Jesus Saves

by Darcey Steinke

  “You're so beautiful,” he turned his head so that Ginger could see the scar that made the left side of his face unrecognizable. She saw nuance, shades of red and pink lush as tapestry in his mottled face. He pushed himself inside her, suspending himself over her. Long greasy strands of hair fell forward, shadowing his features; the silver cross around his neck swung just above her eyes. She helped herself along by thinking of the girl she'd seen in a porno magazine with a shaved pussy and then of certain parts in the Manson book, how during an acid trip Jesus said to Charlie, These are your loves and you are their need. How he'd gone out to the family bus, filled a pan of water and given himself a whore's bath, how when the girls came in he washed their dirty feet, one by one, how the girls in turn washed the feet of their boyfriends, and how suddenly the bus was filled with naked bodies. She saw Charlie balling one girl while finger fucking another. Ted rolled over so she could be on top, but she didn't press herself up, just clung to him. Sex was psychic. His cock inside her. Her cock inside him. Not boy. Not girl. Just frenzied protons in an electrified atom. She squinted her eyes so the light from the tape player looked like a quasar, like the big bang, like God making life out of nothing. The spirit of God hovered over the face of the water and she saw the smashed pomegranate, the figs swollen and split, honey dripping over everything. All the flesh inside her swelled with blood, tightened until it was hard to .tell that they were separate. Come into me, she thought, and he did.

  * * *

  A few hours later Ginger woke and felt music vibrating the walls of the apartment. She rolled in the sheets to the edge of the bed, then stood and walked into the next room and sat on the floor next to Ted. The duplex living room was sparse; a TV sat on milk crates and Steve's bench press and free weights were pushed into one corner. Death metal riffs blasted so fierce she pressed her spine against the wall, afraid the boom box would crack and the speed metal dragon would burst out, scaly and blue-green as fish skin, its eyes slick as blood, breathing fire from its flaring nostrils, quoting from Revelations in the voice of a God gone bad. It was completely dark outside now, just some murky light in the oven illuminating the gray walls and silver racks, efficient and mysterious as a submarine trawling the kitchen floor. The rectangular window was smudged with meat juice, splattered with particles of petrified food. Dishes were piled high in the sink and a stack of pizza boxes and beer bottles surrounded the doorway. Carpet fibers pushed this way and that, like the coat of a mangy dog, and Ginger imagined them shifting languidly like seaweed caught in currents of windy water.

  Steve walked into the room and knelt in front of her, held the plastic mask over her nose and mouth. It was the kind anesthesiologists used in surgery, the kind that gas came through to put you to sleep. He'd made this contraption with stuff stolen from the hospital supply room—a glass beaker with a heating nozzle, rubber hose. She watched him take a bud from the plastic baggy, load it into the copper bowl, and flick his lighter until the flame caught the dried leaves, singed them into red embers. Steve wore rings on every finger, a skull, a glass eye, a crucifix, and though he'd just showered, changed into jeans and a flannel shirt; his body odor hinted of blood.

  “Suck up,” he flicked the lighter. Steve was the only child of the county's most volatile couple. Sightings were mythic: the time they'd got drunk in the lounge of the airport Holiday Inn and knocked over the singer's synthesizer, the midnight screaming session in the parking lot of McDonald's, and the car accident, where Steve's mother had crashed into a green highway sign and was found unconscious in her baby-doll nightgown, an open bottle of white wine still locked between her legs.

  Steve was legendary for his fights at high-school parties. One second everybody would be standing around sipping from 16-ounce plastic cups of keg beer and the next a strange fusion would go through the crowd and Steve would be going head-to-head in the mud with somebody who rubbed him the wrong way. It didn't matter what it was about; any reason was only a pretense—school loyalty , some half-drunk girl, something somebody said about his favorite band.

  She took her hit and handed Ted the mask, but he appeared to be asleep, leaning against the wall with his eyes closed, his head tilted back. Steve took the mask from her, loaded the bowl again, and held it over his own nose and mouth; with his other hand he brought the fire to the green leaves. The flame spread an oval of orange light over Steve's features, which were as even and pleasing as a movie star's. His hair was slicked back, so that shiny cords spread like horns over the top of his head, and under his eyes the lavender skin was delicately veined as a flower. He took another hit, then put the rig beside him and layout on the carpet with his hands folded behind his neck.

  “Did you ever think about killing someone?” he asked.

  Ginger looked over at Ted, who was stoned, sleeping, or both. “I could see if some guy fucked with me,” Ginger said. “You know, raped my mother or killed my dog . . . but I wouldn't just go out and kill somebody at random. That's sick.” Her voice was firm and reprimanding.

  “It's just a hypothetical question,” Steve said. “I know it's all a circus of shit.”

  The brown dog chained to a tree stump ran at them, raised up on its back legs, and started to bark. Its white teeth flashed in the dark and Ginger saw the furless pink skin of its tummy. Steve and Ted stood on the porch, shoulders hunched forward, hands curled deep inside their front pockets, both shivering. Their warm breath made puffs of frosty steam as Steve knocked again. They waited, listening for the TV or the hippies’ footsteps. Ginger stood in back of them near a swayback lawn chair, picking leaves off a dead geranium in a coffee can. Christmas lights were strung around the little house, but most bulbs on the green wire were smashed or burnt out except a purple and two greens along the gutter and a red one looping down over the top of the door frame. She looked at the ruined garden, the skewed corn stalks, tomato plants reduced to wet heaps, each woven with a strip of stem-securing cloth. The green-pea vines had rotted into the white cord that held them, and the zucchini and squash decomposed to seeds alone. Only the cabbages would grow all winter, ugly as bottom suckers. Beyond the garden, through the thin plot of woods, she saw the lighted windows of Sugar Ridge floating in the branches.

  “The fucker is always home,” Steve said, turning to glance back at Ted's car parked next to the hippie's old Impala, then pounding harder with the side of his fist.

  “Jesus,” Ted said loudly, “you know he’s in there.”

  “Let's go,” Ginger said. “Maybe he doesn't want to see us.”

  The old hippie was usually nice. He once gave her tea for a sore throat made of slippery elm and cayenne pepper, but he was also an eccentric guy, swore he cured himself of cancer by eating only millet and tofu. Once he showed them how he'd sliced his finger, then stitched it up himself with a needle and thread. The hippie could be delusional too, talking about his CIA file, how he knew for a fact that the cartels had him on a hit list. Sometimes he'd speculate about future societies, after Armageddon, how the earth would be this utopian place with everybody living in tree houses and eating organic strawberries. Ted's connection to reality was fragile as a spider's web, and it wasn't good for him to be hanging around the hippie. Last time they were here, Ted told the hippie he was growing mushrooms in his room with purple grow lights and plastic trays of potting soil. And after that she'd heard him tell his mother he was going back to school. He even talked shit to her father, stuff about trying to help some poor kids who lived in the low-income housing out by Robert E. Lee Highway.

  The frosted bulb over the door lit up and Ginger heard the dead bolt slide. The hippie pulled back the wooden door and opened the screen one.

  “Goddamn it, Woodstock,” he yelled at the dog. It whimpered, walked back to the cedar doghouse, and lay down on a muddy blanket. “Get on inside here,” the hippie said, holding the screen door open. “Go on into the kitchen. I got a house guest sleeping in the living room.”

  A young girl was spread like butter over the couc
h, flushed with sleep, sweat pasting baby hairs to her forehead, an Indian tapestry thrown over her like a blanket, her breath so shallow and infrequent Ginger worried she was dead.

  Ginger followed them through the living room into the kitchen. The hippie pointed to the wood table, then swung open the refrigerator and bent over to get some beers.

  “What's with sleeping beauty?” Steve asked as they sat down in mismatched chairs. “Friend of yours?”

  “Hell no!” the hippie said, carrying the green bottles of beer to the table and sitting down at the head. “She just showed up here this afternoon, said she'd heard about the old days and that I had drugs.”

  “She looks young,” Ted said. “What did you give her?”

  “Half a lude,” the Hippie said. “I had to! You wouldn't believe how she went on, screaming and crying. Said she'd tell the police I was a drug dealer if I didn't give her something.” He lifted the bottle and took a swig. “She's a freaky little chick, says she was at that camp with Sandy Patrick.”

  “No way,” Steve said.

  The hippie nodded. “She was talking about it right before she passed out.”

  Ginger tipped back her chair so she could see through the doorway into the living room. Long drugged breaths lifted the material of the girl's sweatshirt, showed her navel and smooth rounded belly glowing in the blue television light.

  “How's the preacher's daughter?” the hippie asked.

  Ginger let her chair fall forward, felt her face warm.

  “Fine,” she said.

  “You should bring these pagans with you to church sometime.” He lifted his beer in Steve's direction, his red braid shifting on his back and the good-luck medallion made of cherry seeds and red thread swaying over his leather vest.

  The hippie was a real hippie. He'd once lived on a commune somewhere in Oregon, where he'd actually practiced free love and learned how to make both butter and cheese. He could bake wheat bread too and curdle yogurt. When they'd first met him he had a dozen chickens and a goat. He told great stories from the commune about snakes getting in the outdoor shower and about their leader, an eighty-year-old Canadian guy who sang the blues better than Muddy Waters.

  “How's business?” Steve asked.

  The hippie sat back and sighed. His lips were delicate and wet, exotic as a pink orchid against the coarse strands of his rust-colored beard. “It's getting scary.” He pulled his braid over his shoulder. “The guy I usually buy from, the one with the hydroponics complex out on Route Seven, got tipped off that the Feds were onto him. He closed down and split to Vancouver. There was another operation out of Florida, run by a young kid, a Dead head,” he rolled his eyes, “but I hate the risk of driving up the interstate, makes my ass sweat just thinking about it. These days,” he shook his head, “nobody cares about the spirit, man, nobody wants to transcend. It's not just drugs folks are down on, but the whole spirit world. Hell, you can't even talk about God without people catching each other's eyes and thinking you're crazy. The fundamentalists have turned Jesus into a redneck. It's pathetic. I think we should let the Indians take over the government; it's the only way to satisfy the earth. People think you can just build a mall or a highway, but the earth is not into that—you have to respect the earth, and if you don't the earth gets hungry and wants blood. That's what plane crashes are all about, blood payment. People think revolution is about intentional violence, but it can be so organic. No different than when those underground plates shift in an earthquake—it's like a new community forms beneath the old and then suddenly whoa,” the hippie shook the table so Ginger had to put a hand down to secure her beer, “tremors start coming up, getting bigger and bigger, knocking down skyscrapers and highway ramps. Ginsberg man, he had it right, he said the first rule in any revolution is to keep a lot of vodka in the freezer. I seen him smoke joints rolled with twenty-dollar bills. One time we wanted Dylan to play at our rally and Allen, man, he says, Dylan might play, but only if war is never mentioned, only if the protesters all carry signs with pictures of different kinds of vegetables. But the best was Che; he was a God to us. Once we all went down to South America to see him. He comes in wearing his green army pants and his black felt beret, and he starts talking about the revolution in Cuba, the guns they got stored, and his plans for his people, and I was thinking, oh man, to be a real revolutionary with uniforms and guns, and then it's like Che read my mind, because he gets this real serious look on his face and he says, I envy you. You are fighting in the belly of the beast.”

  The girl moaned and the hippie paused, glanced into the living room, and said, “Looks like that loony chick is waking up.” He looked at Ginger. “Go in there and sit with her. I don't want her freaking out again.”

  Ginger pushed back her chair and walked into the living room, sat on the arm of the couch. Bunches of dried roses hung from the ceiling and the room reeked of pot smoke and gingery Middle Eastern perfumes. In its clutter, the place reminded Ginger of her own house, the same ambiguity to the world of things. On the TV was a washed-out African plain, then close-ups of zebras turning their heads in quick gestures of fear.

  The girl yawned and moved her hands over her head, stretched, so her ribs pressed through her skin and the tiny bones in her neck cracked. It was a gesture so private in its animal intensity that Ginger felt embarrassed. The girl opened her eyes to slits, tried to focus first on Ginger, then the darkened window over the TV.

  “What time is it?” she asked.

  “Around eleven,” Ginger said.

  The girl nodded sleepily, looked at the TV. A herd of gazelles ran across the screen. “What's your name?”

  “Ginger.”

  “I knew a girl once named Pepper. There were three sisters and they were all named after spices.” The girl sat up and pulled her sweatshirt down.

  Ted came into the room. “We're going in a minute.” He sat on the other arm of the couch. “What's on?”

  “Some nature show,” Ginger said.

  The girl stared at Ted. “What happened to your face?” she asked him.

  “It got blown off in Nam,” he said.

  The girl looked at Ginger and then at Ted.

  “You look young for your age,” she said.

  “Yeah,” Ted said, “I'm kind of magical that way.”

  “Don't tease her,” Ginger said.

  “It's okay,” the girl smiled. “I know he's only joking.”

  The hippie asked Ted to take the girl home and so she sat now in the backseat, legs folded under her and the army blanket pulled over her shoulders. She had a baby doll's voice and knew all the words to every song on the radio.

  “Don't you wish,” the girl said, “that you could move things around with your mind, so you could get a Coke from the fridge by just thinking about it. Wouldn't that be cool?” She tapped Ginger's arm like a child wanting a response from its mother and said again, “Don't you think that would be cool?”

  Ginger turned her head and smiled and the girl took this as affirmation and leaned up over the front seat. “You know,” she said, “last night I had a dream that a witch flew out my bedroom window with my doll, and my mother had to call the army to get it back.”

  Steve gave a condescending snort and Ted glanced at her with a look that said Stop encouraging that girl. But Ginger liked her, knew she was talking so much because she was lonely, that she needed some attention.

  “I don't feel so good,” the girl said suddenly. She was offended by Ted's and Steve's patronizing silence and slumped back heavily against the seat to pout.

  Ginger turned around, “Are you going to be sick?”

  The girl shook her head, tightened her lips, and leaned her cheek against the window. She was trying to be brave, the way little girls do when they've scraped their knee or have a splinter, when a bumblebee's wiggled into their frilly anklet and stuck its stinger into the pink flesh of their soles.

  “So where are we going?” Steve asked. At first he couldn't keep his eyes off the girl's
tiny breasts, but her talking had ruined all that and now he just wanted her out of the car.

  “I live in Woodbridge Hills,” the girl said, “right up there.” She clung to the door handle, her breath making little clouded circles that she wiped away with her sleeve.

  Ted made a left turn off the road into a pre-fab subdivision hugging the highway. The entrance was marked with a well-lit bill-board surrounded by white gravel. Streets were named after the contractor's daughters: Ashley Court, Jennifer Street, and Laura Lane.

  A lot of women were abandoned here, left to raise teenagers in exhausted-looking split-levels. Mothers who were at work, or at the club, or so tired in the evening they didn't care what happened. Some slept all weekend with their doors locked; some went out to the Hilton Bar and drank margaritas. Inside these houses, the TV was always on and kids jumped on the beds until the slats broke and had wrestling competitions in the basement. Walls were smudged with food and toothpaste and she'd even seen muddy tennis-shoe tracks on the ceiling, as if divorce had made the children light as feathers.

  “Go slow,” the girl said, as they passed a blue ranch house. Inside its bay window, a table lamp underlit ceramic comedy and tragedy masks mounted over the couch. “That one,” the girl said, pointing to a white split-level, with burgundy shutters and a colonial eagle hung over the door. “That's it,” the girl said, “that's Sandy's house.”

  The silver Tot Finder sticker drew Ginger's eye to the second-floor window, and deep inside the room a votive candle burned on a white dresser. Next to the dresser was the painted door Ginger’ d seen in the newspaper; the white unicorn, the rainbow, the fluffy clouds, all painted in a sweet amateurish style by Sand y herself.