Godshot Read online

  “Go with God,” Wiley said. Then they rolled past. I looked down into the cracked and collapsing canal. I remembered when it rushed with water, when each summer it was common for a local child to get swept under and never come back up, the temptation of a cool blue swim too much to resist. Their bodies were always found pressed to the bars of a drain, but still I imagined the fragments of their bones lining the floor of the canal like fallen bark.

  Another stream of cars approached and I sat on the edge of the canal. I could not imagine it full of water anymore. Now it struck me more as a tunnel. I eased myself in but it was deeper than I thought and I landed hard on my knees and my wind knocked out. I waited for my breath to calm and an excitement filled me. A secret passage had revealed itself. I ran into it, hand brushing the dry dirt walls. Headlights streamed above me but I was unseen now.

  When I reached my estimation of where I’d need to turn off, I carved a foot hitch with a rock and climbed out. I liked to feel my body work this way, my hands dirty and fighting, my muscles electric. With each pump of my running legs, I felt myself wake up. I sprinted down the unmarked turnoff that led to only one place. We never came down this road, but I was in a new world now. The sky thick and black over me, star show ablaze. The Diviners’ house loomed ahead, its slight slant, and the full-bellied moon glared over it like a spotlight.

  When I got close to the house I sat in the dirt to catch my breath. I looked between my legs and a different woman’s blood had surged onto the yellow fabric. I heard my mother tell me the story of when she had fallen in love at fourteen during an unusually damp lightning summer with a Mexican boy who worked Grampa Jackie’s fields. He and his father barely spoke English and they had come across the border under the floorboard of a van. This was when there was enough work in Peaches to attract migrant workers by the hundreds. Now no one was stupid enough to come here and expect anything. My mother said the boy was tired a lot, worried a lot. Wanted a lot. He hated the valley, she’d said, stirring instant mashed potatoes in the foam cup they came in. I was ten years old and too young to realize she was showing me her heart. She said he wanted to live in some snowy place he’d seen on TV and that she’d told him she’d go with him.

  When he left after the harvest she had cried for weeks. She thought he would come back with his father the next summer but he didn’t. I hadn’t asked her if he had pushed himself into her on a dirt ground and how her body felt and if love had covered her or fear, or something of the two.

  I stepped closer to the house and a glare of motion lights bathed me. From a megaphone: “Who’s there?” I jumped back out of the light. “If you’re here to deface our property think again. We’re trained in archery.”

  Archery! The thought of these seductive slinking women holding bows and arrows in their lingerie struck me as absurd. But of course the house was like nothing else in Peaches. It might have been mistaken for some fine historic Victorian museum if not for the sinister lean, the paint peeling off in large strips. No one in Peaches, believer or not, wanted anything to do with it. The graffiti was beginning to fade but I knew it had appeared after my mother’s banishment. I wondered if the women inside were scared. What did they think of this church that hated them? The cleaning spray smell hung on me. I stepped into the light and knocked on the door. “I’m here about my mother,” I heard myself say.

  For a while there was nothing, a silent negotiation taking place between me and them, of whether or not to make this contact real. They decided yes, and so did I because I had not moved. A dead bolt from the other side undid and the creaking door opened.

  I first saw a slightly swaying crystal chandelier hanging in the entryway, wallpaper of black lace. My eyes adjusted and I stepped inside. Under my bare and filthy feet was a huge smooth cowhide, white with black spots. Polished hardwood ran into a long hallway, and creamy crushed velvet the color of sliced beets blanketed the stairs. Buttons adorned puffy satin chairs in rich mustard yellows and emeralds. I could see a long white leather fainting couch in a back parlor. Framed above it was a black-and-white portrait of a nude woman, her long silvery hair falling over her face. She was turned so only one breast could be seen and her legs were firm with muscle and her waist cut in as if carved with a knife. The halls were silent, the door to each room closed.

  In the corner was not a lingerie-clad archer, but a girl about my age wearing a black tank top and black shorts, black lipstick, and a white lace ribbon tied in a dolly bow around her neck. Her eyes were rimmed in burgundy pencil and her skin was pale as chicken fat. Her hair was not a mass of writhing serpents but lank and long and black. She flicked open a switchblade. “Can I help you?”

  Seeing her, a real person before me and not the imagined women the church spoke about—their skyscraper heels and racy negligees, garish rouge and ratted hair—I wondered what else we could have gotten wrong. “I’m looking to find out”—my voice cracked—“what you all said to Louise Herd to make her go off and leave.” I cleared my throat. It seemed I had acted in some nightmare jolt of energy. I hardly remembered how I’d arrived here at all.

  The girl closed the blade but kept it in her hand. “No one can force anyone else to do anything. I’m sure you know that.”

  But I didn’t. I’d seen Vern force all number of beliefs and actions over us, and I’d seen, in response, obedience.

  “Daisy’ll be off her call soon,” the girl said. “You can wait in the hall. I’d love to chat but I’ve got a history paper to write.”

  I must have looked at her strangely because she said, “Not everyone goes to Peaches Valley High. Not everyone’s a member of the holy roller army.”

  A moon-cycle chart hung behind her and I recognized the formation of circles and crescents from my mother drawing it on the back of her hand like a habit. She had been taken by the moon before she vanished, saying things like Tonight is a beaver moon, prepare for new awareness, a super blood wolf moon, opposite of the sun, but ruled by the sun, and I’d look out at it with her, loving how low the moon hung in the valley skyscape, nothing for miles to compete with its grandness. Even the polluted smog that settled over us became romantic, a mysterious mist, and she’d close her eyes and bask in its particular light. Wolf moon, blue moon. God created the moon, she said. Lacey’s moon.

  I moved up the velvet stairs before the girl could change her mind. On the landing there were three doors. I pressed my ear to the first one and heard murmuring. A low moan and then a high-pitched yes yes yes. I walked farther. I felt an urge to pray, but stopped. I was too self-conscious in front of God in this place.

  Then a voice filtered out of another room, its door open only a crack, sticker gems spelling out Daisy on the wood.

  “Don’t send me a fur coat,” I heard the deep voice say. “I’ll never wear it in this desert. No, I won’t give you my address; now now, you know I can’t do that. Of course, hon, now put that hard rooster right in my mouth just how you want.”

  I watched her through the crack. A telephone was perched between her shoulder and her ear. She was topless and rubbing oils from brown glass bottles into her neck and cheeks in forceful upward motions. The candlelight illuminated what seemed to be scars covering one side of her face, pink raised streaks across her chest like ribbons. Her breasts were rounder at the bottoms, her nipples more assertive than my mother’s, pointing sidewise and brown. Her stomach was smooth like fine-spread frosting on a cake and her white hair was pulled into a bun and secured with long obsidian chopsticks.

  “Your balls are as soft as a little bird,” she said into the phone. “No birds? You don’t like birds, okay, writing that down, forgive me, never again.”

  I could have watched her all night. Was this what my mother did when she was here, sit at a wooden vanity, topless on the phone talking like this? Daisy’s voice seemed to command something. It wasn’t what she said exactly, but how she said it, as if there were chamber after chamber of secret meaning behind each word and only she held the particular knowledge
of what anything meant. The recipient was along for her ride, not the other way around.

  Now in the mirror, Daisy’s eyes met mine. A smile crept across her lips. I felt embarrassed for her nakedness but she didn’t make a move to cover herself. “Okay, I’m going to give you one big squeeze and I want you to blast all over my tits, yeah, or my face, baby,” she said, still looking at me. A laugh lit up her eyes. “My beautiful, perfect, gorgeous face.” She knew her face wasn’t beautiful, not in the way the man was picturing it, and the joke belonged to her.

  I turned and put my back against the hallway wall. The image of her speaking this way on the phone. Why was it so entrancing? It was sin, but still I wanted to keep looking. Her voice was a poem.

  She poked her head out the door and pulled me into the room, closing it behind us. She threw on a black sheer silk kimono. “I sensed you coming,” she said. “I swear I can see the future since he burned me. Gave me some magic powers, I’d like to think.”

  “Who’s he?” I asked.

  “Oh,” she said, surprised. “Your mother really wasn’t much of a gossip. Well, it’s a long story, I won’t bore you with it.”

  “My mother never told me anything about you. Or this place. It was her secret assignment.”

  “I pictured you older-looking,” she said, appraising me. “But you have her face. You walk the same way, too, like you’re not sure where you’re going.”

  “My grandma Cherry says I have the face of a truck driver.”

  “I’ll let you in on a secret,” Daisy said. “You’re going to be really pretty someday, and she can’t stand it. Don’t you have any intuition, kid, or do you just believe what people tell you about your own self?”

  She watched as I looked at the jagged raw-cut pink and jade crystals lining her desk, like the ones my mother had taken to collecting. “Let the crystal pick you.”

  “I don’t believe in that stuff,” I said.

  She twirled a clear oblong wand between her fingers. Held it up. “Selenite. Keeps the bad away.”

  She tried to hand it to me but I stepped back. “It’s because of you and this place she started drinking again. She never would have if it wasn’t for you.”

  Daisy sat on her pink velvet chair. A fan blew a few wispy bleached hairs around her face. One of her eyes was white all the way through, and I saw clearly then that the portrait in the entryway was of her. “Your mother’s got that emptiness inside her and she’s gonna fill it with something. Drink, church, men. Always switching seats on the Titanic.”

  “No one else will help me.”

  “What happened here?” Daisy said, pointing at my crotch. I looked down and saw there was more blood than I thought. Saw that my life was so different than it was just a month ago when my mother was still teetering on the edge of disaster but still here at least. We still completed our days together, some idea of the future ahead. Now the future was this and I hated it. Blood had smudged onto my thighs. The yellow bikini didn’t hide it at all.

  “People underestimate young girls but they never should,” she said when I didn’t answer. “I look at my own daughter—you saw her there downstairs—and I realize I don’t know her experience at all. She doesn’t tell me a thing. And why should she? If I’d have told my mother what I was up to at her age she’d have taken me outside and shot me.”

  “My mother has no idea what she’s done to me.”

  She took a light pink kimono off a hook near her vanity and draped it over my shoulders. I felt immediately comforted by its feel, its vanilla scent. “Is this one hundred percent polyester?” I asked.

  Daisy scoffed. It was not. Silk at last, I thought, fingering its fineness.

  “Your mother’s not in good standing with me, either, I guess we have something in common.” Daisy drank from a tall thin glass bottle. Water. My desire pulled at me. “Broke my number one rule. She let one of these fools convince her he was gonna make her a real star. I told her they all like to promise that. If I had a cent for every man who heard my honey-whipped-cream voice and told me I could make it on the screen I’d be rich.”

  “So you know where she is?”

  Daisy took her hair out of its bun and respun it in one motion, tying it in a knot. “Well. I know the phone number of the caller who stopped calling so much the day your mama went bye-bye, and that’s all.”

  “The Turquoise Cowboy,” I said.

  “But giving it to you would be far against our confidentiality clause. We’re a clean business above all else.”

  “Please,” I said.

  She pulled me closer by the belt of the kimono. “Tell me why you came here barefoot and bleeding.”

  I shook my head.

  “If I had to guess I’d say you’ve been with a man,” she said. “Or a man’s been with you.”

  I felt myself about to cry, just like I hadn’t wanted to. Crying was an exhausting pursuit and I’d done so much of it by now. I’d proven its worthlessness.

  She took my hand. She squeezed. “Whatever’s happened to you can either make you beautiful, or it will ruin you forever. You decide.”

  I pulled my hand back. “I’m not beautiful.”

  “I don’t mean beautiful like you’re thinking. I mean beautiful. I mean, deep and changed. Affected. Wise. When you see a woman like that, you know. She’s beautiful because of her undoing. Beautiful because she rebirthed herself from ashes.”

  “Are you a woman like that?”

  She smiled, looked at her call log, penciled something in. “My own mother was a traveling psychic and had no clairvoyant talent whatsoever. You can imagine how deranged she was. But if she had left me I would have walked through high desert and low river just to drag her back to me by the hair.”

  She pressed her fingers into the thick scars on her cheek. Lifted the bottle to take another drink, but stopped short. “You want something, you gotta ask for it. Staring like a sad pup won’t get you anyplace.” She tilted the water toward me. Everything in me wanted to reach out and take it. I didn’t move. Finally she gave up and took a drink, set the bottle down. “It’s time for you to go.”

  But I didn’t want to go. I wanted always to be under her gaze. I was spellbound then, thinking if I stayed near this woman she would lead me to my mother.

  “Let me work here,” I said. As soon as it came out my body registered it as desire, awful and wild. “I’ll clean for you, or I can help with the front desk. Whatever you want.” And I can find out where my mother is, I thought but didn’t say. My eyes twitched around the room, looking for a call log maybe, some envelope of answers.

  “I have enough help,” she said. But I saw her crack a little. The house was not full of women as I’d imagined, phones ringing off the hook. It felt a little deserted, even.

  “I’m a woman,” I said. “I can take calls. I can do anything a woman can do.”

  “You’re a woman?”

  “Of course. I bleed. I know what there is to know.”

  I remembered my mother small-talking about weird sexual positions and fetishes and how at the time it had made my face burn, but not now, after what had happened to me. Now things were only things. Words only words. I thought I saw Daisy’s expression soften.

  “What about all my mother’s clients?” I went on. “You must need someone to replace her. And I can sound like her. Sure. I can be her no problem.” I threw my head back like my mother did in the mirror, opened my eyes halfway, and peered at Daisy with what felt like my mother’s gaze. How strange it was to become her, but there was something natural about it, as if she had lived within me all along and had just woken up.

  “The reason I started doing this work in the first place,” Daisy said, “is because men on the phone can’t beat you around. They can’t touch you at all if you’re looking to not be touched. And here’s the secret. It’s not really about sex. It’s about connection. I like to think of myself as more of a therapist than a therapist. These men can’t say this stuff to their therapist. This is
the last house on the block in terms of total authenticity.”

  She handed me a card. DAISY DARNELLE, it read. AIN’T NOTHING FINER THAN A CALL WITH A DIVINER.

  “All that to say, it’s not as easy as you think.”

  I picked up her bottle of water and finished it. I told her I’d be back the next day, and the day after, waiting for her to say yes.

  Chapter 9

  But the next day arrived and it was time for Bible study.

  DENAY LIVED IN a small tract home in a grouping that was built when I was a baby in the hope that Peaches could grow into something bigger. Farming families moved in and so did Fresno families who had no idea where their produce came from at all, but wanted a taste of that country life, somewhere to have chickens in their backyard, a small horse for birthday parties. The homes here all looked the same, all a beige stucco style with high pillars standing guard in front of unimpressive front doors with broken screens that didn’t quite fit the frames. Tuscany can be yours! the faded sign read out front. Now Denay’s father was barely making it as a checker at the Pac, his raisin days long gone. But they wouldn’t leave. Being of Vern’s church was its own vocation.

  The door opened. Denay’s eyelids were shellacked in heavy gold glitter. Her boobs stuck out and I could tell she was wearing two bras. “Listen,” she said, blocking my entry. “I’d rather if we just didn’t mention your mom at all. I’m on a real good track right now with God and I can’t have you bringing any weirdness in here.”

  “I have an assignment,” I said.

  “My daddy says there’s two kinds of assignments,” Denay said, leaning in close. “Important ones that actually mean something, and ones that are just to keep folks busy.”

  “What sort did you get?” I asked.