Darcey Steinke - Jesus Saves

Ginger saw this same sort of split-level built at the end of the subdivision. Each house took two weeks: first the pine skeleton, and then they stapled up the pressed-board walls and stuffed them with pink insulation. Using a chain saw anybody could cut through the house's exterior. As a child she set garlic on the window ledge to repel vampires and kept a baton under her pillow to bash intruders in the head. She practiced fire drills incessantly. Her father tried to calm her by insisting God watched over her, but Ginger knew if she had to believe in God and the angels, then devils and monsters existed too. Besides, God was always letting all kinds of bad things happen. It would be different if car crashes and murders were written off to chance, but what scared Ginger as a child was that God just sat on his golden throne and watched these things happen. Sure, he watched over you but that didn't keep you safe. Actually it was even scarier to think of somebody staring at you all the time, like the disapproving ladies in church.

Ginger walked down the hallway to her mother's bedroom. Her father kept the window cracked open to air out the room, trying to rid the space of mothballs and that medicinal ointment, but Ginger saw it as a way to lure her mother's soul back, give her a chance to hover around the bedspread ruffle or be absorbed into the wood grain of the dresser. Ginger lay down in the position her mother took in the last days of her life, slumped sideways, one leg hanging over the edge. She imagined her blood growing sluggish, her own heart stopping, veins fraying, and her soul lifting up with the slippery pluck of an avocado pit out of the greasy green pulp. But what if her consciousness gave out with her corporeal envelope? What if her mother'd become a piece of meat like the hunks of steak wrapped in cellophane at the grocery store? On her last day, Ginger rubbed her mother's feet with peppermint oil and brought flowers from the yard, lilacs and sweet-smelling hyacinths. She brought items that might stir her memory, photographs, the little ceramic deer that sat on the mantle, her beloved blue glass beads. But no object could link her mother with this material world; only Ginger's hand entwined in hers allowed her mother to close her eyes and breathe with a little less effort.

The window in her father's bedroom was locked; he'd even wedged a branch into the side groove to assure that if a pane broke the window couldn't be raised, he who assured people that there was an afterlife, that faith in Jesus could set you free from life's worry and fear. His bed was unmade and she knew he hadn't been back to the house.

After the service, Mulhoffer, surrounded by trustees, listened to the Deerpath Creek pastor talk about how his congregation used marketing techniques, phoning local residents to decide what services the church would offer, how their business components were thriving, the health club, the day-care center, the mechanic's shop, all of which attracted more people to the Lord. She'd slipped past them and into her dad's office, where he was standing by the window with a cigarette, blowing smoke through the screen, his body as languid as the smoke.

“I am utterly demoralized,” he said. “They don't have to fire me because if I ever have to share the altar again with that jackass, I'll quit.” He couldn't handle competition. Ginger knew that was why her father had chosen the ministry, because it kept him above the fray of the free market. And too, he preferred dealing with women and children; other men always made him nervous. Exhausted, he was probably napping on his office floor now, dreaming of the Latin mass or Bonhoeffer's plot to assassinate Hitler.

Up close, the sodden branch spilled wood pulp, and his bed reeked a little. Ginger knew he hadn't changed his sheets in weeks. She worried that like Christ, her father would allow brutish and ignorant people to hurt him or that he'd take martyrdom to the extreme and harm himself. He'd seen enough suicides: fat Mr. Reinholt electrified by a clock radio in his own tub, and the German lady who'd used her son's BB gun to shoot herself in the corner of the eye. Just this summer a teenager hung himself with an electrical cord off a beam in his basement. There was something contagious about suicide, like those kids who gassed themselves in Bergen. Her father's faith might not sustain him against the congregation's endless onslaught of private misery. He'd even admitted that sometimes he felt like a human trash receptacle and that he knew his flock was roaming away.

A lady in pink sweatpants on her way home from aerobics at the health club picked Ginger up along the highway. Her car smelled like cream as it just begins to curdle, and the woman talked about her word-processing job at the insurance company and how her husband, a guy named Chuck, had recently found the Lord.

I didn't know he was lost, Ginger thought as the lady pulled up in front of the welfare hotel downtown.

“This is no place for a girl like you,” the lady said. Ginger assured her she was meeting her father at his church down the block and that it wasn't dangerous down here.

“No more than the mall parking lot where that woman got molested,” she said.

The lady looked skeptical but unlocked the doors and let Ginger off at the curb.

Staring up at the brick hotel filled with dim blue light as if the moon lingered inside, she saw that only one window on the second floor was illuminated by a dangling bulb. A man in a wrinkled white shirt and dark dress pants stood by the window. Like her father in his robes and the old Germans from the church downtown, the man looked antiquated and exhausted by his connection to history, so different than the pastel suburban types sprung fully formed out of the mall's water fountains. Ginger figured something catastrophic had happened to the man, something that ended his life's narrative, that trapped him in a time out of time, somewhere around 1958.

Next to the hotel was the wig shop run by a Chinese man who smoked opium and did tattooing on the side. Before the accident Ted saved for a little red dragon with sapphire blue eyes. Styrofoam heads with starchy, flamboyant wigs peopled the storefront window. Usually there were several men who stood outside the liquor store, but because of blue laws the place was closed until Monday morning. A red-faced guy in a windbreaker sat in an old Pontiac parked out front and flashed Ginger a cynical smile that set off his hacking smoker's cough.

She felt like she was walking on a movie set, that the buildings were one-dimensional. It was that creeping Disneyland feeling again, where everything was make-believe, one attraction as false and inauthentic as the next.

In the parking lot, adjacent to the liquor store and across from the church, lay a dead pigeon and a bunch of rusty engine parts. A fire blazed up out of a chemical canister and two round-shouldered men in hooded sweatshirts passed a quart of beer between them. A couple of naked dolls hung in the bushes under the boarded-up windows of the church; hair cropped with blunt children's scissors, their fat bellies streaked with mud. Below the arch of headless angels, the red doors were padlocked and so she walked around to the side door, where graffiti tags spread over the gray stone. Ginger swung the side door open, saw the light on in the hallway and her father's black raincoat thrown over the radiator. She glanced into his old office, where an open box of bulletins and an ancient carbon copier lay in the middle of the floor. She climbed the stairs to the choir loft, narrow and smelling like oiled wood. The angle of the curve always reminded her of the spiral stairs to fairy tale towers. Somebody lived up here. A blanket was folded over a pew and a paper plate of chicken bones balanced on the organ keyboard. Ginger tiptoed to the railing and looked over at her father standing alone in the light of a single candle.