Black Jesus Read online

  Elephants never forget.

  Black Jesus is shy, and a killer.

  Black Jesus is white as a dove.

  This freeway runs east. On and on until it touches the black and blue sky promising dawn out there in the flat beyond. A water tower in a field three miles distant. From here the girl can’t tell what it is. Looks like a bell. Who’s it ringing for? A little ways on and the water tower’s plain to see. So how many tears will it hold? Her moped rattles beneath her like a robot pony in dreams. Her legs hurt. She took a painkiller at a pull-off just past the Arizona line. It hasn’t done much. A tractor trailer blows past in a swaying riot of wheels and heat. She hums an old Madonna song inside her helmet. Her legs hurt like hell and the skyline’s gone pink.

  *

  Three dollars and thirty-three cents. That’s what the pump reads. Limping pitifully over the ground, she drags herself through the gas station door with the helmet still fastened to her head. In the back cooler she finds a Yoo-hoo and lifts the plastic shield from her face and drinks it down and screws the top back on and returns it to the cold rack, empty as her heart. Nobody saw.

  At the counter she takes off her backpack and fishes a handful of one-dollar bills from the pocket in the front and lays them down. Tips from stripping. The man behind the counter has a little dog cradled up in his arm. It’s white. So is his rodeo hat.

  ‘Pump three?’ he says.

  The girl looks out through the doors to where her moped sits in the bright sun. ‘I guess so. I’m the only one out there.’

  ‘Three three three,’ he says. ‘Sounds kinda lucky to me.’

  She counts the bills out and pushes the paper money across the counter one by one, all crumpled and raised like origami found in a madhouse cafeteria. Then the coins. The man straightens the dollars out and fingers the change into his palm and opens the register and sets them all in their place and shuts the drawer again. All of this done in a very deft and patient way, as if he’d spare any inconvenience his actions might have on the little dog nested there like a ceramic totem in the crook of his arm.

  ‘How’s that chopper on gas?’ he says with a toss of his chin toward the pumps.

  She looks back out at the moped she bought used from a movie extra for three hundred dollars on Valentine’s Day, remembering the date because the extra had shared with her in confidence the tale of his liaison with a co-star and their plans for the night and their plans for a life together. She’d listened to the lie, the little keychain he’d given her turning clammy in her palm under the parking lot lights, and she felt sad and thought to herself, It’s all right, lonesome dove, you can have a talking part in my B-movie tonight and I’m gonna love your crappy moped better than anyone in this whole shameless city could hope to love anything.

  ‘Gas?’ she says, and she’s queasy, a dizzying pain that strikes at her core.

  ‘Yeah. What kinda mileage you gettin’?’

  ‘It’s funny,’ she says, ‘I never thought to do the math.’

  ‘Nothin’ funny ’bout gasoline, dolly. That stuff’s the devil’s dick-wash.’

  The girl smiles the best she can. ‘What’s that supposed to mean?’

  ‘I’m not sure. Just like the sound of it.’

  ‘Hey, can you recommend me a scenic route?’ she says. ‘I need to get off the interstate.’

  ‘Where you headed?’

  ‘Away from Los Angeles.’

  ‘Can’t blame ya,’ he says and fondles the dog’s head. ‘Scenic route. Hmmm. Let’s see. I believe I can do ya one better.’

  He turns around and hunts through a stack of old vacation maps in a wire stand on the wall. While he’s got his back to her she steals a lighter from a display by the register. The lighter says ‘Never Forget’ above a cheap likeness of the Twin Towers.

  ‘Here we go,’ says the man turning around and laying on the counter a faded state map boasting a cactus wren on the cover. ‘This’ll git ya off the beaten path, sure as shit.’

  ‘I don’t really have any money to—’

  ‘Stop right there, doll. This here’s gratis. From one outlaw to another.’

  ‘Thanks,’ she says. ‘You’re sweet.’ The lighter in her pocket just got a little heavier. ‘I better hit the road,’ she says and her hand is shaking.

  She swats the helmet’s pink shield down over her face and raises a hand in farewell and goes limping to the door.

  Almost there when the man says, ‘What happened to your legs you don’t mind me askin’?’

  A few more steps and she’s leaning on the door and her slight weight cracks it and a dose of clean desert air hits her. She lifts the shield from her face one more time and breathes.

  ‘Last night the guy I live with hit them with an aluminum bat till I passed out on the carpet. He did that ’cause I got into the City Ballet Company,’ she says. ‘They just loved my audition. You should have seen me.’

  ‘Fuck’s sake,’ whispers the man.

  With a nod of her helmet the girl motions to her right leg. ‘I think I heard this one crack. Like a stick on the beach. He said, “I’m going to kill you.” Then he said, “I love you.” Then he laughed like a hyena and took his pants off. When I woke up he was asleep and I split. Put some things in this bag and rode all night. Have you ever seen a million pale windmills all turning in the dark?’

  The man shuts his eyes a moment. As if he’d find them turning there. But all he finds is blackness. And a type of despair he hadn’t counted on today. ‘You look after yourself,’ he calls through the empty store but she’s already out on the pavement in the sun, dragging herself to the pumps. A trucker passes her on his way in to pay for diesel and the trucker squints and looks her up and down.

  ‘People,’ says the man to his white little dog. ‘When the hell they ever gonna learn?’

  *

  Sky of red. Dusk on this quiet road off Highway 180. Clocking no more than 25, she hugs the white line at the shoulder. Signs that say ‘Petrified Forest National Park’ come on and recede. Souvenir shop. Sky of rusty blue violence. Cold desert night drawing closer by the mile, sharp at her fingers and neck. Memory. Throttle. Voices in her helmet. Smell of burnt brakes on a hill. Sky of burnt sapphire.

  Through the pink plastic she spies a huddled shape in the road ahead. Something hit by somebody’s car, somebody’s truck. The girl slows the scooter and brakes it to a stop and plants her feet and looks down at the body. It’s a bear. A small one. A young one. And it’s still alive.

  The runaway shivers and turns her head back the way she came and looks that long stretch over to be sure no one is upon her. No one is. Returning to the mess at her feet, she finds it lying on its side in its own hot viscera with its arms sort of crossed at its heart and its knees drawn up and something about this pose disarms the girl and she starts to cry.

  ‘You poor thing,’ she says and lifts the shield and the tears are hot down her face. The animal’s chest rises slow, falls slow and its eyes are wet in the scooter’s lamplight and very beautiful and she’s not sure but she thinks they’re looking back into hers.

  The bear’s brunette coat is slick with blood as she drags it onto the loose roadside gravel. White-hot pain through her legs up into her mind. In the gathering darkness she sits by its side and strokes the crown of its head, both of them broken and strange.

  ‘It’s okay,’ she tells it. ‘You can go now.’ The animal blinks and shudders. ‘You can go. It’s okay, there’s gotta be a better place than this.’

  In Gay Paris, New York, there’s an Arab gas station and a few churches and a small brick post office and three or four gargantuan country boarding houses falling into varied stages of disrepair, tall weeds, paint peeling, bungalows in back, screen doors sliced or gone, leaning relics of a different time, lost American summer. There’s the Dairy Queen you already know
about and the old folks’ home and a coke house down the street to which everyone turns a blind eye. There’s a bar & grill called Shakespeare’s at the traffic light, a firehouse, a worn metal sign that says ‘Welcome To Gay Paris, Stay A While’ and little else.

  When Lionel White was a kid he was very frail and quiet and one summer they built a giant billboard of the Marlboro Man on horseback with a six-shooter in the empty lot next to Shakespeare’s in the middle of town. Everybody hated it, called it an eyesore. But whoever put it up knew that a million city people in cars would pass it on their way to the lake and ski lifts and Hasidic summer retreats and Korean Christian camps ten miles up the mountain road. Everybody passes through, maybe stop for gas, stop for ice cream, maybe change a flat tire. Not many reasons to stay.

  So one summer the Marlboro Man took up camp and towered arrogant and bizarre above all Gay Parisians and the kids hit him with rocks and their folks shook their heads and cursed him, but they all figured there was nothing they could do about it.

  All but one man. A legend, God rest his soul. An ex-long-haul-trucker-turned-minister known simply as Interstate. Interstate who liked to drink and had a tough wiry frame and cold blue eyes that lit up his old face. He wore cowboy boots and listened to Dolly Parton and Styx on a boom box from the porch of the camper he lived in next to the gas station. And that year, one night late in August, he left his boom box playing and walked down the highway in pajamas with a hunting rifle and shot the Marlboro Man all to hell. And when Joe the Deputy showed up and had to put the cuffs on him, he smiled at Interstate and asked him why he did it and Interstate smiled back and said, ‘That big fucker drew first.’

  He spent the night in county jail and got away with a fine and never paid it, and after a while they tore the holey billboard down and life went on like before. Some kids found a piece of the giant cowboy’s hat in the weeds behind the lot and they brought it to Shakespeare’s and Mona swapped them for Cokes and hung it on the wall by the jukebox with a little silver plaque that read ‘Don’t Fuck With Interstate’.

  And in the very early mornings you’d see him smoking on his porch watching the colors in the sky with Dolly singing from the speakers on the rail and he’d minister when the money was good and last year he got lung cancer and didn’t do the chemo like they told him and died on his birthday, Halloween.

  If you’ve ever been through town it would’ve been hard to miss the trailer Lionel grew up in. A little ways past the gas station you’d have seen it standing tan and cockeyed in the last mangy yard before the mountain road rises hard and twists its way up through state land along the rushing creek.

  And there by the trailer, under blue tarps and various makeshift canopies thrown up throughout the years, you’d have found Fat Debbie’s perpetual yard sale, ever-shifting bric-a-brac on wobbly tables or simply on the ground, dangling from hooks and hangers, perched on stands, in baskets with masking-tape price tags stuck on each treasure, marked in her own surprisingly fine hand, to aid the frugal shopper on his way through a maze of generally worthless things. Never tell her that, she’ll smack your face. In Deb’s mind her yard sale offers all the same mystery and charm as, say, some silk and spice bazaar in the Holy Land might’ve once, some bustling marketplace in the furthest Orient. Just instead of a monkey and myrrh and an abacus, she’s got a stuffed cat and Right Guard for Men and a calculator she stole from Wal-Mart. The yard sale is her life’s work, her opus. And on any given day, winter, spring, summer or fall, you could’ve stopped and gotten out and approached to the sound of soft hits on the radio and she’d probably have tried to sell you a pair of ratty moon boots, a TV, a mirror, a set of Russian dolls just missing one, a sea chest, a painting of a wolf, a motorcycle helmet, an ashtray she’ll swear belonged to FDR, a painting of an Indian on horseback, a ski jacket, a knife set, Candy Land in a box missing just a few cards, an evening gown, a Crockpot, a turquoise anklet, a sugar bowl, a bikini top, a painting of Jerusalem at twilight, a lamp, an Atari, a fish tank, Ghostbusters on VHS.

  Lionel’s been home now for two weeks and if it ever crossed his mind that moving to Dairy Queen would have somehow put an end to his mother’s bazaar he was sorely mistaken. She’s a crafty one, that Debbie, a sort of Boss Tweed in pink sweatpants and dirty white Reeboks. Since the move she’s been working with renewed zeal, driving around the back roads, stopping at the odd house to ask the guy in the driveway if there’s anything in his garage he wants to get rid of, maybe a camera, maybe a rocking horse? With the help of her new flame called Joe, she’s put up better tarps than ever against the rain, and together they’ve spray-painted a big wooden sign that says ‘Flea Market. Donations Welcome. Lighten Your Load. One Man’s Junk is Another’s Delight!’ and hung it where the Dairy Queen logo used to swing.

  Since he’s been home the rain’s let up. There are birds singing and the lilacs that line the road are in late bloom, but he can’t see them. He’s sad. He’s quiet and sad.

  Debbie calls to him up the ladder. ‘Lionel?’

  He doesn’t answer.

  She tries again. ‘Black Jesus?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Come outside, it’s a sunny day.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘’Cause I got you something.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Come down and you’ll see,’ she says, and then quietly to herself, ‘What’s wrong with you, Debbie? You really gotta stop doing that.’

  She hears him shuffling around, his footsteps in the attic, and she goes to the top of the ladder and tries to take his hand but he pulls it away and says, ‘I can do it. Stop treating me like a baby.’

  ‘I just wanna make sure you—’

  ‘I’m a Marine, Mom,’ he says and his voice is strange.

  ‘Okay, babe. You’re right. I’m sorry,’ she says. ‘I’ll be outside, business is pickin’ up, sold a Dictaphone this morning.’

  ‘Dick what?’

  ‘Don’t be fresh.’

  In a little while he appears at the top of the ladder in grey jogging pants and makes his way down slowly, rung by rung. Last night he dreamt of the war he was in.

  He watched a child die in the street. Its mother came running, an emerald green scarf trailing behind her in the hot wind. There was shooting from a window, and the smell of cooking spice, and a loud siren and men shouting in his own language and a language he doesn’t know.

  He cowered in a tight doorway. Then he felt the blast and stepped from where he hid, and as he came into the street glass from the windows above rained down on his helmet and cut his hands. When the shooting stopped he knew the sniper was dead. He turned back to where he’d seen the child cut down and a small crowd had gathered there. He started towards them and as he did the woman in the green scarf got to her feet with the little body cradled up in her arms, its brown head limp as a bell.

  ‘Go home!’ she shouted at him in the Queen’s English, her face calm and pretty. ‘Please, just go home!’

  Now here he is, crossing the room with his black glasses and his hands out in front of him, feeling his way through the maze of boxes and clothing racks, the picture frames leaning, past a broken guitar, a mannequin, a bicycle tire, groping in the dark to find the door that’ll take him out into the parking lot where his mom is waiting. And when she sees him there she stops fidgeting with a set of painted teacups and comes to him and takes his hand. This time he lets her and she leads him down the steps and out into the heart of her flea market where a wicker rocking chair seesaws slightly in the summer wind.

  ‘Have a seat, Your Highness,’ says Debbie to the boy.

  ‘What am I sittin’ on?’

  She takes his hand and sets it on the arm of the rocker. ‘It’s old but it’ll give you an excuse to hang out with me.’

  ‘Just what I always wanted,’ he bullshits and eases himself down into the chair, the muscles in his for
earms quivering as he grips the wood.

  ‘Go for it,’ he hears his mother say.

  ‘Go for what?’

  ‘Rock. It’ll be good for your head.’

  ‘What’s wrong with my head?’

  ‘Nothing’s wrong. I just want you to be happy.’

  ‘Good luck,’ he says. ‘Where’s my painkillers?’

  ‘You’re all out.’

  ‘Fucker.’

  ‘I’ll go to Catskill and get more. Rite-Aids or CVS?’

  ‘I don’t care, just get them.’

  ‘Okay, honey. I’ll be right back.’

  Once she’s gone he starts to rock. The wicker on his spine. Gas truck goes by. The dull ache in his temples, something he’s learnt to wear, crown of thorns—what would he be without it?

  In the diner they watch her come up the steps and open the door, the waitress and a handful of vague men at breakfast. They’d get up and help her but they’re not sure she’s real. It’s just before the sun, that hour when the new day’s meaning is still unclear, when life is something like theatre and who it is you’re meant to play can swing like a hinge.

  As if she’s carried some dire news for them all to hear, the girl stands in her helmet swaying on the tan linoleum like a refugee from space, all pigeon-toed and warped at the knees with grinning bunnies and baskets and all the colored pomp of Easter hanging from strings overhead spinning drunkenly in the wind she’s let in.

  ‘You all right, doll?’ says the waitress, her painted-on eyebrows raised and her hand frozen in the cash drawer.

  The doll doesn’t answer. She just starts to fall. Like a gutted building after dynamite. Quick jumps a man from the counter with a howling cayote on his t-shirt. Moving like a wrestler he takes the girl up in his arms before she can hit the ground and carries her limp figure to the door. The waitress puts her hands on her hips. The diners watch in dull amazement, forks frozen in mid-bite.