Godshot

by Chelsea Bieker

  He grunted. “I’m hungover as fuck. I didn’t see no God.”

  I crept to the bathroom and lay in the sticky tub and read. When I read it seemed time could stop. It seemed perhaps my life was just another book I was in and it was anyone’s guess what the real life was. Was Stringy saved or not? It wouldn’t matter, I decided. Either way we had defied Vern’s plan. He didn’t want us to be families, and somehow I’d convinced everyone that was what we were. I read some more. Nothing could soothe me this very way but books. Thirst crawled up my spine and I drank brown drips from the tap, mouth pressed into the metal spigot that tasted like pennies. It was hot in the bathroom, hot forever. Was it cold where my mother was, where her new man Rick was? What was December in Reno?

  Cherry appeared in the doorway. She had put on a mauve lace gown, something I’d never seen, and a matching coverlet. Her snarled feet were jammed into mauve satin heels. “Wore this when Pearl was wed,” she said, shy.

  “Wish my mother could have seen me married,” I said.

  Her long white hair was back and secured with a golden brooch. “Want to dance?”

  We swayed in the living room to no music, Cherry leading. “This is what happens after infidels get married,” she explained. “Dancing and presents.” We both knew this wasn’t true for GOTS weddings, though. GOTS weddings were clerical, businesslike, and holy. If anything, there was weeping. If anything, the bride looked morose in her new responsibility and the groom looked hungry for it to be over, for consummation, which took place in a white tent in the field behind the church with the Body holding hands in a circle just outside the canvas. Children were not welcome for this part, but I imagined you could hear everything. I imagined it was something to just get through. After the couple was finished they would come out and the groom would hold up the sheet with its spots of virgin blood and everyone would lapse into spirit song, writhe on the ground in glorious jubilee. I would not be welcome to marry Stringy in the church this way now, I knew, or anyone for that matter.

  I put my head on her shoulder, the old Cherry.

  “What’s going to happen now?” I asked. It was a small voice that came from me, one I was not proud of but one I couldn’t stop. I wanted the pity of a mother. I wanted the love of one, and what was the difference between pity and love?

  THE HOUSE FELL silent, Cherry in bed, Stringy a-snore. I crept out and walked in the deep valley quiet, looked for the stars in the smog. I took the go-phone and I called Rick’s Angels. I wanted to tell my mother. The phone rang and rang.

  “Is Little Lou there?” I asked.

  “Our girls don’t take no personal calls,” the man said. The Turquoise Cowboy.

  I lifted my voice so he wouldn’t recognize it from the hotline. “Can I write to her?”

  “She don’t want to hear from no one in Peaches,” he said. “She said, ‘Don’t connect me to no one from there. That’s in my past.’ I have to respect a lady’s wishes.”

  “This is her daughter.”

  “She don’t have a daughter,” he said.

  Chapter 15

  Being married offered no special treatment at Cherry’s. I still had to entertain all her grooming needs at her whim, had fly duty, had to call for Goldie. Stringy was an annoying person to live with, up all throughout the night, building his business, he said, staring into the glow of his phone even though I had mentioned it kept me awake, mentioned it might be bad for the baby. He was too exhausted to really rouse from a lying-down position most of the time. The moment I decided maybe I hated him was when I watched him put olives on each finger and smile to himself as he ate them off. But on Sundays it didn’t matter that he was tired in the morning—not a morning person, he liked to say. Tired or not, Cherry told him, Sundays were for church. And it’s one, two, three strikes you’re out! she’d taken to singing around the house. He listened to her more than he did me, almost as if he’d been longing for a mommy to boss him around. He shaved his face clean and put on his favorite black shirt. “What do you think?” he asked her. I stood watching them, invisible. “Don’t take off those sunglasses,” she told him. “In your case, it’s better to keep some mystery.”

  I WALKED INTO church with Stringy on my arm, head held high. Cherry trailed him like a handler, muttering, He’s taken, he’s taken, when we would pass people, but she didn’t mean romantically. She meant spiritually—she’d taken him, so don’t bother trying to get a feather in your cap of heaven. She gawked around hoping someone would cause a fuss over it all. We scooted into our pew and I could feel the eyes on his tattoos, the ones that managed to crawl their way out from his clothing. His knuckles: EWMN. What does that mean? I’d asked him a few nights before, lying on the baby mattress, him trying to play footsie and me shifting away from him. Evil, Wicked, Mean, Nasty, he’d said. I’d waited to see if he would explain. When he didn’t, I said, “You’re not those things.” I meant it like an insult. He’d shrugged. He barely understood himself, I could see.

  A few people looked up at us from their Bibles, side-eyed and fearful. We had all become weird other versions of ourselves in the drought. The Body was nervous, thirsty. Dying, probably, from a diet of straight soda.

  Denay came in with her parents, wearing a dress made from a sheet, stapled at the shoulders. Her face was full and round, her cheeks a rush of pink.

  “What’s this?” she said to me, eyes on the lanky man at my side. I had noticed that Stringy hunched his shoulders when he was uncomfortable, and he did that now, sort of turned into me. Pushed the sunglasses higher on his nose.

  “My husband,” I told her. “Father of my growing babe.” I patted my stomach under my tight white tank top. “Here to make things right.”

  She looked me up and down slowly. “And he’s the true daddy under the eyes of God?” She leaned into me over the back of the pew, a light embrace. She whispered, “And you expect anyone to believe that?”

  “More believable than a white light in the middle of the night.”

  Denay laughed. “Not around here.”

  Vern emerged from the back. The boys were on folding chairs on the stage, Lyle in the center. Vern turned a few times, letting his blue robe fan out from him like he was about to perform a magic trick.

  “Vibe’s all wrong,” Stringy said, sinking low in his seat, his eyes narrowed on Vern. He shivered a bit and crossed and uncrossed his legs.

  “He’s saved this town once and he’ll do it again,” Cherry snapped.

  “Church,” Vern addressed. “The work you’ve been doing is transforming us. I see it in the air. I can feel your intensity. Who’s hard into their assignments?”

  The Body shouted, raising their open hands. It seemed in the past months the numbers had been pruned—only half the pews were filled now.

  Stringy leaned forward, long fingers drumming his knees, suddenly interested. I imagined both of my worlds combining. What if Stringy was truly converted that night in the bathtub, what if we became a real family today at church?

  “Any announcements from the Body?” Vern said.

  Cherry stood and pulled me and Stringy up by our hands. “Married! These two, I married them myself under God’s holy watch after converting his damned soul! Add another to the army!”

  She smiled wide, expecting a cheer to rise but only blank stares blinked back at her.

  “We’re having a baby,” I said as loud as I could.

  The Body murmured low, looked around. A young mother pulled her toddler daughter into her skirt and glued her eyes to the top of the girl’s sweet head. Lyle stood up in a bolt and then sat down. His cheeks flamed.

  But Vern was unruffled. He placed his hands together as if in prayer and bowed at us. I was holding my breath, waiting for something, but he went into the rest of the sermon, a blur of terror, locust-eaten plants and flooded valleys and parched lands like ours where the people died on their long walks to watering holes. That could be us, he kept saying. Is that what we wanted?

  “I need to know
who I can trust,” he said. “Who can I look at and be sure?”

  The Body stretched their hands forward. Me. Me.

  “I should be able to hand each of you a shotgun and tell you to shoot your own self in the skull and you should do it without a moment’s hesitation. You should feel that certain that I am your leader.”

  Cherry hooted and clapped. “Shoot me, Pastor Vern!” she cried.

  I thought back to the early fall when all of us girls had vomited like a team against the church, the smells overpowering us. I felt a skittish relief to have removed myself from that group. To be able to watch them now from afar. But next to that relief, a familiar voice of doubt crept in, wondering if I was giving up the best thing that had ever happened to me. Was this how it felt to give up religion? For the rest of your life feeling good good good but always scanning the shadows for an archer, always wondering late at night before sleep if you had squandered your eternity.

  How could you not?

  Something drifted before my eyes and I snatched it. A white puffy feather. Another, then another. I looked around as they fell over everyone and silence became us. The Body raised their arms. Children twirled under them. It was like what I imagined snow could be. I looked at Stringy and he stared up, his mouth open. I couldn’t tell where they were coming from. I didn’t see Trinity Prism anywhere in the rafters. She couldn’t be throwing these feathers anyhow. They were coming from everywhere, thin air, impossible. I smiled. I couldn’t help it.

  Vern gazed upward, laughed as they stuck to his sweaty skin. “But for you who fear my name, the Son of Righteousness will rise with healing in His wings!” he cried. “I am here now! God among you in human form! Let your doubts be cast aside.”

  Stringy held his palms out and the feathers collected in them. Cherry was weeping now. I looked back up and I couldn’t see the ceiling anymore. I was in a white cloud. I didn’t notice for a long time that Stringy was no longer next to me.

  When the last feathers had fallen my face was damp and my skin tingled. Nothing had ever been more beautiful. How quiet we’d stood under the feathers. The thing about signs is that they are up to each person in how they will be believed. I felt then that God was with me again. He was smiling down on my plan, all I’d done.

  AFTER THE SERVICE, Stringy leaned against the hearse, smelling of smoke, wired to the hilt. “Mizz Cherry,” he said. “You saw this man pull rain from the sky?”

  “I ain’t the only one.”

  “Hard to believe,” Stringy said.

  I thought of the grapes in Vern’s yard, how no one would believe me if I told them that here in this barren valley I’d eaten of bulbous aching fruit.

  Vern came out, smiling wide and shaking hands with the last trickle of the Body, the hangers-on who so desperately wanted to be touched by him. “That headache’s nearly gone!” old Mrs. Jenkins said, clutching Vern’s shoulder. “Praise!”

  He waited until every last person had left and then walked toward us.

  “Newly saved, and now wed,” Vern said to Stringy. With his sunglasses on Stringy didn’t look as old as normal and I was glad. Vern reached out and placed a hand on my belly and I stepped back.

  “Jumpy,” he said. “But you were so eager inside, for everyone to know.”

  “Don’t forget we’ve got a new recruit,” Cherry said, her lips pulled back so I could see the gray of her gums where they met the teeth.

  “Young man, are you certain you’ve married an honest bride?” Vern smiled, seemed lightly amused by us.

  Stringy kicked a toe into the dirt and in a flash I saw him as a nervous young boy, no tattoos to cover him. Under the unforgiving sun I could see where his real hair color, a soft mouse dander, was growing out from under the thick inky dye.

  “I’m just doing right by her,” he said. “What’s it to you?”

  “It’s everything to me,” Vern said. “Lacey is a big part of Gifts. Or didn’t she tell you?”

  “Well, we best be going,” Cherry said. “And I’ll get through to this one. You know infidels, the saving doesn’t always come easy, but he’s in the door, I’d say.”

  “You are faithful, Cherry. I know you won’t do me wrong,” Vern said to her.

  Stringy walked backward, eyes on Vern like a spooked dog until we reached the car. I had the sense we had gotten away with a crime, but were still under surveillance. Vern’s approval couldn’t be this easy.

  “I’ve seen him before somewhere,” Stringy said back at Cherry’s. He was getting ready to go paint a lawn at a location he could not really describe. “You know that feeling when you see something and you feel like you’re reliving it. Like you already did those things and saw those people?”

  “Yeah,” I said. “I’ve had that before.”

  “Déjà vu,” Stringy said.

  “No it ain’t,” Cherry cut in. “That’s God.”

  I WENT IN for a Sunday shift at the red house so I could drink water. It seemed others were being steadfast in their waterless ways, Cherry included, and their skin had turned a sheen the color of the soda of their choice—oranges, blues, purples, greens. Teeth were rotting, brown and weak. Cherry had lost one of her molars and bellyached about how sore her mouth was all the time. I worried for my own and had taken to brushing at Daisy’s using her natural organic toothpaste.

  The Turquoise Cowboy called right after I got there. “I’ve got a mansion with a boat,” he said. He didn’t even say hi. “I’ve got two cars. One of them works and one’s for parts. I’ve got satin bedsheets and silk drapes. I’ve got girls of each color, all shapes and sizes. Sometimes I line them up and take their picture all together.”

  He was very drunk. This would be my chance if there ever was one. I shifted at my mother’s desk. Did she like a drunk man? I imagined it was a relief to have everyone as drunk as you.

  “Come be with me, princess,” he said. There it was again: princess. Why did grown men want a princess? Something about it seemed creepy. “Once you see the place. Oh, man! It’s like angels walking around all the day, the finest delicacies. Crab cakes and them chicken biscuit crackers. Tuna melts.”

  “What do I have to do once I’m there?” I said. My voice had faltered, gone high. Maybe he’d tell me what my mother spent her days doing. I had a dark feeling it had nothing to do with getting famous.

  “Number one, you have to work,” he said. “Lifestyle doesn’t come for free. You have to want people to recognize you on the street and ask after your name signed on their receipts. You have to really show them why they like it. You want that kind of life?”

  I knew this was the part when my mother had told him, Come get me, I’m ready. She had told him where she was exactly, where to find her. She’d told him so much about her, maybe, that she hadn’t even had to say the word come, she’d only had to croon sweetly to him and he couldn’t be held off. I knew she had been surprised that day in the church when he’d called her name, but not too surprised. If I knew my mother, I would say there had always been a clock ticking within her, waiting for another man to change everything. I was the fool to imagine she had changed.

  “I want to get out of this town,” I said. “Ain’t nothing for me here. Nothing for a star. I need you.”

  He paused. “Now, I said I’ll come get you. But I need to be sure you’re ready. I ain’t making that drive for nothing.”

  Perhaps I would only get my way if I threatened a man with a man, someone he would listen to. He wasn’t listening to me.

  “Give me your address, baby,” I said. “I got a daddy with a shotgun you don’t want to mess with. They call him One Shot Joe. You don’t want to know why.”

  “Tell me something first,” he said.

  “Anything.”

  “You ain’t a part of that no-good church there, that church where that crooked pastor’s taking advantage of all them nice ladies?”

  “Tell me straight what’s on your heart.”

  “I know a gal from there and she has stories, y
es she do, about that man and his ways. Said he had been trying to get her to be his other wife for years and she just couldn’t take it no more. She was trying to be a good church girl, but he was making it real hard, making her perform all number of naughties in the name of God. And I ain’t got no business in what religion you are; hell, I don’t care. But I can’t be playing therapist to a broke-down Sally who’s been brainwashed to hell and back. I ain’t got time.”

  I thought of how Vern forbade my mother from dating, how he held her so prized, how he blushed under her beauty. But had he wanted her to be his wife? Had he touched her? What had I missed in the haze of my adoration? I hated all the things she’d never told me, but here they were circling like a cast of hawks.

  “Can’t imagine such a thing,” I said.

  I had him so close. I could feel it.

  “Why don’t you get yourself another drink and have a seat,” I said. “Imagine I’m massaging you. Picture me real now, working on those strong shoulders.”

  I heard him slurp through a straw. Oh yes, I knew just what kind he was. He was the gas-station-soda-cup-and-Popov-vodka kind. Nursing it all day, refilling it before it got to the bottom so that by sundown the soda was nothing but a tint in the vodka and he would be the type of drunk that had no memory of itself.

  I waited until I heard the straw search around in the ice, the sound of emptiness. Then he burped like a baby. Time for a nap.

  “You’re better than all these broads here. You’re the one for me.”

  What horrors had he lived through as a child? People didn’t usually just become this way, I thought. It was probably not completely fair, whatever had happened to him, and now here he was, his untended wound blasting around the world, wrecking things.

  “I been telling you that,” I said. “Now what’s the address, darling?”

  He laughed a little. Sighed. I wrote it down. Alibi Drive.

  I WAITED UNTIL Cherry was tied up something deep with her Telephone Testimony and slipped from the house. The hearse purred. The sun was setting, a haze of orange lowering in the smog as I pulled out onto the road. No other cars around, cash on my lap, nearly two hundred dollars. I sped toward the freeway in the hearse, grateful for those driving lessons my mother had given me. I’d outsmarted every man in my way. She would be impressed by this. She would finally see the way things should be.