Make Me Work (10 page)

On her way back to the figurines, she passed through the children's section. Religion was a sunnier thing for kids today than it had been for Josephine. She could see where kids would like these books and games and jigsaw puzzles. An old-fashioned children's book about the saints called An
Half-Hour with God's Heroes
looked like something Josephine might herself have read back in Catholic school. She picked it up. It didn't contain the information she desired at this juncture in her fallen life—how to get a saint to bring people with money to your home. It was a storybook full of sweet little tales about the saints and the miracles they had performed, with ancient cartoon paintings to go along. It was great. Kind of great. She liked it. It was the kind of thing, she thought, that Camilla would like, too, and she decided to buy it as a present for her.

She put it under her arm and went back to the statues. If you wanted a dinky little Saint Joe for forty-nine cents, they had that, but such a thing was not going into Josephine's lawn. On the other hand, she wasn't springing for the $30 hand-painted ceramic number, either. The plastic Saint Joseph for $4.99 was a bland beeswax color, semi-translucent and perfectly hollow, but a good ten inches high and decently molded: you could make out the baby's features, whereas on the cheaper models the Saviour's face was kind of a smudge. She balanced it in her hand and discovered that she was having difficulty breathing. Religious asthma, for real this time. She practically ran to the checkout, where, under the suspicious eyes of the lady at the computerized cash register, Josephine clawed money from her wallet like a Saint Joseph junkie scoring a fix.

She ascended a different flight of concrete steps and found herself back at the Stations of the Cross, staring across a flagstone terrace at the Holy Steps. The old gentleman was almost to the top—all the way up on his knees. Dizzy, Josephine turned toward the parking lot, nearly knocking down a nun in a light-blue habit. The nun gave her the bad, scolding look of nuns everywhere, and Josephine was time-shifted back to the Catholic home, where a girl didn't simply live, she worked, and the nuns were her masters. Josephine had scrubbed the floors there a thousand times, and polished them once a month with Butcher's Wax from a can, buffing away the adhesive haze with a cloth-wrapped brick until her arm almost fell off. Yes, they would hit her hands with rulers if she didn't do it right; they really did that. She had worked outside for entire sweltering summer afternoons in her starched school uniform and dark knee socks, picking iridescent Japanese beetles off the roses and dropping them into coffee cans full of kerosene, where they died instantly, according to the nuns, though Josephine had seen them suffer intensely with her own two eyes.

The sidewalk led right to the open mouth of the big canvas tent that she'd seen when she arrived. She walked up to it and peeked inside. A veritable sea of votive candles was burning in there—thousands of them, arranged in tiers, each flame in a green glass tube. You could light a candle here in the tent twenty-four hours a day. Josephine stepped inside, half expecting to choke, but a large hole in the tent top took the fumes away. Fifteen or twenty people were worshipping, one of them a bearded man in a shiny black parka and jogging pants, who was maintaining some kind of martial-arts stance before the candles, swinging his rosary like a lasso and mumbling to himself. His approach to God was strangely hostile, but he was getting the same reception as anybody else. And that hit Josephine like a rock: God didn't care about a person's approach. The human things people cared so deeply about on earth dropped through the screen when God scooped you up, panning for gold. Josephine wished they had taught this back in Catholic school. Her insight made her like God more than she could remember ever liking Him before. He was utterly indifferent to all the stuff she worried about. She felt free now to light a candle herself.

A sign said $3
DONATION
. Three bucks to light a candle! You got a shot at a Ford Taurus for a dollar fifty. The new God she'd discovered wouldn't care whether she paid or not, but that was the difference between Him and His agents on earth. His agents wanted the cash. She glanced around; nobody was looking, but she felt guilty anyway. She slipped three singles from her wallet into the Plexiglas box, and stepped onto the wooden platform.

Dear God
, she prayed, lighting a candle,
I wish I could say I believed in You a little more than I do. I used to, when I was a kid, and if You really exist, then I don't have to tell You. I don't believe in these candles, either, but I'm lighting this one for Ricky, my son. He's a junkie thief, as You presumably know. He's nineteen, but he won't get out of my life and go rob and torment someone else. Why did You let my son shoot dope and turn into a germ? He steals from me, his own mother, rips me off and lies to my face about it. Well, pretty soon he's going to wake up and find me gone. I'm here to get a Saint Joseph to sell my house, which is probably blasphemous or something, but You don't care about superficial things like that. I just got that point. So let me ask You this: Why does anybody bother talking to You at all? You know everything already. Why does anybody build a shrine like this? Why am I burying a Saint Joseph? It's because actions speak louder than words, isn't it? That's why it's three bucks for the candle, right? I get it
.

She looked at Ricky's flame flickering in its green glass tube. It was a small, inconsequential thing to put up against the wall of crap her son lived behind. Once, before he stole her TV, she'd checked out the heavy-metal videos he liked to watch when he was stoned and under her roof—the Satan worshippers and leather Nazis acting nasty with guitars they couldn't even play. This was no turning of any generational wheel; it wasn't her own mother's dismay over the Rolling Stones. This was her offspring growing extra legs and wings and turning into a locust or something, and Josephine had decided that the leaders of the country secretly wanted youth this way, that it served some hidden government purpose. How else could she explain the incredible collection of losers she saw when she drove around town these days, every guy Ricky's age looking just like Ricky, a tattooed doper who smashed bottles on the kids' playground every night and lived for nothing but whatever jolt he could get in the next fifteen minutes?

She'd hung on till he was nineteen, and that was it. Blood was thicker than water, but it wasn't thicker than a woman's whole life.

So I'm taking action
, she continued to God.
Maybe finding me gone will make him change. I doubt it, but if You could help him do that, that's all I ask. I'm not asking anything for myself. Well… I am asking to sell my house. And I wouldn't mind winning that car to have in Florida. Mine's just about shot. Oh, and Camilla. She's a great lady. Take care of her for me. Thank You, God
.

She stepped down from the tiers of candles, away from the welter of wiggling flames. Hers flickered with the others in its green glass tube, but when she blinked her eyes, she lost track of which one it was.

When she got home, an hour of daylight remained, possibly less. Today was her day off, and she was starting to wish she was going in. She hated the dark shroud that winter dropped over the afternoon. She was a chef at Cantami in Boston, one of the new Italian places where everybody went. The restaurant's kitchen had no windows and a million small distractions, and you didn't have to experience the untimely demise of the day.

She half expected to find Ricky in the house, or some evidence he'd been around—something missing or messed up somehow—but she didn't see anything. She'd thrown him out a year ago, when he turned eighteen. She would have liked to bounce him sooner, but he'd been remanded to her custody at sixteen, after sticking up a convenience store. Josephine had wanted him sent to reform school then, but the lawyer assured her that institutionalization only made kids like Ricky worse, and then they came home like mutant bacteria that nothing could kill. By this logic, Josephine was left alone with a full-fledged juvenile delinquent. A father's guiding hand would have been nice, but no court in the world would have let her ex-husband care for Ricky or any other kid, so it didn't really matter that Sal was halfway through six-to-eight for armed robbery—short time for that offense because he wasn't the one carrying the gun. Or so the judge had been persuaded to believe. Josephine didn't even know. She knew that Sal
had
a gun: she'd seen it a number of times—once pointed at her head. He claimed it wasn't loaded, but that was why she got her divorce.

When she threw Ricky out, he went to live with his girlfriend, and Josephine changed the locks on the house. But Ricky knew how to pick locks and came in whenever he pleased. Sometimes he wanted to spend the night. Sometimes he just wanted to steal something. Josephine couldn't keep him out, so she asked him not to come in when she wasn't around. He came the next day and stole her toaster oven. He called that “borrowing.” By now Ricky had borrowed almost every fenceable thing Josephine owned—her TV and VCR, her stereo, her clock radio, two toaster ovens, a nice floor lamp—along with whole cartons of cigarettes, and cash if she was stupid enough to leave any around. The television set had become his symbolic object, even though Josephine liked to eat toast as much as she liked to watch TV. Every time he came around, he promised to bring the television back. If it weren't so pathetic, it might have been endearing, this insistence that he had the TV and would return it next time, when Josephine knew perfectly well he'd shot it into his crotch the same day he stole it. That was where Ricky and his friends stuck the dope, in the hairy parts of their groins, so they wouldn't have marks the cops could find easily.

She made a mug of strong black coffee, and got her garden spade from the basement. She put on her parka and cap and gloves, and stuck Saint Joseph in one of her cargo pockets. Thus outfitted for the wars, she glanced out the kitchen window into her tiny back yard. Something was terribly wrong out there. Everything beyond her property line was gone. The world had broken off like a cardboard picture and fallen away. Her snow-filled birdbath was still there in the foreground, along with her revolving clothesline like some weird antenna on its aluminum mast. After that, it was empty gray sky. A spasm of terror sealed Josephine's windpipe. Even in her panic, unable to breathe, she blamed herself: God was punishing her after all for burying Joseph, slicing the world right off at her door.

When she shook her eyes into focus, everything was normal again. Yes, she'd been raised by the nuns—when in doubt, assume holy wrath. The cold, cloudy sky was almost the same shimmering gray as her neighbor's weathered fence, and the two things—gray sky, gray cedar boards—had feathered together in a visual trick, making her yard look like the edge of the earth. She almost laughed, but she couldn't quite do it. A vision of doomsday shakes a person up, even when it's an optical illusion. She got the Old Grand-Dad from the cupboard and glugged some into her coffee, had a slurp, and headed out into what had just been, for a second, the end of the world.

Saint Joe belonged dead center in the lawn, she decided, sipping her fortified coffee. She kicked away some powdery snow and set her mug down. The ground felt hard. She dropped the point of her spade; the lawn was like rock. With a purposeful whack, she got maybe a sixteenth of an inch in. She wanted to cry. Then she reflected that the ground would be most frozen near the surface, and softer the deeper she went. Three or four inches down it might not be frozen at all. She had to be the most naturally optimistic person she'd ever met.

She thought about the shrine as she dug. She hadn't said a prayer in years, and now she remembered why. Praying was absurd. If God existed, He knew your every thought. He could only laugh when you tried to single out certain ones for His special attention. If God existed, every single thing you thought would be a prayer. Everything you
did
would be a prayer. Your
whole life
would be a prayer, Josephine thought, and when she thought that, burying Saint Joseph suddenly made more sense. It was superstitious, but at least that implied action—throwing salt over your shoulder, carrying a rabbit's foot, wearing specific socks when you played gin rummy. Superstitious people were the most religious of all, Josephine decided, because they lived their beliefs. Their weird obsessions were their ongoing prayer. That made gamblers like her ex-husband the priests and rabbis of the group. Their whole lives were offerings to luck—and what was luck if not fate, and what was fate if not God? Sal was a hood, but he was a spiritual hood—Josephine saw this about him for the very first time. And there he was now in his monastery cell, like the young brother she'd met today. The young brother selling raffle tickets.

She hooted at the sky and sipped her drink. It was a cold drink now, but that was what she needed, whereas before she'd needed something hot. Everything taking care of itself. The statue's resting place looked pretty good. All she really had to do was get him deep enough so the dogs didn't dig him up before the sale. After her exertions over his tomb, the hollow Saint Joseph seemed to weigh nothing in her hand. He seemed to float in space before her eyes. She set him down on his back in the hole, but found that she couldn't shovel the dirt on top of him, not right on his face like that. She turned him face-down, but that seemed worse. When she picked him up again, half-frozen dirt had sifted into his open base. You could see it through the translucent, cream-colored skin: Saint Joseph turning brown as he filled up with soil.

She washed him in the kitchen sink and put him in a Ziploc freezer bag, and when she got back outside, she told herself she'd done her best, plopped Joseph in his hole without looking, and scraped soil over him till he disappeared. She tamped down the remaining earth and threw a few spadefuls of snow on the spot. Then she looked around to see if anyone had been watching. She felt furtive and guilty, not uplifted by the magical presence of a sacred personage on her side. She needed to perform some better ritual, something to improve the efficacy of this whole bad act. She closed her eyes to conjure up an image of her soul at peace, and one came to her—her soul in a hot bubble bath with some more Old Grand-Dad.