Bible Stories for Adults

by James Morrow

  Click, click, my keeper turns to the left. Thock, thock, thock, he transfers his rifle, waits. The Old Guard—the Third U.S. Infantry—never quits. Twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week: can you imagine? Three A.M. on Christmas morning, say, with snow tumbling down and nobody around except a lot of dead veterans, and here’s this grim, silent sentinel strutting past my tomb? It gives me the creeps.

  The division surgeons spliced me together as best they could, but I knew they’d left some chips behind because my chest hurt like hell. A week after I was taken off the critical list, they gave me a month’s pay and sent me to Bar-le-Duc for some rest and relaxation, which everybody knew meant cognac and whores.

  The whole village was a red-light district, and if you had the francs you could find love around the clock, though you’d do well to study the choices and see who had that itchy look a lady acquires when she’s got the clap. And so it was that on the first of July, as the hot French twilight poured into a cootie-ridden bordello on the Place Vendôme, Wilbur Hines’s willy finally put to port after nineteen years at sea. Like Cantigny, it was quick and confusing and over before I knew it. I had six more days coming to me, though, and I figured it would get better.

  My keeper heads north, twenty-one paces. The sun beats down. The sweatband of his cap is rank and soggy. Click, click: right face. His eyes lock on the river.

  I loved Bar-le-Duc. The citizens treated me like a war hero, saluting me wherever I went. There’s no telling how far you’ll go in this world if you’re willing to belly-rip a few German teenagers.

  Beyond the Poilu and the hookers, the cafés were also swarming with Bolsheviks, and I must admit their ideas made sense to me—at least, they did by my fourth glass of Château d’Yquem. After Cantigny, with its flying metal and Alvin Platt walking around with a bloody stump screaming “Mommy!” I’d begun asking the same questions as the Bolshies, such as, “Why are we having this war, anyway?” When I told them my family was poor, the Bolshies got all excited, and I hadn’t felt so important since the army took me. I actually gave those fellows a few francs, and they promptly signed me up as a noncom in their organization. So now I held two ranks, PFC in the American Expeditionary forces and lance corporal in the International Brotherhood of Proletarian Veterans or whatever the hell they were calling themselves.

  My third night on the cathouse circuit, I got into an argument with one of the tarts. Fifi—I always called them Fifi—decided she’d given me special treatment on our second round, something to do with her mouth, her bouche, and now she wanted twenty francs instead of the usual ten. Those ladies thought every doughboy was made of money. All you heard in Bar-le-Duc was “les Americains, beaucoup d’argent.”

  “Dix francs,” I said.

  “Vingt,” Fifi insisted. Her eyes looked like two dead snails. Her hair was the color of Holstein dung.

  “Dix.”

  “Vingt—or I tell ze MP you rip me,” Fifi threatened. She meant rape.

  “Dix,” I said, throwing the coins on the bed, whereupon Fifi announced with a tilted smile that she had “a bad case of ze VD” and hoped she’d given it to me.

  Just remember, you weren’t there. Your body wasn’t full of raw metal, and you didn’t have Fifi’s clap, and nobody was expecting you to maintain a lot of distinctions between the surrendering boys you were supposed to stab and the Frog tarts you weren’t. It was hot. My chest hurt. Half my friends had died capturing a pissant hamlet whose streets were made of horse manure. And all I could see were those nasty little clap germs gnawing at my favorite organs.

  My Remington stood by the door. The bayonet was tinted now, the color of a turnip; so different from the war itself, that bayonet—no question about its purpose. As I pushed it into Fifi and listened to the rasp of the steel against her pelvis, I thought how prophetic her mispronunciation had been: I tell ze MP you rip me.

  I used the fire escape. My hands were wet and warm. All the way back to my room, I felt a gnawing in my gut like I’d been gassed. I wished I’d never stood on my toes in the Boalsburg Recruiting Station. A ditty helped. After six reprises and a bottle of cognac, I finally fell asleep.

  The mademoiselle from Bar-le-Duc, parlez-vous?

  The mademoiselle from Bar-le-Duc, parlez-vous?

  The mademoiselle from Bar-le-Duc,

  She’ll screw you in the chicken coop,

  Hinky Dinky, parlez-vous?

  On the sixteenth of July, I boarded one of those 40-and-8 trains and rejoined my regiment, now dug in along the Marne. A big fight had already happened there, sometime in ’14, and they were hoping for another. I was actually glad to be leaving Bar-le-Duc, for all its wonders and delights. The local gendarmes, I’d heard, were looking into the Fifi matter.

  Click, click, thock, thock, thock. My keeper pauses, twenty-one seconds. He marches south down the black path.

  At the Marne they put me in charge of a Hotchkiss machine gun, and I set it up on a muddy hill, the better to cover the forward trench where they’d stationed my platoon. I had two good friends in that hole, and so when Captain Mallery showed up with orders from le général—we were now part of the XX French Corps—saying I should haul the Hotchkiss a mile downstream, I went berserk.

  “Those boys are completely exposed,” I protested. The junk in my chest was on fire. “If there’s an infantry attack, we’ll lose ’em all.”

  “Move the Hotchkiss, Private Johnson,” the captain said.

  “That’s not a very good idea,” I said.

  “Move it.”

  “They’ll be naked as jaybirds.”

  “Move it. Now.”

  A couple of wars later, of course, attacks on officers by their own men got raised to a kind of art form—I know all about it, I like to read the tourists’ newspapers—but this was 1918 and the concept was still in its infancy. I certainly didn’t display much finesse as I pulled out my Colt revolver and in a pioneering effort shot Mallery through the heart. It was all pretty crude.

  And then, damn, who should happen by but the CO himself, crusty old Colonel Horrocks, his eyes bulging with disbelief. He told me I was arrested. He said I’d hang. But by then I was fed up. I was fed up with gas scares and Alvin Platt getting his arm blown off. I was fed up with being an American infantry private and an honorary Bolshevik, fed up with greedy hookers and gonorrhea and the whole dumb, bloody, smelly war. So I ran. That’s right: ran, retreated, quit the western front.

  Unfortunately, I picked the wrong direction. I’d meant to make my way into Chateau-Thierry and hide out in the cathouses till the Mallery situation blew over, but instead I found myself heading toward Deutschland itself, oh, yes, straight for the enemy line. Stupid, stupid.

  When I saw my error, I threw up my hands.

  And screamed.

  “Kamerad! Kamerad!”

  Bill Johnson née Wilbur Hines never fought in the Second Battle of the Marne. He never helped his regiment drive the Heinies back eight miles, capture four thousand of the Kaiser’s best troops, and kill God knows how many more. This private missed it all, because the Boche hit him with everything they had. Machine-gun fire, grapeshot, rifle bullets, shrapnel. A potato masher detonated. A mustard shell went off. Name: unknown. Address: unknown. Complexion: charred. Eye color: no eyes. Hair: burned off. Weeks later, when they scraped me off the Marne floodplain, it was obvious I was a prime candidate for the Arlington program. Lucky for me, Colonel Horrocks got killed at Soissons. He’d have voted me down.

  As I said, I read the newspapers. I keep up. That’s how I learned about my father. One week after they put me in this box, Harry Hines cheated at seven-card stud and was bludgeoned to death by the loser with a ball peen hammer. It made the front page of the Centre County Democrat.

  It’s raining. The old people hoist their umbrellas; the fifth graders glom onto their teacher; the cub scouts march away like a platoon of midgets. Am I angry about my life? For many years, yes, I was furious, but then the eighties rolled around, mine and the c
entury’s, and I realized I’d be dead by now anyway. So I won’t leave you with any bitter thoughts. I’ll leave you with a pretty song.

  Listen.

  The mademoiselle from Is-sur-Tille, parlez-vous?

  The mademoiselle from Is-sur-Tille, parlez-vous?

  The mademoiselle from Is-sur-Tille,

  She can zig-zig-zig like a spinning wheel,

  Hinky Dinky, parlez-vous?

  My keeper remains, facing east.

  Bible Stories for Adults, No. 20: The Tower

  BEING GOD, I must choose My words carefully. People, I’ve noticed, tend to hang on to My every remark. It gets annoying, this servile and sycophantic streak in Homo sapiens sapiens. There’s a difference, after all, between tasteful adulation and arrant toadyism, but they just don’t get it.

  I’ve always thought of Myself as a kind of parent. God the Father and all that. But an effective mom, dad, or Supreme Being is not necessarily a permissive mom, dad, or Supreme Being. Spare the rod, and you’ll spoil the species. Sometimes it’s best to be strict.

  Was I too strict with Daniel Nimrod? Did I judge the man too harshly? My angels don’t think so; they believe his overbearing vanity—Nimrod the enfant terrible of American real estate, slapping his name on everything from Atlantic City casinos to San Francisco condos—merited the very comeuppance he received. Hear My tale. Decide for yourself. I shall say this. As divine retributions go, it was surely My most creative work since the locusts, lice, flies, murrain, blood, boils, dead children, hail, frogs, and darkness. And here’s the kicker, people: I did it with language alone.

  As I said, I must choose My words carefully.

  We all must.

  Listen.

  Like so many things in Michael Prete’s safe, comfortable, and unenviable life, this began with the telephone. A crank call, he naturally assumed. Not that he was an atheist, nor even an agnostic. He attended Mass regularly. He voted for Republicans. But when a person rings you up claiming to be God Almighty, you are not automatically inclined to believe him.

  There were ambiguities, though. For one thing, the call had come through on the private phone in Michael’s bedroom and not on the corporation line in his study. (How could a common lunatic have acquired those seven heavily guarded digits?) For another, the caller was claiming to be the very same anonymous eccentric who, back in ’83, had agreed to pay out twelve thousand dollars, twelve times a year, for the privilege of occupying the Nimrod Tower penthouse. The man had actually raised the rent on himself: an additional thousand a month, provided he could move in immediately, even though the Tower atrium was still festooned with scaffolding and cloaked in plywood panels.

  “Come to the penthouse,” the mystery voice told Michael upon identifying himself as the Lord God of Hosts, the King of the Universe, the Architect of Reality, the Supreme Being, and so on. “Nine P.M. sharp.” The voice was high, brittle, and cosmopolitan, suffused with the accentless accent of the excessively educated. “We must talk, you and I.”

  “About what?”

  “Your boss,” the voice replied. “You know more about Daniel Nimrod than does anyone else on the planet, including that overdressed mistress of his. There’s quite a lot at stake here: the destiny of the earth, the future of humankind, things like that. Bring a calendar.”

  “If you’re really who you say you are,” ventured Michael, intent on catching the crank in a manifest lapse of logic, “why are you living in Nimrod Tower?”

  “You think God Almighty should be living in a lousy Holiday Inn? What kind of jerk do you think I am? Nine P.M. sharp. So long.”

  Michael slipped into the green velvet suit he’d recently purchased at Napoleon’s, snatched up his Spanish-leather valise from Loewe’s, and descended fifteen floors to street level. Within seconds a Yellow Cab, dome lit, came rattling down Lexington Avenue, pushing through the squalls of snow. (Every year at this time, the same idea haunted Michael: I deserve my own chauffeur—I’ve earned it.) He flagged down the taxi and climbed into the cozy interior, its seats redolent of oiled leather and surreptitious sex. “Nimrod Tower,” he told the driver, a Rastafarian with a knitted cap and gold tooth. “Fifth Avenue and—”

  “I know where it is, mon—why else you fine folks be paying me, if not to know? Why else you be giving me such a fat and juicy tip on top?”

  They crossed Madison, swung left onto Fifth. February already, but the city still seemed Christmasy: the red and green of the traffic lights, the swirling snow. At Fifty-sixth the Jamaican pulled over. “Door to door, eh, mon?” he said cheerfully, musically. Michael paid the $9.50 on the meter, adding a generous three-dollar gratuity.

  He recognized the security force immediately, Manuel and George, the former a tall, spindly, grim Puerto Rican who spoke no English, the latter a self-confident and raffish African-American, both wearing the gaudy crimson tunics Mrs. Nimrod had imported from Baghdad. By day the Tower’s guards functioned mainly as treats for the tourists, a touch of the Arabian Nights in midtown Manhattan, but after eight the show ended, and any underclass scum attempting to breach the skyscraper quickly discovered that these men were real guards equipped with genuine guns.

  “Buenas noches, Señor Prete,” said Manuel morosely, his pith helmet shining in the roseate light spilling from the atrium.

  “What’s new with the Poobah?” asked George, grimacing. A two-foot-high bearskin busby sat atop his head like a treed possum.

  “He’s in Japan,” said Michael.

  “Buying it?” asked George, sniggering.

  “Not exactly,” said Michael, for it was merely the Island of Yaku Shima that Mr. Nimrod intended to buy.

  Michael entered the atrium—a dazzling space, epic, echoey, and grand, agleam with polished bronze trimmings and florid Breccia Perniche marble. Boarding the escalator, he ascended though the tiers of polyglot shops. Level A, Loewe’s of Spain; Level B, Jourdan’s of France; Level C, Beck’s of Germany; Level D, Pineider’s of Italy. Michael’s own stooped self glided by, caught in a gleaming copper panel—his hunched shoulders, receding hairline, pinched sad-eyed face. He got off on E, the floor from which the multispeed, indoor waterfall, at the moment set on Slow, commenced its perpetual plunge. Marching past Norman Crider Antiques, he flashed his corporation pass to the Vietnamese guard and stepped into the open elevator.

  The penthouse commanded the entire sixty-third floor. A castle in the clouds, Michael mused as he rose, his eardrums tightening with the force of his ascent; a San Simeon of the sky, he decided, disembarking. The front door, a slab of glossy oak, held a bronze ring threaded through the nostrils of a minotaur. He grasped the ring and knocked.

  God answered. At least, that was who the penthouse’s occupant claimed to be. “Hi, I’m God,” he said amiably, “into macroevolution, quantum mechanics, and Jewish history.” Those cosmopolitan tones again, filtered this time through the pressure in Michael’s ears.

  “Michael Prete.”

  “I know,” said the alleged deity. “Everything,” he added. With his dusky skin, Prince Valiant haircut, and deep chocolate eyes, he seemed of no particular nationality, and his age and gender were likewise indeterminate. A mildly feminine bosom swelled the breast of his white silk housecoat.

  They shook hands.

  “I suppose you’d like some sort of proof,” said the penthouse’s owner in a subtly chiding voice. He led Michael into a parlor paved with carpeting so soft and thick it was like walking on a gigantic pat of butter. “I suppose you expect a sign.” They moved past a Steinway grand piano to a tract of window the size of a squash court. “Viola,” said the rich man, gesturing toward the storm-swept city below.

  Being God, I was able to give Michael Prete several signs that night. First I made the blizzard disappear. Whoosh, poof, and suddenly it was a sweltering summer night in New York, not a smidgen of slush, not one snowflake. The thermometer read ninety-one degrees Fahrenheit.

  Michael was impressed, but his skepticism vanished completely only a
fter I filled the nocturnal sky with phosphorescent seraphim singing “A Mighty Fortress Is Our God” and the streets with platoons of cherubim giving out roast turkeys to homeless alcoholics.

  I changed everything back, of course. Restored the season, recalled the turkeys, sent the angels home, wiped all trace of the event from the collective consciousness. If You intervene too profusely in Earth’s affairs, I’ve noticed, the inhabitants become chronically distracted, and they forget to worship You.

  “Would you like a drink?”

  “Y-yes. A d-drink. Please.” Michael was so shaken he’d dropped his Spanish-leather valise on the rug. “Are You really God? God Himself?”

  “Ever since I can remember.”

  “This is hard to take. You can understand that, right? Do You have any brandy, God, Sir?”

  The Almighty strolled to His mahogany bookshelves and took down two sparkling cognac glasses and a crystalline decanter containing a honey-colored liquid. “I want you to come clean about something. A confession, if you will. Given that you’re a practicing Catholic, perhaps I should summon a priest…”

  “Depends on the sin,” Michael mumbled, glumly pondering the possibility that he had lost his mind. “If it’s venial—”

  “You hate Daniel Nimrod, don’t you?” God asked abruptly as He filled both glasses with brandy.

  Michael gasped so profoundly his clogged ears popped. “It’s not a bad situation, this life of mine. Really. Yes. I’ve got my own apartment on Lexington with a dishwasher and a rear-screen TV.”

  “He makes you call him ‘sir.’”

  “He doesn’t make me.”

  “He sounds pompous.”

  Michael sipped cognac. “Anybody who’s achieved as much as Mr. Nimrod—a person like that has a right to be keen on himself, don’t You think?”

  “You’re envious. Your insides are bright green, I can see them. He’s got his yacht and his concubines and his name in Fortune every month, and what have you got, Prete? You can’t even get a date. Never mind. We’ll change the subject. What can you tell me about Nimrod Gorge?”