Godshot

by Chelsea Bieker

  “You wouldn’t understand how it works,” he said. “You wouldn’t understand sin.”

  “Still time!” Laramie offered, hungry for a baptism. I could just imagine how badly he wanted to run to Vern, say he was the one to convert the phone whores.

  “Well, I’m glad there’s still time,” she said, slow and simple like she was talking to an idiot. She walked backward a few steps, eyes trained on them. “Now get.” She fired the gun into the sky. The shot sent them running in different directions, yelping into the night.

  She looked at the gun in her hand, then at me. “I’m getting the hang of this.”

  “They were gonna burn your house down,” I said.

  “Ha,” she said. “I sleep with one eye on the night.”

  She ushered me inside and lit some sage, waved it around to cleanse the badness those boys had rubbed off on me. I closed my eyes and sat on a velvet chair, exhausted. I loved Daisy, I loved her. I wanted to be hers always. But I understood that I would not be able to stop what was coming toward us. I could hear it approaching like a charge of horses.

  THE NEXT DAY at Cherry’s I slammed open the door to the craft room. Stringy was lying on the floor staring at a blank ceiling. I thought of my first days at Cherry’s in the same room, how alone I felt, how the wallpaper had kept me company. He looked like a sad dog starved and dirty. He slowly turned to me.

  “Tell me everything that news article said. Tell me all about Vern in New Mexico.”

  “I’m right,” he croaked. He looked at me kindly then. Almost like he felt sorry for me. I hated that. He should feel sorry for his own bad way, but I knew he saw my life as worse off. I could tell he wasn’t lying. “I’m right.”

  He pulled himself up. He was a swaying reed. He paused and looked at me. I held very still. “I thought you were eighteen,” he said, loud as he could. “Anyone says otherwise is a liar.” He walked slowly past me and out the door. I let him go, a ghost on his way somewhere else.

  Cherry came out of her bedroom waving her cane as the screen slammed behind him, shaking the house. “What’s this?” she said.

  “Let him,” I said. “Could have gone anytime he wanted, but he stayed. Let’s just forget him now. It’s easier to just forget him.”

  “He’s gonna spread lies about our dear pastor. He’ll ruin everything.”

  “Cherry,” I said. I held her shoulders. “What if the rain just happened to come when it did that day? What if it had nothing to do with Vern out in those fields?”

  “I saw what I saw. If you’d have been there you’d never question.”

  “You just don’t want to be sad that Grampa killed himself,” I said. “You just don’t want to believe that could have happened to you, but it did.”

  “Husband just dead in the field,” she said, quietly. “Didn’t want to follow him to hell. Can’t blame a woman for that.”

  “Tell me you think it’s wrong that Lyle’s the daddy. Just tell me that.”

  She sat on the floor and whimpered. Gave me a fearful glare. “God take me now. Put an end to my suffering.”

  BY MORNING CHERRY’S tears were resolved. She was composed and focused on the phone and what someone was saying to her. She said nothing of Stringy, nothing of Lyle. She hung up and looked at me.

  “Parents are saying God took her in the night, but gossip is running that she killed her own self. Ate her mother’s headache pills.”

  She didn’t have to say a name for me to know. “She didn’t mean to die,” I said. “She was trying . . .”

  “I know what she was trying to do,” Cherry said knowingly, almost with compassion.

  I ran out to the porch and tried to catch my breath. The air choked me. There was nowhere to breathe. Cherry stood beside me and pointed to the sky. I looked up but my eyes lied to me. For there were hardly any clouds ever, and if there were, they were white and filmy, on their way to somewhere else. Sometimes jet trails ribboned over us and faded. But now there seemed to be a mass of clouds forming a stone-gray sky. Smoke, I thought at first, but there was no smell. Shade had collected and the dirt took on a violet hue.

  “The sun is gone,” Cherry said.

  We walked slowly to the front yard. Artichoke squirmed inside me.

  Geary’s police car was pulled over on down the road. He leaned out his window, marveling up at the sky, craning his head back and forth in disbelief. “You seeing this, Cherry?” he called. “Whoo-hoooo!”

  I held out my hands, palms up. I closed my eyes and waited for my skin to report first contact. If the rain came now what could it mean? It seemed like a freedom might unfold, something would change. Sharon, even, would not be dead. Somehow everything would be worth this rain. Here, we could say. This was why.

  Please. I put my hand up to the sky, to God. This is when you save us all.

  What does it feel like for a raindrop to land on skin? It’s a feeling that while you are feeling it you do not think to remember.

  What did it feel like for my mother to kiss my temple? For her arm to fall around me in her sleep. I had forgotten each sensation just after it happened, knowing, as if it were a fact, that there would always be another to come. How would it be to see Sharon one more time? Just one more chance to convince her of her life? But now I would never know. Her body would be returned to the earth, dust to dust, ashes to ashes.

  The sun broke through again and the clouds rolled away west and west. Cherry put her hand on my shoulder to steady herself.

  “Funny,” she said, wiping her nose. “I got real scared it was gonna come down on us there. I imagined being carried right out into the water. That He was just gonna flood us all. Lord. Maybe it’s best the sun is out forevermore.”

  “He promised to never flood the earth again,” I said. “Why would you think He would?”

  “I don’t know, Lacey May. Maybe my faith ain’t as great as I thought.”

  Who could know why I love you this much? I heard my mother say into the still aching air. But I wasn’t hearing her quite right. I had forgotten that too.

  Chapter 24

  A week out from the Birthing Day and the sky had turned a permanent low blue, not the usual blaze, but an odd gathering of color I had never seen, and the crows flew in great swooping arcs over our house then perched in a line on the fence, watching. The flies stilled at last, their bodies in piles in the corners of every room, the grooves of every windowsill. Without their buzzing, a heavy silence settled. I moved from room to room, aimless. Cherry prayed for rain in front of the glow of her television. She oiled herself and finally asked me to shave off all her hair. No barriers, she proclaimed, between her and God. She sat on the toilet and I buzzed her scalp clean. Grampa Jackie always said she had the most beautiful hair.

  “You’ll be grateful to your old Cherry for never giving up on you,” she said when I was finished.

  I turned the tap on in the kitchen and not a single brown drop came out.

  Even after Sharon died there were still moments, I’m ashamed to say, when I wanted to wake up new and see the ways Vern had always kept us in heart and mind. That he was one with God like he promised.

  “We’re crazy not to buy bottled water,” I said. “We’re going to die. I can’t take deep breaths anymore.”

  “All the closer to heaven’s water, then,” she said. I drank more warm soda and felt my veins throb.

  She smiled out the window. “Paradise on its way.”

  THAT AFTERNOON, DAISY’S car pulled into Cherry’s driveway, Florin in the passenger seat, headphones on, black lipstick.

  I ran to the car before Cherry could see them. Stood by Daisy’s open window.

  “Thought you might need someone to help you pick out a crib. Some baby clothes,” Daisy said. She wore a beige catsuit, her white hair a-gleam over her breasts. Huge circular dark sunglasses covered her eyes and her lips were a matte maroon.

  I looked back to the still house. Cherry would be kneeling, praying before her mice until sundown. I co
uldn’t stop myself from getting in that car. It was such a human longing, missing someone. I curled on my side across the backseat, my stomach hanging over. “Drive.”

  Daisy had a happy giddiness to her, chatting about pacifiers and butt creams, and she passed right by the Goodwill drop-off, the Pac. She went on down Old Canal Road and toward the place she’d almost run over Wiley Stam and we’d all screamed. He was no longer guarding the border, not since Sharon had died. No one was there. But the sign still hung. We cruised slowly past and I sat up, buckled in. I wondered if she was kidnapping me, my dream come true.

  We crossed into Fresno and she pulled up to a masking-tape-colored stucco house in a cluster of other masking-tape-colored houses. Hazel bounded out, a large bag on her shoulder. A wrapped item poking up from it like a present.

  “Heard you’ve never seen the ocean,” she said, scooting in next to me. “We couldn’t let you get away with that.”

  WE DROVE THROUGH farmland on and on, and then through rolling golden hills and pastures with water spraying over them and small planes overhead dropping dust. We drank cool water from bottles we bought easily from a quickie mart. It was as if the drought wasn’t in these places, but I knew better. These places were worth saving—that was the underlying idea. MAKE CALIFORNIA FREE AGAIN, a sign said. IS GROWING FOOD WASTING WATER? said another.

  “Put your hand out,” Hazel said. I rolled down the window and felt the cool edge to the air and the freeway sign turned to the 101 and soon we were taking an exit called Avila Beach, driving through hilled and narrow wooded green trails, magnificent houses like I’d never seen, with verandas and balconies, long drooping ivy falling from them, adobe villas and storybook cottages. We wound our way through the forested area until suddenly the blue ocean emerged beyond the trees and the road opened up into a town and seagulls flew over us and kids walked sandy-footed on the side of the road eating popsicles with towels draped over their backs. I felt light-headed. Realized I’d been holding my breath for some time.

  We parked and got out and Florin said before anything happened she needed a sandwich and we walked into a deli and someone made sandwiches in front of us and we took them to the sand. The sand was hot under me, but the closer we got to the water, it took on the texture of cool clay. I let my feet just feel that and we sat and ate the most delicious sandwiches I’d ever tasted, seedy mustard with salami and olives, balsamic and pepper, and I didn’t want anyone to see the emotion on my face, for all the gratitude I felt for them in that moment was bigger than anything I’d ever known. What could I have hoped for in this life that wasn’t before me? The waves crashed on the shore and I’d like to say I thought kindly of my mother then, missed her, or wanted her to be there with me, and though for the rest of my life I would feel that way at different times, seeing a particularly arresting vista, or eating a heavenly crème brûlée, right then I felt only the sting of resentment, that all my life she had deprived me of this place, this absolute paradise just a few hours from our desert kickdown town.

  “We thought we’d have a little baby shower for you here, hon,” Daisy said. In the bright, special sun of Avila I couldn’t see her scars anymore. She only gleamed. I opened the presents slowly, savoring each one, the sweet footed pajamas and the little yellow sun hat with SPF protection built in somehow and the small bottles of shampoo, “samples so you can try them out and pick a favorite,” Florin said, and Hazel got me a muslin blanket with the moon phases on it and then they presented me with the beautiful gauze shift Hazel had worn the night I met her. “For after you have the baby. You’ll want to feel nice,” she said. I was silent. I almost couldn’t handle it. I needed time to freeze so I could grow a heart big enough to accept the day.

  I got up and walked the beach. I let the water kiss my feet. It was cold but cleansing and I gulped the pure air. I waded in and let the water cover my belly so Artichoke could feel the ocean. I would take her here, I decided. I would take her exactly here one day. She would know the roar of the waves and she’d build sand castles and be like the children walking careless through the town with sunburned cheeks, with their blind hope for life. As long as I stood in that water, I had it. I felt it. I knew that God was bigger than my own understanding, and the thought was not frightening, but a sudden comfort. If after all my believing years I still didn’t understand God, then that meant there was life outside of my own, that there were still yet other things I didn’t understand, but could come to know if I wanted. I could let the possibility of the world slowly unfurl before me. Any thought that I could give this baby away evaporated as if it had never existed. A new power ran through me, something of the earth. My tears fell into the salt bath. I felt right then that anything great could happen.

  “I don’t want to go back,” I said.

  Hazel smiled a sad smile. Florin sighed. We linked arms and trudged through the water for a long ways, then returned to our picnic.

  “We wish you could just stay with us,” Daisy said. “But I have to tell you, that old Geary came by and threatened to shut us down if we interfered with you, Lacey. I don’t mean to scare you. But we can’t take you in right now. He seemed real serious.

  “Something will work out,” she kept on, but I could hear the shake in her voice. She doubted each word as she said it.

  “Once you’re eighteen you can do what you want,” Florin said. “It won’t be that long.”

  It was funny to me, and so of the world, that eighteen meant anything at all. It signified for them a time when my life would become my own and I could shift into a new person entirely.

  We approached the car and I wondered if Sharon had ever felt the grit of sand under her feet. If she’d ever seen a crab scuttle into frothy waters. Maybe if she could have come today she would have seen the vastness of the sea and known there was more in the world for her than just what it had shown her. Maybe if I had shared the red house with her, something would have shifted. I regretted that day in the canal when I didn’t take her with me. I was selfish with my survival.

  AS WE DROVE, I watched the landscape change back to what I knew and Peaches pulled us into it. Someone had spray-painted two words on the welcome sign: Fuck it.

  I SAT ON the porch at Cherry’s, the sea still in my nose. I wanted to soak in this moment, before I became someone else. I knew as soon as I went back inside everything would change. I’d pack a bag quietly. I’d take a single mouse to remember her by. I’d bring my favorite romance. I’d take the hearse. Where I would go I didn’t yet know. Maybe back to the beach. Maybe back to Hazel’s house for a few nights. She could help me have the baby. I’d just show up and she’d have to take me in, at least until then. After the baby was out I could travel on and on, never stopping in one place too long.

  Inside, Cherry sat on her stool covered in God glitter. She didn’t look at me. A dead chinchilla rested in her lap and she stroked the top of its head with one finger.

  “He told me to keep a close watch on you,” she said, “and I wasn’t going to let him down. Not at this hour.”

  Vern emerged from the hallway, Derndra at his side. They sat at Cherry’s kitchen table like it was something they’d done many times before. He liked to own whatever space he was in. He wore tattered jeans and an old shirt, the color fraying. His hair was pulled back in a ponytail, no curls bouncing at his shoulders. They looked tired like they’d just cleaned out a basement, dusty and on edge. He gestured for me to sit. I stood where I was, leaned up against the counter. A single fly buzzed and hit the window over and over trying to get out.

  “Derndra knew you couldn’t be trusted. Even when I told her of the grapes we ate together, how we’d understood, together. I said, ‘No, my dear, Lacey May is special. She is chosen.’ But my Derndra is wise. She said, ‘That girl needs to be kept close.’”

  Derndra looked at my belly with hunger, her bangs flat to her forehead.

  I ran past them to the bathroom and pressed against the door. My belly heaved and I clutched my crotch with
both hands. The pressure was immense. I looked at the tiny window. I’d never fit. Artichoke beat my walls. My breath caught. “Please God!” I screamed. Pee trickled down my leg.

  Vern pushed the door open. He put his arms around my upper body, squeezing me tight.

  “Please,” I begged. “Just let me leave.”

  “Derndra said my mistake was banishing your mother. Never separate a mother and daughter, she said. She said that’s why you’ve submitted to your female hysteria.”

  “Cherry, help!” I screamed, but she sat still. Cherry had replaced the chinchilla with a framed photograph of my mother wearing a gold dress and red lipstick, sash across her chest. Miss Central Valley. “Can’t let her go the way of Sharon, no I can’t,” she said to the photo.

  “Cherry!” I thrashed. A sharp pain stabbed deep within me. I willed the baby to be okay.

  Cherry seemed to twitch in her seat now. I thought she was going to get up, fight for me maybe, hug me, but she didn’t. A growl rose from my chest but the pain in my stomach struck again. Vern dragged my dead weight out the door and all the way to the car. He pushed me into the backseat, and I kicked at the windows.

  “Careful with that girth,” Vern said. “See how reckless you are. All the more reason to stay with us until the Birthing Day. We need you ripe and ready.”

  He started the car and I watched Cherry’s house get smaller. A week, I thought. I had a week until the Birthing Day. A week with Vern. I thought of the baby shower presents, the soft cottons.

  “Someone’s gonna come looking for me,” I said. “Daisy and Florin won’t let me just disappear.”

  “No one will find you,” he said. “Not with God’s fence of power around us. The house is a pretty holy place,” he mused.

  Derndra spoke up now, her voice soft and sweet. “We’re finding a peaceful approach just isn’t working anymore on those witches,” she said. “I see why witches used to be burned. There’s just no other way.”