Anthem of a Reluctant Prophet

by Joanne Proulx

  Right up front, I’d have told her that the Hunter family is not overly God. We’d never been regular churchgoers or grace-sayers or anything like that. Probably the closest I ever got to a spiritual sort of experience was during my mom’s O Brother period, which coincided with me being about eight or nine years old.

  My mother had totally loved that Coen brothers movie and she’d run right out and bought the soundtrack. And for a couple years there, it felt like our house was always filled with this oldtime Southern music. She really dug this one song, this Christian revival number, and whenever it came on she’d drag me into the living room and make me dance with her. It’s sort of embarrassing to even think about, because I was already pretty big by that time, but I guess my mom didn’t know it, and seeing how I was her only kid, I guess I felt I owed her a dance or two.

  Anyway, she’d kind of take me in her arms and I’d be all stiff, so she’d press my head to her shoulder and give me a squeeze or two to loosen me up. And she’d sing along with the soulful a cappella choir about going down to the river to pray and wearing the golden crown and the good Lord showing us the way and whatnot. She’d sing all that stuff right into my ear, and when she stopped singing I knew it was because she was all choked up by the music, and that the song, that sweet chorus of voices, had somehow become her love for me. I mean, my mom never actually said anything like that, but I could just feel it in the way she held me, in the way she sang. It may not have been the most traditional shot of spirituality, but for this kid it had felt pretty close to what I thought God might be about, what He might have had in mind for us all.

  So that was kind of “It” for me. And seeing how “It” wasn’t even close to something I’d ever even consider discussing with another human being, I stuck with the dead boyfriend instead.

  “You know, I’d never have guessed Stan came from some whacked-out family. Was he, like, really religious?”

  “We didn’t talk about that a lot. I know Stan thought any story with two thousand years of staying power was one worth listening to. He also told me he went to church and took Communion”— she lifted one hand off the wheel and, curling two fingers, did the universal quotation mark thing—“‘to affirm and commit to his indwelling Christ.’ So yeah, I guess he was religious. Or spiritual, anyway. He told me I expanded his thoughts on God, but I’m not really sure what he meant by that because, like I said before, we didn’t talk about it that much. I don’t even know if he believed in the afterlife or a literal Jesus or what.”

  By this time we were heading into town on Highway 6, the road slicing through the wetlands park. After the drive along the sloppy highway, the snowy park looked especially clean and serene, and all conversation stopped. I think we—Faith and I, anyway—were thinking about Stan and his contribution to the scene outside our windows. The pond on my right was frozen over, and an unbroken plane of white stretched to the blue-sky horizon. I imagined all the frogs Stan and I had paid for, beneath the ice, motionless bumps on a muddy bottom, more dead than alive, hanging in a cold, dark limbo until next spring. Aboveboard, the tall grass around the pond was buckling under the weight of the snow, but the happy bulrushes stood tall under Cat in the Hat–high caps of powder.

  When we exited the park, I could just tell the ride was going to end on a bit of a silent note. Turns out I was wrong, of course, because Faith still had lots to say about the old beau.

  “You know, everyone loved Stan. He was such a golden boy, and I don’t mean that in a bad way. Did you ever notice even the teachers at school went out of their way to get his attention? At first I thought people were drawn to his confidence, but it was more than that. You know what it was?” She paused, but I kept my mouth shut. I knew she wasn’t waiting for Dumb or Dumber to come up with anything brilliant, she was just lining up her thoughts. “Stan had this intrinsic ability to see the worthiest part of a person and deal with them there”—Faith raised her hand and notched a high-water mark in the air, a couple inches from the roof of the car—“at their highest level. I’m pretty sure that’s how he managed his parents. It wasn’t something he worked at or was even aware of, though. It was just the way he was. And it’s not like he was disillusioned or blind to the dark side of humanity or anything like that, either. But one on one, that stuff just didn’t matter to him. So somehow, when you were with him, it didn’t matter to you either. You knew all the darkness was there, in you, in him, in the world, but it was completely latent. And you could be good. Everything could be good.”

  She looked over at me, then glanced in the rearview to see if Fang was listening. Her eyes flashed green and the sun was all tangled up in her hair and it was easy to see she was the yin to Stan’s shiny yang.

  “Do you know what I mean?” she said in this insistent voice. “Did you see that in him?”

  I wanted to tell her I knew Stan. I wanted to tell her I knew him well, but the words jammed in my throat. Instead, I dared to rip off some tiny-trucker wisdom. “Stan unleashed the godliness in people.”

  Faith took a good, smiling look at me then, her big eyes all impressed and opened just that much wider. “That’s right. That’s exactly right. I wish I’d said that to Mr. Miller. ‘I have faith in the godliness of humanity.’ God, that sounds good.”

  She looked so pleased, I was a bit bummed I had no follow-up and was forced to revert to my own, less impressive repertoire of replies. “Yeah, Stan was definitely a good guy.”

  “And Luke’s a complete dick.” That from Fang. It was the only fucking thing he said the entire trip home.

  SEVENTEEN

  Christmas Eve at the Hunters’. Normally happy, holiday times. Normally Fang would come over and my dad would throw on some mood music and my mom would whip up the eggnog and, while she was at it, a couple presents for my friend. Fang was always sort of embarrassed, but pleased, by the gifts from my mom. And I usually had some dickweed thing for him, too—a CD from Sam’s, or a shirt from the Shack’s sale rack, or later on something from Dwight Slater’s special reserve that I’d hand over up in my room after the festivities in the living room had wrapped up. Fang never said anything, but I think sometimes the stuff we gave him was all he got for Christmas, except for maybe a dirty twenty his mom slipped him on her way out the door. To be fair, last year she had gone all out with the DVD player, the one she may or may not have stolen back later on. Still, Mrs. Delaney’s holiday plans didn’t really revolve around her son. She usually chose to celebrate the birth of our Lord by going on a good long bender, one that started a couple days before Christmas and ended well after New Year’s.

  So Christmas Eve with us was Fang’s holiday highlight, and, having limited funds, he never brought over any gifts. For a while what he did bring was the Converse shoe box, and it had become sort of a tradition for us to dump the contents onto my bed and go through the pictures. Sometimes we’d pick randomly from the litter of shiny squares scattered across my comforter, and we’d laugh at Fang clowning for the camera, all pumped up after one big climb or another. But usually we’d arrange the pictures chronologically, put them in order, so we could see Fang and his achievements grow before us. His smile would get wider, his teeth bigger, and every year the estimated heights of his climbs—written in ink at the bottom of the Polaroids, along with the date—got higher. There were quite a few shots of me, too, looking as stoked as my friend, taken at arm’s length by myself, or sometimes by Fang if he’d managed to wrestle the camera from me.

  The last time Fang brought the box over was a couple years back. We were fourteen, maybe fifteen, and we’d headed up to my room earlier than usual, cracked open the window and smoked the holiday spliff I’d bought from Dwight. Afterwards, we’d checked out the pictures and we’d laughed like usual, but there’d been a kind of hollow edge to the whole thing and we’d shut the box up pretty quickly. We never even bothered with the “must-climb” list, the one that had Gandy’s Rock perched near the top. And I think it was only a couple months later that Fang walked off
the school roof, so really it was no big surprise when the shoe box never appeared again. If I recall, the next couple Eves were slow, painful affairs, with the two of us just biding time below, waiting for the moment we could sneak upstairs and get stoned.

  So I was actually sort of relieved when Fang didn’t show up at all this year. Unfortunately, neither did my dad. Mr. Kite, my father’s probably gay boss, was on some short-term leave thing, so my dad had been working nonstop for the past couple weeks, filling in for Kite and trying to do his own job too. I wasn’t sure if the old Kalbro supply chain was taut, but I’ll tell you this, my mother certainly was. She and my dad had a fairly major blowout when he finally arrived home at nine-thirty. And for the first time ever, my parents decided to skip the eggnog and the Christmas tunes in the living room. I was okay with it really, but still, it wasn’t a big thrill hanging out alone in my room for most of the night, listening to my parents’ off-key bickering caroling up the stairs.

  For a while, I filled the time by worrying. Without the Trazon it was a lot easier, and I had such a plethora of shit to choose from, it was hard to know where to start. So I got organized, I got selective and I kind of honed in on Astelle. Since getting back from the concert, she’d been keeping me company, what with her starring role in the Room 14 rape/murder saga that had started playing in my dreams on a fairly regular basis. Yeah, the whole repetitive nightmare thing had really kicked into gear, Astelle was dying on me every night, pounding every fucking detail into me again and again and again—the rope pulling on her mangled arm, the fat guy on top of her tiny body, the big hands around her skinny neck, the shower curtain trailing its wave of hair. I mean, you barely had to be psychic to figure it out.

  After I burnt out on that particular worry, I had just enough energy left to stare out my bedroom window. Clive Avenue was dead, as usual. The complete and predictable lack of activity was pathetic, but also oddly calming, like looking at a really uninspired painting—a farm scene with a couple blurry sheep on a distant hill, maybe, or a poorly drawn bowl of fruit. It was snowing, chunky, wet flakes, and normally I’m with Bing and dig a white Christmas, but this year it meant I’d be busting my ass clearing out driveways.

  It was my own fault, really. When Faith had dropped me off the morning after the concert, I’d headed inside and made a big show of offering to shovel out our driveway, which was really pretty lame seeing how it was my job in the first place. But I’d acted extra-nice and generous to avoid a discussion with my parents about my whereabouts the previous evening, since they were under the impression I’d been at Fang’s. So the whole thing was doubly slimy really, but there you go. I’m no prize.

  I’d practically finished at my place when the Polish widow pushed onto her front porch. Even though it wasn’t that cold, Mrs. Bernoffski was completely swaddled—long black coat, hat, scarf, the whole bit. It took her forever to get down the stairs, turned sideways, gloved hands gripping the flimsy railing, booted feet groping for every snowy step. After the slow descent, she picked her way up the front walk, her knees coming up high under her long coat, her big boots slamming into the calf-deep powder. I mean, watching her, you’d think the earth’s gravitational pull had doubled during the storm or something. When she shuffled past our place, she didn’t even glance at me—the only other person out on the street—just kept her shoulders hunched forward and her head down as if she was battling a wicked wind.

  It was sunny and the snow probably would have melted on its own and I didn’t even know if Mrs. Bernoffski drove, but after I erased the crooked trail of footprints between her porch and the sidewalk, I hung my coat on the railing and cleared out her driveway. If that wasn’t crazy enough, I went home afterwards, wrote up a note, then stuck it in her mailbox. I gave her the same line I’d given her old man about a community service gig for civics class and how, if it was okay with her, I’d be shoveling her place for the rest of the winter. It was a stupid thing to do, because it had been snowing like a bitch ever since. And I knew she got the note, too, because the next time I went over to clear the driveway, she’d inched back the drape in the front room and a slice of old, worried face had squinted out at me. When I gave her a wave, her hand had appeared, flickering for a second in the wedge of light between the parted drapes before the curtain dropped and she disappeared.

  I was still staring out my window, thinking about the Polish widow, when the phone started ringing. My parents were good enough to take a time-out from arguing to answer it, and my mom hollered up the stairs that the call was for me. “And it’s a girl,” she whispered as I grabbed the receiver. It was. It was Faith. Wishing me a merry Christmas. Asking if I wanted to catch a movie during the holidays. I tried to match her relaxed tone, said sure, that sounded good, and we picked a night between Christmas and New Year’s.

  “So who was that?” my mom asked the minute she saw me heading back upstairs, no doubt looking like I’d just been lobotomized or something.

  I paused, one hand on the banister. “Just this girl from school.”

  “Do I know her?” She was off the couch by this time, standing in the hall, looking all excited. If there’s one thing I can’t stand, it’s having my mom pry into my social activities, especially on those rare occasions when they involve a member of the opposite sex. I figured I’d put an end to things fast.

  “It was Faith Taylor. Stan’s old girlfriend.”

  “Oh,” was all she could think to say as I bolted up the stairs.

  I won’t be a prick and use the hookup as a suspense builder, won’t pump out thirty pages of crap before revealing how mightily I managed to fuck up my night with The Girl. I’ll get right down to it, mention how, right off, I got myself good and nervous pondering what I was going to talk to Faith about, how I was going to act, the probability of physical contact under both a total outbreak and a clear complexion scenario—all kinds of retarded shit like that.

  I mean, Faith had joined me in the library a few times since we’d been back, so you’d think I might have been a bit cooler, but I guess in the back of my mind I figured she’d just done it out of pity or due to a lack of alternative seating. And there was that one night we’d spent together in a motel. In the same bed. But that had been spontaneous, forced upon us by bad weather and strange circumstances, just some random act of God, the type of thing you can’t get insurance for. There’d been no time to freak. But this was different. This was a hookup. This was very intentional, very premeditated, and I over-thought the whole thing.

  I decided it would be best to leave Mr. Facetious parked on a shelf at home, because he often went too far, which tended to piss people off. However, leaving the sarcastic, mocking side of myself behind turned out to be a bad idea, because nothing really stepped in to fill the gap. No intellectual bravado, no suave charm, no superhero powers, nothing. I couldn’t even think of a Little Bob line to rip off. And Faith gave it her best shot, really she did. She looked gorgeous, she smelled great, she behaved well. But I sensed she quickly tired of my stuttering replies to all her promising leading lines. I mean, you could practically hear the steam leaking out of the evening, like the hiss of a slowly released fart. I’m surprised people in the theater didn’t complain.

  In an effort to avoid conversation, I made a major mistake by wrapping my lips around the straw of a mega-sized Coke and guzzling the whole thing before the flick even started. (Minority Report … survey says … it sucked. It was an especially uncomfortable choice for a partial pre-cog like me who could never save the day but who knew the fucking movie should have wrapped up, like, an hour before it did.) The two gallons of pop had me squirming in my seat for the last sixty minutes of redundant nonsense, and I practically sprinted to the can when the film finally collapsed.

  I made it to the blessed urinal, which was really just a long, waist-high sheet of tin screwed to the wall with a trough sort of thing below it. It was really classy, like something you might find at a semi-pro baseball stadium or some half-assed rock venue. To
add to the glamour, the trough was completely plugged up, overflowing with soggy toilet paper and candy wrappers and other unrecognizable debris. So there I was, standing at the urinal, freeing the fountain drink, trying to come up with something to talk to Faith about, when I heard 1) a cubicle door creak open, 2) a chuckle and 3) a couple footsteps, before being 4) shoved from behind. Seeing how my hands were occupied, my face sort of broke the fall, hitting the wall first, a millisecond before my foot slipped into the brimming trough. I was so stunned, the voice behind me barely registered.

  “You are so over, kid.” I rolled my cheek against the cold tile just in time to see Lance Winters breezing out of the can, his blond ponytail bobbing behind him. He didn’t even bother glancing over his shoulder to see if I might need a bit of help.

  I had to jack my right leg up on the wall, had to stick my dripping foot under the hand dryer, had to stand in a crotch-splitting V for all eternity, before my shoe stopped squelching when I walked. When I finally exited the can, Faith was the only one left in the lobby. She was polite enough not to ask if I always paused to take a dump during a night on the town, which I thought was pretty good of her.

  About ten quiet, painful minutes later, we pulled into my driveway—in her car, of course, because I was still too lazy and disorganized and pathetic to get my license. I mumbled a quick good night and scrambled out of the Sunbird before it started smelling of piss. And as I watched the very beautiful, very talented Ms. Taylor back onto the street, the only thing I was thinking was how completely unworthy, how utterly un-Stan, I really was.

  PRETTY MUCH RIGHT AFTER imploding on the hookup with Faith, I got nailed by another dead man. There was no doubt about this one. The premonition was real, although the details weren’t super vivid. Just some faceless guy, a row of cigarettes, a gun, a bang, a searing pain, a wall of blackness. Thing is, for the first time since Bernoffski died on me, I was able to identify the body. The story was in the paper the day after the shooting, on page fifteen of the Stokum Examiner. I recognized the victim right off. Turns out one Howie Holman from Detroit, Michigan, had been gunned down behind the counter of his own store, leaving a wife and three kids behind to clean up the mess. The guy who killed him got away with $149 and a couple of cartons of cigs. So, no big deal. Happens every day, right? But even if Howie’s death had been standard-issue, he still managed to make quite an impression on me when the bullets hit.