Saints+Sinners

by Saints

  Becky greeted us and took us into the living room. It was fancy with doilies on the backs of every chair, lamps with real light bulbs on the end tables, and gold-framed pictures hanging on the walls. And in the corner, the radio sat on top of a large box draped with laced fabric. It looked glorious. We chatted and giggled like school girls, and Mrs. Johnson brought us spoonbread in fine china bowls and we ate with real silverware. Soon, Mr. Johnson came into the room and shook our hands and asked if we were ready. We pulled our chairs around and watched Mr. Johnson and the talking box, and like a conductor leading a train out of the depot, he turned on the radio and fiddled with the dials hoping to find the show we came to hear. He never did find the right channel airing the awards show, but we ended up listening to a broadcast of Superman, much to the chagrin of Becky and her mother. I quickly gave up the idea of being Vivien Leigh in a lip lock with Clark Gable and soon got caught up in a wish to be flying in the arms of the man of steel. While listening, it dawned on me about our similarities. He was from another planet and he had super powers. Suddenly, I thought that maybe, just maybe, what Mama and Daddy were telling me might be true. Listening to the radio was the most incredible thing I’d ever done, but we had to deal with Becky and her mother’s interruptions as they sporadically quoted lines from Gone With the Wind, and more than once saying, “You’ve just got to see the movie.” Even Mr. Johnson’s occasional demands to his womenfolk to hush went unheeded.

  After about an hour of listening, Mr. Johnson, despite Becky’s objections, announced that we had to leave since Sunday was a church day, and they needed to get to bed early. Becky accused her daddy of being cheap and not wanting to pay for extra electricity to keep the light bulbs on. I couldn’t imagine talking to my daddy like that. Johnny Mac and I obliged our hosts and said goodnight and expressed our thanks and appreciation to Mr. Johnson for sharing his radio.

  It was way past dark and even colder on the walk home. The crescent moon lit the roadway just enough so that we didn’t stumble in the ruts. Johnny Mac hadn’t worn his coat and his voice trembled as he tried to speak. I offered to share my coat with him, taking it off and draping it over the two of us. He was freezing and I told him to put his arms around my waist and I’d warm him up. We stood there for a few minutes, facing each other in a bear hug trying to warm his body. My cheek pressed against his neck, and I could smell the scent of day-old sweat, a smell I’d remember my entire life. I kissed his neck and he kissed mine. I gently pulled back and looked into his beautiful blue eyes and then kissed him on the mouth. It was my first kiss, and with the sweetness of spoon bread on his breath, along with the nervous warmth of his lips, the moment couldn’t have been more special. “Come on,” I said. “We need to git home before we freeze to death.”

  We walked toward Johnny Mac’s lane, hand in hand under my coat. “See you at church tomorrow?” I asked.

  “Yep, see you in church,” he whispered back to me in my ear before kissing me one more time on the lips. “Night.”

  “Night,” I echoed as I watched him trot quickly down the lane to the holler ahead. I smelled the hand that held his and sensed a yearning in my gut that I had never felt before. I stayed put until he faded into the darkness and then I ran home, every now and then leaping into the air, hoping that I would discover the power to fly.

  * * *

  Daddy hitched up the plow horse to the wagon and we headed to church. Mama kept her word and wore Fluffy around her neck and she even blushed a bit when I told her she looked pretty. The fur pelt looked expensive atop her brown Sunday church coat, and the squirrel-trimmed gloves were the perfect accessory to the outfit. The widow Ballard was going to be so envious, I thought to myself as we walked through the church door just in time to have a seat before the first hymn of the day was to start. I moved my mouth without singing to Shall We Gather at the River? and stretched my neck to get a glimpse of Johnny Mac and his family. Mama kept nudging me to pay attention, but I kept looking, wondering where he was. They never missed Sunday church services.

  After what seemed like hours of singing hymns, praying, and shouting back at Preacher Thompson “Amen!” at the tops of our lungs, the service was finally over and we filed out of the church while exchanging “God bless yous” with our neighbors along the way. The line of wagons meandered down the road and up to the hills, and those on foot followed, all heading home to their hollers for a Sunday meal.

  As we approached the MacDonald lane, I told my daddy that I needed to check on Johnny Mac, and without any objections, he allowed me to go.

  “Don’t be long,” Mama said. “They’s ham on the stove waitin’ fer us.”

  “Yes, ma’am,” I answered before I hurried down the lane and up the ridge.

  I made it to the fencepost about fifty feet in front of the house before I stopped. There was no one on the porch. Rule of the mountains is that you don’t go up to a neighbor’s house if there’s no one on the porch. It had something to do with nosy revenuers and government workers looking into things they had no business looking into.

  “Johnny Mac!” I yelled as loud as I could. “Johnny Mac, are you home?” I waited for a few seconds when I saw Johnny Mac open the door and walk onto the porch. He came down the steps toward me.

  “Brody, you gotta leave.”

  “I didn’t see you at church and I was wonderin’ if you was okay,” I said as he approached me. “What happened to your face?” I brushed back his blond hair to see his swollen black eye and abrasions on his cheek and neck. “Who done this?” I demanded.

  “My daddy was beatin’ my mama last night when I got home. He’d been drinkin’…still is. I tried to stop him and then he turned on me.”

  I was getting so angry at the thought of anyone hurting Johnny Mac, even if it was his daddy that did it. “I ain’t leavin’ you here.”

  “Johnny! Git in the house, and git in there now!” Mr. MacDonald was standing off the side of the porch with an axe in his hand. He staggered a bit and reached for the porch post to catch his balance.

  “I gotta go,” Johnny Mac said before he headed up the hill. With his head down, he passed by his daddy who slapped him to the ground. I had all kinds of thoughts running through my head at that moment. It was just yesterday afternoon that I promised my daddy that I would never use my alien powers, the ones I didn’t really have, and I would lay low. But now I was faced with the biggest challenge of my life. Mr. MacDonald was no Jack Harman, but he was still a bully, a drunkard bully with an axe who just slapped the love of my life. Johnny Mac went into the house and Mr. MacDonald yelled at me to leave his property.

  I was shaking in my shoes, but I stood my ground. “I ain’t leavin’ here without Johnny Mac!”

  The big burly sot started walking toward me, his axe raised in the air. I should have turned and run home, but for some reason, and it might have been a Superman inspiration to fight for good and destroy evil, I couldn’t turn so I did the only thing I knew how to do, especially at a time like this. I spread my legs wide, and I put my hands on my hips, and I summoned my super alien powers by glaring as hard as I could, and then I snapped my fingers in the air. If it worked on Jack Harman like he said it did, then maybe if would work on this loony drunk man. He stopped about ten feet in front of me and lowered his axe.

  “What the hell are you doin’, you fuckin’ fairy?”

  Somehow, I didn’t feel offended by him calling me a fairy. At least he didn’t call me an alien. “I’m usin’ my powers to knock you down!” I yelled.

  “You is crazy like your mama!” he roared back at me, and then he raised the axe over his head. “I’m gonna chop you up into li’l pieces and no one is gonna give a shit!”

  I snapped my fingers one last time as he approached me when suddenly the sound of a gunshot could be heard bouncing off the mountain walls. Mr. MacDonald fell forward, the axe landing right at my feet. He had a bloody hole in his back. I look up and Johnny Mac’s mama was standing there holding a double-barrel shotgun
. She’d shot him dead.

  “He ain’t gonna hurt no one no more,” she mumbled. “No more.”

  * * *

  At the funeral service, I watched as the MacDonald family mourned the loss of their daddy, and I felt sad too, but not because Mr. MacDonald was dead. Johnny Mac and his family were moving to Pikeville to live with a relative, and I knew I’d never see him again. As soon as Mr. MacDonald was given a final blessing and covered with dirt, I glanced at Johnny Mac and said goodbye with my eyes. Becky grabbed my hand.

  “Come on, Brody,” she whispered. “Let’s walk.” I nodded, and she led me away from the cemetery.

  We ended up on Coal Ridge Road where we sat down behind a protruding boulder overlooking Raccoon just as the sun was beginning to set behind us.

  “You gonna miss Johnny Mac, ain’t you?”

  “Yeah, real bad. If I hadn’t been so foolish, Mr. MacDonald would still be alive and Johnny Mac wouldn’t be movin’ away.”

  “Don’t be blamin’ yourself. My mama said it was bound to happen. I think what you did was really brave. Daddy said that Mrs. MacDonald shootin’ her husband dead is the talk of Pike County.”

  “Yeah,” I said. “So maybe it’ll put to rest me bein’ an alien with super powers.”

  “Maybe so, but people like Jack Harman won’t be so convinced.”

  “Guess I need to let him beat me up just once and he’ll leave me alone.” We sat in silence for a few minutes watching lights slowly appear as the darkness fell across the town. “I cain’t figure out how this whole thing about bein’ an alien got started.”

  Becky sat up straight. “Well, I overheard my mama say that your mama made it all up.”

  “Why? Why would she do that?”

  “She said your mama was slow.”

  “Slow?”

  “Yeah, not real smart, and maybe she was afraid about bein’ knocked up with you, or maybe she was sceered fer you, like she did it to protect you, you know, cause you’re a sissy boy.”

  “I don’t know. And what about the bright light Mama talked about?”

  “Maybe they ate some magic mushrooms. My mama says you cain’t be too careful when it comes to eatin’ mushrooms.”

  “Could be Mr. MacDonald was right when he said my mama was crazy.”

  “No, bein’ slow and bein’ crazy ain’t the same thing.”

  “She did wear a dead cat wrapped around her neck,” I said. “Even wore it to church.”

  “And you was the one who made it fer her. That don’t make you crazy.”

  “I’m not so sure. And I ain’t so sure any of this matters.”

  Becky stood up. “We need to go before it gits too dark to see the trail. And anyway, Brody Whitaker, you got a mama and daddy who loves you, and I got a mama and daddy who loves me, ’cept I got me a daddy who’s cheap.”

  “At least you got ’lectricity,” I said as we started our journey down to Raccoon.

  That evening, I realized my life was forever changed, and I might not ever understand my family’s secret. I gave up using super powers that I didn’t have, but like Scarlet O’Hara, I learned coping skills to meet the challenges I faced on a daily basis. I was quick to realize that being a sissy in Appalachia is the same thing as being an alien in Appalachia. I’ve never outgrown my need to stand up for causes I believed in, and I also never outgrew snapping my fingers in defiance of anything that got in my way. At the very least, the gesture gave me a few seconds of start time if I needed to run in another direction.

  Figures of Speech

  Lewis DeSimone

  She’s dying for a cigarette. The urge still hits her after every meal, even breakfast. It would be the perfect complement to the bittersweet coffee that now warms her tongue. All around her, people are lighting up, blowing out elegant puffs of smoke that mingle above their heads. Smoking is still acceptable in Europe, almost an art. In America, you have to sneak a cigarette; even on the sidewalk, people stare at you, their eyes accusing you at once of rudeness, pollution, and child molestation.

  But she’s left the habit behind, along with other reminders of the recent past. Italy is a convenient place for forgetting: so constantly aware of its own history, it leaves no room for anyone else’s. New York seems years away as well as miles. New York is beyond remembering. Except for the damn cigarettes.

  Facing the bright side of the piazza, she’s donned her sunglasses. Everything looks slightly green, though the outlines of people and buildings are clearer without the morning glare. They’ve been in Venice for only a couple of days, but already she’s memorized this spot. Like everyone else in town, they keep returning to it. It’s the only place in the city that feels open, the only place she can really see the sky.

  James sits across from her, looking down at the faux marble tabletop. He’s been unusually quiet all morning. By now, he should be begging her to take a stroll through the twisted, dirty backstreets of Venice. The real Italy, he calls it. Why, she wonders, is reality always associated with ugliness?

  Behind James, a group of startled tourists stand in the midst of a flock of pigeons, encouraging them to land on their shoulders—the same vermin they would shoo viciously away at home.

  A young Italian man, maneuvering his way through the menagerie, catches her eye, a sickeningly flirtatious smile dancing on his lips. She seals her own lips fiercely and squints back at him. She’s tempted to tear the glasses off to show him the anger in her eyes, but decides he’s not worth it.

  “I swear,” she says, grabbing James’s attention away from the patterns in the table, “the next guy who looks at me like that is going to find himself dunked head first into the Grand Canal.” The words taste like nicotine on her tongue. Everything tastes like nicotine these days; it must be like the phantom pains people get when their limbs have been cut off.

  “They think it’s charming,” she goes on, still staring at the man’s back as he disappears under the clock tower. “They probably think I should be flattered—like it’s all an innocent game of cat and mouse and the mouse actually enjoys being chased!”

  “Cynthia, we’ve been in this country for two weeks already. Shouldn’t you be used to it by now?” James stirs his cappuccino with a cinnamon stick and takes another sip. The steamed milk leaves a frothy mustache on his lip.

  “That’s easy for you to say,” she replies. “Nobody’s treating you like a piece of meat.”

  A sudden burst of laughter shakes the foam on his cup. “Thank you very much for that testimonial to my sex appeal,” he cries. “I’ll have you know that I have been come on to several times in the past few days alone.”

  “Well, that’s different.”

  “Why, pray tell?” A child runs through the square, sending pigeons soaring toward the sky in a sudden rush.

  “Well—you’re used to it. That’s how you—oh, you know what I mean.”

  “No, Cyn, I’m not sure I do.” He sits back in his chair, cheek resting on his open hand, waiting. He loves putting her on the spot like this, goading her to make a remark that he can construe as homophobic. He still hasn’t forgiven her for saying that some of her best friends are gay men. It was just a figure of speech, she told him. He should have taken it as a compliment; after all, he is her best friend.

  “I just don’t appreciate being ogled, that’s all. I came here to see the sights, not become one.” She taps her fingers nervously on the tabletop. “Oh, let’s just change the subject,” she says, looking wildly around. “What do you want to do today?”

  To her right, tourists, burdened with tote bags and camcorders, meander through Piazza San Marco, drawn toward the wide corridor that leads to the lagoon. Torn between the basilica on one side and the campanile on the other, they hover aimlessly for a moment around the souvenir carts whose proprietors practice their sales pitches in cheerful broken English.

  James turns languidly back to Cynthia and smiles. “Absolutely nothing,” he says.

  A light breeze swirls Cynthia’s hair
across her face. She brushes it back impatiently and allows her hand to linger on the nape of her neck. She isn’t used to the crisp feeling of the short hairs back there—so much for Milanese hair stylists.

  “Well, we have to do something,” she replies. “We can’t just sit around here all day.”

  “Why not? The Italians do.”

  “We’re tourists, dear,” she sneers. “We don’t sit; we tour. What about all those palaces we still haven’t seen—and the Guggenheim collection?”

  “Don’t you think it’s ironic?” he asks. “Here we are, in the cradle of romance—you and me.”

  She smiles, finally. “It’s not so much ironic as pathetic.” A group of schoolchildren spill out of the basilica now, screeching their appreciation for summer air if not Byzantine architecture.

  “Maybe so,” he says, “but let’s make the most of it.” He glances at the check on the table and pulls a twenty euro note from his pocket. The colorful paper curls up around the cup that he places to hold it down.

  It’s the height of the tourist season. In the marketplace just off the piazza, the narrow alleyways are crammed with a motley group of people—mostly Americans, of course, but she can still catch snatches of German and Italian in the surrounding din. They hurry through the twisted streets, more concerned with finding open space than achieving a destination.

  “Where was it you said you wanted to go?” he asks as they emerge into the light at last.

  “The Guggenheim.”

  “Great. Which way?”

  “Search me.” The perennial answer to a foolish question. In just two days, they’ve discovered that one never looks for anything in Venice; one simply finds it. The most they can hope for is to start in the right direction.