Сигрид Нуньес - Salvation City

He did not care so much about the photographs of himself. He didn’t like looking at pictures of himself, and he’d always hated having his picture taken. He could not recall a time in his life when he hadn’t thought there was something (either big or ginormous , depending on his age) about his looks that was wrong. In fact, he was surprised anew each time he recalled how Addy had described him: like a young man now, so handsome and so serious.

Alone in his room, he stared bravely and hopefully at the young man in the full-length mirror hanging inside his closet door. So handsome and so serious. Yes, maybe. Sometimes he thought he could see it, too.

It began as a small thing: a red round mark on the right shoulder blade, as if a hot dime had been pressed there.

“It’s nothing,” said PW. “It just itches.” He asked Tracy to dab the spot with some calamine lotion. But the next day the itch was worse, and all up and down his spine he had tingling and pricking sensations, which soon turned into what he said felt like a bad sunburn across his back. He had a fever, too, and a mild headache. He took some aspirin and went to bed. “I’ll be fine in the morning. You know me.” Never sick a day in his life.

And maybe if he’d been able to sleep that night—maybe then he would have felt better in the morning. But the “sunburn” kept him up. And now there was a red stripe down his back (“Long as it ain’t yellow!”), like the mark of a whip.

Tracy wanted him to see the doctor, but PW said he wasn’t about to make a big deal out of what was probably just a simple case of hives. “Maybe I’ve developed some kind of allergy.” After all, the person without some kind of allergy these days was the exception.

Tracy said hives didn’t give a person headache and fever. “I think it’s some kind of nerve thing,” she said.

“Your wife was right,” said the doctor. “I wish you’d come in sooner.”

Nine days after the first symptom, painful oozing blisters covered much of PW’s torso, front and back. Had he come in right away, an antiviral drug might have helped. As it was, not much besides rest and painkiller could be prescribed.

The rash should clear up in another three to four weeks, the doctor said. “But I’ve got to warn you it could be a rough ride. Things might get worse before they get better.” Much worse, he should have said.

Cole had never heard of shingles before. It was frightening to see PW so helpless in its clutches. He couldn’t help thinking about his father in his last anguished days, though no one had said anything about PW being in danger of dying. The pain was so bad (“It’s like someone across the room is throwing knives at my back”) that he could not give his sermons. Some days he could not even leave his room. At its worst, it turned him into a raving stranger.

“What is it now? Just what is it you’re trying to tell me, Lord?”

Cole and Tracy huddled together downstairs, listening to the commotion overhead. Shouts and roars accompanied by much fist banging and foot stamping and now and then the crash of some object hurled across the room.

“Just why are you making my life so hard? Just tell me, how’d I screw up this time?”

But even as she wept Tracy assured Cole that PW would be all right. “The Lord never sends anyone more suffering than they can bear.”

Not that that was going to stop her from blaming the suffering on Addy. An almighty coincidence, was it not, that PW, who was never sick, should have become so very sick at this particular time?

Cole had kept his promise to Addy to stay in touch. It was from her that he learned that another name for shingles was “the devil’s whip.”

WHEN BOOTS HEARD Cole was learning how to shoot, he blessed him with a Remington .22 from his own collection.

The first time Starlyn saw Cole with the rifle, she said, “Now you’re complete.” Said it lightly, like something that had just popped into her head. But Cole pretended it was her way of saying she liked him better now. Certainly these days she was nicer to him. But that niceness appeared to be part of a larger change taking place in Starlyn that summer. She was still apocalyptic, but it was as if some restless, ornery part of her had gone into hibernation.

Earlier, when she was in a mood, you’d know it by the way she flounced in and out of rooms and acted as if she didn’t always hear what was said to her. Now she was more likely to lapse into something like a trance. Cole had observed her staring at the same page of a magazine for almost an hour. When something on TV made everyone else laugh, she startled, proving she hadn’t really been watching.

Maybe it was about turning sixteen—no denying she acted more like a grown-up than when he’d first met her. More likely it was about Mason, the burden of her secret love. Or maybe it had something to do with being a rapture child (though Cole still wasn’t quite sure what made her—or any other kid for that matter—one of those; and sixteen was old for a rapture child).

Whatever it was, he couldn’t help preferring this new Starlyn, who was not only nicer but even prettier in her new soft dreaminess. Not that he’d lost all fear of her, but most of his feelings for her were tender ones, including something he wouldn’t have expected to feel and which he thought she might find insulting. He found it baffling: what reason could there be for him to feel sorry for her?

Yes, he’d caught her crying while listening to her iPod—but what girl didn’t cry at “O Lonesome O Lord”? Cheerful-ness was beneath apocalyptic girls, but no one would have called Starlyn unhappy. Nothing came easier to her than making friends. And this summer there was an exciting new face: Amberly, who was twenty and newlywed and who’d just moved to town from Evansville. Amberly wasn’t apocalyptic, but she had dramatic dark eyes and the grace and perfect posture of a ballerina. Starlyn was flattered that a twenty-year-old married woman would want to hang out with her. They saw each other almost every day. It occurred to Cole that at least some of the time Starlyn was supposed to be with Amberly she might actually be with Mason. But no one shared that suspicion as far as he knew.

At first he figured it was because of Mason that Starlyn was spending so much time visiting Salvation City—why else? But then he thought it could be Amberly, and later he learned of another factor. Starlyn’s mother, divorced already a few years from Starlyn’s stepfather (her real father had run off before she was born), had just started dating a certain man. There’d been other men since the divorce, but “This one’s a keeper” (Tracy). Cole sensed a problem, though, something about which everyone was tight-lipped, at least around him.

Lovebirds need a little privacy, he was told. But Cole thought maybe Starlyn and this man, Judd, didn’t like each other. Starlyn herself never spoke of Judd. But once Cole made the mistake of mentioning him, and Starlyn turned so sharply on her heel that her hair, which she happened to be wearing braided that day, smacked him in the mouth like a cable. The sting lasted a remarkably long time, and whenever Cole was tempted (and he was tempted a lot) to ask Starlyn whatever happened to that boyfriend of hers in Louisville, he felt it again.

Starlyn didn’t talk about that boyfriend anymore, but she didn’t talk about Mason, either, and for all Cole knew there was nothing to talk about. Say it was just one kiss, just that one time, just playing around, no biggie. No secret love. No love at all.