Anthem of a Reluctant Prophet

by Joanne Proulx

  The only other entertainment available was Pastor Ted and his throng of religious fanatics, who were wedged into sandwich boards and parked just outside the entrance. Seems the New Life in Christers were pissed about the concert being held on a Sunday, “the seventh day, the Lord’s day, a day for quiet prayer and reflection.” No one seemed to be paying them much attention, and most of the literature they were handing out turned into a big One Drum welcome mat at the front gates. There was this one voice, though, loud and sure, that buzzed in my ears like a trapped fly, reminding me of once-upon-a-time phone calls and hotlines to God. Yeah, the Pastor’s all-knowing, I’ll-be-seeing-you-soon sound cut straight into me, and I have to admit I was pretty goddamn relieved when the Jesus freaks called it quits before noon and went home to give thanks for the rest of the day.

  Despite everything, our merchandise was selling well and a pretty steady stream of customers distracted us from our personal problems for most of the morning. Still, I was hyper-aware of Faith’s every move, knew exactly where she was, exactly how far she was from me at all times. I pretended not to notice that she didn’t have a bra on under her tank top, pretended not to notice the slim silhouette of legs under her long white skirt. And we were careful not to touch, so careful it felt like some repulsing magnetic field had settled between us. Still, we were in tight quarters, with Fang and the fence behind us and the table in front, and every so often the magnets collided. She’d reach for a shirt and her hand would graze my wrist, or her elbow would bump mine, or her shoulder, her tits, would brush against my back as she slid by. Then the contact was supercharged and for a fraction of a second the push became a pull that shot through me like a couple hundred volts. When the connection broke, when Faith’s hand or elbow or shoulder disappeared, I was left holding my breath and my skin tingled where she’d been.

  It was pretty difficult to concentrate on the customers, even harder to chat up the visitors who came by to say hi. Ms. Banks kept checking on us, making sure we had enough change or, one time, dropping off some cold drinks. Hank stopped by too, and he bought a shirt, which was pretty decent seeing how, if he’d wanted to, he could have just printed one up. And, oh yeah, just before noon my buddy Dwight showed up looking like he’d used the concert as an excuse to spark up a little earlier than usual. He hung with us for a good five minutes, trying to talk his way into a free shirt. I ignored him and kept glaring at Fang, trying to get him to do the same, seeing how he was the one out the DVD player. But Fang was passive, as usual, returning the lowlife’s stupid smile and nodding along as Dwight blabbed about his brother over in Iraq, “kicking serious ass, and, well, fuck, that totally warrants a freebie, Prophet man.”

  Just watching him bob around on the other side of the table made me sick. Because with Faith sizzling beside me and the sun sky-high overhead, there was no denying it: Dwight and I looked alike. Even with him stoned out of his mind, I could see how people might confuse us for brothers. I’d been an asshole to think we were so fucking different. I finally just whipped a shirt at my skank twin and told him to get lost. Dwight grabbed it, smiled and stumbled into the crowd, completely through with us now that he had what he wanted.

  Things at the table slowed down after noon, when Brown Bag took center stage. I remembered them from the previous year. They’d played a lot of decent covers—everything from Elvis Costello to Puddle of Mudd to Linkin Park—and a few less impressive numbers of their own. The lead singer was ripped and ripe, the chicks had freaked, so it was no surprise there’d been a lot of tit-tight Brown Bag Ts coming through the gates that day. A large crowd had gathered around the stage at the far end of the fairgrounds to hear what the band had in store for them this year. I took a couple tens from the cash box and handed one to Fang and told him I could look after the table if he wanted to go get something to eat or listen to some tunes. Fang took the money and split, probably to find Dwight and hit him up for some weed.

  I held the other ten out for Faith. Avoiding eye contact, I made her the same offer, said I could handle things on my own for a while if she wanted to take off.

  “I don’t want your money,” she snapped, slapping it away. The bill fluttered to the grass. I took my time bending to pick it up, but when I came up with it, she was waiting for me. “Tell me what’s going on,” she said, her voice hard.

  I could see how tense she was, and for some reason that calmed me. I settled back against the table and looked her in the eye. In my most don’t-give-a-shit voice I told her nothing was going on, and watched her coil even tighter.

  “Listen, did something happen at the dance?”

  “Nope.” I smiled steadily, meanly.

  “Luke, what’s the matter?”

  “Nothing.” I dropped my eyes and brushed my foot back and forth across the trampled grass.

  “Nothing? Give me a break. Something definitely happened.”

  “If you say so.” I was holding on to the nasty smile, but I could feel the cool giving in to the heat creeping up my neck.

  “So, you’re not going to tell me?”

  “Nothing happened, okay?” I fought to keep my voice steady, but I knew she could probably hear the bitter, angry edge. “Why? Were you expecting something to happen?”

  “No. I don’t know. I just thought you might, I don’t know, walk me home or something.”

  “I never said I’d walk you home, Faith.”

  I tried not to watch as she marched across the golden fairgrounds, glowing like a fucking angel in her white skirt, because I just knew that was pretty much the last I’d see of her. I wrapped my fingers around the chain-link fence then and kind of bashed my forehead into it for a while. When I finally unhooked myself and turned around, the guy opposite stopped mid-toot to stare. His muted instruments flashed nothing but sun, until a gaggle of noisy kids showed up and he got back to minding his own business.

  Fang never did come back, but Faith really surprised me by returning an hour or so later, with her face back in place and ready to sell more shirts. I sort of wished she hadn’t bothered, because I was feeling really pathetic and my forehead was still probably smacking red and I definitely didn’t have the energy to be mean anymore. When she was back beside me, I kept bumping into her and dropping money all over the place, and I couldn’t get the fucking cheap pieces-of-shit bags open and the handles kept ripping and the shirts wouldn’t slide inside and I seriously thought I was going to start bawling, except right when I was about to have my breakdown Brown Bag stopped playing and this weird hush settled over the fairgrounds. I think Faith and I both looked up at the same time to see what was going on.

  We watched the crowd ripple, then part to spit out the lost girl. Everyone’s mouths hung wide as Astelle wobbled across the fairgrounds. At first she didn’t appear to be headed anywhere in particular, she just zigzagged across the open field, a thousand pairs of eyes following her along. Then she set her sights on the front gates, and as she got closer and closer a new band started up and distorted music swallowed us all whole. I’m not sure when Astelle spotted me. I do remember this strange, vacant smile spreading across her face, and completely freezing up as she came around the table and slid past Faith, slid her fingers right into the front pockets of my jeans. She pressed herself up against me and she was sort of laughing about how she’d escaped and her pupils were huge and I was pretty sure she’d forgotten my name because she kept calling me Fantasy Boy. She was tugging at my pockets and bouncing her hips against my thighs, sort of yelling at me about coming over tomorrow night, tomorrow night, because her mother would be out and we could party because after that she was off to rehab and she wanted another night with Fantasy Boy, Fantasy Boy.

  Then, through the shock and the blare of noise, a bright, blinding white, and Lance Winters sticking his microphone across the table and shouting, “Astelle, Astelle!” She turned around and the light hit her and I could see how gray her skin was and how dark the moons were ringing her eyes. She slumped against me as Lance spread hims
elf across the table and practically shoved the microphone down her throat, firing off a round of frantic questions. I felt her knees give out, and when I grabbed her under the arms to hold her up I could feel how frail and slivery thin she really was.

  Faith did a brave thing then. She stepped in front of me and Astelle and told Lance to “turn the camera off,” each word crisp and clear. I guess she looked so fierce and so sure, he did it. When he’d backed off, I scooped Astelle up and carried her out the front gates, relieved that Pastor Ted wasn’t around to witness my latest satanic fuckup. Faith must have tracked down Ms. Banks, because she showed up a couple minutes later. Astelle was passed out and I was holding her on my lap, doing a shit job of keeping her dangling limbs, her hair, out of the dirt of the parking lot. When Ms. Banks squatted down beside us, she barely looked at me.

  She pulled back Astelle’s lids, checked out her eyes, pushed up one sleeve of her shirt, then the other. We both saw the trail of bruises wandering from wrist to elbow, decorating her pale skin like some sort of primitive tattoo. Ms. Banks flagged down the ambulance, already on hand for the event, and the medics loaded Astelle inside. They asked us a couple questions we had no answers for before they took off, lights flashing, kicking up a cloud of dirt and gravel, dusting up the sun.

  “SHE DEFINITELY LOOKED SWEETER in the pictures.”

  This from Faith. I was back behind the table, but I stared straight ahead. I had absolutely nothing to say.

  “I thought she was missing.” Faith sounded aggressive.

  I didn’t look over, but I knew she had me locked in her sights. I watched the guy opposite strumming his washboard, watched him blowing his horn.

  “Where was she?”

  It took a lot of energy for me to work up a sigh. “I can’t get into this, okay?”

  “I asked you where she was.”

  I managed another sigh, then, “Miami.”

  “And now she’s back?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Did you know her before?”

  “No.” I leaned on the table, let it hold me up, let my head drop.

  “But you know her now?”

  “No.”

  “She seems to know you.”

  “She doesn’t.”

  “It looked like she knew you.”

  I could tell Faith wasn’t going to stop. But I needed her to stop. So I turned and faced her and told her what she had to hear. “Listen, I can’t be your boyfriend. I can’t. You had a boyfriend, you had this fucking great boyfriend, but he’s dead. He died. And your life isn’t so perfect anymore and you can’t handle that. So you came up with this crazy idea that Stan brought us together or something and you think your life will be all wonderful again if you hang out with me. But it won’t. Stan didn’t bring us together. We bumped into each other at a concert one night because I’m a stoner and my friend is a stoner and he had some stoner panic attack. Okay? I’m just this fucking loser who hangs out with other fucking losers. Okay? Do you get it? Do you get it?”

  Her face was all white and stricken and I thought she’d quit then, but she kept it together, she kept it coming, although she sounded sort of shaky. “I thought we were talking about Astelle. What does this have to do with her?”

  “Nothing. Everything. Fuck, I don’t know, Faith. All I know is that you have no idea who I even am.” We were head-on now, voices raised, concert over, bodies quaking. The one-man band had stopped to watch.

  “Really? Really? You know what I think? I think you have no idea who you are.”

  “I told you who I am. I’m a fucking loser.”

  “Yeah, well, that certainly takes away all expectations, doesn’t it? What a fucking cop-out.”

  Faith scooped her purse from under the table and started fumbling through it. She was breathing really fast, and when she finally pulled her keys out I could see she was crying. Her arm slammed into mine as she pushed past me. Her minty scent practically felled me.

  She stopped on the other side of the table, both hands clinging to the strap of the purse she’d flung over her shoulder. The sun was streaming across the field so one half of her was lost to the low, blinding sunshine, the other half to shade. As we stood there facing each other, I had this flickering thought that I looked the same way to her, split down the middle by light and shadow. For some reason that one stupid, stupid thought made everything tighter and harder and clearer and sicker.

  “You know what, Luke? Maybe you’re right. Maybe that first night we met, maybe I did think Stan had something to do with it. But it was just this deranged idea. This momentary belief in a magical fate. Don’t you ever have weird ideas? Don’t crazy things ever occur to you? Anyway, it doesn’t even matter. I liked you. I had fun with you. I felt good when I was with you. I don’t see anything wrong with that. I don’t see what’s wrong with wanting things to be good.” Her voice, usually so lovely and low, was high and desperate behind her tears. “You tell me what’s wrong with that.”

  She waited. She put a hand to her forehead and shaded her eyes so she could see me, and she waited. But I had no answer for that quivering question.

  Finally she dropped her hand and shook her head at me. “You’ll have to find your own ride home. Maybe when your girlfriend comes to, she can give you a lift.”

  She turned and disappeared through the front gates, and I knew. I’d made her stop.

  I DON’T KNOW what happened to Fang. He never did come back to the table. It was Ms. Banks who helped me pack up and drove me home even though the concert wasn’t over. She didn’t ask me a lot of questions, said we could work out the finances later, which was really nice of her. And she didn’t say anything about me gagging back the sobs as we headed out of the fairgrounds and through the wetlands park and right on into Stokum, which I thought was pretty decent of her too.

  Only two things worth mentioning happened once I was home.

  First thing. I was getting one of the dinners my mom had left in the freezer, and an envelope with my name on it fell out. Inside, a cold, mushy card from my parents and a couple White Stripes tickets. Masonic Temple Theatre. Detroit. End of May. I should have been thrilled, but all I could think about was who I wouldn’t be going with. I threw the tickets onto the kitchen counter. The envelope bounced off the toaster and dropped to the floor.

  Second thing. Another soon-to-be-dead man. And this time the details were pretty clear. There was no missing the taut rope around the skinny neck. There was no missing the teeth.

  TWENTY- SIX

  After the shock of rope and teeth, I admit it, I was a bit messed— madmanning it around the house, reeling from room to room, brain gyroscoping inside my cranium. I’d thought the premonitions were fucking fading out! I’d thought the wormhole connecting my subconscious to the deadly nether regions was shutting down. I mean, since convenience-store Howie, I’d only been hit by a couple hazy flashes, had only had to listen to a couple sacred swan songs. But man, all of a sudden the wormhole was ripped wide open. The Prophet was back onstage.

  Because the skinny neck, the pointy tusks, well, they were Fang’s, man, they were his. Apparently it was my buddy who’d be hanging tomorrow, or at least that’s what my mutant mind was telling me. FUCK. Flying off the school roof. Bawling in the bush. Panicking at the Peppers. Graveyard white at One Drum. Kicked dog in the Jefferson parking lot. Crash bang boom from above. When I thought about that shit, it was easy to believe Fang was up for it. Then again, I’d magicked myself into believing Astelle was dead. She wasn’t. But Stan was. Bernoffski was. And the handful of nameless folks on my list? Well, I wasn’t 100 percent on them either way, but the bird was definitely history. I mean, I’d killed the fucking bird.

  Talk about fucked-up.

  I tried kicking a couple holes in the bathroom door, but I was too shattered to inflict any real damage. Instead, I sort of staggered downstairs and started tearing through my parents’ liquor cabinet, searching for an escape route. It came in the form of a big bottle of Southern Comfor
t hiding near the back of the cabinet. With a shaky hand, I twisted the cap and took a long, sweet, burning gulp of whiskey, one that would have made the Polish widow proud.

  Half an hour later, the bottle was empty and I was starfished on the hall floor, admiring the crystal chandelier spinning slowly overhead. When the phone rang, I didn’t even think. I reached up and fumbled the receiver to my ear.

  “Yeah?” It came out all slippery Southern drawl.

  “Luke?”

  “Yeah?”

  “This is Mick.”

  I sputtered up a laugh. “No fuckin’ way. My favorite uncle!”

  “I take it this isn’t a good time.”

  “A good time? A good time? What’s that?” The words were sloppy. I’d always been a pathetic drunk, which was why I totally preferred drugs.

  “Are you okay?”

  “I’m perfect.”

  “I take it your parents aren’t in.”

  “You take it right.”

  “Anyone else there?”

  “Nope.” Now the light fixture was solid; it was the floor that was spinning. I didn’t mind. I was just biding time, waiting to pass out.