Godshot

by Chelsea Bieker

  “He was everything to us,” I said. “You couldn’t understand.”

  “I could. I understand exactly how you could fall in love like that. I’ve done it myself.”

  She was different then, on the verge of revealing herself to me. I wanted it desperately.

  “What do you mean?” I said quiet, careful not to break the spell.

  “You ask Daisy sometime about who made all our money when she was depressed after her attack. Before we came here we lived in a shithole apartment in Fresno and she thought she was a witch. Spent all her time making potions in our bathtub. She was mad she was ugly and burned. Couldn’t see straight without her beauty back then. Daisy’s not a bad person, but she only knows one trade.”

  “Phones?” I asked weakly.

  She laughed. “Phones came later. Phones were my idea after I couldn’t take the in-person anymore.” Something closed within her. She was done with story time.

  “Rick paid your mom twice as much as any other caller,” she said. “And with your mom’s beauty she could have done a lot better than him, but I could tell she didn’t know her worth.” She sat down at the computer and clicked around a bit.

  “Are you still mad at Daisy for what she made you do?” I asked.

  “Sure,” Florin said. “But she’s all I have. And she’s sorry. She’s sorrier than sorry. I know that deep down. She’s better than some. I have a theory that I did something pretty awful but not too awful in a past life, and my months working was my punishment. Now I’ve paid up and it’s smooth sailing from here on out.”

  “I wonder what I did in a past life,” I said.

  Florin narrowed her eyes at me. “Probably same as me. Like nothing too, too terrible. You didn’t kill someone or something. But you probably fucked up pretty bad.”

  “I don’t know if I believe in all that,” I said.

  “Well, believe in this,” she said, looking at her computer. I came up behind her and saw she had typed in “fourteen and pregnant.” A slew of videos had come up. She clicked one, and a girl my age in a dim room rambled in a chirpy voice, hugged her huge stomach with skinny arms, and did “belly shots” where she pointed the camera on her midsection and swished her hands over the tight fabric of her tank. She sucked a pacifier and called her own mother a cunt, casually without malice, as if she was letting us know her mother was named Amy. She changed the diaper of a teddy bear and said, “Of course I’m ready to be a mom,” fiddling with the Velcro straps.

  The comments below the video made my breath stop. Rot in a trashcan bitch, said one. It reminded me of the way my mother’s men spoke to her sometimes, such biting murderous things. These comments were angry, but angry at what, was hard to say. It seemed they were angry at Dezi for existing. Some comments had only to do with her appearance—ugly ass butterface—which should have been irrelevant, but was not, and never is.

  Dezi confidently reported she wanted three babies by the time she was eighteen. “I always wanted to be a mama. And now I am.” She concluded the video by detailing pregnancy dreams, one in particular a sex situation involving Billy Joel.

  “Who’s Billy Joel?” I asked Florin, and she groaned. “No hope for you at all.”

  I felt better after watching. At least I still had sense about me. At the very least, I wasn’t sucking a pacifier while applying butt cream to a teddy bear. This was a truth no one could dispute.

  Daisy came down the velvet stairs, her arms open like she was about to accept an award. “Hello, preggo! Gonna keep it or what?” she sang.

  “Of course I’m going to keep it,” I said.

  “It’s early enough to get rid of it if you wanted,” Florin said, her eyes down. I thought of the billboard GOTS had sponsored near the freeway on-ramp by the church featuring a scared-looking punked-out pregnant teenager with a thought bubble coming from her worried face saying: My mom’s going to kill me! Another thought bubble stemmed from her belly, where a pencil-drawn fetus floated. From its mouth: My mom really IS going to KILL me. We had all had a vote in picking the billboard we wanted. It had created quite a gleeful stir, all the choices in the catalogue. How we’d gathered to watch it be put up and cheered, and I never once considered there were plenty of women in the crowd who had lived lives before Vern. Who may have experienced just the thing we condemned so openly.

  “You can choose what happens to your body, you know,” Daisy said. I looked at her scars and the paleness of her flesh. Years without the direct touch of an outside wind, years without walking even to the edge of the road to get the mail. She was wrong. You couldn’t choose what happened to your body. Between the two of us, that was clear enough.

  “It’s already a baby in my mind,” I said. But that wasn’t really the reason I knew I would keep it.

  “You’ve gone and got emotional. Women are so prone to that, aren’t we? The second I found out I was pregnant with Florin I cried my eyes out in terror but that same day I bought the cutest little onesie at the Baby Depot. Carried it around in my purse like a nut.”

  I wanted to tell them about Lyle then, and how Vern thought these babies would prove our worthiness to God, how they would restore the kingdom and rain would fall like gold. But I liked being with them in their space, having them think I was just an uncareful teenager, a commonplace idiot like Dezi. If they knew everything they might not want to be near me, and I couldn’t deal with that.

  “I have a man anyhow,” I said. “Father of the baby wants to be around.”

  “Oh?” she said, her eyebrows raised. “And who’s this?”

  “He’s a famous lawn painter. He’s also in a band.”

  They exchanged a glance between them, one that made me feel small and strange, like they were one thing and I was another.

  “Think what you want,” I said. “It’s my body, just like you said.”

  What I didn’t say was that the real reason I wouldn’t get rid of the baby was because I had begun to think myself a mother, even if it was foolish, and I would do all I could to not be a leaver. I would do anything if it meant I would not become like my mother, even if it was hard. Even if it killed me.

  AFTER MY SHIFT I walked out to the road and crouched in the canal. I couldn’t wait any longer on my plan. I had to get a marriage going now before any more cells multiplied. Before I started showing for real. I texted Stringy. Pick me up? At the south end of the canal? I pressed SEND. God, if you don’t want this to happen, then create a storm to stop it. Don’t let him answer. Reveal another way.

  But the roar of the Central Valley Cali Lawn Painting truck came down the road a few minutes later and I pulled myself up. Stringy slowed down next to me but didn’t stop all the way. He opened the door from the inside and I ran and grabbed his hand and he pulled me in like we were escapees, bank robbers, villains.

  He had a wad of Big Red chewing gum in his mouth and he handed the pack to me. The inside of the truck smelled like cigarettes. The gum burned and made my mouth water, made me want to grind my teeth together.

  “We’re going somewhere we can be free and easy,” he said. “Young and in love.” He laughed loud and open, eyes on the road.

  Love. There was that word that had gotten my mother in so much trouble. Love. I pressed my back into the seat and the truck crossed me over an invisible line toward free and easy. I may as well have waved goodbye to God right then.

  He drank from a can of Four Loko between his knees and winked. “At night, Tent City parties hard.”

  “I thought it was just a dump.”

  “It’s so much more than that, honey.”

  We pulled off the main road down a small side lane until it opened to a clearing with a dozen lifted trucks with huge CEN-CAL stickers on their back windows. The trucks formed a circle around the mob of his friends, thick-necked angry-looking men in a uniform of facial sores and tight black shirts that said TAP OUT and AFFLICTION and black star tattoos racing up the muscled meat of their arms. He put his arm around me as we walked up to them. Th
eir names were Jason or Jay. One was just called Dog. One was Big Country. Dog handed us two full red cups. “You’ve never been drunk before,” Stringy said, like he was reading my fortune.

  But he was wrong. Sapphire Earrings had let me sip his beers. We would sit on the couch watching Married . . . with Children together some nights and he would pass me the can without looking at me and I would drink a long spell and pass it back. This would go on for some time. I would feel light and lighter with each sip and then I would sleep sleep sleep. I didn’t tell Stringy about it. Couldn’t tell Stringy it wasn’t right for a woman with child to be drinking anyhow. There wasn’t supposed to be a baby—not yet, at least.

  He put the cup up to my lips. “I’ve heard God himself loved a nice glass of red,” he said, and a little of the drink seeped into my mouth. I remembered as a girl my mother called rum and Cokes Cuba libres, struggling with the words, slurring them. Croo-bra lee-bray. It embarrassed me when she said it. I knew somehow she was saying it all wrong. I had sipped some out of her glass once when she wasn’t looking and had never found that taste again in anything, until now.

  “Cuba libre,” I said, and Stringy looked at me funny.

  “Broads like to be so fancy, don’t they? It’s ’bout the cheapest rum you can find and warm cola. Don’t get too excited.”

  One of the Jasons looked me all over. “Sorta hot,” he appraised. Clapped Stringy on the back and handed him a small baggy.

  They all had their radios tuned to the same song, and it blasted out of their car speakers, about California and knowing how to party. I saw now that there was a group of girls too, standing together smoking cigarettes, wearing cut-off denim skirts over bruised orange legs. Fresno girls. One wore fur boots that came up over her knees and a skirt so short and so low-waisted it looked like a belt. Her pink thong strings were pulled up on her bare hips and she snapped them with long sharp nails. I was repelled by them but I also wanted to be with them, standing in their circle, knowing their thoughts. Maybe I could. I touched the Liz Claiborne linen of my mother’s dress. No, I heard her say. You’re different.

  Still, I wished I had made Daisy curl my hair, put eyeliner on me, wipe the grime from my skin with one of her cool lavender cloths. My stomach was a little paunch forward, safe and invisible under the dress.

  “I don’t want to see you smoking with those hags,” Stringy said. “I’ve fucked most of those chicks and they’re all going to be hoarse-throated cancer cases by the time they’re forty, and baby, we’re better than that.”

  He lit a cigarette.

  “Most of them?” I took another sip from my cup without thinking.

  He looked at the group of five women and nodded. “I think so. Not a one was my girlfriend except maybe that black-haired one but she’s a liar.”

  Dog came up and pulled Stringy over, started pointing to the rims on his truck. I felt nervous standing alone. I took another small sip from the red cup, just wanting something to do with my hands. I felt it trickle down my throat. In the dark here it seemed that what happened with Lyle could have never really happened. Here I was with my boyfriend at a party. I remembered my mother had told me once she’d had a beer a day when she was pregnant with me and that I turned out fine. She said it like she was proud, as if she’d cheated a system, but I knew that one beer meant at least three. I took another sip and my stomach churned but then settled into the burn. I could see why people drank, being here. How else were they supposed to make it through the night? This was how my mother had mustered the courage to leave me. All the beers she drank had given her permission. I looked at the group of girls and walked over to them.

  “Hi, little sister,” a bleached blonde with a lip ring said. It sounded like she was sucking a mouthful of hard candies, but soon I realized it was just her voice.

  I thought about how I’d been instructed by Vern to witness to strangers, always say your name nice and clear . . . I took another sip of the liquid and it wasn’t strong anymore. In fact it tasted no stronger than the cola we used for baptisms. I wondered if God had extracted the rum from it to save me. A wobbliness occupied my legs and my hands tingled. I didn’t hate the way it felt. “I’m Lacey May Herd.”

  “Come on closer. We ain’t gonna do nothing to you,” she said.

  “God protects me and I recoil from sin as if from a hot flame.”

  The blonde looked at her friends and shrugged. Fanned her face with her hand. Even at night, sun nowhere, the heat was heavy upon us. It seemed to come up from the earth. “God ain’t nowhere around here,” she said.

  I took another sip, syrupy sweet. Someone turned the music up even louder. I had to sort of yell, “Have you all found God?”

  “Oh, she’s one of them girls,” an extremely orange one said. “You know, what are they called? The Gotsers or whatever? My mom said you all are on that voodoo magic. You ain’t no kind of church. Just act like one to rope ’em in.”

  “Do you take long showers?” I asked the orange one.

  “Huh?” she said.

  “You’re wasting water,” I said. “Don’t you care about the drought?”

  “The what?” she said.

  The black-haired one spoke. “What’re you trying to do, bring Stringy to Jesus? ’Cause Jesus don’t want him.”

  They all doubled over laughing.

  I drank a little more. I liked how the action of bringing the cup to my lips could stand in for speaking. The black-haired girl shook her head. “Stringy used to be a methed-out skinhead wannabe. I’d be careful, little girl. The only reason he’s not anymore is ’cause his ass went to jail. You want a jailbird boyfriend?”

  “I can baptize you right here,” I heard myself say. I was on autopilot then. I wanted to be asking about Stringy, maybe even asking about their lives, what they did to make money so I could get some new ideas. But the Vern girl in me just kept talking.

  “What’s wrong with this bitch?” one of them said.

  “You don’t even know him,” I said. “He’s from Popcorn, Indiana.”

  They all burst out laughing.

  “He’s born and raised in the dankest part of the ’No. His mama’s a hooker at Motel Drive,” the dark-haired one said. “And.” She walked closer to me. She smelled like cheap berry lotion and BO. I wanted to ask why her mother had never told her perfume didn’t cover up stink, that it only makes it worse. I wondered if maybe she was motherless, too, like me, grasping at clues on how to be and failing. “He’s old. Real old.”

  I took a deep breath. “He warned me you were a liar.”

  The drink seemed to loosen something in me, but at the same time it was taking something critical away.

  I went to find Stringy, amused at the sight of my own feet walking zigzags, but then I was picked up from behind and lifted in the air.

  God? I wondered. Was I flying up and out of here?

  Arms set me down in the bed of a truck and the music swallowed me, rap so fast I couldn’t hear the words, but the beat ran up my legs. I felt only the presence of a man’s body behind me, a thicker man than Stringy. With the music so loud I thought perhaps the man behind me was irrelevant. This was a party. I started to dance. Maybe my mother was dancing, wherever she was, to music like this, taking her clothes off while the men stared at her, and I moved like never before. I felt my own hands run up my body and I pictured my mother my mother my mother. This is what she deserved. To have a daughter drunk at a party dancing in front of all these people to the music of sin.

  The man pulled my ass back into the wide low trunk of his body, and my feet came off the truck bed sometimes, and the dancing was a little painful. I started feeling dizzy, up high, and I wondered what would happen if I fell off, would it kill the baby? The baby. There was a baby inside me and I was dancing like a fool. I squatted down and tried to focus on the space between my feet, make the world go still. Hands tried to pull me back to standing and I looked behind me to see a portly guy, shirtless, two sets of tiny footprints tattooed on
his chest. Were these the footprints of his children? It seemed appalling. “I’m gonna barf,” I yelled at him, and he backed off, turned and jumped off the truck onto the ground, started grinding up behind some other girl like a dog in heat.

  I lowered myself to the ground and looked wildly for Stringy. I sat in the dirt when I couldn’t find him. The Cuba libre came back up and I vomited between my knees and then he was walking toward me. I said, “Why did you leave me?” And he said, “Well, you’re drunk. You like it?”

  Did I like it? Did I like my swimming head, my body taken away from me? I never wanted to feel like this, exactly like this, ever again. “No,” I said. “It’s bad.”

  “You’re a good girl, Lacey May.”

  He left me there on the ground. Went to be with his friends. Maybe he said to take a little nap. I don’t remember. But I felt like I didn’t have a choice, that my body would take the nap for me, and it must have done so, because when I woke up I was alone there between the trucks and the music was still raging like not a second had passed, but this time Stringy was nowhere, and fear ran through me. My head ached but I could see again. What had I done? I was supposed to make him want me. The whole point of seeing him at all was to make him my husband, and I was failing. I got up and looked around. My small purse with the cell phone was there beside me and I clutched it.

  I walked the circle of trucks over and over in a loop looking for him. Finally he came out of one of them, eyes bloodshot, and gripped my arm like we’d both been lost for days without food or water or sense. He sniffed and wiped at his nose. It felt like we were the lone survivors of something.

  We got into his lawn-painting truck and he turned up the radio, some kind of punk band whining. He peeled away from Tent City and he tried to get the truck to go one hundred down Old Canal Road, but the wheel got shaky at ninety. I wondered if he was mad at me and was just taking me home. We approached the Pac N’ Save. “Turn in there,” I said. He pulled into the deserted parking lot and stopped the truck at the outer edge of it. “I’m all jazzed up,” he said, sniffing, jerking his head around.