Godshot

by Chelsea Bieker

  I felt so stupid. I wanted to claw my way back through time.

  “Say something, Lace. Come on. Don’t be like this. It just makes everything so much harder. These are celebration times and here you are being difficult.”

  My mother had been difficult, too.

  “Take care of yourself,” Lyle said, pressing his hand to my stomach. “You’re carrying church property.”

  WHAT I NEEDED was time, I decided, looking up at the ceiling of the craft room. Time to pause, to make the baby mine until everything was sorted. It seemed my possessive worry over the seed within me was innate, though I’d never babysat a child in my life, though I’d never spent much time with children at all. It was as if another woman in me had been awakened, who would do anything to ensure that what had happened to me would not happen to this child.

  I had less than one hundred dollars from my work so far on the phone lines. It might be enough for a bus ticket, but what was a bus ticket? Something I must have heard about on TV at some point, or some common thing from the beforelife, because no buses rolled through Peaches. Believers had no business on buses when there was so much to be done here. It was only a theory and not something I could grasp on to.

  I skimmed my mother’s romance novels for answers: Engorged lips, long neck, wide hands, hot skin, in love, lust thrust push hold squeeze kiss ripple turn I want everything about you I’m in love I like you he put his shaft inside her and she was never the same all night all day I missed him I loved him I had to you made me. I flipped to the back of each book. As I read the endings I realized that almost all of them had something in common.

  A white dress, something borrowed something blue, rice sailing through the air, kiss the bride, until death do us part.

  Marriage. Marriage was always the final scene. Only then did opposing armies back down, threats cease, and villains retreat. It was something that could not be disputed. It righted the wrongs of the past. A marriage was the period at the end of the sentence when everything else was fallible. A boyfriend meant nothing in the books. A boyfriend was trash, however attractive, that would one day have to be taken out. And in the eyes of God a marriage meant a cemented union that no one could come between. A marriage to a man would take me out of my marriage to the church.

  A marriage was what I needed.

  Something buzzed near the mattress. The phone from Stringy. I had nearly forgotten about it.

  Good night princess, the message read.

  My heart pounded. He wasn’t of the church, he wasn’t my age. And if he were my husband, the father of this child and not Lyle, then the child would not be a holy property anymore. I would not be Godshot. The child would just be a common shame, the result of sin with an infidel, a couple who were uncareful but who were doing their best to make things right.

  I texted back, Thinking of you. Like everything was normal. Like I wasn’t about to ruin him.

  Chapter 13

  In the brash heat of November, smoke filled the valley from wildfires north and wildfires south, settling over us like a warning. I listened to the news saying the town of Paradise was burning, that people had died in their cars trying to escape. A man who had abandoned his burning car said he ran past countless people frozen behind their wheels in gridlocked traffic. He knew they would all die. It sounded horrifying but I couldn’t fathom another town aside from Peaches in any clearness. All the same, the smoke from the death towns filled my chest until it ached. The only thing that would clear it was rain.

  “God’s smiting them,” Cherry said, shaking her head as if Peaches was better off somehow. But I saw the tremble of her hands. I knew we were thinking the same thing.

  We were next.

  ONE NIGHT AFTER a long shift at the red house, I came home to Taffy waiting on Cherry’s porch. She stood quickly when she saw me. She looked me up and down. “The world is all over you,” she said. “I can practically smell it.”

  “You’re smelling smoke,” I said.

  She peeled a long strip of skin from her cuticle and it bled hot red. “I just want to know if you’ve been blessed.”

  “Who can say what a true blessing is?”

  “Did you not speak up because you are or because you aren’t?” I stood still. I could tell she was ready to brim over. She heaved a sob. “Tell me you weren’t blessed either. Tell me I’m not the only one.”

  I looked at her little child’s face. Her flat chest and her clear clean skin. “You’ve never received your blood, have you?”

  “God hates me.”

  “What do you think’s going to happen to all these church babies?” I said.

  She put her face in her hands. “Of course Denay went right ahead and got shot like it was so easy. Got her blood in a fine red stream. I saw it in the toilet, all that glory.”

  “I’d count yourself lucky,” I said.

  “Lacey, if you’re saying that, you’re not in Vern’s lane, that’s for sure. If you’re shot it’s not fair. It’s not fair at all!”

  I felt anger looking at this old best friend. Someone I had once cared about, thought of as a sister. “Maybe you just haven’t been obedient enough,” I said. I couldn’t stop myself. “Maybe you’re just not worthy.”

  I WENT TO the red house every day, keeping my secrets deep within me like a good GOTS girl, but I felt the river of my sin widening, felt myself up to my neck. I would need the money now from the phone calls with a baby coming, I told myself, and I craved the comforting way Daisy looked at me. The way she knew of the child I carried and the way she let me try on her lipsticks and wiped the dirt from my face and fed me glasses of water from the jugs she had delivered. The water was reason enough to go. I thought I would die without her water.

  The town seemed to thin even more, moving trucks in infidels’ driveways. Quitters is what Cherry called them. What remained was the Body and our assignments: proselytizing, deeper commitments to prayer, keen eyes tuned to spot anyone set to step out. Obedience would bring rain, a fact as true as the sun. But I had figured out by now that only the young unmarried girls like myself were making a real sacrifice. It was only us, the girls of new blood who shifted around town, heads down veiled in mystery. I asked Cherry what her assignment was and she pretended to load a shotgun and pointed it at me. “You,” she’d said. “Kapow.”

  I sat in church on Sundays, eyes on my knees. I wanted to blend into the pew. I was trying to put together a puzzle that would never fit because I’d always be missing the most important piece.

  I wrote my mother a letter I could not send because I didn’t have her address. I wrote, I miss you. I wrote, You leaving was the first bad thing to happen to me.

  The trouble was that I was transforming in two directions—seemingly into my faith role in the church, silent and Godshot, and equally somehow into a phone sex operator, shameless and in command of the hand that pressed that blinking answer button.

  I PAINTED MY nails black at my mother’s call desk, swiveled in her chair. I tried out some stretches and gave up. Everything made me out of breath now. A call blinked through. It would be Forne at this time, ready for more plastic bag adventuring. I answered the phone and he seemed down. I could tell immediately. Voices give everything away when you really listen, the lilt and register of a voice tells you all you need to know about how to be, what to say.

  “I feel a heaviness around you, honey,” I said to him. I pretended I was Daisy. She always talked to her callers like they were some mix of child and man, son and lover. “How can Sunny help your heartache?”

  He sighed. “How are you?” he said.

  “Oh, I’m really nice, all dolled up. I know how you like it—”

  He cut me off. “No, how are you? You the person.”

  I paused. This was weird and went against our rules. This was how my mother got lured in, went off script, and ended up a stolen woman.

  “No,” I said. “I know what you’re doing and I’m not here for any of it. You got a hard-on I can help you wit
h or you’re feeling real curious over a gal you haven’t ever met? One or the other, and only one road leads to us staying on this call.”

  Maybe this was part of it. He wanted me to talk down to him some more. It felt good to talk to him this way, get my anger out.

  “My wife found out about the calls,” he said. “She saw my credit card statement. She normally doesn’t look at anything like that, but she did.”

  “I’m hanging up now.” I didn’t have any interest in his problems, truly. They annoyed me. It felt like he wanted me to lift weights with my mind to solve them. “Sorry about your shattered dreams.”

  “Wait,” he said. “My wife wasn’t mad at me. She didn’t care, actually. She acted like she knew. She said what she was mad about was me spending our money on calls while bitching to her about going to the expensive hairdresser, the one that uses the organic dyes.”

  “Does something in your brain think I care? I don’t.”

  “It just got me thinking about you. I really like talking to you. You know the real me.”

  I dropped the singsong southern accent. “Sunny isn’t even my real name. You don’t know anything about me. Don’t be a fool.”

  “I just don’t know why there have to be these walls between us. I want to know what you like to read, what you watch on TV. If we went to a diner, what you gonna order? Chicken fried steak, or some kind of fancy salad with crunchies on top?”

  “You’ve lost it,” I said. “I have to go now.”

  “I’m sick,” he said.

  “You are, I’d say so, yes.”

  “Like I’m dying, I think.”

  I stopped. I took a deep breath. Maybe he was lying but maybe he wasn’t.

  “Well, what’s wrong with you?” I said.

  “That’s why I want to know about you. Here I am, a man with not much time and I just want to hear about how you’re doing.”

  “I’m fine.”

  “Fine is never fine.”

  “What are you, a counselor?” But as soon as I said it, I wondered if maybe he could help me. Would he be able to find my mother?

  “I’m not trying to make you uncomfortable.”

  “You want to help me?” I said. “I’ve got a missing persons case on my hands.”

  “Okay, sure.”

  “Her name is Louise Herd,” I started, but then I heard that plastic rustling on the other end. “Hey, what are you doing?”

  Forne moaned a little. “I’m here.”

  Goddamnit. He was messing with me. The rustling got faster and faster and then he let out a pitiful little squeal.

  “Never call here again,” I said.

  “Baby,” he said. “I want to come pick you up in my hot rod and take you away from there. I’m serious about that.”

  I slammed down the phone. My cheeks burned. I felt so stupid. This was my mother’s mistake. She had let feelings come her way over the phone and it had cracked open her heart. I hated to admit that for a second I saw it all before me. How easy it would be to tell him where I was and just see if he came, and if he came, how easy it would be to get in that car and have him drive me on out to another life, trust him and let him help me. The prospect of another life was mysterious and blank. Who knew what horrors would fill it, but I knew they would be different horrors, and somehow that sounded like a risk I could be stupid enough to take.

  After Forne, I sat with my head down on my mother’s desk imagining that each second passing was really just hurtling me closer to my inevitable death. I would quit the phone lines. Every call I took was just making me dumber and dumber, no closer to my mother. I went downstairs. I told Florin never to connect me with Forne again.

  “He’s your best caller,” she said. “Anything that went wrong on the call I guarantee had more to do with you than it did with him.”

  “Just don’t connect him to me. I’m done, actually. I quit.”

  She smacked her gum. Looked at her phone lighting up. “You sure? Got a new one here. Don’t you need the money?”

  I did need the money. Of course I did.

  “Just be cool,” she said. “Take a breath and let it go. These are just voices. They don’t mean anything unless you let them.”

  I stood there thinking. She picked it up. “Welcome to your fantasy, where nothing’s finer than a call with a Diviner.” She looked at me, motioned for me to get upstairs. I didn’t want to leave the red house, not really. I went and picked up.

  The man cleared his throat and a tingle ran through me. Something different, my body alerted.

  “Hello, darling,” I said. “Have we had the pleasure of speaking before?”

  “Honey on a muffin,” the man said. The low and long voice was familiar and different all the same. Where had I heard it?

  “Well, you’re cute,” I said. My pulse raced. Florin had forgotten to tell me his name. He might not tip now if I couldn’t come up with his name, give him a real personal experience. But I didn’t have to say anything. He started in.

  “Speak to me, are you lonely?” he said. My mind ran and ran. The voice was familiar but who was it? I saw the answer up ahead of me, just out of reach. I closed my eyes, tried to steady my breath. I looked at the photograph of my mother but she provided no answer in her closed-mouth smile.

  “I’m lonely,” I said. “Does that make you happy?” I’d meant to say horny, but happy came out.

  “It makes me real sad, honey,” he said. “Makes me wonder if I could make you less lonely.”

  “That’s what I’m here to do for you,” I said.

  “Now, I’m listening to you here, and I’m thinking wild thoughts. I’m thinking, this gal’s a star,” he said. “Tell me, what does your pretty face look like?”

  What did my pretty face look like? I didn’t know. Instead I saw my mother standing before the edge of a cliff. Falling free, chest open into a pit of fire. Rick Walden, Rick Walden, I imagined her chanting as she fell. For it wasn’t a regular client. It was him. It was the Turquoise Cowboy calling from a new number, out fishing.

  I wondered then if God worked in more mysterious ways than I had ever imagined. If God had sent me a direct line right to her. Here you go, I imagined God saying. What, you thought I forgot about you? I heard Florin’s voice: Be cool.

  “How’s the weather where you are?” I said. I pressed my ear into the receiver. Would I be able to hear my mother in the background? Would she sense it was me?

  “Weather’s always fine in heaven,” he said.

  “You got rain?”

  “We got wind and sleet and just the other day I drove through a flash flood and nearly hit a stag. Lightning every which way. You looking for that kind of excitement, dolly?”

  “You got a lady with you in that flood?” I tried to imagine my mother in the passenger seat while crashes of water fell on top of the car. Maybe it scared her, all that water. Maybe she yelped like she did when she rode the mechanical bull at the annual Peaches rodeo, her eyes scanning the crowd of tight-jeaned cowboys leaning around, bottle necks between calloused fingers, her radar sniffing out the most troubled one to take home. Did she think in the flood that she had traded bad for bad? That this new cowboy was still a cowboy like any other?

  “You’re my lady now,” he said. If I was a foolish girl, I’d be prone to believe a voice like his. But I was no fool. I was no girl. And I was not my mother.

  “What are you wearing?” I asked. It seemed a comical question, for it relied on the idea that the cowboy’s clothes were hiding a sexiness that could and should be slowly revealed, but when I tried to envision him naked I saw something akin to two broomsticks for legs, a tin garbage can for a middle.

  “Are you touching yourself?” he asked me.

  My hands were on the desk like they usually were. I never touched myself during the calls. I wondered if my mother had, if she had let herself feel it. I rested a hand on my thigh. “Sure,” I said.

  “Now picture me,” he said. “Right on top of you. You can bare
ly breathe and I’m the only one who can save you.”

  I saw the tin can squishing me. My ears burned. My hand inched closer to my underwear line. I wanted to understand her. How this had worked on her. I wanted to be a woman who would do the things she had done just for a second to know what it felt like to throw myself overboard. My breath caught. A roll of nausea overtook me and I snapped out of it.

  “Why don’t you give me your address?” I said. “I’ll come for a visit. It’ll be real nice. Enough of this phone stuff, what do you say?”

  He was quiet. He cleared his throat and his tone shifted abruptly into something less smooth, less kind. “I like to come get my women. I’m old-fashioned that way. A real gentleman.”

  “I like me a gentleman,” I said. I pulled back. “Now let’s talk again real soon.”

  “You think about me,” he said, like he was giving me homework. “And think about how you want this life of yours to go. You like jewelry? You like lace panties? They all like that shit, why ask? You’ll be living in a pile of diamonds, high-heeled shoes of every color. Glamour.”

  “You know me so well, honey.”

  I hung up and his account charged thirty dollars. I ran down the stairs and stood before Florin at her desk. “That was Rick. Rick Rick, like my mom’s Rick.”

  “Oh shit,” she said. “We had him blocked. Must have called on a new number. They do that sometimes.”

  “I might be able to get information about her.”

  “Daisy’s not going to like this,” she said.

  “Just give me a chance with him.” I ate a bite of brown banana from the sad fruit bowl on her desk. “Please don’t tell her,” I added, as she shoved her stuff into her backpack. A book slipped out. Cults Then and Now.

  “Fine,” she said. “But don’t blame me when this all goes wrong.”

  “What’s that?” I said, eyes on the book.

  “A little light reading.” She snapped it up.

  “I know what you think of me. You think I’m real dumb. You think everyone in Peaches is dumber than dirt.”

  “I don’t think you’re dumb, that’s the thing. I’m trying to figure you out. I’m trying to understand how everyone in this place believes what that psychotic man says.”