she had pulled open the drawer to the left of the sink and had pawed
through her few meager items of makeup with hands that didn't seem
to belong to her. She took out her eyebrow pencil and then looked
into the mirror again.
She raised the hand holding the eyebrow pencil with the blunt
end towards her, and slowly began to push it into the hole in her
forehead. No, she moaned to herself, stop it, 'Becka, you don't want to
do this
But apparently part of her did, because she went right on doing
it. There was no pain and the eyebrow pencil was a perfect fit. She
pushed it in an inch, then two, then three. She looked at herself in the
mirror, a woman in a flowered dress who had a pencil sticking out of
her head. She pushed it in a fourth inch.
Not much left, 'Becka, be careful, wouldn't want to lose it in
there, I'd rattle when you turned over in the night, wake up Joe
She tittered hysterically.
Five inches in and the blunt end of the eyebrow pencil had
finally encountered resistance. It was hard, but a gentle push also
communicated a feeling of sponginess. At the same moment the
whole world turned a brilliant, momentary green and an interlacing
of memories jigged through her mind sledding at four in her older
brother's snowsuit, washing high school blackboards, a '59 Impala
her Uncle Bill had owned, the smell of cut hay.
She pulled the eyebrow pencil out of her head, shocked back to
herself, terrified that blood would come gushing out of the hole. But
no blood came, nor was there any blood on the shiny surface of the
eyebrow pencil. Blood or ... or ...
But she would not think of that. She threw the pencil back into
the drawer and slammed the draw shut. Her first impulse, to cover the
hole, came back, stronger than ever.
She swung the mirror away from the medicine cabinet and
grabbed the tin box of Band-Aids. It fell from her trembling fingers
and cluttered into the basin. 'Becka had cried out at the sound and
then told herself to stop it, just stop it. Cover it up, make it gone. That
was the thing to do; that was the ticket. Never mind the eyebrow
pencil, just forget that she had none of the signs of brain injury she
had seen on the afternoon stories and Marcus Welby, M.D., that was
the important thing. She was all right. As for the eyebrow pencil, she
would just forget that part.
And so she had, at least until now. She looked at her half-eaten
dinner and realized with a sort of dull humor that she had been wrong
about her appetite she couldn't eat another bite.
She took her plate over to the garbage and scrapped what was
left into the can, while Ozzie wound restlessly around her ankles. Joe
didn't look up from his magazine. In his mind, Nancy Voss was
asking him again if that tongue of his was as long as it looked.
She woke up in the middle of the night from some confusing dream in
which all the clocks in the house had been talking in her father's
voice. Joe lay beside her, flat on his back in his boxer shorts, snoring.
Her hand went to the Band-Aid. The hole didn't hurt, didn't
exactly throb, but it itched. She rubbed at it gently, afraid of another
of those dazzling green flashes. None came.
She rolled over on her side and though: You got to go to the
doctor, 'Becka. You got to get that seen to. I don't know what you
did, but
No, she answered herself. No doctor. She rolled to her other
side, thinking she would be awake for hours now, wondering, asking
herself frightened questions. Instead, she was asleep again in
moments.
In the morning the hole under the Band-Aid hardly itched at all,
and that made it easier not to think about. She made Joe his breakfast
and saw him off to work. She finished washing the dishes and took
out the garbage. They kept it in a little shed beside the house that Joe
had built, a structure not much bigger than a doghouse. You had to
lock it up or the coons came out of the woods and made a mess.
She stepped in, wrinkling her nose at the smell, and put the
green bag down with the others. Vinnie would be by in Friday or
Saturday and then she would give the shed a good airing. As she was
backing out, she saw a bag that hadn't been tied up like the others. A
curved handle, like the handle of a cane protruded from the top.
Curious, she pulled it out and saw it was an umbrella. A
number of moth-eaten, unraveling hats came out with the umbrella.
A dull warning sound in her head. For a moment she could
almost see through the inkstain to what was behind it, to what had
happened to her
(bottom it's in the bottom something heavy something in a box
what Joe don't remember won't)
yesterday. But did she want to know?
No.
She didn't.
She wanted to forget.
She backed out of the little shed and rebolted the door with
hands that trembled the slightest bit.
A week later (she still changed the band-Aid each morning, but
the wound was closing up she could see the pink new tissue filling
it when she shone Joe's flashlight into it and peered into the bathroom
mirror) 'Becka found out what half of have already either knew or
surmised that Joe was cheating on her. Jesus told her. In the last
three days or so, Jesus had told her the most amazing, terrible,
distressing things imaginable. They sickened her, they destroyed her
sleep, they were destroying her sanity ... but were they wonderful?
Weren't they just! And would she stop listening, simply tip Jesus over
on His face, perhaps scream at Him to shut up? Absolutely not. For
one thing, he was the Savior. For another thing, there was a grisly
sort of compulsion in knowing the things Jesus told her.
Jesus was on top of the Paulsons' Zenith television and He had
been in that same spot for just about twenty years. Before resting atop
the Zenith, He had rested atop two RCAs (Joe Paulson had always
bought American). This was a beautiful 3-D picture of Jesus that
Rebecca's sister, who lived in Portsmouth, had sent her. Jesus was
dressed in a simple white robe, and He was holding a Shepard's staff.
Because the picture had been created ('Becka considered "made"
much too mundane a word for a likeness which seemed so real you
could almost stick your hand into it) before the Beatles and the
changes they had wreaked on male hairstyles, His hair was not too
long, and perfectly neat. The Christ on 'Becka Paulson's TV combed
His hair a little bit like Elvis Presley after Elvis got out of the army.
His eyes were brown and mild and kind. Behind Him, in perfect
perspective, sheep as white as the linens in TV soap commercials
trailed away into the distance. 'Becka and her sister Corinne and her
brother Roland had grown up on a sheep farm in New Gloucester,
and 'Becka knew from personal experience that sheep were never that
white and uniformly woolly, like little fair weather clouds that had
fallen to earth. But, she reasoned, if Jesus could turn water into wine
&n
bsp; and bring the dead back to life, there was no reason at all why He
couldn't make the shit caked around a bunch of lambs' rumps
disappear if He wanted to.
A couple of times Joe had tried to move that picture off the TV,
and she supposed that now she new why, oh yessirree Bob, oh yes
indeedy. Joe of course, had his trumped-up tales. "it doesn't seem
right to have Jesus on top of the television while we're watching
Three's Company or Charlie's Angels" he'd say. "Why don't you put it
up on your bureau, 'Becka? Or ... I'll tell you what! Why not put it
up on your bureau until Sunday, and then you can bring it down and
out it back on the TV while you watch Jimmy Swaggart and Rex
Humbard and Jerry Falwell? I'll bet Jesus likes Jerry Falwell one hell
of a lot better than he likes Charlie's Angels."
She refused.
"When it's my turn to have the Thursday-night poker game, the
guys don't like it," he said another time. "No one wants to have Jesus
Christ looking at them while He tries to fill a flush or draw to an
inside straight."
"Maybe they feel uncomfortable because they know gambling's
the Devil's work," 'Becka said.
Joe, who was a good poker player, bridled. "then it was the
Devil's work that bought you your hair dryer and that garnet ring you
like so well," he said. "better take 'em back for refunds and give the
money to the Salvation Army. Wait, I think I got the receipts in my
den."
She allowed as how Joe could turn the 3-D picture of Jesus
around to face the wall on the one Thursday night a month that he
had his dirty-talking, beer-swilling friends in to play poker ... but
that was all.
And now she knew the real reason he wanted to get rid of that
picture. He must have had an idea all along that that picture was a
magic picture. Oh ... she supposed sacred was a better word, magic
was for pagans headhunters and Catholics and people like that
but the came almost to one and the same, didn't they? All along Joe
must have sensed that picture was special, that it would be the means
by which his sin would be found out.
Oh, she supposed she must have had some idea of what all his
recent preoccupation had meant, must have known there was a reason
why he was never after her at night anymore. But the truth was, that
had been a relief sex was just as her mother had told her it would
be, nasty and brutish, sometimes painful and always humiliating.
Had she also smelled perfume on his collar from time to time? If so,
she had ignored that, too, and she might have gone on ignoring it
indefinitely if the picture of Jesus on the Sony hadn't begun to speak
on July 7th. She realized now that she had ignored a third factor, as
well; at about the same time the pawings had stopped the perfume
smells had begun, old Charlie Estabrooke had retired and a woman
named Nancy Voss had come up from the Falmouth post office to
take his place. She guessed that the Voss woman (whom, 'Becka had
now come to think of simply as The Hussy) was perhaps five years
older than her and Joe, which would make her around fifty, but she
was a trim, well-kept and handsome fifty. 'Becka herself had put on a
little weight during her marriage, going from one hundred and
twenty-six to a hundred and ninety-three, most of that since Byron,
their only chick and child, had flown from the nest.
She could have gone on ignoring it, and perhaps what would
even have been for the best. If The Hussey really enjoyed the
animalism of sexual congress, with its gruntings and thrustings and
that final squirt of sticky stuff that smelled faintly like codfish and
looked like cheap dish detergent, then it only proved that The Hussy
was little more than an animal herself and of course it freed 'Becka
of a tiresome, if ever more occasional, obligation. But when the
picture of Jesus spoke up, telling her exactly what was going on, it
became impossible to ignore. She knew that something would have to
be done.
The picture first spoke at just past three in the afternoon on
Thursday. This was eight days after shooting herself in the head and
about four days after her resolution to forget it was a hole and not
just a mark had begun to take effect. 'Becka was coming back into
the living room from the kitchen with a little snack (half a coffeecake
and a beer stein filled with Kool-Aid) to watch General Hospital. She
no longer really believed that Luke would ever find Laura, but she
could not quite find it in her heart to completely give up hope.
She was bending down to turn on the Zenith when Jesus said,
"'Becka, Joe is putting the boots to that Hussey down at the pee-oh
just about every lunch hour and sometimes after punching out time in
the afternoon. Once he was so randy he drove it to her while he was
supposed to be helping her sort the mail. And do you know what?
She never even said 'At least wait until I get the first-class into the
boxes.' "
'Becka screamed and spilled her Kool-Aid down the front of the
TV. It was a wonder, she thought later, when she was able to think at
all, that the picture tube didn't blow. Her coffeecake went on the rug.
"And that's not all," Jesus told her. He walked halfway across
the picture, His robe fluttering around His ankles, and sat down on a
rock that jutted out of the ground. He held His staff between his
knees and looked at her grimly. "There's a lot going on in Haven.
Why, you wouldn't believe the half of it."
'Becka screamed again and fell on her knees. One of them
landed squarely on her coffeecake and squirted raspberry filling into
the face of Ozzie Nelson, who had crept into the living room to see
what was going on. "My Lord! My Lord!" 'Becka shrieked. Ozzie
ran, hissing, for the kitchen, where he crawled under the stove with
red goo dripping from his whiskers. He stayed under there the rest of
the day.
"Well, none of the Paulsons was ever any good," Jesus said. A
sheep wandered towards Him and He whacked it away, using His
staff with an absentminded impatience that reminded 'Becka, even in
her current frozen state, of her long-dead father. The sheep went,
rippling slightly through the 3-D effect. It disappeared from the
picture, actual seeming to curve as it went off the edge ... but that
was just an optical illusion, she felt sure. "No good at all, "Jesus went
on. "Joe's granddad was a whoremaster of the purest sense, as you
well know, 'Becka. Spent his whole life pecker-led. And when he
came up here, do you know what we said? 'No room!' that's what we
said." Jesus leaned forward, still holding His staff. "'Go see Mr.
Splitfoot down below,' we said. 'You'll find your haven-home, all
right. But you may find you new landlord a hard taskmaster,' we
said." Incredibly, Jesus winked at her ... and that was when 'Becka
fled, shrieking, from the house.
She stopped in the backyard, panting, her hair, a mousy blond
that was really not much of any color at all, hanging in her face. Her
h
eart was beating so fast in her chest that it frightened her. No one
had heard her shriekings and carryings-on, thank the Lord; she and
Joe lived far out on the Nista Road, and their nearest neighbors were
the Brodskys were half a mile away. If anyone had heard her, they
would have thought there was a crazywoman down at Joe and 'Becka
Paulson's.
Well there is a crazywoman at the Paulsons', isn't there? she
thought. If you really think that picture of Jesus started to talk to you,
why, you really must be crazy. Daddy'd beat you three shades of blue
for thinking such a thing one shade for lying, another shade for
believing the lie, and a third for raising your voice. 'Becka, you are
crazy. Pictures don't talk.
No ... and it didn't, another voice spoke up suddenly. That
voice came out of your own head, 'Becka. I don't know how it could
be ... how you could know such things ... but that's what happened.
Maybe it had something to do with what happened to you last week,
or maybe not, but you made that picture of Jesus talk your own self.
It didn't really no more than that little rubber Topo Gigio mouse on
the Ed Sullivan Show.
But somehow the idea that it might have something to do with
that ... that
(hole)
other thing was scarier than the idea that the picture itself had
spoken, because that was the sort of thing they sometimes had on
Marcus Welby, like that show about the fellow who had the brain
tumor and it was making him wear his wife's nylon stockings and
step-ins. She refused to allow it mental houseroom. It might be a
miracle. After all, miracles happened every day. There was the
Shroud of Turin, and the cures at Lourdes, and that Mexican fellow
who had a picture of the Virgin Mary burned into the surface of a
taco or an enchilada or something. Not to mention those children that
had made the headlines of one of the tabloids children who cried
rocks. Those were all bona fide miracles (the children who wept
rocks was, admittedly, a rather gritty one), as uplifting as a Jimmy
Swaggart sermon. Hearing voices was only crazy.
But that's what happened. And you've been hearing voices for
quite a little while now, haven't you? You've been hearing His voice.
Joe's voice. And that's where it came from, not from Jesus but from
Joe, from Joe's head
"No," 'Becka whimpered. "No, I ain't heard any voices in my
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