Rainbow Gap

by Lee Lynch

  She was changing. Once she would have mouthed a desperate prayer, but lately she stayed inside herself, trying to summon her Whatever with silence and the deep breathing she read about in her comparative religions class.

  Summoning anything in such loud music was taking a lot of breathing tonight and the cigarette smoke was foul. In this packed, blighted basement, her foundation of strict religion collided with the lives of these people, herself included, condemned by creed and country. Yet, if not for the alcohol, her cough, and the close dancing, she could be at a church social. The women and men—how were they so different? How did they—who did they—harm, crowing and posing and greeting one another like long lost family, yet banished from any society beyond the barroom doors?

  She recalled the words Lari once used: My head exploded. Tonight she thought she knew what Lari meant. Images of people in front of her merged with memories of preachers and congregations. The darkness of a chapel lit by candles had become less sacred to her than this space with its bar-long mirror, Old Milwaukee clock, and neon beer signs on the red brick walls. The booming music moved through her like the resonant voice of an inspired sermonizer. She was in both realities, breathing herself above the scene.

  If only she was an angel, gifting the whole world with clarity, so they saw the truth of their interconnectedness: people, plants, air, every living creature. Even, she thought to herself, spiders, and smiled despite herself. Smiling dimmed the orthodox images in her mind, but she was uneasy. Was there a more dramatic entrance to this gay world than once and for all rejecting Eddie Dill’s religion?

  The conflict was exhausting. They would leave as soon as Jaudon came back. Jaudon? Was that Jaudon? She was dipping and skipping to a song, “People Got to Be Free.” Jaudon never before moved with such abandon and it made Berry smile. Jaudon saw her, smiled back and, when the next song began, left Lari to escort Berry out on the dance floor.

  A tall man with a shaved head made his way through the crowd taking drink orders. He quipped “Pay to stay, pay to stay,” in an unnaturally high-pitched, horror-movie voice.

  But Jaudon was stepping high, jumping in a circle, taking Berry’s elbows and manipulating her back and forth. Berry pulled away and moved on her own. The music did tow her every which way. The beat through her feet guided her legs, her arms and, she noted with surprise, her hindquarters. The people in motion seemed galvanized into one connected dance.

  Her face hurt from grinning so hard. Oh, the beauty of this moment, of every moment with Jaudon who was her revelation angel, complete with rainbow around her head, leading her away from darkness inside, leading her into both her body and the glory of her spirit as well, better than any prayer or holy deed. The menacing atmosphere dissipated. It had come from her fear of the bar patrons and theirs of her.

  The Great Spirit was in this room with her, with Jaudon, with every one of these people. They no longer frightened her because, she rejoiced to think, her dance birthed light; she was a holy ray.

  She laughed aloud, as silly as some unbalanced person who thought a deity spoke to her or through her. Wasn’t it true though? What was prayer or meditation if not a conversation with…whatever each human believed? She looked at Jaudon, her strong, smiling mate, giving herself over to the music without these quandaries, and matched her raucous moves.

  When they stopped, several songs later, they were pouring down sweat, out of breath, holding hands here, in public. They ran out of money for the exorbitant Cokes. The waiter glared them to the door. Lari and Rigo stayed behind, Rigo dancing with that Skaggs boy. It was hard to let go of Jaudon’s hand outside; they should always be hand in hand. It would do the world good to see their happiness.

  Instead, Jaudon hurried Berry the blocks to the van and they locked the doors behind them with the quickness of criminals.

  Chapter Nine

  Fall 1971

  Jaudon moved between her accounting and her business classes, grateful for their calm predictability; her emotions got enough of a workout outside school. At the same time, she always watched over her shoulder, expecting to see someone from the bar—they’d gone back a few times—hoping for discretion.

  When the business ethics teacher pointed at her to answer a question, he called her young man for about the third time. She worried that he did it on purpose, out of disapproval. He was, after all, nothing but an accountant who taught evenings to make ends meet at home. She averted her eyes as she left the room later; she didn’t want to see his expression if he realized she was in the college-required skirt. These episodes left no question she was a freak. She tried to lighten her step, to move her arms like other girls, to unclench her fists at her sides. She wore skirts with pockets. She dared to wear culottes to classes and no one stopped her. She longed to wear shorts at school.

  The TV news was flooded with signs of change. She had hopes the future would be less restrictive for her, for nonwhites, and for people who immigrated because they believed in the freedoms promised by the United States. At times she despaired. Berry once asked, “What’s wrong with this world we live in that marks time by deaths? First the president, then Martin and Bobby.”

  In her next class, the principles of business instructor echoed Berry. “Look at what happened in the last decade. Americans killing our leaders: another Kennedy, Martin Luther King. Drug music by the Beatles winning respectable American awards. Homosexuality brazenly rhapsodized in sick bestsellers like Myra Breckinridge. Crazy women, lesbian predators, protesting the Miss America pageant.”

  No one outright insulted her in college—instead they stared—but this guy was teaching them to despise who she was. Why? How did her love for Berry harm him, or anyone? Thinking of Berry reminded her to breathe deeply.

  The teacher ranted from his podium way down at the bottom of the slanted lecture hall with its sprinkling of students sprawled on thin wooden pull-down seats. The backs curved slightly in an uncomfortable academic embrace. Jaudon watched out the window above him, imagined leaping to it, breaking the glass, sliding her wrists along its jagged edges. She was going to jump out of her skin if he kept on this way. A great blue heron glided by, smooth as a dance with Berry. From the high open side windows she heard the brassy rattles of Monk Parakeets, free of their cages.

  Enough was enough. She didn’t need to listen to this hogwash. She would clear out of Cloud Christian where she was seen as a predator, a monster, a sinner with a capital S. Straightforward business classes would do the trick, the heck with liberal arts and science and the heck with religion classes and chapel attendance. The heck with a school which limited its students to people with white skins and prejudiced minds.

  Momma would stop paying for school if she quit. Working the hours she’d need to, it would take her more than four years to get the degree and all the credentials she wanted. The more passionate the teacher got, the more attractive she found a business college. What did she need with liberal arts and what was so liberal about them? Cloud Christian refunded money if a student withdrew within so many days. She would concentrate on business and accounting so Momma would stop threatening to fire her—she’d need Jaudon more.

  Berry was such a believer in a four-year piece of paper. Would she go for Jaudon taking longer? Because the more Jaudon heard, the less she wanted to come back and be insulted and indicted her entire junior and senior years.

  “Where are you going, mister?” the teacher called out as she gathered her books, slammed the writing tray back into its armrest, and headed for the door. “I mean, miss.”

  She was filled with fury, resolution, and trepidation, but she kept walking. At the door she turned back. “Someplace where they’ll teach me how to run a business, not how to run down people different from themselves.”

  Through the door she left open she heard some tittering and a quick tattoo of applause which ceased, she assumed, when the teacher turned back to the class.

  After work as she sat at the kitchen table with a glass of sweet tea, Be
rry discovered the pleading in her eyes. Her hands fidgeted with a pencil, her leg jiggled, and she was sweating. Outside, the jar flies were the loudest sound in the world, warning of, reveling in, shouting down the heat. Gran had started dinner early that morning and the room smelled of andouille sausage browned with onions and garlic.

  Berry saw the sheen of sweat on Jaudon’s face. She got up to open windows and get some cross-ventilation going. She also pulled the chain on the ceiling fan till she got it to high speed.

  Jaudon was so earnest as she outlined her plan to be a certified public and business tax accountant, Berry threw her arms around her.

  Jaudon repeated the titles several times in the course of her prepared speech, which she gave from notes in her lap. Advanced accounting, auditing, cost accounting, federal tax accounting, business math and law—

  Berry tried to interrupt the bumper crop of words.

  Jaudon still read from her notes. “A school in Tampa has my courses. I already talked to the Beverage Bay accountant. He agreed to be my mentor and verify the experience requirement based on what I’ve been doing in the stores all along.” She looked up. “I’m not wasting more time on weirdo Christian Cloud teachers.”

  Berry’s hug stopped the words and toppled the notes. “The only reason you went there was because I did, my angel.”

  “It’s okay with you? Honest to goodness okay?” She grabbed Berry, got them into a dancing position, and sang the words to “I’ve Got a Gal in Kalamazoo,” one of the swing songs they’d loved when dancing to Bat’s left-behind transistor radio up in the tree house.

  They crooned together and broke out laughing.

  No wonder Jaudon had been playing so much of her beloved Nina Simone on their stereo, Berry thought. She was upset about school and was struggling to come up with a plan. Jaudon had no problem with Nina Simone’s politics either—Berry once saw her raise a fist in solidarity when Simone sang “Old Jim Crow.”

  “If your momma gets another bee in her bonnet and hounds you out of the company, you’ll have a great skill to fall back on, angel. This is why I love you: your ambition, your enthusiasm, and the way you come up with solutions to problems. You’ve gotten a lot from your liberal arts classes. Junior year on up you’d concentrate on the technical courses anyway.”

  “Cloud Christian will refund three-quarters of my tuition, enough to pay a business college. Come on, I’ll treat you and Zefer to a cone.”

  There was a dairy stand not far from them on Buffalo Avenue. It backed up to a small lake—or, as they joked, a large sinkhole. “Who can tell the difference?” they asked, as always, in unison. At a picnic table with a sunshade they watched each other drip ice cream between licks. Jaudon wanted so bad to hold Berry’s hand again. Wonderful Berry who never let her down.

  “You’re prettier than a Florida sunset, and they’re awful pretty.”

  Berry puckered her lips at Jaudon and kissed the air.

  The late afternoon downpour came while they ate. They made for the overhang around the side of the building. The van was in sight and Zefer’s head poked out the window, snout in the rain, tongue hanging, eyes on their ice cream. Muddy had passed away some weeks ago and they’d buried her in high ground, crying as they shoveled.

  “Thank you,” Berry called to the skies.

  “Who are you talking to up there?” asked Jaudon. “The rain god?”

  “Meaning Baal in the Bible? He started out as a rain and fertility god, I think. The Seminole myth has medicine men gathering by a spring and communing with a snake to bring rain.”

  “Berry, you amaze me. How do you remember this stuff?”

  “It’s important to me.” She crunched her cone and saved the tip for Zefer. “I need to believe in something.”

  “But what?”

  “It’s the question that keeps me seeking, my angel.”

  “I believe in us, Berry.”

  The rain let up and they dodged puddles on their way to the van.

  “So do I. Some energy brought us together, Jaudon. We didn’t happen for no reason. It made each of us who we are.”

  The cracking vinyl seats of the van sparkled with drops of rain. Jaudon fished dry rags from the back and tossed them to Berry. They persuaded Zefer to move over for them with the ice cream.

  “You don’t think you’ll end up in one of those religions that hates us, do you? I worry they’ll convince you to reform.” She knew she blurted the words out like a loony.

  “Nothing will reform me away from loving you, Jaudon. No religion in the world would suit me if it didn’t love us for who we are.”

  “I don’t think there is such a religion.”

  “If so, I don’t need any of them.”

  “I have to tell you, Berry, I don’t understand religion at all. It loves rules to keep us in line and only men get to make the rules. ”

  “The sheer reassurance of faith keeps me believing there’s a force of some sort to believe in.” Berry laid the rags flat behind their seats to dry.

  “I don’t intend to be dumb, Berry, but didn’t you say you needed to believe in something? And other times you said you didn’t?”

  “I’m beginning to understand faith and religion are two very different ideas.”

  Jaudon drove out of the lot. “You know I don’t have a religious bone in my body. I’d rather be up and doing stuff, not sitting on my bottom and listening. This is beyond my smidgeon of a pea brain.”

  “Your way of worship is action, Jaudon. Mine is stillness.”

  “If I did believe in someone, it would be Mother Nature.”

  “I’ve thought of that myself.”

  “Call whatever’s out there anything you want—Mother Nature suits me. Nothing earthly is capable of coming up with one of those.”

  Berry followed her pointed finger. Two sandhill cranes, in all their ungainly bulk, lifted from the lakefront into flight.

  “Aren’t they magic?”

  “The Wright brothers would be embarrassed, my little swamp flower.”

  “But, you see? What religion would practice its faith by sitting at a dairy stand and enjoying the wildlife? It would be nice to have friends who believe what I do, but organizing would spoil the faith pouring out of my heart at this sight. I fit best with you.”

  She drove, silent while Berry did her deep thinking.

  “Jaudon, I can’t do anything but suppose. I don’t want to worship anyone or anything. Be grateful, yes. Celebrate, yes. Be humble before these miracles—that I can do. Worship a creator? We humans are so limited we can’t imagine a being other than ourselves, so that being looks human: an aged man in a white beard. What’s out there is unfathomable, Jaudon. It doesn’t need us to understand or worship it. People are the ones who need a divinity.”

  Jaudon couldn’t help it; she chuckled. She looked at Berry. “In that case we’re the creators, aren’t we? Because we created the white-bearded being.”

  When Berry smiled it took over her whole face and raised her ears. “The thought never occurred to me.”

  “Why not invent a religion of your own?”

  “Could be I am inventing one.”

  “Soon people will worship you.” As they pulled into Pineapple Trail, Jaudon reached for her. “You know I already do.”

  “Oh, you.” She pretended to flee from Jaudon’s outstretched arms.

  Jaudon and Zefer pursued Berry into the house. Berry checked that Gran was in her room. Then, and only then, did she let Jaudon catch her.

  Afterward, Jaudon said, “The best way I know to appreciate you is to give you this.”

  “And to let me have my way with you.”

  Jaudon made tsking sounds. “I’m serious, Berry. You have a perfect body, as smooth and creamy-colored as the petals of our Southern magnolia. At the same time you can bang a nail into a two-by-four like nobody’s business or whip up a meal and go for ice cream to celebrate the surprise change in my plans. Nobody knows how to love as wholly as you do.”
r />   “Are you sure, my angel? Why don’t you come close again and show me how capably you love.”

  Chapter Ten

  Whenever Lari walked into the Beverage Bay, the lights seemed to flicker and dim. After a hectic day registering for winter classes, her second term at the business school, Jaudon was worn to a nubbins and completely off balance.

  “You don’t live anywhere near my Beverage Bay. How come you spend so much time here, even on school nights?”

  Lari shrugged. “I’m close enough,” she said. “I have a car.”

  “But the store is so busy with the airport and the industrial park, don’t you have more available friends?”

  “You interest me.”

  Most nights, Lari would arrive at the Buffalo Road store in her black clothes and heavy white makeup, buy some cold Mountain Dew, and read aloud from Jaudon’s textbooks when business was slow. A raw plant smell clung to Lari. Periodically, she moved outside to have a smoke and returned with the smell heavier on her. She was helping Jaudon study and, in truth, Jaudon did remember more of what she heard than what she read.

  She knew she should be grateful; instead she was suspicious. “Why are you doing this for me? Don’t you have your own homework?”

  She wanted to talk to Berry about Lari, and mentioned the frequent visits, but was at a loss to find words that described her discomfort, which consisted of excitement, vexation, and a not unpleasant apprehension. She’d told Berry, “You should come around when Lari’s there. It’s creepy she visits when I’m alone.”

  But Berry never did. So Jaudon invoked her presence by talking about her.

  “Berry’s okay.” Lari’s tone made it clear she was holding back her real opinion.

  Another night Jaudon said, “I wish you’d talk about yourself sometimes, Lari. We’re not having much of a conversation.”