Godshot

by Chelsea Bieker

  And a new desire had grown in me: I wanted Daisy to love me the same way she loved Florin. Maybe more.

  ON CHRISTMAS SUNDAY there was no tree in the church, no lights. No paper bag and candle luminaries lighting the walkway for fear of fire through the grasslands. We were instructed to wear black, a time of mourning for our town, a time of faithfulness.

  Stringy eyed my belly in a strange way and spent more time on his phone. “You know,” he said from the couch, “in jail you watch a lot of TV.”

  “Cool,” I said, opening a can of beans. I drank the cloudy juice then pressed the soft pintos against the roof of my mouth, the flavor of nothing.

  “I remember one story of this guy baptizing people and all kinds of shit. This little church in middle-of-nowhere New Mexico. Whole thing blew up when someone in the church accused him of having like twenty wives, not taking any of them to the hospital when they were sick. All kinds of weird mind tricks and brainwashing. All them women wore dresses of blue sequins and held hands everywhere they went. Total freaks.”

  I put the can down. “And?”

  “You really think this guy’s gonna pull rain from that sky out there?” He pointed to the window and the cloudless and blue-brown sky, the crows swarming against the thick smog backdrop, the sun a strange orange orb.

  “He did it once,” I said. Because he did. I still could not deny the divinity of that timing, and neither could the rest of the Body. I still could not get that muscat juice out of my mouth.

  “He’s a fraud. I’m no educated man but it’s plain to see you’ve all been struck blind.”

  “That doesn’t sound anything like our Vern,” Cherry said, emerging from the shadowy hallway. “Lacey here can tell you about her and her mama’s life before that man brought us into savings.”

  I hadn’t said much to Stringy about the beforelife. The nights spent alone, when I’d wake up in a terror and my mother wasn’t next to me. I wouldn’t be able to sleep on the couch, longing for our bed. I’d eat jelly beans and watch horse races on the television. How I’d so wanted to be one of those little men on the horses. I want to be a jockey someday, I told Sapphire Earrings once, my mother passed out in the room. You’re too big, he said, mouthful of seeds and chew, spitting into a red plastic cup, little bits of shell in his horrible mustache. But sometimes if I was truly alone, I would jump up and down and scream loud as I could. I wanted the world to know she wasn’t there and for someone to change it. In true desperation I’d call Cherry and beg for her to come get me. I’d picture my mother dead somewhere, or just dead in the mind, forgetting me completely. It was true Vern had saved me from all that. It was too hard to explain to Stringy. I had no bruises on my body to show my motherloss, and so to anyone else, did it exist?

  “Yeah,” Stringy said. “Seems like your mom’s doing real good these days. All thanks to that pastor, huh? I’d ask for my money back if I were you.”

  STRINGY REFUSED TO come to church that day, claiming he was busy with lawn painting. Day to day I didn’t notice very many neon lawns, though, and I wondered vaguely what he did with his time if not that. I wondered if he might even have a girlfriend. I wasn’t jealous if he did. Maybe he was meeting up with the Jasons at Tent City, letting the seconds of their lives seep away, meaningless.

  I stood in the pew next to Cherry and kept my eyes on her cane, on her snarled knuckles. How special I used to feel here at church, my mother at my side, our hands lifted, letting glitter fall on our palms. The blissful smile on my mother’s face during worship, dreamed up and away. I had felt so much pride to be hers. Her beauty was blessing enough for both of us.

  Vern took to the stage in a silver robe. He pumped himself up with a few jumps, pounded his chest with his fists. This really got the Body excited: Praise Vern! But there were fewer shrieks and whoops today. People were sun-whipped and tired.

  “How blessed can we be?” Vern asked, as if he didn’t notice how small the Body was, how wilted. “That God saw our dedication, saw our steadfast work, and came down in a light and blessed our girls with life. I could hardly believe it myself, but now it’s before us. A true and real answer from above.”

  I thought this was the chance, if ever there would be one. The point where everything might change.

  “Come up here, girls!” he said. Cherry nudged me up and gave me a severe look that I knew to mean future punishment if I did not go. We lined up next to him on the stage. Vern jumped into his dog bed for a moment and looked at us and then sprang back up.

  “Look at them, everyone! Have you ever seen any miracle like this? Each one of them a testimony!”

  The Body looked at us girls, at our stomachs, our haircuts. Little pregnant dollies. They were quiet at first. Eyes on us all together, they really saw.

  Finally old Gentry Roo translated for everyone: “Like the blessed virgin,” he offered. He raised his arms in a salute toward us.

  Aha. Shoulders relaxed. Breaths exhaled. No, I thought. Someone speak out. Someone ask how this happened, really. Like the blessed virgin, they murmured. Yes, yes, that was it. The Body raised their hands and a cheer vibrated through the church. The downfall of the Body was that we loved a mystery. Mystery was proof of God. Mystery was not complex, but simple. You never needed to understand it. Acceptance alone would do.

  “Let’s close our eyes and let this miracle seep into us. If you were worried about Peaches, about the future, lay those worries down.” Everyone bowed their heads. I kept my eyes slightly open and watched Vern nod toward the rafters where Trinity Prism stood above us, something primed in her hand. I closed my eyes again. My heart pounded. Seconds later, God glitter became us. I looked at it closely on my arm. It was the same kind Cherry bought from the Dollar Disco for her eyelids, wasn’t it? I looked back up to the rafters but no one was there.

  AFTER THE SERVICE Denay told me she had seen me driving through town with the witch girl, that I was out of my mind. She wanted me to remember that there was no worse punishment in hell than for the believer who had seen yet chosen blindness.

  “Who did that to you?” I asked her. I pointed to her belly.

  “I was scared just like everyone else,” she hissed. “But I’m obeying. I’m making the best of it. Take my advice. You tell yourself it was God every day, one day you wake up knowing it as truth. That’s the way He works.”

  “Just say it.”

  “White light bathing my virgin’s body,” she said. “No man to be found.”

  The church revealed itself to me then. Creaking wood planks, peeling and hot. Trinity Prism in the rafters, long in the face. The cheap common glitter, no specimen of heaven. Vern in a polyester robe fraying at the edges. I saw everything exactly as it was, dark and dirty, the people covered in filth, farm-beaten and raw, their deadened searching eyes, desperation. And the girls. The girls of blood, all full up like me.

  I nodded. Vern was looking at me now, far enough away that he couldn’t hear. I wondered if he could read lips. “You don’t know who Vern is,” I said under my breath.

  But Denay stood her ground. Waved and smiled at him. “Neither do you.”

  Chapter 17

  Where gone the town of Peaches, I imagined the country folk muttering, though even in my imaginings no one dared to speak their dismay too loud, lest God hear their grievances and decide to make a bad thing worse. But by now everyone had noticed that for all of Vern’s efforts, for all of our assignment work, things were not improving. There were rumors of entire families up and leaving in the night and never coming back, driving into the city to stock up on water bottles, to swim in public pools. It seemed only the most dedicated were following now, mostly staying inside homes praying, but some were struck crazy by the heat, on diets of nothing but canned trash and warm soda. Some could be seen wailing in their front yards, heads shaved and nearly naked, digging at dirt for hidden water. Pacing the one strip of shops, peering in their windows, remembering maybe the ice-cold water that came complimentary with your meal at th
e Grape Tray. Remembering, maybe, my mother’s delicate and straining wrist as she refilled their glasses, how they smiled up at her, how we were happy and together in our raisin-made town. For that was when religion was a ribbon atop a fine existence. When religion made the hard things easier to swallow, when it soothed like a meditation. When it colored death from dark to glory, when every good thing, even a good parking spot, was from Him. I remembered my mother swinging into the lot at the Pac, getting a front-row space, how she’d hold her hand up to cup the grace. Thanks, God! she’d say, like God was a good-natured and clever buddy, focused on reserving parking spaces for the faithful.

  Yes, religion felt different now, ravaging even, and not only to me. There was something true at stake. A lot of us seemed to know that now.

  BY FEBRUARY THE girls of blood had reached another level of stewardship to the cause, bellies pushing proud out on the street. They claimed in public cry to have been touched by the spirit in the night in a blast of white light. The stories shape-shifted until they became the same story. I kept my mouth shut. I watched them from a distance, always wondering if life would be easier if I just joined in.

  Taffy didn’t seem to change, but her belly did. Sometimes it was lumpy and low, sometimes it stuck straight out. She waddled like a duck with her arms resting on the bump, proud as pie. Denay led the pack, little women soldiers with the same haircuts, the same matching maternity tent dresses. They put their bellies together and laughed like it was great fun. I watched them with a touch of envy.

  For I didn’t feel blessed in any way. In fact, I’d never felt worse in my life. The mamas in the magazines seemed to revel in the expanse of their bodies, but no one could articulate for me the particular nausea I carried everywhere I went, the fall-down exhaustion that overtook me upon waking each morning and lasted until I could collapse into bed at night, and why was I out of breath all the time as if I’d just run a mile when all I had done was stand up? My tits hurt my back hurt my feet hurt. I hated all of it. My old self had begun to feel like an oasis, the flat empty stomach, the ease of movement. Would I ever return? And besides all that, I smelled like a barnyard no matter how I tried to wash myself with Daisy’s bottled water.

  Had I made a mistake? I asked myself every other thought. Now when someone from the Body saw a girl of blood coming down the sidewalk, her belly leading the way, praise was thrown at her. Glory be! Glory be to the good church girls!

  Not for me, though. For my devotion was up for debate. I received stares now, shakes of the head. Whispers. Was I a chosen girl, or was I just a girl?

  It was of no merit to be just a girl.

  I BRACED AGAINST it all. I walked in silence, head down. I’d taken to wearing a long blond wig of Daisy’s everywhere but at church, a black tunic she’d thrown at me one day because she couldn’t stand to look at my belly bursting from the one-piece that Aunt Pearl bought me. I shaded my eyes in her silver cat-eye sunglasses. Aunt Pearl seemed always in a hurry, shuffling around church and town, too busy to pay me mind. She regarded me as if I were only distantly familiar, someone she once knew maybe but couldn’t place. I wondered if she knew what her own son had done to me. I wondered if she knew and she couldn’t stomach it.

  Sharon looked like she’d been dragged by a tractor through the scratch of a cotton field. She wore deep red welt marks on her back where I imagined her father had taken to whipping her. She walked around aimlessly swinging a little Hello Kitty purse, her teeth soft and gray, eyes of yellow.

  I was down in the canal on my way to the red house when I saw her walking along swinging that purse, slow and forlorn above me.

  “Hey,” I said. “Down here.”

  She squealed in fright. Jumped. “Jesus Christ, Lacey. What are you doing?”

  “Just ease down, I’ll help you.”

  She sat on the edge of the canal and then lowered herself in but slipped, landing hard on her knees like I had my first time. “What is this?”

  “This way no one can see me from the road. I like it down here.”

  She looked around squeamishly, taking in the cracked dry canal bed, the bones of the tiny rat rib cage near her foot. “Where do you go?”

  I could share the Diviners with her, I thought for a moment. Take her to my other world. But in the land of scarcity there was no room for one more, so I shrugged.

  She squinted up at the clear blue above us. “I wouldn’t care if this whole place burned,” she said. “In Paradise when that happened, a man held his wife in a swimming pool all night while they watched their house burn around them, and then the wife died in front of him.”

  I shuddered. I hadn’t heard that story on the news. “Does dirt burn?” I asked.

  She was quiet then and lay on her back. I saw her stomach quiver when she breathed and I wondered if she had been feeling like I was, that something inside was bubbling. I pictured a pot on Cherry’s stove boiling over. Perhaps I was boiling from the inside. In any case the sensation was worrisome, like nothing I’d ever felt. If I were in a romantic mood, I’d say it felt like a swarm of butterflies. But I was not feeling romantic.

  “You ever feel anything in there?” I said. “Like, movements?”

  “Oh yeah,” she said. She poked her stomach with one finger hard like it wasn’t a part of her own body. “My mom told me it was just gas.”

  I nodded. Gas. This wasn’t gas. It seemed like Sharon knew it too.

  “You weren’t touched by God in the night,” I said.

  She turned her head toward me. “My brother.”

  Laramie, the beefy red-faced boy who laughed in a dull stutter. I closed my eyes. A part of me had already known.

  “My mother told me I was dreaming. Dreaming. She said, ‘Sharon, don’t let the Devil complicate it.’ She baked a cake to celebrate my usefulness.” She started to cry. “I’m going to hell, Lacey. They’re telling me this is what God wanted but I saw. I had a vision that the whole valley just kept dropping and dropping and I fell through the cracks.”

  “Do you think Derndra ever tried to stop him?” I asked.

  Sharon shook her head. “Her own daughter ain’t a part of it. Tells me she isn’t too keen on the whole thing.”

  But I wasn’t sure it was so simple. All Derndra kept behind her placid face. She knew everything, didn’t she? I’d always thought her a snob, someone who was too holy to talk with the rest of us, someone too perfect. But perhaps she was too scared.

  Sharon took a deep breath. Her tears had made pale rivers down her dirty face. “You know I tried to tell the cops after Laramie came at me, and my mom got on the phone and told them I was being dramatic because I hadn’t gotten my way. Geary backed them up just like Vern said he would. No one will help us.”

  “It will be okay,” I said, but it came out flat and dead.

  “I’ve been looking into ways of ending it myself,” she said. “I figure I can eat enough poison to kill it but not kill me.”

  “I’ve never heard of anyone doing that,” I said.

  “Of course you haven’t. Women don’t walk around wearing a shirt that says, ‘Hey, I ended my own pregnancy!’ But it happens. Most of my searches were banned on the school computer but I found one where this girl ate rat poison and it worked.”

  Everything in me knew this was a bad idea, dangerous, but I didn’t say anything. Sharon seemed happy when she talked about it, and I knew she would never really do it anyhow. I’d let her go on imagining whatever she needed to get by.

  THE NEXT MORNING brought Officer Geary to Cherry’s porch, sweating under his black Stetson. I stepped out of the house and closed the screen behind me. I didn’t want him in the house. I didn’t want to have to offer him things, wait on him.

  “Short on manners, not asking a gentleman inside,” he said.

  I stood my ground and pointed to Cherry’s narrow wooden bench with the one wobbly leg. He sat on it, opened his knees wide enough so that there wasn’t room for the two of us. “Why don’t you take a seat?”<
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  “I’ll stand,” I said.

  “Any word from your mother?” he asked.

  “She’s in Reno and she’s in love,” I said.

  “Is that so?” he asked. “Boy, no one saw her turning out like this.”

  “How did you see her turning out?”

  “Well, once she met Vern, she was a real good girl. She was on the best path she could be, considering.” He looked at me. “Considering her earlier troubles. All the boys she went around with. No self-respect at all.”

  “Maybe they should have just respected her,” I said.

  He looked confused by my comment. “I see part of my job as keeping you off the same track as her. And I received the strangest call last night that someone saw you around that lady’s phone house. Now why would they say a thing like that?”

  I drew a sharp breath in. I forced myself to smile but I felt my cheeks burn. Denay must have said something, or was it someone else? I wasn’t careful enough. I should have stopped going probably, just knowing what the church was capable of, but I was part of that house now. It was more my home than Cherry’s.

  “Maybe you could try to find my mother and bring her back and fix all this mess. Focus on that.”

  “Your teachers say they haven’t seen you once all year. They actually assumed you had moved like so many. But that’s okay, I’m not really of the mind that girls need such a broad education myself. But girls do need to keep busy. And this husband of yours is distracting you,” he said. “I’d like to think he’s a God-fearing man starting his path, but then, here he is out at all hours hanging around that Tent City, cruisin’ for a bruisin’.”

  I tried the smoldering stare the women used in my romances. I looked him deep in the eyes. It always seemed to end conversations for the women characters, was a sort of hypnosis over whoever fell under their gaze. But Geary was not hypnotized. He said, “You on drugs?”