Black Jesus Read online

  He looks at her here in the middle of this sad little room and when their eyes meet he finds something there he never saw.

  ‘Were you smoking?’

  ‘Yes, Officer,’ she tries to joke. ‘You caught me red-handed.’

  ‘What’s wrong, Mom?’

  Bea doesn’t answer right off. She turns her face away and shuffles to the open window. From here she can see the dogwood tree in the yard. Its white flowers, its branches in the easy wind.

  ‘It’s caught up with me, Joe Boy.’

  The Deputy knows exactly what she means, but all he can bring himself to say is, ‘What are you talking about?’

  ‘I didn’t wanna tell you till the tests came in and I was sure.’

  ‘You’re gonna die?’

  ‘Not this minute.’

  ‘When?’

  ‘That’s for the Great Spirit to know, not us.’

  ‘Please, Ma, none of that mumbo jumbo. How long did they say?’

  ‘He said if I do the chemo I have a shot at remission. Or at least kicking around another five, six years.’

  ‘So when do you start?’

  ‘I don’t.’

  ‘You gotta be kiddin’ me.’

  ‘No, Sir. Honest Injun.’

  ‘How can you joke?’

  Now her sideways smirk turns to something else. Now she looks her boy in the face, the afternoon light behind her, the breeze at her long silver ponytail. ‘I don’t know how else to make you feel better.’

  And with that he starts to cry.

  ‘Oh, Joe. Please. I don’t wanna make you sad.’

  Her tall son couldn’t reply if he tried. That ache in his cheeks and throat, that dryness of the tongue and strange play of oxygen we’ve all come to know.

  ‘The miracles of chemo. I seen enough. Hair of the dog. One kind of death for another. I guess I just figure your time’s your time. In here you make friends, guys and gals down the hall. You sit together in the cafeteria, play bridge, crochet, maybe watch a picture in the TV room.’ Here Bea takes a pause, and her eyes trail down, moist globes of memory, a war movie there, a chariot race, a starlet dancing barefoot on a windy beach, and says, ‘Then one day you look and they’re gone.’

  Joe moves and sits on his mom’s thin bed. Squeak of springs. Soft blanket. Faint smell of fake peach and dying. Now his cell phone rings: We will, we will rock you.

  ‘Answer it, Joe Boy.’

  He shakes his head, tears down the high bones of his Indian face. We will, we will rock you.

  ‘Could be important.’

  ‘It’s my girlfriend.’

  ‘The one that bought the Dairy Queen?’

  He nods.

  ‘Well, answer it then,’ says Bea.

  Joe does his best to compose himself. Then he flips the Motorola.

  ‘Hello?’

  ‘Joe?’

  ‘It’s me.’

  ‘Don’t sound like you.’

  ‘Sorry. I’m visitin’ my mom. Must be bad reception.’

  ‘Well we got an emergency down here.’

  Like cold water on a town drunk’s face the ‘E’ word snaps the public servant to attention.

  ‘What happened?’

  ‘I apprehended a shoplifter.’

  ‘Are you for real?’

  ‘No time to explain. Just get here ASAP, baby.’

  ‘But I’m here with my mom and she’s—’

  No need for Joe to finish because Debbie hung up.

  ‘I gotta go, Ma. There’s some kind of trouble at the Dairy Queen.’

  ‘Yes. You go. It’ll help get your mind off all this.’

  ‘I doubt that very much,’ he says and gets to his feet, the springs in the little bed complaining as he rises.

  Bending low, he kisses her goodbye and tells her he’ll be back in the morning.

  When he’s halfway out the door Bea warns, ‘Be careful, Joe, tonight’s a full moon.’

  When you gonna stop with that crap? is what he wants to say, but he says, ‘Sure thing, Ma. I promise.’

  After he’s gone the old woman waits a long time at her window. There’s birds in the dogwood.

  On his way through town Joe spies two drunks fighting tooth and nail in the gravel lot outside Shakespeare’s Bar & Grill. He knows them both by heart. Now they’re on the ground, rolling and kicking up dust. Work boots and t-shirts and ragged hair. One’s got a broken bottle.

  Debbie needs me, thinks Joe. Besides, they’ll be kissin’ and makin’ up before the jukebox can change songs. And if not, let them claw each other to shreds if they want, waste of fresh air the both of ’em.

  Pulling into the Dairy Queen, he notices a strange moped parked by Deb’s station wagon, looks like it’s been through the war. Sheer habit makes him check his hair in the rear-view before he shuts the cruiser off and gets out. Approaching the scene of the crime he sees a girl squatting in the gravel next to Lionel’s rocking chair, a helmet on her head, her face lowered between her knees, both her arms wrapped around them as if to shield herself from a falling sky.

  ‘That you, Joe?’ says Lionel from his still rocker.

  ‘It’s me, Black Jesus,’ says Joe and sees now why the girl hasn’t moved. She’s handcuffed by her wrist to the back of the chair.

  ‘Where the hell’s your mother?’ he says.

  ‘Think she went inside,’ says Lionel with a stoned smile. ‘Didn’t know you were bedding down with a crazy lady huh, man?’

  ‘There’s gotta be a reason for this.’

  ‘Sure. Just keep your seatbelt on, Geronimo, this is only the tip of the iceberg.’

  ‘Debbie!’ yells Joe in the basic direction of the DQ and even before the sound of her name dies under the blue tarps she comes waltzing through the screen door like the lead in a play.

  ‘Well, if it isn’t the big bad Deputy. Thought you’d never come. Look what I caught,’ she says and points to the girl still frozen there in her desperate pose.

  ‘What’s going on here, babe?’ says Joe, doing his best to hide the sadness and worry in his voice, the creeping annoyance.

  ‘This freak was trying to steal from us.’

  ‘That’s not why I gave you those handcuffs,’ says Joe.

  ‘Oh, come on!’ barks Lionel. ‘I really don’t need to hear that, do I? I get enough nightmares as it is.’

  ‘She was stealing a pair of gloves, Joe!’

  ‘A pair of gloves?’ says Joe, more annoyed by the moment.

  ‘Those sparkly Michael Jackson ones. Authentic Thriller era. I had ’em marked at eighty bucks!’

  ‘I told her to let her go,’ says Lionel. ‘This is the dancer. The one I saw when they blew me up.’

  ‘Let’s not talk about that now, okay honey,’ snaps his mother.

  ‘She came askin’ how to get to the Mystery Spot,’ says Lionel. ‘So Mom told her. Then she came back a little while later and said to me that her hands were cold. She told me to feel them and put one on my face and it was like ice. Mom was in the shower so I told her just to take a pair of gloves. Any ones she wanted.’

  ‘Debbie?’

  ‘What, Joe?’

  ‘Give me the keys for the cuffs.’

  ‘Christ, if you don’t believe me see for yourself what they go for on eBay!’

  ‘I don’t give a flying fuck about the gloves, Debbie! You should be ashamed. Don’t think I don’t remember you spending the night in Catskill jail for shoplifting a blender from Jamesway in the nineties. What’s that they say? Takes a thief to catch a thief?’

  ‘Joe Two-Feathers! What on earth’s gotten into you?’

  ‘You really wanna know?’

  ‘Of course I do, sweet potato.’


  ‘My mom’s gonna die. She’s got cancer in her lungs. I left her to come down here ’cause I thought you and BJ were in danger. Now just give me the goddamn keys.’

  Speechless, Debbie hands him what he asks for. Turning from her, Joe goes to the rocking chair where Lionel sits quietly and gets down on one knee and uncuffs the dancer. She does not move. Hopelessness petrifies, her helmet to her thighs, her arms wrapped tight as a drum, like some odd tortoise they’ve found.

  ‘Isn’t she beautiful, Joe?’ says Black Jesus, but nobody answers, all stunned to hear him say such a thing. And then just like a morning glory, the girl lifts her head slowly to stare at the blind Marine, her green eyes like a question, her face framed behind the helmet’s shield, her features turned fiercely exotic after a journey of wind and hurt and God only knows what else.

  ‘Are you okay?’ says Joe.

  ‘No,’ says the dancer turning to him, the sound of this one word alone a three-act tragedy.

  ‘You poor thing,’ says Joe. ‘What’s your name?’

  ‘Gloria,’ says Black Jesus. ‘Her name’s Gloria.’

  ‘Well then, Gloria, let’s get you inside. You’ll need supper. And a shower. You’ll be spending the night here at the Dairy Queen. Among friends. Isn’t that right, Debbie White?’

  Rough sea. Kids on the boardwalk. Schizophrenic on a bicycle. Tattooed lovers entwined on a picnic table under one of the pagodas, seagull at their feet. Warren Zevon blasting from a yellow convertible turning east on Rose, gone just as quick as he came. And all the vendors are packing up, guy with the sunglasses, guy with the cotton candy, lady with the crystal ball, pretty slow for a Sunday.

  Dusk on this weird beachscape. Blanket of rosy haze in the far western sky beyond the blue sea. Here is a place where vanity and beauty and desperation and love and sleaze and new beginnings are all smiling and nailed to one word like a mannequin to a plastic cross in a dream: California.

  Ross Klein pays a pretty penny for his place. 13 Brooks Avenue, 2nd floor. A wide-open loft space one of Frank Gehry’s rogue protégés allegedly designed. Everything is brushed metal and blacks, occasionally the dangerous color. There, in a corner, lies a girl asleep on his big brass bed. Her strawberry hair all wild on the pillow, her heartbeat soft, her mouth very dry, one of her naked legs like a pale branch growing out from under his sheet, toenails red as new blood. Last night they met at an industry party. He told her his name and she blushed and took a sip of her drink. Then she swallowed and said she was a singer-songwriter from Florida, the Panhandle. He didn’t know who she was. And still doesn’t. And neither does anyone else.

  When Ross Klein woke, his BlackBerry said 6:09 p.m. He tried but he couldn’t go back to sleep. The trucks outside, the girl’s breathing, the way she ground her teeth.

  He threw on a robe and walked across the flat and sat with his naked ass on his favorite couch, its black leather cool to the touch. On a coffee table lay his big headphones and he reached and put them on and switched on a new album he’s been putting off listening to. Some indie rockers from Montreal. His editor expects the review by morning. So he started taking notes: sophomoric, overproduced, flippant, somebody’s been listening to too much Roxy Music. By track five he was sick to his stomach.

  Now he’s in the bathroom, his pale feet on the tiles, his robe open in front like a door to his secrets. Here in the big mirror the critic Ross Klein looks the critic Ross Klein up and down. And the two share a strange little laugh.

  By the side of the sink is a simple leather shaving kit: gleaming razor and lather brush, worn leather case. Last year they put a handful of Jim Morrison’s belongings up for auction online, things from the day they found him dead in that bathroom in Paris. So, being bored one day and high on coke, Ross bid on this haunted tchotchke and won, paying more for it than his cleaning lady makes in a year.

  The thin steel handle of the razor has a nice curve, provocative, slight as a dancer. As the man in the mirror lifts it to his face he hears the girl he’s never heard of call to him from the bed, her voice like a child faraway.

  ‘Ross,’ she coos, but he doesn’t answer. Instead he talks to the mirror. ‘I’m your private dancer,’ he sings and his eyes are terribly wrong. ‘A dancer for money, I’ll do what you want me to do. I’m your private dancer, a dancer for money, any old music will do.’

  ‘Ross?’ calls the girl again. ‘Come back to bed.’

  What this Floridian does not know is that under the bed she finds herself in is a pair of ivory ballet slippers in a box, the pale chalk still on them.

  ‘I’m your private dancer,’ sings Ross to the mirror. ‘A dancer for money,’ he sings and touches the blade to his face. No lather. No matter. He digs in. Cuts in. His face a hated thing. Gouge away. You can gouge away. And down falls his bright blood as from a tap.

  Waking up on a strange couch is a feeling every lost dreamer knows. Fly on your hand. The uncertain light. Fly on your dry mouth. Seven mild nightmares that run together like wet paints in a new rain, each more mundane than the next. Fly in your wild hair.

  What is this place? Smells weird. All this clutter, these boxes, that clothes hanger, that mannequin, her chiffon dress and purple wig, maybe she knows something I don’t. It’s quiet here. Oh, but there’s the sound of a car, and another out there. Now quiet again. A bird. My head hurts. Is that a soda fountain? Why do I feel like I’ve been here before? Who put this blanket on me?

  ‘Hello?’ she says into the musty room, still supine on the couch, her head turned slightly, her eyes fixed on a darkened window, aluminum mini-blinds.

  Nobody answers. But soon she hears footfalls and motion above her. Must be somebody up there. She thinks of the movie Flowers in the Attic and shivers. Now she sits up, trailing her hurt leg slowly, and wraps the knitted blanket around her, its aged purples and pinks and whites giving easily to the contours of her dancer’s body.

  ‘Hello?’ she says again and cranes her neck in a way that might help her find the source of the racket overhead. Doesn’t take her long to spy the hole in the ceiling and the ladder reaching down. And now the big work boots testing the air, learning the way down rung by rung. Those grey sweatpants descending. Like some kind of low-rent astronaut. Oh, but then she knows him. The guy in the rocking chair. Those same silly black sunglasses. Only now not so silly. Because when he says, ‘Hi, I didn’t know if you’d ever wake up,’ he doesn’t face her, he faces straight ahead in that pitiful way she’s seen acted out a hundred times on TV, the telltale hesitancy, the vague shame and disorientation of the newly blind.

  ‘Do you need help?’ she says when he reaches the bottom of the ladder.

  To that Lionel White gives a smug little laugh. ‘Well, that’s ironical,’ he says. ‘Ain’t you the one sleepin’ on our couch?’

  The girl looks at him there in the poor light, his pale hair awry, his sadness, and pulls her blanket tighter and says, ‘I’m sorry. I just thought—’

  ‘You just thought ’cause I’m blind I must be some kinda helpless retard.’

  ‘No. No, not at all. It just seemed like the right thing to say. Sorry, I didn’t mean it like that. I guess my right-and-wrong detector’s probably been out of batteries awhile. Just ask my leg.’

  By reflex she runs her hand down her swollen shin and feels the heat of it, the slow rhythm of its throb, her own little drummer boy, own little war.

  ‘What happened to you?’ he asks.

  ‘A lot of things.’

  ‘What’s wrong with your leg?’

  ‘I broke it.’

  ‘How?’

  ‘Dancing in the ballet. A horse doctor told me my tibia was fractured. That was a few weeks ago, I guess. Maybe more. God, I must be losing my mind.’

  ‘I think I know what you mean,’ says the Marine, still holding onto the ladder for balance.

  ‘Y
eah?’

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘Scary, right?’

  He thinks about this a moment, the muscles in his jaw grinding like a motor. Both these broken kids waiting for an answer in this ice-cream-parlor-turned-warped-homestead/junkshop, outnumbered by all the cast-off things that surround them, clothes nobody wants to wear anymore, paintings nobody wants to hang up, memories better kept in a box.

  ‘Yeah,’ he says. ‘I guess it is kinda scary.’ Sometimes my dreams are so real and bad I shit my tighty whities, is what he’d like to say. I don’t know why I’m still alive, everything’s dark and I’m all doped up and I miss what I can’t see. It sounds gay, but I miss the sky. And watching the cars go by on the road. I miss my mom’s face, is what he’d love to say, but he can’t.

  ‘I’ve thought about him a bunch since,’ says Gloria.

  ‘Who?’

  ‘The vet who helped me out.’

  ‘Veteran?’

  ‘Veterinarian. Guess we’re all animals when it comes down to it.’

  ‘What kind are you?’

  ‘Animal?’

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘Not sure. I guess I’m a bird. Maybe a swan,’ she laughs. ‘What about you?’

  ‘A wolf,’ says the soldier.

  ‘Really?’

  ‘I don’t know. I used to wish I was one. But that’s when I was kid,’ he says. ‘So, what did the doctor do?’

  ‘He put this brace on and told me to stay with him awhile but I didn’t really listen.’

  ‘Was he a perv?’

  ‘No. He was a nice man. I just had to go.’

  ‘How come?’

  She doesn’t answer right away. In her pounding head runs a dim and random montage of things seen and felt on the ragged pilgrimage she made across this land of ours. Land on the brink. Gas pump. All-you-can-eat Chinese food. Truck full of migrants. Abandoned paint factory. Train crossing. Dying bear so beautiful. Jackknife trailer. Sunset to make you cry. Ten thousand small dark birds changing shape in the air as they go like an Etch A Sketch worked by the same playful force that ends the world, same force that shaped it. Cell phone tower disguised as a giant tree. Truck stop. Rodeo. Corn forever. Cows forever. Sunburnt hitchhiker with a dog. Sunrise to challenge all you believe in. Rain. Headlights. RV center. Dirty picture cut into a bathroom wall. Cross to the sky. Big prison on a hill. Carwash. Baseball field. A million pale windmills all turning in the dark.