Jesus Land (29 page)

I roll up my jeans to keep them from dragging in the orange mud and watch a blue parrot swoop up the trail ahead of us. When we reach a wide shallow stream, we ford it by hopping over moss-covered rocks, tic-tac-toe, racing to see who reaches the other side first.

“Wait for me!” a man’s voice shouts when we’re halfway across. I turn to see Bruce teetering between two rocks at the lip
of the water, his arms spread out to steady himself. Janet rushes back to guide him across, and Susan and I exchange a sneer because he’s such a Canadian pansy. All the girls secretly despise him; they giggle at his jokes and fall all over themselves to fetch his water, but roll their eyes as soon as he leaves the room.

After Janet leads him safely across, Bruce strides to the front of the group.

“Let’s go!” he commands with a forward wave of his arm, The Man once again. Susan and I exchange another look, and I lean over to hawk my disgust into the weeds.

Becky turns to scowl at me as I wipe my mouth with the back of my hand.

“Pardon me, I swallowed some crud,” I tell her as Susan smirks.

As the roar of the waterfall gets louder, Susan and I lag behind the others. RuthAnn stayed at Starr and Becky is ahead of us talking abortion with Rhonda, and finally, we can talk privately.

We swap information about the events that got us here. Susan tells me she’s not really a Devil Worshipper, but joined a clique called the Squires of Death after the preppies and the New Wavers turned her down. The Squires held meetings in the town graveyard, where they recited the Satanic Verses dressed in black choir robes that they found at a secondhand store. Afterward, they’d drive through town in their pickups, blaring Black Sabbath and chugging Apple Slice and Everclear and stopping to spray-paint 666 on churches.

“Wasn’t like we was fixin’ to sacrifice babies or nothin’,” she says as the trail steepens. “Although we did catch this stray cat this one time, but we were too scared to kill it.”

She inquires after my alcoholism, and I tell her about the Comfort in my closet.

“Guess they found it after I left home,” I shrug. “That, and my stash of condoms.”

She asks if I love Scott and I tell her no, but that he was fine to pass time with. She tells me she had her share of boyfriends back in Texas too, but none more special than the others.

We climb a ramp of slippery rocks, then wind through car-sized boulders before the waterfall roars into view ahead of us, catapulting through a crack in the mountain and smashing into a pile of foam on the river below. A cool mist billows from the thundering ejaculation, which drowns out all other noise.

The group stops to take pictures at an overlook, and Becky and several girls lean over the guide rope, craning their necks to watch the water disappear below. Bruce stands behind them, clinging to a tree branch and shouting something no one can hear, and we laugh openly at him.

Neither of us is in a hurry to catch up to the others. As we watch them from a distance, she grabs my elbow. I turn to her.

“I ain’t no virgin neither!” she yells. “But that’s one thing they never learnt. That’s one thing that’s all mine.”

When she says this, her eyes are shining, and she is not sorrowful.

When the word “nigger” crept into the vocabulary of exclusion—yelled by public school kids at the bus stop and roller rink—I had to look it up in the dictionary. It wasn’t in the
Webster’s,
so I asked Mother what it meant. She said it was a bad word for a black person, and that if we heard it, we should ignore it and turn the other cheek.

But it was hard to ignore a word that was suddenly everywhere.

“Nigger cooties!” they’d screech when we jumped into Kingston pool, fleeing before us as if we were Jaws.

“Nigger alert!” they’d yell as we climbed onto the Witch’s Hat at Happy Hollow Park.

We’d pretend not to hear them, but of course we did, loud and clear. I’d look over at David and see a cloud wash over his luminous brown eyes and his little boy smile.

Those kids didn’t even know his name. They didn’t know that he was a champion ping-pong player, or that he knew the best places to hunt salamanders or that he could pop a wheelie for an entire block.

When he got braces in sixth grade, a boy in a grocery store hollered at him: “Black people don’t wear braces, only whites!”

The more they cut us off, the more we clung together.

A new girl arrives from eastern Kentucky. This means I’m no longer the lowest ranker in Starr. This means that I no longer scrub toilets. This means I have a better shot at a second helping of dessert. I welcome her arrival.

Her name is Jolene and she’s fifteen. She’s got bleached, permed hair that cascades to her skinny butt in straw-colored coils and at night, she sits in her bunk and combs it out with a special rubber-tipped pick, one coil at a time. It is her pride and joy.

Jolene’s taken hard to the loss of freedom and often plunges her face into her hands with a small moan, as if all this were a thing too ghastly to behold.

When Bruce gives her push-ups, she chews on her bottom lip a few seconds before lowering herself to the ground, and all his tomato-faced shrieking won’t speed her along. Sometimes I catch her staring at me with confused eyes, as if she were waiting
for an explanation. I look away; she’ll soon find out there’s none to be had.

On a Sunday before Vespers we learn why Jolene is here. Bruce picks me to fetch his water, and then we sit in the metal circle to tell our stories.

I now know my line by heart, as I am called upon to repeat it often.

“I was a fornicator and an alcoholic,” I say whenever a staffer asks me what brought me to The Program. As I say my line, I gaze at my shoes, striving to appear humbled. I do this well, and get consistent high points for Being Totally Truthful and Honest, Facing Reality.

When it’s Jolene’s turn to confess, she looks around the circle blankly.

“Ah honestly don’t know why I’m here,” she says in a hillbilly drawl so backwoods it makes Indiana rednecks seem positively citified.

Bruce narrows his eyes at her response, and the girls around me shift uneasily on their patio chairs.

“You do so know,” Bruce says in a tight voice. His voice rises several octaves when he’s upset, into the soprano range, and it’s a scary thing to behold. “You know perfectly well why you were sent here.”

“Well, Ah do know that Momma married herself a bornedagin man, and that’s when my troubles began,” Jolene says, flipping a long corkscrew over her shoulder. “Ah shoulda known they was storyin’ about this place. That rich old Briggity Britches was up to no good, no how.”

When she says this, I stuff my fist in my mouth to keep from laughing and Susan coughs into her hand to do the same.

Becky turns to Jolene.

“Jesus forgives his children, Jolene,” she says in her earnest bird voice. “He loves you. But to receive His forgiveness, we must first admit our mistakes.”

Jolene sucks in her cheeks as if she were preparing to spit.

“Ah don’t need no forgivin’, cuz Ah ain’t done nothing wrong,” she says, her black eyes flashing. “And Ah cain’t say Ah much care for this Jesus character anyhows.”

Bruce bolts to his feet.

“Would you like
me
to tell everyone why your parents sent you here?”

“That would be my momma, cuz my daddy died when I was . . .”

“Jolene here had a game she played with the boys in her town, called ‘Health Clinic’. . .”

“Nah, it was ‘House Call’ and it . . .”

“This ritualistic sexual abuse took place at her home, while her poor mother was slaving away as a maid in order to . . .”

“Wasn’t no maid, she worked in a hospital . . .”

“Quiet!” Bruce roars.

Jolene crosses her arms and hunkers down in her chair, glaring at him.

“These boys would take turns having carnal knowledge of Jolene, right there under her poor mother’s roof.”

Becky puts a hand on Jolene’s shoulder and Jolene jerks out from under it. I study her baggy Kentucky Wildcats T-shirt and wonder what’s so special about the stick figure underneath that all these boys would crave it. She lifts her chin and stares back at me defiantly.

“Well, what do you have to say for yourself?” Bruce asks her.

“All that happened ̵fore Momma found herself that rich old Bapdist and decided to become a fancy lady. ’Fore that, she paid no mind at all.”

Bruce raises his index finger with an ah-ha expression on his face.

“So you confess to being a fornicator.”

“A forni-what?”

“You had sex before marriage.”

She shrugs. “So?”

“Fornication is an abomination in the eyes of our Lord!”

“An abomini-what?”

“Sin! Evil! Wrong!”

“Wasn’t like we was hurting no one,” Jolene giggles, looking over at me. “Actually, it was kinda fun.”

Bruce orders the rest of us out of the house, so he can converse alone with Jolene. We all know what this means: calisthenics, threats, tears. Big 0s in the Facing Reality and the Courtesy and Respect boxes.

Becky leads us into the darkening field beside Starr, where we sit on the machete-hewn grass and sing “Seek Ye First” and “Sandy Land” and “Humble Thyself.”

But no matter how high we raise our voices, we can still hear Bruce bellowing inside the cement house. We slap no-seeums from our bare arms and scream the lyrics at the fading horizon. We sing until our mouths go dry and the night wraps itself around each one of us like a shroud, and the raging finally stops.

At Vespers, Jolene bends her head to pray and doesn’t raise it up again.

The pastor, a preacher-in-training from Kansas named Stephen (“Call me Stevie”) Erickson, asks us if Jesus will find our hearts 100% pure and hate-free when He returns to earth, and I wonder how such a thing is possible.

David is also in a mood tonight. He scowls at the cross nailed to the front wall during the sermon—”Our God Is a Tubular God”—with the old-man worry line creasing his forehead, and he doesn’t once look in my direction.

After the benediction, we congregate in the courtyard for Social Time. Debbie sets a platter of chocolate chip cookies on a picnic table, and this provokes squeals of delight. The cookies were held up in Customs for two months and are hard and stale, but they are Chocolate Chip Cookies just the same, the first some kids have tasted in over a year.

Susan and I sit on a cement step with our Bibles cushioning our butts and dig out the dark beads with our fingernails. We melt them on our tongues, one by one to make them last, each morsel a piece of Home.

“Been five months since I had chocolate,” Susan says dreamily, lifting a morsel to study it in the gaslight before dropping it into her mouth.

It’s the little things that keep you sane at Escuela Caribe, an extra hour of sleep on Sunday, chocolate pudding cake on Thursday nights, a lukewarm shower instead of a cold one, stale chocolate chips.

Ted Schlund holds forth at the center of the courtyard, surrounded by staff. He twists and gesticulates as he recounts some story, and his audience hoots with laughter. As usual, his wife listens quietly at his side, her face upturned like a waiting child.

Across from us, Janet and Tiffany huddle with their boyfriends at separate picnic tables while Becky hovers nearby to guard against any “unfitting corporal contact.” The definition of said contact—as well as the Program boys we’d like to have it with— is a frequent topic of conversation for Susan and me. She believes that anything beyond a quick peck on the lips is considered
inappropriate, but I think the definition could even include hand-holding, if it’s done in a perverted manner. Like when a boy tongues the space between your fingers and you can feel it down between your legs.

Janet’s boyfriend rises stiffly from the picnic table, a bulge tenting the front of his Sunday slacks.

“My Lord, look at that woodie!” Susan whispers as he walks to the boys’ bathroom. “Do you think he’s going in there to abuse himself?”

We laugh, and I remember Reverend Dykstra telling our Young Calvinist group that “you can’t jack off with Jesus” and laugh even harder. I look across the courtyard at David, but he’s standing alone, scowling at the ground and he won’t look up at me, so I can’t use our secret code to ask him how he’s doing.