Jesus Saves

by Darcey Steinke

  Her nightgown broke up like tissue paper in water as he carried her back through the woods toward the cabin where the exhausted girls lay sprawled on their bunks. On the ground, books nobody wanted were encased in ice and she saw her blue feet, the nails like bits of hard candy. She felt a slight repulsion for them, like a plate of half-eaten food.

  The cats, their fur the palest pink, each wore a necklace made of periwinkles and smoked cigarettes held in long rhinestone-studded holders. They sang in high trembling voices a sort of nonsense French and her little brother drew a unicorn with blue eye shadow and long silver lashes and he handed the picture to her and she thanked him and said she'd tape it up over her bed. It was easy really, these ideas, her mind, smoke-encased in ice. He threw the afghan onto the forest floor, spread the edges out with his foot, and laid her down near a pile of broken bricks.

  “Shut up!” Sandy said, and the sound of her own voice, high-pitched and incoherent, terrified her.

  “You must control your cough,” the troll said, his hair a mass of ice-covered strands. But she hadn't realized she was coughing. He squatted down and put his hand to her throat, fingers feeling for the glands just at her jawline, under her ear. “Swollen up like lima beans,” he smiled. “Poor little monkey.” But then the smile flew off his face and his features went blank as a hollow-eyed statue and she felt all the air leaving her life like an inner tube with a pinprick leak. The ice broke under her weight and she sank down into the lake's cold water. Her hand clawed out, frenzied and separate, until she grasped the lava rock and sat up in her bed, poured white sugar in her palm so the deer would tongue her lifeline, her blue-veined wrist. It felt nice, his urgent animal tongue. But still she couldn't help thinking, Is this all there is to it?

  The bear shook his head, took his hat off, looked down at her lying on the afghan spread over blue moss surrounded by broken plates. “My dear little girl,” he said sadly, “what else did you expect?”

  Seventeen: GINGER

  A hand-painted cross, given to him by a Latin American missionary, hung above the spy hole of the door to her father's room at the welfare hotel. She heard his old black shoes moving around the room, murmuring on the thin carpet. Oystery pigeon poops covered the window ledge to her left. Across the street, on the steps of the old stone church, a bearded man slept below the arch of headless angels. So much happened so fast that Ginger felt disoriented.

  The congregation voted for expansion and to add another pastor. Mulhoffer, her father said, delivered this information as if the decision was as important to the church's history as the signing of the Declaration of Independence was to America's. He'd actually made the last grandiose comparison and her father giggled nervously in a way that sounded, even to his own ears, a little bit satanic. A severance was arranged and he volunteered to vacate the parsonage immediately as long as his daughter could stay in the basement until the end of the month.

  A door opened down the hall and a man, the one she'd seen weeks earlier in the hotel window, poked his head out. If people drank steadily and long enough they mutated into another species: frogish bleary eyes, noses like raw hamburger, a swimmy countenance brimming with longing and dread. He examined her jeans, her oversized jacket, her stringy hairdo and, deciding she was not altogether untrustworthy, smiled shyly.

  “We already know all about Jesus,” he said in a friendly, cheerful voice, cynicism edging only the last word. “You tell him that.”

  “Okay,” Ginger said as the man turned back to his room and raised the volume on his TV set.

  Her father opened the door wearing a white T-shirt pulled out over a pair of black preacher pants, his arms thin and white as a child's.

  “Are the old guys harassing you?” he asked in a forced tone meant to dispel their mutual embarrassment.

  Ginger shook her head. “The man with the brush cut wants me to tell you he knows all about Jesus.”

  Her father laughed, “He sure does. That guy's son died in Vietnam and his wife gave the family savings to a bounty hunter who said he'd bring the boy back alive.” Ginger remembered him telling the story to her mother over dinner one night. Her father knew something secret about almost everyone in town. To hear these narratives was mesmerizing, but she worried that their accumulation had pushed her father over the edge.

  He shook his head. “I gave the poor guy ten dollars, which your mother ridiculed me about for months.”

  Her mother loved to tell stories of how her father had been tricked; the guy who said he had sleeping sickness, the man selling electric flashlights, the woman who came to the church office saying she needed money because her baby was sick.

  He moved a pile of books so she could sit on the bed. Ginger forgot that the furniture in the house all belonged to the church and she was shocked by how little he had, a few boxes of theology books—one marked sermons contained thousands of legal pad pages. The folded blanket from the church office sat neatly at the end of the bed. On the card table by the window he set up an altar. Both his paintings, the ark in the gloomy canal and the dark forest topped by celebratory lilies, leaned up against the glass. Before them he arranged his round-faced bust of Martin Luther, the bronze praying hands, his Oxford Bible, and a set of silver candleholders he'd given her mother one year for Christmas. Leaning against the tarnished metal was a curling snapshot of Sandy Patrick in her brownie uniform, a big goofy smile spread over her face.

  Ginger knew he and Ruth Patrick had become good friends. He used her minivan to move and last week Ginger saw them eating together at a fast-food place along the highway. She knew the tinfoil-covered paper plates of star-shaped sugar cookies and lemon squares came from Mrs. Patrick's kitchen. Even now, an open Tupperware container of brownies sat on top of the muted TV.

  “What's going on at the house?” her father asked as if the energy of his delivery could distract her from the half-eaten food and the room's general dinginess.

  “They steamed off the wallpaper in the dining room yesterday and today they're tearing up all the carpet.”

  Her father's pupils dilated and he got that spacey, nostalgic look. The ranch house had always been an embarrassment to him, the fake-wood paneling and hokey intercom system. Her mother had wanted to fix it up, but there was never any money to do it right, have drapes made, buy a proper couch. So the living room stood empty, just a ficus plant in one corner beside her father's pile of old New York Times.

  “What about my room? Your mother had that shade of blue mixed especially.”

  “The minister's wife is going to paint the whole house beige. She wants to give the place a country look.”

  Her father looked confused.

  “Dollies, quilts, silk flower arrangements in antique flour mills.” Ginger remembered the petite woman with the teddy bear on her cotton sweater, her features set in a stagy display of empathy as she asked questions about the water stain under the kitchen sink.

  “Oh dear,” her father grimaced. “God does work in mysterious ways.”

  Ginger laughed sharp and flat as a gunshot. She was so relieved he could still joke that her shoulders slipped down and she let a long breath up from her lungs.

  “Best to get out of there as soon as you can,” he continued. She hadn't told her father yet, but she'd been thinking of moving in with Ted. Since he disappeared, she thought of him like a delicate and slightly demented prince. She missed their late-night talks about time travel and getting his navel pierced. Distance gave him a narcotic and slightly saintly appeal.

  “So have you decided what you're going to do?” Ginger asked. The night of the news, his emphatic, wild-eyed ideas frightened her. He was going to Haiti to work with the poor; he was going to minister to the homeless and live among them on the streets.

  His neck flushed a prickly nervous pink, and his face grew even paler. “Well, you know the economy is not what it used to be,” he glanced at the picture of a beach put into a dime-store frame and hung over the sagging twin bed, “and I'm not a young man
either.”

  Ginger nodded as he brought the Oxford Bible onto his lap and pulled out a glossy pamphlet. “I'm thinking of something along these lines, where my experience would come in handy.” He passed her the rectangle of slick-colored paper.

  PEACE OF MIND, the pamphlet spelled out in soft blue pastel letters, the typeface cursive and feminine. Inside was a photograph of a synthetic stone gate with two azalea bushes on either side of a newly paved asphalt drive. Above hung an iron sign with gold letters: Forest Rest Cemetery. Opposite the photo was a checklist, reasons why a cemetery plot was a good investment.

  “I don't get it. You're going to work at the cemetery?”

  Her father leaned back on the folding chair, one she knew he'd taken from the church basement. “No. No. I'll be selling plots door to door.”

  He was tired. He was not himself. “You're kidding, right?” Ginger asked.

  “Not at all.” A smile bit into his cheeks, its rigid architecture all that held him up. Instead of moving into one of the condos on the highway, he moved to this monkish room in a sleazy hotel and decided to do the job that most made his skin crawl. Grief sent her father into this alternate reality.

  Ginger handed the pamphlet back. “You have gone completely nuts,” she said, spacing out each word for effect.

  “Maybe so.” He looked down at the photo as if considering the possibility. Yellow stains were burned under the arms of his T-shirt and his eyes looked wet and confused, their expression not unlike those of the hotel's other shell-shocked residents.

  “You know,” he said, “it's true what your mother used to say. I have no idea how the world works.”

  Even from the grave her mother's endless accusations, long rooted in her father's head, grew up like goat grass through cracks in cement. Her father always countered her mother by saying she was chained like a slave to the world of things. But Ginger knew all she wanted was to be respectable, have a clean couch in her living room and a few nice dresses hanging in her closet.

  “If you could have heard Mulhoffer,” her father's own voice trembled.

  “Who cares.?” Ginger asked. “The man is a moron.”

  Admiration filtered across his face but then the light drained out of his eyes. He'd decided there was no use trying to explain. “Of course you're right,” he said unconvincingly, his head swiveling like an adolescent's over her shoulder to the muted TV.

  He bolted up and raised the volume. “Did you hear?” he asked, his eyes locked to the screen. “Another girl is missing.”

  Ginger swung around on the bed, watched the video footage of police in black rain slickers being led by German shepherds on leashes through the woods.

  “Who is it?”

  “Shush,” her father nodded at the newscaster, a young man who jumbled his vowels and looked a little too excited as he delivered the facts. Police were searching the woods between Willow Brook subdivision and Creek Mist Condo Complex, where neighbors said kids sometimes played. The screen flashed to the house, a mint-green split-level. Press gathered under black umbrellas on the front lawn. The mother provided home-video footage; flickering and fuzzy sun dappled a picnic table covered with a red gingham cloth. And then the girl, a towheaded child with slate blue eyes in a strappy sundress, turned toward the camera. “Oh my God,” Ginger said, “I know that girl.”

  Press vans lined the street in front of the girl's house, their white satellite dishes collecting cold drizzle. Inside one of the campers, a pinched-faced woman sat typing intently into her laptop computer. And inside a bland rental car, an older man talked on his cellular phone, glancing occasionally at his legal pad notes. The rain kept most of the media inside their vehicles, though she overheard two men in parkas standing outside a minivan talking about Sandy Patrick.

  Smoke leaked from the carport next door to the girl's house, where a teenaged boy grilled hot dogs and filled his entrepreneurial cooler with Diet Cokes, and on the front lawn neighbors stood in little groups under umbrellas. Ginger saw two girls holding a candle and looking solemnly up at the house. A young female newscaster stood under a striped CBS umbrella and complained to the cameraman that Oprah had already offered the mother big money for an exclusive and she heard Maury Povich had checked into the Hilton out by the airport.

  A truck from the local TV station was parked in the driveway. Thick black cords ran out the back end, over the cement walk and through the front door. Ginger leaned inside, saw two men sitting below six screens, simultaneously showing a woman with the same fine features as her daughter say, “. . . please, whoever you are, let my little girl go. She's all I have in this world and I—.” Her mouth trembled, refused to make words, formed into the primordial O, and she stuck a Kleenex to her lips and pressed her head into the neck of the bald dentist. His little pony tail shifted, the one the girl always referred to as a rat's tongue.

  The man inside the truck swiveled his chair around to face the other man sitting in front of the soundboard. “Bet you ten to one,” he said, “that little girl is already dead.”

  “T-R-O-U-B-L-E!” the hippie spelled out, leaning out the screen door of his white house. The smell of rich dirt and sweet pot blossoms wafted around him. “That's what we called the spooky little girls down on the commune. There was one I remember who wore nothing but men's shirts, always had field flowers hanging out of her hair, and told everybody she was Jesus’ little sister.” The hippie shook his head. “Man, it's like I'm trying to tell you, everything is out of whack.”

  “I need to keep looking,” Ginger said. She didn't have time to hear one of the hippie's apocalyptic manifestos. “Maybe she's waiting back at my house.”

  The hippie looked skeptical. “Just don't call the police,” he said. “She'll turn up next week at the bus station in Palo Alto and the next thing you know we'll see her on Entertainment Tonight hanging on the arm of some movie star.”

  “You think?” Ginger said hopefully.

  “Sure,” the hippie said, “that's what always happened to all those girls, either that,” his loopy smile tensed, “or something else.”

  No, he hadn't seen the girl, though she'd taken to calling him late in the night, singing her favorite songs to him over the telephone and asking if she could come over to score, Steve said as they stood in the living room, just inside the door. He wore a towel around his waist, seemed bored, kept his eyes half closed, his mouth slack.

  “She's a freaky chick,” he said. “For all I know she could have walked into the woods and killed herself.”

  “Did she say she was going to do that?”

  “She said a lot of crazy stuff. How do I know?” he said, glancing down the hall, where Ginger suspected a woman waited in his bed, one of the older ladies who bought him tanks of gasoline and took him out for steak.

  Her room was empty. Her sleeping bag wadded up on the bottom sheet, a fine layer of plaster dust covering everything from where the workmen were putting up drywall in the corner. Ginger flopped down on her bed. She held on to this picture, to the exclusion of any thought or sensation, the girl sprawled on her bed sleeping deeply like a child, sweat dampening the nape of her neck. But now this last hope dissolved, leaving her sick with worry. Clenching her eyes shut so hard the usual silver blackness turned to orange, she heard blood thumping in her ears. Please God bring her back and she saw the girl walking around the mall with ten dollars in her pocket for an orange julius and a pair of earrings, the girl scratching a bug bite on the back of her calf and laughing in that self-conscious way she thought of as glamorous, talking about super-models, her favorite Cindy, getting her hair soft as silk pajamas, and the aggressive way she yanked perfume samples out of magazines. If you bring her back, she prayed to God, I'll take care of her myself. She imagined him like a black hole with a swirly ghost face and a booming, computerized voice. Better to pray to Jesus and his bullet-riddled body, blood trickling from the corner of his mouth.

  Highway lights illuminated falling ice like patches of free-form static,
and the crimson Steak and Ale sign floated up on the hill like a message from an angry God. Rain turned to ice, so the asphalt was slick as oil, and the few cars on the road slid like old dogs trying to keep their balance. Ginger's umbrella blew back with a tug. Several ribs were broken so she pitched it down into the muddy ditch. Slushy water moved sluggishly into a drainage pipe. Drops of ice hit her face in a sensation cold and sharp but not altogether unpleasant.

  Mud froze up in ridges like whipped cream, made soft crushing sounds under the heels of her tennis shoes. Branches rattled against one another like dime-store wind chimes as she moved onto the dirt path past the cat skeleton and the broken-down high chair. Ice glazed the old socks and bits of newspaper, froze bugs to dead leaves, and gathered in mealy drifts on the ground.

  The barn was dark. She'd half hoped Ted would be in front of the fire, reading the I-Ching and toasting marshmallows. Ashes surrounded the TV like a moat; plastic carnations scattered over the dirt floor. Moving the toe of her tennis shoe around in the ash, she felt for the deer's head, but it was gone. A sheet of newspaper fluttered at the edge of the ash, diaphanous and nuanced as a scarf, a phantom with a white face. Startled, she thought someone said something, but when she turned her head all she heard was the rain's flat report on the soggy papers in the corner. Drips formed a discordant melody and entered her mind like speech. She listened to the wind flap against the dead leaves on the forest floor. She felt stupid now for thinking the girl might be here. The hippie was probably right: she was headed for Colorado or California or anyone of those states that looked pretty in photographs. Wearing headphones, reading a magazine, the girl was probably curled into a seat on a dark and buoyant nighttime bus.

  Wind spun the branches against one another like a chaotic chandelier. Ginger walked out the barn doorway, stood looking into the woods, thought another deer might be moving among the trees, or the ghost deer had come back to haunt the woods, searching for its head. Coming around the side of the barn, she saw a figure and though at first she couldn't make out the features, she presumed it was Ted, but then stray condominium light showed a small hunched man with a long white beard and bulging eyes. Anger shot off him, dense and oppressive as an opened oven door, as he yanked her arm so hard the bone wheezed and strained against her shoulder socket. He swung his arm up and hit her in the face, thumb jabbing into her eye, the ridge of his fingers breaking the bridge of her nose. Blood ran into her mouth and she felt dizzy.