Godshot

by Chelsea Bieker

  Old Canal Road hit its dead end, the church to my right, the on-ramp to Golden State Boulevard to my left. I gripped the wheel. This was it. Goodbye, Peaches. Hello, Mother. I accelerated, but moments later had to brake. I thought I was imagining things but no—there was Wiley Stam’s body slumped over in the middle of the road, a shotgun resting between his legs. He sprang up to a stand and pointed the shotgun at the hearse. The wet of his open eyes glowed.

  He tapped the gun on the hood. “You know, Miss Cherry, ain’t no believer coming or going out of Peaches right now. Vern’s orders. Ain’t safe out there.”

  He got closer and stuck his head in the window. The smell of beer flooded the car, the same kind my mother liked. Didn’t they know it made them weak and prone to foolishness? But of course Wiley, man as he was, wouldn’t be banished for it.

  “I just need to run a quick errand,” I said, fumbling. I didn’t even know what that errand could be.

  “You think I trust a girl on her own?” His lips were sloppy. “I don’t.”

  “How’s Sharon?” I asked him. “You know what’s going to happen with your very own girl?”

  He planted the gun between his feet in the dirt. “I know everything I need to know.”

  “What are you going to get out of all this?” I said.

  “My vineyards’ll grow back,” he said. “I’ll be making millions. Riches like I’ve never seen.”

  I thought of the GLOBAL WARMING FOOLS! sign I’d seen months ago. “You won’t be rich.”

  He held the shotgun up and focused his eyes just over the barrel. “You talk too much.”

  A gun to the face. It centers you. Focuses you. I thought of how when Lyle was over me in the shed I had made a point not to look at Grampa Jackie’s guns on the wall. I didn’t like the thoughts they brought to me, imagining my own self pointing one at Lyle. “I’ll be going on home now,” I said carefully.

  He spat in the dirt. “Think that’s best.”

  I reversed away from Wiley. He kept the gun on the hearse until I had turned all the way around and was rolling back toward Cherry’s. I cried when I got there, sitting in the hearse with Grampa Jackie’s spirit, a sort of gulping frantic sob. I imagined Grampa watching me, patting my back maybe, but I couldn’t conjure the words he might use on me now. He could never see my mother in any fullness. How he favored her, how he loved her. Everything, even her worst low-down moments, were just strokes of bad luck to him. Was she a bad mother to me? Yes, I thought. Clearly. But he would not have been able to say that. For she was his baby. And I was no one’s. My whole body shook. A gun in the face lets you know in an instant just how badly you want to live. Everything’s fine, little baby. I sent messages to the person within me. I won’t let anything bad happen to you.

  I got out of the hearse and stood on the porch. Looked out into the black land. Anything could be out there, I thought. I imagined my mother walking toward me from the darkness. I might hear her before I saw her, a cracking branch. Then she would be before me bathed in the glow of the moon. She would look angelic, not real. I would ask her if she had found God where she’d been. If she could take me with her. But then I heard Vern in my mind: The only way to God is through me. He had said it time and time again. But something about it didn’t feel right anymore. I knew he’d told my mother those same words. Presumably they had meant something different for her. How even before assignments had come about, she’d already had one. To please Vern in an unholy way. Either doing it and feeling shame, or fighting it and becoming exhausted. It was spiritual warfare, what he had done to her, holding her afterlife over her head like a bribe. I felt for her, if what the Cowboy had said on the phone was true.

  Chapter 16

  The next morning, a knock at the door. Cherry yelled from her bedroom for me to get it. I raced toward it like a loyal dog hoping for its owner to come home. But it wasn’t my mother, it was Derndra and Trinity Prism. “Cherry,” I called. “Come here.” Cherry groaned and shuffled out of her room but sprang to life when she saw the pastor’s wife and daughter, ushered them inside with bravado as if we could not be prouder of all that was contained in the house. The flies buzzed in a pack around Cherry’s head and refused to go out the open door. They were happy here.

  I could tell Derndra had paid special attention to her bangs that morning. They sat high on her forehead in a hard layered stack. Trinity’s were the same. I sat on a kitchen chair in a top and underwear, started eating lima beans from a rusted can. The mice were scattered about the living room in action poses from the night before. Derndra held out a large gold envelope. “This is for Lacey May. We think it’s best she come, even though she’s claimed a husband.”

  “Of course,” Cherry said. She tried to smooth her long hair back, and one of her boobs popped out from her loose robe. Trinity Prism’s face went red. Our eyes met. I wanted her to smile, to let on she was a girl too, a girl like me, prone to laugh at the presence of an unexpected tit. But she didn’t.

  Cherry took the invitation and she kissed it. “All married and a woman but still a member of her church.” She started to hum. She looked around the room waiting for us all to join. “This is the day that Vern has made!” she sang out.

  We will rejoice and be glad in it, I thought, but I let the silence hang. Eventually Derndra said, “All right.” And they turned to leave.

  “Blessed are the meek, ain’t that the saying?” Cherry said when they were gone, tearing open the envelope. She seemed giddy over the sparkly invitation like I’d been asked on some fine date, like I was in the best of fortunes. I kept thinking of the hearse, what it would feel like to leave this place.

  I got up to read over her shoulder: GOTS meeting concerning YOU and the other selected soldiers of God’s army: you’re invited to an informational gathering regarding your special assignments. Please come alone and in faith. 5 p.m., TONIGHT.

  “No sense in me going,” I said, but Cherry shook her head.

  “At least find out what he has to say. This Stringy, I’m starting to think you got a dud here. Sits around all the day like a born loser. I need me my alone time.”

  “Tell him to go paint lawns,” I said. “Give him work to do.”

  “Maybe you’ll come around, Lacey. Maybe you’ll hear the good pastor and decide another way. You never know.”

  AT THE PAC, I searched for pregnancy magazines. Instead the tiny green Bibles we gave out to infidels filled the space where the magazines used to be. There were hundreds lined up and the sight of them together in this way sent a terror through me, the same books that used to incite such calm.

  Quince stood behind me with her arms crossed. “They did it in the night,” she said. “Broke in and replaced every ungodly thing with them Bibles.” She waved a hand toward them. “I flipped through. That ain’t the Bible. I read the Bible before when I was a little kid and that ain’t it. But I ain’t moving them. I don’t want to know how they might replace me. I watched that rapture movie on the TV. People’s silver teeth left on their car seats and all that.”

  “Of course it’s the Bible,” I said. “What else could it be?”

  “The real Bible don’t talk about Vern specific. What are you, a dummy? Vern’s name is in this shitty book like a thousand times.”

  My face burned. I searched for an explanation, something to make the Bibles legitimate. I changed the subject. “You got any pregnancy magazines somewhere in the back?”

  She looked around like there was someone watching. “We. Ain’t. Got. No. Magazines,” she said loud and slow. Then she leaned over and whispered: “I saw them on the security camera. All them teenage boys like a gang of thieves.”

  WILEY HAD SAID only believers couldn’t leave. Florin and Daisy weren’t believers, I reasoned on my way to the red house later that day. They wouldn’t be stopped.

  All my calls were sad sappy scenarios. Daisy said it had to do with Mercury retrograde, just making everyone off and a bit crazy, but I wasn’t sure. It just seemed like
my own bad luck, these men wanting me to do so much reassuring of their worth and their kindness. I would have given anything to talk about a penis, some tits.

  By the end of the shift, I thought of telling Florin that I’d gotten an address from the Turquoise Cowboy. I wanted to ask if they would take me there to get my mother. The magenta hearse had been a bad idea, but I could be concealed in their car. I stood by Florin’s desk, the address sweaty in my palm. But she threw down a stack of books she had checked out from the Fresno County Library. On the cover of one of them was a baby’s face descending from space. Ina May’s Guide to Childbirth, it said. I forgot the address in my hand. I forgot my mother. I hugged the book to me.

  BACK AT CHERRY’S I read and read the books and the thing inside me began to become a real thing, an artichoke-sized being who was gearing up to be able to hear me, be someone I should sing a song to. I learned I had a perineum that could and should be massaged. Some of the information in the books was startling, especially the fuzzy photos of bobbing fetuses and the explanation of birth itself, how the fetus was supposed to twirl through the canal and emerge face down and the uterus was doing the work despite the woman and her pain or her fear. One book had three women on the cover dressed in colorless smocks like sad townspeople in Jerusalem during the time of Jesus. It said that a woman could not bother pushing at all and her body would take over and her strong amazing all-powerful uterus would expel the baby. They said red-faced pushing was something invented by impatient white men who had entered the art of birthing in a rush, trying to make money and rob women of the one thing we were physically made to do that had nothing at all to do with them. So they screamed at women to push and push and took away their animal knowledge and then when it didn’t go well the woman would give up under the weight of all that naysaying, and the doctor would save the day by cutting the baby out in the nick of time, always in the name of emergency.

  I looked deeply into the open caverns of these birthing women—a few of the books showed everything—and at first I could not look at the images directly. I had to squint my eyes and then slowly let them return to focus. The pictures were so powerful it felt like if I didn’t pay them the respect they deserved the women in their sweat and toil could come off the page and incinerate me.

  One of the books was called Your Pregnancy Week by Week. It said, “20 weeks: You might find out the sex this week. Are you dreaming of pink bows or blue trucks?” The truth was I’d dreamed of neither. It seemed I was already a terrible mother.

  “Hello,” I said aloud to the baby. I said it again and it rang out high and strange.

  “Hello yourself,” Cherry said in my doorway.

  “I’m trying to talk to it,” I said. This was the moment for Cherry to offer up some female intelligence about baby growing or birthing or something, anything, of use.

  “Time for that church meeting,” she said instead. I pictured the inside of her brain as an empty bowl, dead Goldies and Grampas flying around like bats, the church at the center, Vern a sniper, shooting down every critical thought from the sky of her mind. “Get on and go.”

  AT THE SPECIAL meeting the church was emptied just for us. It felt like a lifetime had passed since I had nearly skipped through town to get to Vern with my new blood, how the church was empty that day too but it seemed to glimmer with possibility, the empty pews waiting for God’s people and all we would do. Now the emptiness was matte and gray, dust thick in the air, heat pressing in. It was hard to take a deep breath.

  I was the last to arrive by the looks of it. The boys’ club sat scattered around the church. I saw Lyle shooting rubber bands at Laramie, carefree. He didn’t even look up when I walked in. Denay and Taffy sat legs splayed in the front row with the other girls, obvious baby bumps poking out from tight white tank tops. Denay rubbed her belly with her eyes closed. I sat next to Taffy but then I heard Psssst. It was Sharon at the end of the row, sitting a few spaces from the rest. I got up and plopped down next to her. She wore what looked like her father’s shirt, huge and billowing over her body, and flip-flops on her dirty feet. Her face was swollen and scrubbed. Her brown hair was a nest on top of her head and she absentmindedly poked around in it every few seconds.

  “Time to let the world know we’ve been knocked up by the white light of God. Can’t hide these stomachs any longer.” She smirked, whispered, “Well, not you, Miss I-have-a-husband. Wish I’d thought of that.”

  I was stunned by the way she spoke, so different from the other girls. She reminded me a bit of Florin, but more trapped. I didn’t sense much belief within her. I considered that perhaps she had never believed at all.

  Vern breezed to the front, an impatient energy about him. He wrung his hands and kept glancing toward the main door. “Girls, your stomachs are growing and growing! Praise be to the one who created us. In your wombs are church babies, of course. Future leaders of our army. Miracles in human form, the greatest offering we can turn over to God. Only then he will bless us with . . . ?”

  “Rain,” we all said together.

  I saw Willow, a skinny quiet girl, open her eyes in shock. She grabbed her tiny potbelly. She hadn’t figured it out. This seemed ridiculous to me, but I would probably be like her if Daisy hadn’t explained everything.

  Vern went down a list. We were to take care of ourselves in terms of spiritual fitness, which would nourish the babies far more than anything we ate or drank. Only God words through the mind. Only GOTS influence. We must stay steadfast in the face of naysayers. Be prepared for the less faithful to doubt our plan. We were to offer nothing to these people. No explanation. No apologies for our faith. If anything we should feel sorry for them.

  Lyle kept his face primed at Vern. He wouldn’t look at me.

  “There’s one among us who isn’t following,” Denay said, pointing in my direction.

  “What’s to happen to these babies?” I blurted out. I thought of the gloriously smushy-faced infants I’d seen pictures of in my books, how my heart swelled to bursting when I thought of my own baby coming out just like that, nothing but innocent.

  Denay’s face broke into a smile. I knew she was excited to meet her own baby, too.

  “Their sole purpose will be to share the gospel,” Vern said. He explained it slowly like I was dull. He came up and squatted before me, put his hand on my knee. It seemed a father’s movement, perhaps, after a child has fallen from a bike. But I flinched when he touched me, and he drew his hand back. Stood. “You won’t be burdened by the day-to-day care of them at all. Once you turn them over they will become part of the Body. With time it will be like you’ve never known them as anything more than a face among many. You’ll see everyone like that eventually. No more roles. No more labels. It wastes time, valuable time that we could be using to shoot people with spirit.”

  Denay’s smile fell. “What will happen to us?” she asked him.

  Vern looked exasperated for a moment, as if there were a textbook on church babies we had not read before class, but he recovered. “You’ll do it all again, of course. The common family structure can just fall away. We will be one big family.”

  “Something like this in the Bible?” asked Taffy meekly.

  “Psalm 127, dear.” Vern cleared his throat and recited from memory:

  Children are a heritage from the Lord,

  offspring a reward from him.

  Like arrows in the hands of a warrior

  are children born in one’s youth.

  Blessed is the man

  whose quiver is full of them.

  They will not be put to shame

  when they contend with their opponents in court.

  The room was still. The verse struck me as beautiful in the way most verses did. My mother had called me sentimental more than once, my eyes threatening tears during the Sunday readings, but now my life was a verse. Now the verse seemed abstract, inapplicable to any of us in a practical sense. I looked at the boys’ club. Why did it have to be Lyle? Why couldn’t one of
these boys have committed the act with me? But I knew why. This way, there could be no real love to distract us. Nothing could turn romantic. We girls would stay in our shame, where we were most pliable. We would hand the babies over, relieved.

  “When all this comes to pass, I don’t want people thinking I didn’t contribute anything here,” Lyle whined. He looked to me finally. “Marrying that infidel behind all our backs. When will she pay the price for that little stunt?”

  “Lyle, stand down,” Vern said. “You’re giving her the power to upset you.”

  Lyle looked at his hands and pushed out deep loud breaths. Vern told the girls we were to go with Derndra, and the boys were welcome to have fellowship out behind the church, where there were snacks and cards for games. Vern had gotten the boys white baseball caps to wear to keep the sun from their eyes. Something useful, I thought. I could have used a cap. The sun was always in my eyes, my nose always in various states of peeling sunburn. But that was the way with boys. Always getting things that made them better—pants with pockets, tools for building—while girls received adornments, things to make us appear better to others.

  Derndra appeared from the back of the church and led us up the stairs into Vern’s small office, where we could be alone. We crowded together on the floor and she stood above us, presented us each with a large swath of white cloth and a small sewing kit. Then she passed out fun-size bars of Hershey’s chocolate.

  “I craved chocolate when I was pregnant with Trinity Prism,” she said, smile curling her lip. It was more than I’d ever heard before about her personal life. To crave chocolate seemed so human. It made me wonder what else there was.

  Trinity Prism remained stoic sitting on a stool behind her mother, set apart from us as usual.