“Yes,” Marva said. “That’s what I meant to say.”
“There is a semblance,” Josiah allowed.
Marva, unable to contain herself, said, “When I first laid eyes on him I toppled! It’s a miracle!”
“It’s like a miracle,” Josiah corrected.
“Yes, that’s what I meant to say,” she lied. “It’s just like a miracle.”
“The time of miracles is long gone,” Josiah said.
“We are at the end of times. Chaos and desecration are upon us, not miracles. Mankind is played out, and God has turned his back. We need to take stock. The day is coming when things will be put right.”
Becka Comfort whispered “Amen.”
The child looked into the Shelvador without asking. He helped himself to a slice of American cheese which he folded into quadrants. He brought the folded cheese to his mouth and his mouth yawned open mechanically like a hinged trap. He had more teeth than seemed natural—tiny blunt pearls that would have looked more at home in the jaws of a large rodent. He finished the cheese and went back to the Shelvador, his salivating mouth anticipating another slice.
“Corky Comfort!” Becka said in a shouted whisper. “You must always ask sister Marva before you take!”
Marva held back comment as she watched the boy peel a second slice of cheese out of the cellophane wrapper. She wanted to take the cheese away from the boy, wanted to tell him that he was not to open the Shelvador, but she also wanted to seem generous to the Comforts—after all, there’d be no Shelvador without them. The boy ate the second slice of cheese, ignoring his mother, who seemed to live in a state of permanent distraction and was no longer focused on Corky’s unabashed snacking. Having finished with the American cheese, Corky opened the bread box and removed a hard dinner roll, which he quickly nibbled down to crumbs.
When he was done foraging, Corky planted himself on his mother’s lap. His ample flesh made him seem larger and heavier than Becka but he snuggled up to her as if he were a two-year-old. Becka appeared uncomfortable under the child’s weight but she did not push him away or complain. Corky laid his head on her chest and sucked his thumb noisily. Becka stroked the boy’s silky locks—an open act of adoration. Corky seemed to drowse, though under their half-closed lids his eyes were active. He studied Gus and Marva, making secret appraisals. He watched Gus for a time, then shifted to Marva, then back to Gus, then back to Marva. The knowing eyes, satisfied with what they saw, closed.
Marva said, “Orson here fixed the television.”
“Do not call him Orson, daughter,” Josiah warned. To Gus he said, “What is your name, son?”
“Gus Reppo,” Gus said. “I’m in the air force, on leave.”
“And you are not attempting to deceive Mrs. Gunlocke for personal gain?”
“No sir. Not at all.”
“He fixed the Ford like he knew it from having done it before,” Marva said with guarded defiance. “He also fixed my leaky commode—ball cock, flapper, and all. Orson always was a expert with the plumbing.”
Josiah weighed Gus’s worthiness a second time, again finding him innocent of poor intentions. He turned to the Bible he’d brought with him. He opened it and read:
“ ‘A great star fell from heaven blazing like a torch and it fell on a third of the rivers and on the fountains of water. The name of the star is Wormwood and a third of the waters became wormwood and many men died in the waters because it was made bitter.’ ”
Josiah looked up from the page. “Could it be any clearer than that?” he said. “Could the Lord’s final disposition of fallen humanity be laid out more plain?”
“Amen, amen,” Becka whispered.
Corky stirred in Becka’s lap. He withdrew his glistening thumb from his mouth and opened Becka’s blouse. His chubby fingers worked the buttons with practiced speed. He reached in, retrieved a thin, elongated breast. He raised the dark nipple to his lips and began to suckle. Becka allowed this without resistance or embarrassment, as if Corky receiving his mother’s milk on demand was commonplace and never contested.
When Corky had satisfied himself he sat up straight and said, “Can we go home now? When we gonna pray? I wanna pray now so we can go home.” Becka buttoned her blouse. She tried to hush the boy in constrained whispers but Corky arched his back defiantly and slid between her knees to the floor where he bellowed his displeasure.
With the others distracted by Corky’s tantrum, Gus sidled out of the kitchen, recognizing an opportunity to escape. He went out to the front yard where he’d parked the Goldstar.
The weather had changed. It had started raining and a hard wind was coming off the ocean, which gave him second thoughts. Riding the Goldstar was easy enough, but the roads now would be wet and slick. And it was dark. Not good conditions for an experienced rider, much less for a novice. He went back inside. He turned on the TV and watched a boxing match.
While he watched he could hear Josiah talking. His voice was full of trembling intensity. “ ‘… the beast that ascends from the bottomless pit will make war upon them and conquer them and kill them and their dead bodies will lie in the street of the great city which is called Sodom.’ In our day, my fellow supplicants, all cities are called Sodom!”
As if perfectly timed with Josiah’s emphatic words, one of the boxers knocked out the other.
Josiah said a brief prayer, then declared the Taking Stock meeting over. Josiah, Becka, and Corky filed out of the kitchen and out of the house.
Marva saw them out, then turned to Gus. The session had affected her. She looked radiant, as though taking stock had heated her blood. “Tomorrow,” she said, “we are going to the Mainstay Tabernacle over in Lemon Grove.”
“Mrs. Gunlocke …”
“I told you before, do not call me Mrs. Gunlocke. You know my name.”
“Marva, you’ve really got things mixed up,” Gus said.
“You’re the one mixed up!” she said.
“Josiah thinks you’re the one mixed up.”
“Josiah don’t know what I know. He can’t see you like I see you. You maybe fooled him, but you do not fool me.”
“I’m Gus Reppo.”
“So you say, but a lie is a lie whatever name you put on it.”
“You’re telling me I don’t know who I am,” Gus said.
“I’m telling you, you will know who you are before this night passes.”
Gus shrugged. There was no arguing with the convinced.
“We won’t have any trouble getting there now we got the car,” she said. “Listen to me, Orson. You hear Josiah preach in the tabernacle, you will flat topple. People topple every Sunday. It is a thing to behold! After they topple they are cured. You will be cured of your doubt.”
“I don’t think so,” Gus said.
“You don’t listen too good, do you?”
“That’s what my mom says.”
“Your mama got you figured!”
She put her hand on his arm. She squeezed his biceps in spasms timed to underscore her words. “Let’s not talk about it for a while,” she said. “We have time, and things will sort out by morning, you’ll see. You are tired after your long journey over the waters. You need to rest your mind, which is stuck in the mudflats of confusion just now.”
She opened the sofa into a bed and brought out sheets and pillows from her bedroom closet. “You sleep here tonight,” she said. “I’ll make grits and eggs tomorrow and then we can drive to Lemon Grove.”
Gus didn’t argue. He figured he’d get up early and whether it was still raining or not, he’d make good his escape on the Goldstar.
Marva went into her bedroom and closed the warped door as best she could. Gus watched the little TV until after midnight. Then he made up the sofa bed and turned in.
The sofa bed had a steel crossbar under the thin mattress, level with his kidneys. He kept waking up with sharp back pains. He turned sideways to avoid the steel bar, legs drawn up in fetal repose. When he finally fell asleep it was almost
dawn.
The dream started as a thought, a plan of escape. He felt the Goldstar under him, throbbing powerfully. He saw landscape flying by. He cut through traffic but it wasn’t southern California traffic, it was US Route 2 traffic, coming into Milk River from the west. He could see the river on his right, grain elevators on his left, the tall sky above. He twisted the throttle and the bike went airborne on the viaduct and then he was with Sandy in her Turnpike Cruiser sliding broadside across the ice of the Milk River reservoir.
“Kiss me, Orson,” Sandy said. And he kissed her in front of his parents’ house, his mother’s face grieving in the window, only now Sandy did not make him stop. Her lips were surprisingly hard and dry and he was surprised again when he reached under her dress and found she was not wearing anything underneath it.
This discovery excited him further and Sandy said, “You go on and work her good, for it is your right! I knew this was goin to happen, it was fated! I foretold it for I have the gift of prophecy!” Though puzzled by the way she spoke, he entered her thrusting hard, and her lean thighs pressed with uncommon strength against his kidneys. Her hands clamped his neck, squeezing his jugular, and he saw wheels of light turning in the dark air. When she started uttering non-words like a certain sect of believers speaking in tongues, he realized that he was not dreaming and that it was not Sandy under him clawing his neck and back and pulling his hair and ears and slapping at his shoulders and buttocks, it was Marva Gunlocke, his dead father’s insane wife. He stopped mid-thrust, stunned by the horror of it, but she locked her legs on him and wouldn’t let him pull away. She said, “You keep on workin it! You got to keep on! It’s your right and duty to finish what you begun!”
He made his mind blank and kept on until it would not have been possible to stop, and when it was over she let him rise.
“You see now how right that was?” she said. “There can be no question in your mind! You don’t just look like him, you are him! You are Orson come back to me! You even do like him—all rabbity like. I got chillbumps down to my feet! Looky here, my toes are still splayed out like they was cramped. You done me right, Orson, like you always did!”
“Orson’s dead, Mrs. Gunlocke,” Gus said. “I am Gus Reppo.”
“Go ahead. Say it a thousand times. Make me out the one can’t see things straight. It won’t change the truth.”
“I am Gus Reppo, I really am Gus Reppo,” Gus said.
“I know who you are! It’s you that don’t know who you are!”
Gus showed her his dog tags. “This proves it. My name and air force serial number are stamped on them. Call the Pentagon, tell them my serial number. They’ll tell you who I am.”
“Show me anything you want. Show me pictures of you in baby clothes. Show me your school picture. Show me pictures of the gal you left back in Cimarron County. It don’t mean nothing. Orson come back the only way he could figure to come back—as himself in body and soul, but taking a false name.”
“I am Gus Reppo,” Gus said. “Always have been.”
“Reppo!” she scoffed. “Who ever heard of such a thing? It only shows how the Lord deals out hints and clues. There is no Reppo, never was. After the Fisk went down Orson’s spirit rose up out of the darkling waters and he spanned the great ocean itself and he found you, his spit and image, and then he went down into you, like the Fisk went down into the deep, and some years later when he figured the time was right he made you come to Chula Vista to fulfill what he was intended to fulfill but couldn’t because of the Jap torpedo. That’s why you did what you did. And that’s why you are wrong to think you are some fool boy named Reppo when the facts say you are Orson Gunlocke—heart, body, and mind.”
She stood up and smoothed her wrinkled nightgown around her narrow hips. “Anyhow, it’s sealed now. You can’t undo what you done. Maybe you think you can, maybe you think you just had a good time with a poor helpless widow, but that’s because you are blind as a doorknob and can’t see the truth underneath the deed. That’s where the truth lies, underneath the deed.”
“It was a dream … I don’t see …”
“That’s right! You don’t see! You’re blind to the truth!”
“I was with Sandy in the dream, and then she wasn’t Sandy, and you were there …”
She covered his mouth with her hand. She said, “Dream is just another side of waked-up which itself is part of a bigger dream too big to ponder by the likes of you and me.”
She stroked his hair. She picked up his hand and kissed it. There was nothing in her eyes to suggest insanity except for this sudden uncharacteristic tenderness.
“I am going to get us up some breakfast now,” she said. “And then we are going to the tabernacle. You get yourself into the bathtub. I don’t want the smell of rut befouling sanctified air.”
20
Gus stepped on the starter. The weak six-volt battery barely turned the crankshaft and the carbon-caked spark plugs fired indifferently. When it finally caught Gus kept the accelerator pinned to the floor listening to valve clatter and fan belt screech. The car shook like an old dog rising out of dream. Gus revved it until it moaned.
He backed it out of the driveway and into the street, then shifted into first. The car bucked ahead in neck-snapping jerks. Marva’s Sunday hat fell off twice. When Gus forced the shift lever into second the going was smoother, but it backfired and balked in third. The engine had no power in third.
He drove to Lemon Grove in second, never exceeding twenty miles an hour. The car left a blue haze of smoke behind it. Gus stopped at the first gas station he saw. He told the attendant to fill the tires and to put a dollar’s worth of gas in the tank.
“After church I’ll have to go back to LA,” Gus said.
Marva smiled, as if humoring a stubborn but unclever child.
“Lyle will be worrying about his motorcycle,” Gus said. “And then we have to be on the plane Tuesday morning or be counted AWOL.”
“Those lost at sea are not considered willful absentees,” she said. Her tone suggested a superior knowledge of such matters.
Gus felt lost at sea. He felt seasick. Marva’s grits were greasy and her partially cooked eggs were strung with clear mucous. For toast she blackened slices of stale bread under the oven’s broiler. Her coffee, made from twice-used grounds, was bitter and gritty with an acidic aftertaste. Some eggshells she’d packed into the percolator’s basket to restore flavor and clarify the coffee found their way into the pot. Gus choked on a fragment.
Another aftertaste, one from the previous night, soured his thoughts. None of it was his fault—he needed to believe that. Marva had planned it. She was the instigator. But he hadn’t pulled away from her after he realized what was happening. He’d needed to finish it. Needed to hear her unchecked gibberish rise in pitch and volume as she worked herself up to a sharp climactic yelp.
He thought: I’m so fucked up.
Not as fucked up as she is.
But that’s not an excuse, is it?
Do I need an excuse?
Everyone needs an excuse.
Not everyone. Just the fucked up.
“I hear voices,” she said cheerfully. “Is that you talking to yourself, Orson dear?” She put her hand on his knee. The hand traveled to his thigh.
“If I stay, they’ll come and get me anyway,” Gus said. “They’ll lock me up for the rest of my enlistment and give me a dishonorable discharge.”
“If it came to that, I would wait for you. But you musn’t worry about things that are not ordained. You are safely home now, Orson. Please try to understand that.”
The car sputtered along, the engine revving and failing to rev, the steering wheel shaking violently and transferring the shake to Gus’s hands, chest, abdomen, and legs. He felt overpowered and invaded, his grip on sanity pried loose, finger by finger.
Marva pointed out a plain, one-story flat-roofed building made of whitewashed concrete blocks. “There’s the Mainstay Tabernacle,” she said. “We’re right on t
ime! You see? You are running on a schedule you didn’t even know you had! Things are coming to a head, Orson! See how things turn out? Are you beginning to understand what is happening to us?”
“I am not,” Gus said.
He slipped the gear lever into neutral and the car stopped shaking. They coasted smoothly into the parking lot. Gus set the brake and they got out of the car and went into the church.
Josiah was sitting motionless in a high-back chair next to a lectern. His head was bowed and his large-knuckled hands were clasped. Marva and Gus took seats in a middle pew. There were about forty people in the church. Becka and Corky sat up front, facing the lectern, along with several other women and their fussing kids.
The organist, a piously smiling fat man in black-rimmed glasses and tangerine suit, struck a note. He held the note longer than needed then added a second note. It was the first chord of a hymn. The congregation recognized it, and they stood up and began to sing:
Oh weary soul the gate is near
In sin why still abide?
Both peace and rest are waiting here
And you are just outside
And you are just outside.
After several more choruses, Josiah stood up behind the lectern and cleared his throat. The music died. “Everyone deceives his neighbor,” he said. “And no one speaks the truth.”
His voice was barely audible—a practiced technique—and the congregation, some with the hymn’s lyrics still on their lips, leaned forward. Some elderly worshippers cupped their hands behind their ears or fiddled with the buttons on their hearing aids.
“Their tongue is a deadly arrow,” Josiah continued, a little louder now. “Each speaks peaceably to his neighbor … but in his heart he plans an ambush!”
This last phrase fell on the ears of the flock like a thunderclap. Josiah raised his head now and for the first time leveled his scouring eyes on the assembled. An emotion twisted his austere features into a mask of contained fury. A woman gasped. A man coughed as if he’d been struck in the throat. Josiah closed his text.
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