Anthem of a Reluctant Prophet

by Joanne Proulx

  Afterwards, I rinsed my mouth out with some Scope that was on the counter and sat down on the toilet. I held my head in my hands, rocking back and forth, making the plastic seat creak. God. God. God. Superman Stan couldn’t even make it to school. My Polish neighbor couldn’t even make it around his lawn. The old man couldn’t get through a day, the bird through a flight, Howie through a shift at work. There was no way some waif of a girl could survive months on her own in this brutal world. No way. I mean, I was the Prophet of Death, right? Dead people were my thing.

  I’d known Astelle Jordan was dead the second I saw her face decorating Hank’s door; I hadn’t had to reach out and touch a sweatshirt or grab hold of a shower curtain to figure it out. And I understood the details on Astelle had come at me from a different angle, I understood that, but so what? She’d found her own way to pound them in. And she’d been good at it, too, she’d been fucking fantastic. Next to the reality of the nightmares, my premonitions felt like toothless bedtime stories. Next to the Jordan women haunting me day and night, the dead men felt like friendly ghosts. I mean, Astelle had a poster campaign and screamed through my dreams. Her mother shook articles of clothing at me and begged me for help on the six o’clock news.

  But Astelle and her mother hadn’t been haunting me. I’d been haunting myself. Freaking myself out. Killing off missing girls. Turning fat freaks into felons and dreams into lies. Beating myself up for being too cowardly, too scared, to say what I knew—what I thought I knew.

  But I didn’t know a thing.

  When I staggered out of the bathroom ten, fifteen minutes later, Astelle was leaning against the wall, one leg tucked up under a short plaid skirt.

  “Are you all right?” she asked. Her voice was high and light, a little girl’s voice struggling to be heard over the thud of the bass. I just shook my head and wobbled for the front door, but she steered me back to the couch and told me to chill out for a while, to make sure I was feeling okay before I left.

  “Besides, I could use some company,” she added, giving me a weak smile. I stared as she flopped down beside me. Her hands twisted in her lap, her gaze flickered around the room—to the blaring stereo, the black television, the dark green velour chair, the cross over the door, decorated by an anguished Jesus and a few long grassy stalks. It took a minute for her to come back to me. “So … who are you, anyway? Do you know my mom or something?”

  “Sort of.” I sat frozen on the reeling couch, watching her move and breathe beside me.

  “Sort of?”

  “Not really.” She was small, tiny, pretty. Dance music closed around us.

  “Lucky you.” She glanced at me. Her eyes were brown, like the poster said, but the whites were red.

  “Where is she, anyway?”

  She shifted beside me, started scratching at her arms, fidgeting with the buttons on her tight white blouse. Her eyes kept darting over my shoulder, to something behind me, and she seemed distracted, only half-interested when she answered. “At work, probably. I don’t know. House was empty when I got back.”

  “You mean she doesn’t know you’re here?”

  “Nope.” She fluttered her hands by her shoulders in mock enthusiasm. “Surprise, surprise.”

  I tried to get my mind around this shocking bit of information, but the music and the girl and the insanity of the situation were sort of fracturing my thoughts. Still, even I knew that her mother would have appreciated a call, but I wasn’t about to start telling anybody what to do.

  She pushed her long, dark curls off her face. A row of studs climbed one ear. She put a hand to her nose and sniffed, her slim fingers thick with silver rings. Her skin was a lot lighter than Faith’s.

  “So, where were you, anyway?”

  “Miami.” She gave a bitter laugh. She had tons of hair. A thin white neck. “Lost in Miami.”

  “Lost in Miami?”

  “Yeah. Lost. Totally lost. On the beach. In the clubs. On the streets. Heroin gateway to America, you know?” She started twisting her buttons again. “I really don’t feel like talking about it, okay?” Her gaze bounced around the room before finally landing in the corner behind me. She went completely still.

  I looked over. A big ivy plant spilled off a table and dangled to the floor. Astelle pushed herself off the couch and dropped to her knees beside it. She tore at the ivy, parting the long strands with her fingers, and then she pulled a backpack—a blue Adidas backpack—from the tangle of leaves. She started unzipping zippers and digging through pockets, pausing only to tell me how bad I looked and how she had something that would make me feel better.

  My head was banging. “Is it okay if I turn down the music?”

  She didn’t hear me. She kept rooting through her bag and then with a satisfied smile she pulled something from an outside pocket. She dropped back onto the couch, clutching a Ziploc in one hand. It was the one I’d been expecting when I’d searched Fang’s hoodie that night at the Red Carpet, dirty with crushed green buds and pills and tiny white papery squares, each printed with what looked like a horned devil’s head.

  “Sunshine in a bag,” she said in a singsong voice. She was talking to me, but her eyes, big and shiny now, were firmly on the Ziploc swinging back and forth between us.

  The dance beat seemed to quicken, to get more intense. “Could you turn down the …” I pointed to the stereo at her end of the couch.

  She leaned back and spun a knob. The pounding dropped a notch. “What? You don’t like music?”

  “No … yeah …” I shook my head.

  She gave me a playful, scornful look. “You do smoke?”

  I nodded.

  “I figure, you fall into someone’s house, puking, in the middle of the day, you probably like to party, right?”

  I nodded again, even though Astelle’s voice was so fast and eager it was pretty obvious she was going to “party” whether I was into it or not.

  “Is weed okay?” She raised her eyebrows and her voice went up too. “Or do you want something a little wilder?”

  “Weed’s fine. Weed’s good.”

  When she folded herself into a cross-legged position, her skirt stretched across her thighs, putting the crotch of her underwear on display. I tried to concentrate on her hands as she rolled a spliff— she was as good at it as Fang was—but the strip of white cotton between her legs was distracting. She sparked up a minute later, took a quick toke, then shuffled along the couch and held the joint to my lips. I took a drag. It was potent, and it hit fast. So good, so familiar. I relaxed into the cushions as Astelle held the spliff up again.

  By the time we’d each taken our last puff, her toes were tucked under my leg.

  “Feeling better?” she asked, giving me her first steady smile.

  I smiled back sloppily and sank deeper into the couch.

  “You look better.” Her toes pressed into the back of my thigh. “You’re very cute. Very sexy.”

  A snort shot from my mouth. “Try very fucked-up. My life is a fucking joke.”

  “Yeah, well, I know what that’s like.” She tilted her head to one side and stared right at me. “So, who are you? What are you doing here?”

  “Luke Hunter. Asshole. Here, look, I’ll show you.” I was laughing, a stupid, stoned, bitter laugh, as I fumbled my wallet out of my pocket and dropped the reason for my visit into her lap. She gave me a curious look, then slowly unfolded the paper. Her mouth thinned to a tight white line as she read her own Missing poster, and time may have been sort of warped by the weed, but it felt like it took a long time for her to react.

  “God, one hundred and ten,” she said finally, rattling the paper. “I only weigh, like, ninety-seven pounds. My mother doesn’t have a clue about me. Not a clue.” She tried to iron the flyer flat over her bag of magic, but the creases wouldn’t straighten. She looked up from the paper to sneak a glance at me. “So, what, you thought I was pretty, so you carried my picture around like that?”

  “Actually, I thought you were dead. I w
as positive you were dead. So I finally did something about it, I finally came over here to tell your mom all about it. What a fucking idiot.” I stretched my arms along the back of the sofa and tried to hold back the sharp slaps of laughter that were bursting out of me. Her toes slid from under my leg. She fidgeted beside me, tugging at her skirt and her buttons, watching me laugh. I tried to stop, I really did, but it took some time for my sick amusement to fade. When finally nothing felt very funny, I let my head drop back onto the couch, between my outstretched arms.

  “So what, you don’t think I’m pretty, then?” Her little-girl question floated over. The cushion beside me tilted and shifted and she bumped against me.

  I should have told her she was kind of missing the point, but I was too dopey and exhausted and disgusted to bother. It was easier to nod and laugh and tell her I thought she was fucking gorgeous, thought she was a fucking babe. She stood up then, asked me if I wanted anything to drink, anything to eat. I said I didn’t. She gave the peak of my baseball cap a gentle tap and told me not to go anywhere, she’d be right back.

  My eyes followed the swing of her skirt, the swing of the Ziploc, to the hall. When she disappeared, the room twisted around me. The green velour darkened. Jesus spun on his cross. The long grass quivered. The music got louder, then faded away completely. Waves of panic kept trying to knock me over, but I pushed them back, fighting to stay mellow, fighting to still my thoughts and stay on the good side of the high.

  When Astelle came back five or ten or fifteen minutes later, she stood in front of me. I watched her sideways, barely raising my head from the back of the couch. She looked way dreamier than she had in any of my nightmares, and I couldn’t really remember why I’d been afraid of her for so long.

  “My boyfriend OD’d in Miami,” she said, pushing her hair away from her face.

  “My friend got hit by a van.”

  She nodded before she climbed onto me, straddled me, settled into my lap. She gave me a remote smile, then started rocking gently back and forth, moving that white crotch of hers against me. I wasn’t even surprised. I just closed my eyes, kept my arms stretched along the back of the couch. But she tugged at the sleeves of my shirt, carried my hands to her belly, slid them under her shirt. Her breasts were soft and warm. I brushed the tips of my fingers across her tits. She sighed. I tugged on her nipples and she moaned. She lifted up and wiggled her hand inside my pants. She undid my jeans and pushed them low on my hips. And then I was inside her and she was moving up and down on my lap, we were moving and moaning together and my hands were under her skirt, wrapped around her, and the panic was there, pressing into the pleasure, and her hip bones were sharp under my thumbs, her ass a smooth, bobbing curve beneath my palms. I bounced her up and down, harder and faster, and harder and faster. I squeezed my eyes shut and let myself go.

  Afterwards, she slid off me, slid onto the couch and curled into a ball. She pulled me down behind her, wrapped my arm around her, and we stayed like that for a while, pressed together with my face buried in her long dark hair, thick with the smell of dope and some cheap flowery shampoo.

  I think Astelle fell asleep or passed out then. But my worry over her mother coming home and finding us there wrestled a million other troubling thoughts, and I couldn’t relax. If I’d just left then, I might have been able to rationalize the whole messy afternoon, blamed it on the drugs or the shock or whatever. But when I tried to bail, Astelle woke up and followed me to the front door. And when I lifted her up and fucked her right there, against the wall, there was no excuse for that. I knew exactly what I was doing, exactly who I was doing it to.

  TWENTY-FIVE

  When Faith stepped out of her car the next morning, I could barely look at her. She stood on the driveway, with her hands on her hips, watching as I stuffed boxes of T-shirts into the Sunbird, which turned out to have zero room for cargo. I could feel her behind me, mad and confused, all ready to get into it. I concentrated on loading the boxes, giving the last one a couple crushing blows before cramming it into the square of floor space on the passenger side and folding myself around it. When Faith joined me inside, I told her we had to get Fang before I cranked up the radio. She turned the DJ down immediately, but still, between my directions to Delaney’s she had time for only a few curt questions. What happened to me at the dance? Why did I take off so suddenly after—what?—one dance? I shrugged her off before Fang, so skinny and pale he looked like he’d just climbed out of a coffin, squeezed into the box-packed back seat and put an end to all conversation. I stared straight ahead, mesmerized by the strip of blacktop leading to the Rolland fairgrounds. I didn’t say anything about Fang’s knees jittering against the back of my seat, although I felt like turning around and punching him in the fucking face the entire time we were trapped in the car.

  It had been my mom who’d insisted I hook up with Fang when she’d called from the airport the night before. After staggering home from Astelle’s, I’d wrestled the TV out of the pile of furniture in the living room. I’d plugged in the set, turned it on full blast. I couldn’t be bothered putting the rest of the shit back where it belonged. I just parked myself on the sheet-covered couch, smack in the center of the room, and surfed between bad music and bad sitcoms and bad movies and bad commercials and bad war. Hey, look at that! There’d been no fucking power in Baghdad for six weeks. I bet that guy with the insulin bucket was pissed! When the phone rang, I’d been tempted to leave it, but I’m such a nosy, sick, twisted bastard, I couldn’t. I guess I thought it might be Faith. Or maybe even Astelle. Before I left, she’d asked for my number, and for obvious reasons I’d felt obliged to give it to her. So my hand was sort of shaking as I picked up the receiver, but turns out it was only my parents, calling from Detroit.

  My mom had been in charge for the first couple minutes, reminding me for the hundredth time to take out the garbage Tuesday morning, that if I needed anything I was to call Ms. Banks, that there were labeled dinners in the freezer, one for each day except Wednesday, when Mrs. Bernoffski was bringing something over, that the number for the hotel in Paris was on the fridge, that there was a six-hour time difference, that I should have fun at One Drum and, oh yes, had I called Fang and asked him to help me at the festival yet?

  What I’d really wanted to say was no, I hadn’t called him. What I really wanted to tell my mom was Fang should have been the one creamed by the van instead of Stan because then my life wouldn’t be quite so fucked-up; I’d have a decent friend and Faith would have a decent boyfriend, and no one would give a fuck if Fang died anyway, right? But I didn’t say any of that. Instead, I told my mom I’d be sure to call.

  When my father took over, the conversation was all long, stilted pauses and pathetic small talk, until my mom whispered over my dad’s shoulder that she had to get some gum so their ears wouldn’t pop on the plane and blew a kiss into the phone.

  My father waited until she was gone before telling me he wanted to call the trip off. He didn’t think he could keep my news from Mom. He didn’t think he could get on that plane. When I told him Astelle was alive and well, for a while nothing but an occasional muffled loudspeaker announcement came down the hollow line holding us together. When my dad did finally speak, his voice was thick with emotion and he kept saying, “What a relief, oh what a relief, oh my God, Luke, that’s good news, you must feel so much better.” He laughed nervously. I could just picture him, all weak-kneed, propped up in the phone booth, rambling away. “Oh God, that’s great news about the Jordan girl, and here comes your mother, and I guess we’ll go. And Luke? I love you. You have no idea how much.”

  Although it was the last thing in the world this piece of shit son wanted to do, he did phone his piece of shit friend, who agreed to help him at the festival. And just so there’s no confusion about what a piece of shit the son really is, I’ll tell you that the only reason he even made the call was because he knew the piece of shit friend would serve as a nice conversation buffer during the ride to Rolland with the
solid gold girl.

  And he did. With Fang in the car, no one said a word.

  When we arrived at the fairgrounds, the lot was already littered with beat-up-looking VWs and box trucks and old station wagons. Of course, the WDFD van was there, on the edge of the grass, close to the main stage. Faith parked the Sunbird and Ms. Banks must have been watching for us, because she hurried right over, looking slutty in a pair of jeans and an old Nirvana T—both definitely tighter than the gear she wore at school. It was hard for me to be civil, and seriously, she couldn’t have missed the tension spilling out of the car alongside the battered boxes. She tried to infuse a bit of enthusiasm by pointing out how great the weather was (I hadn’t noticed) and where we would be setting up (in a prime spot just inside the front gates).

  Our table was tall with shirts when the first concertgoers started arriving around ten. The uncomfortable silence from the car was holding, however, and Faith and I were having only the briefest exchanges, to discuss prices and sizes, to make change or to ask for “The cash box, please.” Fang stood two feet behind us, leaning up against the chain-link fence that circled the fairgrounds. He looked pathetic as he fumbled to slide the T-shirts into the cheap plastic bags Hank had supplied, but he also had a bit of a subdued grin and I knew he found the friction between me and Faith pretty goddamn amusing and every time I turned around to give him a shirt, the urge to knock his big pointy teeth down his throat resurfaced.

  There was really no musical relief for our motley sales crew, either. The bands were scattered around the fairgrounds, well back from the front entrance, and whatever they were trying for sounded like tuneless noise and echoing feedback by the time it reached us. We were left with this fucking one-man band, parked opposite our table, on the other side of the gates. He was welcoming the crowds with folksy numbers he played on the instruments—washboard, harmonica, drums, cymbals—lashed to various parts of his body. The kids dug him, and he posed for pictures between songs. I found him amusing for all of about five seconds. Mostly I felt like shoving his little honking horn up his ass, but I knew that would probably cause trouble. Especially when Lance Winters showed up to film him. I held myself as far away from that media scumbag as possible, curled my fingers around the chain-link and tried to blend into the backdrop beside Fang. I know Lance spotted me, though, because when he turned around to check out the shirts, he gave Faith a roaringly wide, white smile, which disappeared pretty fast when he saw the roadkill plastered against the fence. He didn’t bother trying to kick-start our old friendship or anything, but he did give me a nice scowl and proclaimed the shirts to be the ugliest fucking things he’d ever seen before heading out in search of his next prime-time victim.