gods with a little g

by Tupelo Hassman

  “You need to get to school,” he said, and then he took a deep breath and his voice was stronger. “I’ll call in sick today, I’ll find him.”

  And I believed him right then, every word. I needed to, not because of the cat, but because Dad was there, helping. Dad was giving a fuck. So I buckled Rudolph’s collar around my wrist and wore it to the first day of school. And then I wore it all year.

  * * *

  After school that day, there was no Rudolph. But there was Dad. And the stapler, the staples, the package of Sharpies he had bought. These were the atonement for the only lie I bet he ever told. The weirdest thing is, when the last bit of comfort we had between us was gone, Rudolph’s gray fuzzy self totally disappeared except for that collar, Dad did not once mention prayer. He handed me permanent markers and industrial-strength staples instead. Faked some hope. And told me to write it all down.

  Dad traded his perfect, sinless record for this single falsehood. For me. And I knew better, but that didn’t stop me from writing my signs that night and it didn’t stop me from posting them up or walking until dark every evening for weeks calling Rudolph’s name. Dad had to suffer through hearing this, his daughter’s voice crying in the wilderness of Rosary, and knowing it would go unanswered, because he had already cried himself hoarse.

  SHARPIE

  In the morning, the morning of now, I empty all the leftovers, wrapped and sealed and labeled in Iris’s frilly cursive. I shove them into the garbage and I walk the long way to school so I can take down all of the lost-cat signs I hung on every telephone pole for half a mile. Baby Rudolph isn’t coming home. I wouldn’t either if I were him.

  MARRY FUCK KILL

  This isn’t necessarily a drinking game, but drink anyway. It helps.

  It goes like this. You are given three people to choose from. They might be famous people or people you know in real life, they can be alive or dead, and, in some very specific instances, both. You categorize them according to who, of the three, you’d be most inclined to marry, to fuck, and to kill.

  For example, Sissy offers me the following three choices, “Bird. Eddie. Cy.”

  First, I say, “Cy.” The marrying part of the game is forever and does not include sex, so you want to choose someone you can put up with but don’t want to fuck. Cy is already like background music. Without Bird to prod him into action, you barely notice him. I imagine him to be the perfect husband of my three choices here.

  Then, “Eddie.” You only have to—or get to, depending on your desire—fuck the person in the second category one single time. If any of the people you are choosing from is listening as you play Marry Fuck Kill, a good strategy is to lie your face off, especially if the person you actually want to fuck is on the list. Knowing it. Waiting for it. Waiting for you to say his name.

  Save that one for last. Kill. Kill. Kill.

  MOUTH

  If I were going to put Iris out of my misery, I’d start by melting all of her lipsticks. All the Mary Kays and the Avons, I’d roll their little dick-shaped selves up and up, out of their plastic shafts, until they toppled over like every erection must do when brought close to Iris’s face, when it hears her trying-too-hard voice, feels her breath burning with metal from too much iced tea washing against her silver fillings.

  I’d ruin all of her lipsticks, but that is only the beginning.

  When she goes to open up her makeup case, instead of finding tubes of shellac to color her hole, she’ll find the Sunset Pink and RubyFruit Red and Pleasure Purple penis I’d made by melting all of her lipsticks together and then shaped and smoothed, glistening and erect and waiting to be spread across her lips. On the tip, right in the center, I’d have stuck a sequin using the Bedazzler she keeps hot in her holster, ready to sparkle up anything in reach. Just that one sequin there, a shiny little arts-and-crafts piss hole for her pleasure. And when she beholds this creation, her Avon Commemorative Porcelain Heart, the one that beats Tepid Rose and GoldDigger Peach and BitchFace Wine behind her Maidenform bra, will freeze, pucker up, and stay that way as she runs for the door.

  DISCIPLE

  The parable of the dog shit begins with Principal Harrison losing her old fat basset hound, Marlon. Harrison posts this loss to enough Rosary telephone poles that even I am impressed. And I can see from that picture of Marlon, from his cloudy, worried eyes, his graying fur, what Harrison can’t, or refuses to, see. Dogs, like cats, like moms, try to do their last bits of suffering away from the pack, to save us from that. I almost feel sorry for Principal Harrison.

  The rest of the Dickheads, and the entire population of Rosary High, learn that Marlon has gone missing when Harrison actually makes an announcement about him on the loudspeakers after the Pledge of Allegiance. Her voice breaks in the middle of it, after she says Marlon’s age, twelve years old. Advertising this moment of weakness is, let’s face it, a very dumb move.

  Principal Harrison lives just a block away from Rosary High. Her yard, like mine and Winthrop’s and everybody’s, has the same four bushes that never flower, the same gravel circles beneath them. And it is there in that gravel that Bird sends Cy for three nights straight, to take, as near as we can figure, a truly basset-hound-sized shit.

  Cy does it, of course, drops trou and breaks dumbass Harrison’s heart. On the fourth night he is going to do it again but there she is, our principal, sitting on her porch with a flashlight and a box of dog treats. She has seen the signs Cy has been leaving her, obviously thinks they are evidence of Marlon coming home every night, that he is just confused and unable to find the door, old dog that he is. So Principal Harrison sits there with her dog treats and believes, like all the rest of us, what she needs to believe.

  POST NO THRILLS

  Principal Harrison never takes down her flyers, but they eventually disappear, just like Marlon did. Every few months, the Thumpers get the spirit so hard it is like they have blue balls for the rapture. Some try to speed salvation along by nailing scripture to the door of the Rosary Psychic Encounter Shoppe. Some do the Lord’s work legally by getting the street sweepers in.

  The streets are swept in Rosary once a week, just like everywhere else, but the sweepers also come through late at night every season or so. On these nights, they move from one telephone pole to the next ripping down the flyers posted there, every single one, no matter what kind. Church flyers about the never-ending white-elephant sales, single white men and their never-ending hunt for companionship, pictures of lost dogs and cats and people, they all come down. Rosary’s desires are washed away. In the mornings after, all that’s left are the naked staples running the length of every pole like the bark of a petrified forest.

  THE ALLIANCE

  The Dickheads don’t care that Rain is trans. Or, in what might seem like a shocking turn of events, they actually do. Like, in a good way. The Rosary Bible Thumpers also care. And not in a good way. Thumpers cringe at the idea of hanging new signs on the bathroom door, the same way their ancestors did at the prospect of using a community water fountain.

  Did I mention that Rosary is pretty white?

  The Thumpers would heal Rain. Which is a sentence that reads like a word jumble for all the sense it makes, reads like fridge magnets someone was trying to put in a comprehensive order and then left hanging there while they made a sandwich instead.

  The Thumpers would heal Rain.

  Would Rain heal the Thumpers.

  Rain would heal the Thumpers.

  There. I fixed it.

  * * *

  It might be easier for the Dickheads to accept Rain because we know a little bit about feeling like we are on the wrong planet, but mainly, Dickheads owe the fact that we aren’t complete morons to Sky Radio. Its hosts offer practical advice, like reminders about peeing both before and after sex, and, when exploring multiple orifices, the importance of going in reverse-alphabetical order. Vagina to anus. Never anus to vagina. And finally, that while ass play can be healthy, smoking cigarettes kills.

  Sky Radio
’s advice when encountering people for the first time, especially ones going through changes, or who want to be going through changes, in a world that insists everyone remain just as miserable as God made them, is this: mind your own fucking business.

  BOOKS OF JOB

  Unless I’m relentlessly judging them, I do stay out of people’s business. For example, whatever Cy’s business is. The second time his tent pops up in the empty lot, its dark shadow against the evening sky, I walk over without taking off my shoes.

  “Cy, it’s Hell,” I say, and he doesn’t say anything. And when he unzips the tent, he doesn’t offer me a beer. There is no beer. But that isn’t why I am here. I mean, I don’t know why I am here, but it isn’t for beer.

  This time, instead of beer, there is a stack of magazines shoved under the sleeping bag. Cy is kind of leaning one leg against them, like maybe I won’t notice them there, casual, like maybe we are used to seeing each other read. He sits hugging his fancy flashlight to his chest and the light comes up around his face in that spooky, sad, underneath way that flashlights do.

  Cy says, “I can’t.” Just that. And he lets the flashlight go. It rolls onto its side, so the light shines right on the magazines. I recognize the slick and torn pages from the dank bookshelf in the tire yard’s bathroom. The porn that time forgot.

  Cy’s too nice to be a Dickhead, he doesn’t have enough religion to be a Thumper, and whatever else he is, he’s still trying to figure out. No wonder he keeps building his tent in no-man’s-land. He doesn’t talk much, but we hear him loud and clear. He isn’t about the straight porn in the tire yard’s disgusting bathroom and he isn’t about making out with anyone, so much that no one even dares him to. The whole point of Truth or Dare is that you get to do the thing you wanted to do, and you don’t have to take responsibility for it. You get to tell that ugly truth, you get to take that stupid risk, you get to kiss that filthy mouth.

  But no one is kissing Cy.

  The one time a day Cy can be counted on to speak is just as we’re leaving. We’re pulling on our backpacks, pulling out sticks of gum to cover our breath, and saying we’ll be back the next day. Like we have somewhere else to go. This is as future tense as the Dickheads get and there are few variations:

  Tomorrow.

  Yeah, tomorrow.

  Tomorrow, fuckers.

  I listen when Cy says he’ll see us tomorrow. Because if he ever doesn’t, I’m going to get in his business and stay there.

  * * *

  Have you ever noticed how, in small towns like mine, there are these kids who commit suicide, and no one ever saw it coming, and it is always because of drugs? And how no one in these cities that are suddenly awash in drugs is ever homosexual? I never noticed it either. But the guys on Sky Radio did, and I think they are on to something. I’m no anthropologist or statistician or whatever, but if I cooked up one of those Venn diagrams to illustrate this point, with the circles overlapping to prove commonality, where the Rosary circle and the suicide circle meet, there’d be this valley. And in that valley, there’d be some Thumper with a bullhorn shouting about drugs, and the noise that he is making there is louder than understanding and almost louder than grief.

  Meanwhile, the circle with homosexuality inside of it is nowhere near Rosary. Gay kids are off in a bubble of their own, far away from that noise that ignores their lives and masks their deaths. Not in My Graveyard, says the bullhorn. Not in a grave at all, I say. So, when I see Cy, when I really see him, I imagine him in that circle, floating like a balloon let go. Safe. And when it’s time to go home, I listen for his tomorrow.

  THE GAME OF WHO NEEDS WHO THE WORST

  I never thought that Bird and Winthrop had actually done much more than nod at each other over beers at Fast Eddie’s until this afternoon under the blanket-slash-porn fort in Winthrop’s room. We just finished reading through Working Bend-Overtime and are talking about whether anyone might still be hanging out at the tire yard, if we should try to do something more productive with the rest of the day than read more porn. Like drink. This is when Winthrop makes the following incredibly surprising announcement: “Spencer said he’d be there late tonight.”

  “What?” I can sometimes fail at expressing confusion in a way that leads to clarity.

  “Spencer’s mom has plans. The tire yard’s open late.”

  “Bird’s mom?”

  “The woman who is right now making out with your dad. Yep.”

  One, this is not true. And two, it makes me sick. I ignore it.

  “Bird told you his plans?”

  Here, Winthrop stands up, throws the bedspread off with a dramatic shrug like it is a disguise he no longer needs in order to keep his superhero identity secret. He strikes a bodybuilder pose. “Helen”—he turns from side to side for me, showcasing his physique—“Spencer Doncaster and I are…” Here he squats, grunting like he is breathless from all the flexing, then he drops the bodybuilder guise and in its place becomes a bad stereotype of a French person still learning English.

  “How do you say…” He twirls an imaginary mustache, squints. “We are, how do you Americas say … le bros?”

  TAROT BEFORE BROS

  Aunt Bev’s laid out on her couch. It’s a flowered thing that is faded in a perfect square from where the sun shines through the window of the shoppe. She has the small, worn green pillow over her eyes, is resting from the last client, a woman in an old car with a smiley-faced ball topping the antenna. She was one of those people. The main sort. She had come to hear only good things because she felt she had nothing good to look forward to and, as it turns out, had a pretty good insight into her future already. She could have saved herself the cash.

  I knew her future was bleak because Aunt Bev charged her five times the regular rate. It would have been cheaper if she’d brought her to the back room for an after-hours reading. Aunt Bev calls this the sugarcoating fee, her hardest work. She doesn’t like to dress up doom. “It already has on a suit and bow tie,” she says, “but people want a carnation in the buttonhole.”

  We had been talking about Bird and Iris and the never-ending dinners. That is, I had been complaining about Bird and Iris, and Aunt Bev had been mostly listening. And then she asks me about Rudolph. Why I am missing him so terribly, so suddenly. She has seen the flyers.

  I don’t have a good answer.

  Which seems like a good answer. At first. “Because I want some answers,” I say, before realizing that I sound like one of those people.

  “She wants some answers,” Aunt Bev mutters. Her voice is weary all over again. It’s the voice she uses when she is trying to save herself from putting a top hat and tails on doom.

  I hold my breath.

  “You met your match in the principal’s office that day.”

  Her lips are all that moves below the green pillow, one hand steady on the water she drinks between clients to keep herself clear. “No matter how it feels now, you are lucky. You’ve saved yourself a lot of time because you’re young and strong and you will figure this out. Later on, you’re tired. You don’t fight so hard. Keep your eyes open around that boy.”

  I think about Bird’s shoulders, the muscles pulsing under his shirt. “I’m watching him. I promise that,” I say. A hot guilt. Does Aunt Bev see me at night, rubbing one out while I imagine him over me? I’ve met my match, all right. And he has already won.

  “Some people have the One. That’s how it was for my sister. And I thought it was that way for your father too. But now, with that Iris, now I’m not so sure.”

  She takes a deep breath and the room fills with what feels like static electricity. Her glass of water sparkles in the sunlight and I rub my hands over my forearms where the hair has started to rise. My eyes water. I swear the room is tilting.

  Aunt Bev sits up and holds the eye pillow to her chest. Her eyes are watering too. “Helen,” she says to me, “with my sister’s blessing, I am sharing what is none of your business. Your father is alive. And unlike you, he knows
what is good for him.”

  She lies back down again. Replaces the eye pillow. And then she laughs quietly and falls asleep with a smile on her face.

  VIII: STRENGTH

  Great-Grandma Helen spread the tarot for Aunt Bev when she was just a little girl, and it was clear right away that she and that pack had a thing for each other. On nights when she was with her grandchildren, their grandma Helen would first sing my mom to sleep in her crib, then she would move to Aunt Bev’s bedside with a book. Only, hidden inside Heidi or Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm or whatever they were supposed to be reading, would be a single card from Great-Grandma Helen’s tarot, the pack she had received in her own childhood. The same pack she learned to hide away as the years went by and Rosary started attracting people with a more singular idea of belief. Still, she would slip a different card out every night for the little girl she knew was destined to take her place in the Hill family legacy, and Aunt Bev would study that card as she fell asleep, tucking its meaning into her dreams.

  Aunt Bev has that pack now, it is the one that sits on her velvet-covered table. It is the one that will come to me when she dies, like the rest of my gift will supposedly come when she dies, the same as it did for her when Great-Grandma Helen passed. Because nothing in this life is free.

  POM-POM

  Mom was a cheerleader in high school but she wasn’t an asshole. She was an actual dancer, and she danced all the way through to her graduation and then gave lessons to little girls at Rosary Dance School. Until I came along. Then she stopped moving, of course, became stuck, with me and then in a hospital bed where they stuck tubes in her arm and then a tube in her throat and then she got stuck in a grave.