Jesus Saves (4 page)

In the mirror, little red pimples dotted her forehead and her eyes looked glazed like when she had a fever. The pills obliterated
the pain, though nothing could counter the bee-buzz sensation, strong as a refrigerator's hum, that signaled the world on the verge of collapse. And during these days she had eagle-eye vision, so the bathroom revealed itself in painful detail, the hairs stuck to the porcelain bowl, the flecks of soap dried on the mirror, and her own features yearning and greasy.

She slipped the Advils and tampons into her blue suede purse and carried the beer out, then laid the key on the counter. The cashier stuck fresh hot dogs onto the metal prongs of the rotisserie. Balancing herself on a car, she stepped off the elevated cement and walked across the vast parking lot. The only time it felt right walking in a parking lot was to or from a car. Any other time it was humiliating, like being left behind at a party. Wild daisies and monkey flowers flourished alongside the road, the sky was static-gray and boring as a headache. Shredded plastic bags hung from the trees, rippling out like strips of ghost flesh. The Heinzes’ Buick passed. Anna turned her head on Ginger and smirked, one of those stiff half-smiles that show a mixture of superiority and pity. Ginger felt her face get warm. There was nothing wrong with walking. People around here thought you were crazy if you didn't ride around in an automobile. Anyone on foot was considered immoral and insane, no different than the guy from the psyche center who escaped once a month in his bathrobe and slippers.

Jesus didn't have no automobile! Ah Jesus. Lover of little woodland animals, baby bunnies and little brown bears. Jesus, with those dreamy blue eyes, was the only person she'd ever known who'd been murdered and she knew his exquisite corpse by heart.

She wanted to start her own religion. Its premise would be simply that if you sensed someone needed kindness, you acted. If a
homeless guy asked you for a dollar, instead of getting angry you'd just give it to him. You'd stop if a lady had a flat tire or if someone needed a ride. One of the symbols would be a hitchhiker's raised thumb. The communion ritual, the symbolic changing of a tire. She imagined herself in her father's robes going down on her knees into the roadside mud, turning a gold ratchet to loosen the nuts from a lame tire.

She saw skid marks reaching across the blue asphalt like charcoal strokes and found the brown blood flecking up now like dried mud, and the trail of trampled grass that led into the woods. She thought of going down and looking for the headless deer. But it'd be rotting already, covered with flies and squirming maggots. She crossed the street, walked a little faster in the roadside weeds because she felt it coming on strong now, not the pills but a vague uneasiness and longing. Ted was right when he said Sunday was the best day out of seven to get stoned. She'd go to his house, lie on his bed, watch the Sunday afternoon movie, split a six-pack with him. Maybe he'd sense how sad she was and do one of his little shows, sing the holy-holy-moly song or the one he made up as he went along, about how pretty she was and how much he loved her. Ted was fucked up, but he was still the only person who knew all the ways to make her feel alive.

Three: GINGER

Through the slow afternoon of fading light they lay on the soft fitted sheet's big oriental peonies, pale blue petals languid as any flower in an opium-soaked dream. The blue comforter wrinkled like water at the foot of the mattress. Conversation wandered as it always did toward Ted's favorite topic, the devil's physical manifestation in this world. She told him how she'd once seen a demon squatting in the branches of the pear tree outside her bedroom window. “His skin texture like a lizard covered with soot, his eyes slimy as a silverfish, and when the thing uncurled his tongue it looked like a thin black snake.”

Ted's eyes were wide as he told how his father used to hang his terry cloth robe over the door that separated his room from his parents’. “At night, I'd hear footsteps, turn to look, and see the bathrobe transformed into a devil with a gray, bullet-shaped head. This devil tormented me every night, until one afternoon, while lying on my bed, I heard the devil's footsteps, felt it's breath against my cheek, but instead of being overcome with fear, I punched out at the demon. That was the last time the monster bothered me; after that, the robe was just material that reeked of cheap cologne and beer-soaked sweat.”

Ginger looked at him, unsure if he was being sincere or mocking her; sometimes it seemed he just made up anything to stay part of the conversation.

“I rode over and checked out the deer head this morning,” Ted said. “Its eyes have developed a milky film that makes it look blind.”

Ginger felt a queasy riff in her stomach. “I bet that deer had been eating out of fast-food dumpsters,” she said. “Bun crusts and hamburger gristle.” She wondered if it's spirit might have passed into her. Ted made her close her eyes, try to visualize shifting leaf light, an appetite for tree bark and vernal grass, but all she heard was a dog whimpering in the apartment next door.

“That deer's trapped on my retina,” she said.

“That's what ghosts are,” Ted said, “spirits living inside of you. Your eye is like a movie projector, shining them out.”

Ginger nodded. Her mother was often in her eye, thin, pale, and breastless, black stitches running in and out of the skin of her chest, not slanted and orderly like they had been, but going every
which way, so she looked like a rag doll repaired haphazardly with black thread.

“Some people, like Jesus or Elvis, have souls so expansive,” Ted said, “that when they die their spirits become a part of all cellular life. They coat the world like a fine membrane, distill into every atom, and that's why people see them inside redwood trees and on corn tortillas simmering in frying pans.” This last idea excited him and he sat up against the wall; his pupils expanded as they tried to soak up the last bit of daylight. “It happened last year,” he said. “I was at my grandma's house down in Bixler. She made TV dinners and we ate them on TV trays with cans of Coke on the porch. She was worried about the boy that mowed the lawn, said he was over-charging her, that when he came into her house to use the bathroom he stole things out of the medicine chest. She didn't like the way he was always spitting in the grass. She went on and on and I'm sitting there, starting to feel really uncomfortable, you know; I was getting that trapped-in-the-DNA-of-this-pitiful-family feeling; her paranoia, her TV trays, her shoe-box-size existence. So I went into the bathroom, locked myself in, opened the window, and lit a fat doobie. There was a white crochet doll with a plastic head over the spare toilet paper, a bowl of pastel soaps, frilly curtains, pink towels with little bears. The air started to hum, then I felt this pressure pushing up against the top of my skull, and I realized how wrong this bathroom was, how it didn't suit me, and then I looked at my face in the mirror and realized my body was just as wrong and external as this bathroom—how completely arbitrary it is that we're stuck in this body or that one—and that's when the pressure gave way and I felt like I was floating in water, like I do when I'm having a dream.”

“How's that?” Ginger said.

“You know,” he said, a little embarrassed now that the story was over, “all dreamy and shit.” He pulled her onto his lap and kissed her, trying to keep the stretched skin away from her cheek, but Ginger still felt the hard line of his fleshless jawbone, and she had the sense she was kissing a skull. He moved his hand up her thigh and pressed his fingers between her legs, so he touched the tampon cord.

“Go take it out,” he said. “I don't mind the blood.”

She walked down the hallway, wearing only his long Black Sabbath T-shirt, her swollen breasts swaying with a lush animal grace. The half bottle of red wine she found in the refrigerator and the pills she took earlier, plus a few tokes off his joint, all combined to numb out the pain in her stomach and make her weak-kneed and very high. She liked pot; it gave her a giddy sense of possibility, even hope, like warm weather in early spring or getting an unexpected large amount of money. The conversation made her dizzy too. They'd been talking like this ever since that first night at the bar in the Quonset hut out on Highway 9. She liked his Prince Valiant haircut and how he sat alone at a back table sneering at the local band. When she asked him what he did, he laughed and said cynically,
Saving the world through prayer.
The conversation that followed was the best she'd ever had, how he loved the butter-soaked Texas toast at the Western Sizzler and the tiny Graceland at the miniature-golf course on Garfield Road. He was the first person to say the new post office as well as everything else out here was ugly and she was so grateful; a
few hours later she went for a ride in his car and fucked him in the backseat.

Flipping on the bathroom light, she saw a water bug run over the white Formica and disappear behind the sink. Mold spores pockmarked the shower curtain, inched up the white tile walls. The toilet was shellacked with missed piss, hairs imbedded like ants stuck in amber. The room was humid, the walls swampy. Nature was taking it back. She sat on the toilet seat and reached between her legs, found the white string that hung out like a price tag, and pulled. The bloodied mouse plopped into the water and sunk down moodily to the bottom of the bowl.

She walked down the hall with her legs pressed tight, pausing in the open doorway of Steve's room. Dusk's flaxen light flooded his unmade bed and the pentacle plaque hanging above it. There was a poster of Iron Maiden, one of Blackie Lawless drinking blood out of a human skull, and a huge movie poster of a slimy seven-headed demon, each face with red ember eyes and horns the length of yardsticks. All his tapes, Krokus, Metallica, Judas Priest, were piled up by his boom box, and there was one of his pen-and-ink drawings taped up on the closet door, a surrealistic image of a saw-toothed demon with a butcher's knife in its throat and blood cascading down from its right ear into a basketball hoop, which became a spigot and flowed into a drinking glass. The caption read in big black letters:
I GOT STONED AND I MISSED
.

Steve worked during the week as a janitor at the hospital cleaning the operating room after surgery and, when he could get them, dealt acid and ’shrooms. Ginger felt a little afraid of him. It was easy to imagine the seven-faced dragon, between the bed and
the Formica dresser, bobbing its multiple heads like thin-stemmed wild flowers frenzied in a breeze. She heard a rumor he'd poured gasoline over a dog and set it on fire and that he'd spent a year in jail for cocaine possession. Ted told her all his satanic stuff was just a joke, that none of the rumors were true. “Steve has been shitted on all his life,” he said. “He's a great person, just totally misunderstood.”

She walked down the hall into Ted's room, lay on the towel he spread over the sheets. A flutter of blood spilled out of her, trickled down the inside of her thighs. It always felt like more blood than it actually was. The body was weird that way, magnifying its mass and function in the mind. Ted sat on the edge of the bed. At his feet was a shoe box full of junk: screwdrivers, nails, plastic pieces from broken clocks, his old pot leaf belt buckle. He hunched over so all she could see was his bare back, his jeans so low the crack of his rear showed. The room was drenched in smoky twilight, white light glowed from his tape player. The music was over, but the blank tape played on, a silent hum as incomprehensible as snow falling.

Moisture ran into the crack of her rear as he spread the lips of her pussy and wet his pointer finger with blood, tugged up her T-shirt, so the material gathered in folds above her bra and touched her just under the tiny bow, pressed his finger into that hollow cleft at the top of her rib cage, then swung his hand down along the curving bone. His touch left a dark line, and sent out rings of sensation like a pebble tossed into water. Sliding his hand up higher under her shirt, his fingers were cold in a sexy way, like when you first take off your underwear and your bottom is bare against a cool vinyl car seat. Pushing her bra up, he cradled a tit away from her ribs. This gave a sudden sense of her own delicateness and she shuddered. Ted
undid his jeans and pushed them down to his knees. Crouching over her, butt up, balls hanging, he leaned his head down and swayed his tongue messily into her mouth, jabbed his cock against her stomach, the red skin shifting around the hard inside part.

“You're so beautiful,” he turned his head so that Ginger could see the scar that made the left side of his face unrecognizable. She saw nuance, shades of red and pink lush as tapestry in his mottled face. He pushed himself inside her, suspending himself over her. Long greasy strands of hair fell forward, shadowing his features; the silver cross around his neck swung just above her eyes. She helped herself along by thinking of the girl she'd seen in a porno magazine with a shaved pussy and then of certain parts in the Manson book, how during an acid trip Jesus said to Charlie,
These are your loves and you are their need.
How he'd gone out to the family bus, filled a pan of water and given himself a whore's bath, how when the girls came in he washed their dirty feet, one by one, how the girls in turn washed the feet of their boyfriends, and how suddenly the bus was filled with naked bodies. She saw Charlie balling one girl while finger fucking another. Ted rolled over so she could be on top, but she didn't press herself up, just clung to him. Sex was psychic. His cock inside her. Her cock inside him. Not boy. Not girl. Just frenzied protons in an electrified atom. She squinted her eyes so the light from the tape player looked like a quasar, like the big bang, like God making life out of nothing. The spirit of God hovered over the face of the water and she saw the smashed pomegranate, the figs swollen and split, honey dripping over everything. All the flesh inside her swelled with blood, tightened until it was hard to .tell that they were separate.
Come into me,
she thought, and he did.

*  *  *

A few hours later Ginger woke and felt music vibrating the walls of the apartment. She rolled in the sheets to the edge of the bed, then stood and walked into the next room and sat on the floor next to Ted. The duplex living room was sparse; a TV sat on milk crates and Steve's bench press and free weights were pushed into one corner. Death metal riffs blasted so fierce she pressed her spine against the wall, afraid the boom box would crack and the speed metal dragon would burst out, scaly and blue-green as fish skin, its eyes slick as blood, breathing fire from its flaring nostrils, quoting from Revelations in the voice of a God gone bad. It was completely dark outside now, just some murky light in the oven illuminating the gray walls and silver racks, efficient and mysterious as a submarine trawling the kitchen floor. The rectangular window was smudged with meat juice, splattered with particles of petrified food. Dishes were piled high in the sink and a stack of pizza boxes and beer bottles surrounded the doorway. Carpet fibers pushed this way and that, like the coat of a mangy dog, and Ginger imagined them shifting languidly like seaweed caught in currents of windy water.

Steve walked into the room and knelt in front of her, held the plastic mask over her nose and mouth. It was the kind anesthesiologists used in surgery, the kind that gas came through to put you to sleep. He'd made this contraption with stuff stolen from the hospital supply room—a glass beaker with a heating nozzle, rubber hose. She watched him take a bud from the plastic baggy, load it into the copper bowl, and flick his lighter until the flame caught the dried leaves, singed them into red embers. Steve wore rings on every finger, a skull, a glass eye, a crucifix, and though
he'd just showered, changed into jeans and a flannel shirt; his body odor hinted of blood.

“Suck up,” he flicked the lighter. Steve was the only child of the county's most volatile couple. Sightings were mythic: the time they'd got drunk in the lounge of the airport Holiday Inn and knocked over the singer's synthesizer, the midnight screaming session in the parking lot of McDonald's, and the car accident, where Steve's mother had crashed into a green highway sign and was found unconscious in her baby-doll nightgown, an open bottle of white wine still locked between her legs.

Steve was legendary for his fights at high-school parties. One second everybody would be standing around sipping from 16-ounce plastic cups of keg beer and the next a strange fusion would go through the crowd and Steve would be going head-to-head in the mud with somebody who rubbed him the wrong way. It didn't matter what it was about; any reason was only a pretense—school loyalty , some half-drunk girl, something somebody said about his favorite band.

She took her hit and handed Ted the mask, but he appeared to be asleep, leaning against the wall with his eyes closed, his head tilted back. Steve took the mask from her, loaded the bowl again, and held it over his own nose and mouth; with his other hand he brought the fire to the green leaves. The flame spread an oval of orange light over Steve's features, which were as even and pleasing as a movie star's. His hair was slicked back, so that shiny cords spread like horns over the top of his head, and under his eyes the lavender skin was delicately veined as a flower. He took another hit, then put the rig beside him and layout on the carpet with his hands folded behind his neck.