Jesus Land

by Julia Scheeres

  David said the meal didn’t taste any worse than usual, and that they noticed it was extra foul only when people started finding bits of fur and cockroach on their plates. Steve, the group leader, found a long turd that Boy 0 had not sufficiently crumbled, and then people noticed he wasn’t eating his food and remembered it was his job to clean the cat box.

  A minute later, everyone was lined up under the clotheslines behind the house for a communal retch.

  Boy 0 hasn’t stopped running since. Before school, he does casitas. During lunch, casitas. After school, casitas. When he collapses from exhaustion, the TKB group leader pulls him to his feet and herds him along with his moped. When Boy 0 no longer has energy to stumble up the hill, he’s forced to crawl up it. We observe his buglike ascent during lunch from our picnic tables, and afterward, he staggers into Bible class with scraped knees and palms and sits shivering in his chair.

  Jolene doesn’t poison anyone but herself. She drinks bleach one morning during House Jobs. I was mopping the dormitory when I heard Becky shriek and raced to the bathroom door. Jolene was hunkered down between the toilets, her mouth latched onto the bleach bottle like a baby at a plastic teat. We tried to snatch it away from her, but she kept us at bay with sharp kicks.

  “Go on and let me die!” she squalled. “Go on, then, and let me die!”

  Bruce charged upstairs, and RuthAnn followed with a glass of milk. Bruce grabbed hold of Jolene’s legs and dragged her out and sat on her stomach. Becky pinched her nose shut to force her to open her mouth and RuthAnn poured in the milk. Jolene spit it right back in her face.

  She only swallowed when Bruce threatened to send her back to The Hole.

  “Suicide is an act of rebellion against God, a sin!” Bruce bellowed at her. “The Father giveth life and only He can taketh it away!”

  At this, Jolene changed her story and said she was only trying to sicken herself so she’d get sent home.

  “You won’t go home until I say you go home,” Bruce told her. “Keep up these antics, and I’ll keep you down here forever.”

  Jolene spent the day recuperating in bed, forced to drink liters of milk as she complained of throat and stomach pains.

  They still came for her that night. Bruce and Ted barged into the dormitory with flashlights and pulled her, kicking and howling profanities, from her bunk. Back to The Hole. Her screams echoed in my head for hours afterward as I tried to fall back to sleep amid pillow-muffled crying.

  Throughout all this wretchedness, a single thought sustains me: David and I will soon be free again, for a few precious hours at least.

  Each time Ted grants us permission to volunteer at the orphanage, joy overwhelms us. Each time, he fixes us with a stern look and lectures us on the omnipotence, omniscience, and omnipresence of Jesus Christ and each time we hold his gaze and solemnly vow to be good.

  The irony of this situation is not lost on us. When we were little, we were often forced to play alone because other kids shunned us, and now these people have made our being alone together a privilege.

  Once the gate shuts behind us, we shed our humble demeanor and flee the school full sprint. Our hours together are numbered, and we want to live every second fully.

  First we stop at the café to savor agua de coco and forbidden music, and then we set out to explore a new corner of the village.

  We stumble across a butcher shop where the owner scoops live rabbits from a pen by their hind feet, whacks their heads on a marble counter with a graceful swing, then peels and quarters them. We’ve never seen something go from animal to food before and couldn’t rip our eyes from the flashing blade, from the wet pink carcasses with their bulging eyes. One rabbit, two rabbit, three. The process both fascinates and repels us. When the butcher winks at me, I elbow David and we leave.

  We line up behind Dominican kids on the banks of Rio Jimenoa to take turns swinging across the tan water on a tractor tire. The older kids strip down to their underwear and plop into the sluggish river, and the small ones strip naked. David and I just swing back and forth in our jeans and T-shirts, gazing wistfully down at the water. “Americanos locos!” the Dominican kids holler.

  We buy fat mangoes from street vendors and suck out the pulp, flashing each other hairy orange smiles as the fibers lodge between our teeth.

  We roam the jungle and stare gape-mouthed at each new discovery: green lizards with red heads, tree trunks as wide as cars, butterflies that glow like rainbow shards as they flit through shafts of sunlight.

  Every now and again, I’ll catch David’s arm.

  “Look at us, David!” I’ll say when he turns to look at me. “Look at us in the Dominican Republic!”

  I try to teach David the pop songs that came out after he left, but I’ve forgotten half the words and get frustrated and hum them instead.

  We gripe about The Program. I tell him my letters from home have slowed to a trickle and he tells me this is normal.

  “Out of sight, out of mind,” he sighs.

  I tell him what a pansy Bruce is and how Susan betrayed me and he warns me again to trust no one.

  “Except your little brother, of course,” he grins.

  I thank him for stopping me from slipping into the abyss at Salto de Jimenoa.

  “It was nothing,” he shrugs.

  He tells me that his group leader plays this joke on him whenever they’re on a field trip. They’ll be walking down a crowded street and Steve will point at David and yell “Haitiano! Haitiano!” and back away from him. Haitiano. Haitian.

  Dominicans hate Haitians, who are poorer than they are, and dark-skinned like David—African black compared to the Dominicans’ wet sand color.

  In Cultural Studies class, we learned that Dominicans blame Haitians for everything from their country’s poverty to outbreaks of disease; the police routinely round up black people and dump them at the Haitian border.

  But they keep coming back because they’ll take the one job Dominicans refuse to do: harvesting sugarcane. It’s dirty, hot, hard work. I’ve glimpsed the Haitians as we’ve driven through the countryside, dark shadows slouching barefoot between cane fields, machetes glinting at their sides.

  Calling David “Haitiano” on a crowded street is akin to yelling “nigger” at a KKK rally.

  David says the Dominicans glare at him when Steve does this, and then Steve laughs and thumps David on the back as if it were funny.

  “I wish he’d stop,” David says, scowling down at the dirt road as we round the corner to the orphanage.

  “What a racist pig,” I say, shaking my head. “What an asshole!”

  That’s another thing we do when we’re alone—cuss. Neither of us swore much beyond “gosh” and “sperm breath” back in Indiana, but now cursing gives us a nah-nah-nah-nah-nah-nah rush of delight. It’s another forbidden fruit, another freedom restored. We cuss, therefore we are. Sometimes we blaspheme all the way to and from the orphanage, inventing new obscenities along the way: “Papaya-fucking goat eater.” “Fruity-assed Canadian cunt.”

  But we never take the Lord’s name in vain, because the Bible forbids it. The Good Book doesn’t mention those other words, however.

  One afternoon in early November, we strike gold.

  After passing a high cement wall that runs through the middle of the village, our curiosity overcomes us and we decide to trace it to its opening. We follow it for several blocks and finally reach a large metal door.

  It stands ajar. David pushes it open, and it creaks inward to reveal a cemetery so vast that it seems to spill to the horizon in every direction.

  “Cool!” David exclaims.

  “Fuckin’ awesome!” I add.

  It’s unlike any graveyard we’ve ever seen. In front of us, row upon row of concrete boxes are laid out like freezers at a President’s Day sale. To our right, crosses fashioned from sticks and metal rods sprout from the hard clay. Up to the left, sheds populate a hillock like children’s playhouses. All of this is fortified by the high cem
ent wall. It is a walled city of the dead.

  David and I stand gawking in the entrance. It is the beginning of the rainy season, and dark clouds swarm over the village, making the ghoulish landscape look doubly ominous, and doubly fun.

  “You first,” I tell David as the wind lashes my hair about my face.

  “Nah, you,” he says.

  “Scaredy-cat.”

  “Pussy.”

  I shove him through the doorway and he turns, laughing, to grab my wrist and pull me after him. We sprint to a concrete box and crouch behind it, glancing about. The only motion we detect are mounds of trash blowing across the barren ground, the only noise a parrot squawking atop an iron cross. We are alone.

  We stand to peer down at the lid of the concrete box, which is covered with a fine layer of red dust. David wipes it clean with his hand.

  Mario Agusto Martinez

  Nasio 1 de Oct. de 1921

  Fallesio 25 de Dic. de 1974

  “He croaked on Christmas day!” I say, tapping the lid.

  “Musta had a heart attack when he didn’t get no presents he liked,” David says.

  “Any presents he liked,” I correct him. “Stop talking like some hick.”

  The wind shifts direction, and the air is suddenly tangy and sweet with a stench akin to rotting pineapple.

  “Must be all the trash,” David says, wrinkling his nose.

  We amble about the tombs, reading the dead people’s names and making up stories about what killed them. Jorge gorged himself on pinto beans and exploded in an enormous fart. María drowned in shit when she walked under a stilt house and a slop bucket emptied on her head. Rogelio was eaten alive by an army of three-inch cockroaches.

  As we walk across the cemetery, I notice the high cement wall is honeycombed with squares, which I recognize as compartments for bodies—Papa Scheeres was sealed in one after he died of cancer a couple of years ago. But some of the squares are fringed with cement shards, as if they’d been busted open. Weird.

  “This one says Elsa Gómez Gómez,” David says, squatting before a spray-painted cement block inscribed with nothing more than the name. I creep away from him to hide behind a jaguar palm. “Gómez Gómez. Sounds an awful lot like kissing cousins, don’t it?”

  He chuckles.

  “Julia? Where you at?”

  I peek around the palm to see him dusting off another cement box and tiptoe behind him. When he leans down to read it, I jump on his back. It’s an old trick, one we used to scare our friends at Grandview Cemetery in Lafayette. His shriek ricochets off the high cement wall, and then he whips around and starts after me.

  We swerve, whooping and laughing, past the legions of bodies crammed into their cement freezers and holes and compartments. Look at us, we are still alive!

  After a while, his footsteps fall silent behind me and I turn; he’s gone.

  “You can’t scare me! I see where you’re at!” I yell.

  It’s a lie that sometimes works, but this time elicits no response.

  After a few minutes of pussyfooting about, whirling around every few seconds to check my back, I get bored and wander up the hill to the cement playhouses and walk down a paved lane between them. The metal grate entrances are secured with chains and padlocks and I press my face between the bars to study their interiors.

  From the murky light cast by a small window at the back of each shed, I make out shelves attached to the side walls, and on these shelves are coffins. Most of the sheds have a stand under the window that holds saint candles and decaying flowers and photographs pinned to corkboard.

  I reach a shed that is chained but not padlocked, and swing the grate open.

  There’s only one coffin, on the lower right shelf. I glance nervously behind me before entering, imagining David slamming the grate shut and trapping me alone with this dead person. This one has a lot of pictures, but it’s hard to see them, so I feel around on the stand at the back and find a book of matches, then light several saint candles.

  It’s a girl. In one photograph, she poses in an elegant red gown and sparkling earrings, her long brown hair piled atop her head. In another, she stands with her arms flung around two friends, beaming mid-laugh at the camera. In another, she’s a little girl taking a bubble bath.

  She’s lovely and I covet her beauty, even in death. I lean down, lit match in hand, to read the metal plaque on her coffin:

  Gloria Hilda Váldez Martínez

  Nacio el 8 de Julio 1963

  Fallecio el 2 de Abril 1982

  She was ninteen, just two years older than us. What killed you, Gloria?

  “Whoa, she’s hot!”

  I jump. David’s beside me, eyeballing the pictures. I elbow him in the ribs.

  “Have some respect for the dead.”

  He glances at his watch, then pulls my arm.

  “Come on, I wanna show you something.”

  “What?”

  “You’ll see.”

  I blow out the candles, and we leave Gloria’s and walk along the cemetery wall past a section of busted-open honeycombs.

  “Looks like they unburied someone,” I say, motioning at the wall.

  “A whole lot of someones,” he responds. “Maybe they weren’t dead yet.”

  He leads me to a back corner of the cemetery that is vacant but for large sheets of plywood lying on the clay ground. Here the stench of rotting pineapple is strong, and I plug my nose.

  “It stinks,” I say in my plugged-nose voice.

  “Just help me out a second,” David says, kneeling beside a board.

  “Help you do what?”

  He grabs the edge of a board.

  “Move this.”

  “Why?”

  “Because I want to see what’s underneath,” he says.

  I unplug my nose and kneel beside him. We both push the board, grunting with effort, and it skids over the ground, revealing a deep pit. We sit back on our haunches and squint down into it, but it’s too dark to see anything.

  David gets on his belly and lowers his head into the hole.

  “I see something! . . . like a branch or something,” he says.

  He scoots forward until his shoulders are underneath the plywood and I grab him by the waistband of his jeans as he wiggles around.

  “Got it!” he shouts.

  I stand to get out of his way as he drags himself backward from the pit. He leaps to his feet, holding his arm triumphantly over his head. In his hand is a human femur. A thighbone. I recognize it from Biology class at Harrison. Only the Harrison one belonged to a white plastic skeleton that hung in a corner next to the chalkboard, and this one is dark and cracked and wet like an old dog bone. Only that one was fake, and this one is real. I scream.

  David lowers his arm and stares at the bone for a horrified second before heaving it away; it clatters onto a piece of plywood.

  He scrubs his hands on his jeans, over his own femur. “Get off! Get off!”

  “David, let’s go! Let’s get out of here!” I yell.

  He’s too busy erasing death from his hands to hear me, so I grab his arm and yank him toward the cemetery exit.

  As we wind through the tombs, we pass a young couple standing next to a tiny cement box. A child’s grave. They are dressed in black, and the woman holds a single white rose in her hand.

  She lifts her head as we sprint by, and in the moment our eyes meet, I glimpse a desolation that chills me to the core. Although her dark eyes look directly into mine, they see nothing beyond the hell at her feet.

  At least the dead no longer suffer.

  The next day during kickball, when Susan stubs her toe and the P.E. teacher calls a time-out, David saunters up to me. A few kids look in our direction, but they’re too far away to eavesdrop.

  “I know where that leg came from,” David says, pretending to tie his shoe. “Those wall spaces are rented, and if your family falls behind on the payments, the cemetery owner busts you out and throws you into that hole to rot alongside
the other people who can’t afford it.”

  Down the field, Susan limps back and forth in front of the P.E. teacher, who frowns and crosses his arms. People are always faking injuries so they can sit out the game and rest.

  “And what makes you so smart?” I say, still watching Susan’s lame performance. Her limp has no rhythm; she’s totally faking it. Wuss.

  David stands.

  “Sam told me.”

  Sam’s a fourth ranker in David’s house. He’s standing in the middle of the field right now, chewing on a piece of grass and gazing up at a bank of dark clouds rolling into the valley.

  I whip around to face David.

  “What’d you tell him for?” I ask loudly.

  A couple of kids glance in our direction and David waves at them.

  “Shhh . . . ,” he says. “Sam’s my bud.”

  “Your friend?” I struggle to contain my voice. “What happened to ‘trust no one’? You know what Susan did to me.”

  The P.E. teacher shakes his head at Susan, and she slowly walks back onto the playing field, limp gone. David looks at Sam still staring up at the sky, and grins.

  “Shoot, Sam won’t tell no one. He’s my friend.”

  The P.E. teacher blows his whistle.

  “Friend indeed,” I say, before turning to rejoin my team.

  Ted’s waiting for us at the edge of the field when P.E. ends. While the other kids murmur and shoot glances at his looming presence, Sam bounces the kickball off his knee, pointedly ignoring him. Fucker. I give David the stink eye when Ted calls our names.

  As we follow his wide back through the courtyard, David worries his bottom lip, his face contorted with panic and confusion and disbelief. Despite everything, he still believes in the goodness of humankind, that our parents will someday welcome him home with open arms, that his friends will not betray him. That’s the fundamental difference between us. He needs to trust, and I don’t. I narrow my eyes at the back of his head as we walk into Ted’s office. Life would be a lot easier for you, David, if you stopped being so damn optimistic.

  “So, I hear we had quite the adventure yesterday,” Ted says once he’s got us alone. He leans back in his chair with his hands behind his head and grins as if he were in on a joke. “Let’s talk about it.”