Jesus Saves

by Darcey Steinke

  “I'll let you go if you tell them you ran away from camp and spent all these weeks counting dead leaves on the forest floor and making friends with little animals,” the troll began thoughtfully as if he'd been practicing this speech all night. “If you can tell me the name of the bird with the highest IQ, or the exact weight of the one-legged Indian chief's beautiful daughter,” he stared at the inside of her wrist where the tendons stood up like piano strings. “I'm going to let you go,” he said in a firm voice, meant to convince himself, “but not until the very last minute.”

  “No talking allowed,” the unicorn said, because to fly he had to meditate, think about angel food cake and milkweed spores, of loosened balloons and grocery bags caught in the wind. The mall from above resembled sand dunes, and the myriad condominium complexes, patches of mushrooms. Wind stung her ears and jerked her hair back. She crouched behind the unicorn's head, her hands fisted in the long hair of his mane. His fur smelled like old snow and was sooty and damp, pricked up on end with effort. Below the cloud cover, school buses lined up behind the cement-block building and a smudge of gray became the flapping American flag. She was surprised how shabby and ephemeral all the buildings looked, like an overturned junk drawer filled with gray ribbon and ugly dime-store beads. There was the 7-Eleven where she and her brother played pinball, drank Slurpees, and ate silver-wrapped Hershey kisses. She recognized her block by the strange triangular cul-de-sac, and the unicorn spiraled down until he hovered like a dragonfly just above the split-level's bay window. Inside, her mother slept on the couch under her winter coat, her face above the navy wool so slack and lined that she looked like a different person. On the coffee table was a drawing Sandy made in kindergarten of a stick figure with arms coming out of its gourd-shaped head and a naked doll with stiff black hair. Watching her mother's hand clutching the coat's material to her chin, Sandy realized that for a long time before she'd gone to camp she'd felt sorry for her mother. In her head she created a string of pink hearts and red rose petals, and clasped this necklace around her poor mother's neck. Through the doorway, Sandy saw her little brother sitting at the kitchen table eating a TV dinner. He'd turned his head to look at the poppy-colored refrigerator, a fancy one with double doors and a tinkling ice machine. There, held up with a magnet, was a pencil drawing he'd done of her face and at the bottom he'd written Sandy Come Home.

  The troll carried a blue plastic bucket and sang “Rock-A-Bye-Baby” as he entered the dark room. He bent over and turned on the pink shell night-light. Steam rose in fragmentary tendrils from the pail's lip. He sat on the edge of the bed and sank the yellow dishrag into the bucket and crushed a stream of water out with his fists. He washed her hip and thigh in tiny round strokes as if he were buffing a beloved sports car or stripping an antique table. Through the cage of her lashes she watched his face flush and his eyes fill up with tears and she felt grateful and wanted to tell him it was all okay, that God could still forgive him if he'd change his ways at once.

  “That's exactly right,” the butterfly, who was always looking for any opportunity to proselytize, interjected. “Miracles happen every day! Take the little baby who crawled onto the open window ledge, tried to reach out and touch a bird on a nearby branch and began to fall.

  ‘''No, baby!’ a man screamed out and ran forward. He arrived just in time to catch the infant in his cradled arms.” The butterfly sighed dramtically, “Now isn't that a sweet story?”

  Sandy nodded her head and the moon sent a ring of light into the room that moved across the floor like a rock's ripple on water, and she tried to get the dream back but the unicorn had lost his concentration. Crippled with exhaustion, he needed to be led through the dark wood.

  Eleven: GINGER

  In the dream she was singing off a printed sheet at the new-age center. The melodies were like campfire songs and the lyrics full of eagles soaring above mountaintops and lines about beautiful souls dancing in celestial moonlight. Cheerful men in pastel sweaters took her father away to the county hospital. She felt the lyrics bite into her scalp, slither into her brain like baby snakes. As the group chanted their affirmation, she managed to sneak out of the cinderblock building. But all around the perimeter stood a chain-link fence. Spirals of barbwire laced the top, and on the other side a Doberman with a bloodied, bandaged foot foamed at the mouth and stuck his snout angrily through the metal mesh.

  Throwing off the sleeping bag, she limped up the stairs, still wearing the thrift-store blouse with the Peter Pan collar and her mother's floral skirt, the waistband twisted to one side. The house reeked of phantom pot roast and ink off the Sunday Times. She hallucinated tinkling silverware and her mother's lilac perfume. Turning on the faucet in the kitchen, Ginger washed out her father's coffee cup and scrubbed the oat bits stuck to the edge of his cereal bowl, then let water gather into a glass and carried it to the rec room, where she sat under the gloomy Easter lily painting and contemplated putting on one of her father's jazz records. She liked the blue duo-tone covers and the way the scratchy music crackled out of the speakers. Sipping the chlorine-spiked water, a light froth spun on the cloudy surface; she noticed that the latch on the window behind the TV was open. Hairs on her arms pricked; her flesh goose-pimpled as she walked over and slammed the frame shut, twisted the metal lock. Anyone could shimmy up the drainpipe, latch onto the deck rail, and slip inside the window; that's how a convict escaped from a chain gang had raped a lady the next state over. He climbed onto the deck, opened the sliding glass door, found a steak knife in the kitchen, and accosted her on the bed, where she was folding clothes still warm from the dryer. The lock on the kitchen doorknob lay horizontal. Her father forgot to lock it when he went to church. Ginger slid the button vertical, which stiffened the flimsy latch bolt, not that somebody couldn't kick the hollow plywood door down or break a pane and shift the lock. The dining-room window was locked, but at ground level one smash of a hammer and a stranger would be standing beside the table with the white lace dolly and the bowl of plastic fruit.

  Ginger saw this same sort of split-level built at the end of the subdivision. Each house took two weeks: first the pine skeleton, and then they stapled up the pressed-board walls and stuffed them with pink insulation. Using a chain saw anybody could cut through the house's exterior. As a child she set garlic on the window ledge to repel vampires and kept a baton under her pillow to bash intruders in the head. She practiced fire drills incessantly. Her father tried to calm her by insisting God watched over her, but Ginger knew if she had to believe in God and the angels, then devils and monsters existed too. Besides, God was always letting all kinds of bad things happen. It would be different if car crashes and murders were written off to chance, but what scared Ginger as a child was that God just sat on his golden throne and watched these things happen. Sure, he watched over you but that didn't keep you safe. Actually it was even scarier to think of somebody staring at you all the time, like the disapproving ladies in church.

  Ginger walked down the hallway to her mother's bedroom. Her father kept the window cracked open to air out the room, trying to rid the space of mothballs and that medicinal ointment, but Ginger saw it as a way to lure her mother's soul back, give her a chance to hover around the bedspread ruffle or be absorbed into the wood grain of the dresser. Ginger lay down in the position her mother took in the last days of her life, slumped sideways, one leg hanging over the edge. She imagined her blood growing sluggish, her own heart stopping, veins fraying, and her soul lifting up with the slippery pluck of an avocado pit out of the greasy green pulp. But what if her consciousness gave out with her corporeal envelope? What if her mother'd become a piece of meat like the hunks of steak wrapped in cellophane at the grocery store? On her last day, Ginger rubbed her mother's feet with peppermint oil and brought flowers from the yard, lilacs and sweet-smelling hyacinths. She brought items that might stir her memory, photographs, the little ceramic deer that sat on the mantle, her beloved blue glass beads. But no object could link her mother with th
is material world; only Ginger's hand entwined in hers allowed her mother to close her eyes and breathe with a little less effort.

  The window in her father's bedroom was locked; he'd even wedged a branch into the side groove to assure that if a pane broke the window couldn't be raised, he who assured people that there was an afterlife, that faith in Jesus could set you free from life's worry and fear. His bed was unmade and she knew he hadn't been back to the house.

  After the service, Mulhoffer, surrounded by trustees, listened to the Deerpath Creek pastor talk about how his congregation used marketing techniques, phoning local residents to decide what services the church would offer, how their business components were thriving, the health club, the day-care center, the mechanic's shop, all of which attracted more people to the Lord. She'd slipped past them and into her dad's office, where he was standing by the window with a cigarette, blowing smoke through the screen, his body as languid as the smoke.

  “I am utterly demoralized,” he said. “They don't have to fire me because if I ever have to share the altar again with that jackass, I'll quit.” He couldn't handle competition. Ginger knew that was why her father had chosen the ministry, because it kept him above the fray of the free market. And too, he preferred dealing with women and children; other men always made him nervous. Exhausted, he was probably napping on his office floor now, dreaming of the Latin mass or Bonhoeffer's plot to assassinate Hitler.

  Up close, the sodden branch spilled wood pulp, and his bed reeked a little. Ginger knew he hadn't changed his sheets in weeks. She worried that like Christ, her father would allow brutish and ignorant people to hurt him or that he'd take martyrdom to the extreme and harm himself. He'd seen enough suicides: fat Mr. Reinholt electrified by a clock radio in his own tub, and the German lady who'd used her son's BB gun to shoot herself in the corner of the eye. Just this summer a teenager hung himself with an electrical cord off a beam in his basement. There was something contagious about suicide, like those kids who gassed themselves in Bergen. Her father's faith might not sustain him against the congregation's endless onslaught of private misery. He'd even admitted that sometimes he felt like a human trash receptacle and that he knew his flock was roaming away.

  A lady in pink sweatpants on her way home from aerobics at the health club picked Ginger up along the highway. Her car smelled like cream as it just begins to curdle, and the woman talked about her word-processing job at the insurance company and how her husband, a guy named Chuck, had recently found the Lord.

  I didn't know he was lost, Ginger thought as the lady pulled up in front of the welfare hotel downtown.

  “This is no place for a girl like you,” the lady said. Ginger assured her she was meeting her father at his church down the block and that it wasn't dangerous down here.

  “No more than the mall parking lot where that woman got molested,” she said.

  The lady looked skeptical but unlocked the doors and let Ginger off at the curb.

  Staring up at the brick hotel filled with dim blue light as if the moon lingered inside, she saw that only one window on the second floor was illuminated by a dangling bulb. A man in a wrinkled white shirt and dark dress pants stood by the window. Like her father in his robes and the old Germans from the church downtown, the man looked antiquated and exhausted by his connection to history, so different than the pastel suburban types sprung fully formed out of the mall's water fountains. Ginger figured something catastrophic had happened to the man, something that ended his life's narrative, that trapped him in a time out of time, somewhere around 1958.

  Next to the hotel was the wig shop run by a Chinese man who smoked opium and did tattooing on the side. Before the accident Ted saved for a little red dragon with sapphire blue eyes. Styrofoam heads with starchy, flamboyant wigs peopled the storefront window. Usually there were several men who stood outside the liquor store, but because of blue laws the place was closed until Monday morning. A red-faced guy in a windbreaker sat in an old Pontiac parked out front and flashed Ginger a cynical smile that set off his hacking smoker's cough.

  She felt like she was walking on a movie set, that the buildings were one-dimensional. It was that creeping Disneyland feeling again, where everything was make-believe, one attraction as false and inauthentic as the next.

  In the parking lot, adjacent to the liquor store and across from the church, lay a dead pigeon and a bunch of rusty engine parts. A fire blazed up out of a chemical canister and two round-shouldered men in hooded sweatshirts passed a quart of beer between them. A couple of naked dolls hung in the bushes under the boarded-up windows of the church; hair cropped with blunt children's scissors, their fat bellies streaked with mud. Below the arch of headless angels, the red doors were padlocked and so she walked around to the side door, where graffiti tags spread over the gray stone. Ginger swung the side door open, saw the light on in the hallway and her father's black raincoat thrown over the radiator. She glanced into his old office, where an open box of bulletins and an ancient carbon copier lay in the middle of the floor. She climbed the stairs to the choir loft, narrow and smelling like oiled wood. The angle of the curve always reminded her of the spiral stairs to fairy tale towers. Somebody lived up here. A blanket was folded over a pew and a paper plate of chicken bones balanced on the organ keyboard. Ginger tiptoed to the railing and looked over at her father standing alone in the light of a single candle.

  The silver cross was gone, as were the tall candleholders and the red glass eternal flame. The slab of marble that served as the altar table and the cherry-wood carvings of the apostles had been ripped out. Everything was sold to pay the new church's mortgage. Her father spread his black shirt out so the dark sleeves hung over the raw wood. He stood in his white T-shirt. The tiny glass decanter of red wine and the tin of communion wafers sat ceremoniously on the black fabric. His lips moved silently as he held up a round wafer, broke it, and offered half to the wall. Ginger tipped back on her heels to see that he'd taped up Sandy's school picture and was now pretending to make her eat. Eventually he placed the wafer in his own mouth and picked up the silver chalice, offering it first to God and then to Sandy's lips. Ginger sunk her fingernails into the fat of her palm as she watched him drink from the cup, then place it carefully back with the other implements, shiny and strange in the candlelight, as the innards of a freshly killed cat.

  As she came around the side of the church Ginger lost her footing on the weed-ridden sidewalk. In the lot across the street she saw Sandy Patrick hovering between two men, her blurry figure flittering among orange flames. Pale and insubstantial as an angel, Sandy wore her mother's oversized raincoat and a pair of electric blue pumps. Foundation streaked down her neck, silver eye shadow glittered under her brow, and on each cheek was a heavy spot of sparkling rouge. One of the men laughed, the girl said something, and Ginger recognized her voice from the hippie's house and from Steve's apartment.

  “What are you doing here?” Ginger asked the girl, who looked less surprised than sullen, obviously trying to decide whether to acknowledge Ginger or not.

  “Trying to score some weed,” the girl said.

  The man with the blond mustache and ratty eyes shook his head. “Oh man, we don't know nothing about that.”

  “These guys said they'd give me stuff to smoke.” The girl looked at Ginger, sucking on a strand of her dirty brown hair.

  “You're hearing things, girl,” the second man said, his pale, pockmarked face squeezed like toothpaste out of his hood.

  “You said you were going to give me some weed,” the girl raised her voice.

  “Now you just calm down,” the first man said.

  “I won't,” the girl said and started to scream. Both men turned and ran along the parking lot fence and disappeared into an alley. The guy waiting outside the liquor store started his engine and drove off.

  “Shut up!” Ginger said, trying to grab her arm, but the girl swung away and slipped her fingers through the chain-link fence.

  “I'm staying
here as long as it takes,” the girl yelled, “and you can't do anything about it.” She swung her hair and kicked her leg out awkwardly. “Fuck you.” The girl screamed so loud the noise shot up like a bottle rocket, sent vibrations through the dark air.

  “Let's go home.” Ginger pried the girl's hands loose from the metal mesh.

  “No! I don't want to go home,” she said. “You go home.”

  “Come on,” Ginger said, her tone implying that the girl was childish, “you're acting stupid.”

  The girl quieted down, but she wouldn't come off the fence, just hung limply, staring into the fire. Ginger stood with her hand on the girl's narrow wrist and watched her father walk furtively out of the church in his long black raincoat, his Bible with the electrical-tape spine and the leather communion kit under his arm. Ginger realized he didn't believe his prayers worked in the new church on the highway, that to satisfy himself and his God, he had to come down here.

  “Okay,” the girl finally said, “just don't tell my mother. She gets mad if she thinks she has to worry too much.”

  * * *

  Bugs tangled in the yellow halogen streetlight and Ginger watched a man stagger out of a bar to pee against a parked car. His shirt was opened to his belt, his face so pale it seemed like he wore greasepaint and a little black eyeliner. Midway down the old highway, after the car dealerships but before the strip malls, the road degenerated for half a mile into Quonset-hut bars and shops that rented porno videos. The girl talked steadily about how her mother's boyfriend was a dentist, that he wore loafers and smelled of the grape fluoride he used to pack patients’ teeth. Ginger gripped the girl's wrist and pulled her across the deserted highway. She just kept talking about how even though her mother's boyfriend's hair was receding, he still pulled the fringe back in a gross little pony tail and that he thought he was so intelligent just because he'd seen every movie in the classic section of the video store and always won when they played Trivial Pursuit. Worst of all was how her mother wanted to sleep over at his fancy condo almost every night and when she was home she acted like a goofy teenager, giving herself facials and asking if her new jumpsuit looked sexy on her.