Darcey Steinke - Jesus Saves

“Is anyone in there?” Steve asked.

“Her mother,” the girl said. “Her father lives in a different state with some other woman.”

The light went on in the second-floor window. Beyond the sheer curtains Ginger could see the edge of a double bed and a long, low chest with a portable TV on top. The curtain floated up and the round anxious face of a woman hovered there in the dark pane of glass.

“Shit,” Steve said. “Let's get the fuck out of here.”

Ted skidded up the road. The girl started to cry and said that Sandy was the nicest girl, that there was always something kind of sad about her, that sometimes she wore the same skirt all week and her tops and bottoms didn't always match and sometimes too, when she was nervous, she stuttered. “God,” the girl screamed, “I can't stand it!”

There was no fire, just glowing embers giving off a hazy orange light, though it was still easy to see the deer's head balanced on top of the TV. Ted had dragged the TV from the dump and set it up at the edge of the fire. All the knobs were missing and the screen was smashed out. Inside, a metal board with Japanese writing and a lattice of multicolored wires snaked this way and that. He carved a hole into the top of the deer's head with his jackknife and stuck in a red flare, kept for emergencies in the trunk of his car. The pink flame was low now, directly above the fur, like a Pentecostal fire. Ginger was thinking the deer was the last one left and there was no doubt it did have an apocalyptic look, the way wax spilled onto the fur and thickened blood dripped over the edges of the television. But the thought was crazy; there were thousands of deer, maybe millions.

While the others had taken the flashlight and gone to look for more firewood, Ginger went out to pee around back in the safe spot of feather moss and butter fern, where she'd never seen a snake and there was no poison ivy. She walked down the pressed-dirt path, past the sumac grove and the dead cat in the open box, its skeleton delicate as a chalk math problem. In the woods she lifted her skirt and squatted, listened to the sound of her urine hitting leaves, then walked to where a cushionless couch was set up around a cold campfire. Burnt Bud cans. Blackened angles of wood. The low-lying mist clung to the weeds, made her feel dreamy, and she threw herself down on a safe-looking patch of grass and thought of the deer, how it hovered above the hood in the sliver of sky between the dark tree line on either side of the road. It was the earth's spinning that made it seem to pause and float.

An airplane's red lights divided the splatter of stars and she could feel the bright eyes of angels in the icy constellations and sense a sort of second-place grace spreading over her. Wind rocked the leaves, made her shiver and curl up sideways with an ear to the earth. There was the rumbling of the highway, but then behind her what sounded like a footstep, a crackle of dry leaves; a twig snapped. She pushed herself up into a monkey squat, turned toward the barn, thought of yelling for Ted. But if she spoke the devil would come after her, fierce as a rabid bat. If he was watching her now, there were a hundred places he could hide. She felt the thick lips of her pussy still flushed and filled with blood.

A strip of light, radiant as a fluorescent tube, shone up from under the closed door, illuminating the edge of the bare mattress, her bound ankles, pale blood-starved feet, the toenails like lavender shells. Millions of dust particles swirled around, made her feel like a tiny figure inside a glass dome, where the miniature scene never changes and specks of white plastic careen around sublime as real snow.

The cat raised its sleepy head, looked with indifference toward the door, then, satisfied no one was coming down the hall, shifted its belly and walked over her, hip to rib to shoulder bone, as if these were raised rocks and her flesh a riverbed. Crouching, it tongued her ear, with sly little strokes that resounded roughly through the cartilage. Sometimes the cat chewed her hair, and at first, before she learned to keep her eyes shut, it had batted her lashes as if they were spiders.

She listened to the rain behind the boarded window, the TV downstairs, and for any sound of his presence among these. The laugh track rose and fell and she heard him hack, clear the petal of phlegm from his throat, shift his weight on the couch. She sensed his anticipation, obvious and uncomfortable as summertime humidity. It was nearly time, and she needed to let the seconds build to minutes, the minutes to hours, listening to the fly trapped inside the ceiling fixture buzz hysterically against the glass.

He stood, took one step, then another. She pressed her ear to the mattress, felt the muscles in her neck harden and separate. The steps varied in cadence from carpet to wood to bathroom tiles, then stopped. She heard the stream of his pee, first hard, then softer until he flushed and the water swirled down the drain. He jiggled the handle until the tank started to fill up. Drops of urine flooded her vagina; pee trickled between her legs, puddling in the crack of her rear, then soaked through the fabric of her nightgown into the bare mattress. The smell of urine tightened her stomach muscles, stretched her nightgown up like a tent between her hip bones. She struggled to wiggle her butt off the damp spot. It was okay, she said to herself, it didn't really mean anything. I am still the same person. She tried to move again, but each time, the cord that ran under the mattress forced her back into the cold pee.

Somewhere downstairs a washing machine rattled to life, must be from the little room, off the kitchen, the one her mother called the mud room, where a table, covered with detergent granules and single socks, stood across from the Maytags. There was a shopping bag overflowing with puffs of blue dryer lint and a freezer filled with frozen hamburger meat. Her mother had put in a late load and she tried to separate the sound of the engine from the thumping cadence of wet clothes. She was lying in her bedroom half asleep, listening to the rotating water downstairs and to the music box on her nightstand, watching the ballerina twirl around slowly. She called her Elena, a name she thought Russian and sophisticated. The dancer was the size of her pinkie, with a tiny brown bun, pink toe shoes, and a little satin skirt that covered the top of her white legs. Her stuffed animals, that napped all day on the yellow gingham pillow, were displaced now, strewn into the alley-way between her bed and the wall. Each one had a name, a personality all its own, but in the dark it was only their eyes, toxic green or red, that shone up at her and made each seem like tiny sinister strangers.

She felt the blueprint of her house around her, a phantom sensation, hard to throw off because she wasn't in her own bedroom, but held hostage in this room with its wood-paneled walls, brown boxes stacked in one corner and a colonial chair. This room could be anywhere, maybe in one of the Main Street mansions downtown. She'd always thought of them, white or butter-colored with round turrets and generous front porches, as somewhat ominous. Most had turned into boardinghouses, the big rooms cheaply remodeled into drywall apartments, where dazed-looking people in sleeveless T-shirts and cheap vinyl shoes sat all day long looking out the window. Or maybe it was one of those ratty condominiums out by the airport. A boy at school told her prostitutes and drug dealers lived there. Once she heard the big globular sound of a water cooler and figured she was being held in one of the half-empty glass office buildings along the highway. Other times she thought she'd been pulled through a portal into another dimension, that this room was underground, that the man with the white beard was the devil and this her particular hell.