sway in the breeze even though the stained-glass windows are shut tight. You follow the ponytail’s path down her back and it seems to be pointing to a navy-blue hymnal, caged behind a wooden rail. Pastor Rush is at the front now. He coughs and the room goes silent. He asks you to pick up the hymnal and turn to page 22. The book is heavy and its pages are dipped in gold. The glitter comes off on your hands and you wonder if that is, in some way, a blessing.
“Lift up your voices,” Pastor Rush says.
A bald man with a hole in his throat sits down in front of an organ and pounds out the first few notes of a song about angel wings and Emmanuel. You don’t know the tune. You’ve never heard it. The only songs you know by heart are “Waltzing Matilda,” your friend Fikus’s favorite and, according to him, “the only worthwhile thing to have ever come out of Australia,” and that sappy number your mom loves with the woman swearing over and over, “I’ve been to paradise, but I’ve never been to me.” Even though you’re a few beats behind the rest of the kids, you mouth the unfamiliar words anyway—who is the Holy Ghost? What is hosanna in the highest?—hoping Asperger’s Alex, who spotted you a second ago and keeps looking at you over his shoulder, doesn’t tell anyone your secret.
Your secret is you are a heathen. An unbaptized, unsaved bastard of a heathen. No Bible in the house. No father that you know of. No idea of what a burning bush is or an arc.
But it’s okay, says Pastor Rush. Nothing matters but Jesus Christ, the body, the blood, the son of God who died on the cross so that we might be reborn. “Forget everything you’ve ever known about the truth,” he says. His hands seem to catch fire from the candles on the altar. “Forget everything you’ve ever heard about the way and the light. This, my friends, is the way. The only way, the only light that guides your path to paradise. The rest is darkness, void, a vacuum of hate and ignorance and unlove.”
He calls out to the congregation to be saved, to accept Jesus as their personal savior. The adults sit still. You suppose they’ve already been saved and accepted the light, the Jesus, the way. Most of the kids just look at each other, but Asperger’s Alex jumps up, steps on a few feet, and hurls himself toward the altar. “Me me me me!” he says. A few other kids follow him at a slower pace—a redheaded girl with freckle-brown legs, a boy carrying a paper airplane. Pastor Rush palms each of their foreheads in turn, declaring them free of sin. They fall to their knees and kiss the carpeted stairs.
You almost go. You think very hard about going. You finger the necklace in its box, releasing a tiny smoke signal. Is the devil holding you back? And where the hell is Daisy? You concentrate for a minute, trying to pray, but you don’t really know what it takes. Please God on your throne at the head of the table of the world, bring back my friend. I want to sit next to her on the bus and talk to her about my problems and her problems and take rides on the back of her wheelchair like we used to when Fikus wasn’t looking. Also, God, please make my soul a light thing not a dark thing. And for Christ’s sake, turn this necklace into something normal so I can wear it on dress-up days without dying.
Pastor Rush shouts, “Children! Children of God! Those who have not come to me today will come next week and the week after that and the week after that until all of you, like a sea of salvation, will pour down this aisle toward redemption. Waves and waves of belief and truth and love.”
The ponytail of the Girl Who Might Be Alex’s Sister shudders and goes still.
Then there’s another song, this time about a woman named Mary and a dead guy named Lazarus, and when that’s over you’re told it’s time for Sunday school. You follow a line of heads down an elbow-shaped staircase to a room painted pea green, the same color of your grandmother’s attic, and that reminds you of the little girl you tortured there a few years ago because she had lice and no shoes.
“We’re all loved by Jesus always remember never forget that,” says a woman who introduces herself as “Miss Shellie for you new faces.” You and the rest of the kids sit in four cross-legged rows in front of her. Miss Shellie is dumpy and white and old. A dark line of base runs along the bottom of her face and blends into her wrinkled neck. She looks a little like Mrs. Holt, who lives down the street from you and has a special house behind her trailer for her pet chinchillas.
“Today we’re going to talk about the story of the loaves and the fishes,” Miss Shellie says. “Can anyone tell me what this story is all about?”
Fishes and bread? Oh hell no. You love fish—Murphy’s cool as shit—but this is not what you came here for. You came here to pray for Daisy and have your soul saved and your guilt exorcised. Last things first, you figure. You raise your hand.
Miss Shellie nods at you. “Yes, little girl?”
“Forgiveness for sins. How does that work exactly?”
“Excuse me?”
“So I did this thing. It wasn’t a good thing. How do I stop being punished for it?”
Miss Shellie sits down in the teacher-sized chair. Even so, her hips spill over. “That depends. What is it you’ve done?”
You fess up as fast as you can to the “making Fikus drive away while Daisy was still basically alone and vulnerable” part, but you don’t yet mention the necklace because as you speak, all the heads of all the kids swivel in unison and their blue and green and gray eyes stare at you like you’re an alien and for a moment you feel like you are. There are only two pairs of eyes that look like yours and they belong to some other Wyndham-on-the-River pricks. You can tell by their cute dress/tights combinations and shiny hair. This makes you miss Daisy with a fierceness that surprises you. You miss your mom, too. And your bed and your My Little Pony and even Ruthless. You don’t miss Tony. He sucks. His pizza sucks more. It tastes like dirty socks if it tastes like anything at all. But even if he’s still there in your house sleeping off Sharkey’s you want to go home and forget this day ever happened.
“Miss Shellie?” you say, but she doesn’t answer you. While you told her about your sins, she stood up and got busy slapping felt fishes and felt loaves on an easel. You reach for the box in your pocket. The kids are still staring. Miss Shellie brings out the felt Jesus. He has white robes and a yellow halo over his honey-blond hair. Miss Shellie sticks him on the board next to what appears to be a trout and some French bread. Her fat back is to you. Her fat butt jiggles in her skirt while she works. Finally, she turns around. Her face is red with anger. She is saying something to you about soap and washing your mouth out with it, which means you must have cursed during your confession. The problem is, it’s a habit now so you hardly notice it.
“That’s it?” you ask. “Wash my mouth? That’s all you got? I tell you I probably killed my friend and you tell me not to say ‘shit’?”
“Perhaps this is not the place for you,” Miss Shellie says. “My Sunday school room is reserved for children who know how to behave themselves.”
Excuse me? you want to say. But not excuse me. No. Fuck that. Fuck behaving yourself. Instead of sitting meekly in front of the stupid felt easel like the rest of the blond, reserved children, you take the necklace out of its box and throw it as hard as you can at Miss Shellie’s pasty face. You pray it makes a permanent mark. Come on, God, brand her. Please, Jesus, a scar. Then you start running as fast as you can up the elbow stairs, through the church sanctuary, past Pastor Rush, and out the front doors into the cool world, where it’s raining softly. You head for your dirty trailer with its broke
n door and bouncy stairs, its dusty carpet and duct-taped windows, its hard-water-stained bathtub, kitchen sink, dishwasher. The dishwasher that Ruthless likes to head butt from one end of the house to the other, often while shitting Tootsie Roll–sized turds in perfect ten-inch intervals. Paradise.
F5
(June)
The winds and rains were coming for Colliersville. Everything from Hate Henry Road in the south to Elm Street in the north to the dusty ends of Route 20 would get swept up in a funnel cloud and a flood and nothing would be left of the town but two telephone poles and maybe a lone pig left to squeal on a roof. It was inevitable and Trevor tried to tell the ugly policeman so, but the cop just sighed into his clipboard and said, “Fine, fine. That’s fine, but what exactly did you see?”
Trevor balled his fists. His fingernails had gotten too long again. Facts. That was all anyone ever wanted from him. His boss was the worst. “How many carts in the parking lot, Trev?” He called him Trev. Trevor despised him for it. “And how many in the store? Do you think that’s the right ratio for good business? Do you, Trev?” And his mother was forever asking about his paycheck so she could decide where to keep the thermostat. Numbers. More numbers. It didn’t matter if she set it at sixty-three or sixty-seven. He was always cold.
“There won’t be anyone left,” Trevor whispered.
“What’s that?” the policeman asked.
“Never mind.”
Trevor knew records would be broken. There would be record winds, record rainfall, enough lightning strikes to power Colliersville for a year, if only it were still standing. The animals had told him—the first being the two dogs he saw on his way to work, a black bulldog and brindle mastiff mix, both big in the shoulders and short of snout. “Watch out,” they said. “When the rains start, duck.” The geese confirmed it. “We’re gonzo,” they squawked between wingbeats. “Gone. So. Gone. So. Gone.”
Trevor worried for the chained, the caged, the otherwise domesticated. The wild ones could simply leave, but the two dogs had grown fat and happy behind a hurricane fence and now they whined at the wood every morning when Trevor walked by. “Help us,” they said. “Do something.”
The nightly news would try to tell the story, but the apathetic anchors would mispronounce all the names. They’d call him Taylor if they called him anything at all. They’d call the town Colorsville, which was funny because almost everyone who lived in Colliersville was white. Trevor thought that when the twister came, if he didn’t die, he’d move to Mexico because in movies Mexico looked like a rainbow unfolding into the sea.
“Colorsville,” the news anchors would say, “is history.”
“Look, kid.” The policeman shifted in his chair. “Think of the little girl.”
The White Swan Grocery Store employee break room smelled like Lois’s old lunch. Trevor sometimes wished the place where he ate his daily peanut-butter sandwich and apple weren’t windowless and claustrophobic and lit with buzzing fluorescent bulbs, but the boss said natural light was a luxury he couldn’t afford. “Who do you think I am?” he told anyone who complained, usually Lois. “Sam Walton?”
If the tornado didn’t come Wal-Mart would and Trevor wasn’t sure which was worse. He figured it was total destruction either way. Six one, half dozen the other, as his mother liked to say.
“I am thinking of the girl,” Trevor said to the cop.
A centerpiece of fake African violets drooped onto the card table where Trevor bumped his balled fists together, demolition-derby style. Vroom. Crash. Burn. Trevor and the policeman were alone but they wouldn’t be for long. Henrietta from deli took her break at twelve thirty every day so she could stay up-to-date on General Hospital and throw orange peels at any man who a) was sleeping with someone else’s wife or b) wore a double-breasted suit.
The truth was Trevor couldn’t stop thinking about the little girl. He saw her face on boxes in the cereal aisle, so cute, so dimpled, hovering above bowls of whole grain. He imagined he could hear her voice over the PA system, announcing a special on kale. He dreamed about her, too, and in his dreams she was older, no longer wheelchair bound, and beautiful. She had long hair and glitter on her face and seemed somehow to have grown wings. She invited him to take flight with her, to ride the currents out of town to someplace bigger, someplace better. I’m thinking Disney World, she often said. Trevor wanted to go with her but never did, sometimes because he had to work but mostly on account of his mother, who needed him to stay behind and fix something—the toilet, the cat’s collar. He woke up convinced that if he’d only done something, anything, if he’d screamed when he saw the car and the spinning wheels out the window, Daisy would have had the chance to grow up into that lovely young woman, to fly, if not on her own at least in a plane, all the way to Disney World. The dreams made him even sadder than before.
When he wasn’t thinking of Daisy he was thinking of Kurt in seafood, who had a black unibrow and hair like a bristle brush. Whenever Trevor stopped by the live lobster tank, Kurt talked his ear off about Star Wars—“the first three, correction, the only three”—and about how much he hated living with his mother, who, according to Kurt, gave all their money to TV preachers and paralyzed veterans.
“I’m dying,” Kurt told him. “Dying a slow death of boredom and casseroles.”
It was fate. He and Kurt had so much in common. It didn’t matter that Kurt was ten years older and had a son to think of and student loan debt, too, on top of it all, which Kurt said was bullshit because education should be free. “Like air and sex.” Trevor loved Kurt with a passion that made it hard to breathe. He worried that the crushing feeling on his chest might be due to the proximity of shellfish, which, if Trevor ever ate some by mistake, would send him into anaphylactic shock, but in his lucid moments he knew it was love combined with the terrifying thought that any day now Kurt might transfer to the Fort Wayne store.
The lobsters told him Kurt was short-timing it. “He can’t wait to get out of here,” they hissed. “Don’t be such a fool.”
Of course, when the storm came none of this would matter a bit. Love was nothing in the face of an F5. Neither was wood or glass or metal or concrete. Churches would end up as flattened as Miss Kitty’s and the liquor store. God didn’t cherry-pick. Kids would die, kids like Daisy Gonzalez, and grandmas who’d never done a thing wrong in their lives, and mothers like his own who might eat too much but who loved their children unconditionally and packed them plastic bags full of pills and a sack lunch every day because they never remembered to take their meds and were pretty much helpless in the sandwich-making department. The town would be destroyed, leaving only that one pig to tell the tale of what it was like to be inside the funnel cloud—oink, the pig would say to the handsome man from the Weather Channel, who understood nothing and cared only about his hair and pending contract. Oink, oink.
Trevor could translate those oinks but who would think to ask him to? “You wouldn’t believe the whiteness,” would be the pig’s exact words. “Blinding white, is what I mean, and lightning flashes every few seconds and the smell of gas—which I’m used to but still—and little tornadoes spinning off the big one as geese and ducks and chickens whirl past on their way up and out. Poor devils. Too small. Too loved. I only lived because God didn’t want me.”
Trevor thought he might be spared for the same reason. Pastor Rush once sermonized that heaven spit out people like him, and then, during the intervention that his mother paid for with her Mary Kay money, the pastor prayed Trevor would abandon his sinful ways and maybe even marry one of the teenage cashiers at White Swan, preferably the out-of-wedlock pregnant one, killing, as Pastor Rush put it, “two doves with one stone.” But Trevor just took greater care to hide his Bronc magazines from his mother, and when the two of them sat down with their popcorn to watch movies on the weekends he now threw things into the conversation he hoped put up a convincing straight smokescreen: “Look at that lady’s butt!” he said. Or, “Those are some breasts on that lady.”
His mother’s cat, Mr. Greenjeans, called him out on it. “You’re gayer than I am. Just admit it.”
Ever since Mrs. Moody’s third-grade class and the take-home gerbil incident of 1989, Trevor heard everything animals had to say. That was twenty years ago and his brain was an echo chamber, filled with the loves, disappointments, and complaints of the four-legged, the amphibious, the furry. The clamor was so loud it made it difficult for Trevor to do anything beyond watch movies with his mother and count shopping carts, some of them still holding little purse dogs abandoned for the moment by their owners, who said nothing when the pooches called Trevor “chubs” and “hopeless plebe.”
The lobsters in Kurt’s tank were even worse. They pleaded for their lives in high-pitched whines that made Trevor’s eardrums ache. “Why let us swim now if all you’re going to do is kill us? We know what happens after this. We’re not stupid. We’re not monsters. Do we not weep?”
According to the boss, the lobster tank had been installed to class up the joint. Trevor supposed it did. White Swan, half a century old and sans an organic food section, could use all the help it could get. It was just too bad that Kurt didn’t work in deli, where everything was already dead.
“Hey? Are you listening to me?” The police officer waved a hand in front of Trevor’s face.
“I’m listening,” Trevor said.
“Your boss said you told him you know what’s become of Daisy Gonzalez.”
“Yes.”
“Well,” the police officer said. “I’m waiting.”
Trevor supposed everyone was waiting, waiting for Daisy to be found, to be given back to her father, alive, smiling, in perfect health. Especially Trevor’s mother. Viv followed the Daisy Gonzalez case like a woman obsessed. She worried more about that little girl than she did her diet or her own son. Not that she ever joined the search party. She was too fat to do much of anything for too long, but she watched every newscast she could and saved the articles from the Colliersville Record in a gingham scrapbook, along with a few of the flyers volunteers stapled around town and photos of the girl she’d made Trevor find for her on the Internet. Viv’s scrapbook had bulged to an alarming size. “It’s going to be fat as my rear end soon,” Viv said, squishing it shut under a mottled thigh. Trevor looked at his mother and then at the book and was silent.
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