Darcey Steinke - Jesus Saves

Used to be she could talk herself down by recounting unfathomable odds, imagine one bottle cap on a whole beach full of sand or a tiny star a million light-years away. She didn't know anybody who'd died in a plane crash, or even a car crash. But then she did know a girl who'd been raped — some old guy trapped her in a Hardee's bathroom and did it to her in the stall — and then last summer a dead girl was found floating in the man-made lake. Every night for a week, the local news showed a close-up of a tattoo on her thigh, a red cross encircled with blue ivy. The mushy water-soaked skin broke apart like wet paper. No one ever came to identify her and Ginger overheard someone at church say she was probably a prostitute from California, one of those throw-away types nobody cared whether they lived or died.

Then there was Sandy Patrick. Xeroxed copies of her school picture were up on the bulletin board at the supermarket, taped inside store windows at the mall, even on the occasional light pole along the highway. Ginger had studied the girl's face, her stiff smile and worried eyes. It was the sort of expression Ginger associated with trying to be cheerful when you really want to cry. Just last week somebody found a photograph in a convenience-store parking lot the next state over. An underexposed Polaroid showed Sandy lying on a mattress, her arms tied behind her back, black electrical tape sealing her mouth. Her eyes were closed, so it was hard to tell whether she was dead or just sleeping.

What was taking so long? She saw bits and pieces of ranch houses through the thin strip of woods, sliding doors tinted blue with TV light, bright kitchen windows and murkier bedroom ones. Ted stood in a shadowed patch of trees and she watched his dark silhouette. His hand moved up to his mouth, the tip of the cigarette brightened from orange to red. Probably covering the deer with dead leaves and broken branches, that would be like him, trying to give the thing some dignity. Better than anybody she knew, he understood ritual, how it made you feel better and appeased the gods.

She watched him stand and walk through the trees toward the car. Dried leaves rattled and he broke from the woods and skittered up the slope carrying something white that held light like a sheer scarf. Ginger swung the door open for him and slid over to the passenger side. He leaned in, laid the plastic shopping bag gently beside her, then sat down and started the car, pushed in the lighter, clicked on the radio, fiddled with the dial until he got the metal station, and turned the music up loud. Metallica cranked. His expression was strained and there was something false and dramatic in the way he pulled his Marlboros from his jacket pocket and knocked out a cigarette, matched the tip with the orange coils of the car lighter. Blood was smeared on the bag and she could see the strands of brown fur pushed against plastic. The deer's face came to her slowly, as if rising from polluted water. He pulled the car onto the road and made a wide U-turn back toward the highway.

“You are one sick fuck,” she said as she picked up the bloody bag, twisted around, and threw it behind her. The tip of one bony antler rubbed against her wrist. The severed head bounced on the backseat and landed with a fleshy thud on the rubber floor mat. Ted's face was flushed and his thick keloid scar filled with blood.

He patted her knee and tried to say something but his speech was slurred, garbled like it had been right after his accident, before he adjusted to the new angle of his jaw and the knotty scar tissue embedded in the soft inside of his cheek. When he came to in the hospital, his face was a collage of gauze and purple bruises. In baby talk he told how the night had been so cold everything was covered with a fine geometric frost. And right before he passed out, his breath became so solid and white, he thought his soul was escaping. But the particulars, where he'd gotten the gun, why he'd been driving around at five in the morning, and who'd been with him, these things he refused to tell her.

“Well, aren't you going to say anything?” she asked.

“About what?”

“That thing,” she motioned to the backseat. Ginger waited to see if he'd answer, but Ted's face was blank and unreadable. The car got quiet; each atom of air grew sullen and mysterious. They passed Orchard Brook Mall. It was an ugly building, the moon a better place for it, not that it was modern but because of its windowless melancholy. And there wasn't a stream in sight, unless they were referring to the drainage ditch along the highway. Ginger had spent her entire adolescence roaming around the fountain and plastic plants, breathing the endlessly recycled air.

Behind the mall the old highway looped downtown toward the boarded-up movie theater, vacant storefronts, and the drugstore that sold porno videos, three for ten dollars. There was still a drive-thru bank and Bamberg's, a big failing department store where heavily made-up ladies sold strange, antiquated merchandise like panty girdles and dusty, cat-eyed sunglasses. Ted turned right, accelerated past the endless parade of strip-mall franchises — the Western Sizzler, Domino's Pizza, and Blockbuster video — then turned down the dirt road toward the dump. The tires bounced over mud holes, past riprap and loamy back fill. Headlights shined over the kudzu-covered maples, made each leaf look shellacked. He stopped near a grove of burnt-out tree stumps and turned off the engine. He got out and opened the back door, lifted the deer's head, and carried the bag with two hands, solemn and ceremonial as an acolyte. She followed him down the hard dirt path, past a pile of tread-bare tires and the carcass of a water-stained mattress. There was smaller stuff too, cracked plastic toys, one like a car's dashboard with a tiny rubber steering wheel. Bits of paper scattered over everything like dreary confetti.

The barn came into sight. “Everything will be cool once I get it all set up,” he said, already way in front of her, stomping fast in long, loose strides, leaving her alone in a fairy circle of greasy-looking trees.

She pulled one sweaty leg out from under the sleeping bag. Ginger had it since grade school and the material, faded pink gingham on one side and powder blue flannel on the other, smelled faintly of sweat. The ceiling creaked above as her father shifted in his sleep. Saturday nights were always restless for him and lately he was upset about the trustees at church. Last week, she went upstairs to use the bathroom in the middle of the night and found him sitting in the family room reading his Bible by the television's muted light.

She pulled her pillow over her head. Some nights she felt more dead than others. Last winter Ted's tires locked on a patch of ice and they'd skidded into the guardrail. Afterward she'd felt dead, as if she'd passed over to the other side. She felt this way again because of the deer. Like they'd all died. Father. Son. Holy Ghost. They'd been crooked and devious in their paths so their paths led down into death.

The furnace kicked on and the house shook as all the vents jiggled to life. The basement was crowded with damp boxes of family memorabilia stacked on boards in case of flooding. Blue dryer lint clung to every surface and spiders meditated in the corners. Her father's old jazz records leaned against one wall; plastic toys on metal shelves filled up another. Even in the dark she recognized her doll Kimmie, her toy cash register, and the telephone with the eyes that swayed this way and that.

Ever since her mother died nobody slept deeply. Just after the operation, her mother lay in bed, watched TV, read from pamphlets on breast reconstruction, on living with cancer. She cried, sometimes quietly, but usually she'd cry and scream and yell about how she wasted her life, that all the women in the Ladies Guild could go to hell if they didn't like the way she dressed. God was nothing to her and the idea of redemption was bullshit. She never swore, so when she did, it was like a demon inside her. She didn't believe in God anymore. The body, she'd say over and over, was just shit and you can't turn shit into anything else. Liquid built up inside the stitches and when they changed the gauze, it was wet and fetid.