Godless

by Pete Hautman

  Even the way he looks is ordinary. One time for a computer project I scanned a whole bunch of student photos from the yearbook, then used a graphics program to morph them into a single face. What I got looked like a slightly fuzzy version of Dan Grant. When I showed the picture to Dan, he didn’t see the resemblance. But everybody else did.

  In addition to being exceedingly ordinary, Dan is also a P.K., which stands for Preacher’s Kid. His father, Reverend Andrew Grant, is the minister at Calvary Lutheran Church. Naturally, the Reverend Grant expects his only son to follow in his hallowed footsteps. Dan would rather be a firefighter. No kidding. He’s wanted to fight fires since before kindergarten.

  I am playing ping-pong with Dan in his basement the day I decide to invite him to join Shin and me in our exploration of the Ineffable and Glorious Mystery of the Ten-legged One.

  I am seven points ahead when I bring it up. The reason I am seven points ahead is because I have a psychological advantage over Dan, even though he is a better ping-pongist. He can’t beat me. Here’s how it works. First, I am bigger than him. Second, the first few times I hit the ball, I smack it as hard as I can, right at his face. Now you might think that getting hit by a little ping-pong ball wouldn’t hurt, but you would be wrong. The very first shot I connected with Dan’s forehead. He still has a red spot where it hit. And now, every time I hit the ball, he flinches.

  That is what you call technique.

  Between flinches, seven points ahead, I ask Dan if he has been saved.

  “Saved from what?” he asks.

  “Ignorance, dehydration, hellfire and damnation.”

  Dan thinks for a moment. It is one of his most irritating habits. Ask him his name and he takes a few seconds to consider his response.

  “Yes,” he says.

  “Yes, what?”

  “I’ve been saved from all three. School saved me from ignorance, Mountain Dew saved me from dehydration, and my father saved me from hellfire and damnation. At least I think he thinks I think he did.”

  “How did he put out the hellfire?”

  “Huh?”

  “How did he put out the fire?”

  “He … what are you talking about?”

  “What’s the most important element on earth?”

  “I don’t … ah … oxygen?”

  “Wrong. It’s water.”

  “Water isn’t an element. It’s a compound.”

  “Earth, air, fire, and water. Those are the four elements, according to the ancient Greeks.”

  Dan stares at me, blinking. We’ve been arguing for ten years and he hasn’t won one yet.

  “What’s your point?” he asks.

  “Shin and I have a new religion,” I tell him. “The Church of the Ten-legged God.”

  Dan comes off as such a straight-shooter that most people would be surprised to know how crazy he can be. For instance (very few people know this), he likes to chew aspirin. He says he likes the way it feels on his tongue. Maybe Dan isn’t so ordinary after all.

  He says, “What is it? Like, a cult?”

  “Better than a cult. You don’t have to dress weird or anything. No church on Sunday. And it’s free.”

  “I like free. How many people do you have so far?”

  “Three, if you join. I’m Founder and Head Kahuna. Shin is First Keeper of the Sacred Text. We’d like you to be First Acolyte Exaltus.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “I have no idea.”

  “Do we get to sacrifice virgins?”

  “Possibly. Much remains to be decided. You’re coming in on the ground floor.”

  “So why does this god need so many legs?”

  “I don’t know. Should we go ask him?”

  A few minutes later Dan and I approach the Ten-legged One, looking up at its swollen belly. Shin is waiting for us. He is lying flat on his back on the grass with his mouth open.

  “Is he okay?” Dan asks.

  “I’m fine,” says Shin.

  “What are you doing?”

  “Trying to catch a drop of Holy Water.” Just as he speaks, a large drop hits his cheek. Shin closes his eyes and smiles and says, “Ahhhh.”

  “It’s one of our sacraments,” I explain.

  “What are the others?”

  “Giving Thanks to the Tower—that’s where we bow in the direction of the Ten-legged One three times a day. And the Sacred Washing of the Hands. We do that before meals. The Flushing of the Toilet. We’re working on more.”

  Dan crumples his brow, then says, “How about the Daily Immersion?”

  “Would that be a bath, or swimming?”

  “Either.”

  “I like it.”

  Dan looks up at the tower, then at Shin, then turns to me. “My dad would totally freak. Count me in, Kahuna.”

  Just then, Shin lets out a startled squawk. An exceptionally large water drop has hit him square on the forehead. But it’s not just water. He sits up and wipes it away and stares at the glop dripping from his fingers. It looks like snot, or slime. My first thought is that a bird crapped on him, but then we hear laughter from above. We all look up and see a grinning red face hanging over the edge of the lower catwalk, 120 feet above us.

  “Gotcha!” shouts the face.

  It’s Henry Stagg.

  * * *

  FOR THREE BILLION YEARS THE OCEAN WATCHED, CONTENT, AS THE WORLD EVOLVED. IT WATCHED THE RISE AND FALL OF THE DINOSAURS, THE RISE OF THE MAMMALIANS, THE CETACEANS’ RETURN TO THE SEA, THE MIGRATION OF THE CONTINENTS.

  * * *

  6

  Father Haynes, a thousand years old at least, is standing in the pulpit delivering one of his famous sermons on selflessness. His voice rises and falls like the sound of a crop duster passing back and forth over a field, spraying us with words. I’ve endured this sermon before. It goes on for nearly half an hour, but the message is simple: Give more money to the church.

  I could use some money, too, for necessities such as game discs and french fries and size-thirteen Nikes. Maybe I should collect dues from the congregation of the Church of the Ten-legged God.

  I look to my left, at my father. His lips and jaw are set in a determinedly attentive mask, but his eyes are drooping. I’m not the only one who’s heard this sermon before. I lean forward and look past him at my mother, hands folded neatly in her lap, a worried smile on her pink-lipsticked lips. Probably thinking about all the germs floating around the church. Influenza, hanta virus, ebola, bubonic plague …

  Do they really think that attending mass will make them better, or happier, or save them from an eternity of hellfire? Maybe they do. But there are something like ten thousand religions in the world. What makes them think that they happen to have been born into the right one? I have asked this question several times. So far, I haven’t heard a good answer. Better to start your own religion, I think. That way you get to be your own pope.

  I’m well on my way. I have a god, I have sacraments, and I have two converts—plus myself. But the Church of the Ten-legged God (CTG for short) still needs one more thing: a set of rules, or commandments. I wonder what sort of commandments the Ten-legged One might hand down. I’ll have to make some up.

  Father Haynes has shifted gears and is now talking about respect for the sanctity of the church. I think he’s upset because a few weeks ago he found some chewing gum stuck to the bottom of one of the pews. I wonder how he would feel about spit, and I think about Henry Stagg.

  Nobody likes being spat on. As Shin disgustedly wiped his face clean with his shirttail, Henry descended the spiral staircase. Watching him trot confidently down the perforated metal steps, I couldn’t help imagining that the Ten-legged One was sending an emissary down to speak with us, like God sending Jesus to Earth, only he turns out to be Adolf Hitler. When Henry ran out of staircase, still fifteen feet above us, he sat down on the bottom landing and dangled his cowboy boots over our heads.

  “What are you guys doing?” he asked.

  I was not a
bout to tell Henry that we were there to worship the water tower.

  “How’d you get up there?” I asked.

  “I flew,” Henry said.

  “Yeah, right.”

  Henry shrugged. I looked around. No ladders, no ropes. No way he could have jumped high enough to reach that bottom rung.

  Shin said, “You’re not supposed to be up there.”

  Henry laughed.

  “How are you gonna get down?” Dan asked.

  “Why would I want to get down?”

  “You have to come down sometime.”

  “I don’t … uh-oh. The law.” Henry pushed himself off. For a moment he hung with both hands gripping the bottom step, his feet still about eight feet off the ground, then he dropped, hitting feet first, the heels of his boots punching into the soft ground.

  “See? No problem.”

  A few seconds later a squad car pulled up to the grassy apron. Gerry Kramer, one of St. Andrew Valley’s oldest and grayest cops, got out of the car and walked up to us, shaking his head.

  “You kids … is that Henry Stagg? I thought we talked about this, Henry,”

  “Talked about what?” Henry put on his Who me? face.

  Kramer wasn’t buying it. Henry trying to act innocent is like a wolverine trying to act cuddly.

  “Henry, Henry, Henry … what are we gonna do with you?”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Henry said, trying to hold back a grin.

  Kramer stared until Henry lowered his eyes. “I don’t need any more of these nuisance calls, Henry. Next time I get a kid-on-the-water-tower call, you’re going downtown.”

  “I wasn’t on the water tower, officer. Did you see me?”

  “No, I didn’t, but that doesn’t change the facts. You were seen. I know it was you up there.”

  “So how did I get up there? You think I flew?”

  Kramer shook his head, as perplexed as the rest of us. “You got up there somehow.”

  “I guess I musta flew.”

  “Well, you can fly home right now. I don’t want to see you—” He crossed his thick arms and looked at the rest of us. “—any of you around here again. You hear me?”

  “Yes, sir,” said Dan. Dan is terrified of authority figures.

  We edged away, feeling Kramer’s hard eyes on our backs. As soon as we were out of earshot, Henry said, “What an asshole.”

  “He’s just doing his job,” Dan said.

  “Yeah, well he can shove it.” We reached the sidewalk and continued walking up Louisiana Avenue. It felt strange to be walking beside Henry Stagg, but the confrontation with the law somehow bound us together.

  “Did he catch you up there before?” I asked.

  “Just once. A couple weeks ago.”

  “What were you doing up there?” Dan asked.

  “I like it. You can see forever. You can see the school. I can see my house.”

  “You ever go all the way to the top?” Shin asked.

  “Sure, all the time.”

  “What’s up there?”

  “All kinds of stuff.”

  “Like what?”

  “You should check it out, Schinner.”

  “You’re not supposed to.”

  “Well then, you’ll never know, will you?”

  Shin shook his head and drew his mouth into a knot.

  “So how did you get up?” I asked.

  “Like I said, I flew.”

  Father Haynes ends his tedious sermon and launches into the Nicene Creed. I know all the parts of the mass. I used to be an altar boy, one of those kids sweating uncomfortably in their black-and-white polyester robes. That was back before I realized that it was mostly made up.

  Henry never told us how he got up to that bottom step, and it’s been bugging me. All I can figure out is that he brought a ladder, or somehow swung a rope up. But where did the rope or ladder go? Maybe it’s some sort of religious miracle—but I don’t believe in miracles.

  Take, for instance, the miracle that Father Haynes is about to perform.

  The so-called miracle of Holy Communion is my least favorite part of the mass. It’s the part where everybody gets up and stands in line to eat a communion wafer—what they call the host. Have you ever eaten a host?

  I once read a short story about some cannibals who didn’t turn their victims into steaks and chops and roasts; they made them all into sausages. Because when you’re eating a sausage you don’t think so much about what you’re eating. It’s the same with communion wafers.

  Hosts are little white disks that do not resemble any kind of real food. The closest thing I can think of would be a flattened, sugarless marshmallow. They have almost no taste, just a faint sourness, and they require no chewing. I think they’re made out of some kind of digestible paper.

  My point is, the miracle of Holy Communion is when the priest turns these little white disks into the flesh of Jesus Christ. They call it transsubstantiation. So, if you buy that, then the host the priest places on your tongue is actually a sliver of Jesus meat. But they make the host as different from meat as they can, so that even though communion is a form of cannibalism, nobody gets grossed out. Like with the sausages.

  Anyway, the reason I hate communion isn’t the meat-eating component. I get hungry enough, I’ll eat anything. The reason I hate it is because everybody in the church except me, Jason Bock, stands up and gets in line for their little snack. I sit there alone in the pew while everybody stares at me as they file past. I sit there and burn under the hellfire and damnation stare my father gives me. And I feel awful. But what choice do I have? According to Father Haynes, if a nonbeliever takes Holy Communion, he’ll be damned for all eternity. Of course, being a nonbeliever damns me anyway, so I suppose it doesn’t really matter, but I figure it’s safer not to partake. Just in case I’m wrong about the whole God thing.

  So I sit and endure the stares and the pangs and twinges of Catholic guilt, knowing that I am doing the right thing if I’m right, and the right thing even if I’m wrong.

  Being Catholic is hard. Being ex-Catholic is even harder.

  * * *

  BUT A TIME CAME WHEN EVEN THE PLENITUDE OF LIFE FAILED TO SATISFY, AND SO THE OCEAN INSTILLED INTELLIGENCE AND FREE WILL IN CERTAIN OF ITS CREATURES, AND IT CALLED THEM HUMANS, AND IT WATCHED AS THE FIRST CRUDE TOOLS WERE FASHIONED BY HUMAN HANDS, AND IT WATCHED THE FIRST WARS BEING FOUGHT, AND IT WATCHED AS THESE LARGE-HEADED APES BEGAN TO RESHAPE THE LANDS AND THE WATERS IN NEW WAYS.

  * * *

  7

  In the CTG, Tuesday is the Sabbath. Why, you ask? Because nothing else ever happens on a Tuesday. Shin, Dan, and I honor the Sabbath at Wigglesworth’s, where we all order Magnum Brainblasters. Never had a Brainblaster? You should try one. It’s a Wigglesworth specialty.

  A Magnum Brainblaster is about a foot tall, green, foamy, and numbingly cold. For maximum impact, you drink it through a straw. Wigglesworth keeps his ingredients secret, but a Brainblaster certainly contains massive amounts of sugar, enough caffeine to wake up a corpse, and I think he throws in a chunk of dry ice just before serving. Think of it as Mountain Dew on steroids.

  So we’re sitting in the window table at Wigglesworth’s Juiceteria, charging up on Brainblasters, and Shin, First Keeper of the Sacred Text, is showing us the Secret Dimensions he has calculated using Trigonometry, Guesswork, and other Holy Mathematical Techniques.

  Overall height: 207 feet

  Distance from ground to bottom of tank: 154 feet

  Circumference of central column: 22 feet, 3 inches

  Diameter of tank: 67 feet

  Volume of tank: 1 million gallons

  Weight of water: 8 million pounds

  Distance between legs: 24 feet

  … and so on. After Shin completes his presentation we stand up and bow in the direction of the Ten-legged God. Magda Price, who works for Wigglesworth part time, wanders over. She is wearing the official Wigglesworth Juiceteria uniform: a tight pink T-shirt with Juicy
! printed across the front in lime-green script. On her it looks good.

  “What are you guys doing?” she asks. Magda can’t stand to be left out of anything.

  “Honoring the Sabbath,” I tell her.

  “It’s Tuesday.”

  “We are aware of that.”

  Magda wrinkles her forehead. For some reason it makes her look extra sexy. Not that she needs it. “The Sabbath is Sunday,” she says.

  “Not if you’re Jewish.”

  “You’re not Jewish. Besides, if you’re Jewish the Sabbath is Saturday, and today is Tuesday.”

  “We are aware of that.”

  “Then you know it’s not the Sabbath,” she says, as if she’s proved her point.

  “We are Chutengodians,” I say, making up the name on the spot. “Chutengodians celebrate the Sabbath on Tuesday.”

  “Chattenoogians?”

  “Chutengodians. It’s a religion.”

  “Oh. Is that what you were talking about the other day? At TPO? The ten leggy thing?”

  “Ten legged,” I say.

  “It sounds like something you just made up.”

  “Blasphemy!”

  “So what kind of religion is it?”

  “The one true faith.”

  “Is it, like, a cult?”

  “Not exactly.”

  Have you noticed that Magda and I are doing all the talking? Dan just stares at her like a lovesick dolphin, while Shin is paralyzed, in a world of his own. Dan is afraid to open his mouth because he knows he’ll say something stupid, and Shin—well, Shin is so terrified of girls he’s probably just hoping he won’t crap in his pants. That’s why what happens next is so bizarre.

  “What do you worship?” Magda asks.

  “The Ten-legged One,” says Shin in a voice deeper than I’ve ever heard from him.

  We all look at him, startled. He is staring at Magda with the sort of intensity he usually reserves for gastropods.