Black Jesus Page 10

  Sparking the lighter, she looks around in the soft glow and takes the cake from the box and sets it between them and plants the candles in the top and lights them both.

  ‘One for beauty, one for the beast. Now open sesame,’ says the stripper to the creep, and parting his mouth like a nurse might a fluey child’s she stuffs his face full of angel food. He chews and slobbers and grabs at her tits and she jerks back and raises a finger and warns, ‘No, no, no. Not till you’ve finished your treat. Then you can have your cake and eat me too.’

  Once she’s gotten all the icing down his throat she eases up off his crumby lap and climbs onto the desk.

  And dances in the wavering light.

  Then off with her hat.

  And each sharp boot in turn.

  Her crimson teddy to the floor like a soul falling.

  Wet mouth.

  Slow zipper.

  Just like riding a bike.

  Till the room starts to spin.

  Till all movements lose their meaning.

  And hanging by a string above, the flypaper turns immeasurably slow in the dark.

  Bea stares out her open window, smoking one of her famous cigarettes, an elbow perched on the brown sill, a withered breast bent out of shape inside her nightgown. The setting sun throws a faint rosy haze on the lawn, and up among the branches of the dogwood tree, and past it, there where the woods meet the sky.

  Wow, the days are getting shorter, thinks the prisoner. And mine are numbered. Are you finishing your crosswords? Are you snipping the good coupons? Are you afraid to die? Don’t let it get to you. Don’t let it bring you down. Maybe death is just a new dress.

  Then a knock at the door. But today Bea Two-Feathers is in no rush to answer it. She smokes and watches the fine sunlight where it plays, birds in the fall air. Then she turns from the window and looks at the door. Another few quick knocks in a row, louder this time. The days of hiding her butts and spraying the peach aerosol can are done. How much more trouble can she get into? Walking across the tiny room with the cigarette burned low between her fingers, Bea twists the knob to find whoever she will.

  ‘Oh good, it’s you. I thought it mighta been that Nazi again.’

  ‘I wouldn’t worry about him,’ says Gloria, breathing heavy from her run up the stairs, the bad air in the hall, the whole seedy escapade unfolding.

  ‘I hoped you might come back. But what are you doing all done up like a floozy? Is it Halloween already? You know I used to have that same hat.’

  ‘Bea?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘I’ve come to break you out.’

  Hearing this the old woman smiles and slowly nods her head and pulls a final hit off her smoke and blows it out and says, ‘Just like Papillon.’

  ‘Bea?’ says Gloria, standing here in her big white coat and heels.

  ‘Yes, angel?’

  ‘We really gotta go.’

  ‘I get it. Just let me doll myself up a bit. It’s not every day of your life you get sprung.’

  ‘Okay, just hurry up.’

  ‘I knew it the first time I laid eyes on you,’ says Bea, rummaging through her dresser drawer now, tossing a yellow blouse over her shoulder and onto the floor, hunting deeper. ‘When you left holding that poor soldier’s hand I said to myself, that girl is something special.’

  Deb’s tan Chrysler wagon is idling at the big glass doors in front when Gloria pushes her way through them holding Bea by the arm. Falling leaves. Last light of day. The old woman’s face shows a wonderful calm, her white hair blown by the wind.

  Wide-eyed in the passenger seat with the window rolled down, Joe the Deputy smiles, his eyes moist, hard to believe what he’s seeing.

  ‘Gloria! How in God’s name did you manage to—’

  ‘No time to explain,’ she pants, climbing with her fugitive into the back seat where Lionel waits in a hooded sweatshirt, his black glasses clinging, joy on his mouth at the sound of her voice. ‘Debbie, get us the fuck out of here before all hell breaks loose.’

  Twilight on the narrow mountain road. Geese in a pink sky. Green metal sign that reads ‘Town of Hunter’. Tall pines. Steel-deck bridge across the winding creek. Another sign that warns ‘Landslide Zone, Next ½ Mile’.

  ‘Let’s turn on the radio,’ says Gloria.

  ‘You don’t have to twist my arm,’ says Debbie White as she twists the knob. ‘Phil Collins!’ She declares and begins to sing, one hand on the steering-wheel, one on Joe’s thigh, ‘I can feel it coming in the air tonight.’

  Joe Two-Feathers can’t help but join in, and Gloria too, even Bea knows the words, and now a whispery Lionel to everyone’s delight, their voices like a broken prayer in the laboring Chrysler. ‘I’ve been waiting for this moment for all my life.’

  When they pull up to the shabby little ticket booth the old man inside seems surprised to see a car full of paying customers. With a head like a potato and kind blue eyes, in a voice that shakes because the sun’s gone down and his heater’s broke, he says, ‘Evening, moviegoers. It’s six fifty a head. Buy four, get one free. End of the season special. That makes it twenty-seven fifty.’

  Nobody in the station wagon can find it in their heart to argue with his dubious math, or the fact that one of their number can’t see; not even Deb. Joe opens his wallet and leans over his big breathing love and reaches out the window and hands the old timer a twenty and a ten and tells him keep the change.

  ‘Thanks,’ says the man in the booth. ‘Tune your radio to 88.9 FM and enjoy the show. All we ask is no booze and no sex.’

  ‘Sure thing,’ says Deb and knocks the transmission back in drive and pulls ahead into the wide barren lot, thin weeds rising spectral in the headlights, snack bar off to the side, black Coke on ice, greasy popcorn, long red licorice, tall dark trees past the fence.

  And in the open air before them looms the very thing they’ve journeyed past Hunter to behold. The drive-in movie screen. A titan in decay, pale and gaping, slashed and grainy when the projector starts to roll. This is a love story. And Bea will smile as it plays, and weep when it plays, the cancer just a ghost in her chest. And from time to time Gloria will lean and whisper in Lionel’s ear so he might know how the story goes. And the wind blows the trees. And the heater rattles in the dash. But at least it warms the car. And we’ll all sit together, our eyes on the giant screen in the dark, one of just three left in the state, sad relic of yesteryear, when everybody went to sleep at night still believing this was God’s country.

  Because thin white birch trees stand naked down the path they walk. Because their pale branches grope for something beyond themselves. Because the sun just came up and the pastel glow it casts paints all things rare, their faces, the rusted-out truck they pass, the boots they wear, their fingers laced together, that vodka bottle in the leaves. Because November is a dying time. Because the pond she’s led him to is so still. Because life is so strange, so real. Because we all got holes to fill. That’s why we stick around.

  Gloria sits down in the dewy leaves and cool grass by the water’s edge, still gripping Lionel’s hand, and helps the blind boy lower his body down here beside her. Tall cattails grow along the warped oval of the pond, their brick-brown heads like big dark corndogs swaying in a light wind. Faint woodsmoke on the wind, so good when it hits.

  ‘A kid I knew drowned here.’

  ‘Black Jesus?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘I’m not really a ballerina.’

  He doesn’t answer straight off, just listens to the quiet field, the woods at his back. ‘So what are you?’

  ‘Nothing.’

  ‘I don’t believe that.’

  ‘Just a stripper,’ she says. ‘Used to be a stripper.’

  ‘Wow. That’s pretty cool.’

  ‘It paid the bills. But I
think I attracted the wrong people. That’s what got me in a lot of trouble.’

  ‘You danced on a pole?’

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘And picked dollars up with your beaver?’

  ‘Yeah. Even did handjobs in the Velvet Room. God it seems like a different world now.’

  ‘Are you ashamed?’

  ‘Not really. Just a little creeped out.’

  ‘How did you keep on doing it?’

  ‘I took a lot of showers,’ she says, staring at the cold pond. ‘I almost did an audition for a ballet company out there. But then I got hurt and ran away. And now here I am in Gay Paris, New York, falling for a soldier. Who woulda guessed.’

  ‘What’d you say?’

  ‘What part?’

  ‘The soldier part.’

  ‘Never mind.’

  They sit in the silence they’ve made. Beech smoke like ghosts, streaming from a chimney.

  ‘Something happened over there, Gloria,’ he says, his cool rough hand in hers.

  ‘I know. You got blown up. And now you’re blind because of it. For the rest of your life you’re blind. I can’t even start to imagine how that feels. I’ve tried, but I can’t.’

  ‘That’s not what I mean. It’s not what happened to me. It’s what I saw. Something I saw.’

  Gloria breathes, treading lightly. ‘The dancer I heard you talking about?’

  Here the Marine gives out an ugly little laugh and says, ‘Oh—that. No. I think the IED knocked my head so fuckin’ bad I was just seeing things. Like some kind of guardian angel I wished was there for me.’

  ‘Maybe that’s what it was.’

  ‘An angel?’

  ‘Stranger things have happened,’ says the dancer.

  Black Jesus breathes in. Then he exhales, his breath a pale cloud in the chill morning air. ‘Gloria?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘There’s no angels in Iraq.’

  Apart from the silence now they hear the sound of blowing leaves, distant cars down on 23A, a dog barking someplace.

  ‘Maybe I just made her up to help me forget about what really went down,’ says the boy. ‘Then when you came around I think she turned into you, the dancer I mean, or you turned into her or whatever. I don’t know. I was just so sad and busted, and the dreams wouldn’t stop, and I wanted to look at everything I missed but I couldn’t, and my head hurt, and all the pills. It got to be that hearing your voice or just you being around was the only thing that could keep my mind off it.’

  ‘Off what?’

  ‘I’ve been afraid to tell,’ he says and lowers his head, his voice small and haunted. ‘I didn’t tell anybody.’

  This is when she takes his hand and brings it in against her warm side. ‘You can tell me.’

  ‘I wasn’t supposed to be there, Gloria,’ he says, lifting his head to face her, the obscene glasses that hide his wounds, his wounds more real than ever. ‘They were building a Burger King. It was a jobsite. Like a roped-off lot where they’d laid a slab and started nailing up the walls. It musta been Sunday or somethin’ ’cause the place was empty. I was supposed to be helping keep watch at the checkpoint, but I had just seen a Marine, a guy I ate with sometimes, they called him House of Blues ’cause he’s big and plays harmonica, I’d just seen him get shot in the face the day before. The bullet blew the back of his head off, he was right next to me, as close as me and you, we never even saw where the shot came from, then his brains were on my hands, all over my pants, so I was shook up the next day. I told the squad leader I was going to piss and I took off and found the Burger King and hid there with my back against the wall like a big pussy.’

  ‘You were scared,’ she says, knowing how cold his hand feels in hers.

  ‘Like a little girl,’ he says, a wind blowing over the field where they lay, rippling the water, blowing his pale hair, rattling the dead cattails. ‘I hid there a long time. From where I was I could see a sign the builders musta stuck in the ground. I don’t know why but I kept on reading it. Over and over. ‘Liberty Corp: Working hand in hand with your community to build a brighter tomorrow.’ After a while I fell asleep. Then I heard the truck.’

  Quiet in the field. Gloria’s heart. Barking dog far away.

  ‘It was one of ours. A Humvee. I watched it pull into the lot. First I thought they were lookin’ for me, so I was shittin’ my pants, keepin’ real still. But when they got out I saw they had a girl in the back. A hadji. They pulled her out by her hair and threw her on the ground. I knew these guys. Three of them. Drunk as skunks. I could tell by the way they talked to her they thought she was hidin’ somebody, a sniper prob’ly, prob’ly the hadji fucker who got House of Blues. So I guess they figured she had it comin’ to her. And man did they give it. I watched ’em give it. Like a pack of dogs. Couldn’t look away,’ says Black Jesus. ‘Couldn’t even look away.’

  Gloria watches his mouth as he talks. Any boyishness or innocence she might have marveled at there these past months is gone. Nowhere in sight. The thin dry lips like a whitewashed tire somebody left in the sun after the car it belonged to killed a kid in a hit-and-run somewhere in the American desert.

  ‘Then everything happened so quick. They were done with her and they picked her up and two of ’em held her against the Burger King wall while the other one picked up a nail gun somebody left and nailed her hands to the wood. She didn’t even cry, just hung there with her arms out and stared at them. One of ’em went to the Humvee and came back with a gas can and soaked her up till she shined in the headlights. Then he lit a cigarette and smoked on it once and pitched it at her and it hit her hair and lit her up like a Christmas tree.’

  ‘Oh no,’ she says. ‘Oh no. Come here,’ she says and pulls him close, his head against her chest, her arms around him like a hypothermic child. Child who shakes. Child who knows exactly how to kill. Who was a very good shot in his time. Who’s bottled up a billion tears in the black interim.

  ‘It’s okay to cry,’ says Gloria, looking out at the pond. ‘I won’t tell anybody,’ she says, and soon his tears are hot on her sweatshirt.

  ‘I didn’t help her,’ he wheezes. ‘Even after they left. She was screaming. And crackling. And I didn’t help her.’

  Cattails knock. And colored leaves spin down. And by some reflex Gloria moves and touches her lips to the back of his neck. ‘You were afraid.’

  He can smell her. The shampoo she used days ago, faint, hypnotic. Her nice sweat. Some kind of faded rose, tangerine. Then his mouth is on hers. His warm wet face. Then her palms are to his temples. And her spine is to the cool grass, her wild dark hair falling all around. Her hand up his shirt, his pounding ribcage hot to the touch.

  ‘Take your glasses off.’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Can I?’

  ‘If you really want.’

  ‘Thank you.’

  Black plastic falling to the earth. Her damp kiss on the bridge of his nose like a morphine shot. Her hand in his jeans. He cannot see the wilderness in her green eyes as they gleam and stare but he knows they are beautiful beyond all description. Then her lips again. Then the buckle on her belt. The warmth and smell of her belly. Tangerine. The sound of her tight pants rustling down in the dead leaves.

  He did this once before. Drunk with a Chinese hooker near the base where he trained. But that’s a dead world. Gloria’s breath at his ear now, the delicate drum inside. Drum to go to war. Drum to shake the night away. Drum to dance down a rain so real it’ll scour all this history.

  Days without limit. Pale sinners in the painted leaves. Each of them nineteen years on this earth. Where anything can happen. Where cattails knock by a pond as still as glass.

  ‘Your favorite disk jockey Mike London checking in with the midday weather summary. There’s a low-pressure system moving through carrying cloudy ski
es for the whole Hudson River Valley and into the Southern Catskills. Eighty percent chance of rain this afternoon, skies clearing up around dark. Highs in the mid to low fifties. I tell you what, I’ve been suffering severe Eurythmics withdrawal ever since my wife’s cat peed on every “E” in my CD library. I was just about to spin “Here Comes the Rain Again” but then I had second thoughts, didn’t wanna jinx us. So here they are, Annie Lennox and that other guy, with their 1983 smash “Sweet Dreams”.’

  ‘Turn it up!’ yells Debbie in a wool hat with a multicolored pom-pom on top. ‘I love that crazy redhead bitch.’

  ‘Sure thing,’ says Bea Two-Feathers, rocking away in Lionel’s old wicker chair, all bundled up in a big puffy coat and scarf, a mittened hand already on the boom box, jacking the volume.

  Sweet dreams are made of this, who am I to disagree? Travel the world and the seven seas, everybody’s lookin’ for something.

  ‘I know what I’m lookin’ for,’ says Joe, grabbing Deb by the waist and doing his best Patrick Swayze. ‘I got everything I want right here in Gay Paris, right here at the old DQ.’ Now he spins the big woman around. ‘Woo-weee. Ain’t that right, baby doll? One man’s junk is another’s delight!’

  ‘Shit, you better believe it, I already sold a ski jacket and a dartboard and that lady who died’s exercise bike, all before noon! I’m so hot I’m sweatin’ like a whore in church.’

  ‘I second that emotion,’ howls Joe the Deputy, and a prefab modular home wrapped in plastic strapped to a flatbed truck lumbers past on its way to answer other dreams.

  Now here come Lionel and Gloria right behind, easing the battered moped into Dairy Queen’s parking lot with their helmets gleaming in the cold sun.

  ‘You two came home just in time,’ yells a dancing Deb. ‘Radio just said it’s supposed to rain.’ Then she looks Joe in his dark Mohawk eyes and sings along, ‘Hold your head up, movin’ on. Keep your head up, movin’ on.’

  ‘Hi kids,’ says Bea with a mitten in the air.