Jesus Land

by Julia Scheeres

  “You do so know,” Bruce says in a tight voice. His voice rises several octaves when he’s upset, into the soprano range, and it’s a scary thing to behold. “You know perfectly well why you were sent here.”

  “Well, Ah do know that Momma married herself a bornedagin man, and that’s when my troubles began,” Jolene says, flipping a long corkscrew over her shoulder. “Ah shoulda known they was storyin’ about this place. That rich old Briggity Britches was up to no good, no how.”

  When she says this, I stuff my fist in my mouth to keep from laughing and Susan coughs into her hand to do the same.

  Becky turns to Jolene.

  “Jesus forgives his children, Jolene,” she says in her earnest bird voice. “He loves you. But to receive His forgiveness, we must first admit our mistakes.”

  Jolene sucks in her cheeks as if she were preparing to spit.

  “Ah don’t need no forgivin’, cuz Ah ain’t done nothing wrong,” she says, her black eyes flashing. “And Ah cain’t say Ah much care for this Jesus character anyhows.”

  Bruce bolts to his feet.

  “Would you like me to tell everyone why your parents sent you here?”

  “That would be my momma, cuz my daddy died when I was . . .”

  “Jolene here had a game she played with the boys in her town, called ‘Health Clinic’. . .”

  “Nah, it was ‘House Call’ and it . . .”

  “This ritualistic sexual abuse took place at her home, while her poor mother was slaving away as a maid in order to . . .”

  “Wasn’t no maid, she worked in a hospital . . .”

  “Quiet!” Bruce roars.

  Jolene crosses her arms and hunkers down in her chair, glaring at him.

  “These boys would take turns having carnal knowledge of Jolene, right there under her poor mother’s roof.”

  Becky puts a hand on Jolene’s shoulder and Jolene jerks out from under it. I study her baggy Kentucky Wildcats T-shirt and wonder what’s so special about the stick figure underneath that all these boys would crave it. She lifts her chin and stares back at me defiantly.

  “Well, what do you have to say for yourself?” Bruce asks her.

  “All that happened ̵fore Momma found herself that rich old Bapdist and decided to become a fancy lady. ’Fore that, she paid no mind at all.”

  Bruce raises his index finger with an ah-ha expression on his face.

  “So you confess to being a fornicator.”

  “A forni-what?”

  “You had sex before marriage.”

  She shrugs. “So?”

  “Fornication is an abomination in the eyes of our Lord!”

  “An abomini-what?”

  “Sin! Evil! Wrong!”

  “Wasn’t like we was hurting no one,” Jolene giggles, looking over at me. “Actually, it was kinda fun.”

  Bruce orders the rest of us out of the house, so he can converse alone with Jolene. We all know what this means: calisthenics, threats, tears. Big 0s in the Facing Reality and the Courtesy and Respect boxes.

  Becky leads us into the darkening field beside Starr, where we sit on the machete-hewn grass and sing “Seek Ye First” and “Sandy Land” and “Humble Thyself.”

  But no matter how high we raise our voices, we can still hear Bruce bellowing inside the cement house. We slap no-seeums from our bare arms and scream the lyrics at the fading horizon. We sing until our mouths go dry and the night wraps itself around each one of us like a shroud, and the raging finally stops.

  At Vespers, Jolene bends her head to pray and doesn’t raise it up again.

  The pastor, a preacher-in-training from Kansas named Stephen (“Call me Stevie”) Erickson, asks us if Jesus will find our hearts 100% pure and hate-free when He returns to earth, and I wonder how such a thing is possible.

  David is also in a mood tonight. He scowls at the cross nailed to the front wall during the sermon—”Our God Is a Tubular God”—with the old-man worry line creasing his forehead, and he doesn’t once look in my direction.

  After the benediction, we congregate in the courtyard for Social Time. Debbie sets a platter of chocolate chip cookies on a picnic table, and this provokes squeals of delight. The cookies were held up in Customs for two months and are hard and stale, but they are Chocolate Chip Cookies just the same, the first some kids have tasted in over a year.

  Susan and I sit on a cement step with our Bibles cushioning our butts and dig out the dark beads with our fingernails. We melt them on our tongues, one by one to make them last, each morsel a piece of Home.

  “Been five months since I had chocolate,” Susan says dreamily, lifting a morsel to study it in the gaslight before dropping it into her mouth.

  It’s the little things that keep you sane at Escuela Caribe, an extra hour of sleep on Sunday, chocolate pudding cake on Thursday nights, a lukewarm shower instead of a cold one, stale chocolate chips.

  Ted Schlund holds forth at the center of the courtyard, surrounded by staff. He twists and gesticulates as he recounts some story, and his audience hoots with laughter. As usual, his wife listens quietly at his side, her face upturned like a waiting child.

  Across from us, Janet and Tiffany huddle with their boyfriends at separate picnic tables while Becky hovers nearby to guard against any “unfitting corporal contact.” The definition of said contact—as well as the Program boys we’d like to have it with— is a frequent topic of conversation for Susan and me. She believes that anything beyond a quick peck on the lips is considered inappropriate, but I think the definition could even include hand-holding, if it’s done in a perverted manner. Like when a boy tongues the space between your fingers and you can feel it down between your legs.

  Janet’s boyfriend rises stiffly from the picnic table, a bulge tenting the front of his Sunday slacks.

  “My Lord, look at that woodie!” Susan whispers as he walks to the boys’ bathroom. “Do you think he’s going in there to abuse himself?”

  We laugh, and I remember Reverend Dykstra telling our Young Calvinist group that “you can’t jack off with Jesus” and laugh even harder. I look across the courtyard at David, but he’s standing alone, scowling at the ground and he won’t look up at me, so I can’t use our secret code to ask him how he’s doing.

  A group of boys find a tennis ball under a bush and chuck it against the school building and it echoes loudly poing poing poing. One of them is Tommy Atherton, a seventeen-year-old Californian whom Susan and I secretly call “The Clydesdale.”

  We’d both like to have unfitting corporal contact with Tommy; he’s got a basketball player’s physique and talks like Sean Penn in Fast Times at Ridgemont High. We suck the chocolate from our tongues and watch his tan biceps curl beneath the sleeve of his lavender polo shirt as he chucks the ball against the wall.

  When a housefather roars at the boys to stop, they arrange themselves in a glum circle and toss the ball to each other underhanded. Tommy sees us staring at him and grins, and Susan perks up, sticking out her boobs and grinning back. When he sees this, Tommy smiles wider, and Susan sticks her boobs out further.

  “You look real stupid doing that,” I tell her, sore because I have no boobs to stick out. She ignores me.

  A whistle blows to signal the end of Social Time, and Susan and I reluctantly stand to join the other girls.

  No one notices that Jolene’s gone until we’ve lined up to march back up the hill and there’s an empty space behind me.

  Bruce and Becky run back through the courtyard shouting Jolene’s name. They’re joined by other staffers who poke flashlights into the classrooms and toilets calling “Jolene! Time to go, Jolene!” as if she’d simply misplaced herself. Susan and I exchange a wide-eyed look; we know better.

  Ted struts around with his hands on his hips, barking orders. The Dominican guard trots up with his German shepherd and machete to consult with Ted and lopes off into the darkness, shouting in Spanish.

  She’s gone. Vanished onto the Dominican side of the barbed wire
.

  Bruce and the other men pile into the school’s two vans, and the vehicles careen through the front gate, tires spitting gravel, and shoot down the narrow road toward Jarabacoa. We listen to them fade into the distance, and then Becky turns to us, her face as pale as a mushroom.

  “Let’s go,” she says, her voice barely a whisper.

  We walk up to Starr under the moon’s unblinking gaze in deep silence, no one daring give voice to the thought swirling through her head:

  She’s free.

  The vans growl back up the hill a few hours later. I’m awake and thinking about Jolene and listening to the girls in the bunks around me as they sigh and moan and cry out at the demons who pursue them even in their sleep. Tires crunch over Starr’s driveway, a metal door slams, then footsteps clack across the tiles into the houseparents’ quarters. Bruce, returning without Jolene.

  At the breakfast table, Bruce says Jolene made it all the way to the village by hiding in the shrubs alongside the road; the men passed her several times before one of them looked through the back van window and saw her metallic silver purse sparkling in the moonlight. I stare into my grape oatmeal as he speaks and imagine her tottering down the dirt road in her gray satin pumps, her white eyelet dress glowing in the moonlight. Did she have a plan, or was she blinded by panic? Was she happy? For a small while at least?

  They hauled her back to the property and locked her in the room at the end of the courtyard where I spent my first night. Kids call it “The Hole.”

  After lunch, Ted Schlund tells us to remain seated for a special function and I prepare myself for the worst. David and I exchange a grim look across the picnic tables before Bruce leads Jolene into the courtyard, where she is seated on a stool before us. She’s dressed in jeans and a T-shirt, and she perches on the stool with her back curved in defeat, her platinum hair snarled with knots and draped over her face like a corn tassel.

  Ted quotes some scripture and makes some pronouncements, but my attention’s fastened on the scissors in his hand. When he’s done talking, he grabs a fistful of Jolene’s hair at her neck and nips in with the long blades. A thick swath drifts to the ground, where it is dragged over the brick courtyard by a gust of wind.

  By the time Ted has finished with her, Jolene’s pride and joy winds around the bushes, the table legs, and our shoes in a vast golden spider web. Jolene slouches on the stool with her arms crossed tightly over her chest, her pale face naked to the sun, her eyes closed. Her hair has been reduced to a jagged butch cut that’s blond at the tips and black underneath, her natural color. She looks like a punk rock star; all she needs is a safety pin in her ear.

  Ted prays aloud for God to help her accept this punishment, and we echo his “Amen” in a mumbled chorus before he dismisses us for the class.

  On Sunday afternoon, I stand before Bruce to recite Bible verses, then prostrate myself before him to do leg lifts and push-ups and suicides. The house votes to approve my promotion to First Level, and suddenly I can move without asking and use the bathroom without an audience. And these simple freedoms— which just two weeks ago were as natural to me as breathing air—fill me with awe, and I circle the house several times, marveling at the ease of it all.

  Bruce pins a silver-colored medal on my T-shirt that says “Achievement” and tells me I’m now entitled to use one make -up item and one accessory. He returns my safari hat, and I thank him before walking into the kitchen to spit on it and stuff it deep into the garbage can.

  Two more weeks of this playacting, and they’ll let me talk to David.

  First Level also means I can read a letter Scott sent a week ago. I carry it around unopened for days, savoring the anticipation of opening it, prolonging the suspense.

  The staff have already scrutinized the letter and taped it back into its envelope, but I don’t care. A letter is proof that I once lived in the real world beyond the barbed wire fence, and that the real world has not forgotten me.

  Between classes, I take Scott’s letter out of my backpack and trace his cramped handwriting with a fingertip, imagining his fingers gripping the blue pen that scrawled my name. His tongue licking the back flap. His callused palm smoothing it shut, the same callused palm that skimmed my back as we lay in bed after sex. At night, I sniff the letter for traces of his musk and sleep with it under my pillow.

  On a Friday evening, I sit on the patio during Free Time to open it while everyone else plays Scrabble at the long wood table and Sandi Patti wails on the house cassette player. The small speakers make her voice all the more annoying. Thank God that batteries are hard to come by in the Third World, so we’re restricted to only one hour of Jesus music a night.

  I peel the tape off the envelope and pull out the letter. Black marker blots out half the words. Jerks. I wonder how much of my letters to David were crossed out as well. Now I believe that he couldn’t warn me about this place—Bruce and Becky check our letters home for “negativity” and “lies” about The Program, and if they find a hint of nonconformity, they dock our points and make us rewrite them. I quickly learned not to refer to Escuela Caribe as a concentration camp after scoring a 1 in the School— Attitude box. Our parents must continue paying our tuition, and The Program must go on.

  I read Scott’s letter in the gaslight as the evening breeze tugs at the corners of the page.

  Dear Julia,

  My love, it’s only been a few days since you’ve left but it feels like an eternity.

  After you got on the plane, I had some “words” with the bitch and bastard. I told your dad he was a and a and that if he wanted to , then . ’Course your mom pulled him away, and that was that. Reckon they didn’t want a scandal to ruin the good doctor’s name.

  Since you’ve gone, I’ve scarcely moved from my room. I don’t have energy to do anything. When the boys came round the other day to see if I was up for shooting squirrels I told them no, I’d rather .

  I can’t stop thinking about you, about how they seperated us like this. Even as I write this, my hands are shaking. I want to be with you and in you so bad it hurts. I miss your and the way your when we . But it’s not just , it’s you, the way you are good to me in ways no one understands.

  I’ve never felt this way before, this pain is the first I’ve suffered purely from emotional problems. You are my first, last, and only love. When this is all over I want you to come back to me and be mine. And if you want, I will marry you.

  Yours 4 Ever,

  Scott

  I reread the last sentence and snicker. Scott’s always good at saying what he thinks people want to hear; he likes to be liked. But in this case, he’s wrong. I don’t want to get married. I like boys well enough, but the last thing I need is a husband bossing me around after being bossed around by everyone else my entire life. I just want to be left alone.

  The Sandi Patti tape ends, and the player clicks off. The jungle explodes to life on the other side of the barbed wire, buzzing and shrieking. Wild things out hunting at dusk.

  In the valley below, the moon lies shattered in the rice paddies.

  I tuck the letter back into its envelope and reseal the tape, thinking about the words Scott used to get inside me—beautiful, love, special— and wonder if he meant any of them. I miss his touch and playfulness, the way he’d put an ice cube inside me on hot afternoons and drink the water out of me, the way he’d cover my mouth so my parents wouldn’t hear us having sex. But, then again, he also copied my poems for other girls and visited them when I was busy.

  Susan comes out to the patio to sit beside me and we talk about the trip we’re taking to Santo Domingo next month, and what we’ll see there. If there will be McDonald’s and Pizza Huts and places to buy tampons and M&Ms. I long to talk to her about boys and the urgencies they create, but I know that everything we say will be overheard and scrutinized and assigned points.

  We veer left on County Road 50, our bike tires skidding across the crumbled pavement. The sky is quilted with low clouds, the air hot and w
et.

  “Race you!” David yells.

  We rise in unison to stomp on our pedals, blasting past Hanke’s Dairy, the Workmans’ cornfield, the abandoned trailer home with the windows smashed out.

  David zooms ahead of me and looks back over his shoulder grinning because he thinks I won’t catch up. He’s scrawny, but strong. And a bit too cocksure of himself. I blink sweat from my eyes, lean over the handlebars and click my bike into tenth gear. Watch out, here I come.

  A shriek rips through the dormitory, one, two, three times. I jolt upright in my bunk, my heart jackhammering, my dream racing away. Bruce is in the middle of the room with his silver referee whistle plugging his mouth. He blows it again, and I clamp my hands over my ears.

  “Everybody downstairs, now!” he roars.

  Night-gowned bodies rise from bunks like ghosts, and Susan gets out of the bottom bunk and looks at me.

  “You’d best scurry,” she says, her eyes sparking with fear. “We’re fixing for a session.”

  I have no idea what that means, but her tone prods me into action. I flip onto my belly and slide over the bunk’s metal frame backwards, conscious that my nightie is creeping up the back of my thighs as Bruce watches.

  “Get moving!” he yells. I stumble down the narrow stairway and behind me, Jolene, fresh from a week in The Hole, gurgles something and Bruce screams, “Yes, you have permission! Go!”

  I join the other girls clumped in the middle of the living room, my eyes still foggy with sleep. Becky sits in a patio chair in the corner regarding us with a grim face. I give her a questioning look, but she turns away. I tilt my watch to the lamplight; it’s two A.M. Tomorrow, already. Bruce pads downstairs in slippers.

  “Everyone get down and give me twenty-five push-ups!” he shouts.

  I drop to the ground with the others and start humping air. We count in unison as the satin and lace of our nighties kiss the floor and Bruce paces between us, exhorting us to get lower, move faster, count louder.

  What have we done to deserve this? I rack my brains for reasons. Bruce didn’t seem grumpier than usual today. No one even got chewed out for an exposed bra strap or spacing at supper.