Short People (Vintage Contemporaries)

by Joshua Furst

  The door is opened, and Shawn steps humbly forward, his head down, his face red, out of the darkness and onto the stage. He climbs the portable stairs behind the water tank—as big as a coffin, glassed in on four sides—until he stands, terrified and exhilarated, on a thin, carpeted platform next to Preacher Dan.

  He looks out into the congregation, finds his mother and father, holding hands. His mother waves at him. His father whispers something in her ear and softly pulls at her arm. She waves again, this time with a waist-high flicker of fingers. Shawn grins and blushes.

  Behind him, Preacher Dan kneels in the water and whispers, “Lie prone, now. Relinquish your body into my hands.” Preacher Dan is a vessel of the Lord. Quick with sympathetic nods and mild jokes, he carries an unassuming personality inside his beefy body, a protective authority that his parishioners trust absolutely. His hands are thick and calloused. Shawn lets them buoy and cradle his head. He breathes deep and bobs on the water’s surface.

  The question, the dare, “Do you, Shawn Casper, accept Jesus Christ as your personal Savior?”

  “Yes.”

  “Are you, Shawn Casper, prepared to die with Christ, who in His infinite kindness sacrificed His life to save you from sin?”

  “Yes.”

  With his right hand, Preacher Dan braces the back of Shawn’s head. Preacher Dan is built like a football coach, barrel-chested, square-jawed; a sandy mustache cut perfectly straight partially masks a hairlip scar. With his left hand, he presses a towel over Shawn’s mouth and nose. He squeezes his hands together around Shawn’s head. Shawn can’t breathe.

  “I baptize you in the name of Jesus Christ, your Lord and Savior.”

  Submerged, Shawn clenches his eyes shut and waits for the change. Now that Jesus is about to arrive, Shawn wants to cement the misery and confusion of his past life into his heart forever. That way, when he’s out planting seeds, he will know whereof he speaks. He tries to call to mind the totality of horror and fear he’s felt in his nine years on Earth, but the chill of the water, the clamp of the towel, the second-by-second deoxification, all these things are overwhelming. He squirms. He is drowning. He knows, from years of public-pool competitions, the exact number of seconds he can go without a breath: thirty-two. To press his lungs further makes him dizzy. The blood rushes to his brain. He didn’t think he’d actually die. His heartbeat echoes in his ears. His lungs burn and tremble. He doesn’t want to die. He grasps at his face, but the preacher’s thick arms are like boa constrictors—Shawn can’t reach around them, the elbows block and overpower him. He kicks and splashes. His knees beat against the glass.

  Jesus, please, if I die now, forgive me for all the sins I have done. Forgive me for not eating breakfast this morning—it was just because I was nervous. And forgive me for . . . for . . . You know what I mean, Jesus, everything, even the sins I can’t remember. I’m so scared now, Jesus. Make me go to Heaven. Please, please, make me go to Heaven. All I wanted was to get baptized. Please, help me, God. A-men.

  Shawn stops struggling and lets his body go limp. He can feel himself leaving it behind.

  Then he is coughing and gasping, back on the surface. Alive.

  “As you died with Christ, so you are born with Christ.”

  He gulps down air. Everyone claps and the shallow vibrato, the preprogrammed beat of the electric keyboard, starts in on Hymn 162. Wet needles of hair poke at Shawn’s eyes, filling them with water every time he blinks. He flips the hair back with a jerk of his head and slaps at his ear, trying to pound out the sluicing, logged water. The laughter this elicits from the congregation humiliates him. He gazes out at them. Except for his mother in her Christmas dress and his father in his best tan suit, the parishioners are clothed in t-shirts and jeans, khakis and short-sleeved button-downs minus the ties, tank tops, tennis shoes, primary colors, logos and slogans for businesses big and small. They all look the same as they did before. Black tears weave clotted webs along his mother’s cheeks. She wiggles her fingers at him again and beams. His father, chin in his chest, shakes his head at short intervals as if he’s shooing a fly away; when he looks up—yes, Shawn knew it—his eyes are rimmed red; he nods once, a hard, taut expression on his face, the bitten lip betraying the pride it holds back.

  Shawn wonders when the feeling of transcendence will kick in.

  Preacher Dan hugs him and whispers, “A heck of a ride, huh?” before delivering him into the hands of the usher with a congratulatory wallop on the back.

  At Camp Corinth, where Shawn spends one week each summer playing Frisbee golf and Red Rover and watching puppet shows about God’s abundant love, he and his fellow campers revel in passing around warm fuzzies, homemade yarn Koosh balls that hang from strings, to be draped, with a hug, around each other’s necks. Warm fuzzies, like God’s love, are best when given away, but Shawn likes the warmth of receiving them better. He likes knowing that he’s accepted and special. Preacher Dan has always seemed to embody the traits of a warm fuzzy, soft with love and humble understanding. Now Shawn sees something chaotic and tense roil under the calm on Dan’s face. He wishes he could ask: Why did you have to hold me down so long? Why did you have to clap me so hard on the back? Were you trying to hurt me? But no one can question Preacher Dan.

  Back in the dressing room, Shawn searches his body for physical changes. Here on his wrist is the mole by which his mother has always said she would identify him if he ever suffered a disfiguring accident. And here are the scrapes he received last week while riding his bike no-handed, the scabs white and spongy on his elbow now. His belly button is still an inny. The veins on the back of his hands run the same way they did before. Changing his clothes, he checks his thing and sees that it’s still distressingly circumcised; he’d hoped that after his baptism it would start to look like his father’s. He’s the same. Nothing’s changed. He’s the same.

  There must be a reason. He can only assume that he’s somehow done something that even Jesus, who supposedly forgives everyone, can’t forgive.

  For a couple of weeks, Shawn despairs at his lack of transfiguration, but before this despair can shatter his faith, he makes a pact with himself: try harder, be better; only with perfection will Jesus talk to you. There is a right and there is a wrong and Shawn dedicates himself to rooting through all the morsels of his life, until he’s rid himself of the bad bits. He imagines what would happen if he succeeded: God reaching down, placing a finger to Shawn’s forehead, a radiant light spreading through his body, ascendance, briefly, then touchdown and a continued life of walking through a world that can tell he’s a Christian by his vibrant love. On the first day of Advent, he helps his mother arrange the crèche. His father sets up the Jesse Tree, a spindly, dead-looking thing at the start, but as the days progress toward Christmas, it fills out with paper leaves. Each references a different Bible verse, with a short study plan on one side and a really well-done, three-color potato print that relates to the verse on the other. Shawn and his parents sit by the fire for an hour each night before dinner and study the day’s lesson. His father reads the verse out loud and they, as a family, follow the study plan, answering the questions and extrapolating meaning from what before were just words.

  “Why did God allow His people to fall into sin as they waited for Moses to descend from Sinai?”

  “What can you do not to turn into a pillar of salt?”

  “How should you react if God treats you the way He treated Job? Think of a moment in your own life when you felt like God was testing you with painful trials. Did you respond like Job?”

  Shawn’s father’s eyes tear up as he grapples for an answer to the Job question. He flashes Shawn’s mother a look full of trepidation, and she responds softly, all wide, caring eyes, silently cupping his hand between her palms, kissing the fleshy base of his thumb. He breathes deep and exhales through flapping lips, a lawn mower engine running out of gas.

  “Shawn, now that you’re baptized, I think you’re old enough to talk about this. You know,
I didn’t used to be as good as I am now at providing for you and your mother.”

  “Uh-huh.” Shawn is transfixed by the incremental separation of bark from branch as the log in the fire burns.

  “Shawn, pay attention. Your father’s telling you something important.”

  The bark curls in on itself as it pulls away from the hard wood underneath. It pulses orange and red, like it’s breathing.

  “Do you need a moment with the Lord?”

  He tells himself to stop watching the fire.

  “Shawn?”

  His mother takes his father’s hand again and squeezes. “Chad, he’s paying attention now.”

  “Okay, I’m thinking about the story of Job and I’m thinking, when I was a kid—up through, Jeez, till I was twenty-three, twenty-four years old.” He looks to Shawn’s mother for help with the facts. “Twenty-four. The third one was when I was twenty-four. I was inside for my twenty-fifth birthday.” She nods supportively. “All through that time, Shawn, I felt like Job. That’s exactly what I felt like. I didn’t handle it all that well, though. I didn’t have any faith and I thought I had to do it all myself.”

  “You didn’t have any faith, like you didn’t believe in God?”

  “That’s right.”

  “You didn’t believe in God?” Shawn’s eyes bulge. His mouth hangs open.

  “Listen, Shawn, it was a . . . I got in a lot of trouble.”

  “Like you were a Devil worshipper?”

  “No. Well, in a way, but I didn’t know it. The, uh, the Devil’s minions, um, ran through my bloodstream, I guess you could say.”

  Shawn scoots in closer and peers at his father. “You worshipped the Devil?”

  “I’m saying—”

  “No, Shawn, your father did not worship the Devil.”

  “I’m saying I used to drink sometimes. And things like that.”

  The image of his father drinking is preposterous. Shawn slaps the floor. He rolls on the floor in laughter.

  “Shawn, this is serious. This is the Jesse Tree.”

  “It wasn’t a good thing. You’re lucky, Shawn. You’re lucky to have a father now who isn’t—who can take care of you. The thing is, Shawn, there were—I was like Job. I felt like the whole world was out to get me, and there were some people whose love I really needed who didn’t treat me all that well. And that’s why I was destroying myself like that. Do you understand what I’m saying, Shawn?”

  “Um . . . Uh-huh.”

  “I didn’t know that I had Jesus to turn to.”

  “And you, Shawn, do know that you have Jesus to turn to.”

  “And you’ve got us and we love you.”

  “Did Jesus talk to you after you turned to Him?”

  “Eventually.”

  Shawn beams.

  “Have you ever felt like Job, Shawn?”

  He can’t remember. Nothing horrible has happened yet in his life. “I guess when I can’t get Jesus to talk to me.”

  “Yes, that’s like Job. Good, Shawn.”

  “What do you do when you can’t get Jesus to talk to you?”

  “I um . . . I keep listening anyway?”

  This is the first of Shawn’s correct Jesse Tree answers, and as the month progresses, he racks up more and more of them, making his parents proud and winning their approval of his wish not to receive gifts on Christmas—Epiphany is so much more appropriate.

  Over the next year and a half, Shawn carries his copy of The Way—a gift from Preacher Dan, given ceremonially during his baptismal coffee hour—with him at all times, leafing through it when he sees something he doesn’t like, the way others might look up a word they don’t know in the dictionary. He judges, and finds wanting, most of what he reads in the Record Herald. During recess at school he shakes his head in disgust at the other kids chasing each other around the soccer field in flagrant display of evil Lust. He pounds tables and dashboards as if they are Bibles, rants until spit sprays out of his mouth, his face turning red, his ears burning.

  Not even his mother escapes his scrutiny. When, for example, she carts him along to pick out a chair for the living room, she keeps rearranging their route through the store to bring them back to one particularly plush model, dusty rose with indented sky-blue stripes offset at intervals by puffy clusters of pale green-and-yellow flowers. She loves the chair even more than she loved last year’s home splurge, the wall-to-wall heather-gray carpeting. She runs her fingers over the fabric—coy and guilty, daring, blushing like she’s a little girl and not a very Christian one.

  Shawn manages to wait until they’re in the parking lot before exploding, but as they walk toward the car, his lecture begins.

  “It’s called covetousness, Mom. It’s very, very, very, very bad. You shouldn’t covet your neighbor’s wife. You shouldn’t covet your neighbor’s home. It’s in The Way. The Ten Commandments. Those are sins, Mom. You sinned.”

  “I didn’t sin, Shawn.” Her voice is already weary and, Shawn thinks, distressingly indifferent given the gravity of what she’s done.

  As she starts the engine and pulls onto the access road, he fumes, struggling with ways to prove his point. “Because, even if you didn’t play with the fabric and drool on it and stuff, God would have known you were sinning cause He can see all your bad thoughts. You coveted so everybody could see and that’s . . . it’s really bad, Mom . . . Isn’t it really very bad?”

  She watches the road as if he’s not there.

  “Mo-o-om?”

  “Not right now, Shawn.”

  “It’s a sin, though.”

  “You’ve already made it clear that that’s how you feel.”

  “But, don’t you care that it’s a sin and you just did it and now God saw you sinning?”

  “Shawn.”

  “And that now you’re going to go to Hell?”

  “Shawn, I’m trying to drive.”

  He leans forward as far as his seat belt allows, twisting in a fitful attempt to look her in the face. “You don’t care?”

  “Not right now.”

  “That’s a sin too. That’s an even bigger sin.”

  She taps the brake. “Now listen to me, Shawn.” For a moment he’s sure she’s going to yell at him, but instead she swallows and, silently mouthing the words, prays, God, make him stop, before accelerating in silence.

  “I’m listening, Mom. Mom? See, I’m right and you don’t even care.” His arms snap across his chest and he stiffens and glares at his reflection in the window.

  For the rest of the day, he harumphs and sighs and stalks from one room to another, but every time he settles in, there she is, cheerfully trying to spoil his bad mood. He knows she’s not really following him, that she’s doing laundry and paying bills, writing letters and calling friends, but he’s pretty sure that she chooses what to do when based on which room he’s in. He sulks in the kitchen, and she comes and unloads the dishwasher. He sulks in the bathroom, she cleans the litter box. He sulks on the back porch, she hangs the linens, waving to him as she goes. The one room Shawn stays away from is his bedroom; what would be the point of brooding in there, where his mother couldn’t see him nurse his anger. He sulks in the living room, leafing through back issues of Family Life, until she says, “Shawn, now I’m going to fold the laundry and watch Days of Our Lives, so you can stay or not, but if you stay, I want you to smile for me,” and she roughs up his perfectly side-parted hair. By now, he’s less upset with her for sinning than for being such a grown-up. Her unshakable cheeriness makes him feel childish, and that’s not right—after all, she’s the one who is wrong. He glowers at her from the couch for a while, but she watches her television show and folds his underwear and doesn’t seem to care at all.

  At dinner, Shawn politely declines his father’s request that he say grace.

  “Shawn.” His father’s eyebrows jackknife and Shawn knows he can’t argue.

  “God’s great, let’s eat. And make people be not so covetous. A-men.”

  “Tha
nk you, Shawn.”

  Throughout the meal, Shawn clatters his silverware. Instead of eating he dissects his favorite made-from-scratch meatloaf. Nibbling a bit of the ketchup-glazed top, he proclaims that it tastes like soap.

  “Shawn’s had a bad day,” says his mother, attempting to explain.

  Preoccupied with the mound of margarine he’s folding into his baked potato, his father doesn’t look up from his plate. “Something on your mind, Shawn?”

  “He’s just angry at me. He’ll get over it.”

  “No.”

  His father smirks. “No, you’re not angry at her, or no, you won’t get over it?”

  Laughing, his mother says, “Both,” and then launches into her side of the story: blah, blah, blah, blah and now she’s getting the silent treatment.

  Unable to endure any more slander, Shawn finally blurts out, “Not true! That’s not how it was!”

  “Oh? How was it?”

  “The way she says it makes it sound all different than how it really happened.” But before he can get the truth out, she laughs. Shawn tries to be Christ-like and keep his dignity as enmity gathers around him. “Dad,” he says, “could you please ask Mom to stop laughing at me now?”

  “She’s not laughing at you. She just thinks you’re cute.”

  With an attitude like this, Shawn is horrified to realize, his father might also remain with the camels and sinners, unable to squeeze through the eye of the needle when Judgment Day finally comes.