Jesus Land

by Julia Scheeres

  I bow my head.

  “Please take me with you, Jesus, if you really do appear in the sky,” I pray. Better safe than sorry.

  When the song ends, the school therapist slides behind the piano and strikes up “Take My Life and Let It Be.” One by one, a handful of students walks to the front of the chapel as the rest of the congregation sings, holding hands and swaying queerly. Rhonda is the first to go. She gets on her knees before Preacher Stevie and gazes up at him.

  I wait until the last stanza before dropping Jolene’s hand and walking forward. I’m running low on points this week; this might improve my score in the Attitude and Cooperation boxes.

  I kneel beside Rhonda, and when I glance over at her, she’s crying. Whether her tears are from joy or sorrow, I can’t tell; her head is turned toward Preacher Stevie, who’s working his way down the line of students, crouching to pray beside each one.

  When he gets to Rhonda, she grabs his arm with both hands and pulls him to her, whispering in his ear. He stiffens and says something curt back. She looks scared, he looks angry. They whisper back and forth until the swaying congregation reaches the final chorus, and Preacher Stevie pries his arm from her grasp.

  He squats beside me.

  “Is it really possible to be one hundred percent pure and free from sin?” he asks in a harsh voice. I turn to him, but he’s glowering at the cement floor between us. Before I can respond, he stands. As he gives the benediction, I puzzle over his question, feeling gypped of my personal prayer. Why is he asking me if it’s possible to be free from sin? Preachers are supposed to give us answers, not questions.

  Next to me, Rhonda gawks up at Preacher Stevie like a lovesick puppy, her cheeks wet, her mouth moving.

  “Help me, God, oh help me,” she wails in a whisper.

  God does not help Rhonda.

  When she starts complaining of exhaustion and vomiting, she’s taken to a clinic in La Vega for a checkup. That afternoon, when we return to Starr from P.E., her things have been cleared out of the dormitory.

  “Preacher Stevie and Rhonda are no longer with us,” Bruce tells us at the supper table. “They had unfitting corporal contact and have been expelled from Escuela Caribe.”

  There’s a collective gasp—Rhonda’s pregnant! And free!— and a couple of snorts—I wasn’t the only girl who was suspicious of Rhonda’s sudden zealotry. It’s now apparent that it wasn’t the Holy Spirit she felt moving in her during all those one-on-one prayer sessions, but Preacher Stevie.

  Bruce looks at us sternly.

  “This is the last time either of their names shall be mentioned, understood?”

  “Yes, Bruce,” we reply.

  Secretly, I admire Rhonda’s craftiness. Not only did she manage to get laid, she also escaped The Program. She could always give the baby up for adoption and resume her life afterward. Or she could abort it—I’m sure God would also reject the forbidden fruit of a preacher man and a teenage member of his flock. It would make Him look bad.

  Over the next few days, I consider the male staffers I could try to seduce—and I’m sure I’m not the only girl who thinks about this—before shuddering with revulsion; none of them are hot compared to Preacher Stevie, and I’m not that desperate. Yet.

  As if to ward off such scheming, the school issues a new policy barring female students and male staff from being alone together.

  She whose name shall not be spoken got lucky.

  After Jerome was adopted, the violence got worse. Hesitation was rebellion; a question, defiance. Father got into the angry act, beating the boys with a belt in the workshop, making them strip to their underwear and bend over a stepladder. Mother chronicled their iniquities at the supper table, and he disciplined them after reading aloud to us from the Bible. He was the head of the household, the enforcer, the rod and the reproof.

  As the violence escalated, David and I began to fight.

  Our skirmishes were a way to release the tension festering a scratch beneath the domestic surface. We never knew when our parents would erupt in anger, in a slap or a pinch or a spanking, and it felt better to court violence than to dread its arrival.

  We used racial slurs as extra ammo during our brutal kick fights.

  “Jungle bunny!” I’d shriek.

  “Honkey!” David would yell back.

  “Spear chucker!”

  “White trash!”

  If our mother heard us, she’d make us bite a bar of Ivory. We’d hold it in our mouths while she slowly counted to thirty, the white heat searing our sinuses and knifing tears from our eyes. If, after we’d rinsed our sudsy mouths, she didn’t believe we were sufficiently contrite, she’d have us write lines. John 15:12, 100 times:

  “This is my commandment, that you love one another as I have loved you.”

  We’d glare at each other across the dining room table, as repulsed by each other’s presence as two magnets with aligned poles, and storm off to our separate corners as soon as we’d finished.

  Eventually boredom would precipitate peace, and David would slide a bag of pop rocks under my door, or I’d knock on his with The Ungame tucked under my arm.

  We could never hate each other for long.

  CHAPTER 15

  AGUA DE COCO

  Three months after my arrival, I make Third Level. After I recite the required Scriptures and perform the required calisthenics, Bruce gives me a King James Bible with a white plastic cover, an “I Jesus” T-shirt and a medal that says “Achievement.”

  None of this moves me.

  The only thing that makes the event notable is the fact that David and I are now both on a “trust level” and therefore qualify to volunteer at the orphanage together. Which doesn’t necessarily mean they’ll let us. They could say no just to mess with our heads. It happens.

  We take precautions to make our case stronger. When we meet, as usual, for a few minutes at the end of lunch, we sit in the center of the courtyard and read our Bibles. If someone asks us what we’re doing, we tell them we’re reading the Scriptures from start to finish to better understand the Holy Word. That we’ve always wanted to read the Bible straight through, and this is an excellent opportunity to do it, together. Our classmates eye us with suspicion, but the staff nod their approval.

  After a week of this display, we work up the courage to knock on Ted’s office door and ask permission to volunteer together. I’ve donned my “I Jesus” T-shirt for the occasion and David wears “God Rules!” My heart drums at my ribcage when Ted tells us to come in and take a seat.

  To our surprise, he says yes right away.

  “We’re putting a lot of faith in you kids, and we hope you won’t disappoint us,” he says, leaning back in his chair and crossing his arms. He peers first at David, then at me. “Remember, we can’t always watch you, but Jesus can.”

  He points a finger Heavenward.

  “Jesus is always watching and listening and knowing. You can fool us, but you can’t fool Jesus.”

  “Yes, sir,” we respond, holding his gaze. “We’ll be good.”

  The next afternoon, when the guard clanks shut the metal gate behind us and we’re suddenly alone on the Dominican side of the barbed wire, excitement flares between us. As we walk down the paved drive toward the main road into the village, we don’t say a word or even look at one another until The Property slips behind a wall of trees.

  And then we start to run. We run leaning away from The Property, leaning so far forward that we’re half falling, half flying down the hill, our sneakers catching abruptly on the pavement, the rubber soles slapping in our ears. Once again we are kids, racing each other down the path in the woods behind our old house, giddy with speed.

  We continue to race after we turn onto the dirt road into Jarabacoa. We run until our legs are wobbly, and our breath comes out in chunks, and we are beyond everything. David sprints past me and I catch up to him and grab his arm, and we stumble and fall onto the road. We lie on our backs laughing as the jungle whirls around
us in a giant green kaleidoscope.

  After a while, David staggers to his feet and pulls me up.

  “Hot damn,” I gasp, my head still spinning. “Holy crap.”

  “Just remember,” David pants, jabbing a finger at the sky and imitating Ted’s low voice. “Jesus is always watching and listening and knowing!”

  “No sirree,” I say. “You can’t fool Jesus!”

  “And you can’t jack off with Him either!”

  We fall back into the dirt, howling, and when David pulls me up again, I punch him in the biceps and he clamps his hand over his arm as if it hurt. Just like old times. Just like our old selves.

  Two Dominican women appear on the road wearing bright dresses and balancing bundles of twigs on their heads. They give us a sidelong glance, then cross to the far side of the road and hurry past us.

  “Come on, I’ll take you to this place I know,” David says.

  We brush the dust from our clothes and continue down the road. The air is dense with the sweet smoke of burning sugarcane, and the gray clouds that blanketed the valley in the morning have evaporated, leaving a brilliant sapphire sky.

  As we walk in the shade of the mango and mamey apple trees arching over the road, emerald green parakeets dart through the branches, live ornaments that twitter and flash. We walk in silence, marveling at this strange land and the fact that we are in it together.

  We pass a row of jeweled shanties propped on stilts over a ravine. They are pieced together from plywood and sheet metal and have roofs made of palm fronds. As we walk by, the trapdoor on the bottom of a purple one bangs open and water slops into the ravine. The stench of human waste rolls over us and we squeal and pinch our noses shut and jog up the road.

  An ancient VW bus rattles toward us, bouncing hard over potholes. Gua-guas, the Dominicans call them. The driver will charge you five centavos to ride anywhere in the village. Dominicans jam the interior and hang off the sides, gripping handles that have been welded onto the exterior. The women gawk at us and the men wolf whistle, turning to stare even after the exhaust fumes envelop us. We shift our eyes to our feet. It’s the same as in Indiana—everybody wondering what business a black boy and a white girl have together.

  Up the road, merengue music bounces from a yellow shack with a Coca-Cola sign hanging over its doorway. The primitive two-beat rhythm is everywhere here—blaring from car radios, from shanties, from the jam boxes perched on teenage boys’ shoulders like parrots. On weekends, a three-piece band plays live merengue in Jarabacoa’s central square as couples sashay over the dirt, their hips pressed together. When we walk by, boys—egged on by their friends and green cans of Presidente beer—ask us to dance, pointing to the gyrating couples before extending a hand.

  “Dejame en paz,” we tell them. “Leave me alone.” It’s what Bruce makes us say, and they oblige, shrugging and moving on to someone else. I often wish they’d grab my hand and pull me into the music before Bruce could stop them.

  “There,” David says, pointing at the yellow shack with his chin, Dominican style. “Let’s get something to drink.”

  I glance at my watch; we have to be back at The Property in an hour and fifteen minutes.

  “Come on, we’ve got time,” he says, stepping toward the shack. “The missionaries don’t keep track of our comings and goings—they’re too busy saving souls to notice.”

  There’s no one inside. The only furnishings are two plastic card tables and plastic chairs. A ghetto blaster playing the merengue music rests on one of them, and we sit at the other, next to an open window. The music is too loud to talk. A girl in a New York Yankees T-shirt walks through a screen door at the back of the shack and lowers the volume before turning to us. David says something to her in slow, struggling Spanish and she nods and walks back through the screen door.

  “Did you get me a Coke?” I ask him.

  “I ordered coconut juice,” he says with a sly smile. “I think.”

  “But I wanted Coke. I already used all my house pop privileges this week.”

  He smirks and brushes a fly from his face. “Trust me, you’ll like this. If you don’t, I’ll buy you a Coke. I got enough pesos.”

  An overloaded gua-gua clatters past the window, playing the same merengue song that’s on the ghetto blaster. I look at David and smile and then look back out the window as the dust stirred up by the gua-gua settles back onto the road. It’s weird to suddenly be alone with him like this, to be sitting across a table from each other in a private place. There’s too much to talk about, and nowhere good to start.

  The waitress returns with two glasses of chalky white liquid, and David hands her some coins.

  “To getting out of here as soon as possible,” I say, raising my drink.

  “To going home,” he says, clinking his glass against mine.

  I look into my glass when he says this to avoid his eyes, then chug half my drink. I notice the metallic taste only after I set my glass down on the table.

  “Hey, there’s booze in this!” I shout, lifting the glass.

  David frowns and sniffs his drink.

  “Hey, I think you’re right,” he says. “Must be my bad Spanish. I’ll send them back.” He starts to raise his hand to signal the waitress, who’s sitting on a stool by the entrance.

  “Are you nuts?” I cry.

  “But it’s against Program policy,” he says.

  I press my glass against my “I Jesus” T-shirt protectively, and he cracks up.

  “I guess it’s not our fault the waitress brought the wrong drinks,” he says, grinning. “Although she tends to do it every time I come here: I ask for coconut juice, and she brings a piña colada.”

  “You are so bad,” I say, clinking my glass against his.

  He’s changed since Indiana, when he’d call me a lush for siphoning Comfort from the pantry. I guess he now understands why people drink. To feel something. To feel nothing. To feel better.

  A disc jockey babbles Spanish on the ghetto blaster before the first unmistakable guitar chords of The Police’s “Don’t Stand So Close to Me” waft from the speakers. I jerk around and stare at the radio; it’s my favorite Police song, and the first pop song I’ve heard in three months.

  “Oh my God!” I squeal, turning to look at David. “Can you believe it?”

  He nods and smiles slyly again.

  “I knew you’d like this place.”

  We order two more drinks and tap our sneakers against the cement floor and drum our fingers on the table. The waitress sees us grooving and cranks up the volume, smiling. Which is fine by me, because I don’t want to discuss The Program, or home, or what will become of us, or anything else. I want to drink, and listen to secular music, and pretend to be normal.

  The Police song turns into Joan Jett’s “I Love Rock and Roll,” and David taps his watch.

  When we walk back into the sunshine, the Go-Go’s “We Got the Beat” is playing and we’re dancing down the dirt road chanting “We got the beat, we got the beat, we got the beat, yea-ah-ah! We got the beat!” over and over like an incantation. A gua-gua rolls by and when the passengers gawk and whistle, David waves at them and I flip them off.

  We stop at a roadside colmado stand to buy peppermint chicles from a wrinkled man and stuff our mouths full of them and arrive at the orphanage light-headed yet minty-fresh.

  A little boy, naked but for a pair of torn shorts, opens the gate. He smiles shyly up at David before sprinting back to a small bent slide crowded with children. An old Dominican woman sits on a tree stump behind them, jiggling a baby on her lap.

  David turns to me.

  “Basically, our job is to keep the little kids busy while the missionaries convert the older ones,” he says, pointing at a building beyond the slide; a chorus of high voices sing “The Bible Tells Me So” in the interior. “It’s not that hard.”

  “Beats hauling rocks,” I say.

  As we walk toward the slide, a throng of kids swarms around David, tugging his arms
and shrieking Daveed! Daveed! He beams down at them and slings a tiny potbellied boy into his arms. I watch this spectacle of my brother circled by adoring children like some modern-day black Jesus and my heart is warmed by more than rum.

  “Aren’t you popular!” I say.

  He shrugs away my comment, smiling. We spend the next hour playing Duck, Duck Goose and Ring Around the Rosie, and David and I holler as loudly as the other kids. Every once in a while we stop to grin at each other, tipsy and smug with our exploit.

  On the way back to The Property, we consider running away. We could catch a bus to La Vega and from there, another to Santo Domingo. But we have only $6 in pesos between us, not enough to cover the fare. We could hitchhike. But even if we reached the capital, we’d have no money for a plane, and they’d find us and haul us back.

  “My hair can’t get much shorter, but I don’t think you’d look so hot with a shaved head,” David says.

  We trudge back to The Property with deflated spirits, each footstep a step away from freedom. When we reach the gate, I turn to David. His joy is gone, replaced with the same expression of grim wariness that everyone sports at Escuela.

  “Maybe they’ll let us out again next week,” I say, punching him lightly in the arm.

  “Just keep your points up,” he says.

  “You too.”

  The guard hears us talking and swings open the gate and the German shepherd strains at its leash to sniff us as we enter. When the gate clanks shut behind us, we climb the hill in silence to our separate cement houses and our separate unwanted families.

  “See ya around,” I say when we reach Starr’s driveway.

  In the following weeks, a series of events convulse the school and set everyone on edge.

  Boy 0 tries to poison David’s entire house one night by sticking cat poop into the beef stroganoff. He’d been collecting turds from the TKB house cat, Negro, for several weeks and stashing them under the refrigerator, David said. When the housemother left the kitchen to answer the front door, Boy 0 dumped them into a pot of meat on the stove.