Vandal Love

by D. Y. Bechard

  One evening, as mist gathered in the trees, he walked an overgrown farm road into the woods. He’d finished work but was restless, and in the fading light he followed weedy ruts to where he’d been told there was a cypress swamp. Bleached trunks rose from land as irregular as a crumpled egg carton, exposed clay red, the water covered with leaves and pollen and seed fluff. Grass had turned beaver dams into bridges of spongy earth. The sky above the blasted trees seemed faint and far. The silence was voracious unless the wind set up, though oddly the silence remained. He stood in the presence of the marsh, the thick rank settling air, and breathed.

  Sundays were no-work days, and late the next afternoon he loaded his guitar and amplifier and a gas-run generator into the farm truck and drove back. On the bank of the swamp he set up to play, then worked into the songs he’d loved best as a teenager, Iron Man, Metallica’s Fade to Black. Though he’d seen himself many ways, often as characters in books, poets or writers or explorers, music had been the only thing he’d given any effort. There had been a time when he’d memorized the fretwork of songs and practised them for hours. He tried to find satisfaction in the crunching rhythms, the dull chop of palm-muted power chords. He sang, his voice grating. He wanted the noise to be raw, the way he’d first heard it. Sweating against the urgency of spring, he stared at the crowded waters. He lifted his hand to strike the guitar but stopped. A man was standing across the swollen murk, on a hummock, dressed in black and holding a wide-brimmed hat.

  Just a minute, son, the man said and began to make his way over the marshy earth. Don’t leave, he called, all the while lifting his knees like a heron, stepping for solid ground.

  Close, he looked Bart over, up and down a few times as if just now perceiving the sheer size and perhaps the potential danger.

  My boy, he said, what a gift! The Lord has blessed you with the voice of a shepherd. The voice, he added, as if shepherds were not known for hollering, of a leader.

  Now, don’t get me wrong. I thought I heard cries of pain. I myself came here to work on my preaching, but I can tell you have other reasons and I have heard those records played backwards. But the Lord wouldn’t have brought you if He didn’t intend you saved. I can see you have it in you.

  He paused, his face tense, hawkish, gaunt, the skin like frost beneath the thinning hair. I can see you’ve been seeking. I can see you have the power of the Lord God in you and you don’t know how to express it.

  Reverend Diamondstone, he introduced himself—said it was a self-invented name and that he’d been told, street preaching in New York, that it was a Jewish name, but hadn’t believed it. He will tell you anything to turn you away. He said, he will, with special significance, lowering his voice as if this he was not only lowercase but squiggly and smudged. It was not the He of his Reverend Lord Jesus.

  That Sunday, Diamondstone talked until mosquitoes swarmed over the stagnant water and darted at their faces. Bart listened, wasn’t asked but rhetorically. Diamondstone told of days street preaching, businessmen on Wall Street who fell to their knees and wept and gave him donations of a thousand dollars to continue his mission. The Ecclesiastical Manger of the Holy Tribunal, he said. I suppose that’s a good name, but any will do, just so people don’t think I’m another Baptist. I am a Baptist, though. He told Bart he’d been homeless, living in a ditch in West Texas, then had a visitation of the Lord, the terrifying angel Michael who’d cast down the fearful legions with the strength of the Lord’s right hand, and he, Diamondstone, had started preaching right there in the ditch—converted, he said, a lady walking home with her groceries.

  Diamondstone took a long breath that he balanced in his chest. Yes, he said, Jesus found me. Jesus found me in a ditch in Texas and decided I’d done my suffering. He gave me a dream and turned all of my evil to good. But, son, listen now. Do you know why I suffered so much?

  Because I desired. I wanted the world. I wanted to be there, on the mount, instead of Jesus when the devil tempted Him. I would have failed and not known it. That’s why Jesus died for us. That’s why He defeated temptation. My pain took Jesus. And what you are suffering will take Jesus, too. We all know. We all see. Give everything to desire. It will never be enough. But within every hunger or want or need there is a moment, a space of desire that contains all desires. Just to be satisfied, and that, if you understand it, is desire for God. Take your longing to Jesus and the rapture will be real, the satisfaction eternal.

  Bart looked off into the dark as if some faint light had been lit between him and the reverend. The sun was near set, a soft glow against treetops. Diamondstone sighed. So how about it, boy? The world could use a voice like yours.

  Bart understood all that they had in common, the homelessness and drinking. For the first time, the path seemed clear, the restless power of his anger no longer such a force.

  Anyway, Diamondstone said, I will not be returning the way I came. I will follow you to be sure you are not weak.

  The marsh was nearly invisible though Bart could sense its presence, as if the density of mud and clotted water generated a stronger gravity. It was pretty obvious that Diamondstone had been led by the music and had no idea of how to go home.

  Bart loaded the truck, and together they rattled back to the farm, Diamondstone swaying with each bump but holding neither door nor dash for balance. When they arrived, Bart’s employer was at the dinner table with his wife. Bart entered dutifully and said, I’m really sorry about this, but I have to go. I want to thank—

  Before Diamondstone, filling the doorway like the wide, moonless night itself, stepped in and began to preach the beauty of his conversion.

  Those first weeks travelling, the country seemed innocent again. Morris and Andrew were already part of the team, and as spring gave onto summer they gazed out the broad windshield, the changing earth their mystical experience, tableaus of prairie sky, blue with a single lazy stroke of fading contrail, endless fields that made them realize how easy it would be to lose one another and drown.

  Our God is an almighty poet and painter, Diamondstone said.

  Amen, they hollered.

  Amen, Bart repeated softly as an afterthought, looking out the window, testing the space in his heart to hold the bigness of the world.

  Each day they stopped at college campuses and Christian living camps. They crossed the country town by town, though Diamondstone preached and the others collected from the audience. When the spirit came on him, he hollered, This is the place, and pulled the van flush with the sidewalk, the tires squealing against the curb. He’d be preaching before he was out the door.

  Though Bart found comfort in Andrew and Morris’spresence, he shared little with them. Andrew was pale, with a soft, annoyed face, and Morris, a Floridian, had the neat haircut and rim glasses of a prep but the beady eyes of a possum, and was either too happy or too angry, then saying Jesus saves, Amen, thank the Lord for this meal, praise Jesus for the good weather, for the good interstates, God bless McDonald’s. With time, Bart knew everyone’s stories, Diamondstone’s theories on dressing in historical black to make people see, not just hear, him as an agent of Jesus, and Andrew’s drop-out from state college to live in a Christian commune where he symbolically burned everything he’d previously owned —including, he told ruefully, six thousand dollars in unread comics, among which were X-Men numbers one, two and three.

  Though Bart listened and commiserated, he felt that his own hardships were of another order, even at times that happiness would be a betrayal of those he’d lost. But whenever his doubts grew, Diamondstone seemed to sense this. He asked about Bart’s life, encouraging, reminding him that the depth of wisdom came through pain. It wasn’t long before he took Bart aside one evening. Morris and Andrew had appeared nervous all day, and Bart sensed them watching as he and Diamondstone left the campground.

  Son, Diamondstone told him, we’re running out of money. Now, there are some sad facts to being a missionary in the world today. Sometimes, he said—sometimes people need to be
persuaded. They simply don’t know what’s best for them, and a little … let’s call it theatre, is necessary. Now, I have an idea. This might not be what we intended, but we have to eat and the world is a miserly place.

  In this way, Diamondstone revealed his plan, and soon thereafter Bart became mute for the purpose of fundraising. He considered that Diamondstone had found him howling at the swamp and had heard the voice of a leader, but he also understood the need to sacrifice. In a way, he was relieved not to have the responsibility of preaching.

  And so for almost a year, they plied their long, indirect trajectories cross-country. It surprised Bart how easily the anachronism of a travelling religious show was accepted. His role was not a difficult one. He’d never been talkative, but strangely his silence made him want to speak. And though Diamondstone had explained that they were fighting corruption, moving towards something better, Bart’s restlessness crept back. He told himself that he was taking from a world that had wronged him, that this was a spiritual quest. His rages now rarely tormented him. Despite his act, he felt that they had found a sort of innocence.

  But gradually, the mission began to seem like the homelessness he’d once lived, public showers and meals in parking lots. Night highways cleaved, great armadas of blustering semis, runs of billboards flocked by wind and dust, silos and processing plants all with a look of neglect and history. Nearing Oklahoma City they saw lit crosses soaring above the dark disc of the plains. Dear Lord, they said, and Amen. What a blessing! Closer, they realized that the illusion was created by office buildings with lights left on to form a cross on each side.

  This disenchantment was gradual, coupled with the theatre of salvation, archangels and businessmen and perilous ’57 Chevies. Diamondstone never stopped talking. Soon Bart and Andrew and Morris could do no more than sigh a tired Amen. It was twenty-four-hour evangelical television right there at the wheel of the van, practising sermons, telling of his dreams, his decision to make a name like Simon’s, the Rock, with the hardest rock in it, the one eternal stone, made from pressure. I was coal, he said, and they were all fast asleep, immune to sermon or soliloquy, cradled by the jouncy van.

  Eventually, Bart stayed only out of fear of the life he’d led before. He’d never told Isa how truly bad it had been. Though there were periods of rehabilitation and work when he swore never to fall back, he always did. Loneliness and drinking seemed inevitable, then the wandering. He’d slept off the side of the interstate, in gullies and ditches, the dry culverts and arroyos of the Southwest, beneath crumbling, moon-battered cliffs. Weeks, he’d been able to give nothing its name. He’d wandered past burr and shrub and cactus, through yellow and magenta deserts. He never understood how he lost track, layers of self like that red, broken strata: the simple desire for love and that drunken sense of floating, then grief that gave on rage. He beat a man for trying to rob him. He robbed others. He picked through trash. Supermarket glossies were rare and elegant depictions of life in better places, Rome to the Visigoths. He found books everywhere, in sidewalk free-boxes, on vending machines, propping windows or in weedy yards, rain-swelled, stiff as scriptures.

  Bart hadn’t intended to be drawn close to Isa. Diamondstone had wanted him to separate her from Levon. The convenience of her love had been too much to pass up, but somehow, listening to her talk of her mother, Bart had found himself wanting to speak. He’d learned to fabulate from Diamondstone, to use the parts of his life most pertinent to the listener. But this had felt wrong with Isa. What was strange, what truly surprised him, was that he’d continued to lie though his intentions had become sincere, that she find what she dreamed of in him. Brief warm rains blew through, clattering on the stable roof. He’d studied her pale lips, the scar on her nose, her contained gestures, watching for a sign of what she would believe.

  Still, there had been truth to it, too, the childhood passed around as if given away, the years after his mother’s death and the way he’d read indiscriminately, days on end, hardly sleeping so that at twelve he’d had the puffy face and baggy eyes of a trucker. Through novels he’d learned to picture his unknown father as a silent, road-wise man at a bar, frozen and turned away, unable to reveal all that he’d suffered. Like Isa’s, his life had seemed determined by those who were absent.

  Though he’d met his grandmother on only a few occasions, it was these visits he’d drawn on for his stories. The first time, she’d appeared uncomfortable and had talked in a detached manner, far too polite, cold even. Nice getting to know you, Bart, she’d said. Together they’d walked through town, and she’d shared a bit of the history. Her mother had been Irish and her father French, and though he hadn’t understood much of what she was telling him, she’d talked of old animosities between the cultures, especially where work was concerned. Many of the French had eventually changed their names. She knew a Mr. Beauchamps who’d become Mr. Fields. She mentioned the first years that the French schools were closed, and the places her cousins and brothers had gone to work, Manchester and Woonsocket and Fall River. But he’d never considered any of this the way Isa did. Once, in Louisiana, in a boarding house, an old Cajun man had told him that teachers used to make boys lie on the damp earth under the school building as punishment for speaking French. Bart had never felt French, or cared.

  Perhaps the only strong memory of a family had been the funeral. His grandfather, a near stranger, had finally told him what had happened to his mother. He’d sighed and mumbled about the Lord’s ways with little conviction. Later, before the viewing, he went out to speak with the stepfather, and Bart found himself alone. After the frozen streets, the warm hall felt detached and foreign, vases with roses in the corners, a bouquet of white on the closed lower half of the coffin. His shoes touched silently over the carpet. He neared and looked inside. He hadn’t expected it to be his mother. He must have known but was startled as if this meant she wasn’t dead. She had on too much makeup. He said her name. Amy, he repeated. He lifted her hands and moved them from her chest. He undid the buttons on her blouse. He let his weight rest on the side of the coffin. Tinkerbell was visible just above her bra. Her tattoos had never been so vivid, and he’d wondered what would happen to them in the earth.

  The evening of Levon’s death, Bart had left Isa’s no longer sure of his intentions. He’d told her the truth and wanted to change everything, but his fear had been too much. Outside, in the dark, he tried to make sense of it. If he turned against Diamondstone and she rejected him, he would be alone. Under the cover of the forest, he stopped to consider Diamondstone’s order from that morning to frighten Levon at the stream. The plan had been simple, entirely in keeping with their theatrical tactics. Diamondstone and Andrew and Morris had discussed how to awaken Levon’s fear of God and the strange man he’d seen. Though Bart felt he’d switched loyalties, he’d lacked the courage to refuse.

  He was sitting on a rock, trying to decide, when he heard Levon’s car climb the driveway. He hadn’t expected him to return so soon. He listened, the highway not far beyond the forest, the constantly fading traffic sounds so much a part of him. Finally, he started towards the stream. He told himself that he wanted to see Isa’s husband for himself, to know if all that she’d said was true.

  The rushing water was loud, and as he crossed the rise above it, the moonlight cast his shadow. He’d been thinking of a hiding place, but Levon was already there, gazing at him. They faced each other for what seemed like a minute. Bart had thought he was being sized up, and this made him realize how foolish he was. Levon’s heart must simply have stopped. A moment later he collapsed. Bart waded the stream and crouched. Levon’s eyes were open, the muscles of his throat clenched. Bart touched his chest, then his wrist. He lifted him and started towards the house before he realized that he would be blamed.

  Cold sweat began to drip in his armpits and along his back. As gently as he could, he returned to the stream and stepped in. Rains had kept the current high and muddy, and he followed it up the mountainside. He came to a place he
’d been during his walks, a wide pool with low stones at the centre. He lay Levon in the water. His hands trembled. Sweat dripped from his fingertips. He chose a stone that was slightly larger than Levon. He bent and heaved until it came up, the water sucking in around his knees. He took the body and studied the moonlit face. The eyes seemed to have glossed faintly. There was no question. What Isa had told him was true. He pushed the body under and pulled the stone back. He took a few steps and turned in a circle. Perhaps in the summer, when the water was shallow and clear, someone might notice. He went back down the mountain, not leaving the stream until he came to the place where Levon had been waiting. Carefully he crossed through the fields to find Diamondstone, knowing that if he stayed, he would be caught. Sooner or later a muddy footprint would give him away.

  Every decision from then on passed in a fog of terror. As soon as Diamondstone found out what had happened, he told Bart that he and Morris and Andrew would accuse him if they had to. The departure was without ceremony. The tents went into the van, and they left him in the field. Bart walked into the forest and waited as the rain began. He heard the cars arriving and saw the ambulance lights. He knew that his size alone would mark him as guilty.

  Those months afterwards, in Lewiston, each time he wanted to run, he drank. The responsibility of his actions was with him constantly. He’d lived through too much that he’d never chosen, and only with his drinking did this feeling go away. When Isa arrived pregnant, his confusion and rage was involuntary. It hurt him to see her fear. He’d known that by telling her he’d killed Levon he could make her leave. But when he said it, he wanted to see if she would stay, though he didn’t give her that chance. His rage was too much. Christmas morning, he woke sober to a breathlessness like pain, as if he’d been struck in the chest and felt the heat of an injury that would never rise to the surface.