Jesus Saves

by Darcey Steinke

  “Sounds like you were almost dead.”

  “Yeah,” Ted said, taking Ginger's hand, kissing her fingers, thin skin of his lips sticking to the ovals of her fingertips. “It was like a demon had a hold of me and I had to shoot myself to get him out.”

  She slipped her body under Ted's arm and put her head on his chest. He'd made it back. She admired that. His heartbeat and warm skin lulled her and she thought she might sleep.

  “Gin,” he said, moving her hair off her forehead, “I've been thinking about getting married.”

  Ginger kept her eyes closed and laughed, “Not to me.”

  Immediately his ribs came out of his chest like iron bars and he was Mr. Skeleton. She moved to the other side of the couch and he stood up looking down at her. “What's so funny about it?”

  “Nothing,” Ginger said. “I just thought you were kidding.”

  “I didn't realize you considered me so beneath you,” he said grimacing, turning an awkward second toward the light of the TV.

  “You know I'm totally into you,” Ginger said.

  “I don't need this patronizing bullshit.” He walked toward the doorway that led into a girl's model bedroom.

  “Ted!” she reached for his hand. “Don't be like this.”

  He shrugged her off and walked toward the canopy bed. The room was pink and white and delicate as a wedding cake. The carpet seashell pink and the wallpaper a mosaic of rosebuds, all the furniture was white, and on the dresser sat a silver jewelry tray and a tiny ceramic box with a doe-eyed figure of a shy little girl standing on top.

  “I can't stand this shit,” he motioned first to the room they were in, the white shelves filled with Nancy Drew books and pink ceramic kittens and angels with yellow hair and tiny glittering wings. Then he swung his arm up, to include the corkboard ceiling and all the other model rooms in a maze around them. “All this,” he waved his arm showing he meant the whole store, “the mall, the highway, all the shitty stores along it, this whole fucking town and everyone in it. Fuck all of you,” he screamed. Then with both hands he grabbed the lamp with the lacy shade and smashed it against the foot post of the canopy, Bits of bulb glass flew out like ice chips, and she covered her head; Ted pulled the wall mirror down, so it shattered, shards falling onto the bed.

  “Ted, don't do this,” she said. “I'm sorry, okay.”

  “Yeah, right, you're sorry. Fuck you!” he said as he kicked down the shelves, so the books tumbled and the cheap pressboard cracked. Then pausing, swaying like a drunk, breathing heavily, he unzipped his pants, pulled his cock out, and pissed on the princess bed with the thick pink comforter and the satin pillows with pastel floral prints. She staggered into the next room away from the flat wet sound, toward a zebra-skin bedspread and the plastic jade plant, and scanned the ceiling for shadows of the red exit sign. Through the next doorway, she ran by a chrome-framed poster of Michael Jordan, team logos all over the little-boy bed. Behind her Ted broke kittens and angels, one after another the smack of hollow ceramics turning instantaneously to gray dust. Out of the labyrinth onto the department-store floor, Ginger passed a wall of dead TVs and a wire basket full of soccer balls, then the long hallway, beating back the bathrooms, the employee lounge; she threw all her weight against the exit door and flew down the cement stairwell, till she was finally outside, running now across the asphalt parking lot.

  She was far away from the mall now, past the bank with the drive-in cash machine, across from Chi-Chi's, the Mexican place were the suits came for margaritas after their long day under fluorescent light. She passed Wendy's and Burger King, almost to McDonald's. The big glass fronts were postered with drink and burger specials. Each chain had its own long empty parking lot separated from each other by barriers of cement. Humidity glowed under the highway lights. Gray moths beat themselves against the textured glass, the asphalt glittering below.

  Ted wanted to bash things up, break windows, do wheelies, burn rubber until his skull cracked open and he fell down dead. Before the accident he was less bones than liquid, as if his thin frame were filled with water and his face smooth and beautiful as a child's. But memories from before the accident, precious as a fairy tale, were just as unreliable.

  She heard the sputtering engine of Ted's car, the pebble rattling in his hub cap, and without looking back ran down the slope into the woods. There was a path that led into the Millers’ backyard and across the road to Brandy Lane, where her house sat dark and silent, but she'd have to pass the deer. The woods were littered with Coke cans, empty cigarette packages, the aluminum and plastic catching what was left of the highway's white light.

  What happened to Sandy was the worst thing that could happen to anyone. She remembered her only in fragments shown on television, the video of her posing at her dance recital, wearing an off-the-shoulder canary-yellow leotard with black sequins around the neck and a big black feather coming out of her hair, her face made up with rouge, mascara, and eye shadow. But when she tried to think of her now, it was always like a porno movie, a little girl with her nightgown pulled over her head.

  Ginger hurried through the thin-trunked trees and thorny underbrush, but then paused. She saw something scurring away, disappearing into the weeds. The deer's body was badly bloated. Where the skin had been pink and furless, it was now yellow with burry blue veins running this way and that. She covered her mouth and nose, turned her head, the flies congregating in the ridges of raw flesh.

  She heard another sound, maybe a dog wandering melancholy among the trees or Ted coming toward her. She moved around the deer, broke off the path, and slipped into the woods. A branch snapped in her face and her cheek stung; brambles pulled at her shirt. She panicked, felt her body lunge toward the backyards, the swing sets, the Weber grills, the cement patios and their sharp overhead lights. Her foot caught in a ridge of mud and she ran forward, leaving her tennis shoe. She ran toward the cul-de-sac lights, the deer chasing her, running like a man up on two feet.

  Six: SANDY

  Early light seeped through the green plastic bags taped over the window, making the room feel like the bottom of a swamp. Algae bled into the walls, spread over her mattress, oozed into her pores until she was green all the way through. Lying in muck, silverfish swam over her and an alligator crept past. Light intensified behind the plastic as if God were on the other side. She knew from books that children sometimes found passageways to kingdoms in the backs of wardrobes or by rubbing lucky coins. Maybe a boy wearing knee-socks and thick glasses would step through the plastic, blinking in confusion, because the moment before he'd been on the beach examining a piece of blue glass.

  In horror movies, the portals that led to hell had gatekeepers, huge three-headed dogs, or blind men with tiny snakes living inside the sockets of their eyes. And if you went down into hell to retrieve somebody you'd better bring an ivory cross or a lock of baby's hair, because the devil tricked people, turned them into other things like bats or lawn chairs.

  This room was smaller than the last one, her mattress a twin, and there was just a broken-down director's chair in one corner and a stack of newspapers in the other. She couldn't read where they were from, but by the layout, length, and spacing of the tiny letters on the edges, she figured they were in English. This comforted her, as she was afraid he'd taken her all the way to Mexico, through Latin America, where she heard men roamed in packs like stray dogs and killed tourists for their Visa cards and traveler's checks. Towns back in the rain forest of Costa Rica, where whorehouses had cement gates and barbed wire. If you ended up there, Robin had told them at camp, you'd never escape.

  Oh-u. Oh-u. A bird called in a voice resonant with worry. Oh-u. Oh-u. But she couldn't answer through the gag, just thought of the bird's purple feathers, its pale peach beak and pink tongue, how all day it ate iridescent blue beetles and licked water off white flower petals. When he came in to feed her, pea soup right out of a red and white Campbell's can, he wouldn't make eye contact, and since she'd tried to escape he hadn't
even touched her. It was a silent fight like her parents used to have. For days her mother wouldn't get dressed and rushed around in her nightgown acting crazy and officious. Her father sat on the edges of the furniture as if he were a houseguest. But now the man wanted to make up. All night the TV crackled and whispered like a campfire as he sat at the kitchen table writing, cutting letters out of magazines with scissors and pasting them to a blank page. Maybe the letter was to his mother or to an old girlfriend or some company whose product pissed him off; maybe he was working on a project, or filling out a work application. Or maybe he got an idea for a kid's book about a lonely troll that kidnapped a little girl right out of her subdivision. But she knew from the frenetic pace of his work, from the long meditative pauses where he went inside himself, that it was an important letter, that he was careful with the details. His scribbling went on for hours, cutting and pasting. He never looked at her once and for a moment she wondered if he'd forgotten all about her.

  The gecko came up from where it lived between the wall and her mattress and stood frozen, lashing its tongue in the air. Its beaded head scooped the quilted material for centipedes and red ants. The movement of her eyelashes frightened the shy thing and it dived back over the mattress's edge. If Sandy sat very still in a forest filled with every kind of wild flower, chipmunks and squirrels would come up to take nuts from her fingers and lay their tiny warm heads against her thigh. She heard the turtle plodding along in the underbrush, eating soft leaves and meaty mushroom caps, the baby bear with a velvet bow tie listening patiently while the caterpillar, in his top hat, gave a speech in the style of Abraham Lincoln, talking mostly about Divine Providence but sometimes about Divine Intervention.

  * * *

  Sun baked the house. Like bread in the oven, she felt her mushy insides changing into a substance both dry and white. She was thirsty for water, for grape juice, for Sprite with crushed ice in super-sized wax cups, for a cold piece of watermelon, for a teacup full of homemade lemonade. And there was water and lots of it somewhere behind the plastic, a green lime quarry, or a man-made lake, maybe even an ocean. She heard the wet slap against sand and rocks and mud, and she pushed her tongue against the black electrical tape and for an instant hallucinated sucking on an ice cube, sitting in a baby pool, drinking from a cold can of Coke.

  It was cute how her brother, when he was little, leaned against her legs, how he'd go around to the neighbor's front lawns eating the stale bread thrown out for the birds. Sometimes he'd take off all his clothes and run naked around the house. He was a preoccupied little kid. Once she asked what he was thinking and he said, “The big bang theory,” and threw himself onto the couch. Another time he found a baby rabbit in the garage and squeezed its stomach so hard blood gushed out of its nose. The frog he'd found in the back woods had an orange belly and crazy eyes. He'd caught a catfish in the graveyard pond. Its skin was like black rubber and he'd pulled its whiskers off on the asphalt driveway, cut its heart out with an old hunting knife. The heart looked like a piece of wet gravel and her brother skewered it on the tip of the blade and carried it into the house.

  She'd watched from behind the peonies, deciding to punish him, to take his little red race car and hide it under the mulberry bush. Winter rains turned to hard ice and encased the tiny automobile; snow covered it like white frosting on a Danish. She stared at the dream car swerving left, the expression of the Italian driver confident and intense. Oh-u? Oh-u? Oh-u? The bird had attracted others and they were having a meeting, deciding how best to get her out. The blue jays, who thought of themselves more like marines than civil servants, wanted to bust the window, lead her out through the shards of splintered glass. The egret, a coy international spy, wanted to infiltrate the house solo, pin the man to his chair with its long lancelike beak, while all the other birds flew down the hall, pecked through the plywood door, and set the girl free. A flock of seagulls wanted to tear the man's eyes out, then send the water rats in to finish him off. There were other proposals, the robin's call for peaceful negotiations, the owl's for covert night maneuvers. Sandy listened until everyone started to talk at once, and the black crow said that there wasn't much time left and shook lemons from the tree to get everyone's attention back to the matter at hand. But what was time to her? A jewel beetle made its way across the ceiling like a floating emerald. The faucet pondered a melody of drips. The shy gecko stalked a fringy centipede. He was time, time was his heartbeat, time was his breath.

  “Fourscore and seven years ago,” the caterpillar began, “all beings were dedicated to the universal notion that every animal is created equal. We were highly resolved in those days to the proposition that the dead did not die in vain, but for the greater good of these woods. That was when,” the caterpillar swayed his body to the right with whiplike rhetorical force, “this place was divine.”

  “It still is,” said the bear, who had an optimistic disposition and didn't like anyone running down his home. He yawned, slumped against the tree stump. His bow tie was crooked, his hair matted with leaf bits and broken twigs, and he looked as if he were recovering from another drunken night.

  “Don't interrupt,” the caterpillar said, trying to look as large and dignified as possible. He gave a speech every day, but could tell that this was going to be a particularly good one. “It is for us, the animated, to be devoted to the work which they who fought on this hallowed ground here have so honorably advanced. For instance, we had in those days a family of fairies who could make a delicious casserole, using nothing but butternuts and tree bark.”

  “I'm glad they're gone,” said the bear, yawning more dramatically, hoping the caterpillar would get the message. All the other animals had already gotten bored and wandered off; only the bear was polite enough to listen. He had a bad reputation, as a rogue and a dandy, but his manners were exquisite. “That fairy, the one who made rose petal slippers, she was a horrible gossip.”

  “Shut up!” shouted the caterpillar. “You're making me forget what I'm saying.” He glanced down at his crib notes, etched onto an acorn beside him. “Whenever, if ever, we admit we are created by the four winds, our souls shall not perish from this earth.”

  “Amen,” said the bear. “Is that it?”

  “Yes,” said the caterpillar stiffly. “I got all fouled up because of your constant interjections.”

  “It was a nice speech,” the bear said, “but I'm too tired to hear you practice it again.”

  “Well I just might, and it'll be all your fault!” the caterpillar screamed. He was already mad at the bear for drinking the last bottle of champagne. “It's because of you that we need to raise money.”

  “We could sell lemonade,” said the bear hopefully, “or paint some rocks? We could make seashell necklaces or weave pot holders, sell driftwood or the tail feathers birds drop onto the ground. I'll collect aluminum cans—they're all over the place—or I could give kindergarten students rides on my back. We could pick blackberries and sell them at a stand on the highway! I'll make floral arrangements out of foxglove and milkweed. I bet they'd bring a pretty penny. I think I'm old enough now to baby-sit, to feed children Rice Krispies squares out of Tupperware containers and referee while the little boys wrestle. I'd be good to the little girls too, read them stories about unicorns and princes, about trolls with bad teeth and white hair. . . . The troll comes in,” the bear said in his most evocative storyteller voice, “and sits on the edge of the bed. He holds a coffee cup filled with warm water to her parched lips. He's whistling a tune and smiling, calling her his little darling, his baby girl. But the girl watches the zipper of his khaki pants. Inside his pants is a monster; the little girls in kindergarten told her that. Inside little boys’ pants was a monster like a worm.”

  The air was a thick-petaled flower swarming with baby lizards crawling everywhere over the idiot grass: skinks and whiptails, chameleons twilling their minuscule dew flaps, hatching even now from a clutch of eggs. Just an inch long, they hunted insects, butterfly larvae and worms
, baby crickets and katydids. They sounded like a trillion synchronized, reverberating rubber bands, but wetter and more mysterious. The troll spit a glob of marbled mucus into the weeds. The lumpy spit slid down a blade of fool's wheat. Dung beetles and mayflies hatched from tiny gummy eggs, caterpillars spun branches together to make gray mummies, and moths, convinced the porch light was the moon, beat themselves to death against the bulb. She couldn't think of what she was thinking; every few seconds she lost her way, her thoughts going on without her, being revealed behind a closed door, like when she waited outside her parents’ bedroom while they whispered inside. It made her feel like she was already back with the earth. Earwigs crawled over her arms, gnats chewed her ankles, horseflies bit her neck. She was no different than this aluminum lawn chair, the frame tilting to a dangerous degree, no different than the deformed oranges, than the nightshade gone to seed by the side of the house.

  The troll put his pen down and got up, walked over, and pulled the afghan up to her shoulders, covering up her chest. He wheezed. “Smoking,” he said, rubbing his fat tongue over his rotten teeth. He moved one citronella candle, smelling of lemon and a needle's prick, closer to her feet, carried the second back to his table and set it down, careful not to spill wax on his work. In the flame she saw auras of tiny handwriting on onionskin paper. The letters were square and uniform. They looked more like a pattern than characters in the alphabet, and there was a picture of Michael Jackson torn out of a magazine and framed with carefully drawn roses and thunderbolts, a blurry newspaper oval of the president with 666 written on his forehead and one of the Virgin Mary surrounded by swastikas. At the top of the page he was working on was a Polaroid of her. He must have taken it while she was sleeping. Underneath, he'd written, GIRL.