Godshot

by Chelsea Bieker

  “I’ll do anything,” I said, “just leave them alone.”

  “She says she’ll do anything,” Vern said. “Anything to defend sinners of the worst kind, the very women who spoiled the goodness of her mother, but not willing to do anything for her church. Practically encouraged Sharon to kill herself.”

  “You spoiled the goodness of my mother,” I told him. “You killed Sharon.”

  “I was deep in prayer when Sharon died,” Vern said. He stopped the car in the middle of the road. A truck moved slowly around us, the arm out the window waving. “Help!” I screamed to it, but the scream stayed in the car, windows rolled up. Not that it would have mattered anyway. The good pastor could do anything he wanted.

  He turned back to me, looked in my eyes. Spoke softly. “I felt her heart and the baby’s heart stop in my own heart, so please don’t tell me I had any hand in one of our own being sucked down under.”

  Derndra cleared her throat. “Lean Cuisines tonight?” she asked him.

  He turned back to her. Smiled. “Yes, dear.”

  ONCE AT VERN’S house, his soft voice left him. They dragged me into the basement like I wasn’t a human at all, but a huge sack of flour. They were careful about the baby though, Derndra even cooed to it. It’s okay, baby, it’s okay. Fear covered my eyes and sent the world back to my mind distorted. They set me down on the floor. All I could see was red. I thought it was the red of the Turquoise Cowboy’s performance room, perhaps somehow I was to relive that again, but after a few minutes, after my breath caught up with me, I realized the lightbulbs were red and the walls brown. Heat and dust hung in the air. Derndra turned a radio up. Vern’s sermons came rushing though the speaker. Sometimes I wish God would give me a Holy Ghost machine gun, he cried. I’d blow every sinner’s head clear off! I remembered the sermon when he said that, probably a little over a year ago. I’d thrown my arms up, fists in the air. Yes, I’d screamed. How I wanted sinners to eat of their sin, to grovel at the feet of Vern, and then join us.

  “We’ll leave you here to think,” Vern said. He kissed my forehead.

  “Please.”

  “The wages of sin,” he said, putting his hands up, looking around the room. “Is death.”

  IN THE BASEMENT I didn’t know what time it was. The red light washed over my skin. It seemed specifically built, windowless. No one would know what went on here, who was here. A single black painted serpent wound up the wall, yellow eyes on watch. Artichoke was still and I kept time waiting for her kicks. I’d feel one and relax back into nightmares of pushing out not a baby but bunches of bloody muscats. I birthed a pack of Cherry’s chinchillas, Sharon, my mother. I screamed for the images to stop. I sweated, and fever became me.

  Derndra came in and put her hand on my forehead. She was calm as she ever was.

  “Water,” I said.

  “If you’re good you can come up for dinner tonight,” she said. “I’m not a cruel woman.” She put her hand on my belly. “I won’t deprive this sinless being.”

  “You don’t really want to be trapped with him forever, do you? You know Sharon shouldn’t have died. You know we were all raped. Don’t you care?”

  Her spine softened and I imagined her a girl. How had she ended up here? But I knew how. It was the same way I had. Her belief had accumulated like a tumbleweed and it became too hard to go back once she’d come so far, sacrificed so much. “I’ve been with Vern a long time. I’ve seen him through much adversity.”

  “What he’s going to do on the Birthing Day, it’s all illegal,” I said, then added, pathetic even to my own ears, “Think how it would look to outsiders.”

  “Nothing Vern does is illegal in Peaches.”

  “You can testify the truth and do the right thing. Imagine if I was Trinity Prism. What would you do?”

  I saw her lip twitch at the mention of her daughter’s name. Perhaps it was the only nerve I’d be able to hit.

  “This isn’t what God wants,” I said. I heard it come out of me sure, and I felt the truth beam. The black dots crowding my vision pulled back. I was dizzy, thirsty, but I knew for a fact that this had nothing to do with God. “There’s a God out there who loves us, who doesn’t ask for signs and wonders.”

  She glanced back to the door. “Okay, smarty, where does that leave me? Trinity Prism?”

  “You can go wherever you like. God would pave another way for you.”

  The door creaked open at the top of the stairs. There Vern stood square-shouldered, a plasticky orange cape to his ankles. “Girl talk?”

  Her openness vanished. She pressed her hands into her long skirt before walking back up the stairs, bowing to Vern as she passed. But a part of her had wavered, had come to my side, however momentarily. I saw it.

  “Don’t sour the pure heart of my wife,” Vern said. “She’s strong but the devil is wise.”

  “I know you loved my mother,” I said.

  “I love all my flock,” he said.

  “No. You loved her different. You loved her so much you couldn’t bear to look at her anymore.”

  He pressed his fingers into his temples. Closed his eyes. He was in pain. He was feeling something. “Everyone is subject to suffering, Lacey May. Even me.” He closed the door softly behind him.

  All this time I hadn’t been the only one missing her. He knew something of my grief. He felt his own perverted loss. But I didn’t have time to feel bad for him. The loneliness of a monster can only become sentimental after it is dead.

  HOURS PASSED AND Trinity Prism came to get me. She walked me up the stairs and to the table without a word. She wore a long white shift and a gold cross hung to her belly button.

  “How wonderful!” Vern said brightly. “Our wayward daughter is here at the table with us. Lacey, I think your rest has done you well.”

  The room tilted and deep pains stabbed the underside of my belly. Derndra set a Lean Cuisine before each of us, Salisbury steak and mashers, only 260 calories! I needed so many more.

  “Where’d these fancy feasts come from?” I asked. I thought of me and Cherry eating canned chicken livers with our hands, meanwhile our pastor was gobbling up fine frozen fare.

  “Dear saving father,” Vern began. “May our blessings be rich as we eat of your bounty. As we remember the fields as they once were, life full, sprouting and vast. Bring us back to your holy land evermore, and if you will not bring rain to us, then send us somewhere far away. Pave our path in the gold of your love.”

  “Where are we going?” I asked. I tried to seem uninterested, a casual observer, but my heart thumped.

  “There may be another place for us. A place we can all live together in one godly family. We won’t need rules there. Water will be a rich bounty. Without all the distraction of the world, imagine the work we will do.”

  Trinity Prism looked at her mother. She was wide-eyed, like she didn’t know this part of the plan.

  “Then I guess there’s no need to burn down the red house,” I said. “If we won’t even be here anymore.”

  He raised his eyebrows. “Eat. You’ll need your strength.”

  “Why didn’t you tell my mother about this place?”

  “Tell me, Lacey,” he said. “Do you wonder if your mother ever wanted you at all? You blame me for what’s happened, but could it be possible that I only revealed her true nature? That she didn’t want to be a mother and when she saw her way out, she took it?”

  I considered what he said. Maybe it was true. The possibilities lay before me, but something rang off about it. For nothing could take away who my mother and I had been when we had loved each other, when we’d driven the town, heads back screaming along to her favorite songs, the way she looked so melancholy and how she’d rested her chin on my head while we slow danced in the living room to “Tears in Heaven.”

  I thought of the time before our conversion when she went to a two-week rehab and I got to visit her there one afternoon and she’d run to me, picked me up, held me so tight I couldn’t breath
e. She hated it there but her breath was clear. She could see me again. She loved me as long as she could see me.

  “God will always be more powerful than you,” I said.

  “There’s not God apart from me, Lacey. Thinking there is is your main problem.”

  THROUGH THE NIGHT Vern paced the halls. Trinity Prism slept silently. I couldn’t even hear her breathing. She lay in a twin bed with plain white sheets. I curled on the floor beside her bed on a carpet, my hips aching. The carpet smelled like nothing. It was like no one lived in this house. She had few belongings in her room, some Bibles and notepads, one stuffed bear with no eyes. I could see the dark outline of Vern’s feet under the crack in the door. He stood there for long periods and then paced the hall again, tapping something heavy on the floor.

  “What is he doing out there?” I whispered. I sat up and put a hand on Trinity Prism’s sheet. “What that’s noise?”

  “Holy Ghost machine gun,” she murmured. “He asked God for one and God provided. He spray-painted it gold.”

  “A real gun?”

  “He said it showed up on the doorstep of the church, blessed day.”

  “What’s he going to do with it?”

  “Stop your warring thoughts,” she said, awake. “You’d be lucky to be Godshot with that gun.”

  “I would be dead.”

  “I can’t wait for my earthly visit to be over,” she said. “My reward awaits in the next life.”

  “Does Vern come in here? Does he just pace all night?”

  She turned toward me and I saw her glassy eyes in the moonlight. It was a full moon, I could see from the window.

  “He does just what he’s called to do.”

  WHEN I WOKE in the morning Trinity Prism’s bed was crisply made. The sun filtered into the room and the heat I was so accustomed to pressed its way through the window. The closet door was open and in it hung two dresses and nothing else. The pain in my stomach had intensified. What were labor pains like? All the things I’d forgotten to ask Hazel.

  Trinity ate mush at the table, leaning over her worn green Bible. Derndra prayed on her knees before a low-hung cross. She kissed it. Vern was gone.

  I knelt next to her and put my face close to hers. “Will you still help me?” I whispered.

  She pinched my side, a tender spot, and I pulled away in pain. Her eyes were cold.

  “What’s he going to do to the Diviners?” I said.

  “Flames can dance a beautiful dance, did you know that? Have you ever seen a house on fire? It’s spectacular.”

  I ran to the living room, searching for a phone. Where was a phone?

  She held it, unplugged. “We know you’re a tricky heart.”

  “You’re lying to scare me.”

  She balled up her hands and let out an exasperated sigh. “You shouldn’t have made nice with those women. Do you think I like to watch a girl suffer? I’m a good person. I follow the rules. You’re doing this to yourself. You and your mother. You just couldn’t do one thing right and now it’s come to this. It’s all gone too far, if you ask me, but it’s not my fault and I won’t be made to feel like it is.” Her pale face had reddened and she looked different and uncontained. “I won’t be lured off the path by you.”

  A nervous laugh escaped me. She had never shown this much expression before and it was exhilarating and terrifying. She came close like she was going to slap me. I braced and lowered my head, but then her arms were hugging me. I could hear her chest pound, I could hear the human of her.

  THAT NIGHT I had a dream and in that dream I called my mother. She said, What can I do to hold your heart still?

  I don’t love you anymore, I told her. A lie.

  What can I do? she said again.

  Help me, I said. And then leave me alone.

  Chapter 25

  The morning of the Birthing Day the sky opened up cloudless and everlasting. They loaded me in the backseat of the car. I wore my white gown. The neck came up to my chin in an itchy lace collar. It covered my body to the floor, sleeves falling past my wrists. Under this gown I disappeared.

  We rode in silence, Vern’s fingers drumming the steering wheel. Trinity Prism sat next to me, pressed into her side of the car, hands praying under her chin. We drove out and out on Old Canal Road. The Holy Ghost machine gun was in the trunk. Every time we stopped I could hear it shift, feel the bump of it against the seat. We neared the turnoff for the Diviner house and the car slowed then stopped.

  Out the window, in the dry lands, I saw the bones of dead animals sticking up from the ground like stakes and I allowed myself finally to understand I would not be alive for much longer. I had known it for some time but I’d buried it. I could not be a prisoner with them forever. I could not be bound and gagged living in their basement and I could not be trusted to be released back to Cherry. There was no place for young girls.

  A calm shrouded me. I felt the sun burn my hand through the car window. How I’d miss that ruthless sun, how I’d long for one more day of dryness, grateful only for breath. Soon I would not know the pleasure of my own exhalation.

  God, I thought, please take me in your arms. I know you aren’t the God of Vern. I know you aren’t the God of man. If you’re there and you’re a sinner’s God like I’ve come to hope for, will you bless me one more time? Will you let my baby be taken far from here and into another bright life? Not here. Not here.

  When we stopped I opened my eyes. Cars were parked every way through the field, the girls of blood in white gowns being led by their fathers toward an unseen belly of the expanse. Mothers trailed them tight-lipped and rigid. I strained to see where they were going. Vern pulled me from the car, gripped my arm. The gun was strapped to his back, huge and gold. He’d adorned it with rhinestones. His hair gleamed in the sun, glitter twinkling on his scalp. I reached up and touched a tight curl, pulled it, and it bounced back up. Tears streamed down my face. “You could just let me go,” I heard myself say.

  “No longer a bastard, Lacey,” he said. “You’ve got fathers all around.” He kissed my temple. We went deep into the field beyond the swarm of cars, following the line of the Body. Cherry walked past me arms outstretched toward what she must have envisioned as God, her head shaved bald and gleaming with jelly and bronzer. All I wanted was water before I died.

  I looked up and before me like a blessing was the red house. I saw the tallness of it, the leaning structure. I thought I smelled Daisy’s incense. But I blinked and it wasn’t the red house. It was a skeleton frame. The red had turned to char. The walls had begun to fall away. I thought of the velvet chairs, ruined. The silk robes in tall ornate dressers. Daisy’s matches on the back of the toilet and Florin’s moon chart.

  “No,” I said. My legs went weak. I leaned into Vern and he stumbled and the gun swung around and hit me in the head. I dropped to my knees and gripped the earth, white dress ruined. I tasted smoke in the air.

  “Tell me they weren’t inside,” I said.

  “Whether they meet their devil now or in fifty years, does it really matter?” he said.

  I looked up for someone to help me, but the crowd walked past, eyes ahead, carrying lawn chairs and bags of chips like they were going to watch a football game. Vern pulled me up and we joined. When we came to the clearing, the full-bellied girls like me were kneeling in a circle on a clean white tarp. A huge plastic gas station NASCAR soda cup was in the middle. Denay was stretching her body like an athlete preparing for a competition. Taffy smiled with her lopsided pillow belly. The rest stood around dumb and gawking, clueless. Sharon was supposed to be with me for this. If she was here, we would find a way out.

  Vern stood in the middle of our circle and raised his arms at the Body. “We are here,” he said. “We have made it to the offering.”

  This was when the girls of blood were to raise our arms up to God and sing. I moved with them, my own voice trailing out of me. Hell is hot, don’t drink the water.

  After we sang, Vern held up the NASCAR cup.
“God’s own birthing elixir,” he said. I tried to remember my magazines, the books. Had they ever mentioned a drink that would bring on labor? Vern solemnly handed Denay the cup. She didn’t hesitate for a moment. I almost admired her willingness. Her face quivered and she gagged as she drank. The Body cheered. I thought of how I’d once known her before all this, in her room when she’d pulled down her unders and showed me her pubic hair. When she’d asked me if I thought she had too much. Now she was a girl with no memory of me or herself. I caught sight of Sharon Stam’s father biting into a chicken leg, her mother glancing down at her watchless wrist over and over like a tic.

  The boys’ club stood closest to us, their hair shaggy and long, curled and glittered for just this moment. Their robes gleamed. They were the men of honor today.

  Denay passed me the cup. Inside the liquid was red. I had so wanted it to be water. The smell of whatever it was reminded me of my mother’s breath after she drank, of grapes gone bad. Vern stepped near to me. I reached my hand away from him and turned the cup over. The red spread across the tarp and some of the girls shrieked.

  But Vern smiled. “I guess you’ll need my help.”

  Lyle rose up with an old glass jug and refilled the cup. The crowd closed in, formed a wall with linked arms. I sensed the Body begin to grow frustrated. “Make her drink it!” someone yelled.

  Lyle held my jaw open and I tried to close my throat but eventually it opened. The sting of it went down my throat. It was not my mother’s Cuba libre but it belonged to the same family. Sometimes wine can relax a woman in early labor. A midwife had said that in one of my books, I remembered. Vern was trying to loosen us up. But I knew no amount of wine would bring a baby. It would only make us sick. The boys helped the rest of the girls drink. I closed my eyes for a while.

  I thought of the red house. I was sure they hadn’t been spared. I was sure no one in the town of Peaches, California, had been spared anything.

  My stomach retracted and released. It took me by surprise, this feeling I hadn’t felt yet. It was almost like the cramps that had come before my blood. Why was this happening now? I wondered if I was imagining the sensation, creating the thing I was most afraid of. Actually going into labor now was not an option.