Godshot Page 9

  She moved aside to let me in, eyeing me. I flopped down on the big pleather sectional that took up most of their living room. A big-screen TV was cockeyed on the wall and a blanket featuring a huge lifelike embroidery of Vern’s face her mother had made was strewn across a recliner that matched the couch. I used to be jealous of Denay’s big house and all their nice things but today everything looked wrong next to my memory of the red house. Denay’s mother’s collection of unused Bath and Body Works candles, her apron that hung in the kitchen that said WINE O’CLOCK, the worn gray carpeting—it all seemed fake and cheap and stupid. I had touched velvets, I had seen the gleam of hardwood floors, cowhide rug underfoot.

  “Don’t tempt me, Lacey May. Jesus.” Denay smoothed the Vern blanket. I thought she might wrap herself in it even in this heat to show off her dedication, but she didn’t. She sat next to me.

  I wanted to tell her I felt like I was going crazy in this heat and was she? Was she? Had anyone laid over her and how did it make her feel?

  Taffy walked in, no knocking like she lived here, wearing a cropped top and white jean shorts. She was petite, and I could put my chin on top of her head if I wanted. Her blond hair was thin and wispy as a baby’s.

  “We were talking about assignments,” Denay said. She cast a look to Taffy and I knew they had discussed more than they were saying now. Taffy smiled. Leaned back in the recliner right on top of the blanket.

  “My mother would still be here if it wasn’t for her assignment,” I said.

  “I hope you’re not blaming Vern,” Denay said.

  “Hers was probably the hardest, biggest assignment there was,” I said.

  “If that even was her assignment,” Denay said. “Some folks think she just went crazy and started working there all on her own. Can’t stop a true-born whore, some might say.”

  My mind flickered to my mother’s world. Ain’t nothin’ finer . . .

  “Do like me and don’t question every little thing to death,” Taffy said. “Just focus on your assignment and it’ll all work out.” She patted her flat stomach. “I’m hungry. Your mom make anything? No food around my house. My daddy said it’s depression times. I was like, I ain’t depressed. Make me a frozen pizza.”

  A stand-up fan wobbled in the corner of the room but it was no match for the heat of Peaches pressing into us from outside. I sucked sweat from my upper lip and missed the way I used to be with Denay and Taffy before the drought, how the only land we were concerned with was the plains and hills of our bodies. Denay would pull us into her small bedroom and perform a sort of puberty roll call: we took down our pants and stood leg to leg to leg looking at one another and ourselves, how I had hardly any garden growing, how Denay was the clear winner with a thick brown hedge, and how Taffy had long blondish fur collecting like the underchin of a kitten. We never spoke of it out loud, the way we would examine and appraise and then pull our pants back up or smooth skirts back down, fasten bra hooks and close the sights up inside our minds for next time when we would compare again.

  “My mom said I’m not allowed to give anything away,” Denay said. “Just think about how skinny you’ll get and be blessed.”

  Bottles of water lined the wall in the kitchen. I wondered if I could steal one without her noticing.

  “We had those before everything,” Denay said, watching me. “Don’t even think about taking one.”

  I peeled my sweaty thighs off the sectional and went to the bathroom down the hall, past the mural of decorations Denay’s mother crafted by hand, painted wood planks that said, In this house we do forgiveness and We will serve Vern. I sat on the toilet and tried to look at myself. Did I look different? It didn’t seem so. I ached. I always expected sex would happen years from now, with my husband, a man I loved. A man I had seen from across the church, maybe someone new to town but rich in faith. But not my own cousin. I wanted it to have been the exact right thing but then why wasn’t God granting me His peace?

  Then my mother was in my mind, but this time we were with Sapphire Earrings on the side of the road where his car had broken down. He was taking us to Mexico, where he could buy “drugs, so many drugs,” but we barely made it an hour outside of Peaches and my mother and I wandered the aisles of an air-conditioned Long’s while we waited for a tow and I saw a postcard that said, The greatest happiness you can have is knowing that you do not necessarily require happiness. “William Saroyan,” my mother read over my shoulder. She smacked her gum. “Didn’t know what he was talking about.”

  But this idea had stuck to me for some reason and I thought of it again now. Perhaps the chase of happiness was only a trap to pull us further from God. I wasn’t happy in this life but what did that matter when faced with eternity? This was the big question. Was anything really worth an eternity apart from our church family?

  I walked out to Denay and Taffy. Seeing them huddled together on the couch, I had the sensation that I was watching my own life go on without me. I wasn’t quite here with them like I had been before. I was different now. The feeling felt repulsive in a way, but under that was something else. I didn’t let myself dwell on it. I joined them and we read aloud to one another from our Bibles and I went back to being a good member of the Body, Daisy in the rearview. And I knew people on the outside of the church wouldn’t understand how I could stay instead of leave, withstand instead of run. I would say those people have never been under the hand of a bad thing so bad it can start to seem good.

  Chapter 10

  Cherry dragged me to the Pac N’ Save so I could watch her hand over her very own money for the groceries that fattened me. “You could use a lesson in gratitude,” she’d said that morning. “I want you to watch an old lady pinch her pennies and see how much you like them greasy canned pigs feet after that.”

  The Pac N’ Save could no longer afford to stock bottled water or fresh produce and all that littered the aisles were canned goods and the occasional bag of corn chips. They could not afford to keep the freezers running, so gone were the TV dinners, the syrupy half-melted popsicles. It looked like the whole place was an empty warehouse temporarily being used for a food drive. Buying the water of another town is like a slap in the face to God! Vern had said to us. To me. I felt his eyes on us all around.

  She filled her cart with canned whatever. Whatever was there was fine enough for us, she kept muttering. Canned whole chicken, canned scorpion, three cans of fish mouths.

  “You aren’t gonna eat any of these,” I said. I remembered the square meals she used to cook for Sunday lunch, hot piles of mashed potatoes, asparagus in olive oil, roast so soft it melted from bone. I threw a canned cheeseburger on the pile and my stomach clenched in craving for the real thing.

  “These is famine-of-Egypt times,” she said. “I’ll eat you if you don’t watch out.”

  I walked ahead of her and scanned the town bulletin board. Ads for babysitters and dog walkers and an old depressing faded ad for toddler swim classes. What I wouldn’t give to wade in a pool. Grampa Jackie used to complain about Fresno, how almost every house had not only a pool but a sprinkler system that sprayed water over clean-cut front yards rich with grass that nary a child ever played on, and sometimes the sprinkler would be broken and the water would just be spraying the concrete, flooding the street, and no one stopped it. No one caught the water in buckets and worshipped it, but let it dry on the asphalt under the unrelenting sun. Sick, he would say, as if he were talking about murder.

  When we turned down the next aisle there was old Gentry Roo standing with an empty basket in one arm, his other arm outstretched as if reaching for something. He was frozen, it seemed, his eyes fixed on the nothing or everything that lay before him. Long legs in his pale cornflower jeans, torn at the knees and hitched high on his hips, a checkered cotton shirt buttoned up to his chin, the sleeves cut off leaving a raw hem, an amethyst bolo tie around his neck. He was hatless today, and his white hair was yellowed in places, combed over a sun-beaten scalp. His lips were creamy in th
e corners. Thirst was an easy ailment to spot.

  “I’m caught in the devil’s grasp,” he said finally. He still didn’t look at us directly. “A little help?”

  Cherry went to him and placed her hand on his arm and his head fell. Sweat hung in teardrops from his earlobes like little diamonds. Grampa Jackie would have been about the same age, I figured.

  “Now. Gentry,” Cherry said. She put a hand to his forehead. “Think you might just need a drink of water?”

  “I haven’t been drinking any,” he said. “Just like I was told.”

  I handed Cherry a pop-tab can of peaches in syrup and she pulled the top off and handed it to him. He drank the can steadily until the juice was gone and then we watched him eat the slippery peaches one by one, his tongue slow like a thick fish. “My, oh, my,” he said. “I’ve seen the light.”

  “We best be on now,” Cherry said.

  “Wait,” he said. He lurched forward and pushed his hand against my forehead. His palm was cold against me. He closed his eyes and the lids fluttered. “She’s been chosen,” he said.

  Cherry scrambled up close to him. Laid hands to his arm to catch the foresight that had become him. “Anything about me?”

  “This one,” he said. “Chosen.”

  I stepped back and his eyes shot open, such pale blue circles. “Don’t be a fool,” he said to me, so clear and clipped, nothing like his slow take-your-time voice. It reminded me of a parrot. Don’t be a fool, Don’t be a fool.

  Cherry was annoyed and pulled me out by the wrist, leaving our canned goods behind. She arranged dirty towels over the scalding leather seats of the hearse and plopped down. “He could have told us something we didn’t know, like how many more days of this. Or maybe what color my Mercedes-Benz is in heaven. How high I can pump that air-conditioning.”

  I buckled up but I felt shaken and a little angry. I wished God would tell me what to do himself, not through the mouth of a man.

  “Once we’re in heaven all this will be worth it,” she said. “I’m going to have one of those leather purses with the LVs all over it and a mansion with a swan swimming in a swan pool in the backyard.”

  “Will you swim with the swan?”

  Cherry snorted. “The swan is for looks. It’s to tell people, I’m so rich I got a pool just for a swan.” She drummed the steering wheel. Silence folded over us for a short time and the hot air of the car began to make me tired. She yawned. “Sometimes I don’t want to go home,” she said. “When I was a kid I used to imagine I was in a coma and I was just dreaming all the things around me, that my real family was standing over my body in a hospital bed saying, Cherry, Cherry, wake up! That’s a weird thing for a kid to be thinking, ain’t it?”

  “I don’t think it’s too weird,” I said.

  She put her hand in mine and held it. “The closest to a real family I ever felt was after Vern came here and gathered us all up. Made us care about one another. Before him I was just drifting along.” My instinct was to pull away but I grasped on to her anyhow.

  “He wants the best for each of us, I do believe that,” she went on. “It’s a relief, ain’t it? Knowing someone’s got your life in his hands.”

  I looked at her wrinkled, sun-painted face. Her face like this, soft and sad, always did remind me of my mother’s.

  TIME HAD PASSED in an odd way after my mother left, fast yet slow, day running into night creating the feeling of one continuous day that never really ended or began. I needed her I needed her. It was not even the fantasy that things had been great when she was around, because that didn’t matter. I needed her body next to mine to remind me of my own. I don’t know why I loved her the way I did, in this aching way that could not be explained, other than she was my mother. There was no reason beyond that.

  The temperature never cooled, never offered relief, and then somehow it was mid-August, time for school to start again. I waited outside the gate that bordered the classroom trailers until the last moment before I had to go in. A huge SUV sailed into the parking lot like a boat, a pop song about undeniable California girls blaring from the speakers.

  The cheer girls got out one by one, their knee-length blue skirts rolled at the waist so their periwinkle undies could be seen. I was surprised they were coming back to Peaches Valley High at all. It wouldn’t last long, I knew. But it seemed the drought hadn’t touched them, still probably having cookouts with Costco hot dogs and jugs of corn syrup limeade, showering at their granny’s house in the right county. Their legs long, muscles cut in a line down their thighs. Ribbons perched high on their heads. Some of them were part-time believers, but they didn’t come to our church. They liked to say our church wasn’t actually Christian at all, didn’t follow the true words of the Bible, didn’t believe in grace, and didn’t know the real Jesus, like he was just a nice casual guy we were refusing to meet. Cult, they called us, their sterling silver crosses swinging around their necks.

  But Vern liked to remind us that they didn’t know that true belief meant giving your whole self away and that anything short of that was just a hobby. They wore their faith like a loose sash they could put on and take off when the moment struck them. Some went to the Journey, a big warehouse church in Fresno County, and attended Rage every Friday night, where a Christian rock band did worship and couples made out behind the building while the cool young pastor played video games with the boys. It sounded both useless and intriguing, a place where it seemed no one had to earn God’s approval and where salvation was handed out like a participation ribbon.

  “Spacey Lacey,” Farley Sampson said. She was the head cheerleader and a Rage girl. She loved God in the way you might love chocolate sundaes. “Meet any spirit fairies in the sky this summer?”

  “An eternity’s a long time,” I said. “Are you prepared?”

  She rolled her eyes. Took out a bottle of Crystal Geyser water from her backpack and drank it slowly. Her tiny silver cross necklace glinted in the sun. I wanted her to pull me into her SUV and haul me out of Peaches then, lead me to a simple life where the drought was something you heard about on the news but didn’t connect to your actual life. The rest of the squad crowded around her, pressing powder from black MAC compacts into sweaty foreheads, smearing their lips in sparkly Oh Baby gloss.

  “Can I try that powder?” I said. I knew it was nice makeup, much more expensive than anything in my mother’s makeup bag. But they had already forgotten about me, huddled together. I was invisible.

  I scanned the parking lot for Denay or Taffy, but they weren’t there. I walked to the edge of the gate where Laramie Stam’s red truck tore down the road, Lyle and some of the boys’ club standing up in the bed, puff-chested like ship guides. Lyle wore rolled-up jean overalls with a black torn shirt underneath, new white cowboy boots, and his hair was combed back in a smooth wave, his teeth a wet shine. He looked more alive than ever. More vibrant. I hated that he reminded me of the photograph of my mother that hung in Cherry’s entryway, her arms out as if about to take flight, the flat stretch of land behind her, all teeth and pulled-back eyes. Like her, Lyle smiled up at the sky and reached his arms out, captain of the world. Family was a strange idea, how it connected us by appearance, locking us to one another through similar noses, cheekbones, smirks. I hated that Lyle looked like my mother.

  The truck breezed past me. I opened my mouth and tasted dust. They parked in the last row and Lyle jumped out. He clapped Laramie on the back and then he turned. Came toward me.

  He had taken a cool distance from me since the shed. He’d been busy, so busy, with Vern. I hadn’t seen him up close since it happened, and my body responded: I held my breath. I pulled my dress down. My legs clenched together and my jaw was a trap.

  “Coming in?” he said.

  “I need Vern to tell me himself that what we did was right,” I said.

  “Did you think your whole life would remain the same forever?”

  “I wish I could just go in there and be normal and not have to think abo
ut the drought or any of this,” I said. “Like Farley Sampson. I wish I could be her. No cares at all.”

  “You think stooping as low as an infidel is gonna bring anything good? You wouldn’t dig through a trash can to get to a steak at the bottom, would you?”

  He brushed past me, entwining his pinky with mine before he went, just for a split second, so fast I couldn’t be sure it had happened.

  I looked at the school one more time and a nervous laugh came out of me. I just wouldn’t go. I’d always gone but now I wouldn’t. I took backward steps away, waited for someone to run out and grab me but there was no one. The world didn’t operate on the rules I’d once thought it did.

  I RAN ALONG the fence until it ended and I paused to catch my breath. A car idled next to me. It was Pearl.

  “Geary came by and asked why I didn’t take you in, as if it’s expected for the sister of the sinner to make everything right. I’ll have you know, missy, I’ve got a lot on my plate. I’m working overtime at the post and I’ve got Lyle as my very own son, lighting matches and invoking the Holy Ghost in his own room all the night.”

  Pearl seemed a strange apparition then, a version of my mother, but not my mother. A cellular twin of a kind, but the traits were scrambled on Pearl and not of comfort to me. She told me to get in.

  She smelled of heavy chemical perfume and wore pearl earrings, her trademark, what a surprise. I smelled her wine seeping from her skin, the bitter twang of noble rot, cinnamon Altoids working to cover. I could turn her in right now, couldn’t I? Why wasn’t she afraid of meeting the same end as my mother? She turned down her Amy Grant CD.

  “Your mother used to skip all the time. She’d hitchhike into Fresno and do God knows what. Once she ended up out at Motel Drive calling me from a pay phone. She thought there was a real audition for a teen dream soap out there. That’s what kind of girl she was. A dummy.”

  Motel Drive, I hardly remembered ever passing it, the low-ceilinged row of motels, the flickering neon signs. Women leaning over the railings, leaning into car windows. One hour rates, the sign said, and I’d wondered who needed a hotel for just one hour, but I didn’t ask my mother, and she kept her eyes on the road. Now I knew all that could happen in an hour.