Darcey Steinke - Jesus Saves

Steve walked into the room and knelt in front of her, held the plastic mask over her nose and mouth. It was the kind anesthesiologists used in surgery, the kind that gas came through to put you to sleep. He'd made this contraption with stuff stolen from the hospital supply room — a glass beaker with a heating nozzle, rubber hose. She watched him take a bud from the plastic baggy, load it into the copper bowl, and flick his lighter until the flame caught the dried leaves, singed them into red embers. Steve wore rings on every finger, a skull, a glass eye, a crucifix, and though he'd just showered, changed into jeans and a flannel shirt; his body odor hinted of blood.

“Suck up,” he flicked the lighter. Steve was the only child of the county's most volatile couple. Sightings were mythic: the time they'd got drunk in the lounge of the airport Holiday Inn and knocked over the singer's synthesizer, the midnight screaming session in the parking lot of McDonald's, and the car accident, where Steve's mother had crashed into a green highway sign and was found unconscious in her baby-doll nightgown, an open bottle of white wine still locked between her legs.

Steve was legendary for his fights at high-school parties. One second everybody would be standing around sipping from 16-ounce plastic cups of keg beer and the next a strange fusion would go through the crowd and Steve would be going head-to-head in the mud with somebody who rubbed him the wrong way. It didn't matter what it was about; any reason was only a pretense — school loyalty, some half-drunk girl, something somebody said about his favorite band.

She took her hit and handed Ted the mask, but he appeared to be asleep, leaning against the wall with his eyes closed, his head tilted back. Steve took the mask from her, loaded the bowl again, and held it over his own nose and mouth; with his other hand he brought the fire to the green leaves. The flame spread an oval of orange light over Steve's features, which were as even and pleasing as a movie star's. His hair was slicked back, so that shiny cords spread like horns over the top of his head, and under his eyes the lavender skin was delicately veined as a flower. He took another hit, then put the rig beside him and layout on the carpet with his hands folded behind his neck.

“Did you ever think about killing someone?” he asked.

Ginger looked over at Ted, who was stoned, sleeping, or both. “I could see if some guy fucked with me,” Ginger said. “You know, raped my mother or killed my dog. . but I wouldn't just go out and kill somebody at random. That's sick.” Her voice was firm and reprimanding.

“It's just a hypothetical question,” Steve said. “I know it's all a circus of shit.”

The brown dog chained to a tree stump ran at them, raised up on its back legs, and started to bark. Its white teeth flashed in the dark and Ginger saw the furless pink skin of its tummy. Steve and Ted stood on the porch, shoulders hunched forward, hands curled deep inside their front pockets, both shivering. Their warm breath made puffs of frosty steam as Steve knocked again. They waited, listening for the TV or the hippies’ footsteps. Ginger stood in back of them near a swayback lawn chair, picking leaves off a dead geranium in a coffee can. Christmas lights were strung around the little house, but most bulbs on the green wire were smashed or burnt out except a purple and two greens along the gutter and a red one looping down over the top of the door frame. She looked at the ruined garden, the skewed corn stalks, tomato plants reduced to wet heaps, each woven with a strip of stem-securing cloth. The green-pea vines had rotted into the white cord that held them, and the zucchini and squash decomposed to seeds alone. Only the cabbages would grow all winter, ugly as bottom suckers. Beyond the garden, through the thin plot of woods, she saw the lighted windows of Sugar Ridge floating in the branches.

“The fucker is always home,” Steve said, turning to glance back at Ted's car parked next to the hippie's old Impala, then pounding harder with the side of his fist.

“Jesus,” Ted said loudly, “you know he’s in there.”

“Let's go,” Ginger said. “Maybe he doesn't want to see us.”

The old hippie was usually nice. He once gave her tea for a sore throat made of slippery elm and cayenne pepper, but he was also an eccentric guy, swore he cured himself of cancer by eating only millet and tofu. Once he showed them how he'd sliced his finger, then stitched it up himself with a needle and thread. The hippie could be delusional too, talking about his CIA file, how he knew for a fact that the cartels had him on a hit list. Sometimes he'd speculate about future societies, after Armageddon, how the earth would be this utopian place with everybody living in tree houses and eating organic strawberries. Ted's connection to reality was fragile as a spider's web, and it wasn't good for him to be hanging around the hippie. Last time they were here, Ted told the hippie he was growing mushrooms in his room with purple grow lights and plastic trays of potting soil. And after that she'd heard him tell his mother he was going back to school. He even talked shit to her father, stuff about trying to help some poor kids who lived in the low-income housing out by Robert E. Lee Highway.

The frosted bulb over the door lit up and Ginger heard the dead bolt slide. The hippie pulled back the wooden door and opened the screen one.

“Goddamn it, Woodstock,” he yelled at the dog. It whimpered, walked back to the cedar doghouse, and lay down on a muddy blanket. “Get on inside here,” the hippie said, holding the screen door open. “Go on into the kitchen. I got a house guest sleeping in the living room.”

A young girl was spread like butter over the couch, flushed with sleep, sweat pasting baby hairs to her forehead, an Indian tapestry thrown over her like a blanket, her breath so shallow and infrequent Ginger worried she was dead.

Ginger followed them through the living room into the kitchen. The hippie pointed to the wood table, then swung open the refrigerator and bent over to get some beers.

“What's with sleeping beauty?” Steve asked as they sat down in mismatched chairs. “Friend of yours?”

“Hell no!” the hippie said, carrying the green bottles of beer to the table and sitting down at the head. “She just showed up here this afternoon, said she'd heard about the old days and that I had drugs.”

“She looks young,” Ted said. “What did you give her?”

“Half a lude,” the Hippie said. “I had to! You wouldn't believe how she went on, screaming and crying. Said she'd tell the police I was a drug dealer if I didn't give her something.” He lifted the bottle and took a swig. “She's a freaky little chick, says she was at that camp with Sandy Patrick.”

“No way,” Steve said.

The hippie nodded. “She was talking about it right before she passed out.”

Ginger tipped back her chair so she could see through the doorway into the living room. Long drugged breaths lifted the material of the girl's sweatshirt, showed her navel and smooth rounded belly glowing in the blue television light.

“How's the preacher's daughter?” the hippie asked.

Ginger let her chair fall forward, felt her face warm.

“Fine,” she said.

“You should bring these pagans with you to church sometime.” He lifted his beer in Steve's direction, his red braid shifting on his back and the good-luck medallion made of cherry seeds and red thread swaying over his leather vest.

The hippie was a real hippie. He'd once lived on a commune somewhere in Oregon, where he'd actually practiced free love and learned how to make both butter and cheese. He could bake wheat bread too and curdle yogurt. When they'd first met him he had a dozen chickens and a goat. He told great stories from the commune about snakes getting in the outdoor shower and about their leader, an eighty-year-old Canadian guy who sang the blues better than Muddy Waters.