Godshot

by Chelsea Bieker

  “Do you like me?” I asked. It was now or never.

  “The lawn painting’s getting big,” he said. “I can afford you a steak dinner once a month if you want.”

  “Sounds like you’ve got things figured out.”

  He let out a big sigh and clicked the radio off. “I’ve been wanting me a new girlfriend,” he said. “But I had to get rid of the old one first. I’m a gentleman and those things take time, if you need to know what was taking so long.”

  “You broke up with her for me?” I asked.

  “She was heading off to some school to teach her how to tattoo eyebrows on chicks. I was sick of hearing her talk about it.”

  I worked my eyes up his body in the light of the streetlamps. He was tattooed most everywhere. Skulls, winding smoke, a mermaid. A raised and fresh outline of the state of California, a star in the valley over a woman with her hands between her legs, breasts bare, head tilted back. The tattoos continued up his arms and under the sleeves, a collage coming up his neck. Only God Can Judge Me necklaced his chest. I imagined Vern scoffing at that one.

  My mother might admire something in Stringy, his sure large hands on the wheel of the car, the way he smelled like cinnamon more than cigarettes and his clean small teeth. I liked the way he looked at me like he’d known me well for a very long time. She would comment on the tattoos. Run her finger lightly across one to flatter.

  “You’ve got to have a clear view on your hopes and dreams to make it in life,” he told me.

  “To make it where? To the big dirt nap?” I asked. Some of the alcohol was still swimming in my blood.

  “To, you know. Your goals. To feel good about the life you’ve lived.”

  “My goal was heaven, but now I’m not so sure I’ll ever make it.”

  “My mama went through a religious stint,” he said. “She took me to a Buddhist temple, and a Catholic mass, and a hippie convention in the desert where she walked around topless with paint all over her and ate acid.”

  “Which did she choose?”

  “None,” he said. “She died in a car crash when I was twelve before she ever really got right with any of them. She was on her way, in fact, to a Mormon church when she was taken. I stayed home sick that day.”

  “Wait, she’s dead?” I asked. The Fresno girls hadn’t mentioned that.

  It was as if the smoke cleared out for just that moment, the stars blinked a blinding silver. It was my own wound before me.

  “My mother left me,” I said. “She didn’t even die, she just chose to leave. I wish she would have just died.”

  “You don’t mean that,” he said, taking my hand in his. “As long as she’s alive there’s hope.”

  He was listening to me, really listening. I felt like he understood the truest part of me. I wanted to confess it all to him, my face buried in his chest. But no. I tried to picture a happy place. I saw a beach scene from an old postcard of my mother’s, the ocean ruffled white with waves, the people prostrate on towels. I smiled to lighten things. He wouldn’t want to have sex with me if I was sobbing about my mother. But I couldn’t help myself. The beach scene faded. “How long until you felt okay without her?”

  “You always ask yourself if there was something about you that made it happen.”

  “Like, something you could have done to stop it?” I asked.

  “No. Like I was bad and I caused it somehow. I don’t know. You don’t need to hear my sad song.”

  Watching him talk I felt heat expand within me. He was a person like I’d never met. A person wise and worldly. There in the car his skinniness turned sleek, his old acne scars became pleasantly rugged, and the grease black of his hair reminded me of the Elvis poster Cherry had framed over her bed. Blue suede shoes. I liked the way he seemed to like things, his bands and his tattoos, his truck and his friends. He had a whole mysterious life. This would work. I was carried away and I didn’t even try to fight it.

  I brought his hand up my mother’s dress, all the way up to the little cups of her bra. My bosom. I was a woman from the romance novels now. It was never this way with Lyle.

  He buried his face in my neck and in one motion pulled the lever on the side of my seat so the back went flat. He’d obviously perfected the move many times over. I didn’t care. I kissed him and kissed him. This was my first kiss, I decided. His mouth was dry as sawdust. His fingers moved all over me. I closed my eyes and I was in a clean house with an ivory rug and a clear glass coffee table with one iced glass of water sitting on it and a pool I could see from the sliding glass window and yes, there was a cityscape of lit rectangles beyond that pool and I immersed myself in it and yes. A heat burned under his hand and I focused on the center of it like staring into the sun, and on that coffee table was a slab of undercooked red steak and I bit it and the blood dripped down my chin. Yes. This is what my romances were talking about, this final moment, two breaths connecting into one.

  I pressed my head back and in the black of my closed eyes came hot light and a treacherous feeling took me over. I couldn’t move. A drum inside me beat and beat.

  He finished quickly and then lay on me and I could scarcely breathe. I felt his heart my heart the heart of both our bodies.

  “That was my first time,” I said, liking the way all this felt. The awayness of it. I liked life for a moment and its strangeness. And God was either with me or he wasn’t. How could a person tell? I was only sure now of the way my lower back had hit the seat like a song.

  He looked into my eyes. We were lovers. “That wasn’t nobody’s first time.”

  I CREPT BACK into Cherry’s, stepped carefully down the hall. I turned on the light of the craft room and there she was lying down on the baby mattress, eyes open. The room reeked of Sweet Dreams and an ashtray was full of the butts next to her.

  “Oh my God, what are you doing?” I said. “Scared me half to death.”

  She sat up. “Vern came looking for you tonight. Said he had a bad feeling about your soul. And what was old Cherry supposed to say? That I didn’t know where you were?”

  I shuffled around the room not looking at her. I took the dress off and threw on one of Grampa Jackie’s old tractor supply shirts. I tried to imagine a story to tell but my mind was scrambled from the night.

  “You made me lie to my pastor, Lacey. I’ve been in here all night thinking I should call him up and tell him the real truth.”

  “Which is?”

  “I raised your mother. I know a thing or two. After she was grown I told myself I’d never stay up all the night waiting on no person again. And now here you are, stepping out.”

  “I was with Quince. Converting her.”

  Cherry lit another Sweet Dream. Ran her tongue over her teeth.

  “One lie leads to the next, leads to the next.”

  “Vern isn’t going to banish me,” I said. “I’ve got something he wants.”

  “Let’s hope it’s something of worth. Something that will work this time.” Unlike my mother’s assignment, I knew she must have been thinking.

  I thought of what the Fresno girls might say. I rolled my eyes like them. “Relax,” I said to her, tossing my hair.

  Cherry got up and stood close to me. “I don’t know what all you’ve got going on in there,” she said, swatting the back of my head. “But you smell like hell rolled in going nowhere fast.”

  After she left, I lay on the baby mattress unable to sleep. I imagined Vern at the window looking in. I could talk a big game, but I was terrified of him. It seemed my faith rolled in and out now like a tide. Some moments I was void of it completely and then some, like now, I was ashamed, fearful of the truths I had been told for so long. I wanted a lush green world where I could please Vern, go to heaven, have my mother, and keep my child. I wanted a different world. One that did not exist.

  Chapter 14

  December. The sky grainy, begging for rain. The smoke from the fires had drifted out to the ocean by now but I swore I could still smell it. The local news rep
orted that temperatures in Peaches had reached record highs while in neighboring towns, mere miles away, there were cool downs, tule fog covers, low visibility on the highways. Kerman soil was said to be moist and Fresno itself was chilly enough for a light jacket if you were going to walk down Christmas Tree Lane in the evening, but Peaches remained a desert wasteland. This was further proof that we were being tested, punished even, for something grave. But how could it be, everyone wondered, when the town was made up of such fine believers, when we honored God certainly more than the people of the city? It was by this I knew something beyond human understanding was at work. I couldn’t feel God’s love for me now, and I couldn’t feel His destiny, but something supernatural was boxing us in this eternal summer and it was why I couldn’t let go of my faith completely, even if I wanted to, even if it would have been easier. All I had to do was feel the heat bear down, burning an endless dryness into my body. No man could accomplish something like that.

  I sat on the floor in front of the television while Cherry sewed exercise clothes for the chinchillas. The news segment showed a fat Santa handing out candy canes to a mass of people. “You ever walked down Christmas Tree Lane?” I asked her.

  Cherry grunted. “There’s a house there that hands out hot cocoa for free,” she said. “All those rich people with the most beautiful lights. That lane is the best thing about Fresno. Only neighborhood worth seeing, you ask me.”

  “I wish I could see it.”

  “Santa and elves parading around like they’re the reason for the season,” she said. “All these infidels decorating their houses like chumps over a holiday they don’t even believe in. It’s Christ’s birthday party, for God’s sake. Set out a damn cake and light some birthday candles if you need to celebrate so bad.”

  “Sounds kind of fun,” I said, sucking my stomach in. It was pushing out more now, harder to hide. Earlier I’d tried on one of Cherry’s old sweaters from the back of the craft room closet and my skin rashed and itched and my sweat poured under it. I had taken it off within minutes. I dreaded when my body would betray me, when there would be no hiding what had happened in that rainless stretch of summer. I’d fixed it, though, with Stringy, and now I needed Cherry on board.

  “I’ve got to tell you something,” I said to her.

  She turned down the TV. “That’s the tone of a bad girly done wrong.” Her lips thinned, she closed her eyes. She stayed still to receive God’s premonition, lifted a hand to catch it from the air.

  “Stand in front of me, now,” she said, holding her hand up like an antenna, moving it from side to side, trying for further clarity. “In some trouble?” she asked.

  I was quiet.

  “Spell it out.”

  “I’m full with blessing,” I said.

  “So it wasn’t the cleaning making you sick,” she said. There was a long pause. “Soon as this illness passes you can get back to it.”

  I’d expected a beating with the bull penis cane. For her to call me a whore, condemn me and send me to the floor to clean. Threaten to call up Vern.

  “It’s the lawn painter’s,” I said.

  She sank back in her chair, twirled the tail of a stilled squirrel between her fingers. Its eyes glinted in the low light of the television. “Been word that some other church girlies are full up too. Suppose it’s just a coincidence of timing?”

  “I don’t want to give this baby to the church.”

  “Who done it to you, really?” she said.

  “Vern won’t want the baby if it’s half infidel.”

  She looked up at me. I couldn’t place her emotion. She was usually angry but she seemed calm. “A grandbaby,” she said. “I did always want me one of those.” I almost reminded her that I was her grandbaby, but I let her feel her feelings.

  She stared out the window and I saw her face begin the slow puff toward tears. It was dark, but even if it wasn’t, she’d still be gazing over stick brittle fields, barren. A pair of headlights shone in the distance and faded. I didn’t know what to do so I knelt before her and put my head in her lap. “He’s gonna marry me,” I said.

  She groaned. “This won’t end well. Just remember your old Cherry told you that.” But I felt her hand stroke my hair. I knew there was a part of her that understood. It was the woman part.

  CHERRY TOOK MY marriage plan and ran with a gusto I hadn’t expected. Made me message Stringy right away. He was at the door within the hour, eyes bugged and tired, hands vibrating and clumsy. I had texted him something about a repeat of the Pac parking lot night. I knew he’d be right there. My mother used to say, before she was saved, and then lost again, that men were easy. I could see now that she was right. But looking at him standing there, a familiarity also came over me. The way I felt now was similar to the way I’d felt toward my mother’s men, who had always seemed so below her. How she clamored to please them, how everything seemed to hinge on their approval of her. I never understood it. They seemed like bad men to me, the way they talked and spat, their dirty smells, the way they cussed with tense jaws, teeth concealing the shells of sunflower seeds at all hours. How they loved their sunflower seeds. They looked at me too long and too strange like they were piecing together the mystery of what made up a girl. How it was my job to get the Doritos from the kitchen, to bring them another beer, to wear those sapphire earrings and smile while my mother flitted around nervous and unhappy, trying to keep them there, but why? Now I saw Stringy and he was one of those men. He wasn’t so different at all and here I was, desperate for him to save me.

  “Thought you could make sex with God’s precious property and not marry her?” Cherry said.

  He looked at the door behind him and Cherry hit her cane against it. “Don’t even think about it.” Her bathrobe was loose and I could almost see her breasts in their totality. “’Cause from what I can see, Fresno’ll bring the law on a full-grown man lying down with a girl child.”

  “Now, now,” he started. He looked at me wary, like I could reach out and sting. He held his hands up, unarmed. “Don’t get any ideas. Heard of Three Strikes and You’re Out? I already got two.”

  “The proof,” Cherry said, pointing at my stomach, “is right here. So tell me again, would you like to marry my granddaughter and make this right in the eyes of God and the law?”

  I stepped close to him. I held his hands and pressed them to my stomach. “We can be a family.”

  “Cut the softy stuff,” Cherry said. “It’s this or jail time, boy, which do you prefer? No one here in Peaches is gonna care a thing about it long as you’re married up nice under the hand of God.”

  “Is this real?” he said to me.

  “Strip it down, young man,” Cherry said. “Time to get saved.”

  I looked at Cherry. “What are you doing?”

  “I was sitting here thinking, now what’s in this for me? Then I saw a-clear. ’Bout time this old Cherry brings a new convert to Vern. Imagine the pennies in my heaven jar.”

  Stringy looked at me. He touched my stomach. “I thought you were eighteen,” he said loudly, as if to some hidden recorder.

  “I need me a man of sin,” I told her. “Not a saved man.”

  “You don’t comply, girly,” Cherry snarled in my ear, “and I’ll call Vern up right now and tell him the truth easy as pie.” She looked him up and down. “Saved or not,” she said, “he don’t amount to a hill of beans. Vern won’t want that baby.”

  “I’m gonna be a daddy,” Stringy said, his own world swirling and blinding him.

  I nodded and hugged him and he slowly pulled his shirt off and stripped down to his black boxers.

  “You taking those to heaven with you?” Cherry asked, prodding the elastic on his shorts with the cane. “Get naked. We ain’t got time to pussyfoot around. Sooner we get the two of you married, the better off that child will be and we can put this whole mess behind us.”

  She filled the tub with several liters of soda and Stringy got in. Cherry stirred the liquid around him with
her cane, speaking in her heavenly tongue. Click click rhombus a dadadadadad. Stringy’s soft penis bobbed in the brown soda. There were tears pooling in his closed eyes. His body began to shiver, spirit moving.

  “Out demons!” Cherry screamed, and she banged the cupboards with the cane so the room shook. I sat on the toilet and peeled my cuticles until they bled. I didn’t know anything about him at all. Maybe he had been in a gang. Maybe those girls at Tent City were right to warn me.

  “This is Stringy, and he comes to you today to be baptized into Gifts of the Spirit, may he heed your heavenly command and discard his ways of sin,” Cherry said. “Do you accept our Papa God into your heart for all of your days and submit to the hand of the church?”

  I leaned in and watched him. This was always the best part. Transformation was a physical thing, I’d seen it before and I wondered if it would still be possible to my new critical eye. But here it was: Stringy looked tormented. He writhed around and pulled at his own skin like it was a suit he wanted to take off. Then there was a stillness. Moonlight shone in through the small window and made everything glow. Cherry looked at me. “He breathing?” she said, just as Stringy sat up gasping and choking for air. “I saw God!” he screamed. His eyes were electric and his neck veins bulged. “He said he was my own daddy! I never had a daddy and now I do!”

  We cloaked him in a Virginia Slims beach towel and walked him naked to the front yard, where I stood next to him under a falling-down archway that used to have flowers growing over the top of it when Grampa was alive, and Cherry brought out my mother’s old Children’s Illustrated Bible and I held Stringy’s sticky hands. With his eyes still closed, she married us before God, and we said, I do.

  He fell asleep on the baby mattress, his body a small ball. Now it was his bed, too, Cherry said, for we were made one in front of God.

  I lay next to him and poked him awake. “You really see God?” I asked.