by Jan Carson
‘Sure, mama,’ Malcolm Orange answered. ‘Learn Spanish. Maybe you can get a job in Taco Bell.’
‘You don’t need Spanish in Taco Bell, Malcolm. They have those little pictures on cards to point at when you order.’
‘We could move to Mexico if you learned Spanish, mama.’
Preoccupied with the notion of learning a second language, Martha Orange ignored her eldest son, pumped up the volume on the TV set and administered her first of many, many thousands of impromptu kisses to the crummy remote which lived on the nightstand.
Portland, Oregon was wasted on Martha Orange. It would take her almost three days to gather enough energy to leave the motel room. During the interim she would survive on gas station candy and soda, fetched by Malcolm three times daily from the Texaco across the road. Eventually the motel owner – a slack-faced Asian man in an Adidas tracksuit – appeared at their door, cordless telephone in hand, and threatened to call the cops if they did not check out immediately. The remaining Oranges packed their belongings, Ross included, into two sports bags and a garbage sack, left the room ankle deep in candy wrappers and stumbled, bleary-eyed, into the city which was to become their home.
(Martha Orange, finally convinced that Alaska would never come to pass, abandoned her scarf beneath the queen-size bed. It hibernated there for several months, unnoticed by a series of incompetent housekeepers until the autumn damp caused its well-fluffed fibers to swell further, forcing the lower left side of the bed two inches off the carpet. Surrendering her scarf, Martha Orange would later come to realize, had left her sadder and somehow more perturbed than the loss of a full-grown husband.)
Sitting on the curb of the motel’s parking lot, Malcolm and his mother considered their options.
‘You could do waitressing again, mama,’ Malcolm suggested.
‘What would I do with Ross?’ she replied.
‘I could mind him.’
‘Don’t be ridiculous, Malcolm. You’re only eleven. You’re supposed to be in school.’
Malcolm Orange held his tongue. This, he realized, was not the moment to defend his twelfth birthday or point out that most of Ross’s practical care already fell at his feet.
‘We could go to a church and ask God for help. Maybe he’d let us sleep there for a while.’
Malcolm’s mother said nothing. She crossed her legs at the ankle and stared plaintively upwards. Malcolm assumed her pre-occupied with the act of fervent prayer.
‘I could sell lemonade,’ he continued. ‘Though I don’t think we have a jug for making it in … you could do laundry for rich folks … we could live in a tent at least ’til the rain starts … you could take your clothes off for money. I saw it on TV. It pays really well.’
Malcolm Orange had spent most of his formative years moving forwards at a rate of some sixty-five miles per hour and with the disappearance of his father had been suddenly and unceremoniously thrust into the possibility of a permanent zip code. The hope of normal American living filled him with a terrible, excruciating excitement, pinching, as excitement often did, at the neck of his bladder. Malcolm could not see anything beyond a semi-permanent silver lining to all the Oranges’ troubles. He bounced around on the curb, itching like a kid caught short, and waited for his mother to join in with his enthusiasm.
Conversely, Portland, Oregon was wasted on Martha Orange for she could not see past the Volvo-shaped hole in the parking lot. She drew both knees to her chin, clasping her hands across her shins like a belt buckle, and began to rock slowly, coaxing the sadness out of her fingernails. A single tear peaked out of her left eye and rolled down her cheek, losing momentum and disappearing into the skin around her nose. She wiped her face with the back of her hand and felt fifty-eight years old at least.
‘I’ll learn Spanish,’ she said, ‘I’ll learn Spanish. There’s a lot you can do with Spanish.’
‘And in the meantime what will we do for food?’ Malcolm asked, genuinely concerned by the tremulous hunger which was already beginning to gnaw at the inside of his lungs. ‘We need to make enough money for eating. It shouldn’t be too hard to find a job of some sorts. You’ve got a lot of options, mama. You could do the laundry thing again, though we didn’t make a lot off that in Idaho, or take your clothes off for strangers, or ask God to help us out.’
And because she had no money for tents and knew in her darkest heart that no one in Portland, Oregon would pay to see a thirty-seven-year-old stripper with deep-veined nursing breasts, Martha Orange reluctantly agreed to ask God for help.
It was a significant stretch, for neither Malcolm Orange nor his mother entirely believed in a benevolent God.
Martha Orange had been brought up Presbyterian with a new church hat and frock twice yearly. Even after almost fifteen years of practiced religiosity she had never admitted, even to herself, that it was the promise of a new dress, combined with the ominous threat of her father’s belt buckle, which kept her regularly attending the meeting house long past her thirteenth birthday. God himself seemed many million miles beyond Oklahoma, hovering on the edge of some ancient nursery rhyme, mythical, bearded and seasonal as Santa Claus
Martha Orange was not a believer in the strictest sense of belief.
Her own father had died of the cancer six weeks before her fifteenth birthday, shriveling slowly into a small, raisin-skinned man who took his liquids from a baby bottle and spent two hours straining to expel his daily shit. Martha, as the oldest child, had been contracted to lead the nightly prayer shift, reading aloud from the ancient leather-bound King James and endlessly repeating the Lord’s Prayer (for it was the only prayer she felt confident to deliver convincingly). During this evening ritual a thin, peaceful veil habitually descended over her father’s face. And though Martha wrestled against the peace that passes all understanding, cherry-picking passages of bloody wrath and Revelation and reading them with mounting anger over his wasted frame, her father smiled on, beaming beatifically at the ceiling fan.
‘The Lord giveth,’ he would whisper as each nightly reading came to a close, ‘and the Lord taketh away. Blessed be the name of the Lord.’ Though the drugs were by this stage turning his mind to mush, he’d still sounded believably contrite.
Young Martha, deep-filled with righteous anger, could not bear his faith. It slid around her like a constricting hunger, ridiculous and yet perversely insatiable. Eventually, when the evening drove her to breaking point she’d quit her father’s bedside and carry her consternation to the back barn where she smoked contraband packs of Lucky Strikes and raged against the Almighty for his bloody-minded ability to favor the fine art of taking away.
God, she’d finally concluded at fifteen years old, flat on her back beneath her father’s freshly-promoted foreman, was for halfwits and folks who couldn’t sort themselves out.
By the age of ten, with a dozen or more funerals under his belt, Malcolm Orange was all but ready to agree with his mother. If God was good and God was love Malcolm could not help but wonder why he seemed to throw himself with such great gusto into so many acts of willful destruction and suffering; floods and famines and plagues and elderly grandparents whisked into the next world halfway through Ghostbusters. Furthermore, the Almighty, until very recently, had not seen fit to answer a single one of Malcolm’s prayers.
Malcolm Orange knew exactly how many prayers God had yet to answer. He was keeping a list.
Over the course of the last decade Malcolm Orange had daily prayed a series of humble, selfless prayers, which in his small opinion, were absolutely achievable by a God who claimed (with little significant evidence) to have created the entire universe in less than a week, to have walked barefoot on the sea and, on one notable occasion, brought himself back from the dead, bursting from an underground tomb in a move ripped right out of an X-Men strip. On paper, God was someone worth believing in. In reality he had yet to deliver on the dogs, the bunk beds, the death rays or kick-ass siblings Malcolm Orange had asked for over the last ten years. Malcolm Or
ange felt entirely justified in distrusting God, for God had purposefully stricken him with chicken pox on three separate occasions, bounced him round America like a five-foot ping pong ball and added insult to injury with the arrival of the mild-mannered Ross, who in Malcolm’s opinion was simply another example of the Almighty taking the piss from on high.
However, in light of his father’s untimely exit, Malcolm Orange was now prepared to give God a second chance, considering all those smaller unanswered demands a mere preamble of faith to this, the ultimate answer to prayer.
‘I think we should ask God for help, mama,’ Malcolm said. ‘I have a feeling he’ll listen this time.’
‘OK,’ his mother replied. She sounded like a birthday balloon deflating.
‘Which God should we ask?’
‘Our God, Malcolm. You get born with one God and you’re kind of stuck with that one … unless you marry someone foreign. Then you’re allowed to change your God for a different one. That’s the way religion works.’
‘So, you didn’t get to change Gods when you married Papa?’
‘Well,’ she said, smiling sadly, ‘that’s a fine question to be asking, sweetheart. I didn’t get a different God from your dad. I ended up giving up the only God I got. Your daddy wasn’t a big one for religion.’
‘No ma’am, Papa didn’t believe in any God at all.’ Malcolm replied, nodding fervently. ‘Sure, once I asked him for a Bible and he gave me a book of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory instead and said there was more sense in going to the movies than reading the G-D Bible. And I never even bothered reading Charlie and the Chocolate Factory because I didn’t want to make God mad, but I didn’t want to make Papa mad either, so I pretended real good that I was reading it for miles and miles in the backseat of the car.’
Malcolm Orange’s mother laughed, leaning back on the curb to let the noise out. Malcolm laughed too. He wasn’t sure why they were laughing but it made a welcome change from melancholy Spanish.
‘Mama,’ he asked cautiously, when he was almost sure the laughter had run its course. ‘Is it the Jesus God that belongs to us?’
‘Yes,’ she said, scuffing his sneaker affectionately with the toe of her sandal, ‘ours is the Jesus God.’
‘Good,’ replied Malcolm, ‘he’s the one who made the world so we should be alright.’
After which the remaining Oranges shared a Snickers bar, gathered their resolve and wandered across 82nd street into the residential part of town. They’d barely gone five blocks before they stumbled across their first church.
‘Evangel Baptist Church,’ Malcolm read aloud from the street-side sign. ‘Is this the kind of church where our God lives, mama?’
‘Baptist,’ murmured his mother, rolling the words round the inside of her mouth like a brave new taste, as yet undecided. ‘Yeah, Malcolm, I think Baptist will be just fine. There were good Baptist folks at the end of our road in Oklahoma. The day after he passed they brought us a whole suckling pig for my pa’s funeral. I think Baptist might be just the ticket today.’
They climbed the four steps to the church door. A homeless person of indeterminate gender was dozing noisily under the porch, the greater part of his or her body covered by a mossy green tarp. One arm emerged from beneath the tarpaulin’s edge, sporting, at the furthermost end, a salami pink hand hooked round a shopping cart. Malcolm’s mother stepped carefully over the homeless person, motioning with a finger for Malcolm to be quiet. She tried the church door and upon finding it open stepped inside, deposited her possessions on the foyer floor and assisted her son as he swung himself clumsily over the homeless doorstop.
Malcolm Orange had never before been inside a proper church. All Orange funerals had, for financial reasons, been conducted in funeral crematoriums and Dairy Queen parking lots. He hesitated on the threshold of the sanctuary, adjusted his tube socks and considered the possibility of what might lie behind the enormous mahogany doors.
The better part of Malcolm Orange trilled with a curious longing to see where the Jesus God lived. However, he was also reasonably terrified, having read enough comic books to acknowledge the possibility of winged beings: angels, saints and ill-imagined demons hanging from the interior roof beams. Furthermore, Malcolm Orange remained convinced that God – who knew everything, even invisible nighttime indiscretions – was still pissed about Malcolm’s bigger sins: the naked lady programs and cancer lies, the tail ends of umpteen cigarettes smoked to the nub and the many, many booger balls, surreptitiously rolled and wedged down the inside of the Volvo’s seatbelt holders. Malcolm’s bowels began to churn in the customary manner. In such circumstances a bout of nerve-induced diarrhea seemed all but inevitable.
All things considered, Malcolm Orange thought it best to go second. If someone was to be struck down upon entry, he preferred it not to be him.
With one hand on the small of his mother’s back he wedged the sanctuary doors open and ushered her inside. She shuffled forward and disappeared into deep, all-encompassing darkness. The doors closed behind her backside with a moist, snowy whoosh. Malcolm Orange stood on his heels, rocking forwards and slowly backwards in time to his own breath. He felt eleven years old – closer to ten than twelve – and terribly far from home. Thirty seconds later, realizing that his pilgrim mother had left him standing solo in the church’s darkly lit foyer, he gathered his guts and slipped into the darkness behind her.
(Whilst Malcolm Orange and his mother investigated the inner sanctum of Evangel Baptist, Ross, who even for a young infant, prematurely born, seemed above-averagely fond of sleeping, dozed lazily in his sports bag under the welcome table. Ten minutes into the escapade he would be discovered by an elderly cleaning lady who, in an early morning attempt to make the 7:43 bus, had rushed out of her house at 7:38, leaving her seeing glasses marooned on the nightstand. Ill-equipped to differentiate between babies and sports clothes, she would unsuspectingly throw Ross into the lost property cupboard, the final straw in a morning of visual faux pas which had included mixing the pew Bibles with the hymnbooks, polishing the pulpit with toilet cleaner, and, perhaps most worryingly, mistaking the pastor’s wife for the enormous lady who came to do the flowers on Friday afternoons.
‘You just don’t think to check for babies,’ she would later confess, mortified. ‘You just assume a sports bag’s gonna be full of gym clothes or sneakers, not babies.’
‘Not to worry,’ Mrs Orange would reply, fishing her youngest son out of the lost property cupboard where he had become entangled in a pair of long-abandoned swim goggles, ‘there’s not a day goes by when I don’t forget about Ross.’
‘He’s a very forgettable baby,’ Malcolm would automatically add, receiving a bitter clip around the ears for his impertinence.)
Inside the sanctuary the blackout blinds had been drawn as they most often were on weekdays; a church-wide policy designed to preserve the royal blue carpet from the sort of daily fading which had sent the last two royal blue carpets to their early graves. Mrs Orange had progressed a mere two feet up the aisle and, not yet adjusted to the darkness, Malcolm found himself banging into her back.
In the pitch black with the Jesus God watching, Malcolm Orange felt incredibly protective of his mother. He slipped his arms round her waist and stood on his uppermost tiptoes, attempting to rest his chin reassuringly on her shoulder. Through her shirt he could feel the outline of her shoulder bones, curving like a pair of polished doorknobs atop each arm. They were moving up and down slowly, independent of her elbows. Without looking he could tell she was crying.
‘Mama,’ he asked, whispering into her left ear, though he knew it was pointless to try and conceal even the slightest secret from God, ‘shall I talk to him for both of us?’
‘Yes,’ she replied and the sound of tears was unmistakable, a choked catch at the back of her throat, clasping like the moment before a truly satisfying sniff.
‘Should we kneel?’
‘It’s dark in here. I don’t think it really matters.’
>
‘God sees everything, mama, even things that happen underground. He has special eyes for seeing everything.’
So they kneeled, bare, naked knees burrowing into the royal blue carpet. Twenty seconds into the prayer Malcolm’s thighs began to ache from the pressure. Thirty seconds in his shins followed suit, throbbing from underuse. (Reliable though it had been, the Volvo had offered little opportunity for exercise; consequently all the Oranges – Ross excepted – were hideously unfit and prone to breathless huffing at the merest hint of an incline.) To his left Martha Orange was similarly preoccupied with the muscle burn creeping up and down the back of her perfectly tanned thighs.
‘Make it quick, Malcolm,’ she whispered, adjusting her weight from one leg to another.
Malcolm was a mere two lines into the Lord’s Prayer, feeling the need to begin with something familiar. He was taking his time, relishing a captive audience and pronouncing each word with showy, theatrical intent.
‘Our Father,’ he proclaimed, rolling his eyes towards the ceiling, ‘Who ART in Heaven. Hallowed be THY name … and also Jesus be THY name,’ he quickly added to avoid confusion with other, lesser-known Gods who might be listening in on their conversation.
‘Malcolm!’ his mother hissed, poking him viciously in the rib cage, ‘get to the important bit.’
Exasperated by his own mother, who did not seem to understand the etiquette associated with prayer, Malcolm Orange prematurely abandoned the Lord’s Prayer, raised his hands like a deep south Revivalist and addressed God in the very voice his father usually reserved for parking attendants and persnickety authorities of all ilk and persuasion.
(‘If you want something done, Malcolm,’ Jimmy Orange had explained on several occasions, ‘speak up like a man. Shout if you can and if you got yourself a gun, it never hurts to let folks know. Folks won’t give you nothing if you go round talking like a pussy. Find yourself a man voice and get used to it.’
