Darcey Steinke - Jesus Saves

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Steve sat in front of the fire in the barn, knees to his chest, shoulders straight, the position of Indian forefathers in museum dioramas. It was a small fire started with newspaper stoked with broken branches and an old tree stump. Flames encased them in red light and reflected in the snaggletoothed pieces of glass left along the edges of the TV screen. She could tell by Steve's swollen features that he was drunk and by his wide, dilated pupils that he'd recently snorted lots of cocaine. In front of him was a fairy circle of white plastic carnations and fallen feathers, in the center a carefully folded blood-soaked rag, the hospital's name stamped along the hem.

Ted's flushed face was weirdly translucent as he flipped the blanket up and spread it over the barn's dirt floor.

“Your dad was in the hospital today giving communion to some old lady.” Steve squinted his eyes, as if trying to squeeze out tiny tear bullets that would pockmark Ginger's face. Ted grabbed her hand; it was a warning that Steve was in one of his crazy moods.

“What a bunch of shit.” He poked the fire with a stick.

“Lay off her,” Ted said. “She hurt her ankle.”

“Fuck her ankle.” Steve stood up, his spit hissing on the embers. “What about all that shit she said to you in the mall?” He pointed at her.

Ginger felt her face flare up, her heart pound against her ribs. He's going to kill me, she thought, and Ted won't do a thing.

In the backseat Ted arranged the army blanket and the peony pillows from his bed. Everything he owned was in the car and Ginger could tell by the fast-food wrappers on the floor and the half-filled plastic gallon of springwater that here's where he'd been hiding out. She got under the blanket and put her bad leg up on the armrest. Ted made the rounds, the long gray parking lots, the dark fast-food chains, and the strips of ratty woods, over and over until it was three in the morning. Ginger watched light play in the long strands of Ted's hair and Steve's body rising and falling as he slept, hunched against the passenger door up front. Strip-mall lights strung out mile after mile like a necklace of meteors. She felt trapped in a film loop, the scenery out the window painfully familiar, but for all the kinship she felt it might as well be outer space.

“I thought I heard someone trying to break in down here,” her father said as he stood above her bed. “The door rattled and there was a knocking at the window and a voice like your mother's warning everybody to eat properly and not to bump the fontanel on the baby's head.”

“You're dreaming,” Ginger said, trying to see if he had on his striped pajamas or black suit. Slowly her eyes focused on his white clerical collar floating below his face like a leash. “Go back to bed.”

“I can't sleep. Mulhoffer invited the assistant minister from Deerpath Creek to preach tomorrow. He said it would be a nice change of pace.” Ginger heard the mellow sax notes of one of his jazz records in the stairwell and could smell that her father had been smoking cigarettes. “Promise you'll come,” he said, stepping closer to her bed.

“You know I will, Dad,” she leaned up on an elbow.

“Are you sure you didn't hear anything?” he asked. “Sometimes when I look out I think I see her over where she tried to grow those pear tomatoes, walking in and out of the tree line in her flannel nightgown.”

Ginger's eyes adjusted and her father's face took form and definition. She saw that his eyes were closed and his chin tense and bunched.

“Do you think she was happy, Gin?”

“No,” Ginger looked the other way, “she never was.”

He cleared his throat and Ginger heard the mourning doves start up on the telephone wire outside, and the starlings in the maple and the ravens on the windowsill and the fat vulture that crouched on the streetlight waiting for another bloody roadkill. And her father said, “Go back to sleep. I'll just sit here for awhile at the foot of the bed.”

The usher smiled, showed his capped teeth, and slipped her a bulletin printed with a close-up of a daisy. He nodded toward the altar. “Packed house.” He winked. “Better duck into the cry room.”

Inside the soundproof room a little boy with pale brown hair pushed a tiny cement truck around on the carpet, and in the front row a baby fretted — drool darkened its mother's shoulder. Ginger found a seat in the back corner below the speaker suspended high on the wall. A hymn sounded, its reception through the black cloth tinny and distorted like a transistor radio. Through the thick glass Ginger saw that every pew was packed, and even while the people sang, each head remained so still they might as well be stones with wigs attached. It was a German thing, complete physical command over even the most passionate scenario.

The Mulhoffers sat in their usual place up front, alluding subtle control. It was all passively situated in the slightly arrogant slant of Mrs. Mulhoffer's head, the squarely confrontational positioning of Mr. Mulhoffer's shoulders. Her father was only partially visible, an outstretched black shoe and a bit of linen cloth, one anxious eye and the bridge of his nose. This fragmentation gave Ginger the sense he'd come apart like a paper doll and had been hastily taped back together. Beside him the Deerpath Creek pastor, in a blue suit and red tie, exuded the low-key confidence of a corporate raider.

The organist pushed the pedals and the notes got thicker and the hymn rumbled to a stop. In the silence the cars on the highway could be heard rushing by, but the sound was subtle and unobtrusive as water moving in a riverbed. The man walked up to the pulpit and looked down into the first pews. Beside him on a small table were two boxes of breakfast cereal. He beamed at the audience, took his folded sermon from his inside jacket pocket, and bowed his head.

“Grace, mercy, and peace unto you from God our father, Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ. Amen.” Her father visibly cringed, put both his hands to his brow, as if he had a headache. Today he wore his richest robes, the raw silk, the densely embroidered stole, and his heaviest bronze cross. But the material was wrinkled and it embarrassed Ginger that her father looked disheveled. It was like he'd come from the past and the trip through time had soiled his apparel and wrung his body out.

“People are strange, aren't they?” the man began cheerfully. “We tend to judge a person by their outward presentation. In other words, we'll size them up by the type of car they drive, the clothing they wear, even the brand of cereal they eat. Think about it, if a fellow drives up in a sixty-thousand-dollar Mercedes 480XL, gets out wearing a Nautica button-down sports shirt with designer polo pants and a matching belt with Timberline on the heel of his one-hundred-fifty-dollar loafers, the guy is too cool, he's the cluck of the roast, the talk of the town, he's on the fast track to the top.

“But if you were to take the same exact fellow, have him drive up in a rusted-out 1979 Pinto with a K-mart sports shirt, Sears on the rump of his bell-bottom blue jeans, Made in the USA on the rubber heel of his ten-dollar tennis shoes, he's a graduate of Cotton Belt Tech and Beauty School and eats a generic brand of cereal. The guy's a bona fide nerd, a geek with a capital G. None of the girls would want to go out with him, no one would want to associate with him, we would call such a person a loser. But it's the same guy in different wrappings, so what's in a name?

"It appears everything.

“We have here a generic box of cereal, Crisp Rice.” He held the box up for everyone to see. “Now you would think with the savings that are offered with generic goods that they would take the food market by storm, but the reality is that generic food only makes up three percent of U. S. food sales. We're kind of suspicious of this stuff, aren't we? Maybe it's substandard? Let's get honest; there's no telling where they got it. Maybe they put the good stuff in the brand-name boxes and swept the generic stuff off the floor. We don't know this product. We're suspicious of it. We don't trust it. So we don't buy it.