Jesus Saves

by Darcey Steinke

  She watched her father raise his hand and make the sign of the cross to dismiss the first group of communicants. All rose with their heads bowed. The organist used the softer tones of the choir keys and only a few people sang.

  Take my will, and make it thine / it shall be no longer mine /

  Take my heart, it is thine own / it shall be thy royal throne.

  Her father lifted his head and glanced at her. His features were not tense or angry, but Ginger knew what he wanted her to do. She stood with an irreverent swivel of her hips, loosened herself from the pew, and walked up the aisle to the far end of the communion rail, knelt down, watched from the side of her eye as he placed a wafer on each extended tongue. This is his body given unto you for the forgiveness of sins.

  The real world should seem foreign and out of focus from inside here; a church was a way station between this material world and the next immaterial one. But she saw cars like meteors made of colored light zoom past on the highway. And heard a truck heave and honk, the driver hurling his load into the express lane.

  He moved closer, smelling of nautical aftershave and dry toast. This is his body given unto you for the forgiveness of sins. He placed the wafer on her tongue and she brought it back into the wet cave of her mouth. The host stuck to the roof, tasted like typing paper, like white grade-school paste.

  He began again with the silver chalice. This is his blood shed for you. He tipped the cup to a man's lips, then lifted it, cleaned that spot with a piece of white flannel. This is his blood shed for you. He was near. Flutter of robes, his muffled side step. She raised her head, took the cup's lip between her own, and looked into her father's face. Large pores were open and oily around his nose, and his eyes reflected pinpoint faces of parishioners in the first pews. This is his blood shed for you. The red wine stung her gums. She tried to swallow but a cramp punched into her abdomen. Flinching, her mouth opened and wine dribbled down her chin, spattering circles round and soft as berries on the wooden rail. How ridiculous, she thought, that this is happening now. He was already behind the altar, making the sign of the cross, touching his forehead, his heart, then each shoulder. “Go in peace,” he solemnly said.

  As she rose the muscles in her stomach contracted and she felt that monthly paradox, a light-headedness with unbearable bloody weight. She walked along the side aisle with her thighs clamped together so that no blood would drizzle down her legs. A man sat in the back row in a baby blue golf sweater silently moving his lips, not the wide-open shifts of singing, but whispering furtively to the trustee beside him.

  She hurried out the narthex doors, down the stairs toward the basement, past rows of Sunday school rooms, the nursery. Posters lined the hallway, enlarged flowers with Bible verses printed underneath and a banner that proclaimed PEACE TO ALL WHO ENTER HERE in big, badly cut, felt letters. She swung open the door to the ladies’ room and flipped on the light, pushed open the stall door, squatted back toward the toilet seat and reached under her skirt, pulling her pink cotton panties down. It was one of the bad pair with the loose elastic waistband and the pee-stained crotch. Now the material there was blood-soaked and heavy, smudges of red on the inside of her thighs. She sat on the cold toilet seat, listening to the last verse of the communion hymn.

  Take my love; my Lord, I pour / At thy feet its treasure store /

  Take myself, and I will be / Ever, only, all for thee.

  At Christmas her doll Kimmie was always baby Jesus, and she was always an angel with a tin foil halo and cardboard wings. Sometimes she chewed on her long cuticles and said The body of Ginger take and eat. Once when she was still in her crib an angel had hovered in the corner of her room all night, and on Halloween she saw a demon squatting in the bare branches of the pear tree. She remembered the exact moment she'd first found out that the soul wasn't a real organ like one's heart or kidneys and the story her father told her about the little boy who wanted to get to heaven so bad he kept trying to ride his Big Wheel off the garage roof.

  Organ notes caused the cork panels of the ceiling to tremble and she saw her father's long, elegant fingers gripping the base of the common cup and tipping it to one fearful face after another.

  * * *

  The convenience store reeked of steamed hot dogs and microwave burritos. She laid the box of tampons, the tiny bottle of Advil, and the Tall Boy beer on the counter and watched sweat gather on the fair hairs of the cashier's upper lip as he rang her up and put everything into a paper bag. She'd been in here a lot, but his round face was always expressionless. She asked for the bathroom key, watched him open a drawer, lift the plastic disc with the key dangling from a dirty shoelace and hand it to her, then swing back to the Slurpee machine where his Playboy waited.

  The back of the store smelled of spoiled relish. In front of the bathroom door, a mop sat in a bucket of gray water. She squeezed between the Pepsi quarts stacked to the ceiling, flipped on the bulb that hung over the tilted medicine chest. Paneled with fake pine, SUCK ME was scratched into the wood with a car key. She couldn't get the warped door to close properly, set the useless key on the sink's ledge, and opened the box, quickly unwrapping a tampon. She pulled her panties down to her knees, squatted back over the toilet and pushed it up inside. Blood dabbed one end of the cardboard applicator like a lipstick-stained cigarette. She tossed it in the garbage, then stepped out of her stained panties, reached up to the dispenser and pulled out several brown paper towels, wrapped her underwear in them and stuck the bundle deep into the garbage pail. She aligned the arrows and pressed up the plastic Advil cap, peeled off the foil cover, and threw that and the cotton ball into the trash. Popping the beer, she put the can to her lips, dumped four or five pills onto her tongue and washed them down with a mouthful of beer.

  In the mirror, little red pimples dotted her forehead and her eyes looked glazed like when she had a fever. The pills obliterated the pain, though nothing could counter the bee-buzz sensation, strong as a refrigerator's hum, that signaled the world on the verge of collapse. And during these days she had eagle-eye vision, so the bathroom revealed itself in painful detail, the hairs stuck to the porcelain bowl, the flecks of soap dried on the mirror, and her own features yearning and greasy.

  She slipped the Advils and tampons into her blue suede purse and carried the beer out, then laid the key on the counter. The cashier stuck fresh hot dogs onto the metal prongs of the rotisserie. Balancing herself on a car, she stepped off the elevated cement and walked across the vast parking lot. The only time it felt right walking in a parking lot was to or from a car. Any other time it was humiliating, like being left behind at a party. Wild daisies and monkey flowers flourished alongside the road, the sky was static-gray and boring as a headache. Shredded plastic bags hung from the trees, rippling out like strips of ghost flesh. The Heinzes’ Buick passed. Anna turned her head on Ginger and smirked, one of those stiff half-smiles that show a mixture of superiority and pity. Ginger felt her face get warm. There was nothing wrong with walking. People around here thought you were crazy if you didn't ride around in an automobile. Anyone on foot was considered immoral and insane, no different than the guy from the psyche center who escaped once a month in his bathrobe and slippers.

  Jesus didn't have no automobile! Ah Jesus. Lover of little woodland animals, baby bunnies and little brown bears. Jesus, with those dreamy blue eyes, was the only person she'd ever known who'd been murdered and she knew his exquisite corpse by heart.

  She wanted to start her own religion. Its premise would be simply that if you sensed someone needed kindness, you acted. If a homeless guy asked you for a dollar, instead of getting angry you'd just give it to him. You'd stop if a lady had a flat tire or if someone needed a ride. One of the symbols would be a hitchhiker's raised thumb. The communion ritual, the symbolic changing of a tire. She imagined herself in her father's robes going down on her knees into the roadside mud, turning a gold ratchet to loosen the nuts from a lame tire.

  She saw skid marks reaching across the blue
asphalt like charcoal strokes and found the brown blood flecking up now like dried mud, and the trail of trampled grass that led into the woods. She thought of going down and looking for the headless deer. But it'd be rotting already, covered with flies and squirming maggots. She crossed the street, walked a little faster in the roadside weeds because she felt it coming on strong now, not the pills but a vague uneasiness and longing. Ted was right when he said Sunday was the best day out of seven to get stoned. She'd go to his house, lie on his bed, watch the Sunday afternoon movie, split a six-pack with him. Maybe he'd sense how sad she was and do one of his little shows, sing the holy-holy-moly song or the one he made up as he went along, about how pretty she was and how much he loved her. Ted was fucked up, but he was still the only person who knew all the ways to make her feel alive.

  Three: GINGER

  Through the slow afternoon of fading light they lay on the soft fitted sheet's big oriental peonies, pale blue petals languid as any flower in an opium-soaked dream. The blue comforter wrinkled like water at the foot of the mattress. Conversation wandered as it always did toward Ted's favorite topic, the devil's physical manifestation in this world. She told him how she'd once seen a demon squatting in the branches of the pear tree outside her bedroom window. “His skin texture like a lizard covered with soot, his eyes slimy as a silverfish, and when the thing uncurled his tongue it looked like a thin black snake.”

  Ted's eyes were wide as he told how his father used to hang his terry cloth robe over the door that separated his room from his parents’. “At night, I'd hear footsteps, turn to look, and see the bathrobe transformed into a devil with a gray, bullet-shaped head. This devil tormented me every night, until one afternoon, while lying on my bed, I heard the devil's footsteps, felt it's breath against my cheek, but instead of being overcome with fear, I punched out at the demon. That was the last time the monster bothered me; after that, the robe was just material that reeked of cheap cologne and beer-soaked sweat.”

  Ginger looked at him, unsure if he was being sincere or mocking her; sometimes it seemed he just made up anything to stay part of the conversation.

  “I rode over and checked out the deer head this morning,” Ted said. “Its eyes have developed a milky film that makes it look blind.”

  Ginger felt a queasy riff in her stomach. “I bet that deer had been eating out of fast-food dumpsters,” she said. “Bun crusts and hamburger gristle.” She wondered if it's spirit might have passed into her. Ted made her close her eyes, try to visualize shifting leaf light, an appetite for tree bark and vernal grass, but all she heard was a dog whimpering in the apartment next door.

  “That deer's trapped on my retina,” she said.

  “That's what ghosts are,” Ted said, “spirits living inside of you. Your eye is like a movie projector, shining them out.”

  Ginger nodded. Her mother was often in her eye, thin, pale, and breastless, black stitches running in and out of the skin of her chest, not slanted and orderly like they had been, but going every which way, so she looked like a rag doll repaired haphazardly with black thread.

  “Some people, like Jesus or Elvis, have souls so expansive,” Ted said, “that when they die their spirits become a part of all cellular life. They coat the world like a fine membrane, distill into every atom, and that's why people see them inside redwood trees and on corn tortillas simmering in frying pans.” This last idea excited him and he sat up against the wall; his pupils expanded as they tried to soak up the last bit of daylight. “It happened last year,” he said. “I was at my grandma's house down in Bixler. She made TV dinners and we ate them on TV trays with cans of Coke on the porch. She was worried about the boy that mowed the lawn, said he was over-charging her, that when he came into her house to use the bathroom he stole things out of the medicine chest. She didn't like the way he was always spitting in the grass. She went on and on and I'm sitting there, starting to feel really uncomfortable, you know; I was getting that trapped-in-the-DNA-of-this-pitiful-family feeling; her paranoia, her TV trays, her shoe-box-size existence. So I went into the bathroom, locked myself in, opened the window, and lit a fat doobie. There was a white crochet doll with a plastic head over the spare toilet paper, a bowl of pastel soaps, frilly curtains, pink towels with little bears. The air started to hum, then I felt this pressure pushing up against the top of my skull, and I realized how wrong this bathroom was, how it didn't suit me, and then I looked at my face in the mirror and realized my body was just as wrong and external as this bathroom—how completely arbitrary it is that we're stuck in this body or that one—and that's when the pressure gave way and I felt like I was floating in water, like I do when I'm having a dream.”

  “How's that?” Ginger said.

  “You know,” he said, a little embarrassed now that the story was over, “all dreamy and shit.” He pulled her onto his lap and kissed her, trying to keep the stretched skin away from her cheek, but Ginger still felt the hard line of his fleshless jawbone, and she had the sense she was kissing a skull. He moved his hand up her thigh and pressed his fingers between her legs, so he touched the tampon cord.

  “Go take it out,” he said. “I don't mind the blood.”

  She walked down the hallway, wearing only his long Black Sabbath T-shirt, her swollen breasts swaying with a lush animal grace. The half bottle of red wine she found in the refrigerator and the pills she took earlier, plus a few tokes off his joint, all combined to numb out the pain in her stomach and make her weak-kneed and very high. She liked pot; it gave her a giddy sense of possibility, even hope, like warm weather in early spring or getting an unexpected large amount of money. The conversation made her dizzy too. They'd been talking like this ever since that first night at the bar in the Quonset hut out on Highway 9. She liked his Prince Valiant haircut and how he sat alone at a back table sneering at the local band. When she asked him what he did, he laughed and said cynically, Saving the world through prayer. The conversation that followed was the best she'd ever had, how he loved the butter-soaked Texas toast at the Western Sizzler and the tiny Graceland at the miniature-golf course on Garfield Road. He was the first person to say the new post office as well as everything else out here was ugly and she was so grateful; a few hours later she went for a ride in his car and fucked him in the backseat.

  Flipping on the bathroom light, she saw a water bug run over the white Formica and disappear behind the sink. Mold spores pockmarked the shower curtain, inched up the white tile walls. The toilet was shellacked with missed piss, hairs imbedded like ants stuck in amber. The room was humid, the walls swampy. Nature was taking it back. She sat on the toilet seat and reached between her legs, found the white string that hung out like a price tag, and pulled. The bloodied mouse plopped into the water and sunk down moodily to the bottom of the bowl.

  She walked down the hall with her legs pressed tight, pausing in the open doorway of Steve's room. Dusk's flaxen light flooded his unmade bed and the pentacle plaque hanging above it. There was a poster of Iron Maiden, one of Blackie Lawless drinking blood out of a human skull, and a huge movie poster of a slimy seven-headed demon, each face with red ember eyes and horns the length of yardsticks. All his tapes, Krokus, Metallica, Judas Priest, were piled up by his boom box, and there was one of his pen-and-ink drawings taped up on the closet door, a surrealistic image of a saw-toothed demon with a butcher's knife in its throat and blood cascading down from its right ear into a basketball hoop, which became a spigot and flowed into a drinking glass. The caption read in big black letters: I GOT STONED AND I MISSED.

  Steve worked during the week as a janitor at the hospital cleaning the operating room after surgery and, when he could get them, dealt acid and ’shrooms. Ginger felt a little afraid of him. It was easy to imagine the seven-faced dragon, between the bed and the Formica dresser, bobbing its multiple heads like thin-stemmed wild flowers frenzied in a breeze. She heard a rumor he'd poured gasoline over a dog and set it on fire and that he'd spent a year in jail for cocaine possession. Ted tol
d her all his satanic stuff was just a joke, that none of the rumors were true. “Steve has been shitted on all his life,” he said. “He's a great person, just totally misunderstood.”

  She walked down the hall into Ted's room, lay on the towel he spread over the sheets. A flutter of blood spilled out of her, trickled down the inside of her thighs. It always felt like more blood than it actually was. The body was weird that way, magnifying its mass and function in the mind. Ted sat on the edge of the bed. At his feet was a shoe box full of junk: screwdrivers, nails, plastic pieces from broken clocks, his old pot leaf belt buckle. He hunched over so all she could see was his bare back, his jeans so low the crack of his rear showed. The room was drenched in smoky twilight, white light glowed from his tape player. The music was over, but the blank tape played on, a silent hum as incomprehensible as snow falling.

  Moisture ran into the crack of her rear as he spread the lips of her pussy and wet his pointer finger with blood, tugged up her T-shirt, so the material gathered in folds above her bra and touched her just under the tiny bow, pressed his finger into that hollow cleft at the top of her rib cage, then swung his hand down along the curving bone. His touch left a dark line, and sent out rings of sensation like a pebble tossed into water. Sliding his hand up higher under her shirt, his fingers were cold in a sexy way, like when you first take off your underwear and your bottom is bare against a cool vinyl car seat. Pushing her bra up, he cradled a tit away from her ribs. This gave a sudden sense of her own delicateness and she shuddered. Ted undid his jeans and pushed them down to his knees. Crouching over her, butt up, balls hanging, he leaned his head down and swayed his tongue messily into her mouth, jabbed his cock against her stomach, the red skin shifting around the hard inside part.