Sweet Jesus

by Christine Pountney

  Running through the woods in our little homemade nighties, Connie said.

  Sometimes I feel like we’re still running through the woods, Hannah said, in our little homemade nighties.

  You know, Connie said, all this time I’ve felt so vulnerable to danger. And yet, imagine how many disasters we’ve actually averted? She nodded towards the big hall across the street. Am I like that, do you think? I mean, am I like these people? Connie looked genuinely concerned.

  You’re not like that, Hannah said. You’re something else. I’m something else.

  Zeus stood to one side of a small room at the back of the church, next to an old-fashioned, elegant wooden coat stand that seemed out of place in its surroundings. He watched as a group of about thirty people, men and women with kids, mothers with their babies, pressed in around Enoch. They had begun to pray, calling out shouts of praise and exultation. The room was painted an ugly shade of green and felt claustrophobic. He felt sick about the kiss. Had he given Enoch a burden? Would it make him suffer?

  A tall, blond woman he heard referred to as Delilah seemed to be leading the ceremony. The congregation was closing in on her, and he couldn’t see Enoch anymore. The woman raised her Bible in the air and leaned forward and started shouting at the floor. What is your name! What’s your name!

  Zeus hated the tone of her voice, how angry it was. He moved closer to the edge of the group and saw that Enoch was now face down on the floor and being pinned there by two big men. One was pressing down on his shoulders while the other one knelt on the back of his legs. Beneath them, Enoch was twisting and writhing.

  Zeus started sweating. They’re going to hurt him! he thought. He despised what was happening. He crouched to look through the legs of the people and tried to get Enoch’s attention. For a moment, Zeus bowed his head and covered his eyes, then Delilah shouted, Clear the space! Nobody talk!

  The room fell silent and Zeus stood up again. Delilah’s arms were thrown wide open and all Zeus could hear was Enoch’s exhausted panting and thumping under the weight of those two big men. Delilah leaned forward again and demanded, Who are you? What is your name, evil spirit?

  Zeus winced. There was no healing going on here, only a battle of wills that would require so much defiance, it would take Enoch years to soften his heart again. And where were his parents in all of this? He suddenly forced his way through the crowd, to where Delilah stood with her Bible, and shouted, Stop!

  Everyone froze. The men leaned back and lightened their grip. Enoch glared up at Delilah from the floor. There was the watery sound of many people catching their breath. Zeus didn’t know what to do next. You should be doing this to me, he said. I’ve committed graver acts than this boy.

  The congregation was murmuring now. Delilah turned to Zeus and said, What do you want here? This is not your business.

  I’m a repentant sinner, Zeus said.

  One of the men who was holding Enoch stood up and straightened his shirt, and Enoch bolted to his feet. His face was red and wet with tears and snot, his eyes were puffy. He looked proud and hateful and victorious.

  I’m the one who needs purification here, Zeus insisted. You can’t refuse me, can you?

  Folks, Delilah announced, this man here is requesting deliverance.

  Hallelujah! someone called out halfheartedly.

  By what name, she asked, does the demon that torments you go by, brother?

  Delilah spoke with such composure, it was almost as if she’d been expecting him all along.

  You can speak openly here, Delilah said, brushing her hair back with her fingers.

  I will, Zeus said, but first I’d like to take off my coat. He pointed to the wooden coat stand and the congregation parted. Zeus walked towards it slowly, unbuttoning his beige trench coat. A single hanger dangled from one of its curled stems. It reminded him of something. It was the beginning of a mime Fenton had mastered and performed many times. He’d never attempted to perform it himself, and wondered now if he could do it unrehearsed.

  Connie left Hannah waiting in the truck and walked into the church. She looked around the worship area but couldn’t find Zeus, so she headed past the reception desk. She came to a corner where another hallway started, heard a voice shout, Stop! and got a jolt of fear. It sounded like Zeus’s voice. She hurried down the hall and opened a door to a room that was empty. She opened another one. Two people sat in an office, working at their computers. They turned to Connie and she apologized. At the end of the hall was another door, and when she opened this one, Connie saw a crowd of people, standing motionless, watching rapt as Zeus arranged his coat neatly on a hanger. She stood there perplexed.

  He brushed the coat off with the back of his hand and a man went towards him, but Zeus held him off with a gesture. Wait, his hand said, and the man waited. Zeus tugged at the shoulders of his coat and straightened it up. He tilted his head as if inspecting the results, taking stock of the coat. It was a good coat. A decent coat.

  Behind him, the audience was being patient and watchful. Even from the back, you could tell a transformation was taking place. Zeus seemed no longer himself but a charmed, enchanted being, transformed as if by magic into a character capable of funnelling down and distilling into a kind of concentrated moonshine all the pathos of the world. And he was pouring it into a cup and asking you to drink it. He untied his red scarf and wound it twice around the neck of the hanger. There was a good suggestion of a person in just the coat and scarf. Zeus dusted it off some more, then thrust his arm into the coat’s sleeve and pivoted to face the room, his back pressed up against the coat.

  Okay, this is ridiculous, a tall, blond woman said.

  A teenaged boy shouted, Leave him alone! and people turned to look at him.

  A few young kids had come out of the crowd as if they knew something was about to happen. Of course they did, Connie thought. Suffer the children.

  Zeus held up his arm for more meticulous dusting when suddenly it froze. It had come to life! The arm belonged to the coat, and Zeus was leaning away from it suspiciously. He didn’t dare move. He looked up over his shoulder at the coat stand, then back at the arm of the coat, its hand open and hovering in the air. The hand made a move towards him, and Zeus recoiled. It inched forward, and Zeus shrunk back an inch.

  The room had grown quieter. Everyone was watching him now. What would he do next?

  Zeus’s expression was one of alarm, eyebrows arched. His eyes darted one way, then the other, as the hand moved closer. It touched the front of his t-shirt, felt the fabric, tidied it up, then swiftly, with one stiff finger pressed to his jaw line, swung Zeus’s face towards its own. Zeus gave the coat a nervous, obsequious smile. The audience laughed. Then the coat began to brush him off, reciprocating with the same fussy care and attention Zeus had shown it earlier. The coat dusted off his arms, his shoulders and chest, and then, with a sudden flicked upswing, it had Zeus by the throat.

  Connie was amazed and found herself smiling.

  He hung suspended in terror, chin in the air, until the coat released him, and stroked him in one tender, sensual caress, from his neck all the way down to his belly. Zeus grovelled and swooned, in an agony of submissive pleasure, his face drawn into a grimace of longing. He looked slavishly, irrevocably in love.

  How does he do that? a child’s voice asked.

  And then, abruptly, Zeus pulled out his arm, extracting himself from the coat and shuffling off to pick up an invisible suitcase. He hesitated. This was going to be a classic, heartbreaking farewell. He turned, rushed back to the coat, shoved his arm in, and they embraced again, facing the audience, cheek to cheek, with all the tenderness in the world. I will never let you go. The coat reached up and lovingly traced a lazy circle on the tip of Zeus’s nose, making his whole head follow fawningly. Zeus closed his eyes and his eyebrows peaked in the centre. His mouth, hanging open slightly, started to blubber. He turned to bury his face in the coat’s chest and his hand flew up to the coat’s shoulder, floating up throug
h the final distance very slowly, leading with the wrist like a piano player lifting his hands off the keys. His hand, having finally settled on the coat’s shoulder, gathered up a fistful of material and clung to it.

  Together they rocked one way, then the other. In unison, they rose and sank on the wave of a powerful sigh. Stillness again. Then they jumped apart. Zeus grabbed his head. He was late! It was time to go! He shuffled away from the coat, bent to pick up his suitcase, straightened up, then stopped. He looked back and waved. There was applause.

  So this is what he did, Connie thought. He didn’t even need a costume, he was so thoroughly a clown. What a lovely, remarkable thing to do. If anything, she had underestimated him. They all had. It wasn’t Zeus who had needed their pity, it was Zeus who could have rescued them, if only they’d been open to the possibility.

  At dinner that evening, they were subdued, drained by the excesses of the day. They’d found a tavern near the Comfort Inn and were sharing a large plate of nachos.

  You should have seen him, Connie told Rose and Hannah. Had the whole room eating out of the palm of his hand. I couldn’t believe how good you are, she said, turning to Zeus. You could have your own show.

  Zeus was picking the black olives out of his nachos and putting them on the edge of his plate. I still can’t imagine clowning without Fenton, he said.

  But you were born to be a clown, Connie said.

  Entertainer to the charismatics, Hannah said dryly. Do I see a new character emerging?

  Fenton used to say the art of clowning was all about the search for love and acceptance, Zeus said. Clowns like to pretend they’re happier than they are, but it’s usually because they’re trying to avoid something dark.

  Avoid it or illuminate it? Rose said.

  They illuminate human suffering the way falling down the stairs can cure you of a headache, Zeus said.

  Rose reached across the table, held Zeus’s wrist for a moment, and said, It takes some of us a long time to learn new ways of thinking about things. I’m not saying I didn’t mess up. I did, I know that, and I’m sorry. But it’s easy to fall into the mistake of waiting for other people to make up for theirs. Even if they do, it will never feel like it’s enough, because the only meaningful change comes from within.

  The waitress came over to ask if everything was okay, and Hannah nodded thank you.

  What I’m trying to say is, you’ve just got to ignore everything that’s outside of yourself at some point in your life, Rose went on, and be entirely faithful to you. And then, you know what will happen? You’ll suddenly come into contact with the rest of the world. At least that’s what it seems to me, although I’m not there yet myself. I’m still working on getting to know Rose Crowe.

  I think I understand what you’re saying, Zeus said, but what means the most to me is that you’re here. I mean, you came all this way. That’s what nobody ever did for me, and I wouldn’t want you to think it went unnoticed.

  In the morning, they checked out of the hotel and drove Zeus to the bus station, where he bought a ticket to Chimayó. You sure you don’t want us to take you there? Rose asked, and Zeus confirmed that he did not.

  This is my final leg of the journey, he said. And I want to do it solo.

  Rose asked him if he had enough money, and Zeus told her about Fenton’s twenty thousand dollars. She said, I remember when you were about nine years old, you came to me one day with this tin box. It had a map of New Mexico you’d cut out from a magazine, I think, and some fruit roll-ups and things you’d been saving to make the trip back to your parents’ place. You also had eighteen dollars in there, saved up. It made me so incredibly sad to see how homesick you were, but that you had made a plan, and come to tell me about it? I realized then that you had a kind of determination, and I knew you were going to be okay, that your heart was open.

  Zeus nodded and looked down at his feet.

  Rose put her hand on his face and said, It would make me very happy to hear from you sometime, Zeus Ortega. She said goodbye, then went out to wait in the truck.

  Connie and Hannah walked him to the bus and Zeus turned to his sisters. They looked so full of apology.

  Connie hugged him and said, We’ll stay in touch, okay, little brother? Good luck in Chimayó.

  I love you, Hannah whispered into his neck as they hugged goodbye.

  Now go, Zeus said and watched them walk out and turn at the door, one last time, to wave.

  The bus was slow, and Zeus had to make a connection in Oklahoma City and then take the overnight bus to Santa Fe. In Amarillo, in the middle of the night, he woke up and saw in the yellow haze of a lamppost a family of seven, standing beside a mountain of suitcases and striped woven bags, like they were moving house, or on the run. It reminded him of a day Tim and Rose took him out shopping and let him get a red varsity jacket with black leather sleeves and a felt patch of a bluebird carrying a ribbon in its beak like a tattoo across the back. He’d begged them for it and they’d let him have it, and he’d loved that jacket with his whole being, wearing it until the cuffs were threadbare and the bluebird patch was so frayed it had lost all its features. It took the driver fifteen minutes to load all the family’s luggage, and then they boarded noisily and took seats all over the bus beside the other huddled, sleeping passengers.

  At dawn, Zeus woke and from the window of the Greyhound bus watched the landscape of his childhood come into view again for the first time, unimaginably beautiful – the sky its distinctive blue, behind an endless pattern of white clouds, and the red hills spotted with the dusty green pompoms of sagebrush and mesquite. The bus stopped in Santa Fe, and Zeus bought three tamales in tinfoil at the plaza and carried them onto another bus that would take him to Chimayó, though when he tried to eat, he realized he was too nervous. The bus wound its way through hills and past cliffs that seemed to him both to reflect the magnitude of his emotions and make them feel puny. They carried on towards Chimayó and passed the famous pilgrimage church, so much smaller than he remembered it, like the toy model of a church, its rounded corners giving it a soft, spongy look.

  Zeus got off at a stop a little further after that and followed the map Fenton had made for him.

  As he approached his parents’ house, he began to panic. There it was. A single-storey adobe, old jalopy up on cement blocks, evidence of children. Toys in the yard. A stray dog sniffing around under a window. His feet wouldn’t slow down. He just kept on walking. I can’t do this, he said to himself.

  He found a shady spot on the other side of the road and sat there, staring at the house for what felt like an hour, trying to imagine what their lives were like. What would he be interrupting? As he sat there, a car drove up and turned into the drive. It was the same car his father had owned when he was a boy. A bit faded and a little rusty in places, his 1978 Ford Thunderbird. The car stopped and the doors opened and two young girls jumped out of the passenger side and started running towards the house. A man got out and shouted at the kids to come back to the car. It was his father. A thin, wiry man, with tattoos on his arms. He opened the trunk and lifted out some bags of groceries and gave one each to the girls. He carried the rest inside and the door closed behind him. Another car started to come down the road, music blaring, windows down, two guys about his own age in the front seats with their black hair slicked back. They slowed down to look at him as they passed. Zeus grabbed his duffle bag and hurried away.

  He headed back out to the highway and started hitchhiking. It was a long time before anyone picked him up. He was heading north, and at dusk he got dropped off at a crossroads and started to walk. The sky was denim. In the west, a thin band of yellow flared briefly above a bank of violet clouds, then went orange, pink, and finally blue, the dark hills like hunched shoulders, growing blacker and bulkier on either side of him as the light drained out of the sky.

  Zeus walked through the dark countryside. Occasionally, a car or a truck would pass, one lit up like a casino, with a neon blue cross on the grill. Its
headlights showed trees to his right, tall Ponderosa pines growing out of the sandy ground. Zeus wandered off the highway and started walking into the woods. A half-moon rose. Tomorrow was election day. He thought about his country and the world. He came into a small clearing surrounded by trees, dropped his duffle bag, and sat down. He felt exhausted. He opened his bag for something warmer to wear and as he was getting a sweater out noticed the edge of Fenton’s white clown suit. He put his sweater on and pulled the suit out and laid it on the ground, where it seemed to soak up whatever light was left in the evening until it was a glowing thing. It had a human shape, but it struck him now as empty, just a piece of clothing that Fenton wouldn’t want him to be dragging around with him wherever he went. He caught it by the wrists and swung it over his head, and it hung down his back like a long cape. He tied the arms around his neck, crouched to dig out Fenton’s slippers and stood up, wearing the slippers on his hands. He felt like a confused superhero.

  Someone drove by on the highway and the strobing of headlights against the trees gave what he was about to do an almost criminal aspect. The wind was picking up. Fenton’s clown suit rippled like a flag. Zeus tucked the slippers under his arm and got a lighter from his duffle bag and a map he’d picked up at a motel and twisted it into a wick and lit the tip. He cupped his hand around the flame and held the wick upside down to encourage the flame to climb up the map. He took a few blind steps away from his duffle bag. He couldn’t see anything beyond the flame.

  Zeus dropped the slippers and crouched to arrange them in a V, the way Fenton used to stand in them, then he untied the silk knot at his throat with one hand and laid it on top. He was rotating and waving the twisted map, trying to nurse the flame without scorching his wrist.