B003UYURTC EBOK (6 page)

“The Book of Enoch?” Benton asked.

“Yes. It is not in your Bible. Only in that one.” Rameel pointed to the bookshelf behind him and to a thick, leather-bound edition of the Ethiopian Orthodox Bible.

“They were banished to hell for all eternity because they kept messing with the humans here on Earth. They were nosy and so God, through Gabriel, killed their children and sent them to hell,” Isadora explained casually.

“They had children?” Benton asked.

“The Nephilim,” Rameel said quietly.

“They were giants. Gabriel killed them all and made their parents watch,” Isadora said, and took a sip of water.

           Two weeks into summer break was how long it took for everyone in town to start talking about that damn woodpecker. This guy named John Barling started popping up on the front page of the
Lily Press
, and people in restaurants and stores began to hassle him for details and even ask for his autograph. Three weeks into summer break and he was on
Little Rock Live
, a morning show with two corny hosts whose hairdos couldn’t have been shaken with a sledge hammer. He talked mostly about himself and how he had decided a year before that he would come down to Arkansas to find the “elusive Lazarus woodpecker.” When asked why he would do such a thing as to travel from Oregon to Arkansas to find a bird
that hadn’t been seen in sixty years, he said something along the lines of “I knew it wasn’t dead all along.” Wasn’t that convenient? That was like saying, “I knew my keys were here all along” or “I knew you’d win.” I knew from the first time I saw John Barling’s face that he didn’t give a damn about birds, and he sure didn’t give a damn about Lily, which he tried his best to compliment in every interview that summer. The other thing I knew about John Barling was that he had been shacked up since February with Shirley Dumas, who lived next door to us with her son, Fulton.

Fulton Dumas, a tall, lanky, and disheveled sixteen-year-old, described John Barling as the most egotistical, maniacal, and power-hungry man he’d ever met. I didn’t put too much stock in what Fulton said, given that the only man he had to compare anyone to was his slightly effeminate father. But when I saw John Barling and heard him talking about finding the Lazarus, I knew Fulton had been spot-on. This guy was the ass-hat to end all ass-hats. The last of the great ass-hats. The only man to dethrone the Quit Man to reign as King of the Ass-Hats.

When one is driving his mother’s car through town and sees signs taped up in the windows of stores and restaurants that read things like love the bird and lily: home of the lazarus and second chances happen in lily, he immediately starts to think about what heaven must look and feel like to distract himself from the hellish thoughts that invade his mind. He imagines heaven to be not some huge city with streets of gold and tall, white buildings, but a simple room filled with just enough of the good people to make him smile and feel like
the center of attention as he tells a funny joke or talks about a new idea for a book. He sees his brother standing in the corner wearing green flannel pajamas like he did at Christmas five years before, and he sees his mother and father holding hands at the kitchen sink as he caught them doing one time when he was eleven. He sees Lucas Cader tossing a football across the room to his older brother, Alex, who looked just like him, and he hears his aunt Julia singing a hymn that he heard in church when he was eight or so. He sings the chorus out loud, the only part he can remember, as he drives past Burke’s Burger Box to see advertised a new product called the Lazarus Burger.

Here I am, Lord. Is it I, Lord?

I have heard you calling in the night.

I will go, Lord, if you lead me.

I will hold your people in my heart.

It’s hard to say exactly what bothered me so much about John Barling and the whole bird thing without painting myself as an angry-for-no-real-reason teenager dressed in black and moping around like Charlie Brown all the time. But it was the same for Gabriel, and Lucas, too. It was as if we got the joke that everyone in town had been told. We knew the punch line. And it would’ve been much easier to sit back while all of Lily fell under the awe-inspiring spell of the possibility of second chances, or rebirth, but we just couldn’t do it. I may not have liked the people in Lily that much, but I felt sorry for anyone being massively scammed.

My cynicism had been known, from time to time, to get me into accidental trouble. I was especially cynical in groups, perhaps feeling that a witty cut-down about a stranger would earn me the respect and admiration of friends. This rarely worked. You can only act like a jerk so many times before people stop listening to you. Gabriel broke me of this habit one night after I made fun of a couple leaving a movie theater. “You act like you hate everyone. It must be exhausting.” And, having no response, I decided that he was right. My brother, ever innocent, had a way of giving everyone in the world a chance to prove him wrong. First impressions meant nothing to Gabriel. In fact, his dislike for John Barling and his mission stemmed not from cynicism, but from the perspective of an animal rights activist. “If I saw the bird, I wouldn’t tell anyone,” he said to me one afternoon at home. “People can sort of mess everything up even when they’re trying to help.”

I had gotten to work at noon, and four hours into my shift I had read an entire book and shown off my expert whistling skills to three junior high school girls who liked to flirt with me while one of their mothers pumped gas outside.

Five hours into my shift brought me to the realization that if I saw the bird, I wouldn’t tell anyone either. Not a soul. Like Gabriel said, people only got in the way of things. This is why the bird went away in the first place. How could bringing all those people into its home help it to survive any better? No, the Lazarus would be much better off without John Barling and his little mission of rediscovery.

Just as I was about to resign myself to the fact that I should
probably mop the store’s dull-brown floor, Lucas Cader came striding through the door (
ding-ding
) with his head bopping from side to side.

“Guess what, my kind clerk of a friend?”

“What?” I asked.

“I have big news.”

“Well?” I hated when someone would tell me they had something to tell me instead of just telling me.

“I got you a date!”

“A date?”

“Yes, and I don’t mean the fruit.” Lucas chuckled.

“Funny. With who?”

“Are you ready for this?” he asked, both his hands pointing at me.

“Yes! Tell me!”

“You may want to sit for this one, Cullen.”

“I’m going to kill you and go on a murderous rampage if you don’t—”

“Alma Ember,” he interrupted with confidence, leaning against the counter and close to my face.

“Alma Ember?”

“That’s right. The one, the only. Oh yes, my friend. She’s all yours.”

“Lucas,” I said, “Alma Ember is twenty years old.”

“Wrong. She won’t be twenty for another month, I’d say.”

“Still. I can’t date Alma Ember!”

“Why? Is it her name? I know, it’s kind of—”

“It’s not her name, jackass. I can’t date a twenty—”

“Nineteen.”

“Sorry, a nineteen-year-old girl who wouldn’t even talk to me when we sat right beside each other in civics class!”

“Cullen. Cullen, Cullen, Cullen. You were a freshman back then. You were short, awkward, I’m pretty sure you had acne. It’s all changed now. She’s gone out there into the world. She’s seen what places outside Lily have to offer and now she’s back, and back for good. That means that she’s ready to see what’s left in Lily that she hasn’t already—”

“Screwed?” I interrupted.

“Experienced,” he said, crossing his arms.

“The last thing I heard was she was getting married to some guy in Georgia,” I said, confused.

“Yeah, and the divorce is nearly finalized. I made sure of it.”

“Lord have mercy. What’s wrong with you, Lucas?”

“What’s wrong with you, Cullen? That is the question that needs to be answered here. I have arranged a date for you with a beautiful, kind, funny young woman who told me that she couldn’t
believe
you didn’t have a girlfriend.…”

“She said that?”

“Absolutely did. She even mentioned the last time she saw you, how you were so nice and handsome. I swear it.”

“You’re full of shit.”

“No. Just you wait. Tonight.”

“Tonight?”

“Yes, tonight at seven o’clock I’ll be pulling into your driveway with my woman at my side and yours in the back. Hopefully you’ll be waiting there with flowers in hand. What do you say?”

“You’ve already made the plans?”

“Mena and I are picking her up at six fifty on the dot.”

“Fine.”

I couldn’t help imagining, as I bit into my Lazarus Burger on the way home from work, what it might be like if the bird actually did exist and happened upon one of these sandwiches. The burger itself wasn’t made from woodpeckers, of course, but instead was a quarter pound of beef with ketchup, mayonnaise, and barbecue sauce. The red, the white, and the dark brown were supposed to remind one of the bird but only reminded me of ordering the same burger when it was called the Number Three.

“Gabriel,” I began as I walked into my brother’s room when I got home, “what do you think about the Lazarus Burger?”

“It’s just a Number Three without cheese.”

“Right. But what about the fact that they are selling a burger that has nothing to do with a bird that probably has nothing to do with this town and isn’t even alive anymore?”

“I think you’re thinking about a burger too much instead of just eating it.” Gabriel turned a page of the book he was reading.

“Think about this.” I sat on the edge of his bed. “What if I threw a burger into the woods and the Lazarus, if it existed, flew down and took a bite out of it?”

“Ha! Cannibalism!” Gabriel shouted.

“Ornithological cannibalism! That’s even worse!” I shouted back, before jumping into the air and running down the hallway
to my room in a childish manner that only brothers exhibit around each other.

At five past seven there was still no one in my driveway except for me, and I didn’t have flowers in my hand because Handy Stop didn’t sell flowers and neither did Burke’s Burger Box. At eleven past seven, Lucas’s car could be heard making its way to the end of my gravelly road. Mena had her hand hanging out of her window, letting it fly through the wind, as they pulled up and right beside where I stood. Mena opened the door, hopped out, kissed my cheek, and folded her seat forward to let me in. Once in the backseat, I became quiet and awkward as Lucas looked back and said, “Cullen, you know Alma.”

“Hi,” I mustered.

“Hi, Cullen. You look great,” Alma said.

“So do you, Alma.”

“Thanks.”

What I noticed about Alma Ember is that she didn’t seem nervous at all. I guess that is what the world does to you. Or what growing up does, anyway. She seemed quite comfortable to be riding in the backseat of a seventeen-year-old’s car with a bunch of high schoolers who I’m sure she’d told herself she’d never see again. I, on the other hand, couldn’t think of a time when I’d been less comfortable. Lucas could tell this from the way my eyes shot at him through the rearview mirror, so he tried his best to distract us all by talking about almost getting bitten by a snake that day while helping Mr. Branch build a fence.

Soon after, we pulled into one of the few functioning drive-in movie theaters in the country and all got out to get some food.
I bought Alma a small popcorn and a Diet Coke and bought the same for myself, feeling a little embarrassed to order a diet drink, but not embarrassed enough to drink a real Coke, which I found and still find to be too syrupy. She kissed me on the cheek to say thank you, and I believe that I felt something quite like the feeling one gets when he drives over a steep hill on a country road. From that small moment forward, I began to grow more and more confident and less and less like the usual me.

I couldn’t stay focused on the movie long enough to gain any sort of interest, because Alma Ember had set her popcorn aside and opted instead to nibble on my left earlobe. While that was quite enjoyable, I felt overcome with an uncertainty of what to do with my hands. So I just continued to eat popcorn as Alma Ember continued to cannibalize my left side.

When one suddenly feels a young woman’s hand crawling up under his shirt, he instantly pictures her having an argument with her ex-husband, who he imagines is much larger and stronger than he is. He sees himself eating supper with Alma Ember in Pizza Hut when this large man rushes through the door, picks her up with one arm, and smashes his face in with the other. He sees Lucas Cader jumping through the window to pick up a chair and break it across the giant’s back. Soon Mena Prescott is on top of the checkout counter doing a cheer that spells L-U-C-A-S and Lucas Cader is holding Cullen Witter’s head as red trickles down from his hairline and his eyes go glazy. He dies there, on the dirty, burgundy carpet of Pizza Hut, for a few sessions of mediocre sex with a used-up college dropout who does nails on the weekend for extra cash.