Rumor had it people died of shame and broken hearts. No hope those would work on Rich, though over the years she had given it a go, usually at the top of her lungs with tears and snot pouring attractively down her face. A dedicated philandering deadbeat pornographer, Rich had embraced shame as an alternative lifestyle and his heart was apparently made of India rubber.
“Goddamnmotherfuckingsonofabitch,” she wrote on the fresh, yet-to-be-eaten page of her notebook, knocked back the last of her wine, and left the waitress a five-dollar tip.
Two hours later she was again staring at the page. The compulsion to write what she’d done was overwhelming. Vaguely she remembered there was actually a word for the phenomenon, hyperscribblia or something. “Don’t, don’t, don’t,” she said as she uncapped a razor-point Pilot and put the tip against the smooth paper.
Mildly fascinated and massively alarmed, she watched as the pen flickered down the page, line by line, leaving a trail the dumbest of cops couldn’t fail to follow.
“Went to the garage. Shoulder-deep in junk. No room for car. Found motorcycle. Put on gardening gloves. Drove roofing tack three-quarters of an inch into front tire just below fender.” On the pen flew, painting the pictures so clear in Jeannie’s mind: Rich’s praying-mantis form, clad in the endless leathers that arrived almost daily from eBay—chaps, fringed and plain, leather vests, gloves, leather pants, boots, leather jackets, leather shirts, helmets, do-rags, even a leather face guard that made Jeannie want to reread The Man in the Iron Mask—or rent Silence of the Lambs. Done up like a macho caricature of a macho caricature, the imaginary Rich pushes the bike out with his long spider’s legs. Backward rolls the heavy machine, the tack slides unnoticed up beneath the fender.
Words flow across the tiny cramped pages, spinning a tale of how the tack, pounded in at an angle just so, remains static until the curve heading out onto the freeway, where the wheel turns and the bike leans and the head of the tack finally hits the pavement, driven deeper. Bang! The tire has blown! Out of control, the motorcycle is down. Rich is sliding. My God! My God! His helmet pops off and bounces across two lanes of freeway traffic. The motorcycle is spinning now; Rich’s protective leathers begin to tear, leaving black marks on the pale concrete, hot and lumpy like a black crayon dragging across sandpaper. Leather is rasped away; flesh meets the road. Crayon marks turn from black to red. The driver of an eighteen-wheeler, high on methamphetamines, barrels down the highway, unaware of the man and motorcycle spinning toward his speeding rig. Look out! Look—
“Lover Girl? Have you been in the garage?” Rich’s murmuring voice, always pitched a decibel or so lower than the threshold of human hearing, thus forcing the unfortunate listener to say “What?” several times just to make audible something not worth hearing anyway, wisps down the short hall between the garage and the kitchen, where Jeannie sits at the counter.
“The garage? No. Why?” she calls as his rubber-soled slip-ons shuff-shuffle down the hall.
The pages. She shoves them into the Osterizer and pushes puree. Jammed. A pint of milk. Bingo. Pasta. “Thankyoubabyjesus.”
Rich’s bald head on its Ichabod Crane neck pokes around the corner. “My things. In the garage. Did you touch them?” Rich hates her to move his things.
“No, sweetheart.”
“Dinner?” he asks, eyeing the Osterizer.
Jeannie nods, too scared to talk.
Rich settles on a stool, his pale bulbous eyes fixed on her. Under the blue stare Jeannie pours the mixture into a casserole dish with pasta and sauce from a bottle and sets the oven to three-fifty.
Rich likes it. “Happy tummy,” he murmurs as he eats, eyes glued to Fear Factor contestants on the television gagging down pig bowels in cockroach sauce.
GDMFSOB, Jeannie chants in her mind as she surreptitiously makes herself a ham-and-cheese sandwich and takes it to bed.
Rich stays up till three, as he often does. Jeannie has learned to sleep. She knows if she tiptoes down the hall like a curious child on Christmas Eve night and peeks in the piled mess he calls his office, Good Old Rich will be hunkered in front of his computer screen, bald head nestled between hunched shoulders like an ostrich egg in a lumpy nest, watching the X-rated cavortings of what he insists is not pornography but Adult Content Material.
Sleep is good.
Plotting is better.
The next day, armed with information from the library’s computer—so there will be no history on her own—Jeannie cultures botulism. It is surprisingly easy and naturally deadly. Perfect. Bad salmon. The GDMFSOB loves salmon. She doesn’t. Perfect. Until she gets hold of the pen and out it comes: Rich reeling out of the marital bed, dragging himself to the bathroom, Jeannie pretending to sleep as his calls grow ever weaker. She dialing 911, but alas! Too late! Weeping prettily as she tells the kind, attractive, young policeman how she took an Ambien and can’t remember anything until, gulp, sigh, she woke to find this. Mea culpa, mea culpa, but not really…
Damning, damning, damning, the words rattle over page after page.
Shuff-shuffle. The bald pate, the watery blue eyes. “Sketching a new sculpture?” Rich is oh-so-supportive of her work. He needs the money for his lifestyle.
“Sketching,” Jeannie manages as she snatches up the pages.
Rich turns on the television. It’s Thursday. Survivor is on Thursdays. Rich never misses Survivor.
“What’s for dinner?”
“Salmon.” Perfect but for the incriminating compulsion.
The osterizer: olive oil, pesto, onion.
“Dinner is served.”
“Lover Girl, the salmon smells funny. Did you get fresh?”
“Fresh.”
“The pesto is great. Happy tummy.”
Over subsequent days Jeannie drips acid on brake lines and writes, melts off the tips of his épées and writes. Osterizes and seasons and serves.
And Rich lives. Thrives. Like the cat who came back the very next day. Jeannie cannot get her hands on an atom bomb.
Damn.
Nothing.
Damn.
Rich is hunkered on the sofa eating lasagna of hamburger, cheese, and the pages detailing how she greased the feet of the extension ladder before asking him to take a look at the chimney, when Jeannie realizes that, as a murderess, she’s a bust. Rich is protected by angels. Or demons. Or stupidity.
Suicide returns as an option. She can’t love. She can’t leave. She can’t live.
Damn.
Guns are too messy. Hanging too painful. Pills. Being with Rich for eight years has driven her to a veritable cornucopia: Ambien, Effexor, Desyrel, Xanax—all good traceable drugs. Surely if she takes them all at once…
The nagging of Big Brother on the forty-two-inch TV whines into the bedroom, where Jeannie, tuna sandwich untouched, sits in bed, sixty-two pills in pink, white, and yellow cupped in her palm, bottled water on the nightstand. Usually she sleeps nude, but to night she has put on a nice pair of pajamas: discreet, modest. Lord knew how she might sprawl and froth. Better to be on the safe side.
Suicide.
So be it.
Rich had won.
Jeannie tips all sixty-two pills into her mouth and reaches for the water.
“Lover Girl?” Rich stands in the bedroom door. He looks peaked, as Jeannie’s mother might say.
“What?” she mumbles around the deadly sleep in her mouth.
“Unhappy tummy,” he moans.
He runs for the bathroom. Jeannie spits out the pills.
“Haven’t taken a dump in days,” he calls genteelly through the open bathroom door. Rich never closes the bathroom door. In fact, he makes deposits while she showers, brushes her teeth, suffocating, stifling deposits.
“Oh,” she calls with mechanical sympathy.
Two days later Rich is dead. Jeannie dials 911.
“Impacted bowel,” the coroner tells her. “Was your husband eating anything unusual?”
“Murder,” Jeannie might have said, but she d
idn’t.
The House of Deliverance
Christine Matthews
First it was food.
To hell with all the psychiatric logic from Dr. Phil and suffering looks from Butch. A bag of Chips Ahoys or a plate piled high with meat loaf, mashed potatoes, gravy and biscuits, a slice or two of chocolate cake for dessert, were the only things that comforted Opal. Potato chips with lots of onion dip. Ice cream sundaes, barbecue ribs, cheese in a can, popcorn with lots of butter and salt. It took more and more to help her get over what had happened to Brenda.
And she was getting there. In her own good time, in her own way. But soon she couldn’t button her blouses, so she got stretchy T-shirts. Big ones. And pants with ten percent spandex, elastic waistbands—all in dark colors. She was fine with it.
Hamburgers with extra cheese, king-size orders of fries, pizza, fried chicken—anything fried—Twinkies, Oreos, and doughnuts.
She was getting better…until her blood pressure skyrocketed, which led to migraines, shortness of breath, and backaches.
That’s how she started taking pills. Diet pills from the drugstore, not the real ones the doctors prescribe. And she started losing weight. There, she thought, is everyone happy now? Will you all leave me alone?
But Timothy Bridgeman was out there somewhere having a life. Last she heard, he was interning down at Children’s Hospital, and Brenda, sweet, beautiful Brenda, was still suffering so.
After a month her clothes got baggy. Another month and little lines around her mouth deepened, skin on her neck sagged, and she swore, if there was anyone around to swear at, that her knees had dropped close toward the floor. Looking in the mirror made her depressed. What had been the point? She’d forgotten. Besides, Butch never took her anywhere. It didn’t matter what size she could squeeze into or even if she bought all new clothes.
“You’re no good to anyone anymore,” Butch shouted one evening during a commercial break from his basketball game. He shouted all the time; it was his normal tone with her now.
“What am I supposed to do? The police still haven’t arrested that bastard. We’ve given them—”
“It’s been more than three years. Stop waitin’, ’cause nothin’ ain’t never gonna happen. Never! Get over it, will ya?”
“For your information, Mr. Smart-Ass, it’s been two years and three months. Shows how much you care about your own daughter. What kind of a man are you, anyways? Our only child was violated by some punk who thinks he’s better than us. He has to pay for what he done. Any normal parent, any parent who loved their kid at all, would want to kill Tim Bridgeman.”
“Brenda’s fine. Stuff like that happens in college. First time a kid’s been away from home, booze, parties, hell, it happened to—”
“Rape’s rape. It don’t matter if you’re on a date, or drinkin’—none of it matters. Brenda said she told that son of a bitch to stop. She swore she screamed for him to stop. Over an’ over again, but he wouldn’t listen.” Why couldn’t Butch get it through his thick skull that the law had been broken the moment Tim Bridgeman had turned into an animal?
“Yeah, well, all I know for sure is it come down to his word against hers. There never was no evidence. How do you figure that one out, Einstein?”
Their arguments always brought them back to that question. Truth was, Opal didn’t know how to explain the absence of any semen or bruises on Brenda’s body. And in a town, especially one as small as Atlas was, no one put up much of a fight against the family who ran the whole damn place. Certainly not her loser husband.
Butch stood in the doorway holding his beer can in one hand and a cigarette in the other. “Now listen up ’cause I don’t wanna have to talk about this no more, woman. Your daughter needs you even if she ain’t livin’ here now. An’ I’m sick an’ tired of bein’ the husband an’ father of them poor Decatur women. I need you to straighten up. Do somethin’ with yourself. Stop embarrassing this family. Get off your fat ass and go see Dotty. Or call up Rita—it’s Thursday—play some bingo like you used to.”
Opal sat in her chair across the room from Butch. The double-wide had been used when they bought it, but the furniture was new. Well, it had all been clean and pretty six years ago—before all this shit started.
Opal reached for a pill and studied her sorry excuse for a husband. “Just like that. You want me to get up and act as though nothing happened to Brenda. Geez, Butch, if only I could be as cold an’ uncaring as you. Wouldn’t that be dandy if the whole world could be as carefree an’ happy as you? Tell me how to do that, Butch, an’ I’ll do it. For Christ’s sake, just tell me how you manage to get up every day, go to work, an’ not think about what Bridgeman done to your daughter? Your only daughter? Your little girl!”
He walked over to the ashtray on the end table next to her chair and put out his cigarette. Then he looked at her long and hard. After a moment he shook his head as if she were too pathetic to spend any more time with.
As he walked out of the room, Opal figured that the twenty pounds she’d lost with those big pills she’d been swallowing weren’t making her feel any better about anything.
And that’s when she found religion.
It hadn’t come all at once like in some flash of silver, with Jesus standing in front of her wearing a robe trimmed in blue. It hadn’t even come in a dream or a vision. No angels appeared at the foot of her bed like they had to Dotty, her neighbor on lot number six. The psychic at the fair she’d gone to years ago when Brenda was in sixth grade told her she’d never have any other children. She’d been right, Opal had known it the very instant she heard the words. But this wasn’t nothing like that either. It happened in that quiet way life has of unraveling while you’re working so furiously to tie everything up all neat and pretty.
And it happened at the House of Deliverance.
There it stood, but you had to look hard to find it. An old, run-down wooden building, off of Highway W, near a creek. Opal, who’d been living in Atlas for more than half of her forty-four years had never even noticed it before. Until that day—that beautiful, glorious, sunlit day when she made a wrong turn.
“I have half a mind just to call the sheriff sometimes an’ have him repossess your license,” Butch was always threatening. “What are you thinkin’?” he’d ask if she got lost.
“Hell, Opal, you never go anywheres to get lost. Take your head out of your ass sometimes, will ya?”
So it wasn’t unusual, even though she was alone in the car, that she winced at the realization she was lost. But later, after much reflection, it became clearer than a glass of Stoly that destiny had been steering her Buick.
Sunflowers bloomed everywhere. Big flowers, standing as high as a grown person, and as she walked through the field they seemed to nod at her. Guiding her toward the front door.
There were no other cars around and it wasn’t until she got closer that she noticed a small gravel-covered parking area in the rear of the building. Golden letters on the door were worn, the L in DELIVERANCE missing altogether. A small side window was broken, frosted over with cobwebs. But there didn’t have to be anything fancy here, it was in the air. In the ground. Opal could feel it. This was a place where the Almighty Himself visited from time to time. She was sure of it.
There were eight rickety stairs; she counted each one before starting to turn the rusted door knob, wondering all the while if she was trespassing.
“No, this is meant to be.”
“Can I help you?” a man with movie-star-blue eyes asked as he opened the door.
“I’m…I was just drivin’…”
“And you got lost? Ain’t that what you’re going to tell me, my child?”
“Well…”
He slicked a piece of hair behind his ear and she could see the gold pinkie ring shine. That had to be a real diamond, she thought. Why, a man as handsome as he was surely had to be one of God’s chosen.
His laugh made her feel giddy. “Why, if I had a dime for every person who come
to my door askin’ directions, I’d have enough money to put a new roof on this old place.”
“But I don’t think I’m lost. Not really,” she said. “In fact, now that I’m standin’ here, I think I was meant to make your acquaintance on this particular day.”
“And in this particular way?”
She wasn’t sure if he was making fun of her or just being friendly, so she didn’t answer.
He didn’t seem to notice her confusion. “Well, Miss…”
“Mrs. Decatur.”
“Well, Mrs. Decatur, care to have a look around? Since you made the trip anyway…on purpose or not. The Lord is always workin’ out there in His mysterious ways, ain’t He? We just have to relax and go along for the ride. Watch that step there.”
For a moment Opal thought about saying no, getting back in her car, hightailing it home to…Butch. Oh yeah, Butch. Picturing him sitting in his big ol’ recliner, spewing advice at her. No, she realized in that same moment, this was a better place for her to be.
“Thank you,” she said, and walked through the door.
She hadn’t expected much and the inside of the building met her expectations. There were no stained-glass windows, no golden trim anywhere. Not even a piece of carpet on the floor. Plain. Everything was so plain. Which made it all seem truer. Truer and more real than anything she’d known during the last few years.
As they stood in the middle of the large room, he introduced himself. “I am Reverend Hempel and I welcome you to the House of Deliverance.” His hands waved through the air gracefully, like one of those magicians on TV who made whole airplanes disappear.
She nodded, glad to meet him.
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