A Rhinestone Button

by Gail Anderson-Dargatz

  Jocelyn caught up with him. “What?” she said.

  “I thought I saw someone I knew.”

  “Who?”

  “Nobody.”

  They ate the cookies sitting together on a bench advertising the Full Gospel Businessman’s Association. Graffiti scrawled across the seat in bold black paint read Please Post Propaganda Here. Cars roared past, the thump of their stereos. But the city noise didn’t overwhelm Job as it once had. The colours the noise generated were faded, all but gone.

  A man on crutches stepped in front of them. He was chubby, dressed in a blue shirt and brown vest, a cap that read Ducks Unlimited. He offered them a tract, a comic book of sorts, with a frightened-looking devil on the front, and the title “A Demons Nightmare.” Jocelyn waved a hand, said, “No thanks.”

  The man shifted his weight on his crutches, and handed Job the tract. “Have you heard the good news of Jesus Christ?”

  “Yes,” said Job.

  “Have you been saved?”

  Yes.”

  “Are you sure you’ve been saved? Are you absolutely sure?”

  Job didn’t answer. He picked up the bag of Oreos and he and Jocelyn walked on. The man hobbled after them a few feet. “But if you’ll just give me a moment of your time!”

  Job flipped through the tract as they walked. A grinning evangelist in a suit and tie saved the soul of a tough-looking kid on a bench. But, urged on by the demons, the boy was tempted by friends back into his old way of life. Then, choosing a Wednesday-night prayer meeting over a movie on television, the boy was once again saved from a life of sin. He went on to save countless souls himself, much to the disgruntlement of the demons. The tract ended with the helpful reminder: “And whosoever was not found written in the book of life was cast into the lake of fire. Revelation 20:15.”

  Job cast the tract into a garbage can.

  They passed kids selling jewellery from blankets on the street and a ragged man standing on a street corner with his hand out to everyone who passed.

  “Aren’t you going to talk to anyone?” asked Jocelyn.

  “I was waiting for you.”

  “You’re the mature Christian here.”

  “I guess I haven’t seen anyone desperate enough.”

  “You’re not going to talk to anybody, are you?”

  Job scratched his cheek. “Probably not.”

  “Want to grab some lunch? Those cookies just left me hungry.”

  She led him to the pub of the Strathcona Hotel. A mime stood by the door, his white face painted over with red and blue stripes, acting as though he were a robot or a marionette on strings. Job wasn’t sure. An oversized black cowboy hat containing a few coins sat at his feet. “This is a bar,” said Job.

  “They have these great double-wiener hot dogs. Two wieners wrapped in this huge bun. They’re famous for them.” She pulled him in by the sleeve. “It’s okay. Nobody fights here. They do, the regulars kick them out.”

  The pub had a shuffleboard at one end and a dartboard at the other. A haze of cigarette smoke. The smell of beer. A dark room, without windows, filled with old-timers, the regulars, and university kids from the U of A. The hum of voices, which produced little in the way of colour for Job. Once he would have found the din overwhelming.

  They got themselves a couple of hot dogs at the kiosk by the bar and sat at a small round table covered in red towelling. “To sop up the beer,” said Jocelyn when he pinched it.

  A waitress came by wearing jeans and a white shirt. She had a cigarette hanging out of her mouth with orange lipstick around the filter, and she made Job think of Crystal. “You want something to wash that down with?” she asked.

  “Yes, please,” said Job.

  “Got a particular pleasure?”

  “No.” Thinking of water. But the waitress set down two sweating glasses of draft. “Enjoy,” she said, and was off. Job pushed the beer off to the side and ate his hot dog as he waited for the waitress to come back, so he could ask for water. But she was busy with other customers and didn’t return. The lunch-hour rush.

  Jocelyn drank her beer. “What are we supposed to do after we bring somebody to the Lord?” she asked.

  “I guess that’s the whole point of the construction we’ve been doing. To give the converts a place to go.”

  “No, I mean, are we supposed to be friends to these people? Pastor Divine said to make these people feel like we care about them, that we’re their friends. But are we supposed to just pretend to be their friends?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Huh.” Jocelyn finished off her hot dog and wiped the ketchup from her lip with a napkin. She slurped her beer. “After I started going to church, my neighbour Linda stopped coming over to visit me. I thought we were friends, you know? When I did that whole song and dance with her in the pew, accepting the Lord and all that, Linda gave me a Bible that she signed, ‘In Christian Love,’ and for some reason that hurt, made me angry. I couldn’t think why until this morning when Pastor Divine said that stuff about making people think you care about them, that you’re their friend. That’s just it. No one really cares, no one really is your friend. What was important to Linda was that she make me a part of Christ’s body. Who I was, was irrelevant.”

  “We’re supposed to die to ourselves,” said Job. He’d been taught the acronym JOY in Sunday school: Jesus, Others, You. In that order. You were always supposed to come last. A notion Job’s father and mother encouraged. At family suppers when he was a child, his mother had convinced him to take the dark meat over the white. “You like dark meat, don’t you?” she asked as she was cutting up a young fryer, a bird she’d raised herself, into segments. Job was setting the table. Jacob and Abe sat on lawn chairs outside the kitchen window. Though Emma had driven the grain truck all day, and Job had driven the tractor.

  “It’s okay,” Job said. But he preferred white meat. Before Abe said grace, both Job and Jacob scanned the plate of chicken for the breast meat with the wishbone attached, and grabbed their forks with their eyes still closed during grace. “Come, Lord Jesus, Be our guest, May this food, To us be blest.” At amen they both stabbed for the breast, hoping to land the wishbone. If Job got the wishbone, he could choose his mother to break it with and count on getting his wish. If Jacob got the wishbone, he invariably chose Job to break it with, and Job, so much weaker than Jacob, never won.

  “It would make things so much easier at dinner if you just took the dark meat,” said Emma. Dark was what Emma chose. It occurred to Job at that moment that likely Emma also preferred the breast meat but ate the thigh so the men would get the white. It was understood that Abe would always get one of the two chicken breasts Emma served. The boys fought over the other. If Job succeeded in getting the breast to his plate first, Jacob would sulk through dinner and refuse to eat the dark meat that Abe put on his plate. And the evening would be rife with argument because Abe refused to let his boys leave the table until they had eaten every last scrap on their plates. Come bedtime, Jacob was still at the table, sobbing over the dark meat on his plate as Abe shouted at him. All because Job wanted the breast with the wishbone. So Job took the dark meat, as his mother did, as she requested. Not at first. But over time, because each dinner at which chicken was served and Job stuck his fork into white meat, his mother said, “Can’t you leave that for someone who doesn’t like dark meat?” He continued eating dark meat to this day, out of habit. It hadn’t occurred to him that he could choose to eat white.

  Job finally gave in to his thirst and downed the glass of beer. It was good. Refreshing. He licked his upper lip.

  “I don’t think I’m cut out for this whole church scene,” said Jocelyn. “At first it was great, everyone was so nice to me. But now.” She shrugged. “I don’t know. I missed the last couple of church services. I just didn’t feel like going. I think the only reason I went to the workshop this morning was because I thought you’d be there.”

  Job stared at his glass, not really listening. H
e suspected something terrible would happen, now that he’d drank the beer, though he couldn’t think what. But instead he felt mellow, and the colours of the sounds around him were heightened. He watched one of the waitresses prop open the door. On the city streets outside, a ruckus: horns blared, throwing up pale flashes in front of Job’s face, like the reflections from the slough on the pumphouse wall. The roar of vehicles tickled his hands. Layers and layers of sound that grew louder on the occasional breezes that blew in, a cacophony that threw rings of translucent colour splashing one into another against the dark of the pub, and trailed ghost fingers across the skin of Job’s arms and face, startling him again and again.

  He thought of the time in Denver when he drank beer and watched naked women skate. The colours were brighter then too. Maybe the colours and shapes of sounds had nothing to do with God, despite the certainty that accompanied them, the feeling that God was imparting to him some knowledge, though he could never put that knowledge into words. Maybe it was just a trick of perception.

  “You’re a nurse, right?” he asked.

  “Yup,” said Jocelyn.

  “Does alcohol ever make you see things?”

  “Not unless you’re an alcoholic detoxing. Why? You seeing something?”

  He hesitated, but the beer was making him bold. “I always see colours when I hear sound. But it’s been fading.”

  “Wild. I’ve read about this.”

  “This happens to other people?”

  “It’s called synesthesia. You really see colours when you hear a sound?”

  “I can feel some sounds in my hands, like the vacuum cleaner is an egg in my hands, a glass egg.”

  “How do you know it’s glass? You see it?”

  “No, it’s invisible, but it’s smooth, and cool. So it feels like glass.”

  “Huh.”

  “But then when I see colours, or feel shapes, I get this feeling that’s hard to describe. It’s like I know.”

  “Know what?”

  “Everything. But not like I know everything. It’s like God’s in me. I feel certain.”

  “My nephew’s an epileptic. He gets a feeling something like that when he has a seizure. He describes a feeling of profound awe, a knowing, that he can’t put into words.”

  “Yes!”

  “But for him the feelings pass. You feel that all the time?”

  “The sensations sort of faded recently. But today, after I had the beer, the colours were more vivid. And I feel that certainty again.”

  “I remember reading about one guy with synesthesia whose colours got brighter when he drank. He died of liver disease.”

  “But why would the colours be fading?”

  “You got me. There was something about how more children than adults experience it, so it must fade with time. A fever, or some drugs or a trauma, like a blow to the head, sometimes make it go away.” She waved at a waitress.

  “Are we leaving?” said Job.

  “No. I’m going to get you another beer.”

  They spent the afternoon in the pub, sampling different brands of beer. Pilsner, Corona, Guinness. Job described for Jocelyn the colours of sounds, how the voices and music blended into a fantasia around him, and how his watch, a Bulova Accutron that had once belonged to his father, produced a raised metallic dot that pulsed with each passing second as it hadn’t since he’d seen Will kiss Ed, since the duck landed on his head. Jocelyn leaned over the table and laughed in fascination at everything he said. Job was pleased, and saw himself differently, not as bumbling, but as capable. The shift wore well on him, made him randy. That and the beer. With each beer he drank, the colours of voices in the bar, the cityscape around them, became brighter and brighter, and that feeling of certainty, of excitement mixed with calm, grew. Jocelyn brushed her hand against his arm as she reached for a napkin. Held his glance longer as the afternoon wore on. Slipped off a shoe and ran a toe down the calf of his leg. He reached across the table and took her hand. She lifted his hand and put his ring finger in her mouth and suckled on it. A jolt to his groin. He pulled his hand away when the waitress brought them their next round.

  “What did you think the colours were?” asked Jocelyn.

  “I don’t know. At first I just thought they were how everyone heard things. Then, when I figured out other people didn’t experience the world that way, I thought maybe it was the Shechinah the Bible talks about.”

  “The what?”

  “The glory of God, like a shining light or something, evidence of God’s presence, made visible, here in this world. When I started to lose the colours I thought maybe it was a test.”

  “A test?”

  “From God. Pastor Henschell always said if you feel God’s love slipping away and you can’t pin it down to any sin, and your worship life is good, then it might be God testing you.”

  “To see if you’re faithful,” said Jocelyn. “Yeah, Pastor Divine says something like that. It’s the old story of Job all over, isn’t it? God makes a wager with the devil and says, okay, take away all his goodies, his health, but I’m betting he’ll still love me. But think about it, Job. Would you put up with a spouse who treated you like that? A wife who said, ‘Prove you love me. If I piss off, will you still love me?’ Why put up with a God like that?”

  “He’s God.”

  “It’s just someone’s idea of God. Who knows what God is like? Or if there is a God? I mean, if there was no God, do you really think the world would be any different than it is now?”

  They window-shopped along Whyte Avenue before heading back to the mall, where they sat on the van’s bumper waiting for Rod and Penny. A crow landed near by and pecked at an upturned McDonald’s french-fry carton. When another crow landed close by, it cawed a navy blue, far deeper than the transparent tongue of sky blue he’d heard in the months since the duck hit him.

  “My feet are killing me,” said Jocelyn. She took off her runners and pulled a bottle of suntan oil from her handbag. Her fingers glistened as she worked coconut oil between her toes. Her toenails were painted a sparkling bronze. “I had a really good time today,” she said.

  “Me too.”

  “I was thinking maybe we could get together again soon. But I doubt it’s going to be at another church function.” She crossed her legs, ran a slippery toe down Job’s bare shin. The shine of oil on his leg.

  “I’d like that.” At that moment, with the glow of the beer on him, he couldn’t think of anyone he’d rather be with.

  Across the parking lot, Penny slapped towards them in her flip-flops in the tight, rapid steps of a geisha. Some yards behind, Rod trotted after her. She didn’t stop when she reached them, but went on flip-flopping towards the mall. “I feel led to try the mall,” she called back to them.

  Rod slowed when he reached Job and Jocelyn. “She is so on fire for the Lord!” he said. “She’s, like, full of the Holy Spirit!” He jogged to catch up with Penny.

  “She’s full of something, all right,” said Jocelyn, standing.

  Job and Jocelyn followed a few yards behind Rod and Penny. On entering the mall they lost them, as they were waylaid by a busload of Japanese tourists crushing their way across the corridor to the Kmart. When they found them again, Penny and Rod had parked themselves across from a haggard couple sitting side by side in the orange plastic chairs of the food court. They were in their late fifties and had, as Pastor Divine had referred to it, the ruffled look of the unemployed. Penny already had them both in her grip. She leaned over the table, tugging at the woman’s sleeve with her left hand, and with her right she had hold of the man’s thumb. Oddly, Job thought, neither the man or woman pulled away or even sat back. They both looked dazed, glassy-eyed. Were they drunk? But they watched Penny steadily, nodding occasionally. The woman went on chewing her beef jerky, replenishing the mouthful with her free hand as Job and Jocelyn walked up to them. “Do you know what’s keeping you from God?” Penny asked them.

  “Yep. Bingo and masturbation,” said the
man. The woman, still chewing, nodded.

  Rod took a scenic drive home, pointing out an ostrich farm, the exotic birds lying on prairie grass, then a pasture of buffaloes confined within fences like cows. Penny sat with Rod in the front seat. She drummed the van console like a restless child and twirled her hair. Slapped Rod’s arm and his thigh playfully. Giggled.

  Jocelyn and Job jostled in the back seat of the van, bumping arms. Job wished he’d worn longer shorts, and more supportive underwear. His privates jiggled and shook loose of his Stanfields. Limp penis down his sweaty thigh. He tugged the legs of his shorts down farther and tried to think of some tactful way to rearrange things.

  They passed a man standing by his truck, peeing. A puddle in front of him. A pair of ducks flew low over the road. Patches of black, scorched earth dotted the fields where farmers had set fire to straw or slough grass. They passed a field where children ran screeching inside a hay devil that made mischief with the brome grass drying in neat rows. A warm spiralling column of air whipped clumps of hay into blue sky, tumbling the neat rows like a father messing his child’s hair. The wind plucked caps from the children’s heads, kept them floating in circles before dropping them back to the ground. The kids shrieked in delight, leapt into the hay-strewn air, tossed hay up themselves for the joy of watching it sweep circles above them.

  Up ahead, a black horse stood by a fence, its huge penis dangling. Job found his own leaping to the sight, thinking of its own accord. Again. Jocelyn nudged Job’s knee and grinned. She put a hand to his thigh and found the bulge in his shorts and massaged it through the fabric as they passed the horse by.

  “That horse makes me think of a story I heard,” Rod said, raising his voice so he could be heard in the back. Jocelyn cleared her throat, removed her hand from Job’s thigh to pick her handbag up from the floor. Job with his arms over his lap, withering.