Darcey Steinke - Jesus Saves

“How's that?” Ginger said.

“You know,” he said, a little embarrassed now that the story was over, “all dreamy and shit.” He pulled her onto his lap and kissed her, trying to keep the stretched skin away from her cheek, but Ginger still felt the hard line of his fleshless jawbone, and she had the sense she was kissing a skull. He moved his hand up her thigh and pressed his fingers between her legs, so he touched the tampon cord.

“Go take it out,” he said. “I don't mind the blood.”

She walked down the hallway, wearing only his long Black Sabbath T-shirt, her swollen breasts swaying with a lush animal grace. The half bottle of red wine she found in the refrigerator and the pills she took earlier, plus a few tokes off his joint, all combined to numb out the pain in her stomach and make her weak-kneed and very high. She liked pot; it gave her a giddy sense of possibility, even hope, like warm weather in early spring or getting an unexpected large amount of money. The conversation made her dizzy too. They'd been talking like this ever since that first night at the bar in the Quonset hut out on Highway 9. She liked his Prince Valiant haircut and how he sat alone at a back table sneering at the local band. When she asked him what he did, he laughed and said cynically, Saving the world through prayer. The conversation that followed was the best she'd ever had, how he loved the butter-soaked Texas toast at the Western Sizzler and the tiny Graceland at the miniature-golf course on Garfield Road. He was the first person to say the new post office as well as everything else out here was ugly and she was so grateful; a few hours later she went for a ride in his car and fucked him in the backseat.

Flipping on the bathroom light, she saw a water bug run over the white Formica and disappear behind the sink. Mold spores pockmarked the shower curtain, inched up the white tile walls. The toilet was shellacked with missed piss, hairs imbedded like ants stuck in amber. The room was humid, the walls swampy. Nature was taking it back. She sat on the toilet seat and reached between her legs, found the white string that hung out like a price tag, and pulled. The bloodied mouse plopped into the water and sunk down moodily to the bottom of the bowl.

She walked down the hall with her legs pressed tight, pausing in the open doorway of Steve's room. Dusk's flaxen light flooded his unmade bed and the pentacle plaque hanging above it. There was a poster of Iron Maiden, one of Blackie Lawless drinking blood out of a human skull, and a huge movie poster of a slimy seven-headed demon, each face with red ember eyes and horns the length of yardsticks. All his tapes, Krokus, Metallica, Judas Priest, were piled up by his boom box, and there was one of his pen-and-ink drawings taped up on the closet door, a surrealistic image of a saw-toothed demon with a butcher's knife in its throat and blood cascading down from its right ear into a basketball hoop, which became a spigot and flowed into a drinking glass. The caption read in big black letters: I GOT STONED AND I MISSED.

Steve worked during the week as a janitor at the hospital cleaning the operating room after surgery and, when he could get them, dealt acid and ’shrooms. Ginger felt a little afraid of him. It was easy to imagine the seven-faced dragon, between the bed and the Formica dresser, bobbing its multiple heads like thin-stemmed wild flowers frenzied in a breeze. She heard a rumor he'd poured gasoline over a dog and set it on fire and that he'd spent a year in jail for cocaine possession. Ted told her all his satanic stuff was just a joke, that none of the rumors were true. “Steve has been shitted on all his life,” he said. “He's a great person, just totally misunderstood.”

She walked down the hall into Ted's room, lay on the towel he spread over the sheets. A flutter of blood spilled out of her, trickled down the inside of her thighs. It always felt like more blood than it actually was. The body was weird that way, magnifying its mass and function in the mind. Ted sat on the edge of the bed. At his feet was a shoe box full of junk: screwdrivers, nails, plastic pieces from broken clocks, his old pot leaf belt buckle. He hunched over so all she could see was his bare back, his jeans so low the crack of his rear showed. The room was drenched in smoky twilight, white light glowed from his tape player. The music was over, but the blank tape played on, a silent hum as incomprehensible as snow falling.

Moisture ran into the crack of her rear as he spread the lips of her pussy and wet his pointer finger with blood, tugged up her T-shirt, so the material gathered in folds above her bra and touched her just under the tiny bow, pressed his finger into that hollow cleft at the top of her rib cage, then swung his hand down along the curving bone. His touch left a dark line, and sent out rings of sensation like a pebble tossed into water. Sliding his hand up higher under her shirt, his fingers were cold in a sexy way, like when you first take off your underwear and your bottom is bare against a cool vinyl car seat. Pushing her bra up, he cradled a tit away from her ribs. This gave a sudden sense of her own delicateness and she shuddered. Ted undid his jeans and pushed them down to his knees. Crouching over her, butt up, balls hanging, he leaned his head down and swayed his tongue messily into her mouth, jabbed his cock against her stomach, the red skin shifting around the hard inside part.

“You're so beautiful,” he turned his head so that Ginger could see the scar that made the left side of his face unrecognizable. She saw nuance, shades of red and pink lush as tapestry in his mottled face. He pushed himself inside her, suspending himself over her. Long greasy strands of hair fell forward, shadowing his features; the silver cross around his neck swung just above her eyes. She helped herself along by thinking of the girl she'd seen in a porno magazine with a shaved pussy and then of certain parts in the Manson book, how during an acid trip Jesus said to Charlie, These are your loves and you are their need. How he'd gone out to the family bus, filled a pan of water and given himself a whore's bath, how when the girls came in he washed their dirty feet, one by one, how the girls in turn washed the feet of their boyfriends, and how suddenly the bus was filled with naked bodies. She saw Charlie balling one girl while finger fucking another. Ted rolled over so she could be on top, but she didn't press herself up, just clung to him. Sex was psychic. His cock inside her. Her cock inside him. Not boy. Not girl. Just frenzied protons in an electrified atom. She squinted her eyes so the light from the tape player looked like a quasar, like the big bang, like God making life out of nothing. The spirit of God hovered over the face of the water and she saw the smashed pomegranate, the figs swollen and split, honey dripping over everything. All the flesh inside her swelled with blood, tightened until it was hard to.tell that they were separate. Come into me, she thought, and he did.

* * *

A few hours later Ginger woke and felt music vibrating the walls of the apartment. She rolled in the sheets to the edge of the bed, then stood and walked into the next room and sat on the floor next to Ted. The duplex living room was sparse; a TV sat on milk crates and Steve's bench press and free weights were pushed into one corner. Death metal riffs blasted so fierce she pressed her spine against the wall, afraid the boom box would crack and the speed metal dragon would burst out, scaly and blue-green as fish skin, its eyes slick as blood, breathing fire from its flaring nostrils, quoting from Revelations in the voice of a God gone bad. It was completely dark outside now, just some murky light in the oven illuminating the gray walls and silver racks, efficient and mysterious as a submarine trawling the kitchen floor. The rectangular window was smudged with meat juice, splattered with particles of petrified food. Dishes were piled high in the sink and a stack of pizza boxes and beer bottles surrounded the doorway. Carpet fibers pushed this way and that, like the coat of a mangy dog, and Ginger imagined them shifting languidly like seaweed caught in currents of windy water.