Darcey Steinke: Jesus Saves

Oh she was high as they flew nowhere in particular in Ted's white Ford with the harelip fender. Her dirty blonde hair whipped around her face. A single strand caught on her tongue as she sucked the sweet pot smoke. Her lungs tightened and she coughed a little, ran one finger down her cheekbone and set the taut hair free, then pressed the joint into the ashtray. Tears swamped her vision and the car swelled gently around her. The light changed from red to a textured leaflike green, as if life itself gestated behind the curve of glass. It was a sign for her to levitate off the seat, slip out the window and fly up, like a piece of paper caught in a whirlwind, high over this place until the houses looked like strings of Christmas lights and the mall a Middle Eastern mecca.

Ted turned his head from the road and grinned. He liked watching pot wing her back into a kid philosopher, when she spent whole days lying on her bed figuring how the earth got here, or wondering if raindrops could be souls falling from the gutters of heaven.

Beside the highway on a treeless hill, between Gold's Gym and the black glass Allstate building, was her father's new church. Ted said the cross on top of the pie-shaped building looked like a satellite fallen from the sky. Her dad's car was parked near the trash Dumpsters, overflowing now with altar flowers, limp gladiola and brown carnations. He was writing tomorrow's sermon, pen poised on the yellow legal pad, willing an angel to guide his hand across the page. He'd scribble for a while, then look up at the bronze bust of Martin Luther. Sip cold coffee. When she was little he'd write about her funny questions. “Was Santa God's brother?” “Was heaven on the moon?” Now he'd decided she'd fallen out of God's favor, he never actually said it, but she could tell in the way he always spoke to her in his church voice, the same officious tone he used with the trustees and the ladies’ guild.

Ted turned onto Brandy Lane, dipped beneath the underpass. Cool air rushed in the window and the car tugged out of the dark into a stretch of scrubby pine, a trampled, trash-filled forest, but still charming to her in its familiarity. Her house was in the subdivision just beyond the trees and she'd played in these woods as a child, knew the spot where bloodleaf grew near a dogwood tree and the mossy niche in a covey of rocks where you could keep dry in the rain.

She put her hand over Teds’ crotch, felt his rubbery cock tighten. That's what she was after, the dumb thrust of life, like the films on PBS that showed a seed sprouting, peeking through the dirt and lifting itself up. A tiny wet spot bled through the denim — that first pearl of come. She smiled slyly at him and he rolled his eyes in a way that meant You're too much. From this side his profile was normal; you couldn't see where the flesh had been torn away or any hint of the thick keloid scar.

Looking back at the tree line, she saw puzzle pieces of rusty brown through the blue-gray branches. Kids, Ginger figured, pretending to be bank robbers or Indians, squatting in the underbrush trying to think like wolves. But the rich patches of color moved quickly and a deer ran out of the woods, all elegant animal grace, weightless and otherworldly. Its antlers grew up into the heavens and knocked down some stars and the deer trampled on them with graceful indignation. The animal's ribs pressed out urgently as it stepped like a zoo animal, depressed and indifferent, onto the road.

“Oh fuck!” she said, and saw from the corner of her eye Ted rear back, his knee straightening as he slammed on the brakes. There was a dull thud, then the sickly sound of blood splattering over the windshield like a burst of puddle water heavy with mud. Her body slammed against the door as the car spun sideways. Black tree branches, the blood on the windshield, and the midnight-blue sky figured and refigured into patterns, as obvious and elusive as a kaleidoscope.

The radio blared. She watched her hand reach out and turn the knob to the left, and the music was gone. Ted cracked the door, rushed onto the pavement, and paced around the front fender, his hands deep in his pockets. He looked small, thin-shouldered, and slight in his unbuttoned black and blue flannel shirt and white T-shirt. She slid over the vinyl seat, came out the open door, and walked to where he stood. The deer was enmeshed with the grill and right fender, grown out of the car like some freakish mammalian extension. Its eyes looked up into the twilight and its mouth was open and filling slowly with pale pink foam.

“What are we going to do?” she asked.

Ted looked up the road to the highway, then down the embankment into the woods. “I'll drag it down there,” he motioned to the trees, then bent over and picked up a cracked Slurpee cup from the scorched roadside weeds and pushed it against the deer's glass-splattered belly. “I guess it's dead,” he said, jabbing the cup harder into the fur of the deer's long throat. The neck suddenly shifted and the deer pulled its head back, tried to focus its eyes on them.

Ginger screamed and grabbed Ted's jacket, pulling him away from the animal. Its front legs beat the air and the effort sent a stream of blood rushing off the fender; the foam moved out of the deer's mouth with the soft sound of soap bubbles popping.

“Jesus,” Ted said, holding Ginger as she leaned against the car and gagged up mouthfuls of warm beer. She puked on the pavement until her stomach was empty and there was just a sour taste of yeast in her mouth.

“It's gotta be fucking dead now,” Ted said, adding an edgy nervous laugh, holding his hands over its wide nostrils. “I don't feel any breathing.” The deer was still and she watched him stick the cup into the skin of the animal's belly, then throw it behind him, place his hands on the ankles — where the black hoof met with fur — and yank the deer, its skin ripping like cloth, until it flopped sloppily into a puddle of its own blood.

Ted's chest heaved. The muscles in his neck stood out like rope. He jerked the body over the gravel shoulder, then onto the grassy incline where it crushed blades of grass and smeared them with blood.

“Pull the car over,” he yelled, “and wait for me.”

The urgency in his voice made her run to the car, get in, and slam the door. Ginger turned the ignition key and the engine sputtered to life. She shifted into drive and let the wheels roll forward onto the soft shoulder, then pressed the button on the steering column that squirted blue fluid up over the blood until the window was clear and the wipers forced rose-colored water to collect along the bottom of the glass and flow down the sides. A few small circles of blood remained above the wiper's range, but they were tiny and dark and could easily be mistaken for mud.

She watched the red alternator light flicker, just a short, Ted always said, but it showed how every object was taking on a life of its own, until the steering column had an agenda, as did the backseat and the fast-moving wheels. An empty Bud can jangled at her feet, possessed by wind from the window.

Lately her nervous system seemed like the control center of her body, anxiety shot through her, made her heart pound and the baby hairs stand straight on the nape of her neck. Maybe it was all the talk about the serial killer captured a few weeks back, how he kept chopped-up human bodies carefully wrapped in butcher's paper in his basement freezer. Every day you heard about another grisly murder, and there were always mug shots on the news of the dead-eyed perpetrators and blurry snapshots of their victims smiling on Florida vacations or standing near a Christmas tree. Worry, like cornsmut boils, had grown along the ridges of Ginger's brain until she suspected her body ran on fear alone. She had a bad habit of chewing her cuticles, peeling off strips of opaque flesh around the fingernails, and lately she slept only intermittently, jolted awake by every truck on the highway.