Darcey Steinke - Jesus Saves

“Right here is fine,” Ginger said, focusing inside the restaurant at the sleepy couples in back booths drinking giant-sized Cokes and sharing piles of ketchup-strewn fries.

“I just hope you'll pass all this along to your dad,” Mulhoffer said as she grunted and slammed the door. She felt his eyes between her shoulder blades as she knelt in front of the restaurant's glass doors, let her breath fall into a melody with her heart and began to pray. Mulhoffer kept his hand on the horn so long the sound made her light-headed and she thought she might faint.

Behind McDonald's, just inside the tree line Ginger came upon a configuration of objects. In the middle was a dead cardinal, a muted female, its belly split to expose shiny red innards, gluey and crimson as menstrual blood. Nightshade berries circled in the soft dirt followed by a wreath of white plastic roses. In the roots of a maple tree a motor-oil can filled with pee balanced in front of a ravaged doll's head. Someone had scribbled swastikas into her forehead with green magic marker.

Fear spread like sun rays out of her nervous heart, infiltrating every vein and capillary. She felt a dreamy reverence because the Protestant ritual of wine and water was wearing out. The dead bird's nightmarish holiness demanded silence. She bowed her head and touched her cold fingertips to her lips.

Steve clenched barbells in his fists and with a fast, synchronized Hex of his elbows swung them to his shoulders, then back down to his thighs. Wearing a pair of cut-off sweatpants, the fabric hung low around his sculptured waist. His Hushed chest held a sweat sheen and the hairs were so blond they lost definition and reflected like neon light. He must have worked late at the hospital and couldn't sleep. The night shift was particularly bloody: car crash victims, shootings, stabbings — all these happened almost exclusively at night. And the sight of blood leaking from flesh, spilling off the tin tables and dripping ink-spot patterns onto the white floor, was always miraculous to him. He usually came home invigorated, ready to pump weights for hours.

Ginger watched him stare at the TV. His biceps stiffened up like dinner rolls. His face reminded her of the wolves she'd seen on TV. He took pride in his physical perfection. Transparent enough to project your desires onto, he made you feel part of a glamorous world, usually available only through the spy hole of television. His girlfriends behaved like actresses, exaggerated their gestures, and spoke only in flippant one-liners that were supposed to sound like movie talk. And in a town like this, where everyone felt like the party was happening somewhere else, Steve was a lethal character.

“You're the last person I expected to see here.” Surprise registered in his eyes.

“I thought you might have heard from Ted,” Ginger said.

Steve shook his head. “He don't want to hear from you.”

“Can you just tell me if you've seen him or not?”

“He split·town.”

“Without telling me?”

“Yeah, well, he met up with a sweet little piece of poon-tang at the mall.” Ginger could tell Steve was lying by the way he looked over the top of her head at the cars parked outside. “He got himself a girl that won't preach at him all the time.”

“Is that right?”

Steve nodded. “I'm available though,” he said, pushing his hips forward, puffing up his chest, “if you're interested in a dance with the devil.” He reached up and grazed Ginger's neck with his hot fingertips, but she recoiled and ran over the grass, back into the woods.

The clouds outside darkened the altar. During prayer she heard a truck fade into the distance. Her father stood in the pulpit in his rumpled linen robes, unshaven, goggles of gray around his wet eyes. He was trying to convince the congregation that their minor missteps allowed evil to flourish.

“We give evil a name,” her father said with a tinge of real desperation in his voice. “Evil always comes at us directly.” He wiped his brow. “Lucifer searches for a chink in the armor!” Ginger saw a trustee shake his head in the direction of another.

“As modern people and as children of the Enlightenment, we are not as realistic about the power of evil. We figure that if we ignore evil, especially our personal brand of it, it will simply disappear, or at least lie low. We blindfold ourselves from it. In fact, the more it's hidden, the more vicious it becomes and the harder it looks for a whipping boy.”

She'd heard every kind of sermon. Her father preached on obscure theological points and horrific current events, the bombing in Oklahoma, the massacre in Luby’s, now Sandy Patrick. And while his subject varied, his theme never did — the familiar form of evil and how everyone is implicit in the lie.

“We deny the evil lurking within us because if the truth were to be exposed, we would be consumed and obliterated from this community. We would be swallowed by evil itself.” His pause was supposed to signal a tone change, but when he looked up he saw in-difference stiffening the people's faces and, like a lounge singer desperate to hold a crowd's attention, he raised and animated his voice. “But the truth is that we can live together in such a way that the world's deep structures of evil begin to wither away. We do it by being faithful to each other. We do it by casting off power and intimidation. We do it by surrendering our claim to any kind of superiority over anyone. We give up our desires to make excuses for our behavior and we give up our constant claim of innocence, a claim we make despite the sure evidence that we are up to no good. In other words, we decide to be accountable to each other — all of us. We can do these things and more, because in Jesus, God has given us the grace to do them.”

Resistance hung in the air like humidity. The congregation pushed their backs into the pews and braced themselves as if the church was an airplane hijacked by a religious militant. The tips of Mulhoffer's ears were red as bell peppers; he was furious her father hadn't taken his advice and preached about future growth, or at least copped the mega-church pastors’ down-home style and talked about television or sports. Even Mrs. Mulhoffer, who always hid her emotions behind a smile, looked surly.

Her father quickly intoned the benediction, then hurried down the pulpit steps to the bench by the altar. He hid his face behind the hymnal as the organ started up.

Thou most kind and gentle death / Waiting to hush our latest breath /

O Praise him, Alleluha / Though leadest home the child of God /

And Christ our Lord the way hath trod /

Praise, Praise the father, praise the son /

Praise the spirit, three in one.

The people sang off key, unable to disguise their hostility. She'd asked her father when he planned to move on to another theme and he said, When they hear this one.

The troll threw a banana onto the yellowed newspapers. Sandy crawled over, frantically peeled down the fragrant skin, and shoved the fruit into her mouth, almost choking. The troll laughed, my little monkey girl.

Chained by the ankle to an exposed pipe in the basement, Sandy squatted on the cement floor next to the bucket filled with pee. She sucked the moisture from inside the banana peel and watched to see if he held anything else in his hands. She was the little monkey that sat on the wheelchair of the man with no legs in front of the gumball machine at the Walmart. The monkey wouldn't sit on the man's shoulder, wouldn't take the peanut from the man's lips. She jumped from the Pez machine to the top of the tall one that sold Pepsi and Diet Coke.