by Tim Curran
Usually, assuming they have the one he’s looking for, he’ll just go in and negotiate first. Most of the idiots who do these things are just confused sex fiends or deluded losers trying to appease their own failed lives with someone else’s blood. They never understand that you don’t trade blood for making something better; you have to shed it to keep things from getting worse.
These kind of people are the worst to deal with. The ones who think they know what they’re doing. Thrush has traded a couple times––take me instead. Hurts, but if you do it, you can take the rest of the week off.
He zips up the bowling bag, checks his shitty old .22 target pistol. No bullets, but if they’re not scared of the sight of it, shooting them seldom does much good, anyway. He tucks it into the pouch of his hooded sweatshirt. No pass-by, no lights; only lanterns hanging on porches, candles in windows. Somewhere out there, a man battles an accordion, and loses.
He listens to some screwball yodeling cowboy on the college station and waits. A slash of cold cobalt light spills out of an open door on the back of the museum wing of the church. A hulking brute in filthy overalls drives a couple of feral children away from the dumpster, then dumps a trashcan full of scrap lumber and moldy drywall.
Thrush flips on his headlights and throws the Celica into gear. The hulk turns and flashes a big K-Bar pig-sticker that glints in the light.
Thrush floors it. The bumper clips the goon just above his knees. He bounces off the windshield and roof and hits the pavement. Thrush reverses and parks on the body. Never bring a knife to a car fight.
Thrush gets out and kneels by the corpse. A piledriver of stench wafts out over him, but he tastes her sweat, tears.…
These idiots are either pouring innocent blood into an empty hole, or they’re unknowingly feeding something they can’t name, and they’ll never stop regretting when it answers their prayers.
Thrush goes over to the door. There’s no knob on the outside, but it’s not locked, standing out an inch from the frame. He presses his ear against it and stills his breath, stops his heart to listen.
Blue-white china screams, breaking on garbled red words. He throws the door open and pounces on the space. Blue light so thick it drips off him. Shadows you could drown in.
Just as his eyes begin to adjust to the darkness, the lights come up to reveal a cyclorama of boundless indigo sky and clouds like ghostly funeral barges crawling with headless cherubs and winged eyeballs. Muted red, gold and blue lights nestled behind the trees.
Not trees … crosses.
One door, artfully hidden, leads to the gift shop, while another goes into a massive plaster serpent’s mouth. This is where the noise is coming from.
The robed man comes out of this and throws a trashcan, knocking Thrush on his ass.
The man comes at him, and his loose, floppy robe swirls round him. He’s naked, swaddled in rippling curtains of skin. He must’ve weighed five, six hundred pounds, back in the day.
A head taller than Thrush, the zealot tackles him, throwing an arm round his shoulder and another between his legs, crushing his balls. Thrush braces himself, grabs his opponent, but it’s like grabbing an empty waterbed slicked with bacon grease. He’s resisted stronger men, but the naked man hoists him nearly over his head and flings him across the exhibit hall.
He flies backwards and slams into a cross. The knotty 4X8 pine splinters and snaps at the base. Thrush flops around, trying to catch his breath, to find the gun, but his pocket’s empty.
The naked giant kicks the pistol away. Thrush rolls over and over, grabs a cord and yanks on it, swinging a Skilsaw over his head like a lasso. The giant swats it down, catches the cord, yanks Thrush off his feet and face first into the big man’s knee.
Dazed, smothered and sinking into musky folds of skin closing over mouth and nose so he inhales only sweat and smegma until he just decides, fuck it, and stops breathing.
He wakes to bad breath, and a piercing falsetto humming “Were You There When They Crucified My Lord,” and nails going into his flesh at high velocity. He tries to stop it, but his arms are tied down with nylon rope, secured to the wings of the cross he knocked down.
Something that stinks like a fish kill in August shuffles over to lean in close. “Is this the Serpent, come at last,” it croaks, “bearing forbidden wisdom?”
“Naw,” growls the naked, flabby man, “it’s just some shitheel from over to the U-Haul.”
The naked man does the yodeling refrain part and his voice goes up somewhere dogs can’t hear, and he nuzzles the nail gun into Thrush’s left palm and punches a ten-penny nail into the sinewy gap between the middle and ring fingers, then one through the ball of tiny bones in the heel of the hand, then he snaps off a salvo of them up Thrush’s forearm. Some go through the gap between radius and ulna, but more than a couple stab right through the bones. The muted splintering sound when he twitches is like ice cracking.
Then they cut his clothes off. “Were you there when they rolled away the stone,” the fishy man tunelessly gasps, vestigial gillflaps spasming in his bloated neck-sac. Rheumy eyes behind nictitating membranes like grimy glasses, but it’ll dry up and die in the dustbowl rather than be what it is. Its blood would be worth money to some people, who have the fool notion that transfusions will let them change and go down to the sea and live forever.
Thrush strains with all his might to smash the bastard with his other hand, pops his shoulder and twists and strains until the nylon rope saws through his wrist. The naked man stands on his forearm and goes to town on the right arm. He stops to reload, then does the feet with twelve nails each onto a little ledge on the board.
Thrush mumbles and moans for them to stop, please, and everything else he can think of, but the pain sweeps him off his nut and into the darkness that is his birthright.
He’s just drooling when they hoist him upright and stand the cross up in a posthole in the middle of the room. The stink of the other crosses’ occupants is lost on him. When the crowd files in from the church, the flabby man and the fishy man stand by in cheap Roman centurion costumes, handing out rocks.
Embittered die-hard Xians, they couldn’t quite bow down to a monster, but they had a funny way of loving the Lord, lately.
The preacher’s mic is a bullhorn. “Behold the prophet of submission and false hope, his hour come round at last!”
A big chunk of sandstone hits Thrush’s face, crushing his left cheekbone, forcing him to smile.
“Hold, brother!” The preacher howls and rails at the crowd, laying all their thwarted hopes, all their crushed dreams, all their unanswered prayers on Tobin Thrush’s head, until they all hold their rocks up, some old folks staggering under the weight, some kids jumping up and down with one in each hand. “And for his too-little, too-late Rapture, brothers and sisters, we ask only the boon of replying in kind!”
This goes over their heads, and he has to cast the first stone. Then they all come flying, and everybody goes back five, six more times, until the unrecognizable sack of shattered bones nailed to the cross is buried up to its ankles in rocks, and the crowd seems to wear out without satisfaction, somehow, because though they’ve broken every bone in his body and he’s a swollen purple-black rag, they could not make their failed savior shed a single drop of blood.
“Cast this pathetic demiurge from your hearts and your memories, brothers and sisters,” says the preacher, leading them out of the room through a hole in the horizon beyond which dinosaurs snarl and prowl in their stalls in the belly of Noah’s Ark. “At the end of our tour, you shall bear witness to the invisible glory and terrible beauty of the true savior of this world, waiting only to be born––”
Why fight it?
You were never cut out for this civilized, day-labor, upright-walking bullshit. Who were you trying to fool?
Just give up and let go.
Go back to the beginning and start again––
Let yourself fall back into the arms of your ancestors, into the memory of y
our blood, into the abyss that your people mistakenly crawled out of twenty thousand years ago. Go further, give it all up. Forsake the sun and stars for the eternal womb of the Earth. Abandon the land for the primordial sea.
What do you have to lose?
He surrenders to the fatalistic gospel of the god whose unspeakable true name was corrupted into the tribal name of his people, gives in to the slower, deeper pulsation of his blood. Thrush can’t come up with an answer, can’t come up with words to defend himself. How truly stupid and useless words are for one who never has to beg, never threaten––
All of the forking paths of his life and all those lives behind him rise up in a thicket, a forest of wrong turns and evolutionary misfires. We fell from grace long before the Garden. We fell when we left the sea, when we arrogantly rose up on spinal towers, when we gathered together into colonies of cells. Before, it was better … it was all so simple.…
Thrush’s body is in shock, a slug in salt. Every twitch, every breath, carves up his insides with bony knives. But he is powerless not to contort and throb in time with the quickening rhythm of the Backward Path.
The crowd has moved on into the recesses of the museum by the time Thrush comes around on the cross, but he is so far from conscious that his actions are only a retreat from pain and confinement to liberty. Free is all he knows, all he wants.
He tries really hard to remember what he’s doing here, but the Backward Path is calling, the slippery coil of sweet devolution sucking him down. He tries to fight it, thrashes, tearing his flesh on the nails and shattered skeleton, biting at the monkeys swarming up the cross to gnaw at his wounds, even though it is his only hope.
He convulses and upchucks his lunch and breakfast, then his bones.
The naked man stomps into the Golgotha Room to crack open the fuse box and push a circuit breaker, when he notices the new cross is empty. Growling in alarm, he goes for the gun on the floor where Thrush dropped it, and steps on something that jabs through his foot. It’s a shattered rib. Stumbling backwards, he falls on his ass amid the wreckage of Tobin Thrush’s skeleton. Puzzlement and disgust and terror set him scrambling almost backwards, the need for a wall at his back trumping all other concerns, when he feels tiny claws climbing all over him, up into the folds of his baggy skin, climbing him faster than he can claw and swat them off.
He hears someone whispering above him, and he looks up, mouth gaping so wide that Tobin Thrush falls right into it.
“Behold! The mother of us all, and the author of our grief!” Even with his bullhorn, the preacher has to shout to be heard over the drums.
The spotlight falls on a girl standing under a tree with red luminous apples hanging from it. Plastic grass covers the floor. She wears only a green G-string with fabric leaves sewn to it, and a serpent. Adam stands next to her, a strapping Caucasian youth with a fig leaf painted on his featureless plastic pubic arch.
“Condemned for her sin, branded with her madness with none of her hard-won wisdom, you writhe in night soil like serpents and worms yourselves, and all for the sake of her!”
Everyone in the crowd is holding a snake. Timber rattlers and cottonmouths twist in the trembling hands, placated, seemingly hypnotized by the pounding rhythm and the rivers of gibberish flowing from the mouths of every member of the congregation.
Only the fishy man takes any notice of the flabby man when he comes back into the Eden room, but all he can do is stare. Naked and restored to morbid obesity, his partner waddles through the Garden, shoving ecstatic rednecks out of his way with the blunt prow of his turgid belly.
The preacher stands above her on a riser, holding a rattlesnake that spills out of his arms and drags on the fake grass. He’s a handsome silver-haired man, vaguely familiar, with a big, perpetual grin that belies the venom spewing through his bullhorn. “An eternity of suffering for all humankind for the failure of one … until tonight, brothers and sisters! Let her taste the sting of damnation, and let our souls be cleansed and restored to the innocence of Eden!”
Two of the quivering flock stumble towards Eve with their snakes upraised like daggers and crash into the plexiglass wall just before the flabby man runs into it.
“Who among you is worthy to claim the wisdom of the serpent?”
The drums fall silent. The preacher lays his snake on Eve’s shoulder. The flabby man pounds on the plexiglass, making it buckle, smearing it with sweat and blood.
“Now consider,” the preacher says, “that most blameless victim of the conspiracy of Heaven and Hell, the most magnificent of all God’s creations, in its wisdom superior even to man, that did walk even as a man, that did spread its wings to fly even as the eagle. Condemned for eternity for its part in Eve’s temptation to grovel in dust and mud and to be trampled underfoot by the author of its disgrace. Behold the glory and splendor of the serpent, before the betrayal of Eden! Behold!”
The preacher tears open his linen robes. The congregation begins screaming.
Behind him, men and women writhe as the vipers in their hands strike again and again at necks, faces, shoulders, arms in a frenzy. Some throw down their snakes and stumble towards the gift shop exit, but nobody makes it. The tangle of spastic limbs, glassy eyes, bloated, blackening faces is knee-deep from the glass wall to the exit.
“Not a mother-loving one of you,” the preacher sourly concludes. When he’s not looking directly at you, his handsome face is just a cracked old Halloween mask of one of the old-time presidents. The rattler glides across Eve’s shoulders and slithers down her arm, no more interested in her than she is in it.
The flabby man bulldozes through the plexiglass wall.
“What’d you do with Francis?” the fishy man gasps. He shambles around the mountain of corpses, pointing Thrush’s gun at him.
“I just come for the girl,” says the flabby man. “She’s wanted at home.”
The fishy man pulls the trigger again and again, then throws the empty gun aside. “Shit, who’s gonna help me clean up this mess now…?”
The preacher laughs and says something to the fishy man in a tongue composed entirely of varieties of Y and S. “Just take her, then. We don’t want any more trouble.” Going over to help the fishy man collect the exhausted snakes from the dead rednecks’ hands, he spitefully adds, “Never should’ve let her come with us in the first blessed place.…”
The Davenports are hosting a party. Security lines the driveway, and even real hooded police stand by the front door. A valet tells Thrush to drive around back and meet Mr. Davenport there.
Thrush gets out in the backyard and scratches his back against the bark of a twisted oak in the back driveway, ripping off the last chunks of the flabby man. He’s still doing it when Davenport and a bodyguard come strolling up.
“Congratulations.” Still shedding copious gobbets of necrotized flabby man, Thrush staggers over to the Celica and pops the trunk.
“What for?” Davenport slurs, tosses a highball glass into a shrub.
“You’re the new mayor, ain’t you?” He had to fold down the backseats to fit the rolled-up area rug into it. He pulls it out now, careful of the hank of blond hair sticking out one end.
“She’s all right,” Thrush says, “in case you’re wondering.” Brushing back the bodyguard, he shoulders the area rug. “Where d’you want this?”
“Uh … follow me.” Davenport leads him down a path through Italian cypresses and box hedges into a backyard big enough to hunt poor folks for sport in. Somewhere, off by the house, a party is in full swing. Folks are dancing on a banquet table, swinging red banners, and fucking in the hot tub. Davenport leads him up to a guest house, unlocks the door, and flips on the lights. Thrush carries the area rug in and lays it not ungently on the Spanish tile, then kneels over it, subtly pushing Davenport back. The bodyguard comes forward with his hand on the automatic in his shoulder rig, but Davenport tells him to go get a cola.
“We still have to settle up, don’t we?” Davenport goes into the hip pocket
of his slacks and hands Thrush a fat wad of cash and ration coupons. “Gas, meat, medicine … and they spend like cash money most places. So … where was she?”
“Right where you put her.”
Davenport flushes, but he didn’t win a mayoral election in a shit-stain town like this by losing his cool every time some mouthy nobody gave him shit. “Friend, I don’t know what you think, and I don’t much care. I asked you a simple question.…”
“She was with those folks painted your curb the other day. Maybe she went off with them, and maybe you set it up, but she had to get out of here so your wife wouldn’t take her before election day.”
“I don’t take your meaning, boy.”
“Everybody knows, sir. About how the quality people around here show they have what it takes. About how bargains get done out at the country club. I heard all about how some folks will offer up their first-born at a banquet … usually if it’s a girl, and all the other rich folks come pig out. Nobody blames you for taking the belt-and-suspenders approach.”
Davenport’s slow smile made his face look like the preacher’s rubber mask. “Oh, you know, do you? You boys share stories at the U-Haul lot when you’re not doing deals over at the courthouse? You know what it’s like to be left holding this monumental bag of shit when the goddamn music stops? To try to hold it together so the few decent people left in this world don’t go batshit crazy and eat each other? You know what it’s like to see something going down the street you know damn well ain’t even a human being, but you can’t say or do anything because you don’t know for good and all how many of your own people you can count on. You think this fucking mess has knocked us all into a cocked hat and we’re a big joke, don’t you? Well, let me enlighten you, my subhuman scavenger friend. We were cutting throats just to keep the lights on around here since before we took this shithole back from the Indians. Don’t matter if your tin-shit toad-god crawls up out of that hole at the edge of town or the stars fall from the sky. We know how to keep order around here, and we’ll keep on doing it.”