“Ready to go, Philip?” Adeline says with a smile.
I will always choose the girl.
Day of Reckoning
Adeline and I walk home from school along the highway toward Faireville. Buds have sprouted on the tree branches, birds chirp, and the sun shines. Flowers bloom in the baskets hanging from the gas-well street lights, perfuming the entire town. Water from melted snow rushes through the roadside ditches, and my heart beats a little faster. Spring has arrived.
We spend the afternoon wandering around the cemetery, looking at the old gravestones. The dead don’t tell tales or pass judgment. As a sort of gesture against Old Wellers in general, Adeline salutes the unknown soul beneath Grave 69, and then pats the imposing statue of Jeremiah Faire on its rotund bottom. After a while we head for home.
“I’ve heard from my dad,” she says, “and I’ve been accepted at U of T. I wanted you to be the first to know.”
“Adeline, that’s great!” Unbeknownst to her mother, Adeline has done some searching on the internet, and has located her long-lost father, with whom she has been communicating regularly in recent months. He is now a well-to-do businessman, and has agreed to fund Adeline’s university education. One weekend, about a month ago, while her mother was away on a Tabernacle-sponsored “Spiritual Retreat,” I gave Adeline the money for a train ticket, and she snuck away to Toronto to visit him. He’s offered her a room in his condo if she decides to attend the University of Toronto in September, and he’s got his lawyers on standby if Adeline’s mother decides to make a fuss about it. Adeline is waiting for the right strategic moment to drop these cluster bombs on her mother.
“Let’s pick up the pace a bit,” Adeline says as we approach the Tabernacle of God’s Will. “I don’t want them to see me. It’s too nice a day to get shunned.”
The Tabernacle parking lot is so jammed full of cars that some are lined up along the shoulders of the highway. There are even a few beside the laneway that leads to my home at the top of the hill.
“Hey,” I ask Adeline, “how come members of your church have to wear old-fashioned clothes and shun entertainment and technology, but you’re still allowed to drive cars?”
“Don’t call it my church,” Adeline says. “It’s not my church.”
“Sorry. But seriously, why cars? Why not horses and buggies?”
“According to the Elders, cars don’t offend God if we remove all the chrome and emblems from them,” Adeline says. “Besides, they don’t want to prevent all those city people from getting here, right? The collection baskets wouldn’t be as full then.”
“Why all the cars today?” I wonder. “What’s going on?”
“Pastor Vangelis called an emergency meeting,” Adeline says. “Mom’s there. It’s supposed to go on into the evening.”
“Are they deciding what to set on fire next?” I wonder.
“Don’t laugh,” Adeline says.
I’m not laughing. Over the past few months, the Tabernacle of God’s Will has succeeded in attracting attention to Faireville in a way that the Town Council never could. In December, the Tabernacle’s founder, Pastor Patrick, died suddenly while choking on a chunk of filet mignon in his private dining room in the Tabernacle’s underground chambers. The Tabernacle Elders, after much deliberation, chose Bob Miller, Bradley’s dad, as the successor to the throne. Apparently Bob Miller didn’t think that “Pastor Bob” had enough of an evangelistic ring to it, so he renamed himself Pastor Vangelis.
His first act as the new leader of the Tabernacle of God’s Will was to rent a truck to have their anti-homosexuality trailer towed to Ottawa, where, after years of collecting signatures in the Tabernacle parking lot, it finally reached its intended destination: the front lawn of the Parliament Buildings. When a tow truck arrived on the scene to remove the trailer, Pastor Vangelis instructed the Tabernacle volunteers to set the trailer on fire. As the police arrested those holding the gas cans and torches, the man formerly known as Bob Miller screamed into a bullhorn about the Constitutional Freedoms of Speech and Religion. All of this made the national news that evening.
Since none of the arsonists would implicate Pastor Vangelis in the Ottawa trailer fire incident, he was free to rally the Tabernacle faithful to escalate their activism even further. It was no longer enough merely to protest the perceived evils of modern society by handing out pamphlets at the Faireville Arena and chanting in front of the condom display at the local drugstore; Sinners and Blasphemers needed to be rooted out individually and forced to face up to their sins.
When three Tabernacle members were arrested for setting fire to the condom display at Anderson’s Hometown Apothecary, Adeline told me that Pastor Vangelis referred to them in a sermon as “Martyrs to the Cause,” even though they hadn’t actually died. Mr. Anderson has since stopped selling condoms altogether, since the sales weren’t worth the increase in his fire insurance premiums, nor the time and effort it took to scrub away the smell of scorched latex.
Other businesses in Faireville have been eager to avoid being next on the Sinners and Blasphemers Hit List. The soft-core porn videos have disappeared from the back room of Faireville Video Rental. Even the miniature replica figurines of Renaissance nudes have vanished from the window display at The Goode Faith Gift Shoppe.
For every Tabernacle member that goes to jail, five new members join the congregation. The parking lot is always full; national television exposure seems to have attracted every vengeful outsider within a two-hundred-mile radius of Faireville. The paint on the new anti-homosexual trailer is barely dry, and already it has more signatures than the original did. A fleet of other trailers now surround the Tabernacle fortress like circled pioneer wagons. One is painted with the slogan, Sex for pleasure equals HELL for ETERNITY! another, Movies, music, and sports: THE DEVIL’S DISTRACTIONS, and another, Science LIES, God’s WORD is TRUTH! Perhaps the most alarming slogan is on the fifth trailer: One Will — GOD’s WILL! One church — The TABERNACLE of GOD’s WILL! Pretenders and Idolaters will SUFFER! “Hey, Philip,” Adeline says, “want to do something different today?”
Usually, we sneak past the Tabernacle and go to my house. Mom makes a pot of coffee, and we sit at the kitchen table and make small talk for a while. Mom likes Adeline, because unlike Michael’s succession of Socialite girlfriends, Adeline will actually give her the time of day. Since my father spends all of his time locked inside his lab or away riding his motorcycle, my mother doesn’t really have anyone else to talk to.
Adeline uses my bedroom to change from her jeans into her Tabernacle uniform to avoid a confrontation with her own mother when she gets home. I say my bedroom, because Michael and I no longer share a room. I think Michael’s feelings were hurt somewhat when I moved into Dennis’ abandoned quarters, but he got over it soon enough when he realized it was easier for him to slip in late at night (and to slip into the occasional Socialite girl) without me in the next bed.
Dennis vacated his room after making a small fortune selling satellite television systems to people around Faireville. All he’d had to do was plug in the Jacob’s Ladder at the right moments: during the Super Bowl, the Stanley Cup Playoffs, and the season finales of several popular TV series. Eventually, somebody at the Cable Television company in Gasberg noticed all the satellite dishes appearing on rooftops around the county, and decided that they should also Ca$h in on the $atellite Revolution. To eliminate Dennis as a competitor, they bought his fledgling company for a grossly inflated price. Dennis took the money and ran off to Toronto, where he has set up some kind of internet-based business. He left me his old computer and most of his teen rebel wardrobe, and he keeps inviting me to go visit him at his downtown apartment. Some day I will take him up on the offer.
“Why don’t we go to my place today,” Adeline suggests as we reach the laneway to my house. “My mother won’t be home until later, and I suppose you should see the inside of my house at least once before we both leave Faireville.”
It’s true. I’ve
never been inside Adeline’s house. We have both been too afraid of what might happen if her mother were ever to catch us alone together. Candace Brown is, after all, a devoted member of an organization that believes it’s a sin for a man to look upon a woman’s ankles.
“Why don’t we just go to my place, like we always do,” I say. At my house, although she makes me look away when she changes into her Tabernacle outfit, I sometimes catch a glimpse of her, distorted and naked, in the glass of the computer monitor. She’s lost the thickness around her midriff, but she’s kept her hips and breasts. Michael isn’t the only one who’s glad he’s got his own bedroom.“I thought maybe the two of us could take a look at the book I gave you,” she says, “but, if you’d rather read The Art of Sex at the kitchen table with your mother . . . ”
“No, no,” I say, “let’s go to your place. Are you sure your mother won’t be home?”
“Not until she’s consumed her share of hellfire and brimstone,” Adeline says.
Adeline pulls up a couple of blinds, and light diffuses into the Spartan home she shares with her mother. The only furniture is a plain wooden table with a couple of tortuous-looking straight-backed chairs. The walls are ghostly bare, the only adornments being the crucifixes hanging above each doorway, and a couple of 1970s-era portraits of Jesus, in which He looks more like a stoned, lily-white hippie than a Middle Eastern carpenter’s son.
“Your house looks like a castle in comparison, doesn’t it?” she says. “Oh, wait . . . your house is a castle.”
“A small, fake castle,” I amend.
The once-white walls of Adeline’s home are stained brownish-yellow from the smoke from the cast-iron stove and the kerosene-fuelled lanterns. The electrical sockets have been crudely plastered over, and the light bulbs removed from all the remaining fixtures. There is no television, radio, or telephone.
“So,” I marvel, “you can have a car, but you can’t have a telephone or electricity?”
“The Tabernacle’s rules aren’t very consistent,” she says. “I feel like I’ve been living in the Dark Ages.”
“You won’t have to put up with it much longer,” I say. “Just a couple more months until we graduate.”
“I don’t know if I can last that long,” she sighs. “Maybe I can get myself shunned in the meantime.” She looks at me seductively. “Maybe if I commit a carnal act outside the sanctity of marriage . . . ?”
I follow her toward the doorway that leads to her bedroom — I can tell it’s her room by the padlock hanging open on the outside of the door. If the rest of the house resembles a monastery, then Adeline’s bedroom is nothing more than a jail cell: bare walls, a small cot, a single bedside table. I sit on the cot and set my backpack on the quilt folded across the end of the mattress.
Adeline takes off her glasses and sets them down on the little table, then casually peels of her top. “Hey,” she says, “can you take my ‘street clothes’ back to your place with you?”
“Uh, sure.”
“I’ll stop by to change at your place tomorrow morning, as usual,” she says. “Do you like this bra?”
The bra is not Adeline’s usual industrial-beige mechanism made from bullet-proof-vest material. The bra Adeline is wearing at the moment has slender straps and delicate cups, and it’s translucent and violet-coloured. Just thinking about breasts normally causes my blood to run south, but seeing her pink nipples through the film-thin fabric creates a rush like a river during spring thaw.
“Nice,” I choke out, trying to sound as casual as possible. “Natural looking.”
“Your mom gave it to me.”
“My mom?”
An image flashes into my mind of my mother standing in the kitchen wearing this same brassiere, and my nether regions deflate. Adeline unzips the fly of her jeans and wiggles her hips free. The denim slides down to her knees, and she steps out of one pant leg, then flips the jeans onto my lap with the opposite foot. She is bound from waist to knee in a flesh-coloured contraption that resembles a medieval chastity belt more than a pair of women’s panties. The only time I’ve seen anything like it was during my pre-teen explorations of the women’s underwear section of the Sears catalogue, on the Old Lady page.
“If my mother can’t keep me fat by force-feeding me junk food, she’ll keep the guys away by dressing me in granny panties,” she says. “I swear, as soon as I get out of here, I’m wearing only lacey little thongs for the rest of my life. Now turn your head and hold out your hand.”
I do as I am told. She drapes the bra over my outstretched hand. The material radiates second-hand warmth.
“Put it in at the top of your backpack so it doesn’t get crushed, okay? Your mother’s bra is the nicest thing I’ve got.”
“Don’t call it my mother’s bra, okay?”
Resisting the strong temptation to sneak a glimpse, I unbuckle the top flap of my backpack and remove Volume XYZ of the Encyclopedia Britannica and The New Illustrated Art of Sex to make room inside for her clothes.
When I turn my head, I’m expecting her to be repackaged in her stiff Tabernacle uniform, but she’s wearing nothing but her Old Lady Underwear. She straightens, takes a step backward. Her naked breasts rise into perfect orbs as she reaches behind her head to tie her hair into its Tabernacle-mandated braids.
All I can say is “God.”
“You really shouldn’t take the Lord’s name in vain like that, Philip.” She giggles, her breasts bouncing slightly.
“Proof of God,” I say.
“Better,” she says.
My heart thumps. My head feels like a helium balloon.
“Well, my dear, the Day of Reckoning is nigh,” comes the shrill voice of Adeline’s mother from just outside the bedroom door. “Pastor Vangelis has officially declared war on the Sinners and Blasphemers, and we are all to be troops in the . . . ”
Her voice trails off as she strides into the room. Time, motion, and sound come to an abrupt halt as she freezes mid-step to contemplate the scene in front of her: her giggling daughter, arms raised, back arched, naked from the waist up, and an open-mouthed boy sitting on her daughter’s bed with her jeans in his lap and a skimpy brassiere dangling from the index finger of his right hand.
“AAAAAAAAIIIIIIIIIIIIIEEEEEEEEEEEEEE!”
Adeline’s mother presses her palms against her temples as if to keep her head from bursting. Adeline folds her arms across her naked chest, grips her shoulders, and dances on her toes, shrieking almost as loud as her mother. I leap to my feet, adding my own startled voice to the dissonant chorus.
Candace Brown’s glare moves from her daughter’s naked torso to the enormous bulge in the crotch of my pants. Her eyes bug out as if I’m aiming a loaded pistol at her, and she screams even louder. When she sees The New Illustrated Art of Sex in the grip of my left hand, she begins to hyperventilate. “Oh! Oh! Oh!” she pants, her face turning blue. She slumps against the bedroom wall.
“Her uniform is restricting her breathing,” I tell Adeline. “Loosen her clothing.”
Her mother leaps away from the wall and screams, “YOUR PERVERTED EYES HAVE SINNED ENOUGH, PERVERT!”
She lunges at me, panting like a rabid dog.
“Mom!” Adeline cries, “He was only trying to help!”
“PERVERT!” Adeline’s mother hollers. “DOG OF HELL!”
I sprint through the bedroom door and stumble forward as something solid slams against the back of my head. I spin around to see Volume XYZ of the Encyclopedia Britannica lying on the floor where it landed. I rub the back of my skull, where a lump is already forming. Candace Brown is standing in the bedroom doorway.
“PERVERT! PREDATOR!” she sputters, trembling with religious fervour. “GODLESS DEMON!”
With both hands, she holds my backpack over her head, and hurls it at me with all her strength. It hits me square in the chest. She cocks her arm back and hurls The New Illustrated Art of Sex at my face. I dodge the flying manual, and it skids across the floor behind me.
> “THE DAY OF RECKONING IS COMING!” she screams, her face turning purple. “YOU WILL PAY, PERVERT!”
“Mom,” Adeline begs, “Calm down! Please!”
Adeline’s mother spins around, her braided hair swinging like the chain of a mace, and she strikes her daughter’s face with her open palm. Adeline tumbles backward, and her mother rushes into the bedroom after her, shrieking, “SINNER!” followed by the hard sound of a slap. “YOU WILL BE SHUNNED!” Another slap. “SHUNNED!” Another slap. “YOUR DISGRACE WILL BE MINE! MINE!” Slap. Slap.
I rush back toward the bedroom to help Adeline, but her mother steps out and slams the door behind her. She threads the shackle of the lock through the deadbolt, snaps it shut.
“Mrs. Brown,” I say, “unlock the door, please.” I wish my voice didn’t quiver.
She stares at me with burning eyes, takes a step toward me. Involuntarily, I step backward. “You will pay, pervert,” she says, her voice now eerily calm. “Your whole perverted family will pay for your sins.”
“Leave my family out of this.”
“Your family are sinners of the worst kind. Perverts. Liars. Full of greed and pride. Do you think we don’t know?” She takes another step toward me. I take another step back. “Look at you! You are a punishment from God. Yours is a Godless home, a house of Atheism, a house of . . . ”
“You don’t know what you’re talking about. My mother goes to church every Sunday.”
“To a church of PRETENDERS!” she says, the evangelistic pitch returning to her voice. “A church of IDOLATORS!”
“She goes to the Catholic Church,” I say.
“We’ll see how much that matters when the Day of Reckoning arrives,” Adeline’s mother says, smiling smugly. “Rest assured, the Army of the Righteous will soon be knocking on your door.”
The Monkeyface Chronicles Page 11
