by Kevin Egan
"No. I ain't the kind to sit back and let wrong ways get spread. We'll do it our own selves if we have to. Like we've always done."
He pulled a lighter from his pocket and handed it to David. He remembered how it had felt. How the front had been inscribed with an ornate cross.
David watched as his father walked around the clearing. Tearing branches from pine trees, ripping up wild bushes and long handfuls of dry witch grass. He put them all at David's feet and built a small pyre.
"It's been too long since I've shown you," his father said as he kneeled in front of the collection of brush. "Now you're going to learn how to do it yourself."
Beside him, David fell on his own knees, remembering the ceremony he'd seen so many times. At the edge of the cleaning he saw a snake moving slowing over pine-straw. He heard birds in the trees. To the west, the sun fell behind the mountains.
"Normally I like to have the Book with me, but this will do." He reached out and took the lighter from David's hands. "Now focus hard in the center, David," his father said.
With his thumb, he flicked the lid of the lighter open. Flame sprung from the top. Steady. Dancing light in the dark clearing.
"David," his father had asked. "Are you watching?"
Outside the abandoned warehouse, the pitch of the wind and snow dropped a note, and David felt a new kind of fear enter him. From somewhere deep in the guts of the lonely place, he thought he heard a dog growl. His hands clapped together, rubbing himself for warmth, he waited for the sun to rise.
In the morning, he oriented himself and headed back towards the depot. He waited outside the gates, too exhausted to worry about the yardmaster.
With chapped lips, David prayed. Prayed for forgiveness. For the woman he'd seen and thought was an Angel. For a train. For the things his father had shown him to have actually been there and not something else, a trick by the Devil or his father or a trick of the light in a possibly godless world. He prayed for God to be as real as David wished Him to be.
Behind him, he heard the warning whistle of a train. An engine, a tanker, and then a line of freight cars emerged from the gate. David began to run, matching pace with the engine, but hanging four cars behind. As the train picked up speed, he fell further and further back, his eyes searching for an open door. Finally he found one. He angled himself towards the car, and sprinting through the snow, threw himself forward, caught the handle, and kicked his legs up after him.
He rode alone in the freight car for hours. The slackening and slapping of the wheels on rail finally lulling him into a dreamless sleep, and when he awoke, he saw the sun setting on the edges of the prairie. White and pink and brilliant gold, he thought again of his father and the time in the clearing—and again, he allowed himself to doubt whether or not any of it had ever happened. The faces in the flame, the chill that puckered in his spine and the spreading warmth on the balls of his feet and in his belly as he stared into the fire. He thought of the woman again, screaming in the fire on the floor. In those moments, he had known his experiences to be true, but how could God's way lead him to this?
He pulled the Bible from his backpack and tried to read it, but the words swam together into either nothingness or a code he was too tired to break. He put it back and pulled out the western instead.
David read until he felt the train slowing beneath him. From the inside of the car, he could see it was pulling through a small town. A scattering of houses, a garage, a grain silo, what might be a diner, a highway running off to the left, and a large billboard looming over the pothole pocked road. "CHESTER NE—Home of 2001 Class A Football Champs!" The train continued to slow, then came to a full stop.
Over the billboard, he saw the last flash of the setting sun, and even though he questioned the thought, he considered the final burst of light to maybe be another sign, the last guidepost from God, calling him back. He scrambled together the contents of his bag, then jumped from the train.
He began to walk. The streets of Chester were empty. He thought of the woman as he walked. Pictured her wrenching herself from the floor. He wondered if she were Mexican or white. If she had ever lived in a town like this, or if she had ridden north with her family from Mexico, having snuck across the border in Texas or Arizona or. . . Why had she been there? Had that always been the plan, an act of sacrifice to create doubt in order to become stronger? Or had he been abandoned? Or worse, had something severed his connection with God?
In front of him, a girl ran across the road, giggling, a small dog at her feet. She was the first life he'd seen since Omaha besides grazing cows huddled under snow-covered trees, and her laughter lifted him, made him sure again of his purpose and his Heavenly vocation. He watched her bound through the snow with the dog and when she was gone, swallowed inside an old house, he continued down the street, towards the diner.
The lot of the diner was long and flat, scarred with dirt peeking through the wind-tossed snow. Half-assembled remains of trailers and carbines littered the lot around the lone light pole, and at the end, a house sat, derelict and leaning with the weight of snowpack. The diner itself was built of white painted cinderblock, and on the side he found a painted black foot on the wall as large as him, the word "Footies" written in cursive on the sole. He tried the doors but found they were locked. The inside of the place dark except for a television playing inside, a news channel showing the President giving a speech cut with shots of soldiers jumping from helicopters in the desert. He stood, watching.
The President cut away and the news next showed a low gray wreck smoking in the snow and shots of firefighters and police huddled together, consulting. The bottom of the screen said OMAHA NE and David knew without seeing any more that it was his house, the house of his last Service. His belly grew hard. His hands shook by his sides.
On the screen the long shots of the smoking remains gave way to a photo of a mother and daughter, arms wrapped around each other, their smiles large and happy, the mother's hair dyed blonde, the daughter's onyx black. The bottom of the screen changed.
TWO DEAD IN OVERNIGHT HOUSE FIRE. ARSON SUSPECTED.
David leaned over. He felt something moving through his guts. He tried to vomit in the snow, but nothing came except for acid that hung on the back of his tongue. "Forgive me Lord," he said aloud, then cringed at how broken and lonely his voice sounded. He stood and leaned against the doors of the diner, his back to the television and tried to cry, but nothing came.
His hands still shaking, David stuffed them into the pockets of his jacket and was only slightly surprised to find the box of kitchen matches. He pulled his hand back, repulsed, the image of the girl and her mother in front of his eyes, unmoving. Again he tried to make sense of it, to find an order in the chaos that had swallowed two lives.
Worse though, was the doubt. Could it have just been an accident? Mindless deaths on a rock spinning through the void caused by a man with no direction? He thought of the sign he'd seen after climbing off the train, declaring Chester the home of the 2001 State Football Champions. He'd played in middle school and high school and loved it, placing in it a dedication stronger than anything else in the world before he'd found the face of the Lord in the Fire. He wondered if he'd gone the wrong way, if he hadn't been meant to do something else, football maybe—to run through flat green fields in the South, pockmarked with hash lines and end zones, his mother and sisters cheering from the stands while the muscles of his legs burned and the ball clung to the insides of his sweaty palms.
He recalled his mother and sisters, how they'd looked the day his father had left. How they had stood on the front porch watching him walk away. They looked nothing like the woman and her daughter on the news, but the thought haunted him. They could have been there, or a place like it, but for the Grace of God.
But for the Grace of God.
The TV had moved off the fire, and now showed two teenagers with cold eyes. They'd been killed in a shootout with police somewhere west of him. David removed his hands from his pock
ets and said a prayer for those they'd killed and the mother and daughter in the house. He stepped away from the window of the diner and followed the white cinderblock wall around the side. Behind the diner he found an old snowblower tucked away next to a picnic bench. On the ground next to it was a red plastic canister of gasoline, the color of the thing garish and sickening, but impossible to miss in the snow-drifted corner.
It was as though it had been placed there for him.
He picked up the gas can and began to move across the lot, towards the sloping house.
For our God is a consuming fire.
The house was two stories of rotting wood and the door let him enter with a groan. The inside was black and cold and dust rose from his footfalls. It had been trashed. There was nothing good or pure about the place, but he didn't allow himself to pause and consider the ruin. It would lead to doubt, and David was done with that. He climbed the stairs, the can of gasoline sloshing beside him.
He found the largest room on the second floor and pulled the drapes. Outside, against the light pole in the diner parking lot, he could see it was snowing again—fat flakes swirling underneath the fluorescence. Again he thought of the mother and her daughter. He went to his knees and said another prayer for them. He asked them and God for their forgiveness and promised that after he knew what he was to do, he would honor their memories.
David rose. He pulled the plug from the canister then moved in a circle, splashing the walls and floor and drapes. At the windows again, he looked out at the plain, at the flat darkness that stretched out and wrapped the land up in cold and misery.
So different from his home in South Carolina, but so similar. It had once been a Pagan land, too. It was an empty place, filled with ghosts and loneliness, but wonders for those who were willing to look. He could picture his father walking these roads just as he had walked the roads back home, finding meaning in the slant and weight and angle of things. He pictured the man, tall and thin, a severe nose under thick brows, and tried to hold the image in his head.
He would find him again, wherever he was. God would show him the where and the way, even if he had to make, then pass through, a hell of his own making.
"Moses didn't go up the hill and find God burning in the bush. He lit it and found God in the flames," David said, the words booming in the soaked room.
He reached into his pockets and brought out the matches. Took one from the box and held it to the strike strip.
The fumes of the room had worked into his nose, making him lightheaded, and for a moment he considered what he was doing. He wondered if it was foolish, if it was all foolish. And then he remembered the woman and the stairs, how she actually had been a message from God, he was sure of it now, leading him away from the city and the blood in the air. Leading him to this place, this moment. This trial. This proving of himself to the Lord.
Hell on earth. He would enter into it willingly. He would stand amongst the flames to find the Face of the Lord and prove that he was worthy for His mission.
Snow falling softly against the windows, David lit the match and tossed it to the floor and watched as all around him, like God blowing breath into Adam, the room rose to beautiful life.
The Ice Cream Snatcher
by Bryan Paul Rouleau
A guy in prison told me that ninety percent of auto thefts happen when the keys are left in the car. It's true— I'm one of the thieves. Cars aren't so easy to wire like they used to be, so I never wasted a minute on a locked one. Another thing. When I was a kid, my social worker told me that people who have traumatic experiences in the first three years of their life are damaged for good.
Can't be fixed.
No return policy at that point, either.
Anyway, that social worker, she was talking about me. My mother shot my dad in the head when I was two and a half—six months shy of the safe zone. I remember it clearly. I blame her to this day because now I steal cars and been to prison twice for it.
Even though my father survived the head shot. The bullet went right between the two lobes of his brain and when the cops rolled up on the house with the lights going, he answered the door with a towel pressed to his head and said, "Can I get you boys some coffee?"
It is these two things—the stealing cars with keys inside, and my mom trying to kill my dad before my third birthday and finally doing it by my seventh—that are going to land me behind bars for a third time, too. I'll put on the familiar orange suit and serve a big sentence along with the unfortunate nickname relating to my final crime. I'm called the "ice cream snatcher," and that's not a name you boast about on the inside.
When I get out of the joint, though, I'm done with dirty work for good. No more cars for me, and no more ice cream either. Not after what happened on that last botch.
It was summer and Pedro and I were lurking around a supermarket parking lot when a black Maserati pulled up to the front curb with its hazards on the way money trucks do. A guy in a baby-yellow polo shirt and leather sandals got out of the driver's side and hurried into the store. The passenger seat was empty.
The keys were in the ignition. We usually don't run into this kind of luck. Pedro's never driven anything nicer than a Corolla. That's why I let him take the wheel.
I got in the passenger side and Pedro drove away from the curb and made a left toward the intersection. In the movies, the car thieves are always flying around everywhere like they're hot to get noticed. That's not how it's done by professionals. Drive it like you stole it means something completely different to guys like me and Pedro.
Pedro waited at the red light with his left blinker on. I turned the air up because it was pretty warm with those black leather seats. Then I turned up the radio. A CD was on track twelve, a couple minutes into the song.
"What's this shit?" said Pedro.
"Disney song."
"Dude listen to Disney music?" said Pedro.
"What's wrong with Disney music?"
"I don't know. You think dude's a boss driving around a Maserati, but then he listening to Mufasa and shit."
"You know a lot about it."
"Fuck you. This light's gotta turn or we gonna be fucked."
I looked in the sideview. "We're ok."
The green arrow popped on and Pedro eased the sedan on a wide turn. We took the ramp onto the eastbound interstate.
"Call Hambles," said Pedro. He said it like Hamblez, which is wrong.
"Hambley," I said.
"Whatever the fuck."
I took my cell out and punched in Hambley.
We haven't met Hambley. At least we don't think we have, but who knows in this kind of business the people you're dealing with. We call him whenever we get a car, and he gives us the drop point because it's always changing. Once we get the car to the drop and get our money, we are completely in the clear. Ghosts after that.
"Hambley," said the guy who answered. Sounded like he was sleeping because his voice had some grog in it.
"Sunrise here. Got some wheels."
"Abandoned lot across from the south entrance of National Terminal."
"Got an address I can plug in?"
"No. Hurry up. Drop changes in six minutes."
"Where's the next drop then?"
"Can't tell you that, Sunrise. It's across town."
"Ok, we'll see you at the terminal."
"No you won't." Hambley hung up. I didn't know then what a prophet Hambley turned out to be.
Even if we weren't seeing Hambley, we'd see someone there who would pay us. I was thinking how surprised that motherfucker was going to be when a Maserati rolled up. Usually we bring in shit cars with mismatched doors that we pulled out of what Pedro and I like to call the gated communities. Not the nice white gated communities, but the ones where all the shops have bars over the windows.
"What did the prick say?"
"He said we have six minutes to get to the drop before it changes. Keep going east and take exit eight, I think I know the area. It's across fr
om the National Terminal on the waterfront."
I got busy searching for the place on my phone. We wanted to get the car to the terminal because we wanted the thing off our hands. If we missed the drop, we would have to call Hambley again for the new spot and drive across town to find it. That would mean more time riding around in a car that the police would be looking for. I reached over and lowered the music so I could concentrate.
"It's a problem freeeeeee philos-fee, hakuna matata," sang a small voice behind me.
Pedro did a triple take into the rearview and I looked in the backseat.
A kid was sitting there in a car seat, swinging his feet and looking shy now that he'd been caught singing. He covered his face with both hands.
"You didn't check the back seat," Pedro said.
"Didn't think to," I said. "Usually the kids speak up. Or cry or something."
"Well now we fucked. Kid heard everything and seen us."
"Shit, calm down, Pedro. Jesus Christ."
"Don't use my fuckin' name, and don't use the Lord's name in vain," Pedro said and jammed his fingers hard into his ribs, where a gold cross was hanging unceremoniously tangled in his chest hair. "Figure out where we need to go, we don't got time for this shit. We got to make a pit stop now."
"Yeah, we'll just drop him off at a gas station," I said and felt a little relieved by that idea. That wouldn't eat up too much time.
"Yeah, ok, why don't we bring him down to the fucking police station, Sunrise? What the fuck's the matter with you?"
"Hey, I'm coming up with ideas to fix this."
"Too fuckin' late dude, it's broken. Kid saw us dude. Heard about the drop. Heard about you calling Hambles. Heard my fucking name."
"Shut your mouth Pedro, the kid can still hear us." I turned around and looked at the kid. His eyes were wide and his lips were closed. He was staring at me. He was about three I'd say.
"Then stop using my name dude, that's what I'm saying."