Jesus Land (10 page)

On Saturday, I rush through my chores and bike to my sister Debra’s place in town. Swim practice starts Monday and I’ve started jogging and going for long bike rides after school to build muscle.

David doesn’t ride with me anymore—he’s taken up Dungeons and Dragons with Kenny Mudd. He tried to explain how it’s played to me, but I didn’t get it—there’s no game board, just dice, paper, a pen and “imagination,” he said. When he’s not playing it with Kenny, he’s studying the “Dungeon Master’s Guide” in his room, learning to cast new spells.

Deb is twenty-three and lives on the outskirts of West Lafayette, a thirty-minute ride from our house, in an apartment complex overlooking the sluggish brown belt of the Wabash River. She works as an accountant and has a Catholic boyfriend, which irritates Mother.

Mother calls Catholics idol worshippers. All those saint statues they keep in their cathedrals are graven images, she says, and she doesn’t understand why Debra would want to go out with one of them when our French Huguenot ancestors fled to Holland precisely to get away from Catholic persecution in the sixteenth century.

Despite all this, Debra has not dropped Tom, whom she started dating in high school and plans to marry. She recently started going to his cathedral instead of our church, and at the moment, Mother’s not talking to her. I lied and told Mother I was visiting some made-up friend rather than see her get lathered up about Catholics again.

Deb answers the door in a red bikini that Mother would not approve of. She’s seven years older than me, but anyone can tell
we’re sisters; we’ve got the same fine long blond hair, the same hipless bodies, the same snorting laugh.

“Come on in, I was just pouring some lemonade,” she says, smiling and swinging the door open.

Going to Deb’s is a taste of what life will be like after eighteen, a preview of freedom. When I visit, she treats me special, preparing gourmet food from her French cookbook, letting me sip small glasses of wine or sit in her living room watching that new music channel, MTV.

We spend the afternoon lounging beside the complex’s kidney-shaped pool, sipping hand-squeezed lemonade with mint leaves, listening to Christopher Cross, reading fashion magazines and diving into the pool whenever the sun starts to prick our skin. I wish I could stay with her forever.

As we paint each other’s nails Cinnamon Vixen, I consider telling her how bad things are at home. After she and Dan and Laura left for college, everything got worse. Mother’s mood swings, Dad’s violence, the name-calling at school. But I don’t want to break the magic spell of the afternoon by bringing up home—I’ll have to go back there soon enough.

Deb fries vegetables in beer batter for our supper. We eat wrapped in our towels in her tiny kitchen as the late-afternoon sun falls over the table, warming a handful of marigolds she’s stuck in a chipped blue glass. James Galway plays on the stereo, reminding me of the nights she practiced flute at our old house. Her room was directly above mine, and as I lay in bed, her melodies fluttered down to me in the darkness, easing me into a peaceful sleep. It was angel music.

“I wish you were still home,” I tell her, my eyes stinging with tears. I stare down at the marigolds to avoid her gaze.

She laughs with a soft snort and reaches behind her for the glass pitcher on the counter.

“I’m glad I’m not,” she says. “More lemonade?”

When I turn onto Indian Meadow Lane, the twilight air is still soupy with heat and moisture. Lightning flashes along the chalky gray horizon; maybe there’ll be a good thunderstorm tonight, a real gully washer. We’re overdue. On the basketball court beside the pole barn, three figures bob and leap in the half darkness: Jerome, David and a stranger. Their sneakers scuff the cement as they perform their grunting ballet.

They don’t notice me as I glide into the driveway and stop on the concrete rectangle in front of the garage. I turn to watch them as the floodlights attached to the pole barn and house snap on, revealing the mystery player. It’s the boy with the blue satin shorts who was there on the morning of swim team tryouts; he’s wearing the same shorts tonight. “Scottie the hottie,” girls call him at school. He’s a football player, and I’ve seen him at the tables of both the Jocks and the Hoods in the school cafeteria. He seems to get along with everyone. They say his mother’s Asian—his father’s war bride—and that’s where he gets his toasted skin and tilted eyes.

His torso gleams in the floodlights as he swerves between my brothers, and four black arms strain after him as he plunges the ball through the low net. The three of them reel back—Jerome standing a head taller than the other two boys—and David rebounds. He tussles with Jerome as Scott walks to the side of the court and spits into the weeds. As he turns to watch my brothers play, I take in the broad T of his shoulders and the curves of his chest and arms. He’s short, but studly.

The basketball bounces off the court in my direction and I turn to walk my bike to the garage.

“Hey, little sister!” Jerome shouts. “Wanna see some ballhandling?”

Everything sounds dirty with him. I keep walking.

“Hey Julia, come meet our neighbor!” David yells.

Neighbor?!
“Just a sec,” I mutter, leaning my bike against the garage door.

Glamour
says to act casual when you’re introduced to a handsome man, as if he were only a valet, or a delivery boy. But I’ve never even met a valet or a delivery boy.

Scott dribbles the ball and muscles ripple up and down his entire body. As I saunter toward him, he flings the ball to David and strides to meet me, stopping a few inches from my face, a spicy musk rushing off him. His wavy black hair is cut short over his ears but falls to the base of his neck in the back in a mullet. He’s my height, or a little shorter.

“Julia, right?” he says, smiling, hands on his hips.

“Nice to meet you,” I say, sticking my hand out. My voice doesn’t sound casual, it sounds high-pitched and little girly. “What was your name again?”

He wraps his hand around mine and gives it a hot squeeze.

“Scott Cooper. I live about a mile away, up on County Road 50.”

“Right or left?”

“What?”

“Which way on County Road 50 from here?”

“North. Um, right.”

The dangerous side of County Road 50.

“You don’t take the bus?”

“Nah, I got wheels.” He jerks a thumb at a scooter parked in front of the pole barn.

“Oh.”

I smile and nod and throw out my hip, not knowing what else to say. His eyes, rootbeer brown, hold mine for a few seconds
before my cheeks flush and I drop my gaze, letting it slide down his chest to his abdomen to his satin shorts. When I look him in the face again, the corner of his mouth is pulled back in a sly smile; he thinks I was checking him out. I
was
checking him out.

“It’s nice to meet a neighbor kid finally,” I say, stumbling over the words. “Okay, then. You boys have a nice game.”

Jeez, I’m such a dork
. Behind him, David and Jerome mock my hip-out stance and crossed arms.

“Actually, I was just leaving,” Scott says. He reaches a curvy arm behind his head and shakes his fingers through his hair. A bead of sweat hits my lower lip. I lick it off without thinking.

“Dudes, call me when you’re ready to play some serious ball,” he says, walking toward his scooter. “No more of this sissy shit, okay?”

He hops on the bike and kick-starts the engine.

“Oh yeah?” Jerome shouts. “How about we play on a regulation court next time, shrimp!”

Scott flips him off, grinning, before laying a long track in the gravel, rocks and dust spitting into the air. Jerome watches him disappear before peeling off his T-shirt and mopping his face with it.

David scoops up the basketball from where it rolled into the weeds and lobs it at the net with one hand, whacking the backboard, and Jerome rebounds it, then plants himself at the far end of the court for a free throw. The floodlights shine down on his back like a spotlight, and I cringe. Fat welts lace his skin like red leeches. Dad put them there last night with a belt, as punishment for running away and stealing the Corolla.
Spare the rod and spoil the child
.

Both boys’ backs are riddled with welts, the fresh ones red, the old ones mottled gray, the deeper ones hardened into jagged
scars. They avoid taking off their shirts in public, and seeing their bare backs always makes my throat thicken, makes it hard to breathe.

When their wounds are fresh, their allegiances change, and it’s no longer children against parents. It’s blacks against whites, and I’m one of the enemy. David snubs me to hang out with Jerome, the two of them bonding over their beatings.

Jerome is right. I don’t get whipped like they do when I talk back or get caught in a lie. I get grounded. I’m spared the rod, and it’s a dirty privilege that makes me feel guilty. I hate sharing genes with the man who hurts them, our father.

Our father, who heals the sick and dying by day, and causes injury at night.

The sound of metal grating on metal is barely audible over the cicadas at first. I wake with a start, clenching my teeth, recognizing the noise.

It’s the sound of a fingernail scissors, teasing the flimsy button lock of my bedroom door. Mother doesn’t like me to lock it—
what are you hiding?—
but I started again after Jerome returned. Not that it will stop it from happening. But it’s an objection just the same, a small plea to stop.

I could tell by the way Jerome looked me over earlier that he’d be coming tonight, by the way he’d smirked and stared, as if we shared a secret.

We do.

It started in grade school, when I was eleven and he was twelve. That’s when he began to collect the dirty magazines that blew against the guardrail on Happy Hollow Road. We’d glimpse them as we raced down the steep hill toward Kingston swimming pool, flashes of skin and hair, smeared and torn by the
elements. For years, we paid no mind. Then one day, Jerome stopped his bike, bent over, and rolled one into his towel. A few days later, on a Sunday afternoon, he tried to get me to look at it. I was curled up in a beanbag under a basement window, reading Nancy Drew. Upstairs, Mother was playing hymns on the piano, accompanying herself with her warbling soprano voice.

Jerome thrust a mildewed picture of a woman with blond hair over my book. She was naked, gagged, and tied to a chair. Straps were wound tightly around the base of her breasts, making them stick out like fleshy missiles, and her blue eyes were wide with pain or fear. I stared at her in horror.

“She looks like you,” Jerome said. “Except you don’t have these yet.” He touched the woman’s strangled breasts and then my flat chest. I jumped up, Nancy Drew spilling to the floor.

“Leave me alone!” I shouted.

When David poked his head around the corner, Jerome sauntered away, hiding the magazine under his shirt.

But he didn’t leave me alone.

One evening a few days later, I was in my bedroom playing with my teddy bear hamsters when Jerome knocked on the door holding Mousetrap, my favorite game.

We played lying on the floor, facing each other across the cardboard square as the rest of the family watched
Mutual of Omaha’s Wild Kingdom
in the family room. I tossed the dice and it shot across the board, bumping to stop against Jerome’s stomach. As I reached for it, I noticed his penis spilling from the slit of his pajama pants like a rotten banana. When I looked at his face, he was frowning in concentration at his yellow mouse, as if he were contemplating his next move. I was embarrassed for him, believing it had fallen out by accident, and he hadn’t realized it. We played like that, him with his dick hanging out, me
averting my eyes, until the television show ended and it was time to go to bed.

But it kept happening. I’d be peeling potatoes or practicing piano and he’d walk by with his penis poking out. I didn’t understand why he did it, and pretended not to notice.

A few days after my twelfth birthday, he tried to kiss me. I was on the balcony off my bedroom, setting out apple slices for the raccoons that lived in the woods behind our house; they climbed the balcony’s support posts at night, and I liked to watch them eat through the glass door. As I crouched down, arranging the fruit on a dish, Jerome tapped me on the shoulder.

“You’re not really my sister,” he said when I stood up. At thirteen, he was already a good six inches taller than me, and a whole lot stronger. He grabbed my shoulders and tried to smash his mouth onto mine, but I averted my face and his chapped lips grazed my forehead instead. I walked out of my bedroom and locked myself in the bathroom, afraid, creeped out, not knowing what to do.