by James Morrow
“This place needs a roach fumigation and a shower that works. Babies are like kittens, Julie, they grow into something much more sinister. Can you imagine the amount of chaos a baby will bring to our lives, can you even imagine?”
“She’ll be outnumbered. Four to one. We’re all going to raise her.”
“Not me.”
“Once she arrives, you’ll fall for her, I just know it. You’ll take her to school, show your students what babies look like.”
“Far too many of my students know what babies look like.”
“Don’t rain on this particular parade, Bix Constantine. Not on this one. Don’t.”
Humanity did not have all the science, but by 2012 it did have a simple way for a pregnant woman to learn her baby’s sex within seven weeks of conception. Go to Dr. Lefkowitz’s clinic, get your womb sonogrammed, and a minute later a technician named Bob announces the either/or result.
“It’s a boy,” Bob said.
“It’s a boy!” Phoebe screamed, running deliriously through the house. “I’ve got a boy growing inside me!” she shouted to Julie, Irene, and Bix.
A boy. The news won Julie over completely. A boy, a nascent Murray Jacob Katz—oh, the wondrous stories she’d tell her little brother about his pop. “Can we call him Murray?”
“Little Murray, eh? Little Murray Sparks?” Phoebe rolled the syllables across her tongue, testing them. “Sure, honey. Absolutely. Little Murray.”
A perfect warmth moved through Julie, clear to her steel fingertips. “And he’ll really be as much mine as yours?”
“Girl Scout’s honor. He’ll love us all equally.”
While nothing in her past history indicated that this middle-aged alcoholic, dynamite thief, and retired prostitute would take expectant motherhood seriously, that is exactly what Phoebe did. She followed Lefkowitz’s advice religiously, giving up coffee, wolfing down vitamins, and daily inserting a kind of vaginal suppository known to prevent miscarriages. Although she planned to have the baby at home—“the natural way,” as she put it, “like a goddamn cave woman,” as Bix put it—she readily agreed that Bix and Irene should rush her off to Madison Memorial the minute things got too natural for her own good.
Phoebe’s pregnancy filled the house like flower fragrance, penetrating every crack and wormhole, oiling the wainscoting with its sweet fecund ooze. Her face glowed like brown porcelain, her voice grew mellow, her small breasts swelled. Prodded by Georgina’s pagan blood, she took to strolling naked through their azalea-choked conservatory, thrusting her abdomen toward the windows, letting Little Murray feel November’s diamond sun.
And yet, beneath the earth mother’s crust rumbled an earlier Phoebe, Julie felt—the louder, angrier, wilder one. “Something’s eating you,” Julie asserted during one of Phoebe’s sun-worship sessions.
“True.”
“Is it hard staying sober?”
“It’s a bitch and a half staying sober.” Phoebe patted Little Murray. “That’s not it.” Stretched and squeezed by the pregnancy, her navel had become as flat as the valve on a basketball. “My dad expects me to shoot Billy Milk.”
“No, Phoebe. That was just something I made up.”
“You made it up?”
“So you’d want to go on living.”
“Oh.” Phoebe sounded mildly disappointed. “Did you really meet Dad? Is he good-looking? Smart like me?”
Julie nodded. “Good-looking. Smart.”
“Proud of his African blood?”
“Oh, yes. A terrific father, evidently. He had four sons.”
“And a daughter. A daughter who should shoot Billy Milk.”
“No, I said that. Not him. Me.”
“I don’t care who thought of it—it’s a great idea either way. Milk even has Mom’s bones, doesn’t he? Know what I’d like to do, Katz? I’d like to slip over to Jersey right now, shoot the bastard, and bring those bones back home. Right now.”
“Don’t talk crazy, Phoebe. It’s bad for the baby.”
“The Sermon on the Mount—it never ends for you, does it? If somebody kicks your right buttock, turn the other cheek.”
“Settle down, Phoebe.”
“Once you’ve got somebody’s bones, you can give her a funeral. A major production, with eulogies and flowers and all that shit. It wasn’t easy raising me.”
“I know. I was there.”
“Ever notice what a great word ‘revenge’ is, Katz, how it throws your lips apart like you’re about to blow a lion?” Phoebe threw her lips apart. “Revenge, honey. Let’s go shoot Milk.”
“Hey, you want a funeral? We’ll do a funeral. Fine. But stop talking crazy.”
“I want a funeral.”
And so, the following Sunday, the four inhabitants of 3411 Baring gathered in the backyard beneath a sycamore tree, its leaves aglow with their incipient deaths: strawberry red, pumpkin orange. The funeral began with Phoebe addressing the ground, assuring Georgina her daughter was off the sauce for good, telling her a grandson was on the way. Irene said a few banalities to the effect that anyone who could raise so fine a person as Phoebe had surely found a favored room in God’s many mansions. Bix, self-defrocked priest of Uncertaintism, speculated aloud that Georgina had fused with the Universal Wave Function, ashes to ashes, quarks to quarks.
“Amen,” said Julie.
At last came the burial itself, Bix and Julie grabbing their spades, chopping a hole in the taut November earth, and depositing a yard-sale hope chest filled with a joy buzzer, a whoopie cushion, a swatch of latex dog vomit, and a fully functional pair of windup chattering teeth.
A dangerous place, the hand had said. But the planet kept circling, tilting, carrying Plywood City away from the sun, and now came December, the worst in memory, crashing into Philadelphia like a frigid meteor, dunning it with ice, snow, and record lows. The Green Tureen stayed on call around the clock, fighting the incipient winter with soup. To Milk’s church, no doubt, Julie and her followers had always been avatars of Satan, and now they were indeed Lucifers, bringers of light, bearers of incandescence: Sterno heat, Coleman heat, off-brand heat, any source would do.
Just as Pop used to comb flea markets and thrift stores for books, so Julie now frequented such places in quest of used fur coats, second-hand blankets, castoff woolen mittens, hand-me-down ski caps, and recycled insulation, for the heat once brought needed to be preserved and nurtured. And if the coats, blankets, and mittens failed to appear in the bargain spots, then Julie would visit the retail stores, paying when she could, shoplifting when she couldn’t—Julie Katz, the thermodynamic Robin Hood, robbing the warm to give to the cold.
“A dangerous place,” Julie muttered to herself as she and Mohammed Chaudry nailed a swatch of Corning insulation to the north wall of his family’s shanty. The stuff was pink, fluffy, and laden with glass, like some corrupt form of cotton candy.
In the far corner, Mohammed’s eleven-month-old daughter issued a sound somewhere between a moan and a gasp. The baby’s teeth chattered like the windup novelty they’d buried at Georgina’s funeral; Julie could hear the tiny clicks.
“I shouldn’t be here,” she whispered, the words buried by the whacks of her claw hammer. She enjoyed the feel of the hammer, its unambiguous utility and steely balance. Her brother, too, knew his way around tools.
But this particular night, she realized, none of it would be enough. “Zero degrees exactly,” said the sprightly young voice on Julie’s portable radio. “The WPIX Weatherwatch Team predicts twenty below by dawn.” A can of Sterno wouldn’t protect the Chaudry baby tonight, nor would a garage-sale comforter or a flea-market snowsuit. Forget warm milk. Forget these feeble chunks of fiberglass.
Julie liked Mohammed Chaudry, refugee from the CIA’s recent and wildly successful attempt to reinstate a shahdom in Iran. He made his way in the world collecting scrap metal and redeeming it for fifty cents a pound, the tin cans of wrath, except Mohammed wasn’t Pa Joad, he wasn’t the deserving poor. He stole. H
e thought the world was owned by Jews. He talked, half seriously, of assassinating the secretary of state. Mohammed’s plausibility, that is what Julie liked about him, his lack of any uncommon virtues, and when she resolved that night to give him something more than Corning insulation, she saw it not as charity but as justice, not as his deserts but as his due.
Justice served, she headed into the snow-swept dawn toward the Green Tureen, the sepulchral boxcars to her right, the frozen shantytown to her left. Snowflakes mashed against her parka like soft-bodied insects. She yawned, long and hugely, her mouth filling with the miniature crystals. Next stop, the all-night Superfresh at 35th and Spring Garden. The Tureen was out of coffee, sugar, oranges, everything. She didn’t want to go. She wanted to drive straight home and make furious love to her husband.
A sudden sound, reverberant, like a bowling ball colliding with steel pins. Julie turned. The massive metal door of a New York Central boxcar slid back, and even before the dark figures poured out she knew something ungodly had been set loose. And then, as the policemen charged through the storm, her heart, prophetic pump, drummed the full truth: Circus. “Get out of here!” she screamed into the cold blaze of their flashlights. “Leave me alone!”
There were over a dozen, decked out in globular riot helmets and green armor, a swarm of malevolent grasshoppers. Their captain, a tall, coarse-skinned man whose handlebar mustache flared from beneath his nose like antlers, marched forward wielding a Mauser military pistol. “The sacred river will burn you like acid,” he declared, raising his visor, “and by that sign we shall know you.”
“This is American soil,” Julie snarled. “Let me see your passports.”
“Brother Michael, show the woman our passports.” The captain’s syllables emerged as palpable clouds, words made flesh.
A stumpy, pimple-faced sergeant approached—Brother Michael, evidently—brandishing not passports but handcuffs.
He clamped one manacle around Julie’s left wrist.
He whipped the other through empty air.
“Hey, she’s only got one hand!” Brother Michael sounded bewildered and hurt. “Somebody stole her hand! Where’s your hand?”
Quite true, no hand, no Molly. Molly of the hot circuits, Molly the oven with five fingers, now permanently installed in the Chaudrys’ shanty. Not a loan, not even a gift. A sacrifice, rather, the penny from the pauper. She could hear Bix say: But Julie, it’s not insured, we can’t get another, why’d you give it away?
“Then chain her to yourself,” ordered the captain.
Done. Tethered. Trapped. A dangerous place. The frigid metal gnawed Julie’s left wrist.
The captain’s Mauser prodded her to the end of the siding, past the Green Tureen, past a dark brooding chemical car sitting on the tracks like a shipment of liquid hate. “I have my rights!” Julie insisted. Beyond the bumper lay an unassuming Tastykake delivery truck, fleecy with snow. “Where’re you taking me?” she demanded. The sergeant climbed into the passenger seat, pulling Julie in beside him. Suffocating clouds of sugar drifted into her nostrils. “I’m an American citizen!” The captain got behind the wheel. “Let me go!”
As the Tastykake truck pulled onto Market Street and headed toward the Delaware, Julie wept. From fear, naturally. From regret and anger. From self-pity, loneliness, uncertainty. But most of all from her sudden realization that her true fortune-cookie destiny read, You will miss seeing your second brother come into the world.
CHAPTER 16
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Zipping up his stark-white neoprene wetsuit, Billy Milk strode past the eternally fecund Tree of Life, scrambled down the bank, and waded into the River of Christ’s Return, its bubbling currents rushing from the northern creeks straight through the city and onward to the sea. Exactly as the Book of Revelation required, the tree grew “on either side of the river,” its mammoth trunk arcing across the canal like a footbridge, a miracle predicated on the existence of root systems at both ends. Among God’s gifts to the year 2012 was the biotechnology required to fulfill Scripture.
Although the baptisms were less popular than the burnings, Billy’s flock still attended faithfully. Over three hundred believers lined the riverbank while another hundred sat atop the tree trunk, their bright faces peering between boughs laden with golden apples. But was it sheer love of God that brought them here, wondered Billy, or did they come because, at least once during each such gathering, their grandpastor’s phantom eye looked beneath the skin of a supposed convert to reveal the wormy guts of a closet Uncertaintist? “Heretic!” Billy would shout. “Let God and the Circus have their way with you!” Whereupon the crowd would go wild.
Most of them. There were always those who misinterpreted the New Jersey Inquisition, those who found it unloving or even unscriptural. Billy had learned to live with such judgments. Equally false readings had attended his attack on Atlantic City.
Reaching the sandbar, Billy mounted the submerged slope and turned. A full house, but no Timothy. Doubtless the archshepherd was still on his penance retreat, still sitting naked in the frozen muck under Brigantine Bridge. Billy’s inner vision displayed his boy’s ordeal, the ice sealing Timothy’s eyes and lips, December’s malign winds lashing his flesh. You raise a blind son. You tell him about Jesus, feed him oats and bran, tuck him in each evening, and, on the very day heaven heals his eyes, buy him a fifteen-speed bicycle with a horn and a saddlebag. And yet he ends up torturing himself like some sort of papist flagellant. It doesn’t make sense.
So cold, the holy river—but then the Jordan was no sauna either, Billy realized. Shivering violently, the day’s first convert approached, a black man, doubtless another Newark citizen who’d wearied of trying to reach the humanist fleshpots of Staten Island and had elected to receive his redeemer instead. Staten Island: God etched his messages everywhere, didn’t he, not just in Scripture, not just on the Mosaic tablets. Take away the first T in Staten, take away the cross, and you got Saten, that is, Satan.
Billy placed one hand on the convert’s shoulder, the other against the small of his back. Scripture was crystal clear about baptism. The whole body must go under, one, two, three—death, burial, resurrection—none of this fey papist business of sprinkling a person’s head. “We descend with Christ in the likeness of his death.” Billy bent the man, immersed him, held him under. “We’re raised to walk in a new way of life.” Billy brought the convert up, the bright waters rolling down his ebony face like tears of joy.
“Hallelujah!” shouted the convert, simultaneously coughing and laughing. No Satan Island for him.
The crowd echoed, “Hallelujah!”
Minute followed minute, conversion begat conversion, and suddenly Billy’s commandant was before him, waist deep in the canal, a plump woman at his side. Jewish, Billy sensed. Fortyish, half homely, half voluptuous, brown skin, fungus-green eyes, a turban of dense black hair spilling from her scalp and across her forehead.
Billy asked, “Is this…?”
“I think so,” Peter Scortia replied.
She lacked a hand. From the right sleeve of her parka a grinning suture emerged. A fitting irregularity, Billy thought, for everything about this woman was sinistral: left, demented, malevolent, wrong.
“Tell me your name,” Billy demanded.
Teeth clacking like castanets, mouth slung at a contemptuous angle, the one-handed woman came forward. “Julie Katz. And you’re Reverend Milk.”
Odd: the waters were causing her no pain. The holy river should be scalding the Antichrist; it should be boiling the meat off her bones.
“Some call you Sheila of the Moon,” Billy asserted.
“My pen name.”
Odd: as thoroughly as Billy probed her frame, his phantom eye could find no locusts scuttling along her ribs, no scorpions in her heart.
He channeled the full force of God’s will into his left eye, swelling its vessels, countering the woman’s terrible gaze. “Do you know why you’ve been a
rrested?”
“Hard to say. There’s something inevitable about it, don’t you think? Jesus tried to warn me.”
“Christ talks to you?”
“Sometimes. Yes. Brother to sister.”
Billy took a loud swallow of air. “You believe you’re the Lord Jesus’ sister?”
“I believe it because it’s true. I suppose that makes me a blasphemer?”
“I suppose it makes you something much worse, Sheila of the Moon.” The interview was giving Billy no pleasure. For the first time in years, his phantom eye was tingling, an itch that couldn’t be scratched. “It makes you—”
A sign! A stark unequivocal sign! Just as the Holy Spirit had visited the Savior’s baptism in the form of a dove, so did a New Jersey sea gull now soar into view, its course sure, purpose certain. Billy’s phantom eye grew hot, a molten marble seething in his head. How clearly God speaks, he thought as the gull released a large black-and-white pudding. How lucid the language of heaven.
The sign splatted against the woman’s brow and crept down her cheek. “Damn,” she said, wiping her face with her glove.
“Children of the Lamb—behold!” Billy addressed the Tree of Life. “The Antichrist’s reign has ended! Spring will come to New Jerusalem, and with it our redeemer!”
Only: the waters hadn’t burned her.
Except: he’d seen no locusts on her bones.
The tree erupted in cheers so thunderous a dozen golden apples fell into the canal.
Thank God for the courts, thought Billy, thank God for the Inquisition. The learned judges would answer the riddle once and for all. Sheila of the Moon: venially guilty or mortally guilty, simple atheist or very Antichrist, mere foul-mouthed Jew or eternal scourge of God?
It was one trial, Billy vowed, his son would not miss.
Satan is seasick. Leaning over Pain’s starboard rail, he coughs into the watery border where the Straits of Dirac meet the Pacific Ocean.
The vomitus arrives in a great tide, as if from a horn of liquid plenty. Andrew Wyvern disgorges the eight tons of soybeans he pirated and swallowed before they could relieve the 1997 Sudanese famine. The devil regurgitates the river’s worth of fresh-frozen plasma he’s been keeping from Canada’s hemophiliacs. He spews out a thousand vials of hijacked interferon originally intended for a Peking cancer clinic. He upchucks the mountain of nickels and dimes collected last Halloween by California schoolchildren on behalf of UNICEF.
