by Lee Durkee
“What kind of blasphemy?”
She shrugged, again seemingly with her mouth. “Let’s see. I guess I pretty much ran the blasphemy gamut, Noel. A to Z. Adultery to Zoroastrianism. I’m a pariah. Can’t you tell?”
“I don’t even know what that is.”
“A pariah? It’s a fish. A very dangerous fish. Indigenous to the Amazon.”
Then she started asking Noel about his religious upbringing, and he told her he was raised Baptist but that he didn’t hold with that anymore.
“I don’t believe in God anymore,” Noel said.
“Oh yes you do,” she said. “You’re too young to really not believe in God yet. You’re just being fashionable and trying to impress me.”
“I don’t,” he insisted.
“Well are you agnostic or atheist?”
“What’s the difference?”
“An atheist says there is no God. An agnostic says maybe there is, maybe there isn’t, but it beats the hell outa me.”
“I guess I’m that last one.”
“Ahh. Do you by any chance read, Noel? It’s a strange question to have to ask a college student, you’ll agree?”
When he told her that he did, she did not appear convinced and asked which courses he was taking. He listed them off then explained that he wanted to be a photographer but that the college did not offer photography courses. Yawning, she asked who was his favorite author. He told her Ernest Hemingway, and she sat up, saluting to block out the sun, and said, “Egad!” Then she changed the subject again, this time back to her class and what Noel had really thought of it. She asked this daringly, as if she had secret misgivings she might share. Noel only shrugged and said all that religion stuff bored him.
“Well, Ernest Hemingway bores me,” she countered.
Staring down at his imitation snakeskin boots, Noel very slowly began to recite a few lines from A Farewell to Arms. Every so often he had to stop and scratch his cheek as he struggled to recall the next part. The passage was the famous one about knowing that the things of the night cannot be explained in the day and that the night can be a dreadful time for lonely people once their loneliness has started.
When he had finished, he glanced over at her and grinned.
“Oh my God,” she remarked. “You must be knocking them off with a stick.” Noting his confusion, she clarified, “The girls, Noel. The girls.”
He blushed—he couldn’t help it—then lowered his head.
“So that’s what you were up to, huh? Sitting up here, doing your best to look like some rock star, and scoping out the talent in my class. Deciding which ones you wanted to undo with your little snippets of macho-boy poetry? Well, let me say, I suspected as much.”
“I’m not trying to look like any rock star.”
“The heck you aren’t, Noel. There are some pretty ones in my class too. Especially sweet Cecilia. She’ll be at our house tomorrow night, by the way, lusting after my husband.”
Noel asked which one was Cecilia.
“She was that very tall, very tanned girl with the long brown hair, the one that left early.” She examined Noel even more keenly. When she spoke again, she had a pink smear of lipstick on her front teeth. “And between boyfriends, at the moment, I might add.”
“And she’s snaking after your husband?”
“I couldn’t have put it better myself. She’s snaking after him, alright. Just out of curiosity, Noel, given the opportunity, since you’re a photographer, how would you take her photograph? She’s a twirler, you know. You might want to figure that into the equation.”
“A twirler?”
“A Dixie Darling. Halftime and all that dog-and-pony show.”
After a moment Noel decided, “I guess I’d have her waiting for one of those baton things to come back down. But she’d have to be holding another one so people’d know what she was looking up after. And maybe a clothesline or something in the background.”
He did not elaborate that the clothesline would have her underwear pinned on it, though he felt certain it would.
“And what would you have her wearing in this photograph—spangles?”
“I dunno, that depends on what she’s like. Maybe one of those real short shirts, the kind that hike up above the belly button.”
“Midriff,” Lily said. “The area from here . . . to here.” She made a slicing motion, as if dividing that portion from herself. “Otherwise known as the oven.” Sitting up straighter and blinking dramatically, she wished out loud that she had brought her sunglasses with her.
“They’re on your head.”
“Oh. So they are.” She slipped them down. “I find it very annoying to talk to anyone wearing sunglasses. You can’t see their eyes. They could be thinking most anything. Something diabolical. It’s a very strange cultural phenomenon, sunglasses are. Almost as strange as wristwatches. Which I see you don’t wear. Good for you.”
“You don’t either.”
“No, but perhaps if I did I wouldn’t let my class run overtime and make my students want to murder me.”
“What religion did you say you were?”
“I didn’t.”
“Well, what religion are you?”
“You have to guess.”
Noel guessed Mormon because he wanted to impress her with his new knowledge on the subject.
“Oh God! Do I look Mormon?”
“You kinda got them Osmond teeth.”
“Wonderful. First a green tongue, now Osmond teeth. And why are you staring at my mouth so much?”
“It’s still kinda green.”
She licked her palm, studied the saliva.
“No, I’m not a Mormon, though I find them fascinating.”
“You believe all that angel Moroni stuff?”
The tilt of her head indicated she just might be impressed. “To tell you the truth, Noel, the jury’s still out on ol’ angel Moroni. What about you, you believe all that angel Moroni stuff?”
“Hell no.”
“It must be nice,” she said, “to know things so absolutely.”
“If you’re not a Mormon, then what are you?”
If he wanted to find that out, she explained, he’d have to come to her house tomorrow night. “Our Thursday night nondenom meetings. Led by my much-beloved husband. I suspect a few cute girls will be there. Cecilia included. Can we count on you being there, Noel? I can promise you it won’t be boring.”
She took his right hand and drew a map to her house on his palm. Then she made him write down his phone number on her own palm. That done, she glanced around and complained that she needed to know the time. She strapped on her sandals, told Noel it had been a unexpected pleasure, and smiled deeply at him. She stood and strolled down the steps, plucking up her leather satchel in passing, and continued down to the island of grass beneath the stage where there stood an old iron sundial that Noel had never noticed until that moment. She placed her satchel on the grass and was studying first the mechanism and then the angle of sunlight over her shoulder when from across campus the chapel bell began to ring. It rang ten times. Each time it did, she extended one finger down at her side. When the bell stopped, she adjusted the sundial then turned and walked away along the edge of the chorus pit while glancing into its depths.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
OUTSIDE HUFF HALL a green and seemingly endless convoy of military vehicles caterpillared through campus. After a while Noel refused to follow its progress outside his dorm window and instead assessed his Mustang in the parking lot below. Though it had been somewhat rebuilt after the wreck, the car was in sad shape. It was bent and dirty and needed a paint job. Finally he turned away from the window and began to stare into the mirror and into the black discs of his eyes. Earlier, while stomaching a bowl of cornflakes in the cafeteria
, he had asked some devout-looking students if they had heard anything about the fire. Turns out, they had. It had been started by devil worshipers, they breathlessly informed him. They knew this to be the case because of the satanic graffiti painted on the water tower in some kind of animal blood. Not only that, but one of the firefighters had spotted men garbed in dark red robes fleeing just ahead of him through the smoke.
The mirror tugged on him like a magnet, but he pulled himself free and crawled into the bottom bunk, taking some magazines with him. He found the one with Layle in it, but even that could not arouse him. He tried another, and another, then gave up and reached under the bunk for the baby aspirin. Real aspirin gave him heartburn. He fell asleep chewing the dry orange tablets, the plastic bottle still in his grip, the aura of girlie magazines spilled out around him.
He awoke a long time later to a window gray-lit with the watery light of either a dusk or a dawn, he could not decide which. Someone was pounding the door, yelling about a phone call. Noel lurched into the hallway and fumbled after the receiver. It was her, the strange but pretty teacher, reminding him that the nondenom meeting started in an hour. “Do you need a lift?” she wanted to know.
Glancing at the map on his palm, Noel told her he had a car. He stopped at Jay’s door on his way to the bathroom, but nobody answered. The bathroom was six curtained shower stalls, four doorless johns, five urinals, six sinks. Hutch was bending over one of the far sinks, carefully shaving around his goatee. Noel brushed his teeth two sinks over, spat, and asked, “Hey, Hutch, that Pink Paradise place, did y’all really finger off some waitresses there?”
Hutch consulted his own reflection. He was wearing a black Rolling Stones T-shirt, the sleeves ripped off, and very tight faded bootcuts. His hair fell in brown ringlets over his forehead. In spite of the bad blood between them, Hutch still scored pot from Noel most every Monday. Smiling at himself, Hutch said, “Shit, that’s just something we tell you rookies to get y’all to roadtrip to Bogtown and bring us back beer.”
“Like that electric-fence bullshit, huh?”
“You know about that? Hell, we was gonna do you next, Mongo.”
“I’d go easy on that Mongo shit if I were you, Hutch. How’s that eye of yours doing?”
Hutch suddenly noticed a spot he had missed shaving.
Noel shook out his toothbrush and added, “Besides, Jay already done it to me. About shit my pants too.”
“You two were down at the tower last night?”
“Nah, not last night, about a week ago.”
Hutch leaned back to study Noel in the long mirror they shared. He asked if Noel had heard about the fire. About five hundred acres torched, he reported. That’s probably a couple million bucks worth of timber.
Noel lathered his face and said, “Know what I heard about that? I heard devil worshipers done it, that they found a bunch of cut-off dog heads and shit like that out in the woods. Devil worshipers from New Orleans is what I heard.”
“No shit.” Hutch massaged his cheeks then sealed his razor up in a plastic bag and asked, “What kind of dog heads?”
“How the fuck do I know what kinda dog heads?” Noel nicked himself in the jawbone and cussed. Pressing a finger there, he asked, “Hey, speaking of devil worshipers, that where you saw the Stones at, New Orleans?”
“Superdome.”
“They on?”
“Kick-ass, son.”
“They do ‘Sympathy for the Devil’?”
“I dunno, I was too drunk to remember. I threw up all the way back.”
“How do you know they was kick-ass, then?”
“’Cause they’re the Stones.”
While leaving, Hutch slapped Noel on the back, which caused him to drop his razor into the sink.
Noel went back to his room to brush out his hair, which was down past his shoulders now. He unbuttoned his green polyester shirt to the chest of the white undershirt, then looped on his belt, crafted in eleventh-grade shop, the word spider seared into brown leather. He pulled on his plastic boots and stood back from the mirror, massaging his thin goatee. He figured he was about as nondenominational as they came.
The walk would do him good, he decided, though two blocks later he was already regretting that choice. The evening sky was lightning-filled, more like heat lightning than any kind that would strike you dead. Noel hated all lightning. Lightning made him feel like his mind was being read, as if lightning could detect fear or guilt and hone in on it. The map on his palm led him about a mile from campus to a remote single-story house on a cul-de-sac. The house had grayish bricks and bluish shutters, the window and rain gutters strung with blinking red and green lights, the flat-roofed carport supporting two plastic reindeer, both of them Rudolph. A life-size manger scene had been assembled in the front yard, mostly silhouettes and shadows. Noel stood at the end of the driveway near the mailbox wondering what the hell he was doing here.
He was still considering turning back when a wave of rain herded him under the carport. The doorbell reverberated a quick five-note melody and then a man he instantly identified as Lily’s husband opened the door and with a handshake pulled Noel inside into a bright kitchen that smelled of eggnog and raisins. “We got some fresh meat here,” he yelled as he ushered Noel into the den, which contained an oblong circle of some dozen students sitting on folding chairs. A few faces he recognized from campus, but nobody he knew by name. Cecilia was there, wearing a tan jumpsuit, her legs crossed at the ankles, her hands clasped in her lap, her brown hair shiny and limp, its part perfectly centered.
Lily was seated to his right but at such an angle it was hard to spy on her for more than a moment, just long enough to glimpse a long ribbed black skirt, a grayish sweater, a string of pearls, and an empty wineglass she was rotating on her fingertips. Already he was making plans to take her picture. There was something about her eyes, a brightening green that reminded him of the McCurry photographs he admired so much in National Geographic. Except for a quick half smile, Lily did not acknowledge Noel.
Kevin, her husband, seemed to be in charge. Maybe it was the swept salt-and-pepper hair, or the black turtleneck, or the way he wanded his hands, but he put Noel in mind of a symphony conductor. Kevin had steely blue eyes above a pondering jaw. He looked to be a lot older than Lily, but, of the two, he was the more striking. Behind Kevin, an upright vacuum cleaner stood in front of the fireplace. Every inch of wall space had been converted into bookshelves. After Kevin had made everyone introduce themselves for the benefit of those of us new to the nondenoms, he winked at Noel and then started the meeting with a few general announcements. Everybody was welcomed here, all forms of practice encouraged. “We’ve got a little bit of everything, a regular Christian smorgasbord.”
The only other guy there not wearing a tie had the shoulders and neck of an offensive lineman. He wore a blue sports coat and was clutching hands, almost belligerently, with an emaciated girl with short red hair who kept giving Noel cold glances. Noel’s attention returned to Cecilia, or rather to her clothes. It was easy to imagine the jumpsuit she wore pinned to a wax-paper pattern. Suddenly she caught his eye and smiled brightly at him and mouthed the word hi just as Kevin began reading aloud the story of Ruth, often using caricatured voices for the characters. Afterward he encouraged the nondenoms to “roundhouse” the story. Noel remained mute, as did Lily, until about fifteen minutes into the discussion, when Kevin prompted, “What about you, Noel? Any deep thoughts?”
“No sir,” he replied, sitting up straighter in his chair.
Kevin fixed him with a clouded look, as if he suspected Noel of harboring great insights, then he nodded toward his wife and asked, “I thought you said he was smart?”
“No, I said he was cute.”
“Oh. That explains it, then.”
Next Kevin started talking about Abraham and Isaac, who, evidently, the non
denoms had roundhoused the week before. Kevin said that somebody—somebody who would remain nameless—this certain nameless somebody, who had stayed deathly quiet throughout last week’s discussion, had made some very interesting observations about our friend Abraham after the meeting had adjourned. Lily fired off an unmistakable go-to-hell look, which Kevin fielded with a graveyard whistle followed by a burningly innocent glance around the den. He said, “Let me summarize. The question before us, if you’ll recall, was Abraham’s attempt to sacrifice his son Isaac—”
“If there’s one thing I detest,” Lily objected, “it is being summarized. What I said—privately to you, dear—was that if God really told Abraham to stab his infant son to death, then God was one sick son-of-a-bitch.”
The sound of the rain swelled outside as Kevin gleamed at the prospect of such controversy. He made a point of meeting each of the many imploring eyes, going around the circle sharing his countenance of feigned shock; after which he leaned forward and assumed the exact position as Lily, who, upon noticing this, straightened her spine, untouched her fingertips, then stood and left the room, only to return a minute later carrying a blue-tinted goblet filled with purple wine. Reluctantly, she stated, “I’m not saying anything profound here. Anybody who’s ever held a baby in her arms should not have to be told this.”
“So you don’t believe it was God who told Abraham to kill his son? Anyone can jump in and answer these questions. There are no wrong answers.”
Following an obligatory silence, Lily replied dryly, “Of course there are wrong answers. What you’re supposed to say is there are no stupid questions. But there are stupid questions, believe me. Thousands of them. I could write a book of them. The Book of a Thousand and One Stupid Questions.”