Scott Cheshire - High as the Horses' Bridles

“Look!” Josiah yells, he can’t help himself, a voice speaks through him: “For the Lord and His army come knocking!”

Excited, he lets his sermon notes slip and fall to the floor.

He looks down, pauses for what feels like minutes — and then he looks away to the back of the hall. He puts his hand to his brow as if saluting a brother in the way back row, as if guarding his eyes from the sun. “And there in the heavens, a door has opened!” Josiah’s thin voice careens throughout the hall, even his mother is startled by its power. Kizowski stands from his chair backstage, and stumbles over to the curtain. Call him crazy, but he actually looks for a heavenly door. The kid’s got something, all right. Without realizing, Kizowski, now side-stage, is resting his arm on Pullsey’s shoulder. Trading glances, how old is the boy, again?

But Josiah is well beyond all this now. He sees every heavenly star within reach.

He sees every dream he will ever have, every way he will become, what he certainly must become: a receptacle, an empty bowl, a deep and lucky cup of God.

“The first voice!” he shouts out. “See the returning Christ riding on a great white horse, and here even now He comes riding!” He straightens his back, shouting, and believing every word as it comes to him: “The Lord God has said every star will fall, and the sun will turn black in the sky. And His voice speaks out like a trumpet!” Josiah sees the crowd see him, and their vision of him infuses him, informing him with a wholly new spirit. “And look!” He points to the ceiling. “The Lord God said, Come up here. And I will show you what waits for this world!”

Hundreds of heads, adoring and reverent, bent back now, looking upward.

Sister Hilda Famosa is swooning in her seat.

“And know this, while sitting in the house of Heaven.” Arms spread wide, embracing every last hungry spirit in the audience, he says: “The Lord God said two thousand years must pass since the birth of the Son of Man. And then I will come, in the year two thousand, at the dawning of God’s New Millennium! And in that last year the Messiah, our Lord Christ, will return!” His hands now reach, grabbing for invisible rungs. “And there I see myself standing as an elder before you! And then — only then — on that day — in that hour, a divine vindication, a great rain of tribulation and destruction, and the End will finally be here!

“At once,” he shouts. “I am in the spirit!”

Overwhelmed, the crowd inhales, each one a child of God.

Lay focus on this boy, lay focus on me — O, look at me filling up with breath and divine voice, and seeing with the eyes of Heaven, because my Lord God opens a heavenly door, one that no man can ever shut. And He himself will enter. And He will sup with me, and I with Him, and He will set me on His throne until the End of Days. And He will write on me a brand-new name, and every soul, I swear, will hear it.

The cabbie tore through a dead-red light and we took off for the expressway, away from the airport and heading for Richmond Hill. He was laughing, fast-talking into his ear clip phone. The sky outside was a cool blue David Hockney pool, but inside, the vinyl seat burned through my pants. I lowered the window. I’m guessing the language was Arabic. The ID card on the back of his seat gave his first name as Abdullah, and Abdullah let loose another howling and happy laugh. He saw me in his mirror and threw me a smiling nod. Pointed at his phone and looked at me like, this guy’s really killing me.

We joined the traffic flow. The whirl of outside, the car horns and sirens, the screech and relentless machine din of city washed over the car like a wave. Everything sounded the same as the car dropped and bounced in jolts, over potholes and swellings all along the Grand Central Parkway. There was a roaring whoosh as a plane zeppelined overhead.

I was ecstatic to be free of the airplane, of its stale dry air, of the small soiled hallways of LaGuardia and those sad plastic baggage carousels. We rolled on solid ground beside the bay. I never liked flying, but I liked the world seen from way up there, the incoming skyline, the blunt slant of the Citigroup Center, and the sterling hubcaps and skyscraping needle of the Chrysler Building. I liked the shipwreck hulk of the Fifty-Ninth Street Bridge, and the concrete sprawl of Queens spreading out from the East River like some elaborate gunmetal carpet. What I didn’t like was the turbulence, the need for airsickness bags. I didn’t like the horror of hollow space between me and what was below, and that some five hundred people died in plane crashes every single year. I had checked before leaving. The odds are maybe not especially good, but actually quite good if it’s your plane that spirals and explodes in the oily Hudson. Manhattan is an island, surrounded by water. People forget this. A sewer stink of sulfur wafted in through the window from the bay.

Abdullah shouted, “What a smell!” Then back to his conversation.

I was amazed by his fluid traversal between the two languages. I waited for him to pause and lean forward. “You’re speaking Arabic, right?”

He said into the earpiece, “Wait a second.” He asked me, “What, you speak Arabic?”

I said, “I’m just wondering if.”

“Well because many of the businessmen speak Arabic.” He lowered his window and slammed his hand against his car door, yelling, “Move, you fucker!”

It was Friday, nearly dusk, and I had only been here in New York for a few minutes but I found the city immediately overwhelming. Sunlight flashed between buildings as if some westward and strobe-bursting ambulance was keeping an exact parallel pace. There must have been a day, one specific day long ago, when I first looked up at the sun and asked out loud, what is that?

Abdullah laughed. “The traffic is starting! What can I do?”

I shrugged my shoulders.

He asked me, “Where are you coming from?”

“California. I moved there. But I’m from here.” I was back, of course, to see my father. Sarah, the lovely ex-wife, she’d told me he was sick, said he sounded “strange” and something seemed “wrong,” but she always exaggerated. I called him and he eventually relented. Really he was fine, just more tired than usual, and he missed Mom. But there was something about his voice.

Abdullah said, “California girls!”

A medium-sized bread truck blared its horn alongside us and briefly slowed, a car length ahead. It was then shot-put forward, barely missing a motorcycle. It screeched to a stop behind a red Buick Regal with T-tops. I imagined loaves of white and wheat, clear plastic packs of hot dog buns scattered between the bumps of back wheel wells.

“He has no patience!” Abdullah slapped his car door. “You’re going to kill somebody! You want I should stay on the expressway? Too much traffic.”

Flushing Meadows Park was under the overpass, and I saw the grassy lakes and rusting sci-fi ruins of the 1964 World’s Fair. That version of the future dated pretty badly. Except for maybe the Unisphere (which I happened to like very much), a hollow steel globe tall as a ten-story building. Abdullah and I were emigrants flying through the Milky Way, our cab a slow yellow rocket, and the Earth was out there lonesome, spinning still in the distance. I played Wiffle ball here as a kid, on congregation picnics. So long ago I hardly remembered them, but still they came alive, flashes of light in my mind. Mom, Dad, and me on a yellow picnic sheet, cooking food on a metal grill sticking out of the ground, it smelling like chalk and smoke and soil. Our sheet always a bit removed from the others. A wooden table, a red-checked plastic tablecloth. Watermelon slices in a bowl. Mom talking macramé secrets with the wives, and a flash of Dad turning burgers. There was a picture somewhere among our family photo albums of a seagull, flying away, a stolen frankfurter limp in its beak. I thought of softball, my first game of softball. I was maybe nine or ten, at a church outing. Dad argued with the other dads; it was obvious we didn’t know all the rules. We knew most of the rules, yes, because nobody grows up in Queens without playing Wiffle ball, or stickball, or some other street version of baseball in an empty lot or some neighbor’s driveway. There was even throwball, without sticks. But these were bastard versions, fitted to whatever shitty equipment and how little space we had. We used to even change rules mid-game. Three bases sometimes, other times two. Balls hitting parked cars were fair or foul depending on who was playing. And balls that spun off cracks in the sidewalk were pretty much always played. Unless a hitter called out “Hindu!” Hindu? Where does something like that even come from? My father once told me they said it back when he was kid, too. It wasn’t specific to my block, or to Queens. Dad grew up in Brooklyn, and so he knew how to play stickball, stoopball, skully. Street games. Kid games. But I don’t think he ever graduated from them. No occasion. No need. He never played on a team, or had many friends that I could remember. Church was priority, a friendship with God. Except during that game of softball, we never played catch.