Mary Miller - The Last Days of California

“Give her a tract, Jess,” my father said, his arm swinging back and forth at my legs. He got a weak hold on my ankle and I yanked it away.

The woman hobbled over on her crutch and took the bill.

“God bless you,” she said, shoving it into the good-leg pocket of her jeans. It reminded me of the times homeless people had said this to me when I hadn’t given them anything, how nasty it could sound. The woman looked almost normal close-up, her face dry and brown but pretty.

My father cracked his window. “It doesn’t take God any time at all to save someone,” he said. “In the last hour of a terribly sinful life, the thief on the cross was saved by Christ.” She gave him the finger. The car behind us honked.

“Go,” my mother said, leaning forward.

My father stepped on the gas and the car jerked into motion. He viewed the bad reactions as a spiritual test. Otherwise, he wouldn’t compare a woman he didn’t know to the thief on the cross, he wouldn’t be such an asshole. He followed the line of cars merging onto the interstate and I wondered if anyone missed the woman and wanted her to come home. I didn’t know how people survived if there was no one to miss them.

“‘And he said unto Jesus, Lord, remember me when thou comest into thy kingdom,’” our father continued. “‘And Jesus said unto him, verily I say unto thee, today thou shalt be with me in paradise.’” He repeated “paradise.” In paradise, he wouldn’t have to work or worry about money. In paradise, he wouldn’t have to take insulin shots, pinching the fat on his stomach and stabbing himself before meals. Half the time he didn’t do it and we didn’t remind him. He had an Asian doctor he called Woo who always sent him home with pamphlets about diet and exercise, which only pissed him off—he ate more ice cream and drank more Coke now than ever. He had also started drinking alcohol, which wasn’t something he would have ever done before. It seemed to represent a terrible shift: a complete resignation, all hell breaking loose.

Ten minutes later, he was still thinking about Elise’s donation to the one-legged woman. “How much did you give her?” he asked.

“A fiver,” Elise said. She flipped a page in her magazine, stopping to look at a woman lying on a floor in a matching bra-and-panty set, her rib bones sticking out severely. The woman was reading a book, advertising glasses.

“That’s a lot of money,” he said.

“She needs it more than we do, and her sign was funny.”

“It wasn’t funny,” I said, “it was sad.”

“You have no sense of humor.”

“I have a sense of humor,” I said, but I thought about it and decided that my sense of humor probably wasn’t very good. People had to explain jokes to me and I’d say they weren’t funny and the person would say of course they weren’t funny—you had to get them right away for them to be funny. I didn’t understand that, either, how getting them right away made them funny.

I watched the mile markers pass and then picked up one of Elise’s magazines. I liked them because they arrived in the mail full of slick colorful ads, smelling like perfume, and they told you how to do everything without even trying. I left it open on my lap and looked out the window again. Interstate miles were boring, though the font on the signs changed by state and sometimes it was hilly before it was flat again. I watched for Starbucks and Love’s gas stations. Starbucks had the chocolate graham crackers I liked, and Love’s had a good selection of baked goods and ripe bananas. I saw a sign for Chick-fil-A and wondered why I only wanted it on Sunday, when it was closed.

I readjusted my seatbelt and propped my feet on the tracts. We had passed out dozens of them, but the bundle didn’t seem to be getting any smaller and I wanted to throw them out the window: they’d get stuck in the branches of trees; prisoners would stab them with their pokers. I picked up one—the picture garish, Technicolor—a man and a woman sitting in a field surrounded by cows and horses and chickens. There were barrels of apples and pumpkins in the foreground. In the background, a nice house and lots of trees and a blue, blue sky. In a nod to multiculturalism, the man and woman could have been Mexican or Middle Eastern or Native American. I reread it for the thousandth time: God made Adam and Eve perfect, but He didn’t want them to be mindless robots so He gave them free will, which they used to disobey Him. As a result, God was letting us see how poorly we were able to rule ourselves by allowing this experiment with total freedom to continue, but it would soon come to an end because we’d messed it up big time—thousands of years of war and poverty and suffering.

I thought about it, God holding us accountable for something we hadn’t done and then letting us continue to rule ourselves so badly for so long in order to show us that we needed Him. I hadn’t ever thought about it before, really. The logic seemed sketchy.

I had handed out these tracts in shopping malls, left them between the pages of books in libraries and bookstores. I’d handed them out at parades and street festivals and I’d once gone door-to-door with an older boy from church but our pastor said door-to-door wasn’t our territory—we weren’t Jehovah’s Witnesses, we weren’t LDS. For all my time and efforts, I hadn’t saved a single person. Even the believers didn’t want to talk to me. They wanted to shop for blue jeans and summer reading books in peace.

Elise rested her head on my shoulder, and I smelled mint from whatever shampoo she’d used this morning. Then she took her makeup bag out of her purse and spread the bottles and containers around. I wanted to touch them, smell them. I loved going through her things. “Would you hold the mirror?” she asked.

I tried to hold it steady as she put on her base coat. She applied blush, eye shadow, eyeliner, and mascara, stopping every once and a while to adjust my hand or tell me I was holding it too low.

“I can’t believe you wear all that stuff. Doesn’t it feel like your face is melting off?”

“It makes me feel pretty,” she said, screwing the tops back on and putting everything away. “You want to play poker?”

“Not really,” I said, but she took the deck of cards out anyhow, shuffled them on one knee. A few fell to the floor. I counted out pistachio shells because we weren’t allowed to gamble with real money, not even pennies. Sometimes we gambled with the good bobby pins we were always swiping from each other, the ones you could only find at Sally’s, but we were running low.

I had a crap hand—2 of clubs, 10 of clubs, 6 of hearts. I put mine down and she put hers down, but then she picked hers back up and checked them again. She wasn’t good at cards, wasn’t good at games in general, but it didn’t make her not want to play.

A motorcycle gang roared past and we stopped to watch them go by, only one with a woman on the back, her long hair whipping itself into knots. I imagined the woman Indian-style on a bed, combing out her wet hair, and then I imagined the man combing it for her. He would tell her how beautiful she was even though she was old and had eye bags, even though her stomach was flabby from having his children. I wanted to sit on a bed with a man who would comb out my hair and tell me I was beautiful. No one ever told me this except for very old women who thought all young people were beautiful.

After the motorcycles passed, I spotted something large and headless in the road, a swath of bright red like a can of spilled paint. There were scavengers circling above, waiting for a lull in traffic so they could swoop down. Their shadows on the pavement were all wingspan.

I popped a pistachio shell into my mouth. It was still salty. I picked up another and another and tossed them in.