Anthem of a Reluctant Prophet

by Joanne Proulx

  So we were still down on all fours, trembling and panting like two dogs struggling to shit, when I felt a hand on my shoulder. I looked up, expecting to see the bum lip, but no, it was Faith Taylor, leaning over me, looking at Fang and the pile of inhalers, one hand on my shoulder, the other holding her hair back from her face.

  “What’s up?” she asked. I was so shocked, I couldn’t answer. Both Fang and I stared stunned from our spot on the floor. I could feel the warmth of her hand through my damp shirt, could feel her fingers resting lightly on my clavicle. Then Fang dropped his head and took a loud pull of air.

  “Does he have asthma?”

  I shook my head. Her slim, perfect eyebrows came a fraction of an inch closer together, and her hand floated from my shoulder. She told us not to use the inhalers, then walked into the box of light at the end of the hallway and disappeared.

  I was standing up, but Fang was still on his knees, gasping, when Faith came back, armed with a bottle of water and a paper bag. She handed me the water and saved Fang’s life with the bag.

  When we were all sitting with our backs to the wall and our knees to our chests, Faith suggested that what had just happened might have been a case of hyperventilation brought on by a panic attack. Even with Fang huffing into the bag beside me, it didn’t seem likely. Fang scaled high buildings without flinching. He lived with a crashingly alcoholic mother. Except for a bit of unwanted attention, nothing freaked him out.

  I unscrewed the cap on the water, took a sip and passed it to Fang. When he dropped the bag to reach for the bottle, it was hard to miss the ragged knuckles or the big, dusty footprint stamped on the front of his new shirt. He took a couple gulps before handing the bottle back, slick with sweat. I wiped my hands on my jeans and tried to clean it up a bit before offering it to Faith. I thought she’d wave off the raunch backwash, but she took the bottle from me and raised it to her lips. I pretended not to watch as she tilted her head back and poured the rest of the water gracefully down her throat.

  “Great night, huh?” she said when she’d finished, rolling her eyes.

  “Yeah, totally.” I managed to keep the shake from my voice. Fang, trying his best to be social, spit on the floor between his feet.

  “You guys on something?”

  “Nothing much. Smoked a bit of weed.”

  She nodded toward the stadium. “Were you in there when it happened?”

  “Yep,” I said. “Right at the front.” I eyed the ceiling, but I couldn’t hold back the big, embarrassing sigh.

  “Must have been scary.”

  “Yep,” I said again.

  Faith leaned her head against the wall and closed her eyes. Her lips were full and wet from the water, and her dark hair, which was all wild and kinky from the heat, glowed red in the exit-sign light. I couldn’t not stare.

  When she started talking, the band was really wailing, and she sort of had to yell and I sort of had to lean a bit closer—mint and music—so I wouldn’t miss anything. Apparently she’d driven up from Stokum with her older sister, Mia. (I knew her. She was a senior at Jefferson, and was almost as delicious as Faith.) They’d met Mia’s boyfriend at the Palace. Andy, or maybe Sandy, was at university in Detroit, and Mia had had a big fight with her parents right before leaving about spending the night at his place. The three of them got split up coming in and Faith had spent most of the concert looking for the other two. She’d checked the balcony, the bathrooms, the floor, etc., etc. She thought they’d purposely dumped her and were halfway to the boyfriend’s place to have sex, which sounded about right.

  “She’s completely in love with this guy. The only reason she even came to the concert was to see him. I’m the big Peppers fan. I bought the tickets a long time ago.” She paused. “For me and Stan.”

  “Really? My tickets were for Stan and me, too.” And I shouted out the story about T-shirt-shop Hank. I hadn’t told Fang where I got the tickets and I looked over to see how he was taking the news that he was second string to a dead guy, but he was still getting it on with the bag and definitely seemed more concerned about remaining conscious than being my lousy backup date.

  Faith and I were both quiet for a while after that, staring at the blank wall opposite. Maybe she was just listening to the band, but I figured the talk of Stan had probably got her thinking about him and how he died and how I was involved, and I sat perfectly still, trying to melt into the concrete blocks behind me. It barely even registered that the music, distorted by the narrow corridor into thick, echoing noise, was “Scar Tissue,” one of my favorite tunes.

  When the song ended and the crowd started cheering, Faith stood up. I could just imagine how unworthy of applause Fang and I probably seemed to her right then, and I waited, motionless, to see what polite exit strategy she’d use to slip back into her better, more beautiful world.

  She slid her fingertips into the front pockets of her jeans. “So, how’d you get here?” she asked.

  I shielded my eyes with my hand, as if in that dim hallway I was trying to shade myself from the sun. “We hitched. Shouldn’t be too difficult to get back,” I said, making things easy for her.

  She pulled a key from her pocket and dangled it above me. “Come on,” she said in that low, sweet voice of hers. “I’ve got a car. I’ll drive you home.”

  THIRTEEN

  Fang and his bag crashed in the back of Faith’s red Sunbird, parked a couple slushy football fields from the Palace. While our driver started up the engine, I did the gentlemanly thing and scraped the six inches of fresh snow off the windows. And I know it was completely insane, but when I cleared the windshield on the driver’s side and saw Faith watching me through the glass, I felt like a kid who’d just pulled the wrapping off some coveted Christmas gift. I was less excited, however, when I brushed the snow from the back window and saw Fang’s ass crack climbing out the top of his jeans.

  By the time I hit the passenger seat, the car was already warm, and it didn’t take us long to slip-slide our way out of the lot. It was a little before eleven o’clock by this time and Faith was worried. She didn’t have her night license, wasn’t supposed to drive after midnight, and, given the weather, we figured it was going to take way more than an hour to get back to Stokum. The plows were out and the roads had been cleared, but the snow was coming so thick and fast there was nothing but two dark grooves in an endless sea of white when we pulled onto the interstate. Most of the cars were taking it easy in the right lane, but the big rigs kept barreling by, shooting up walls of slush that hit the windshield so hard we jumped every time.

  “Geez,” Faith kept saying, leaning forward, squinting into the storm, both hands squeezing the wheel. “I hate those trucks. I can hardly see the road.”

  “We got a ride up in a truck,” I said. “It feels safe sitting up there, above the traffic.”

  “It’s sort of the opposite down here.”

  Unable to compete with the flurry of flakes rushing at the windshield, the brake lights ahead of us faded out, leaving us alone in a tight white blizzard. When they did reappear, they came back as big red disks glowing a few feet in front of us. Faith jumped on the brakes. The Sunbird skidded along the slick pavement as she wrestled the wheel, trying to keep us on the road and in our lane and away from the car in front. I kept telling her what an awesome job she was doing, and she was, but if anything, the storm kept getting worse. The snow had turned to freezing rain and the windshield was icing up. We crawled along for another fifteen, twenty minutes, but we were still a long way from home when another transport blew by, leaving us shuddering in its wake, and Faith finally said screw it and took the next exit off the highway.

  We hardly knew where we were by that time, figured we were somewhere near Monroe, but the exit sure as shit wasn’t a main one. We’d ended up on some small, nowhere road—which probably shouldn’t have bothered Stokumites such as ourselves, but seriously, the thing hadn’t even been plowed. Besides the lone bulb dangling from a pole at the end of the off-ramp,
there weren’t any lights at all. It was in this dull puddle of yellow that we figured out we did not have a phone. (My hopping social life didn’t exactly warrant that kind of connectivity, cell phone bills would have seriously cut into Fang’s drug fund and apparently, before going off to get laid, Mia had failed to hand over the one she shared with Faith.)

  There was no way we were risking a return to the highway, so we hung a left and headed east, toward the lake, thinking there might be something that way, a restaurant or maybe a resort, where we could call for help. We crossed the overpass. On the other side of the highway, the forest straddling the road closed around us.

  We tunneled into the swirling white blackness, listening to the beat of the fan working to defrost the windshield and the odd airy crinkle coming from the bag in the back. The radio spewed static. Faith kept the car in what looked to be the middle of the road, cutting her own path through the snow. We went a couple slow, dark miles without seeing another vehicle or any welcoming roadside establishment. I was thinking maybe we should just pull over and wait out the storm—which led to me fantasizing about an emergency kit in the trunk complete with blankets, candles, a couple condoms, and a small pup tent for Fang—when I saw this faint red glow leaking from the forest ahead.

  “Look,” Faith said, “there’s something up there. Please, God, let it be open.”

  We putted into the light of a flickering sign announcing that we had arrived at the Red Carpet In_ and, yes, there was Vaca_cy. The unshoveled parking lot was deserted except for one snow-covered car and a couple truck cabs. We skidded to a stop in front of the office and Faith cut the engine. She was only half kidding as she made a show of prying her hands off the wheel. “God, that was fairly tense.”

  “Yeah. Fairly. Totally. But you did awesome,” I said, hearing myself sounding like an idiot. Faith just smiled and thanked me for keeping her calm, then started massaging her neck and rolling her shoulders around, trying to work out the kinks. I watched her out of the corner of my eye and realized that, despite the deadly driving conditions, I hadn’t been stressed at all.

  Faith leaned forward to take a peek at the In_. “Looks pretty horrid,” she said. And it did.

  In front of us, a dozen little brown doors squatted either side of a little brown office. It looked like the handyman had been on vacation for the past couple centuries, and the threadbare, watery pink carpet leading to the office was barely hanging on. I was thinking they might want to change the name of the place to downplay the red carpet thing, but then I checked out the buttonhole of an office and figured the rug was probably one of the In_’s best features. The good news was, there was a lamp on inside.

  “Let’s go,” Faith said, killing the lights. She reached for her door handle, then paused and swiveled round to look at Fang. “Are you coming?”

  He didn’t answer. He was lying on his side with his knees tucked tight to his chest as if he was already working at not freezing to death. I reached over and gave him a shake. “Fang. Fang. Hey, man, get up.”

  He grunted a few times, but didn’t budge. Faith got a blanket (no accompanying candles, condoms or pup tent) out of the trunk and laid it over him while I offered up a big thanks for the lift and apologized for my hyperventilating stoner friend crashed in the back seat. But the whole time I was talking, this stupid, excited nervousness was rumbling inside, because despite the circumstances there was no disputing that I was following Faith Taylor, as in the Faith Taylor, into a motel.

  THE OFFICE WAS EMPTY, which gave us a bit of an opportunity to admire the décor. The walls, which may have once been white, were a tarry yellow, and judging from the smell and the big, brimming ashtray, smoking was definitely encouraged at the Red Carpet. Still, if I’d been in charge of the establishment, the first thing on my to-do list would have involved fixing the hole some dissatisfied customer had kicked into the cheap wood paneling on the front desk.

  Faith and I exchanged a bit of a look before she rang the bell. I tried not to stare as she leaned over the counter, but the mirror on the wall behind her made the task of not looking at her perfect ass doubly difficult. In one corner of the room there was a rickety display rack—nailed to the floor in case anyone had dreams of owning such a fine piece of furniture—and I went over and pretended to check out the tourist pamphlets. The usual lame menagerie of attractions promised great times for the whole family at Santa’s Petting Zoo or Wild Cat World or Aquadome, the big water park in Monroe. I gave the rack a push. It turned reluctantly until, surprise, surprise, a Gandy’s Rock brochure spun into sight.

  Gandy’s Rock. A freakish, freestanding, 115-foot-high stalagmitetype rock that, according to the literature, sat in an otherwise completely flat farmer’s field not far from the Red Carpet. Scientists believed the rock was a remnant of the Ice Age, left behind by glaciers as they pulled back up into Canada, where they belonged. A couple of years ago Fang and I had put the rock on our list of Michigan must-climbs, and not only because of its height. We were thirteen when we made the list, and we were pretty positive the retreating glacier rhetoric was bogus. Instead, we believed our own, more probable theory that the rock was extraterrestrial, that it had fallen from the sky during some ancient cosmic meteorite storm and that, once on top, Fang would be able to communicate with alien gods. (We may have made that last part up after we started smoking weed. Sounds likely, but I can’t be sure.) I folded the pamphlet in half and stuck it in the pocket of my jean jacket, planning to show it to Stoner Boy later, to remind him of the only thing he’d ever been any good at.

  Faith gracefully lifted her arm and gave the bell another solid ding. “Hello? Is anyone here?”

  Behind the desk, a door opened. And this dude, decked out in layer upon layer of flab, a thin undershirt and a pair of tight red polyester pants, poured himself into the alley between the door and the desk. For a second I got this weird feeling that we were on the set of some low-budget thriller, or, worse, a gross-out porno flick. Either way, I was definitely an extra.

  The fat guy grabbed hold of the counter, arms warbling, spread his meaty fingers across its cracked surface and gave Faith a long, leering look. “You must be real hot to be out on a night like this.” The guy’s voice dripped with pre-seminalish intent.

  “Excuse me?” Faith said, giving him the evil eye.

  He didn’t flinch, just jerked his head in my direction and kept his gaze on Faith. “You and your boyfriend there need a room?”

  “Actually, my friend and I got caught in the storm. We need a phone.”

  “There’s phones in the rooms.”

  “We don’t necessarily want a room. Is there a pay phone we could use?”

  “Nope.” The guy shot her a wide smile. She denied him entry, dropped her chin to her chest and left him face to face with his own reflection. His teeth were large and white in his loose-flesh face. In the mirror, I saw the smile slip from his eyes.

  Faith leaned over the counter and pointed at the lower deck. “What about that phone there?”

  “Ain’t for customers.” He caught her in his sights and regained his grin.

  “Couldn’t you make an exception?”

  “For a pretty girl like you? Sure I could.” He kept his hands where they were, ran his tongue across his pearly whites, making no move for the phone. Faith waited. I pretended I wasn’t even there, that the hair on the back of my neck wasn’t crawling. The fat man kept leering.

  Faith took a couple steps away from the desk. “So … can I use the phone?”

  “Like I said, I can make an exception for you, but first maybe you can make an exception for me? Do me a little favor?” He bounced his brows up and down a couple times and flexed his pecs. Inside his undershirt, his flabby breasts danced. And before I had a chance to do anything, Faith slammed out the door. A slice of cold air cut through the office, ferreting me out from behind the rack.

  “You got a real live one there.” The fat guy forced out a laugh and finally looked my way. It sort of sickened
me to notice his nipples, hard and erect, under the thin white cotton. Once he knew he had my attention, though, he started bobbing around, making a show of watching Faith stomp to the car. “Great ass,” he said.

  I’d planned on following Faith out the door, but at that, I stopped in front of the desk. “Are you fucking nuts?”

  If he heard me, I wouldn’t have known it. He just reached under the desk and came up with a registration form, which he slid across the counter. “Highway’s closed both ways,” he said, suddenly sounding all businesslike. “Just heard it on the radio. Hell of an accident. And the plows won’t be down this way until mid-morning, so unless you want to freeze your butt off in the car all night, the room is thirty-three bucks.”

  As I filled in the form, Fatty surveyed the board of dangling keys behind the desk. Except for a few empty hooks it was full, but nonetheless he took his time mulling over the lowlights of each room. When he finally turned around, a slick white smile accompanied the key perched on his palm. “Got the honeymoon suite left.”

  “What a surprise. Service is so stellar, I thought the place would be packed.”

  “Yeah, well, Mr. Smartass, it’s boring as hell out here. Sometimes I try to have a little fun, you know? Chat up the customers a bit. Can’t help it your girlfriend doesn’t have a sense of humor. Besides, I don’t see nothing wrong with having an eye for pretty girls.” He shook his head like he was all disappointed in me. “I think it’s pretty goddamn normal, okay?”

  I had zero intention of getting into “normal” with that abnormality. I gave him the twenty-five bucks I had on me and he gave me the key, moaning about what a big favor he was doing me, letting me come up with the rest of the dough in the morning.