#Zero

by Neil McCormick

  I must have passed out somewhere along the line, because the last thing I remember was a vision of an angel of mercy, perhaps even Mother Mary herself, silhouetted in saintly splendour against the glorious moonlight, reaching down to mop my brow. But when I opened my eyes the dark shape towering over me was animal, predatory, hairy, mean of eye, sharp of tooth and claw, a fucking bear, I swear. I tried to scream but no sound came out. It was so close I could make out individual hairs on its pelt, lying along rippling muscle. I smelled rank, meaty breath on my face. Then it was gone, with a snuffle and a shuffle, and I had to wonder if I had dreamed it too.

  I lay shaking, aching, staring at a dawn sky, absurdly glad to be alive, cold and battered and exhausted, but still here, feeling damp foliage beneath my body, smelling the rich, wet aroma of the forest, still part of the world.

  I headed downhill, just because it was easier, driving ever deeper into a mossy green world, my mood as slippery as the pink and grey sky. I was hopelessly lost but beginning to accept this might be my natural condition. The cramps were more tolerable if I kept moving, and even with an icy headache and dry-bone cough, I had a sense the very worst was over. In the clear water of a burbling stream, I washed my hands and face. Dried blood flaked from beneath a tender nose. I prodded it carefully, wondering if it was broken. I imagined Beasley yelling, ‘Not the face! Not the face!’ and laughed out loud, a mad dog bark startling a bird out of the trees. I watched as its wings carried it into the blue beyond.

  At last, through thinning pine, I made out grey asphalt. And there was something else, a battered chrome-and-white motorhome parked at the border of a grassy clearing. Smoke hung in the air, the crackle of a small fire, the roasted, thick smell of coffee percolating. I lingered at the edge of the treeline. Even from a distance, I could see the man hunched by the fire was big, a hulking, bald, bearded slab. I contemplated whether I should make myself known. He could be a hunter. He might think I was in season.

  ‘You gonna come and get some coffee or stand there admiring my RV all day?’ the man called out in a deep, vibrating baritone.

  I inched forward, breaking through a mass of serrated leaves at the edge of the clearing. ‘How d’you know I was here?’ I asked.

  ‘My little brothers and sisters told me you was coming,’ he replied, holding out a metal cup from which steam rose enticingly. ‘Been waiting this past half hour. You took your time. Coffee’s getting cold.’

  I looked around but couldn’t see anyone else about. I wondered if he was mad. He had grave, sad eyes, which studied me intently from beneath a craggy, furrowed brow. His nose was bent and gnarly. Thick lips were mostly hidden by a neat, greying beard. The man was as ugly as he was big, standing at least six foot six. Tufts of hair sprouted wildly from the neck of his sweatshirt, and when he held out the mug, the back of his enormous hand was thickly matted. Vines of dark hairs curled around his wrist, retreating under his sleeve. I suspected his head was the only hairless part of him.

  ‘Where are your brothers and sisters?’ I asked, cautiously accepting the coffee.

  ‘Here’s one of them now,’ he gestured. I turned to see a squirrel inquisitively edge into the clearing before dashing back to the security of the foliage.

  ‘You talk to squirrels?’ I sounded stupid even to myself.

  ‘You been disturbing the wildlife, son,’ he explained, smiling. ‘I could track your movements just from the birds scattering overhead.’

  ‘Oh,’ I said and drank my coffee, feeling warmth spread through my chest. I must have looked quite a sight, scratched and bruised and wasted, dressed in torn T-shirt and dirty jeans, bits of twig and leaf caught in my clothes and hair, but he didn’t comment. He obviously didn’t recognise me, which was something, but then you probably don’t expect to come across a pop star on the side of a West Virginia mountain. ‘Are you a hunter?’

  ‘No, no, I wouldn’t say that, not a hunter, not exactly,’ he replied, then smiled a cryptic smile. ‘I suppose you could say I am a fisherman. Or a fisher of men.’ He waved towards the recreational vehicle. There was a line of coloured letters painted along the top of the cab: REV TYLER SALT – TRAVELLING REVIVAL – SINNERS WELCOME. ‘Are you lost, son?’ the Reverend asked.

  ‘Aren’t we all?’ I replied.

  ‘Amen to that,’ said the Rev. Then he added, ‘I was lost, but now I am found.’ We stood together, silently pondering this nugget. Can found really be a permanent state of being? Do you find yourself, or does someone else find you, and what happens if you move after you’ve been found? ‘Where are you heading?’ asked the Reverend.

  Every question seemed loaded with existential meaning. ‘I don’t know,’ I admitted. ‘You?’

  ‘Anywhere and everywhere,’ said the Rev. ‘Anywhere they’ll have me, and everywhere they need me. The spirit leads, I follow, God and gas prices willing.’

  ‘Which direction is the spirit pointing today?’

  ‘South,’ he nodded. The Lord, it seemed, was going to be my shepherd after all.

  Reverend Salt was on his way to an annual gathering in Moody, Alabama, known as the Heavenly Picnic, a big date on the calendar of the itinerant preaching community. I could tell he was trying not to be pushy, refraining from asking direct questions about what I was doing wandering about the woods battered and bewildered. He simply noted that I appeared to have no worldly belongings and opened the passenger door for me, inviting me to ride as far as I wanted. A bumper sticker on the windscreen read: IN CASE OF RAPTURE, THIS VEHICLE WILL BE UNMANNED.

  Clambering up, I was startled to see a ghostly figure raise itself from an unkempt bed that dominated the dilapidated interior. Grey-skinned, skeletal and sunken-eyed, the creature lifted a hand to point at me. I stared in horror as it croaked two syllables. ‘Ze … Ro.’ The ghost was gasping. Two thin tubes emerged from its nostrils, running to a squat machine humming by the bedside.

  ‘It’s all right, Ma,’ said the Reverend, pushing past. ‘We picked ourselves up a lost sheep along the way. We’re going to give the boy a ride, lend a helping hand, praise the Lord.’ He knelt beside her, gently stroking her hand and muttering soothing phrases, while I hung nervously back in the driving cab. There was some fumbling with the breathing apparatus and administration of medication. All the while the old woman’s rheumy, unfocused eyes never strayed from my direction. Zero, I felt sure she kept saying between gasps. That’s Zero. Eventually, she sagged back, trembling, her gaze becoming unfixed.

  ‘Don’t mind her,’ said the Reverend, settling into the driver’s seat. ‘She suffers bad in the mornings but she’ll be good after she’s slept some more, God willing.’

  ‘What’s wrong with your mother?’ I asked, cautiously.

  ‘My mother passed over to the other side,’ said the Reverend. ‘It’s OK. She’s been dead nearly three years now but we will be reunited in the bosom of the Lord. Could be any time, which is why we must always be ready. We shall be snatched into the clouds into the meeting place of the Lord in the air, it says in the letters of Paul. You heard of the Rapture? It’s coming.’ And before I could open the door of the RV and throw myself on the mercy of the bears in the forest, he started the engine and shifted into gear.

  I glanced fearfully back at the creature behind us as we drove. ‘She doesn’t look dead,’ I said, although, come to think of it, she actually did, lying there slack-jawed with sightless, open eyes, mottled arms crossed on top of the covers like a cadaver awaiting burial.

  The Reverend started to laugh, dry, heaving, shuddering booms. I shrunk deeper into my chair with each terrifying guffaw. ‘I’m sorry,’ he eventually succeeded in saying. ‘Marilyn’s not my mother. She’s my wife.’ And he hooted and chortled some more, until tears ran down his cheeks. Recognising that this might not be an ideal state for driving, he made a visible effort to pull himself together. ‘Hoo-ha, I haven’t laughed like that since … oh … well … it’s been a long time.’ The fleeting memory of his last laugh seemed to sober him. ‘La
ughter’s good,’ he announced. ‘It’s a gift from God.’ He seemed uncertain of this and I got the impression he was searching for an appropriate scripture to justify hilarity. All I could bring to mind was ‘Jesus wept.’ It was the only phrase from the Gospels I ever remembered accurately and that was because my old man used it all the time, though not in a religious context.

  ‘You called her “Ma”,’ I pointed out.

  ‘Yes,’ said the Reverend. ‘That’s what we are together, Ma and Pa, the most important thing we share, along with the love of Christ. Even if our beloved offspring don’t always see it that way.’

  He seemed to have completely lost his good humour but at least his driving improved. The huge vehicle wound down the mountain road at a stately pace. ‘Emphysema,’ he said, after a while. ‘The lungs are gone, really. Only the Lord is keeping her alive now, Christ’s love and oxygen tanks, when we can afford them. But it is not for us to question human suffering. The Lord moves in mysterious ways. “If ye have faith, nothing shall be impossible to you.”’ I sank into my seat, laying my throbbing head against the glass, the movement of the world outside a distending blur. Somewhere in the distance, I could hear the Reverend predicting the coming of the Rapture, when true believers would be beamed up to a heavenly Kingdom while legions of the faithless (fornicators, idolaters, adulterers, sodomites, pretty much anyone who knows how to have a good time) languished in hell on Earth, which sounded like your average global-warming weather forecast: ominous signs in the sun, moon and stars, distress among nations, people fainting from foreboding of what is coming upon the world. Since the Reverend apparently thought newspapers unfit for wiping his nether regions, considered television the entertainment medium of the devil himself and judged the Internet a superhighway straight to hell, I wondered how he could be so sure we hadn’t already passed the point of no return? In which case, he and his missus must have been left behind with the rest of us sinners.

  I was briefly stirred by the sound of the radio, an explosion of country joy, a fiddling bluegrass band praising the Lord over a clickety-clacking, tambourine-shaking rockabilly beat, with lots of yelled call-and-response vocals.

  I’m heaven bent (heaven bent)

  I’ve said my prayers, I’ve paid the rent (paid the rent!)

  For a room at the top of the stairs,

  I’ve been dying to meet Saint Peter,

  Why, you must be the grim reaper!

  Come on boys, take me to your leader –

  I’m heaven bent!

  The jolliness faded as a DJ preacher bellowed over the outro: ‘The Jesus I love is not a hippy, no! He is not a limp-wristed, smiling do-gooder come to pay the Earth a condolence call. Mine is a Furious Christ, ready to confront the Armies of Darkness …’

  I drifted in and out, opening my eyes to watch a blurry crucifix swing hypnotically from beneath the rear-view mirror, then shutting them hard again, as Father Martin and the antiseptic white of a hospital room materialised around me, like a bad dream that wouldn’t let go. That cowardly priest had a mouth like the grill of an old wireless radio, crackling in a southern drawl, ‘And Jesus said, “Do you suppose I came to establish peace on the Earth? No indeed. I have come to bring dissension. From now on, families will be divided, father against son and son against father, mother against daughter and daughter against mother …”’

  And I was in the room I never wanted to go back to, the room I could never escape, smoke hanging in the air, the howling of my father echoing into the distance, silence rising like a wave that might break over me, silence louder than thunder, and all I could see was that bed, that bed, that long white bed, stretching to the horizon, a smooth ocean of crisp linen, and all I could focus on was a hand, her hand, laying still on the white sheet, brown fingers cold to the touch, and I couldn’t breathe, I was drowning, fighting for air, lungs on fire as I struggled to the surface, bursting through the liquid skin of consciousness as the preacher savagely brayed, ‘Hide ye in the blood of Jesus. Get washed in the blood of the Lord.’

  ‘Help,’ I gasped.

  ‘Satan is real!’ crowed the voice.

  The RV was stationary, parked at the side of a two-lane highway, neat green fields and rolling hills stretching into the distance, the sun high in a perfectly blue sky. Someone was gasping for breath but it wasn’t me. I twisted to see Marilyn wheezing desperately, sunken eyes wild with fear, while the Reverend murmured soothing platitudes, ‘got it under control, Ma, just hang in there’, placing a thick plastic mask over her face and pressing a vial of blue liquid into the rattling machine. She sucked and sucked, mouth opening and shutting like a fish out of water, body in spasm, hands flaying in panic. Then suddenly she caught the air, pulling it into her lungs, letting it fill her up with the relief of a junkie, every muscle slackening as she sank back into her pillows.

  ‘There, there, Ma, just breathe, keep breathing, praise be the Lord,’ whispered the Reverend, his big, hairy hand stroking her white hair. Glancing up, he caught me watching, and smiled. ‘Come sit with Ma a moment, son, I need to fix some food. Come on. She’s just having a turn, that’s all. Ain’t nothing to be scared of.’

  Oh, but there was everything to be scared of. Everything. Because if this was where life was leading, if this was the final destination, going out the way we came in, kicking and screaming, then what was the fucking point of this perpetual struggle for air? It was all right for the Reverend with his plastic Jesus promising eternal love in the ever after but when I looked into Marilyn’s worn-out face, all I saw was dust settling in random patterns then blowing away like so much smoke in a hospital room. The old lady sat forward in the bed, skinny fingers grasping my wrist. ‘I know who you are,’ she hissed. Then she lay back just as quickly, as if the effort of speaking had worn her out.

  ‘That’s nice,’ said the Reverend. ‘She likes you.’

  ‘I need a cigarette,’ Marilyn croaked.

  The Reverend turned from his gas stove, which was spitting oil and issuing smoke. ‘Now, Ma, you know it’s cigarettes has put you here.’

  ‘It’s you who put me here, ya sonofabitch,’ muttered Marilyn.

  ‘You don’t mean that, Ma,’ sang the Reverend. ‘It’s just the pain talking. You know, Jesus Christ our Lord loves you …’

  ‘I wanna die, Tyler, why won’t the Lord let me die? Everything I took from you, wasn’t I punished enough? I should be at home with my children. Where are they now, Tyler, where are they?’

  ‘They’ll always be with us, Ma, in our hearts and in our prayers,’ intoned the Reverend, shovelling yolky eggs and burnt steak onto a plate. ‘Someday they’ll come around, I know, the Lord will open their eyes.’ He laid a tray across her lap, on which a pill bottle took pride of place. The label shone like the holy grail: OxyContin. ‘With the Lord’s grace, we will live as a family once again, by His side.’

  ‘I don’t wanna live no more, Tyler,’ moaned Marilyn, but there was feral eagerness in the way she held out her hand for the pills. She swallowed greedily. Her husband held a glass of water to her trembling lips while he recited grace in a mumbling stream, Bless-us-O-Lord-for-these-Thy-gifts-which-we-receive-from-Thy-bounty. I wanted to fall to my knees, yell praise the Lord, stick my tongue out and demand communion. But the Reverend had other ideas. He nodded at me. ‘We’ll take our food outside.’

  We sat in the shade of the RV, eating our greasy meal on a fold-out table. Fields of green stretched away in graceful order. Heat vibrated in the air. Watching a wide-winged bird swoop and dive for the sheer joy of it, I almost laughed aloud to find myself here, on the road with this fucked-up family, experiencing a sort of mad freedom I had forgotten was possible.

  ‘She wasn’t always like this,’ said the Reverend, chewing noisily. ‘She’s a good woman, a beautiful woman.’

  The eye of the beholder is a wonderful thing and I should know. I find it hard to look in the mirror, yet I’m a certified sex symbol.

  ‘That darn oxygen machine is so expensive, e
xcuse my French,’ the Rev continued. ‘The meds eat up our savings, everything we ever worked for, every cent we put aside, spent just to keep breathing – well, it ain’t right. Health insurance been nothing but trouble. Paid dues all my working life, then they invoke some clause about self-inflicted harm. I do believe they are in league with Satan, them, the tobacco companies, the federal government, all in it together. They’re gonna get theirs come the day. Come the day.’

  His fists were clenched, knuckles white, his craggy face scrunching up. Wariness stiffened my body. I had seen that kind of transformation in my father. But then the Rev breathed out heavily, crossed himself and his expression softened. ‘I got an anger in me, sometimes. I used to lose my temper, Marilyn knows, to my great regret. But that was before I accepted the Lord Jesus Christ into my heart.’ He laid a big hand on my shoulder. ‘You have that anger in you, son. You can’t hide it from one who knows. What you running from?’

  ‘Not the law,’ I said.

  ‘Your folks?’

  ‘My mother’s dead,’ I said, and almost choked. I didn’t even know why I would offer that information.

  ‘What about your father? When was the last time you spoke to him?’

  I couldn’t remember. I must have called him this year, surely? Or did we just communicate by bank order these days, the regular payments Beasley made to his account on my behalf?

  ‘Your father loves you,’ said the Reverend.

  ‘How could you know that?’ I demanded.

  ‘Because a father always loves his child. We just have a hard time showing it, that’s all,’ said the Reverend. I guessed he wasn’t really talking about me at all.

  I rode the next leg in the back. The Reverend said it brought his wife comfort to have company but she didn’t even seem to be aware I was there. The radio played gospel, the Rev singing tunelessly along above the bass hum of the engine. We must have gone hundreds of miles before Marilyn slowly stirred from her opiate trance, watery eyes gazing at me. ‘You look a lot like that boy,’ she said.