Black Jesus Read online

  That goddamn phone.

  A paranoid silence coats the second floor like spray paint. Even the dust mites in the sliver of light above the boy’s helmet linger and wait in the drum-tight air.

  And that terrible phone.

  Then gunshots and wholesale mayhem on the landing, six steps up. All hell loose in Room 213. All in a day’s work. But our Marine is heading downstairs, somebody’s gotta answer that phone.

  That it’s his own voice waiting at the other end of the line is a thing made no less chilling by the simple fact that this is only a dream. Just another square in the quilt of hurt and color and stink that’s been stitching itself nightly in his attic room since first he came home from that desert. Babar in his bed.

  ‘Hello.’

  ‘Hi Lionel.’

  ‘Who’s this?’

  ‘You know who it is.’

  ‘Why are you calling me? There’s people dying upstairs.’

  ‘I’m afraid.’

  ‘Afraid of what?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘Say it, pussy!’

  ‘I can’t.’

  ‘Say it!’

  ‘I’m afraid of what’s gonna happen to you.’

  Silence on the phone line. Hard shouts and machine-gun fire in the heat and wreck upstairs. Stillness in this tacky lobby. Dead man still dead. His cheek against the desktop, his arms spread wide. Little black fly on his brown hand. Today’s the dead man’s daughter’s fifth birthday. She was born the night this city fell. She wants a Cinderella DVD. God, would she die for that long yellow hair.

  ‘Did you hear what I said?’

  ‘Yeah, you’re afraid. What else is new?’

  ‘I’m afraid of what’s coming.’

  ‘What, you got a friggin’ crystal ball?’

  ‘No, but I see things.’

  ‘What’s that mean?’

  ‘I know what they did to that girl.’

  ‘What girl?’

  ‘You know just what I mean. You weren’t supposed to be there. You watched them nail her up. You watched them do what they did.’

  ‘Stop. Please.’

  ‘And how she glistened with gas. It’s been eating you up. It’s made you close right up to everyone. Especially yourself. That means you and me.’

  ‘Now I know you’re certifiably bat-shit.’

  ‘I just don’t wanna see you rock the rest of our life away a sad pill junky in that chair.’

  ‘What chair?’

  ‘The one at Mom’s yard sale.’

  ‘How the hell could that happen? I’m a Marine. I’m a motherfuckin’ Marine.’

  Now the voice on the phone is quiet. And the shooting upstairs sounds like firecrackers in a oil barrel at midsummer, Anytown, USA. And the dead man’s eyes are open. And glassy. And a chill shoots through the soldier in this hot lobby, his long black gun on the desk, the silent receiver against his dusty ear.

  ‘Hello,’ he says. ‘Where’d you go?’

  No one at the other end. Silence.

  ‘Is this a joke? Please say something.’

  Nobody. Little black fly on Lionel’s arm now. Little black fly on his face. And upstairs they keep shooting. Upstairs and all around the world.

  The rain’s stopped falling and everything feels a little cleaner as she motors along and the passing countryside spools out before her like a roll of Wal-Mart film she hid away in a drawer somewhere. In five days’ time she’s covered three and a half states, seen a lady with elephantiasis in a van at a gas station, experienced a surprise orgasm brought on by the incessant hum of the moped seat between her legs, nothing to write home about. She found a suede purse in a truck-stop bathroom, pocketed the cash and went to mail the purse to the address on the woman’s driver’s license, but as she copied the street name and zip code on the package her eyes strayed to the face in the picture ID and the face seemed so dreadfully used up that she cursed herself for being such a klepto and put the money back and mailed the thing off and cried inside her pink helmet for miles down the road.

  Maybe I won’t dance again. Hard to think of a time when I didn’t have this pain. Weird how fast we forget the way things used to be. Guess it’s good though. Guess it’s built into us somehow, this way of forgetting, helps us deal with the holes left in us when things we love get taken away. I was so close to it. So close to dancing for real. The ballet. Listen to the sound of that. What could be better? The ballet. Like a bird at your window. No, like a room of colored glass where you go when you’re high on songs. Just when I could close my eyes and do it. Just when I could see the quiet crowd waiting. Just when I could smell my own sweat on the stage, that’s when he took it away from me. The ballet. It was okay when I stripped. He was fine with that. First I thought it was the money I brought home from the club. That if I quit The Cat House to really do my dream he’d have to pay all the bills. But it wasn’t the money. He made plenty. Ross Klein. The big critic. Big deal. My last boyfriend was a biker, he was tough and greasy and out of work but boy was he a teddy bear, wouldn’t hurt a fly, and looking back I think he might have really loved me.

  Then this one. Ross Klein with his silver laptop. Ross Klein with his father’s boat. His place in Venice. His hairdo. His blog. All he ever wanted to do was write songs. That was his dream. That’s what he told me once when we were drunk. That maybe he could write one good enough to fix his fucked-up heart, one good enough to bring his mom back. Sad, but it took him thirty years to realize he wasn’t any good at it. So where do you turn after that? Guess if he couldn’t write the songs to make the young girls cry he figured he’d just pick apart other people’s in a newspaper.

  So when I told him I finally got the audition it was too much for him I think. The bat he hit me with still had the price tag on it. My girl Brown Shugah at The Cat House told me something once, ‘It’s the perfect white boys you gotta watch out for. You can tell by the way they look into their own eyes in the mirror. They got their cake from day one and when they can’t eat it too they snap. And when they snap it’s like Nightmare On Elm Street.’ Guess I shoulda listened to her.

  At a gravel pull-off a little ways past a thin metal sign that said ‘Effingham, Illinois’ she shuts her engine down and kicks the kickstand out and takes her helmet off and hangs it on the handlebars. Struggling past a group of picture-takers, she makes her way through the chain-link fence and limps past the edge of the gravel into a field of green corn that reaches out in all directions to touch a vague horizon. Gloria didn’t bother to read the big silver plaque by where she parked. The one that boasted ‘America’s Biggest Crucifix’, but she can see the thing for herself right there in the field. What a monster. All white and shining in the sun. Rising up from the quiet earth like an eerie daydream. Something sudden. Something altogether warped.

  Now the pilgrims at the roadside in pastel-colored clothes who’ve driven a hundred miles to this holy place lay their cameras by and watch her.

  ‘What’s she doin’ out there?’

  ‘I’d say she’s trespassin’.’

  ‘Yeah, but what’s she after?’

  ‘Hell if I know.’

  ‘Must be a druggy come lookin’ for forgiveness.’

  ‘She better ask in her sweetest voice.’

  ‘Look it, she can’t hardly walk.’

  ‘Hey!’ they call to her. ‘You all right?’ But she doesn’t turn, doesn’t hear them.

  ‘She’s headin’ straight for it.’

  ‘She must be want’n to touch it.’

  ‘Isn’t that against the law?’

  In that field of corn, dragging herself the way she is, dressed in her wandering clothes, her hair all astray, she could be some kind of lady scarecrow come to life by strange arts, shocked awake in this tourist trap by the simple emptiness
of life, doomed to hunt for love, doomed to scratch an answer in the soil.

  ‘Now what’s she doin’?’

  ‘She’s turnin’ around.’

  ‘She’s lookin’ right at us.’

  ‘Looks like she’s gettin’ down to pray.’

  ‘The hell she is.’

  ‘This one needs saving somethin’ powerful.’

  ‘I’ll be damned. The tramp’s pissin’! We gotta get a shot of this.’

  ‘Lucy, cover your eyes!’

  ‘Lester, zoom in!’

  ‘I’m tryin’ to, which button is it?’

  ‘Worthless man! Gimmee that goddamn thing!’

  And so for all eternity the Van Kleek family of Vermilion County, Illinois, will possess in a cardboard box in their attic physical proof that our haunted rag doll did indeed pass this way. With little more than a feeling to guide her. A folded pamphlet in her backpack. A new name she stole from a dead pop song in a nightmare. Her jeans round her ankles. Her hands on her knees. That cross to the sky. That look on her face. Forever young in that field. Squatting forever in the bright sun.

  ‘I’m Mike London with the midday weather summary. Look for the sky to be partly cloudy this afternoon. A chance of scattered showers from Albany south. Rains tapering off by Saturday morning giving way to sunshine and wind most of the weekend. Temperatures in the mid to low sixties. Stay tuned for a solid hour of soft hits and yesterday’s favorites on 98.9 FM, The Hawk. Let’s start the hour off right. Here’s Phil Collins with his 1984 soundtrack smash “Against All Odds”.’

  ‘Turn it up,’ says Debbie, moved by lust and reflex as she bends to dust off a toy fire truck somebody left in a box by the road this morning.

  ‘You turn it up,’ says Black Jesus, stoned on pills in his rocker. ‘I don’t care about this cheesy crap.’

  ‘That’s ’cause you’ve never been in love,’ says his mother with a wistful shake of her gigantic ass. ‘You just wait and see.’

  Above the Dairy Queen the sky is quiet and grey. Thin clouds sail slow and moody. Two crows chase one another from out of nowhere into the roadside trees, their movements deft, hypnotic in the anxious air.

  Just then they hear a motor. A wheezy rattling sound coming close. More like a decrepit chainsaw Debbie sold a Chinese guy a month back than any vehicle they could name.

  Then Debbie spies the pink helmet. And as the moped struggles up the road and into her parking lot she feels a vague sense of relief to know it’s not that crazy fucker Chinaman returned to cut her up and take his twelve bucks back.

  ‘Who’s that?’ says Black Jesus.

  ‘Beats me,’ says Deb. ‘Some chick on a scooter. Looks to me like she’s got a screw loose. And I don’t mean inside that piece-a-shit she’s ridin’.’

  The girl plants her feet in the gravel and takes her helmet off and holds it to her chest and looks around as if she’d just been shaken from a long sleep, some breed of skinny amnesiac in greasy blue jeans come to take her bearings in a world she’d like to get to know again.

  ‘Can I help you?’ yells Deb, thumbing a white sticker onto the fire truck and fishing for a black marker with which to write ‘$8.50 Firm’.

  The visitor doesn’t answer straight away. She weighs the question the loud lady by the blue tarp just asked and weighing it decides that the kind of help she’s really come to need at this hour of her life might be too much to ask of anyone. So what she says is, ‘I’ve gotta find the Mystery Spot. Do you know where it is?’

  ‘Jesus Christ,’ says Debbie, getting to her feet. ‘That was Old Man Gold’s racket. He went belly up, musta been 1998, ’99. Served him right, what a sham that place was, water running uphill, my ass. He was a nice man though. Drank like a fish but sweet as pie. When he died the paper said he was a Holocaust survivor, chopped the “Stein” off his name when he got here, never said a word all those years. Hid his tattoo. None of us had the faintest idea what he’d been through.’

  ‘Yes. That’s where I’m going. The Mystery Spot. How do I find it?’

  Debbie turns to Lionel and whispers, ‘Jeez-Louise, sounds like a broken record.’ Then back to the girl, ‘You ain’t gonna find much down there but poison ivy and a summons for trespassin’.’

  ‘The Mystery Spot,’ says the stranger. ‘Where things are not what they seem. Where just about anything can happen.’

  ‘We got a real live one here, Lionel,’ whispers Deb.

  A wind hits the tarps and they shudder and shake like dry leaves.

  ‘Who the hell are you?’

  ‘I’m a ballerina,’ claims the girl from her steed, her black hair blowing in the driveway. ‘I’m known all over the world.’

  ‘That’s her, Mom,’ whispers Lionel from his rocker, his voice cracked and strange.

  ‘Hold on, honey,’ Deb says to him and turns back to the girl in the driveway.

  ‘Go straight down this way,’ she yells and points down the highway. ‘When you get to the four-way stop hang a left toward Cairo, there’s a stoplight and a farm, that’s Route 32. You’ll go about six, seven miles and you’ll see it, just past Mike’s Diner on the left.’

  ‘Thank you,’ says the runaway and fires up her moped. ‘I really need to find it,’ she says and puts her helmet on and turns to the road.

  ‘If you see American Karate you’ve gone too far!’ adds Debbie and the girl waves and hits the gas and is gone.

  ‘That was her, Mom.’

  ‘Her who?’

  ‘The dancer.’

  ‘You know that weirdo?’

  Black Jesus weighs the question. ‘Yes,’ he says. ‘That’s her. The dancer.’

  Now Debbie knows what he means. And the old hurt is back in her voice like a flu. ‘The day they blew you up?’

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘The one only you could see?’

  ‘Yeah.’

  Another wind hits the tarps and the crows shoot free from the pines they’d harbored in. And there they go dancing out over the road and disappear up the creek, on to Kaaterskill Clove, where ten thousand years ago a most violent water cut this mountain in two like God’s slow guillotine, before any coke dealer gnashed his teeth, any flag flew, any boom box spoke for the wind and rain.

  Bea Two-Feathers smokes dramatically long cigarettes. The ivory-colored box they come in says ‘Extra Light’. Above that there’s a silver crown, jewelled, dazzling, almost sexy, as if this budget brand might offer the lady who carries them in her purse some advantage over the rest of the plebs in her midst, some classier take on life. Bea leans an elbow against her aluminum walker and blows a thin stream of smoke through an open window in her room on the second floor at Serenity Grove.

  It must have been the movies. All those beauties in fine things on verandas looking out upon the lights of LA, lights of Chicago, lights of London. Those slight movements of the wrist, the soft press of filter to painted lips, the slow trail of that tiny fire’s glow in the twilight, like a star to follow. That’s when nothing was impossible. Thirteen when she had her first Lucky Strike. The boy down the street had given it to her. The one with the freckles and glowing green eyes, who everyone called trouble, whose dad was gone, who talked to her about prehistoric birds and Japanese knights and how his great uncle on his mother’s side was none other than Buffalo Bill Cody. The two of them with the windows rolled up in the cab of the junked truck behind the bungalow he shared with his loose mom. And what a strange feeling when the nicotine hit. After the nausea passed. What a feeling.

  ‘Tell me again about those dinosaur birds.’

  ‘They had a wingspan wider than this truck is long. If you could ride one they could fly you to the North Pole.’

  ‘What about that man who lived in a whale’s gut?’

  ‘By candlelight he wrote his life story with a
jackknife on the dread beast’s stomach wall. He was in there forty days and forty nights, but then he died from suffocation. And when finally the army hunted the whale to the Bermuda Triangle and killed it and cut it open they found the hero’s skeleton and all the things he’d written.’

  ‘What do I do with the ashes?’

  ‘You rub it on your jeans for good luck.’

  ‘I’m wearing a dress.’

  ‘Guess that’ll have to do.’

  ‘But my folks’ll see.’

  ‘Do you want me to tell you what he wrote or not?’

  ‘Sorry. What he write?’

  ‘You really wanna know?’

  ‘Pray tell.’

  ‘The dame he pledged his heart to turned out to be a German spy. She was so good at it he couldn’t even hear a trace of Kraut when she spoke American. But because he was a patriot he poisoned her even though he still loved her. And carried her to the sea and threw her in.’

  ‘That’s when the whale got him?’

  ‘Jeez, hold your horses.’

  ‘Sorry.’

  ‘Like I was saying, after he threw her in he—’

  ‘Whitey?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Can you let me out? I think I’m gonna be sick.’

  Just then a light knock at her nursing home door.

  ‘Who’s that?’ she says and throws what’s left of her cigarette out the window and makes a fanning motion in the air with her thin hand as if that might make it all go away.

  ‘It’s me, Ma.’

  ‘Joe Boy?’

  ‘Who else calls you Ma?’

  ‘Hold on a minute, I’m not decent,’ she lies and shuffles on her walker after a spray bottle of Georgia peach air freshener she keeps in a drawer by her bed. Halfway there she loses heart and says to herself, What’s the difference now? Then calls to her son, ‘Okay, come in, I’m fit to behold.’

  Entering with a smile on his face her tall son says, ‘Well thank you, my queen.’