Anthem of a Reluctant Prophet

by Joanne Proulx

  “Holy Christ,” my dad said, gripping the steering wheel, all white-knuckled and breathing hard. His eyes flicked to the back seat. “You okay?”

  I nodded.

  “We’re all fine. We’re all just fine,” my mom said, but I wasn’t so sure because her head was bobbing around like she was in the early stages of some shaky disease or something. Fang, on the other hand, sat motionless beside me, trying his best not to exist.

  “So, what did the pastor guy want?” I leaned forward to ask the question.

  “Nothing,” my dad said, real fast and real flat.

  My mom looked at him like she wanted to add something, but in that same tight voice he said there was nothing worth talking about, and my mom suggested it might be a good idea to get the hell out of there.

  We practically ran Lance and his cameraman over, wheeling onto the street, and from the back seat I mouthed a nice clear “fuck off ” at them, right before we got stuck behind the hearse and were forced to head up the funeral procession. Oh yeah, one good thing—Pastor Ted slipped in behind us. I think he leaned on the horn accidentally. I don’t really know. Either way, he was hard to ignore. Even Fang couldn’t resist. At the beep, we all turned to gape at the big man, planted behind the wheel of this old beater of a K-Car. Except for the enormous glow-in-the-dark Jesus dangling from the rearview, I thought the vehicle really put a dent in the Pastor’s smooth guy-of-God image. Still, he saw us staring and he gave us a confident nod before we all started rolling.

  Being wedged between the Pastor’s rusted-out shit box and Stan’s luxurious last ride was a fairly uncomfortable place to be. It went without saying that we had no plans to venture out to the graveyard. When the hearse went left at the end of Highland, we hung a discreet right. Unfortunately, Ted followed us and then half the fucking congregation followed him, until my dad finally had to get out and wave everybody off. There was a general brouhaha as a couple dozen cars tried to back up or U-turn their way in the proper direction. My dad ended up directing traffic for the next five minutes while people gawked at me and my mom and Fang, trying hard to look cool inside the Taurus. By this time I couldn’t help seeing the humor in the whole twisted situation, and I started to wave at the onlookers and my mom started laughing at my dad flailing around on the street. Fang just rested his head against the back of the seat and closed his eyes, no doubt wishing he’d walked home even if it was all the way across town.

  Despite my father’s best efforts, we didn’t manage to shake all the hangers-on. When we stopped to let Fang off, the roving-eye boys were right there, idling behind us, and they were already parked solidly in front of our place when we scrambled out of the car. My father said he’d take care of them and made a move for the garage while my mom and I dove inside. It took a couple of minutes before my dad emerged from the garage armed with my old pink and yellow Super Soaker. He did this Terminator march across the lawn, Soaker cocked, and when he got to the van he stuck his foot inside, pushed the sliding door wide open and blasted the news team. Ammo spent, he threw the water gun onto the lawn, said a few choice words to his wet friends and headed inside.

  We had a surprisingly laid-back dinner before I crashed in my room. Lying on my bed in the heavy afterglow of my friend’s funeral, you might guess I’d be thinking about Stan, but I wasn’t. I was thinking about me, what had happened to me, how crazy the whole fucking thing was, how impossible, how insane, and suddenly there she was, this dying stranger girl floating around my brain. It wasn’t like it had been with Stan and Mr. Bernoffski. It wasn’t an instantaneous, straight-from-the-gut kind of deal. It was a hazy and distant sort of knowing that settled into me, one part freaky premonition, one part doomed daydream. There were no times, no dates, no license plate numbers. Just a flutter of dark, lifeless eyes and long, lifeless hair. Just a set of pale lips that would never “say cheese,” and two pupils rolling to white above a necktie of blood.

  Just a flash of red razor. Then nothing. But massive amounts of confusion and dread and disbelief.

  FIVE

  I hadn’t been to see a doctor since I broke my wrist attempting a spectacularly unsuccessful front side nose grind off the Stokum library railing. Still, given that a) Stan had died, and b) it seemed I’d known about it beforehand, my mother thought it might be c) prudent to talk to someone with a couple of university degrees, so d) she hooked me up with Dr. Cramp (dig the name). It had been two years since the busted wrist, but the same lame mags still littered the waiting room, the same bogus sailing art still clung to the walls, and the whole place still had that gross wart-remover smell.

  Cramp himself was an okay guy, if you’re into the goldenhaired, completely mainstream, totally successful type. He wasn’t from Stokum (no kidding), had been in town maybe five years max. Before ending up in this shit hole, he’d apparently been over vaccinating kids in Africa for free, saving entire villages from Ebola and whatnot. There were two pictures on his desk: one of the good doctor squatting in the middle of all these smiling black faces, the other of a gorgeous yet wholesome-looking woman with nice perky tits. (Normally enough to give me a huge boner. Unfortunately, over the last couple days, my boner blood had leaked out the gashes in my feet, which were fucking killing me by this time. However, my brain was still being supplied and I was pretty certain photo number one captured the African experience and photo number two the beginnings of a bouncy family life.)

  My mom was with me in the office, and Dr. Cramp listened to her rambling psychotically about my destructive tendencies (so she had noticed my room), my stage one drug addiction and, oh yeah, the premonition. Cramp played along, said he’d seen the story on TV, said he was friendly with the Millers, said it was a real shame about Stan. He checked out my eyes, took my blood pressure, listened to my heart, then asked my mom to step out of the room. He wanted to have a few words.

  As soon as she left, Cramp hopped up onto the other end of the examining table, all friendly and relaxed. “So, the story’s true, then?” he asked in this real low-key kind of way, like we were talking about the Red Wings or something.

  I nodded.

  “And it happened the way your friends explained on TV?”

  “Yeah, pretty much,” I said, trying to sound equally casual.

  “In that much detail?”

  I nodded again and he whistled, utterly impressed.

  “Anything like this ever happened to you before?”

  He was playing it so straight I hesitated for only a second before I told him about Mr. Bernoffski and the weird flash of the girl with the razor. I explained how I had the premonitions a day prior to the deaths, how I’d felt both Stan and Mr. Bernoffski sort of pass through me when they died; and God, it felt good to tell someone the whole deal. Dr. Cramp just sat there, taking it all in, stopping me a couple times to clarify. When I finished, he went to his desk and started making notes in my file. I got a bit freaked imagining all the bent shit he was jotting down, and it took a while for me to get the nerve to ask him if he’d mind checking out my feet.

  “Your feet?” he said, looking up.

  I kicked off my shoes, started yanking at my socks, but he held up his hand, gave me the wait-a-minute wobble, so I stopped. Cramp stood up behind his desk in total slo-mo, with his eyes locked on my feet like he’d never seen a pair of bloody socks before.

  He came over, lifted one foot and then the other. Then he did it again. He was acting so astounded, I was pretty certain the Ebola rumors had to be false, and I didn’t see how the leg calisthenics were helping, so I finally yanked off my socks and stuck a foot in his face so he’d take a look at the actual wound.

  “Glass,” I said. He didn’t respond, so I felt obliged to offer a bit of an explanation. “Stepped on a light bulb.”

  He nodded, but his face was all blank and he still wasn’t saying anything. But at least he started moving at regular speed again. He opened the little cupboard over the sink and took out a couple brown bottles, threw some stuff into one of those m
etal, kidney-shaped trays and stuck his miner’s light on. He knelt on the floor and cleaned the cuts before numbing the soles of my feet with some sort of anesthetic. It still hurt like a bitch when he started digging, and it took a while before he managed to work a piece loose. He held the little red shard up so I could take a look, then dropped it into the metal pan, where it clinked like a bullet, man. Cramp ended up pulling four splinters out, and one of them was pretty long, too; it was a wonder I’d even been able to stand with that fucker wedged in my foot for the last couple days.

  With my feet wrapped in white, gauzy bandages, I started to put my socks back on, but they were a complete mess. I asked if I could toss them in the garbage, told him I really didn’t feel like getting into a deep discussion with my mom about my feet, if he caught my drift. He said he did, pointed at the garbage can in the corner, and was already back behind his desk when something nasty, something totally nasty, started brewing inside me.

  It started out small and heavy—a slow beat pounding my stomach to stone—but it grew bigger and darker and faster, until waves of hopelessness and helplessness and fear were rolling through me like a black symphony. Afterwards, I vomited in the sink, couldn’t stop vomiting. Cramp came over and put a hand on my shoulder, wet a cloth and laid it across the back of my neck as I clutched the edge of the counter and waited for my gut to quit quivering.

  It took a good five minutes before I was steady enough to rinse out my mouth and make it back to the examining table. Dr. Cramp suggested I lie down, said the nausea was probably brought on by the pain of removing the glass. Maybe he was right, maybe the nastiness was just a reaction to the pain, but I don’t know, right then I was thinking some girl might be dead. I closed my eyes and asked Cramp if he could leave me alone for a couple of minutes. I could hear the shake in my voice and I knew he could too. He said he’d be back after he’d seen the patient in the other room, if that was okay with me. I may have nodded, I don’t know. The door closed and the tears rolled. There was no stopping them. I didn’t even bother trying.

  DR. CRAMP had given me plenty of time to sort myself out before he’d called my mom back into the office. She’d looked worried as hell because I’d been in there for like an hour, but Cramp told her he thought I was going to be just fine, I was shaken up a bit, but overall I was handling everything pretty well. I nearly shit when he said that, but then again, I guess you’d probably have to show up with your head in a box or a chicken shoved up your ass or something to get a bad report in Stokum. He did hand me a prescription for Trazon—apparently just the thing to keep me cool for the next few weeks—along with a bit of doctorly advice. Cramp warned me to “stick to the recommended dosage—two pills, three times a day—otherwise you’ll be completely stoned. Okay?”

  Yeah … okay. It took me about thirty seconds to hustle my mother into the car and straight on over to Burton’s pharmacy. She wasn’t too pleased, but I was. I downed four pills as soon as we got home, another four after dinner. And I spent most of the weekend holed up in my room, pleasantly wasted. At some point I did scan the obits section of the Stokum Examiner, and I also took a couple minutes and googled the Net for chick suicides. It was impossible how much shit came up—page after page of desperation and gore, a dozen dead girls that could have been mine—but there was nothing, no one, I could really pin down.

  It was pretty sour reading, but the Trazon made it easier. The Trazon made everything easier. I barely had to think. And I was sleeping like a corpse, got blasted from the depths Monday morning by Sum 41 screaming about the state of the world on my clock radio. Right away I chugged some pills, and I stuffed another fistful in the pocket of my jeans before heading downstairs for breakfast. It sort of registered that at the rate I was going my two-week supply would be gone in about five days, but I wasn’t worrying about that. I had other things on my wobbly mind.

  My parents had decided four days off school for predicting the death of a close friend was enough, and after we ate, they drove me to Jefferson. Seeing how I was trapped in the car, my mother took the opportunity to harass me.

  When she wheeled around in her seat, her bank makeup looked all bright and tight on her pale face, which had gone insta-old in a few short days. “Have you got in touch with Mick yet?”

  Mick. I’d only met him once or twice, but I’d heard his story about a million times. Whenever my mom talked about the guy, I could just tell that, despite everything that had happened, she still loved her delinquent brother, or at least her memories of him. “Our phone would ring,” she’d say, her eyes all wide and sparkly, her voice all thin and trippy, “and if Mick was in the room we’d all look at him, and he’d say, ‘It’s Uncle Steve,’ or ‘It’s the man across the road,’ or ‘It’s Miss McMillan from school,’ and sure enough, when we picked up the phone, it was. It always was. He was only around four or five when he started doing it, and at first my parents and I, and Mick too, we were just so shocked. But after a while we got used to it. But still, there was this unspoken rule that he never did it if there were guests in the house.”

  My mother’s arm was thrown over the seat, and her hand bit into the fake leather upholstery behind my father’s head. “Well, have you called him? I put his number on the fridge for you.”

  “Listen,” I said, the drugs making me cocky, “I don’t see why you want me to call the jerk who bailed on you, like, three days after your dad died. When you were, what, seventeen and freshly orphaned? He doesn’t give a crap about you or me or any of us, okay?”

  My mom’s face fell, but she kept up the staring to nail me with her next inquiry. “Do you at least want to know what he said on the phone? Why he was calling?”

  I turned my head to one side and let my eyes glide out the window, although I made sure my mother could still see the slippery I-don’t-give-a-shit smile I’d wrapped my mouth around. She didn’t say anything. She just watched me, watched me until my smile had hardened up and I was staring through the glass at absolutely nothing. Then she turned to face the front. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw my dad reach over and put a hand on her knee.

  WHEN WE GOT TO JEFFERSON, my father threw the car into park and asked if I wanted him to come with me. But seriously, I couldn’t imagine it, so I said a quick farewell to my parents and floated in solo. Despite my mom trying to hammer me flat in the car, I still had a pretty good buzz on, like the good doctor had promised. I could sense everybody taking a step back as I cruised by, could hear the halls go quiet, but it didn’t really bother me. I just kept my eyes straight ahead and let the Trazon carry me through.

  The teachers welcomed me back as smoothly as they could. Mr. Thorp, my math teacher, gave his huge head a stiff nod and we both tried to ignore the empty seat near the window where Stan should have been. Mr. Wood, the guy I had for tech, said he was glad to see me, but I knew he was full of shit because I could see how nervous I was making him. Mrs. Hayward, the only halfway decent teacher I had, was pretty cool. It was the second year in a row I’d had her for English, so we were pretty used to each other and she treated me with easy indifference, the way she treated everyone until they did something exceptional—good, bad or otherwise.

  Mrs. Hayward lived on a farm, always wore black rubber boots to class, often smelled of manure and probably wasn’t the most popular teacher in the staff room. So it wasn’t really all that surprising, then, that she’d taken a liking to me, especially after we discovered our common love for Dr. Seuss.

  At the beginning of last year she’d assigned an essay and an oral presentation on a novel we’d read over the summer. Given my fairly light holiday reading schedule, I had to go to the library and grab the first thing that fell off a shelf. It turned out to be horrible. Getting through it was painful, like dragging myself over page after page of broken glass. I’m not even going to tell you what it was, it was that bad. Anyway, I wrote the essay, trashed the book in a hostile but humorous sort of way. For my oral presentation I didn’t want to torture the class with the l
ifeless details of what I’d actually read, so instead I gave a snappy little intro to Horton Hears a Who!, highlighting the Gaudíesque influence apparent in Seuss’s zany artwork. (My parents took me to Barcelona that summer. While visiting the Spanish sights, I also managed to lose my virginity—a huge, unexpected bonus that hadn’t been mentioned in any of the travel brochures I’d read beforehand. I’m not going to get into that here, however, because right now I’m discussing the purity of Seuss.) I went on a bit about the doctor’s unparalleled ability to turn simple language into poetry, and for my big finale I read his story of the elephant and the Who-inhabited dust speck. I figured I’d get a failing grade, but I didn’t care. Funny thing is, it turned out that Mrs. Hayward had read the same unnamed, unSeuss piece of shit I had and she’d completely despised it too. She gave me an A on the written report, saying she liked my tonguein-cheek approach to criticism, but warned me to clean up the language and watch my run-on sentences. I got an A-plus on the presentation. My only A-plus ever, which totally reinforced my belief that if I just set my sights low enough, even I could do well.

  After English class, lunch was particularly desperate. There was no way I was going out to the back parking lot to hang out with the media-savvy stoners I’d once called friends, and I certainly wasn’t going to put myself on display in the cafeteria. I gagged down a sandwich and some pills at my locker, then headed for the library, the safe haven of freaks, geeks and small-town prophets.

  I crashed on the floor at the end of one of the stacks and was just sitting there, balled up inside my hoodie, when Ms. Banks, the librarian, tripped over me. Her armload of reading material came crashing down, and there she was, bookless, towering over me in all her Pamela Anderson-ish glory. Tight white jeans ran up, way up, her slim legs to a perfect round ass. A flowery top that would have looked like hausfrau shit on anyone else was just begging to be ripped off her. It was truly a sight to behold.