Gun Love

by Jennifer Clement

  Mrs. Roberta Young also told me about Pascal’s wager. She said, It’s about betting with your life if God exists or not.

  Is this like a dare? I asked.

  No, not exactly, she said.

  Mrs. Roberta Young and Noelle both smoked Salem menthols, which were my favorites. Neither the mother nor the daughter ever bothered to step outside to smoke, and so their small trailer always smelled like tobacco mixed with rotten fruit from the parrot’s cage and dog food from the bowls laid out on the floor of the narrow trailer’s hallway.

  Where there’s smoke there’s fire, Noelle would say as she blew smoke out of her mouth and nostrils.

  If I could steal a Salem out of a pack it made my day. And this was because, after I smoked the mentholated cigarette as far as down as possible, I’d stub it out and suck on the filter and it was almost like having a mint.

  Pastor Rex was also a smoker.

  Mrs. Roberta Young, like my mother, didn’t like Pastor Rex or churches. She said, We lived near a town that has only a few hundred people living in it, but has five churches. This is what America has come to. Someday there will be more churches than schools.

  Pastor Rex was from Texas. He was a short man in his early forties. His head was shaved and he wore round wire-rimmed glasses.

  Pastor Rex seemed to be alone in the world. No family ever came to visit him. He said he’d been married, but had no children.

  Because of the abundance of churches in our area, Pastor Rex was very proud of the programs he thought up to bring more parishioners to his church. He was particularly satisfied with a program called Drive-Thru Prayer.

  On the last Sunday of every month, Pastor Rex had volunteers hold signs on the highway that led into town inviting people to drive into the church’s parking lot for a prayer.

  Everyone can just pull in, stay inside their cars or trucks, and pray with no strings attached, Pastor Rex said. The Drive-Thru Prayer makes praying easy. They don’t even have to turn off their motors or their radios.

  April May smiled at this. Because you live in a car, you and Margot do the Drive-Thru Prayer all day and all night, she said. He’s an idiot.

  Pastor Rex also invented the U-turn Prayer program.

  The U-turn Prayer, Pastor Rex explained, means that if you’re driving down the highway of life in one bad direction, you can just do a U-turn and drive back to the good life where you came from or should’ve been.

  If you’re a drug addict, make a U-turn, he liked to say. If you’re a wife beater, make a U-turn. If you’ve forgotten about Jesus Christ, just make a U-turn.

  April May said, He forgot to say we need to turn on the turn signal first or you’ll get a ticket. He’s a stupid idiot.

  Mrs. Roberta Young warned me to keep an eye on Pastor Rex.

  She said, You better watch it. I don’t like that man. Did you know he’s the one who shot those baby alligators?

  Pastor Rex told you he’s the one who killed them? I asked.

  Oh, yes.

  But why?

  He’s proud of it. He said we didn’t need reporters and people hanging around and looking into our lives. But this doesn’t matter, she said. I’m telling you to keep your eye on what’s going on.

  Mrs. Roberta Young didn’t want my mother to end up with Pastor Rex. She told me that she respected my mother because she was the only well-mannered, properly raised person around.

  Your mother comes from finery, she said. Even if she had you, she still knows the true meaning of the word “please,” which really means “if you please.” Your mother knows you will always regret the small thing you didn’t say for the rest of your life. She’s a person who knows she should be wearing white gloves to church even if she doesn’t do it.

  I knew Mrs. Roberta Young was talking about the fact that my mother had me without a husband, without being married and while she was still in high school, and then had run away from home.

  My mother never told me who my father was, and the truth is I never asked. I only knew he was a schoolteacher with a family and would have gone to jail if anyone found out he’d loved-up a student.

  My mother didn’t want him around, not even in our thoughts.

  She didn’t want his name being said in our oxygen.

  She didn’t want him to open the door, walk into my nighttime dreams, take a seat, and start talking.

  She didn’t want him to stir up our life like a spoon because I knew she loved him. Every time she looked at me she saw him.

  After Mrs. Roberta Young told me Pastor Rex was trying to court my mother, I watched him closely and, yes, of course, Mrs. Roberta Young was right. He was always looking at my mother as if she were a mirror to look at himself. I could see he wanted to be loving her up in the movies by next Saturday night.

  Every other evening, Pastor Rex came over to the Mercury and knocked on the window on the driver’s side of the car. I don’t know how many times I had to tell him that he needed to knock on the window of the backseat.

  I’d roll down my window and say, Pastor Rex, this is my room! Knock on the backseat window. If you please.

  I’m so sorry, Pearl, he’d say every time. Is your mother here?

  I don’t know.

  Really?

  Yes. This car is so big I can’t find her in here.

  Every few weeks he’d leave her a bouquet of flowers on the windshield of the Mercury. When you live in a car there’s no surface for a vase of flowers. My mother would cut the stems short and arrange the flowers in an empty tin of powdered milk that she filled with water. Then she placed the bouquet outside on the roof as if the roof were a mantelpiece.

  My mother was always kind to Pastor Rex because she was kind to everyone.

  She said, God is really boxing with that man. Pastor Rex thinks the church is a U-turn or like wearing a new suit. I can see that what he really likes to do is count up the money he collects on Sundays.

  My mother’s kindness kept him in a state of false hope.

  Pastor Rex was a secret smoker. Even though he lived by himself, he’d smoke in his bathroom and blow the smoke out the window. I guess he didn’t want to catch himself.

  So I had to get into his bathroom in order to steal cigarettes, which he kept on the window ledge. There was often a pair of socks drying in his shower and a short stack of Reader’s Digest magazines on the floor next to the toilet. On the edge of the sink, he had a toothbrush with the plastic grip in the shape of Jesus on the cross.

  It was easy to steal cigarettes from Pastor Rex because I always knew when he was at church. I also took advantage of his visits to my mother. He’d tap on her window, she’d roll it down, and I’d race out of the car, across the park, past the old swing set, the public bathroom, and to his trailer.

  April May didn’t believe me when I told her about the toothbrush. She dared me to steal it and bring it to her. So of course I did because I was begging for danger as if it were a sport.

  One afternoon, when I knew that Pastor Rex was busy with his Drive-Thru Prayer program, I told April May to meet me down at the river, on the dock. Then I went to his trailer, placed the Jesus-on-the-cross toothbrush down the front pocket of my jeans, and snuck down to the river where April May was waiting for me.

  I don’t want to touch it, she said when I held it out to her.

  I told you it was real.

  When I explained that I planned to return the toothbrush back to Pastor Rex’s bathroom, April May snatched the toothbrush out of my hand.

  Oh, no you’re not. You’re not taking this back, she said.

  But he’ll miss it. He’ll know someone was there.

  You’re not going to take back something you’ve stolen, April May said. That would be really stupid. Imagine not getting caught stealing, but getting caught putting something you’ve stolen back in it
s place!

  Then she lifted her arm up high in the air and cast the Jesus toothbrush into the river.

  After this, every time I looked at the river, I knew there were fish and frogs and alligators in that yellow water. I knew there were skinks with twelve legs and frogs with white eyes. Now I also knew there was a Jesus toothbrush lying on the bottom of the riverbed.

  The other people who smoked in the park were the Mexican couple, Ray and Corazón, who didn’t do any of the things everyone else liked to do. They never went to fishing parties, prayer meetings, or bingo games. They also had nothing to do with the VA hospital, which was a large part of life in our area. They mostly spoke Spanish, but their English was not bad. Corazón’s English was actually very good.

  Both Corazón and Ray smoked Marlboro Reds and nothing else. Those cigarettes were like a flag to them, like a cigarette nation, and they had pledged allegiance. They had cartons all over the place because they brought them back from Mexico, where cigarettes were cheap.

  I was only able to get into the Mexicans’ trailer on Saturday mornings. On those days, I kept a lookout from the park’s recreation area. I could sway gently on the cracked swing and keep a look out to see when Ray left for his job as a gardener. Then I had to wait and see when Corazón left her house to go shopping.

  Corazón was always fixed up. We never caught her outside in a nightgown or T-shirt and underwear like everyone else. She never left her trailer without being all made up and her black hair perfectly blown out straight down her back. Corazón’s skin was deep brown and her eyes were black. She always wore a deep-red lipstick.

  Ray had light brown curly hair and brown eyes. He looked like he could be from anywhere.

  Corazón is a Mexican Indian, my mother said with respect. She knows about many things we could never imagine.

  Outside Ray and Corazón’s trailer, stuck into the muddy grass, were five plastic pink flamingoes and the plastic figure of a gremlin. There was a two-ring inflatable pool in the shape of a turtle that was punctured and lay under a tree and was filled with mud and rotten leaves. Those things must have been left by a previous tenant, as Ray and Corazón did not have children.

  Ray had built a large shed on one side of the trailer that contained stacks of newspapers. He also had an old rusty junk of a car without seats inside, which he used to store newspapers and cardboard.

  Mrs. Roberta Young thought that Ray, apart from working as a gardener, also worked in the paper recycling business, because he had negotiated buying newspapers straight from the dump trucks. This way he did not have to sift through the dump’s piles of garbage looking for paper, although sometimes he did this too.

  In the park, Ray and Corazón had the largest mobile home, a triple-wide. So, inside there was even room for a large flat-screen television set, which covered up one of the windows. This meant that it was always dark inside.

  My mother and I, curled up in the backseat of the Mercury together, watched movies, shows, and the news on a cheap phone a soldier at the hospital had given to her. Everything we looked at, Mount Everest and the moon, were the size of her hand.

  The Mexicans had packs of Snickers bars or Milky Ways on the kitchen counter and they had large bags of Lay’s barbecue-flavored potato chips lying around. If April May asked me to I’d also steal some of the candy.

  Outside the trailer by the door, Corazón had a red plastic bucket full of bottles of nail polish, which she liked to collect.

  On the other side of the door there was a large azalea in a pot. Dozens of stubbed-out cigarettes poked out of the soil so the yellow filters looked like weeds growing under the flowers. It just killed me that I couldn’t steal these often half-smoked butts, as they were wet and soggy from the dirt.

  April May and I always went to the dock to smoke our cigarettes. She was convinced that alligators must be afraid of smoke and would not come near us.

  No animal or insect or any living thing likes fire, she said.

  Every afternoon the first question April May asked was how many cigarettes I had managed to steal and then we decided how to divide them up. If we only had one, we would share it back and forth between us counting out the puffs. If I’d managed to steal a pack, we would smoke all the cigarettes.

  On those quiet afternoons on the dock, we liked to light up, lie down on our backs, and blow the smoke up at the sky.

  April May was a little jealous because I had figured out how to make smoke rings.

  It’s easy. Just make a big O with your mouth, I said.

  She never could do it.

  I watched the rings of tobacco smoke leave my mouth and rise above me. At first they were tiny but, as they lifted, the smoldering circles expanded and grew wide and full over our bodies and toward the clouds. I knew my smoke rings would be blown out into the ocean, under the clouds, and become great hoops over Italy.

  There was another reason April May and I were not that frightened of being down by the river as the alligators were culled every week. This was because every Sunday, after the ten o’clock church services, April May’s father and several other men who lived in town liked to go down to the river with a cooler full of beers and their pistols and shotguns. They would drink beer and shoot at the water over and over again just in case there were alligators in there.

  I knew there were thousands of bullets in the riverbed. Some had even washed up to the shore and were mixed in with the gravel.

  Several times a year the water would deliver a red oily liquid that settled on the top and the men would know they’d hit something.

  Every Sunday as my mother and I made peanut butter and jelly sandwiches for lunch in the backseat of the car, we knew the men were shooting.

  From the Mercury we could hear the sound of the bullets opening fire on the water.

  There they go again, my mother said. They’re killing the river.

  8

  Everyone at the park was selling something or promising something or dreaming something. No one believed in anything. It didn’t take too long to figure it all out.

  Pastor Rex was giving out prayers and promising to buy a piano for the church. He also bought guns. This new venture made stealing his cigarettes more difficult, as there were more people around going in and out of the park.

  I’m getting the guns off the street, he said. I’m helping to stop violence in America. Please bring me your guns—even your old guns that have been around the block.

  People in the area soon learned they could sell Pastor Rex their guns if they needed money. Pastor Rex even placed an ad in the local newspaper, which stated: “Give Your Guns to God.”

  Because of this, everyone in the park had grown accustomed to men idling through the front gate with a shotgun over a shoulder or a pistol in a pocket. I remember seeing one man carrying a large brown suitcase that must have been full of pistols.

  As I made my way around the park there was often one man or two or three sitting on the metal steps leading into Pastor Rex’s trailer waiting to sell him their guns. Once in a while, if one of the men smoked, I’d ask if I could bum a cigarette for my mother. There was a fifty-fifty chance the man would reach into his pack and give me a cigarette.

  One old man didn’t believe me and said, You’re already a little imp and you’re never going to grow another inch thanks to your smoking, stupid girl.

  When I used to complain about my size, my mother liked to tell me stories about Thumbelina. Just think, she said. Thumbelina slept in a matchbox, rested on a carnation leaf, and used a walnut shell as a boat.

  Even though I liked the Thumbelina stories, I knew that old man cursed me right then and there. He cast a witch-on-a-broom spell on me. After he told me I was stupid, he gave me two cigarettes and said, Go on, girl, set yourself on fire. Forever after I knew it was his fault I stayed so small.

  The buying of guns was another o
f Pastor Rex’s programs like the U-Turn Prayer and Drive-Thru-Prayer program. The Give Your Guns to God initiative was supposed to last a month, he’d promised when it started, but it was so successful he decided not to stop. For the time being, he announced at church one morning, he’d continue to do this until the Lord told him not to.

  Mrs. Roberta Young complained that she didn’t like to have men coming into the trailer park on a regular basis and wanted to start a petition, but no one wanted to have problems with Pastor Rex.

  If I went to the church’s activities it was almost always with April May, as my mother was raised a Catholic and looked down on any other church. She believed that the Catholic Church was its own land or territory. This was because the same words were spoken, but also because of the scent of incense and candles. Anywhere in the world a Catholic church smelled the same.

  I don’t believe in their worship, my mother said. And remember, you’re going only because of good manners, because April May is inviting you, and not because you like how they love Jesus.

  My mother did have to go to Pastor Rex’s church on occasion because so many of the events in the community occurred there. Pastor Rex organized bingo games, garage sales, Bible-study groups, Soldier Devotion Worship for the war veterans, and Dancing in the Spirit dance nights.

  Ray and Corazón were the only other Catholics in the area. My mother called them Mexican Catholics because they worshiped the Virgin of Guadalupe.

  Because Pastor Rex was always helping someone, we were not surprised when he rented out one room in his two-room trailer to a man from Texas. Pastor Rex told Rose about the man and then April May told me and I told my mother. This was usually the way news got around in the park. The truth is Rose knew what was going on at all times because there was always someone who had a headache or a backache. Rose had an enormous bottle of Tylenol, and she’d give out those pills to anyone as if they were jelly beans.

  After she placed six Tylenol pills in the palm of his hand, Pastor Rex told Rose about a friend who was staying with him who had fallen on hard times. They’d known each other back home, from a church in Texas. Pastor Rex said the man was going to stay with him for a few months and look around for work.