Anthem of a Reluctant Prophet

by Joanne Proulx

  “Yeah, that’s the one,” I said, and headed for the storeroom. I opened the door just as Baldy lobbed a nice clear “Fuck you” at my back. Its amplified echo accompanied me into the small concrete box of a room.

  Hank, down on his knees between two shelving units, looked up. “I see you’re making some new friends, Luke.”

  “Who, him?” I jerked a thumb over my shoulder as the door slammed shut behind me. “Oh, he wasn’t talking to me. He was talking to one of the other customers. Some old lady and her granddaughter.”

  “Very funny, Luke.” He pushed himself off the floor with a grunt and brushed the dust from the knees of his jeans, creating a fine, powdery cloud around his legs.

  “That guy is a goof,” I said, hoping to get a bit of conversation going.

  Hank made his way down the aisle and I could see right away his shirt had a message. Jesus is Coming. Look Busy, it said, which I guess is what he’d been doing before I showed up.

  Hank forced his fingers through his wiry hair. He went right down the center, where the part would have been if the Brillo pad could have been tamed, then settled both hands on his hips. “Bobby is okay,” he said, nodding toward the store.

  “Bobby? Okay? His nose ring is infected, for God’s sakes.”

  “I’ll get him some rubbing alcohol.”

  “You’re too nice, Hank.”

  “Yeah, don’t you know it.” He gave me a bit of a look before asking about the Peppers concert.

  “It was excellent. Awesome. Thanks.”

  “Glad to hear it.” Hank pursed his lips and gave his head a little shake. “I’m just sorry Stan wasn’t there with you.”

  I kicked at the floor and neither one of us said anything for a couple long seconds. I was worried Hank was going to go all soft on me again, but his voice was solid when he asked what I had for him. I pulled two sheets of paper from my back pocket and handed them over. Hank unfolded one, the mock-up for the front of the One Drum shirt—a simple Rolland Rocks in the same font as our award-winning Stokum Sucks design.

  “I see you’re sticking with a catchy two-word slogan.”

  “Yeah, well, I don’t want anyone to get bored and quit reading halfway through.”

  Hank laughed and unfolded the second sheet of paper. “Artwork,” he said, raising his eyebrows at me. “Very nice.”

  Using a felt-tip pen and some charcoal, I’d sketched out a Native-inspired drum for the back of the shirt. Crosshatching a thick birch-bark cylinder, thin strips of leather held the skins in place at either end of the drum. If you looked closely, you could see that the leather twine was actually a finely written list of the festival bands, interspersed with the concert date—April 27, 2003. (I’d added the date on the second go, because on my first attempt the band names alone had only been enough to lace up half the drum, which had looked kind of stupid.) I thought the whole thing was pretty sweet, and I guess Hank did too, because he gave me a good deal on the shirts. We settled on a dark, mossy green, same two sizes but with no ripped seams this time. I told him I’d get him some clean copies of the slogan and the final sketch and he wrote up an invoice, which I had to hand over to Ms. Banks at school for final approval.

  We headed out of the storeroom, were standing by the front door, and I was all prepared to shove off, but Hank had kind of parked himself in front of the door. He was staring out the window and right on into the next galaxy, it seemed. “You know what I can’t figure out?” he said finally. “Stan was the most alive kid I’ve ever met. I just can’t understand how you can kill that kind of energy. I mean, where did it all go?”

  Now he was staring right at me, looking all confused and anxious, like he was expecting me to come up with some concrete mathematical equation to explain the dissipation of life force into the cosmos or something. Drawing on all the knowledge I’d gained over the past couple months, I gave it my best shot. “You’re asking me? Man, I don’t understand dick.”

  The dude behind the cash was totally eavesdropping on our conversation, and besides, the intimate theme of the discussion was making me uncomfortable, so I said a quick thanks and catch- you-later. But when I headed out the door, Hank was right on my ass. Outside, the February weather was refusing to budge. It was still sunny, but thick dark clouds were gathering on the horizon, no doubt preloaded with the evening’s standard dump of snow.

  Hank sat down on the narrow windowsill and stretched his legs halfway across the sidewalk, apparently oblivious to the cold. “I was thinking about you the other day, Luke, when I was reading this article. About this scientific study. There were these doctors, see, and they got these distant healers from all different backgrounds—Muslims, Christians, Jews, Buddhists, Native Americans, the whole shebang—they got them to pray for these people with this incurable brain cancer, right? So they split the cancer patients into two groups, right, and one gets prayed for and the other group, what they call the control group, doesn’t.”

  Hank’s hands were going by this time, like an Italian’s, and you could tell by his face that he was working hard to come up with the facts. I just let him blab away, but given the research I’d done over the Christmas holidays I already knew where he was coming from. I’d read the article. I knew about the study.

  The healers had been sent a name, a picture and a list of symptoms and had prayed for the person for an hour a day over a couple-month period. Results hadn’t come in, but a similar, smaller study with AIDS patients had given a big thumbs-up to the effectiveness of distant healing. Surprisingly, Hank finished off his synopsis with the as-yet-unpublished findings. According to him, a majority of the cancer victims who’d been prayed for were out whooping it up on the town, while their counterparts in the control group had shriveled up and died.

  “So anyway, for some reason I thought about you when I read the article. About what happened with you knowing about Stan. About there being this other dimension.”

  “Do you get all your info from Oprah magazines, Hank?”

  He laughed in an embarrassed sort of way. “What about you? You a fan of the big O?”

  “Not really. I picked it up one day in the can. My mom has a subscription.”

  “I was at the dentist,” Hank confessed. “Root canal. And a crown. Now that’s a sign you’re getting old—bad teeth. Jesus. Anyway, the article got me thinking.”

  “Seriously, Hank, a couple pages in some chick magazine aren’t enough to make you a believer, are they?” A beat-up-looking electric guitar in the window of the pawnshop next door caught my eye. I knew I had no musical talent, still I took a couple steps up the sidewalk to check it out.

  I guess I’d been shading Hank, because suddenly he was sitting in a beam of low winter sunlight. He raised a hand to shield his eyes. “Well, there’s more going on out there than we know. Shit happens that we just don’t understand.”

  I had to agree with him on that.

  “Man, I should have gone to college,” he said, shaking his head in disgust at his vast ignorance.

  “I don’t think that would have cleared things up for you, Hank.” I went to stand in front of him again, offering him some relief from the glare. “You want to know the part of that article I found really interesting?”

  “What?” Hank folded his arms across his chest.

  “The doctor in charge of the study, the one who’d started the distant healing research—she was the daughter of some chess champion or something, remember?”

  “Yeah, Bobby Fischer. His niece, I think.”

  “Well, she ended up getting brain cancer—the exact kind she was doing the study on. The probability of that was like one in a million or something. How’s that for a coincidence?”

  Hank shook his head again, looking more confused than ever. “Behold the inexplicable,” he said, not sounding a whole lot like himself. “I bet she signed herself up for the prayer group.”

  “Yeah, she did. It said so on the Web.”

  “And?”

  The sun slipped
behind the Royal Cinema building across the street. The light around us deepened to dusk and it felt like the temperature dropped ten degrees.

  “She died,” I said. “Before the magazine even came out.”

  TWENTY

  It was already the beginning of March before I finally worked up the nerve to thank Faith for her Mr. J. Cash offering. I found her at lunch, in the library, at The Table, the one that, for a few golden weeks in December—after the concert, before the movie—I’d dared to think of as ours.

  She was looking as hot and heavenly as ever. I approached from the stacks, sort of wandering out and casually bumping against the table to make it look like the whole encounter was completely random.

  “Oh, hi,” I’d said, acting all surprised. She smiled and gave a graceful, game-show-babe sweep of her hand toward the empty chair across the table. I slipped right into the hot seat. We chitchatted for a bit about safe stuff—how many days in a row Mr. Switzer, the science teacher, had been wearing the permasuit (forty-one), the upcoming release of the new White Stripes album (April 1), what she was reading (a play the drama group was thinking about doing; as proof, she dangled a copy of Tennessee Williams’s The Glass Menagerie in front of me). She squared the book up in front of her, then, as usual, quickly swung the conversation in a more sensitive direction.

  “Have you been avoiding me?” she asked.

  “No,” I said, noticing how that one syllable climbed at the end. I said it again, keeping it low and steady. Even so, Faith kept up the questioning.

  “Don’t you like me?”

  I swallowed hard. “No … I mean … yeah … I like you.”

  She leaned in a bit to deliver her next inquiry, and I got a soft, staggering whiff of her peppermint scent. “Do I make you nervous?”

  “No,” I said nervously. I pulled her book over and started skimming the pages. “Any coma victims in the Menagerie? Because, seriously, I’d be perfect for a role like that, if you’re looking for new talent, that is …”

  She took the book from my hands and set it back on the table in front of her. “Is it because of Stan?”

  “No.” Jesus.

  “So, it’s just me?”

  “No,” I said again. Nervously again. “I’ve just been really, sort of, busy.” I picked a pen from her pencil case and twirled it on my thumb and middle finger.

  “Doing what?”

  I concentrated on the pencil and groped for something. “Ahh, hanging out and, ahh, shoveling snow, mostly. My neighbor’s driveway. For free. Her husband died a while ago.” I was trying to impress her, so I skipped the part about my passive, but integral, role in the man’s death. “And I’m doing the shirts for the One Drum festival.”

  “Really? That’s great!” She looked enthusiastic and I decided it probably wouldn’t kill me to be a little straighter with her.

  “Listen, I should have stopped by earlier to thank you for the CD.”

  “Do you like it?” She nailed me with her emerald beams. The pencil clattered onto the table, but I hung on, maintained eye contact, let her come on in.

  “Yeah. I love the Reznor song. It’s so painful.” I took a chance. “Kind of like our Christmas hookup. Only shorter.”

  “Much shorter,” she said, laughing. “What was with you that night, anyway?”

  “It was probably the electric shock treatment I had right before we went out. I should have rescheduled.”

  She laughed again. “Next time,” she said, and my whole body throbbed at the implication.

  I was still sort of lost in that throb when Faith, always thoughtful, asked about Fang. I told her I hadn’t seen him lately, which wasn’t really true. I’d seen him in the back parking lot a couple of times, but he always gave me this weird look, like he was some wounded animal I’d just tried to run over or something. I had, like, zero time for his bullshit, so I’d just glide on by, holding on to his Luke’s-a-complete-dick comment, pretending he wasn’t even there.

  “He’s in my history class,” Faith said, “but he hardly ever shows up. When he does, he looks so bad. Yesterday he fell asleep on his desk. Mr. Howard totally freaked on him.”

  “Yeah, well, to be honest, I’m sort of pissed at him.”

  Faith didn’t look impressed. “Really? Well, I think it’s time you got over it. Seriously, Luke, you should talk to him.”

  To demonstrate what a good, reliable, always-there sort of friend I was, I reluctantly agreed to track down Fang.

  “Promise?” Faith asked.

  I flashed her a peace sign. “Scout’s honor.”

  I could see she was pleased, and she didn’t press for details, which was just as well since I had no intention of actually following through. And I don’t really know where I found the balls to throw out the next couple things, but they were pressing at me, I mean really pressing, and I didn’t think I could just keep coming up and sitting with Faith if I didn’t get some answers, and since I was interested—incredibly, highly interested—in sitting with her, I opened my mouth and let the first thing loose.

  “So, hey, you’ve probably heard what everyone’s saying, you know, that I made it all up.”

  “Yeah, I’ve heard the rumor.”

  “And?” I couldn’t even look at her here. I concentrated on my hands, holding tight to the edge of the table.

  “And what?” she said. So light and easy, there was room for my eyes to flicker to hers.

  “Do you believe it?”

  “Luke, I know what happened. I’ve talked to Fang about it.”

  My hands dropped from the table. “And it doesn’t freak you out?”

  “No.”

  “Or scare you?”

  “No. Luke, you don’t scare me. I know you and Stan were really close and I figure you were, like, connecting on some other level or something. So somehow, somehow, without even knowing, you knew.”

  I could have straightened her out right there, told her that me knowing Stan was going to get nailed by that van had nothing to do with us being tight. I mean, I barely knew Mr. Bernoffski, had never even met convenience-store Howie, and they’d both made my list. But seriously, I couldn’t get anywhere close to being that honest. So instead, I nodded and said, “Okay, then. All right.” And when Stan’s closest pal boomed a big, joyful smile at his old girlfriend? She boomed one right back.

  I guess it was my day to be studding it up with beautiful women, because as I was heading downtown after school to finalize the One Drum shirts, I bumped into another hottie, hanging on the sidewalk outside McCreary Park. And this one came straight for me, clipboard in hand. I recognized her right off, before she even told me her name. Laura, Laura Cramp, looked even better in person than she did on TV, despite the volleyball-sized bump popping out the front of her white down jacket. Laura definitely had the hit-upon-Heidi thing happening, with two long blonde braids poking from a pom-pom-topped ski hat. Still, even knocked up and bundled up, she managed to look fresh and innocent and sexy, and when she started blabbing, I acted interested.

  Apparently she was a member of some group, Concerned Citizens Against Fudge Packing in the Park or something like that, who wanted to out the names of the men arrested in the bandstand. She went on about how it was “for everyone’s safety” and how “men like that can be helped” and “freedom of information” and “constitutional rights,” and when she pushed her clipboard toward me and mentioned the petition she was going to personally present to Police Captain Deeks and Judge Harvey, I noticed her breath was just-brushed fresh. Still, when she tried to hand me the pen, I just smiled and walked away. First off, I just wasn’t the proactive, petition-pounding type. Secondly, I really didn’t give a shit about who was doing what to who in the homo hangout. Thirdly, if my mom ever got wind that I’d signed Laura’s list, she would have kicked my ass. I’ll admit I was curious to know if my dad’s missing boss was gay, but I figured, hey, there were enough small-minded folks in our small-minded town to push Kite out of the closet without any help fr
om me and my John Hancock.

  So even though I sort of blew off Laura, my streak with the chicks wasn’t totally done. I ended up hanging out with Faith a fair bit over the next couple weeks. I never worked up the nerve to actually ask her out or walk her home or anything that bold. Still, it was a pretty stellar time for me. In fact, if I disregarded the recurring Astelle nightmares and a couple more dead men dropping by to sing me their songs and some random, disturbing thoughts about the call from Pastor Ted and the Amish-like shunning I was receiving from a majority of the Jefferson student body, I’d have to say March 2003 was one of the best months of my life.

  I can’t really say the same for my mother. She seemed to be having a fairly shitty late winter/early spring season. She’d developed an especially bleak outlook on life and was dragging her depression around the house like a dirty blanket. I tried to avoid her as much as possible, but the day I came home after school and found her sitting at the Formica table crying, I couldn’t pretend not to notice.

  In fact, when I’d seen her car in the driveway that day, right away I’d felt a pang of concern. It was three-thirty. On a weekday. She should have been at work. I’d gone inside quietly, had stopped in the kitchen doorway when I saw her. Her face was half hidden by the arm she was leaning on, her eyes shielded by the fingers of one hand. A ragged Kleenex poked from her other hand, which was tucked in front of her, balled into a tight fist.

  “Hey,” I said tentatively. I reached out and pressed a palm against either side of the doorjamb, pinning myself in the entrance to the kitchen.

  My mom swiped at her eyes with the Kleenex and glanced at me quickly, forcing out a shaky hello. She was still dressed in her bank clothes and her purse and keys were in the middle of the table. I got the impression she would have preferred to be having her breakdown in the privacy of her own room, which definitely would have suited me, but by this time it was too late for that.

  I headed for the cupboard and grabbed a bag of mini rice cakes, an inspired-by-sawdust snack food that my mom tries to pass off as a worthy substitute for chips. The sack opened with a puffy fart. As I leaned back against the counter and tucked one leg up beneath me, I saw my mother’s coat lying on the floor. It was her good long winter jacket, the one with the fake fur collar and cuffs. I knew it had probably just slipped off a chair, but it still bothered me to see it lying on the floor like that.