by Churton, Alex; Churton, Toby; Locke, John; Lustbader, Eric van; van Lustbader, Eric
Sometimes that was all that happened, the sounds would gradually ebb, Jack would lie back down, his heartbeat would return to normal, and eventually, he’d drift into a restless sleep. But at other times, the first bars of “California Dreamin’” by the Mamas and the Papas creep into his room, and his heart starts to pound and he has to force himself not to vomit all over the sheets.
“I’d be safe and warm …”
The three slices of pepperoni pizza Jack had for dinner rise as if from a magician’s wand.
“… if I was in L.A….”
Stomach acid burns his throat, and he thinks, Oh God, he’s coming.
The melody takes on a life of its own. Like the notes of a snake charmer, it’s filled with an ominous meaning at odds with its original sunny disposition. And like the cobra that hovers and strikes at will, digging its fangs deep into flesh, his father stalks him, the thick black belt he bought in a biker shop in Fort Washington, Maryland, held loosely in his left hand.
It was a time-honored ritual in the McClure household, this whipping. It would have been so much better if the cause had been alcohol because then it wouldn’t have been Jack’s fault. But it is Jack’s fault. How many times has his father browbeaten the fact into him?
And Jack’s mother, what is her part in this ritual? She stays in her bedroom, behind a tightly closed door that leaks “California Dreamin’” every time her husband wraps the belt around the knuckles of his left fist. Jack, a living example of Skinnerian psychology, prepares himself for the pain when he hears the first bars of flower power sweetly, innocently sung.
Fists aren’t what frighten Jack, though his father possesses the big, knuckly rocks of a bricklayer or an assassin. By adult standards, his father isn’t particularly big, but with his dark eyes, sullen mouth, and broken nose, he seems like a colossus to Jack. Especially when he’s swinging the belt. Following Neanderthal instincts, he turned the biker belt into an ugly, writhing thing. Its armor of metal studs, its crown a buckle big as two fists are not enough. He filed the corners to points one sunny Sunday when Jack was out playing softball.
“Tell me a story, read me a book,” his father says as he opens the door to his son’s room. He looks around at the unholy mess of clothes, comics, magazines, records, bits of candy bars and chocolate. “Books, books, where are the friggin’ books?” He bends down, swipes up a comic. “Batman,” he says with a sneer. “How the fuck old are you?”
“Fifteen,” Jack answers automatically, though his mouth is dry.
“And all you can read is this junk?” He shoves the comic in his son’s face. “Okay then, brainiac, read to me.”
Jack’s hands tremble so badly, the comic slips through his fingers.
“Open it, John.”
Dutifully, Jack flips the pages of the comic. He wants to read, he wants to show his father that he can, but his emotions are in turmoil. He’s filled with fear and anxiety, which automatically extinguish what progress he’s made in decoding English. He stares down at the comic panels. The speech balloons might as well be written in Mandarin. The letters float off like spiky sea creatures with a will of their own.
He sees them, but he cannot make heads or tails of what they might be. It’s garbage in, garbage out.
“God almighty, it’s a fucking comic. A six-year-old could read it, but not you, huh?” His father rips the comic from him, flips it into a corner.
“Hey, watch it,” Jack says, leaping up.
His father sticks out his right hand, shoves him back onto the bed.
“That’s issue number four.”
“How the hell would you know?” His father stomps over to the corner, rips up the comic. Batman and his bat-cape are parted.
His father carefully removes his prized gold-and-diamond cuff links from his shirt, knocks a pile of comics off Jack’s dresser with a backhand swipe, lays them down on the open space. Then the beating starts. The belt uncoils from his father’s fist like an oily viper. It whips up, then down, striping Jack’s rib cage. And as the lashing commences in earnest, his father punctuates each singing strike with a litany of words.
“You don’t talk right.” Crack! “You act like a goddamn zombie when I ask you to do something.” Crack! “You fidget and procrastinate because you’re too stupid to understand me.” Crack! “Christ, fifteen years old and you can’t read.” Crack! “I was already hauling garbage when I was fifteen.” Crack!
He is breathing hard, his chest rising and falling rapidly. “Where the fuck did you come from?” Crack! “Not from me, that’s for damn sure!” Crack! “A hole in the ground, that’s it.” Crack!
His rage is immense, as large as the Lincoln Memorial, as large as the sky. He is a man who looks upon his son and is diminished. As if something in his seed is defective. He can’t bear the thought. Having a son like Jack fills him with rage; the rage fuels his violence.
“Your mother must’ve fucked some sideshow freak—” Crack! “—while I was out trying to make ends meet, John.” Crack! “John. They call the losers who go to whores johns.” Crack! “You’re a pinhead.” Crack! “A half-wit!” Crack! “You give morons a good name.” Crack! “Stupid would be a big step up for you.” Crack! Crack! Crack!
Jack’s body absorbs the excruciating pain with its usual indifference. In fact, it grows hard and tough under the abuse. It’s the words that penetrate to his inner gyroscope, fragile, delicately balanced in the best of times. The litany of hate knocks the pins out from under the gyroscope, the heavy machinery flattens Jack’s tattered self-esteem, burying it in the muddy flats at the depths of his being. Belief is as ephemeral as a cloud, shape-shifted by invisible forces. How easily other people’s beliefs masquerade as our own. The enemy outside invades, and we, young and impressionable, are vulnerable; the enemy is so insidious that we’re changed without even being aware of it. Our cloud shape is altered as we are propelled onward through life.
Afterwards, Jack lies on the blood-smeared sheets. His room is invaded by the howls at the edge of the city. The traffic light at the intersection of Eastern and New Hampshire blinks from red to green and back again. Once again, it has predicted his fate. But now the light is ignored. Jack’s mind is busy continuing the punishment his father has meted out. He straddles a widening fault line. This fault line is his; he has manufactured it out of his dim brain, he has spun it from all the things he can’t do, all the things he tried to do and failed. His father is right. His fault, his fault line, growing bigger and wider every day.
Instead of lying in a pool of sweat, waiting for the constellation of dreaded sounds, Jack takes to wandering the flyblown streets. Night shreds like smoke, manhandled by streetlights, neon signs blinking and buzzing like wasps, aggressive arc lights setting filling stations afire in blinding auroras. Shiny faces move in and out of his vision, crossing streets at a cocaine-induced angle, shuffling past him in a bog of alcohol fumes. Hands in pockets, shoulders hunched against wind or rain, he leans against a lamppost on Eastern Avenue, watches the world spin by without him.
It seems as if he has lost himself in the haze of the city. In shopwindows, he looks blurred, as if he is out of focus with the rest of the world. He realizes just how badly out of focus when he is taken behind the local discount electronics store by members of the local gang and beaten senseless for no particular reason save that he’s white.
“Yo disrespected us, coming onto our turf.” The gang leader spits into Jack’s face as Jack sprawls in the filth of the back alley. He is tall—at least a head taller than Jack—and rangy. His eyes are buggy. “We find you here again, we pin yo pale mutherfuckin’ ass to the rear end of a garbage truck.” He kicks Jack insolently in the groin. “You listenin’ t’me, whitey?”
Jack tries to nod, instead groans with the pain.
He must have passed out after that because when he opens his crusted eyes, dawn has crept into the alley. The gang leader and his cabal are nowhere to be seen, but Jack isn’t alone.
A man of midd
le years with an angular face the color of freshly brewed coffee is crouched on his hams, regarding Jack with sympathetic eyes.
“Can you move, son?” He has a voice like liquid velvet, as if he is a singer of love songs.
Fully awake now, racked with pain, Jack pulls himself up against the slimy brick wall at the rear of the electronics shop. He sits with his legs drawn up, wrists resting loosely on his knees. Sucking in deep breaths, he tries to deal with the pain, but it covers so many parts of his body, he feels dizzy and sick in the pit of his stomach. All of a sudden, he rolls over and vomits.
The man with the velvet voice watches this without surprise. When he’s certain Jack is finished, he rises, holds out his hand. “You need to get cleaned up. I’ll walk you home.”
“Don’t have a home,” Jack says dully.
“Well, I doubt that, son. Honest, I do.” The man with the velvet voice pushes his lips out. “Mebbe it’s a home you don’t feature going back to at this point in time. Is that it?”
Jack nods.
“But you’ll want to, I guarantee that.” He bends a little, taking Jack’s hand in his. “In the meantime, why don’t you come with me. We’ll mend what needs to be mended, then call your folks. They must be frantic with worry about you.”
“They probably don’t know I’m gone,” Jack says, which probably isn’t true, but it’s what he feels.
“Still and all, I do believe they have a right to know you’re okay.”
Jack isn’t sure about that at all. Nevertheless, he looks up into the man’s face.
“My name’s Myron. Myron Taske.” Taske smiles with big white teeth. “Will you tell me yours?”
“Jack.”
When Myron Taske realizes that’s all Jack is going to say, he nods. “Will you let me help you, Jack?”
“Why would you want to help me?” Jack says.
Myron’s smile deepens as it grows wider. “Because, son, that’s what God wants me to do.”
Myron Taske is minister of the Renaissance Mission Church farther down Kansas Avenue NE. The clapboard building that houses the church had once been a two-family attached house, but first one family defaulted on their mortgage, then the other. The building was put into receivership by the bank.
“Which was when we bought it,” Taske says as he leads Jack through the side door into the rectory. “Lucky for us, one of the bank’s vice presidents is a member of our congregation. We were searching for a new home and this became it.” He winks. “Got it at a good price.”
“But this area’s filled with gangs, crime, and drugs,” Jack says, and winces as Taske applies peroxide with a swab to his numerous scrapes, cuts, and lacerations.
“And where better to accomplish God’s work?” Taske indicates that Jack should take off his shirt. “Which begs the question, what were you doing on that wild corner in the middle of the night?”
“Hanging,” Jack says sullenly.
“Why weren’t you home and in bed?”
Jack shrugs off his shirt. “I thought it would be safer out on the street.”
The reverend stares at the black-and-blue marks across Jack’s rib cage. Softly, he says, “You didn’t get those tonight, did you?”
Jack bites his lip.
“Father or brother?”
“Don’t have a brother, do I?” Jack says defensively. How would things go for him at home if he said his father is beating him? Anyway, it isn’t his father’s fault that Jack is so stupid.
Myron Taske, silent, contemplative, continues his work patching Jack up. As it turns out, he is a singer, every Sunday, leading the choir in three joyous songs at the end of his sermon. He loves to sing love songs of a sort, love songs to God’s grace and goodness here on earth as in the heavens. This he tells Jack as he bandages him up.
“Everyone here is black?” Jack says.
Myron Taske leans back, regarding Jack over small eyeglasses he has set on the bridge of his nose for the close work. “Anyone who wants to be closer to God is welcome here, Jack.”
Finished with his work, he packs up the first aid kit, stows it back in a large armoire that dominates one wall. On the opposite wall is a painting of Christ’s face, resplendent within a golden aura.
“Do you believe in God, Jack?”
“I … I never thought about it.”
Myron Taske purses his lips again. “Would you like to now?”
Before Jack can answer, a sharp series of raps comes on the door: three short, two long.
“Just a minute!” Taske calls, but the door swings inward anyway.
The doorway is entirely filled by a man of humongous height and girth. He must weigh close to 350 pounds. He is the color of a moonless night, his eyes yellow, teeth very large, very white, except for his left incisor, which is gold. Embedded in its center is a gleaming diamond. His hands are the size of other people’s feet, his feet the size of other people’s heads, his skull as bald as a bowling ball and twice as shiny.
“Jeremiah Christmas, Gus, didn’t you hear me?”
Gus’s face, scarred along both cheeks, is like a black lamp that sucks all the daylight out of the room. His gravelly voice is just as terrifying.
“Sure I heard you, Reverend.” He walks into the room on legs whose thighs are so thick, they make him slightly bandy-legged. “I wanted to see for myself who you picked outta the gutter this time.”
“News travels fast,” Jack says, without thinking. He sucks in his breath as Gus’s yellow eyes impale him on a stake.
“Good news travels fast,” Gus rumbles. “Bad news travels faster.”
“Gus is a storehouse of aphorisms,” Myron Taske says for Jack’s benefit. “A vast storehouse.”
Gus’s enormous belly shakes when he laughs. He moves into the room like a sumo wrestler, like a force of nature.
Still with his eyes on Jack, he says to Reverend Taske, “This one’s different, though. He’s white.” He squints, addresses Jack without missing a beat. “That’s one butt-ugly beating handed to you.”
“It was my fault,” Jack says.
“Yeah?” This seems to interest Gus. “How you mean?”
“I was standing on the corner over Eastern.”
Gus nods his monstrously huge head as he circles Jack. “And?”
“And I got dragged into the alley and beaten. Guy said to me I disrespected him.”
Gus appears on the verge of annoyance. “By doing what-all?”
“I was on his turf.”
Gus’s gaze swings to the reverend. “Andre,” is all he says.
Taske nods sorrowfully.
“Shit, I told you the preachin’ wasn’t gonna work on him.” Gus is clearly disgusted.
“How many times have I told you that kind of language has no place in God’s house, Augustus,” Reverend Taske says sternly.
“Apologies, Reverend.” Gus looks abashed.
“Don’t apologize to me, Augustus.” He gestures with his head. “Do your penance, seek God’s forgiveness.”
With one last look at Jack, Gus lumbers out, slamming the door behind him.
There is a silence, out of which Jack struggles by saying, “I suppose now you’re going to tell me not to worry, that his bark is worse than his bite.”
Reverend Taske shakes his head ruefully. “No, son. You don’t want to get in the way of Gus’s bite.” Slapping his palms against his thighs, he says, “Are you ready to go home now?” He looks at his watch. “It’s already after eight.”
“I’m not going home,” Jack says stubbornly.
“Then I’ll walk you to school.”
Jack ducks his head. “Don’t go to school. They don’t want me.”
There is a small silence. Jack is terrified Myron Taske will ask him why.
Instead, the reverend says, “I’ll call Child Services at nine, make sure the beatings don’t continue.”
Jack bites his lip. Child Services. Strangers. No, then they’ll find out how stupid he is, and his father will be e
ven angrier. “Don’t call anyone,” he says in a voice that catches Taske’s attention.
“All right, for the moment I won’t,” the reverend says, after a moment’s pause, “on one condition. I’d very much like you to come back, because it seems to me that you’re ready to talk about God.”
Jack remains dubious, but he has no choice. Besides, Reverend Taske is so nice, there’s a chance he’ll get to like Jack, as long as Jack manages not to look or sound stupid around him. That means, among other things, keeping away from any printed matter the reverend might want him to read. Filled with anxiety, he nods his assent.
“Believe me, the first step is the most painful, Jack.” Smiling, Myron Taske claps his hand gently on Jack’s shoulder. “You’re lost now—even you can’t deny that. Consider that in finding God you will find yourself.”
11
The First Daughter awoke in a room of unknown size; the walls and ceiling, lost in shadows, seemed to mock her. She might have been in a bunker or an auditorium, for all she knew. Whether there were windows here was another mystery impossible for her to solve. A bare lightbulb, surrounded by the knife-edged penumbra of an industrial Bakelite shade, dropped a scorching bomb of light onto her head and shoulders.
She sat bound to a chair that seemed hand-hewn from the heart of a titanic tree. Its ladder back rose to a height above her head; its seat was of woven rush. Lacquered canary yellow, its surfaces were tagged in a graffiti of swooping red and purple, suggesting both bougainvillea and sprays of blood.
Her wrists were fastened to the muscular chair arms with thick leather straps, her ankles bound similarly to the chair legs, as if she were a madwoman in a nineteenth-century asylum. She was dressed in new clothes, not in the sleep shirt and boys’ boxers she’d worn to bed. Her feet were bare. She felt the vague need to urinate, but she clamped down on it. She had far bigger problems.
Alli couldn’t remember how she got here; she barely recalled the callused hand over her mouth, the nauseating odor of ether rising into her nostrils like swamp gas. After all, it could have been a nightmare. Now she smelled her own sweat, a stew of terror, rage, and helplessness.