Black Jesus Part 11

'Do come in,' says the director, and as she brushes past him with the cake box in her hands he pops his balding head out into the hall to make sure the coast is clear, and seeing that indeed it is he shuts his office door again and locks it from the inside.

'To what do I owe this pleasure?' he says and sits down and leans back in his black swivel chair, fingers laced in his lap. The paneling on the walls looks like wood but of course it's not. It might be that this man has spent so many stale hours here that he's taken on the same diminished look as the s.h.a.g carpet at his feet, the big telephone on the desk, the kinky paperweight, the grim roll of flypaper dangling from the ceiling. All his diplomas are perfectly straight where they hang. His audio books are all in a row. This is a very neat man. Everything in its right place. Then why does it feel so wrong?

Our heroine wastes no time. Deftly she sheds the fake rabbit and lets it fall to the floor in a heap to unveil the scant lingerie she chose, the skin beyond, the dark haunted patch below her pale belly.

'You must have done something really magnanimous in a past life,' she purrs, praying magnanimous was the right word to use.

'I don't doubt it,' admits Director Steve, his eyes wide.

'I think we need a little privacy,' she whispers. 'Why don't you send the staff on an errand for a few hours?'

'Touche. Great idea,' he whispers back, hard in his JC Penney business slacks. Picking up the phone on his desk he dials zero and waits for a voice and says, 'Janet? No I'm fine, she's an old friend of my sister. I was calling 'cause after seeing my friend here all dressed up like this I remembered Halloween is coming right up. Why don't you and Julio and Keith take the van down to Wal-Mart and pick out some costumes for yourselves and for the oldies but goodies in our charge. What? I don't care, you can be anything you want. No, it's okay, you can use the church donation box. No, don't worry, I've cleared it with the pastor.'

So let it be done. Not one of his underpaid peons will argue with that. All three of them abandon their posts and make for the Wal-Mart, ten miles east, where all things are found.

'I think we're alone now,' sings Gloria, and climbs on his lap and straddles the chair. 'There doesn't seem to be anyone around.'

'I think we're alone now,' sings back the director in a shockingly pleasant alto. 'The beating of our hearts is the only sound.'

Now the callgirl bends and reaches her hand down into the top of her tall boot and pulls out two thin candles and a plastic lighter. The 99-cent affair she stole in a different life, under a different sun, different name, when there where two kinds of deserts, the one she rode through, the one inside.

At least now she's got a use for it.

'Turn the lights out,' she demands.

'Lucky thing I've got the clapper,' he boasts and slaps his palms together twice and the room goes black. She can smell him. Their bodies this close. 'Lucky it's the clapper I've got,' he adds. 'And not the clap.' And his laugh in the dark is like a dead cat in a bag.

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 s...o...b..rs and grabs at her t.i.ts 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 b.u.t.ts 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 k.n.o.b to find whoever she will.

'Oh good, it's you. I thought it mighta been that n.a.z.i 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 gla.s.s 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 pa.s.senger seat with the window rolled down, Joe the Deputy smiles, his eyes moist, hard to believe what he's seeing.

'Gloria! How in G.o.d'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 gla.s.ses clinging, joy on his mouth at the sound of her voice. 'Debbie, get us the f.u.c.k out of here before all h.e.l.l 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 Mile'.

'Let's turn on the radio,' says Gloria.

'You don't have to twist my arm,' says Debbie White as she twists the k.n.o.b. '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.'

n.o.body 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 s.e.x.'

'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 c.o.ke 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 t.i.tan 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 G.o.d'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 pa.s.s, 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 gra.s.s 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. G.o.d 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 f.u.c.kin' 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 gla.s.ses 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 p.i.s.s and I took off and found the Burger King and hid there with my back against the wall like a big p.u.s.s.y.'

'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.'