Darcey Steinke - Jesus Saves

Organ notes caused the cork panels of the ceiling to tremble and she saw her father's long, elegant fingers gripping the base of the common cup and tipping it to one fearful face after another.

* * *

The convenience store reeked of steamed hot dogs and microwave burritos. She laid the box of tampons, the tiny bottle of Advil, and the Tall Boy beer on the counter and watched sweat gather on the fair hairs of the cashier's upper lip as he rang her up and put everything into a paper bag. She'd been in here a lot, but his round face was always expressionless. She asked for the bathroom key, watched him open a drawer, lift the plastic disc with the key dangling from a dirty shoelace and hand it to her, then swing back to the Slurpee machine where his Playboy waited.

The back of the store smelled of spoiled relish. In front of the bathroom door, a mop sat in a bucket of gray water. She squeezed between the Pepsi quarts stacked to the ceiling, flipped on the bulb that hung over the tilted medicine chest. Paneled with fake pine, SUCK ME was scratched into the wood with a car key. She couldn't get the warped door to close properly, set the useless key on the sink's ledge, and opened the box, quickly unwrapping a tampon. She pulled her panties down to her knees, squatted back over the toilet and pushed it up inside. Blood dabbed one end of the cardboard applicator like a lipstick-stained cigarette. She tossed it in the garbage, then stepped out of her stained panties, reached up to the dispenser and pulled out several brown paper towels, wrapped her underwear in them and stuck the bundle deep into the garbage pail. She aligned the arrows and pressed up the plastic Advil cap, peeled off the foil cover, and threw that and the cotton ball into the trash. Popping the beer, she put the can to her lips, dumped four or five pills onto her tongue and washed them down with a mouthful of beer.

In the mirror, little red pimples dotted her forehead and her eyes looked glazed like when she had a fever. The pills obliterated the pain, though nothing could counter the bee-buzz sensation, strong as a refrigerator's hum, that signaled the world on the verge of collapse. And during these days she had eagle-eye vision, so the bathroom revealed itself in painful detail, the hairs stuck to the porcelain bowl, the flecks of soap dried on the mirror, and her own features yearning and greasy.

She slipped the Advils and tampons into her blue suede purse and carried the beer out, then laid the key on the counter. The cashier stuck fresh hot dogs onto the metal prongs of the rotisserie. Balancing herself on a car, she stepped off the elevated cement and walked across the vast parking lot. The only time it felt right walking in a parking lot was to or from a car. Any other time it was humiliating, like being left behind at a party. Wild daisies and monkey flowers flourished alongside the road, the sky was static-gray and boring as a headache. Shredded plastic bags hung from the trees, rippling out like strips of ghost flesh. The Heinzes’ Buick passed. Anna turned her head on Ginger and smirked, one of those stiff half-smiles that show a mixture of superiority and pity. Ginger felt her face get warm. There was nothing wrong with walking. People around here thought you were crazy if you didn't ride around in an automobile. Anyone on foot was considered immoral and insane, no different than the guy from the psyche center who escaped once a month in his bathrobe and slippers.

Jesus didn't have no automobile! Ah Jesus. Lover of little woodland animals, baby bunnies and little brown bears. Jesus, with those dreamy blue eyes, was the only person she'd ever known who'd been murdered and she knew his exquisite corpse by heart.

She wanted to start her own religion. Its premise would be simply that if you sensed someone needed kindness, you acted. If a homeless guy asked you for a dollar, instead of getting angry you'd just give it to him. You'd stop if a lady had a flat tire or if someone needed a ride. One of the symbols would be a hitchhiker's raised thumb. The communion ritual, the symbolic changing of a tire. She imagined herself in her father's robes going down on her knees into the roadside mud, turning a gold ratchet to loosen the nuts from a lame tire.

She saw skid marks reaching across the blue asphalt like charcoal strokes and found the brown blood flecking up now like dried mud, and the trail of trampled grass that led into the woods. She thought of going down and looking for the headless deer. But it'd be rotting already, covered with flies and squirming maggots. She crossed the street, walked a little faster in the roadside weeds because she felt it coming on strong now, not the pills but a vague uneasiness and longing. Ted was right when he said Sunday was the best day out of seven to get stoned. She'd go to his house, lie on his bed, watch the Sunday afternoon movie, split a six-pack with him. Maybe he'd sense how sad she was and do one of his little shows, sing the holy-holy-moly song or the one he made up as he went along, about how pretty she was and how much he loved her. Ted was fucked up, but he was still the only person who knew all the ways to make her feel alive.

Through the slow afternoon of fading light they lay on the soft fitted sheet's big oriental peonies, pale blue petals languid as any flower in an opium-soaked dream. The blue comforter wrinkled like water at the foot of the mattress. Conversation wandered as it always did toward Ted's favorite topic, the devil's physical manifestation in this world. She told him how she'd once seen a demon squatting in the branches of the pear tree outside her bedroom window. “His skin texture like a lizard covered with soot, his eyes slimy as a silverfish, and when the thing uncurled his tongue it looked like a thin black snake.”

Ted's eyes were wide as he told how his father used to hang his terry cloth robe over the door that separated his room from his parents’. “At night, I'd hear footsteps, turn to look, and see the bathrobe transformed into a devil with a gray, bullet-shaped head. This devil tormented me every night, until one afternoon, while lying on my bed, I heard the devil's footsteps, felt it's breath against my cheek, but instead of being overcome with fear, I punched out at the demon. That was the last time the monster bothered me; after that, the robe was just material that reeked of cheap cologne and beer-soaked sweat.”

Ginger looked at him, unsure if he was being sincere or mocking her; sometimes it seemed he just made up anything to stay part of the conversation.

“I rode over and checked out the deer head this morning,” Ted said. “Its eyes have developed a milky film that makes it look blind.”

Ginger felt a queasy riff in her stomach. “I bet that deer had been eating out of fast-food dumpsters,” she said. “Bun crusts and hamburger gristle.” She wondered if it's spirit might have passed into her. Ted made her close her eyes, try to visualize shifting leaf light, an appetite for tree bark and vernal grass, but all she heard was a dog whimpering in the apartment next door.

“That deer's trapped on my retina,” she said.

“That's what ghosts are,” Ted said, “spirits living inside of you. Your eye is like a movie projector, shining them out.”

Ginger nodded. Her mother was often in her eye, thin, pale, and breastless, black stitches running in and out of the skin of her chest, not slanted and orderly like they had been, but going every which way, so she looked like a rag doll repaired haphazardly with black thread.

“Some people, like Jesus or Elvis, have souls so expansive,” Ted said, “that when they die their spirits become a part of all cellular life. They coat the world like a fine membrane, distill into every atom, and that's why people see them inside redwood trees and on corn tortillas simmering in frying pans.” This last idea excited him and he sat up against the wall; his pupils expanded as they tried to soak up the last bit of daylight. “It happened last year,” he said. “I was at my grandma's house down in Bixler. She made TV dinners and we ate them on TV trays with cans of Coke on the porch. She was worried about the boy that mowed the lawn, said he was over-charging her, that when he came into her house to use the bathroom he stole things out of the medicine chest. She didn't like the way he was always spitting in the grass. She went on and on and I'm sitting there, starting to feel really uncomfortable, you know; I was getting that trapped-in-the-DNA-of-this-pitiful-family feeling; her paranoia, her TV trays, her shoe-box-size existence. So I went into the bathroom, locked myself in, opened the window, and lit a fat doobie. There was a white crochet doll with a plastic head over the spare toilet paper, a bowl of pastel soaps, frilly curtains, pink towels with little bears. The air started to hum, then I felt this pressure pushing up against the top of my skull, and I realized how wrong this bathroom was, how it didn't suit me, and then I looked at my face in the mirror and realized my body was just as wrong and external as this bathroom — how completely arbitrary it is that we're stuck in this body or that one — and that's when the pressure gave way and I felt like I was floating in water, like I do when I'm having a dream.”