God Says No

by James Hannaham

  “Can I can you Pookie-pie?” she asked, still giggling.

  “You can call me anything you want, except late for dinner.”

  I swear I had real feelings for her. But what are real feelings when it comes to love? If the love doesn’t work out, feelings that drove you stone crazy one year could feel like a feather in your ear by the next. Feelings feel real enough when you’ve got them, but sometimes they don’t mean much more in the scheme of things than what the weather was on this same date last year. When you think about it, it gets tough to put your emotions into boxes called Real and Not Real, or even Sexual and Not Sexual. The way a friend of mine puts it, the problem with attractions might be that they’re all sexual.

  Annie and I finished our meals, tossed out our trash, and headed for Tomorrowland. When we stood under the monorail, she slipped her fingers between mine.

  We went back to Disney World all the time. I didn’t need an excuse. Annie loved Big thunder mountain Railroad and the Indy Speedway, but she also wanted to be near families. She had left her mother, three brothers, and two sisters back in Samoa. Her grandfather on her mother’s side was also still alive. She wrote a letter to all of them at least once a week. Sometimes she wrote personal messages to other relatives in the margins.

  One time she went up to a Samoan family outside Spaceship Earth. It turned out that they had known her father. The mother spoke of Annie’s dad as somebody who had been very kind to their family. I would have liked him, I knew. He was a tuna fisherman, a devout Christian, and a generous leader in his community. When Annie was seven, his boat capsized in a storm and he drowned.

  The Samoan family insisted that we spend the day with them. While we strolled through the park, they explained the Samoan perspective on life. It sounded a lot like Christianity in the South—you had to do everything your parents said, even after you grew up and got married. Annie whispered that that was why so many Samoans committed suicide.

  When we had all gotten tired of walking, we found a table by a snack bar. The mother, Mrs. Tatupu, brought out a couple of Tupperware containers filled with a delicious beef dish called supasui. She handed out forks from a cardboard box and sat down next to Annie.

  “Anone, how is it you’ve come to the mainland?” she asked. I hadn’t heard my new girlfriend—I loved to look at her and think the word girlfriend—tell the whole story myself yet, so I leaned over to listen.

  “I came to study,” she told the older woman. “The Bible.” she smiled. “And I thought Florida wouldn’t be too big a change in climate.”

  “But everyone said—” Mrs. Tatupu began. Her expression became curious. She glanced at me, trying to answer a question she had about me without asking it. “Oh,” she sighed, though her face still appeared confused.

  “No,” Annie said to Mrs. Tatupu, touching my knee. “It’s not what you think.”

  Once we got done with the dish, though, the family said a few words in Samoan to Annie and left us, rushing ahead to the Living seas exhibit instead of exploring France. I tried to convince them to continue on with us, but Annie stepped hard on my foot.

  We said good-bye and entered the neat gardens of the France pavilion. Annie didn’t say very much during our walk, and when we got to the bridge between France and the United Kingdom, she stopped and gripped the stones at the edge. A strong wind threw her hair up, so she knotted it tightly and folded her arms, staring across the reflecting pool at the geodesic dome.

  “I did something foolish,” she said, “because I wanted to leave Samoa.” Annie had placed a personal ad in several Florida newspapers, after a friend told her how to do it. She thought she could find a rich man to pay her airfare. In the ad, she called herself exotic and leggy. A few men responded, and she started writing back and forth to one of them, a guy named Kent. Without her asking, he sent her a plane ticket. Knowing that her mother would never allow her to go under any circumstances, she ran off to Pago Pago without telling anybody, not even her best friend, and got on a plane to tampa.

  For three weeks she lived with Kent, a survivalist type with a bushy beard and a beat-up truck. He did inventory for a software company, but he spent his spare time researching how to live in the wilderness. Neither of them thought the other was a good match, but Annie didn’t have any money or anyplace else to go. Soon Kent decided that she owed him sex, and he tied her to a chair in his basement for four days, only letting her go to the bathroom once a day, when he got home from work. During the time she sat in the chair, she promised Christ that if He got her out of that situation she would serve Him for the rest of her life. On the fifth day she untangled the restraints and crawled through a basement window. She ran away on the public bus and found a church that helped her. Going to Central Florida Christian College was part of fulfilling her promise to God.

  As she told me all this, the corners of her eyes filled with tears. “My family disowned me when they found out I had deceived them. I guess I hoped Mrs. Tatupu didn’t know. But she didn’t have to bring it up. Why couldn’t she have let me pretend, for one day?”

  “But what about all the letters you send home?” I asked.

  “They never write back.”

  Well knock me down and steal my teeth, I thought. They abandoned her. I stooped down and wrapped my arms around her. She wept, and a jolt of electricity went through me, because I realized for the first time that Annie was as cut off from her community and the rest of the world as I was. My toes tingled and went numb, a punch landed in my rib cage, and for a few seconds I couldn’t breathe. I had no way to explain this fantastic sensation, so I came to the obvious conclusion. I meant it more than I had ever meant anything.

  “I love you,” I said.

  In church they said that premarital fornication was a sin, but I didn’t realize that fornication meant sex. Everything I learned about men and women came from kids on the street, or the echoes of right and wrong that you pick up in polite conversation. I had figured out that you kissed a little, you squeezed the breasts, the penis went into the vagina, and the man thrust it in and out a whole bunch. It sounds loco now, but I never quite put it together that that added up to sex, and a child might come along as a result. Sex just sounded like a funny thing everybody wanted to do but couldn’t, or did too much and suffered. Above everything, you had to keep it a secret.

  Annie and I got closer than a boy and a girl were supposed to at Central, and we created our own private rules. She had the key to the kitchen and we would raid the refrigerator at night sometimes. Since we were boyfriend and girlfriend, I figured that the man had to want sex from the girl, but since all the secretive business scared me and I didn’t know if I wanted it or not, or whether the Lord would get angry, I pretended to want it, and that made it a joke I could take back if need be.

  On our kitchen nights, Annie would tell me what time she’d be in there and I’d come find her. We couldn’t turn on the lights because that would attract attention and get us in trouble. I didn’t want my supply of free pralines and mud cake cut off, no sir.

  One time I got to the kitchen late because I’d run into Russ on campus. Actually I saw him across the quad and went out of my way to bump into him. I missed and loved and hated him and simmered with jealousy because he had made the Dean’s List. He had grown his hair out slightly, and a recent shower had slicked it and separated it into ringlets. He was extremely handsome and fresh-smelling. Chilly breezes kept tickling the green, making his nipples stand out under his dress shirt—I couldn’t stop looking at that. Thankfully, Russ never looked at my looking, but he seemed genuinely concerned about me for once, and I wanted to soak that up.

  My erection pounded hotly along my thigh as I arrived in the kitchen. I tiptoed across the cold room, thinking maybe Annie had left. But she’d waited for me in the dark under a long metal table. She barked, leapt out from under the table, and grabbed my leg. I let out a big gasp like a lady. Annie kept pretending to be a dog and we wrestled playfully and shoved each other around
. I joked with her about wanting to make love. Then I kissed her and the joke disappeared. We ground our faces together and went all the way. We scrunched against a bunch of big sacks of cornmeal flour while we did it and flour got all over our clothes and in our hair. Annie whispered that I should pull out, but too late.

  “Gary,” she breathed, lying on top of me, chin to chin. “That wasn’t cool.”

  We heard footsteps outside and froze. The shadow of a head passed the square doors on the far side of the room but didn’t stop.

  “I’m sorry,” I panted. “I’ll ask God’s forgiveness.”

  A worried expression branched out across her face and curled her eyebrows. She answered quietly, through her teeth. “that might not be enough.”

  THREE

  A few weeks after we met Mrs. Tatupu, we stood up in church, as we always did at the end of the service. A younger minister, Michael Woodson, a man of color with a shaved head, red lips, and a complexion like tea with milk, was filling in for Reverend Franklin, who had a family emergency. He encouraged us to call him Mike. Unlike his elder’s hard speeches and deep, booming voice, this young fellow preached a real personal, friendly sermon about reconciling with your family, using the story of Joseph’s father as his basis. Not my thing at all, but I gave him a shot.

  Minister Mike described his grandfather’s stubbornness about making peace with his son, who had suffered under the demon of alcoholism for many years. I thought of my own daddy’s problem with the bottle. Minister Mike’s father had developed bone cancer and died before his father could humble himself. You’d think the grandfather wouldn’t care, but he was devastated. Mike stressed the point that there was only time to patch things up while your relatives were alive. The congregation broke into applause, which I had never heard in that church before.

  As the sermon came to a close, Mike called on us to open our hearts to Jesus, and encouraged anybody who felt the spirit to go on up to the altar. I looked at my shoes. I’d never had a true baptism of the spirit, like everybody approaching the stage.

  When I turned thirteen, after what Euge and I did, I prayed every night for a year for Jesus to change me into a likeable person. “Yes, my son,” He’d say, in a deep voice like a preacher on WGWT. “It will happen any day now, Gary.” But nothing changed. Was He too busy? Did it just take a long time? Why would Jesus promise and then not do it?

  “What does Jesus say when He talks to you?” I asked my brother Joe. Joe was big like me and good in science. He kept a chemistry set under a corner of our bed, potatoes on sticks in plastic cups on our windowsills, and a hurt bird in an animal hospital in the yard.

  Without looking up from his forbidden X-Men comic book, Joe said, “Jesus don’t talk to me. He don’t talk to nobody. That’s some hokum they say at church.”

  Confusion and fear came over me. Joe stared at me like a puzzle he didn’t feel like solving. “You think God’s talking to you? In your head? Boy, you’re stone crazy.” He iced his rejection with a sneer.

  “No I’m not. If that’s not Jesus, then whose voice is answering my prayers?”

  “Gary. Damn. I must say, I’ve never known anybody who could fool themselves as good as you. That’s your own voice. You’re pretending that it’s Jesus.”

  “No. He really talks to me.”

  “Prove it.”

  “I don’t say ‘thou’ and ‘thee’ when I talk. Jesus talks the old talk to me.”

  “Boy, if Jesus is answering your prayers, you must be asking for the wrong shit.”

  Joe rolled over and ignored me. I tried to tame my doubts, but they crept in anyway, and when I prayed after that, I couldn’t hear the voice anymore. Every night I tried to hear His voice again, and nothing happened. I followed Christianity, but in my heart, I believed God had hung up on me.

  A hymn played quietly on the organ. Minister Mike’s voice became soft and serious as he invited us up for a baptism of the spirit. Annie slid her glasses off and set them on the pew behind us. Then she raised one arm to the sky and whispered “Jesus, Jesus.” At first I thought something was wrong. But soon I knew that Jesus had filled her heart. I stepped back so that she could walk down the carpet, toward the front of the room. Still repeating the Lord’s name, she sauntered up to the minister, until I could no longer see her in the crowd of believers at the pulpit. What about me, Lord? I said inside. Reach into my heart!

  My shirt collar and tie felt tight. The salvation period had almost ended. Fewer people moved to the front, where raised hands swayed back and forth like royal palms in a tropical breeze. The hymn grew louder. Sweat soaked my shirt, so I tucked it further into my slacks and loosened my tie.

  Two weeks before, the many classes I skipped had caught up to me. Notes from professors had been arriving in my dorm mailbox, warning that I would soon reach the magic number of absences that guaranteed a failure, but I had slipped them under paper towels in my garbage pail to ease the forgetting. On Saturday, though, I’d gotten one from the dean’s office that said I had to take the next year off. I tried to burn it, but I set off the smoke alarm. I blew out the note and tried to silence the high-pitched beeping by fanning the alarm with my hands, but I couldn’t reach. By that time people had started to bang on the door, so I let in a neighbor and he took care of it.

  In the middle of my panic, I’d put the note down on Russ’s desk. Later that afternoon, sitting at his desk, he held it up behind his back, displaying the charred edge. I’d been daydreaming about his successful future as I watched him study.

  “I’ll miss you,” he said, without turning around.

  I said my worst fear. “No you won’t.”

  He spun around in the swivel chair and flung the note at me like a ninja star. “You’re right,” he said. The note zipped behind our bunk. I left it there.

  There wasn’t a reason to stick around. I answered a newspaper ad and found a job doing telephone interviews at a market research company called Daytona Reports, and moved into the Heritage Estates Condominium Apartments. I decided to tell my folks I had enrolled in summer classes. With all my school friends shrinking away, I needed church pretty desperately if I wanted a social life. But everybody else had gotten saved.

  The way our classmates talked about it, getting saved came naturally, like a sneeze. Jesus would illuminate your soul and touch your heart until it blew like a volcano into ecstasy and new life. Color and peace would flood your world. Annie’s friend Sam had fallen off his bicycle on the way back from church. “Jesus hit me with an energy beam!” he exclaimed. His girlfriend, Lydia, said salvation was like trying to think of a name you couldn’t remember. It would come faster if you didn’t force it. Maybe getting saved and liking women happened the same way. Maybe if I let go and let God in, He’d mend everything.

  I raised one timid arm into the air, then both. “Thank you, Jesus,” I said. “thank you, Jesus. Thank you, Jesus.” I stepped into the aisle and took baby steps to the altar, gaining confidence with each one.

  Nobody’s energy beam hit me. In fact, I feared that the Lord would strike me dead for pretending to experience the power of His love. I had so much nervous guilt inside me that my hands shook. Of course, that made it look like the Lord was healing my soul. I glanced around the crowd of people, all in rapture, eyes closed, heads thrown back, hopping in place, sweating, pumping their hands to heaven: old folks, children, middle-aged women, everybody. I envied the honesty of their belief. None of them seemed as unlucky as me. The faith of a child is so precious, I thought. How can anybody ever get it back?

  By the time I spotted Annie in the crowd, I suppose I did seem to have changed. She gasped with delight when I showed up at her side. She pushed her hair out of her eyes, clapped her hands together, and wept, overcome with gratitude to the Lord. She wrapped her arms around my waist. The entire congregation raised their voices to sing a beautiful hymn of reconciliation between fathers and sons, inspired by the parable of the prodigal son in the gospel of St. Luke:

 
O where is my boy tonight?

  O where is my boy tonight?

  My heart o’erflows, for I love him, he knows;

  O where is my boy tonight?

  Once he was pure as morning dew,

  As he knelt at his mother’s knee;

  No face was as bright, no heart more true,

  And none was so sweet as he.

  Go for my wandering boy tonight;

  Go search for him where you will;

  But bring him to me with all his blight,

  And tell him I love him still.

  The room vibrated with the sounds of our voices. Music swelled from the organ, whose many golden pipes shone across the front walls of the church. Minister Mike brought his own son, Chester, up out of the choir and hugged him, and they both cried. Chester’s meaty thigh was right at my eye-height, straining against the fabric of his suit, and I followed it up his body. I immediately fell into his sexy, maximum-size features: a bowed upper lip that almost breathed me in, a pair of large, reddish brown ears, ripe for nibbling. The energy of a racehorse seemed to flow through his brawny limbs, even as his father held him and he wept. He was one of the most attractive men I had ever beheld. Unconsciously, I wet my lips.

  I wanted the power of the voices of Minister Mike’s congregation to lift me out of the pain I felt. I tried to ride those voices to salvation. But even though strong emotions overtook me, I knew they were coming from my sour memories and guilt, not a joyous rebirth in Christ. I wept, and though it looked like salvation, I knew I was weeping because I could feel Jesus falling out of my life.

  My father once tried to teach me to change my drawers every day by rubbing my face in a pair of dirty ones. When I got a B+ in fifth-grade math, he socked me in the mouth after our meeting with the teacher, and his wedding band chipped one of my teeth. I spat out the chip too close to a storm drain and couldn’t save it. We couldn’t afford to get it fixed, so I had to live with the broken tooth. For many years I kept my upper lip down so nobody would see, especially not Daddy, and I had to smile and hide the smile at the same time. To keep me and Joe from standing up for ourselves, he’d make fun of us if we protested. He’d call us rabbits or girls. “You should’ve seen your face,” he’d guffaw.