Jesus Saves (3 page)

Her father made his way up into the pulpit, laid down his Oxford English Bible, spread out his sermon, flattened the folded crease with his hand, and put on his half-lens reading glasses. He was handsome in a faded Scandinavian sort of way, with his long face and
high coloring. She sat up so the points of her spine rested against the wood pew, aware that she hadn't showered and still smelled of smoke and sex.

Bowing his head, her father intoned, “Lord, we offer this message in the name of your son Jesus Christ our Savior, Amen.” He looked over the members, his face relaxed, somewhat confessional. “You know, you can learn a lot from studying dreams. Last night I had a dream. I was driving cross-country, my eyes strained by the piercing headlights of cars in the opposite lane and the monotony of the highway. From a thermos I poured and drank one cup of black coffee after another. I had no real idea of my cargo or my destination. Whenever I glanced up through the top of the windshield into the starry night, I saw the silhouettes of ravens curving wide figure eights.

“In the deepest part of the night, I needed a break, veered off the highway into a rest stop, got out, and walked around the back of the van. As I looked up at the deserted brick pavilion that housed a bevy of snack machines, it occurred to me that I had to be careful, that I didn't want anyone to see my cargo, and that's when I realized Sandy Patrick was inside the van and that it was I who had kidnapped her.” The pews creaked as the congregation shifted uncomfortably.

“But how could this be? I had no memory of the kidnapping, no memory even of loading the girl into the van. My first impulse was to move away from the van, then run out into the highway, stick out my thumb, and try to hitchhike home. But then a sound came from inside the van; curiosity overwhelmed my fear and I unlocked the back doors and pulled both open. Laying on the cold metal floor was a body. Flesh so pale it glowed a fuzzy blue and seemed to hover
in the dark. The white bloodless feet and purple toenails were closest to me, ankles bound with polyester cord. I was relieved, for it was not a woman's body but a man's. Head shaved, one eye badly bruised and swollen shut. Dried blood obscured his features; clear packing tape flattened his mouth and distorted his lips. But the ruined face was familiar and as I studied the features, I realized it was Jesus Christ our Lord and Savior. Looking at him I had a feeling of such fear and complicity that I woke up screaming.

“For hours I lay awake, trying to decipher the dream. Am I complicit? Small things happen. We tell fibs, withhold love, cheat on taxes, use condescension and hasty class consciousness to shame both strangers and friends. Do these minor sins multiply and allow evil into our world? Could I be complicit in something as macabre as the abduction of Sandy Patrick?

“Who here does not know the story of Sandy Patrick?” He looked at the faces in pew after pew as if somebody might actually answer. “Her mother says she has a dreamy side, that she collects stuffed animals, reads fantasy novels where horses fly and fairy princesses wear gowns made from flowers. Neighbors told reporters that she's a shy but loving child, always bringing home stray cats. One lady remembers how she took in a hurt bird, kept it in a shoe box, and force-fed it dog food on a Popsicle stick.

“But can this sensitive girl be a suitable stand-in for Christ? Must I accept my complicity in her abduction? Does each one of us have to come to terms with the evil that resides within us?

“The answer to both questions is of course yes. Yes, this girl, all rainbows and unicorns, is Christ. Just as much as that tiny baby in the manger was our savior. And yes, each of us must look into our hearts and acknowledge the darkness there. That's the shocking truth!
The evil power that abducted Sandy is not just the exception to the rule but rather part of the fabric of human reality, of our reality, a dark fabric with which we are all clothed and which we cannot cast off. Each of us is scarred with the inheritance of Adam and Eve, that tainted couple who separated themselves from God, who began our long and bloody journey.

“So let us remember Sandy Patrick in an aura of divine light. Let us pray for her in hope that her pain will not be wasted, that in turn it will work as an elixir, just as Christ's blood does in communion, to turn our black hearts pure and white as the first winter snow. In the name of our Lord Jesus Christ, Amen.”

The organist played the first chords of the next hymn. Ginger watched as Mrs. Mulhoffer moved discreetly out of the front pew and down the side aisle. Several other people edged out of their seats, following her, all their expressions tense with outrage and indignation. She heard a woman whisper to her husband, “How dare he say we killed that little girl.” Ginger'd heard them talk; they said that Ruth Patrick deserved what she got, that she was one of the divorcees that got drunk on singles’ night at the Holiday Inn Lounge and that she took continuing education classes just to meet men. The ushers passed the red velvet offering bag from pew to pew.

Sandy'd been gone for months. Dread shivered up Ginger's spine. It seemed like bad luck to mention her. The ushers, jovial and unfazed, walked in formation down the center aisle, carrying red bags of green money and checks. All four could be brothers in their dark suits with the brocade Maltese Cross pocket patch. They shared the same temperament too, self-deprecating and funny; Ginger liked
how they joked with her about oversleeping and how during the sermon they slipped outside to smoke.

Her father took the bags, settling each on top of the other. Then held all four up and with a little prayer, he consecrated the cash for Jesus. She pitied him. This was all he had to offer his God.

In the Bible, God was famous, as in the story of Cain and Abel, for being more pleased by living animals and their slaughter than by a basket of inanimate vegetables. She imagined a lamb struggling, its little hoofs beating against the slate, her father with one hand holding the frantic animal down and with the other slicing into its throat, blood spurting out, soaking the altar cloth, splattering his linen robes. Everyone would be relieved, grateful and happy to be alive. People would sense that someday they'd witness their own death but somehow still live.

The ushers returned to the back. One was holding out his hand, welcoming her to line up for communion. The wine would hit her empty stomach like a French kiss and besides, in her mind communion was a paltry and unsatisfying ritual, nothing compared to its precedent, the lush and drunken last supper, where disciples feasted on bowls of olives and roasted chicken and the bread was so delicious Jesus compared it to flesh. No, today she wouldn't go; better to eye the altar from here. She shook her head, but the lady next to her told her little boy she'd be right back and slipped past Ginger. The boy was leaning on a hymnal coloring a Sunday school sheet that read
God Made Me.
As the line grew she recognized only a few of the parishioners; frizzy-haired Jean Gephart, who was afraid of her dishwasher and fat Mrs. Clayton and her startled-looking husband Herman. There was Ann Heinz, the goody-goody girl in her floral dress with the lace
collar and her exhausted alcoholic mother Barbara. Old Klass was here today too; he was the only member left from the old days. Most of the old Germans lived in row houses or garden apartments downtown; they hadn't taken to the new church building. Her father hired a van to go down and get them Sunday mornings, but the only one who ever came, sitting alone in the back, dreaming like a wizened duke, was old Klass. He was tiny now, less than five feet, and seemed smaller still in his three-piece suit. He kept cinnamon candies in his pockets for the children and was always calling himself a Prussian Lutheran and a libertine.

She watched her father raise his hand and make the sign of the cross to dismiss the first group of communicants. All rose with their heads bowed. The organist used the softer tones of the choir keys and only a few people sang.

Take my will, and make it thine
/
it shall be no longer mine /

Take my heart, it is thine own
/
it shall be thy royal throne.

Her father lifted his head and glanced at her. His features were not tense or angry, but Ginger knew what he wanted her to do. She stood with an irreverent swivel of her hips, loosened herself from the pew, and walked up the aisle to the far end of the communion rail, knelt down, watched from the side of her eye as he placed a wafer on each extended tongue.
This is his body given unto you for the forgiveness of sins.

The real world should seem foreign and out of focus from inside here; a church was a way station between this material world and the next immaterial one. But she saw cars like meteors made of
colored light zoom past on the highway. And heard a truck heave and honk, the driver hurling his load into the express lane.

He moved closer, smelling of nautical aftershave and dry toast.
This is his body given unto you for the forgiveness of sins.
He placed the wafer on her tongue and she brought it back into the wet cave of her mouth. The host stuck to the roof, tasted like typing paper, like white grade-school paste.

He began again with the silver chalice.
This is his blood shed for you.
He tipped the cup to a man's lips, then lifted it, cleaned that spot with a piece of white flannel.
This is his blood shed for you.
He was near. Flutter of robes, his muffled side step. She raised her head, took the cup's lip between her own, and looked into her father's face. Large pores were open and oily around his nose, and his eyes reflected pinpoint faces of parishioners in the first pews.
This is his blood shed for you.
The red wine stung her gums. She tried to swallow but a cramp punched into her abdomen. Flinching, her mouth opened and wine dribbled down her chin, spattering circles round and soft as berries on the wooden rail.
How ridiculous,
she thought,
that this is happening now.
He was already behind the altar, making the sign of the cross, touching his forehead, his heart, then each shoulder. “Go in peace,” he solemnly said.

As she rose the muscles in her stomach contracted and she felt that monthly paradox, a light-headedness with unbearable bloody weight. She walked along the side aisle with her thighs clamped together so that no blood would drizzle down her legs. A man sat in the back row in a baby blue golf sweater silently moving his lips, not the wide-open shifts of singing, but whispering furtively to the trustee beside him.

She hurried out the narthex doors, down the stairs toward the basement, past rows of Sunday school rooms, the nursery. Posters lined the hallway, enlarged flowers with Bible verses printed underneath and a banner that proclaimed
PEACE TO ALL WHO ENTER HERE
in big, badly cut, felt letters. She swung open the door to the ladies’ room and flipped on the light, pushed open the stall door, squatted back toward the toilet seat and reached under her skirt, pulling her pink cotton panties down. It was one of the bad pair with the loose elastic waistband and the pee-stained crotch. Now the material there was blood-soaked and heavy, smudges of red on the inside of her thighs. She sat on the cold toilet seat, listening to the last verse of the communion hymn.

Take my love; my Lord, I pour
/
At thy feet its treasure store
/

Take myself, and I will be
/
Ever, only, all for thee.

At Christmas her doll Kimmie was always baby Jesus, and she was always an angel with a tin foil halo and cardboard wings. Sometimes she chewed on her long cuticles and said
The body of Ginger take and eat.
Once when she was still in her crib an angel had hovered in the corner of her room all night, and on Halloween she saw a demon squatting in the bare branches of the pear tree. She remembered the exact moment she'd first found out that the soul wasn't a real organ like one's heart or kidneys and the story her father told her about the little boy who wanted to get to heaven so bad he kept trying to ride his Big Wheel off the garage roof.

Organ notes caused the cork panels of the ceiling to tremble and she saw her father's long, elegant fingers gripping the base of the common cup and tipping it to one fearful face after another.

*  *  *

The convenience store reeked of steamed hot dogs and microwave burritos. She laid the box of tampons, the tiny bottle of Advil, and the Tall Boy beer on the counter and watched sweat gather on the fair hairs of the cashier's upper lip as he rang her up and put everything into a paper bag. She'd been in here a lot, but his round face was always expressionless. She asked for the bathroom key, watched him open a drawer, lift the plastic disc with the key dangling from a dirty shoelace and hand it to her, then swing back to the Slurpee machine where his
Playboy
waited.

The back of the store smelled of spoiled relish. In front of the bathroom door, a mop sat in a bucket of gray water. She squeezed between the Pepsi quarts stacked to the ceiling, flipped on the bulb that hung over the tilted medicine chest. Paneled with fake pine,
SUCK ME
was scratched into the wood with a car key. She couldn't get the warped door to close properly, set the useless key on the sink's ledge, and opened the box, quickly unwrapping a tampon. She pulled her panties down to her knees, squatted back over the toilet and pushed it up inside. Blood dabbed one end of the cardboard applicator like a lipstick-stained cigarette. She tossed it in the garbage, then stepped out of her stained panties, reached up to the dispenser and pulled out several brown paper towels, wrapped her underwear in them and stuck the bundle deep into the garbage pail. She aligned the arrows and pressed up the plastic Advil cap, peeled off the foil cover, and threw that and the cotton ball into the trash. Popping the beer, she put the can to her lips, dumped four or five pills onto her tongue and washed them down with a mouthful of beer.