God Says No

by James Hannaham

  “Gary, Gary, it’s okay,” she said, trying to cool my jets. I noticed that her voice always sounded a little congested. “I’ll see if there’s a possibility that they’ll reconsider.”

  “Don’t bother,” I spat, and pressed the OFF button on the phone. It made a tiny beep. For a second I marveled at how big parts of a person’s life can end with the little beep of a phone. Then I curled over forward and dropped the phone on the floor. I held my head and tried to weep, but my anger was still too high. Instead I hit myself in the shoulder again and again, making low growling noises so Cheryl wouldn’t hear me over the television noise. I wanted to break the mirror, but I didn’t. Then it dawned on me that Nicky must have ratted on me when Bill kicked him out, and that was why they decided to terminate me. My firing was his sneaky present from the grave. To think that he had really communicated with me from the other side made me laugh until tears streamed out of the sides of my eyes.

  Once I pulled myself together, I left the bedroom and joined Cheryl in front of the television. It seemed like Annie let her do anything she wanted. She was watching a cartoon with two male animals. I couldn’t tell what animals they were. They lived together and everything that happened was disgusting. I found the remote on the couch behind her and changed the channel. Cheryl howled like I had smacked her and tried to grab the remote out of my hand. Her screeching almost didn’t sound human. I stood up to keep the remote out of her reach. I changed the channel to a less bad cartoon and put the remote on a high shelf. She sulked in front of the couch with her arms folded.

  “Daddy, why can’t I watch?”

  “Your mother says it’s okay for you to watch that?”

  “Mrs. Lucas does.” Mrs. Lucas, who was in her seventies, lived down the hall and usually came over in the afternoons to look after Cheryl until Annie got back from work.

  “Well, I say you can’t.”

  “I wish Mrs. Lucas were here and not you.”

  My anger and disappointment about Resurrection carried over into my reaction. “You shut up!” I bellowed at her, so hard I hurt my throat. I shook her and raised my hand to hit her across the face, but I caught myself. The only way I knew how to be a father was to be like my father. Stunned by my behavior, I froze. During the freeze, Cheryl fled into her room and locked the door. I sank down on the couch and watched the Family Channel for several hours, even though it was a marathon of westerns. Cheryl wouldn’t come out of her room, not even when I heated up supper and sweet-talked her through the door.

  Annie returned at 11 p.m. and we talked about everything until 2 a.m. We agreed that I should find a place nearby and slowly get the hang of being Cheryl’s dad, rather than jumping right back in. Then I remembered the vacant apartment downstairs and volunteered to find out about it. That night I laid my second Jesus down in a dresser drawer, and prayed to the one with the hole in his heart. I didn’t need a perfect Jesus anymore. Tired and drained, Annie and I kissed goodnight and I clicked off the lamp. Lying in the dark and trying to fall asleep with just my fingertips touching Annie’s, I felt like after all the trouble we’d gone through together, and even though I’d never be her sexual partner, I had finally earned the right to call myself her husband.

  NINETEEN

  Breakfast smells came into the bedroom the next morning and woke me up. I trudged into the kitchen to find Annie at the stove and Cheryl sitting in front of the television, her hand in a box of sugary cereal. Annie slid a pair of sunny-side-up eggs onto a plate with two stiff strips of bacon on it. Cracking two more eggs, she dropped them into the pan and they sizzled loudly. She asked if I wanted any and I said I did. I was hungry, of course, but I also had a hunger to add myself to their day-to-day existence. I sat at the table and played with the silverware, flashing the blade of my knife in the kitchen light. Annie had brought the paper in, so I unfolded it to the funnies and read a few out loud to Cheryl.

  Annie called Cheryl to the table and she came with the box still on her hand. I made like I was going to grab her and pull the box off, but she ran around the other side of the table to avoid me. Getting her trust back wouldn’t be easy. She took the box off herself and sat down in front of her bacon and eggs.

  “Your mother lets you do whatever you want, doesn’t she?”

  Annie turned to me with the spatula in her hand. I knew she wouldn’t, but it looked for a moment like she was going to slap me with it if I said more of the wrong thing. “She kept getting sick is what it is. Chicken pox, and then a really bad flu, and then bronchitis. I think she was fine for about two weeks that whole time. I couldn’t be strict. She had no daddy and she was ill. But we’re paying the price now, aren’t we, honey?” With her free hand she ruffled Cheryl’s coarse curls. “Things are going to have to change.”

  I tried out my best Dad frown and nodded in agreement with Annie. Cheryl swung her head back and forth to say no, and her dimples deepened when she grinned. She picked up a piece of bacon with her fingers and crunched down on it disobediently.

  “Use your fork and knife,” I told her. I lay the paper flat and tried to get her interested in the funnies, but she didn’t care anymore. She grabbed one of her eggs with two hands and bit open the yolk. It sagged and burst onto the plate and all over her fingers and she laughed. Without getting angry, Annie cleaned her off with a dishtowel and took the plate away from her.

  “If you want to act like a wild animal, I’ll take you to Samoa and leave you.”

  “Okay,” she said. “Grrr!”

  In a matter of minutes, Annie managed to clean Cheryl up and get her ready for school. She threw a modest skirt and blouse on and the two of them left. Annie had restaurant business to do during the day and early setup for lunch, so she wouldn’t be back all afternoon.

  When I finished with the paper, I went downstairs to the building office and spoke to Mr. Foy, a thin white man with brown spots all over his bald head. In contrast to the image of a landlord, he had always been nice to Annie and me. When I knocked on his office door and stepped in he looked up from his electric typewriter, suspicious for a moment. He squinted and pulled the curly arms of his gold-rimmed glasses behind his ears.

  “Hey, haven’t seen you around in a while,” he commented.

  “I’ve been away.”

  Mr. Foy didn’t seem to know any of what had happened, or even to have a sense that three years or so had passed. I asked him about the downstairs apartment and he admitted he’d had a hard time filling it.

  “You have a friend or something, interested in moving?”

  “No, it’s me, I’d be moving in.”

  His eyebrows went up and concern came into his voice. “Oh. Trouble at home? That’s rough.”

  “No, no. Everything’s okay. Better than it’s ever been.”

  “Better than ever and you’re moving out?”

  I nodded. He nodded in a way that said he didn’t believe me.

  “I won’t pry.”

  Mr. Foy handed me an application to fill out and turned back to his typing while I took care of it. As I finished, he came around behind me and read the application over my shoulder. “The place is yours if you want it, Gary,” he said. I accepted and we shook hands. “Can I just make a photocopy of your driver’s license and your social?”

  I hadn’t needed to replace my old August Valentine ID yet. The place in Atlanta was in Gay’s name. I paid for things through a Resurrection account. I took the MARTA everywhere. Mama and Annie had given my real wallet a proper burial.

  “Oh,” I said. “I don’t have it with me. I’ll come back later.” Thinking it better to leave before he could start figuring out what had happened, I got up hastily. Perhaps if he knew, or if I told him anything accidentally, he would think that I was still a fraud, even though being a fraud was what I was trying to overcome. Even nice landlords could make assumptions like that.

  With little time to lose, I called a taxi and waited. I borrowed money from a jar Annie kept on top of the cabinets and searched the h
ouse for a trowel, or some other kind of shovel. The closest thing I found was Cheryl’s beach shovel, the one we used to build sand castles that Sunday. Feeling downright silly, I hid it in a paper bag and wedged it under my arm as I went out to the parking lot to wait for the car.

  It was about 10:30 a.m., so we-me and the taxi driver-had missed the rush hour. We got to the gates of Greenwood Cemetery in just under half an hour.

  I couldn’t see the caretaker’s house, if there was one. The place looked like nobody watched over it, they just opened the gates and went off somewhere else to let the dead folks sort everything out. That was good. I didn’t want anybody to see me. I wasn’t sure that what I was fixing to do was legal.

  I didn’t know exactly where to look, so I started by looking everywhere, my head swiveling left and right. The Florida sun neared its highest position and the granite headstones sparkled one after the other in my eye as I passed. Some of them had last names that I recognized, or funny ones like Sleeper, Dunwith, Leakey, and Hello. Some were very light in color and blinding to look at. Many had small bouquets in little vases next to them. A few were new enough to be covered with a man-sized rectangle of dying flowers. I read some of the loving memoriams and hoped all the dead people were okay, whichever place they had gone to. My father, for example. Nicky for another.

  One corner of Section H contained three rows of recently buried people. From my short walk, I had learned how to tell a recent grave by the amount of grass covering the plot. Then I would check the date of death. In this small area of Section H, most of the plots had thin lawns on top. The lawns were also very bright green, which meant young grass. Stepping sideways through the rows in Section H, I stopped and read every gravestone. Sooner than I expected, I stepped on the mound I was looking for-my own grave.

  Boy, I stared at that stone like a fixed tomcat, my jaw wide. I only snapped it shut when a skeeter hawk flew past. Good God almighty, I said. This is what I look like dead.

  Before they die, everybody should get the chance to visit their own grave. It felt like seeing into the future, and it turned all my worries small and stupid. Of course, I wasn’t buried here, but my memory had been, and one day my body would come back for good. Everybody would die, and probably nothing mattered to the dead-certainly none of my SSA problems. I reckoned there wouldn’t be discrimination against minority groups in Heaven. Or else it wouldn’t be Heaven, right?

  My family had bought a marker lower than any of the others. It had a cut-off peak, like somebody had sliced off the top of a regular tombstone, and my last name was etched into the slice: GRAY. The stone was also gray. The gravestone could have been a floor model used to demonstrate one of the available colors, except that they’d carved the GARY into the base, next to a pair of praying hands, and below that the words LOVING HUSBAND in fancy script. That phrase does not even begin to tell the story, I thought, shaking my head. But if! had never come back, nobody would have known any different.

  Double-checking to make sure nobody was around, I saw only a car parked way in the distance and two people with their heads bowed by a monument. I took the shovel out of the bag and dug in the center, toward where my stomach would one day lie. I hoped that they hadn’t buried my wallet at the same six-foot depth as a corpse. Luckily the sandy dirt gave way easily, without big rocks or roots holding it together. But the sun became extremely hot, and I had to stop several times to wipe off sweat, though I hadn’t gotten very far. I only succeeded in wiping sandy dirt onto my face. Soon I dropped the shovel and used my hands, pulling the soil away from the mound.

  After about half an hour, my hand hit something hard about three feet down. With the shovel, I loosened the dirt around it and found a strongbox made of cheap but hard tin. I pulled the box out of the dirt and lifted it up. Using a key and part of an umbrella I found in a trash bin as levers, I pried open the sides of the box and broke the lock.

  A black wallet slid out, its edges burned, surrounded with dead roses and nestled in a royal blue lining. I picked it up and put everything that had fallen out of the box back in. I folded the cover down and placed the box at one side of the hole. Quickly, I filled the grave again. I had a thin crust of sand all over my arms and clothes, like a gigantic sugar-dusted donut.

  I suppose nobody saw me. Plumb near everybody in this graveyard must be dead, I thought, and then had a chuckle at my own joke. Picking up the box and putting it in the paper bag with the plastic shovel, I rushed out of the cemetery, wanting to get away from the gravesite for a bunch of darned good reasons.

  I walked by the side of the road until I came upon a fast-food restaurant. Hungry and thirsty, I went in and got a large orange Coke and two deluxe hamburgers. I sat down at a table near the window, ate one of the burgers, and sucked on my drink until my thirst left me. Then I ate burger number two. Wiping my hands on a napkin, I opened the box and moved the dried roses aside on the satin lining. I opened the wallet. My plastic student ID from Central had buckled and burned from the heat of the train fire, and so had a couple of credit cards. There were some of my business cards from Bradley Foods still in there with those of other marketing execs I had met only once, and a train ticket stub to Atlanta. My driver’s license was burned. A lot of the picture had melted, but the words were almost all readable. Funniest of all, it hadn’t expired yet.

  From the restaurant I took another cab home, palmed my driver’s license, and hid the box under the bed. I put Cheryl’s shovel back in the bathroom in the net that held the rest of her brightly colored beach things.

  When I knocked on the door, Mr. Foy was still sitting at his desk, typing. ‘‘I’ve got my license,” I announced, holding it out. Moving around the desk, he took it from me with two fingers.

  “Geez, who tried to cook this thing?” he asked, turning the card over in his fingers.

  “It was an accident,” I said.

  “Don’t let it happen again.”

  “Believe me, I won’t.”

  As Mr. Foy placed the card under the photocopier, he muttered that he’d been worried I wouldn’t come back. He hadn’t asked for a deposit or anything, he said, because he knew Annie and me. We could handle all that later. He gave me the keys right then.

  “Go take a look.”

  The new key was very shiny, but the same shape as Annie’s. I figured I’d have to get another job lickety-split in order to pay for it, but I knew I had no other choice. Holding the key to the light, I stepped into the courtyard and found my way along the path to my new place. Inside, it had one less room than Annie’s, checkered linoleum instead of white on the kitchen floor, and a couple of dirty handprints on the wall. Otherwise it was real similar. My footsteps rang out in the empty apartment as I took a look at all the rooms, thinking of good things that might happen in them-birthday parties, Sunday mornings, Christmases. Moving back in here made me feel a little foolish-I had gone next door by traveling around the world in the wrong direction. I walked over to the living room window, took down the FOR RENT sign, and paused to appreciate my new view. Across the courtyard, on the second floor, I could see my daughter’s window through the shade trees. I could look up and see her there. She could look down and I’d be here. Nope, it didn’t seem far at all.

  James Hannaham would like to thank Jennifer Egan, Brendan Moroney, Clarinda Mac Low, Colleen Werthmann, Jim Lewis, Timothy Murphy, Andrew May, Helen Eisenbach, Troy Lambert, David Wright, Anne Stringfield, Katie Williams, David Rogers, Vendela Vida, Eli Horowitz, Jordan Bass, David Groff, Basil Tsiokos, Joe Cabaniss, Tom Cabaniss, Mary Giles and Armand Derfner, Colin Lingle, John Dicarlo, Dave Ramirez, Gary Gray, Anone Palolo, Cheryl Gray, Jamilynn Gray, Obadiah Jocephus (Ioe) Gray, Mrs. Vietta Consequence, Trudy Schwartz and her husband, Mr. & Mrs. Larrymore Hope Walker and their lovely daughter, Ms. K.E. Walker, Gregg Goldston, Marcus Lira, Terry Witek, James Magnuson, Michael Adams, the Michener Center for Writers, the MacDowell Colony, Yaddo, and the Blue Mountain Center for their help, and, in many cases, love.

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  James Hannaham, God Says No