Anthem of a Reluctant Prophet

by Joanne Proulx

  An acknowledgment of His existence. Inside Stan and Mr. Bernoffski, inside the others.

  Twenty-six minutes earlier, I would have guessed the Pastor might nod and smile, lay a hand on my head, utter a few Praise the Lords and send me on my way. Lesson learned. Premonitions over. Walking in the light.

  But as Ted spoke, I knew the God giving him his answers lived in a whole different wonderland than mine. His God didn’t do sing-alongs for the dying. His God wrestled Satan. His God didn’t want vague acknowledgment. His God required deliverance and repentance and full-immersion baptism.

  I shoved away from the table. My chair hit the floor. And I was on my feet, saying thanks for the soup, thanks for the stitches, but I’ve gotta bail. I was pushing through the comfy den, heading straight for whatever was on the other side of the front door, when I bumped into Laura.

  She looked paler than she had before, and she moved slowly down the stairs as if she’d finally noticed her load up front. “You’re not leaving, are you, Luke?” She sounded concerned. “I was just bringing you this.”

  She stretched out the piece of white cloth she was carrying, held it by two corners, flipped it front to back a couple of times before I even recognized my shirt. The blood was gone, washed away. A neat line of stitches ran from the collar halfway down the front of the shirt, which looked freshly ironed.

  “Good as new,” she said. “I bet you thought it couldn’t be fixed, huh?”

  I didn’t answer. For some reason, that impossibly clean, carefully mended, perfectly pressed T-shirt struck me dumb. Even when Pastor Ted and Dr. Cramp charged into the front hall, I didn’t move. I stared from Laura, to the shirt, to the front door and back again. The care taken. The miracle worked upon a worthless rag of cotton.

  Laura’s eyes bounced from face to face. “What’s happened?”

  “It appears he’s leaving us, Laura,” the Pastor said. “I believe he’s uneasy about the deliverance prayer.”

  “Oh, Luke.” Laura came down the last few steps and stood in front of me. Tilting her head to one side, she gave me a little smile—a hint of challenge, a touch of disappointment. “You’re not afraid of a simple prayer, are you?” When she pushed the T-shirt into my hand, I could feel how fresh the goddamn thing was, could smell a sting of bleach, a hint of lemon. The seam of stitches pressing into my palm.

  “Come on,” she said, taking my other hand. Dr. Cramp and the Pastor remained motionless as Laura led me across the marble foyer and opened the door of a shimmering white bathroom.

  In the mirror, a shock of black eye and busted lip and wild hair.

  “You can change in here.” She pressed gently on my back. “Go on.”

  A battered hand squeezing the shit out of a perfect shirt.

  A door closing softly behind me.

  WE SETTLED INTO THE DEN, me on the couch, Laura one cushion to my right, her husband across the way in a fine-looking chair—brass tacks, burgundy leather, matching footstool. As for Ted, well, he was pacing the room, all robed up in his black preacher gear—I guess he didn’t do prayers in the hockey jersey— and ready to go. And I was more relaxed than you might think. The good doctor had slipped me a little something after I’d exited the can in my resurrected T. Even though I was pretty sure that drugs and concussions weren’t a kosher combo, Cramp hadn’t seemed worried and my head had been pounding. So I’d downed the little blue pills he’d offered before following him into the den and claiming the seat beside his beautiful wife.

  In case the drugs weren’t doing their job, the Cramps tried loosening me up with a few comforting tales of Ted’s prior salvation successes. I didn’t really listen—at this point I was just sort of playing along, figuring yeah, a prayer was nothing to worry about, and afterwards I’d find an excuse to split—but Laura’s story really blew me away. Apparently, pre-Ted, she’d been broken and empty—addicted to OxyContin, living on the street, doing whatever it took to get money and stay high (Laura? No fucking way). On the hunt for her next prescription, she’d stumbled into the Stokum clinic and found her future husband. I guess he’d hooked her up with some methadone and taken her straight to Ted, who’d been quick to drive out her evil, forgive her sins and usher Jesus into her heart. Now she was filled with Christ’s love, devoted to her community, a gifted member of the church.

  The whole time she spoke, she massaged her belly. The whole time she spoke, she fucking glowed. She was turned toward me, we had some serious eye contact going on, so it sort of felt like Laura and I were the only ones in the room.

  “Remember when I was cleaning you up in the kitchen?” she asked.

  Like I could forget that semi-erotic rubdown. I gave her a smile and settled back into the couch, getting comfortable as the little blue pills started pillowing my thoughts.

  “Luke, when I laid my hands upon you, I felt Satan dwelling within you surely as I felt the glory of God.”

  That sort of wiped the dopey smile off my face.

  “That is my gift. Discerning spirits.” She picked a sheet of paper off the coffee table and shook out its folds. In very pretty, very Laura writing, I saw my name at the top of the page. And, sitting on the first line, a single word. Fear. On the second line, Rage. Then Envy. Then Lust.

  I didn’t get any further before Laura handed the paper to Ted, who, in his long black robe, was looking very large and steady and sure.

  Surer than I’d ever been in my entire life.

  I glanced around the room, from one intense face to the next. Even with the pills puffing up the edges, I could see things weren’t going to be so easy. I couldn’t just play along. I could feel how scared I was. How vulnerable—as vulnerable as I’d been when I’d dared to open myself to the possibility of Faith loving me. Loving me. And she’d done me in with one word. Yeah, I understood the danger lurking in the soft spots.

  And there I was, on the Cramps’ couch, so soft and so scared I’d have made a blob of whipped cream look tough, and Ted’s towering over me.

  “Let us pray.” His big voice boomed in my ears.

  He and the Cramps bowed their heads. I just closed my eyes so I wouldn’t have to watch. The Pastor asked for God’s guidance and protection before I heard the rattle of paper. “In the name of Jesus, I remove you evil spirit of fear and send you to the Cross.” There were a couple long seconds of silence, then, “In the name of Jesus, I remove you evil spirit of rage and send you to the Cross.”

  When I’d seen it, I’d thought Laura’s list was some one-sided character profile, a Luke-Hunter-at-his-worst sort of deal. But no, it was the Pastor’s guide to my salvation, and he was using it to battle evil.

  The first couple were easy. When he said “fear,” I thought here and now, me and Fang. Nightly nightmares of a dead girl gift wrapped in a shower curtain. A half dozen people dying inside me. A hollowed-out boy kneeling in front of a church. When Ted said “rage,” I saw my father slamming into a wall, posters being ripped to shreds, Fang hunched up in the La-Z-Boy. Envy? Wonder boy Stan sprang to mind. Lust? Faith, beside me under a red velvet bedspread. Faith, across from me at a library table. Faith, against me, against a wall, her skirt lifted. Faith, anywhere. Sexual perversion? Ms. Banks’s mammoth tits. Astelle Jordan’s beckoning white crotch. Blasphemy? That one was a fucking no-brainer.

  Most of them bit deep, and I have to admit being pretty impressed by how well Laura had nailed me on just one try. “Cowardice” brought to mind images of me fleeing a Mexican phone number and a trembling pink sweatshirt, me bailing on my gay friend Fang. Self-pity? Some jerk taped up in a safe room playing at life. Deception and deceitfulness? I gagged that one down, like a fucking horse-sized pill, because it was me. My whole life. The way I dealt with my parents. And Faith. And pretty much everyone else. The way I tried to fool even myself, to shade myself from what I felt, what I believed. Who I was.

  By the time Ted got round to asking God to heal my brokenness and to fill me with joy, I was feeling pretty low. Whatever you tagged it—a rol
l call of evil or a litany of character flaws—Laura’s list had pressed into all my dark places. But nothing had been cut away. Nothing had made it to the Cross. The joy Ted spoke of didn’t exist for me. I had no sense of God. I had never felt further from the truth.

  THIRTY

  So it turned out the prayer wasn’t so simple. It wasn’t cake. And in combination with a couple of wicked blue pills, it stole the energy I needed to get myself out of the den. After the deliverance prayer, when Laura suggested that it might be best if I just crashed on their couch for the night—seeing how my parents weren’t around and there were both a doctor and a pastor in-house and more healing to be done in the morning—I barely managed to tip over. She tucked a down comforter around me and stuck a feather pillow under my head, but I didn’t even look at her. I just sank into the makeshift bed and the blanket of dope and passed out.

  When I woke up, the den was dark. Just a small reading lamp on in the corner, lighting up the chair where Cramp still sat, reading a newspaper. He must have felt me looking at him or heard me stirring or something, because a second after I opened my eyes he was right beside me, perched on the heavy wooden coffee table, playing doctor. He checked out the stitches, checked out the face, asked about the head, gave me a couple of pills I recognized as Tylenol for the pain.

  With a snap, he recapped the bottle and dropped it into the black doctor’s bag by his feet. He leaned forward, his elbows resting on his knees, his hands dangling loosely in front of him. Even at—what?—three, four in the morning, even this close, Cramp looked all chiseled and alert as he eyed me keenly. “That’s quite a shiner you’ve got there,” he said lightly.

  I didn’t respond. I just threw an arm over my face and let out a sigh. I wanted to be left alone. I wanted to go back to sleep. But more than that, I wanted out. It took effort—my head was thick and pounding, my body stiff and sore—but I pushed the comforter onto the floor, swung my legs off the couch and sat up. Cramp stayed where he was, sitting on the edge of the coffee table, not giving me a whole lot of room to maneuver.

  “So,” he said quietly, “besides the headache, how are you feeling?”

  I gave him a hard look. “Shit. I’m feeling like shit.”

  His lips pinched into a tight line. “Listen, I know what happened earlier was heavy stuff. The deliverance prayer can be pretty draining. But can I tell you something that might counterbalance what you heard here last night?”

  At that, I gave a bit of a disgusted snort, which Cramp must have translated into a yes.

  “Do you remember the first time we met?” he asked. “In the helicopter? Right before they airlifted you to Children’s Hospital in Detroit?” I stared at him blankly, although I knew exactly what he was talking about. “You were on a stretcher. Your arm was loose at your side. The paramedics who cut you off the fence couldn’t use a stabilizing board because of the spike, which they left in place to prevent blood loss.”

  He shook his head, remembering, and I had to admit, he’d picked a good place to start. I loved the impaled-on-the-fence story and, never having heard his version, I stayed put, pressed his take up against mine to see how it fit. To be honest, my memories of that day didn’t include Cramp, but he must have been there, because he had all the dirt.

  “The spike had to be an inch in diameter. Was clear through your wrist. There wasn’t much blood, just a trickle running from the wound to the curve of your elbow.”

  His eyes moved to my wrist and, shit, that’s all it took. I rolled right over. I rotated my arm so we could both see the raised circle of flesh on the one side and, with a flip of the wrist, the waxy white twin on the other.

  Cramp was perfectly still, and his eyes gleamed with a weird hypnotic glow. “I was very struck by your injury. And when I took your arm in my hands to examine it—” He paused, as if he was suddenly unable to go on. And despite everything, I was deep in his story, I wanted to hear the rest. When he did start up again, his voice was all low and hushed, like he was talking in a church or a hospital or some other sacred site. “You know, Luke, when I touched your arm that day, something very … very strange happened. And it happened again, during your last visit to my office. After Stan died.”

  Again, my recall of that visit was fragmented, and what was left behind had nothing to do with the doctor. What I remembered was getting hooked up with a Trazon prescription and the suicidal symphony. The one that had painted me black in his office. I remembered vomiting in a corner sink, and being alone, bawling on the examining table. It was like all my memories of those first days after Stan died: Against the shock of the premonitions, the roar of the people dying inside me, everything else disappeared.

  Cramp leaned over and started rooting through his bag. The clink of surgical steel, the crackle of sterile paper and then, dangling in front of me, a freezer-sized Ziploc. Inside the bag, two flattened strips of white cotton, each banded with black and carrying a dark brown stain.

  “Remember these?”

  I shook my head. Through the plastic, behind the dirty lumps, the doctor’s face slid into a distorted smile. Cramp gave the bag a jiggle. The cotton shifted, took shape. The pocket of a worn heel. A thick elastic seam. A hardened circle of blood. The edges pulled back, let in some light, and suddenly I could see more of that visit to the doctor’s.

  Those were my socks inside that bag. The socks I’d worn to Cramp’s office. The ones I’d bled all over after the old no-shoe on the light bulb. Jesus Christ. He had my socks. In a bag.

  An icy sliver slid through me, as chill and motionless as the one that had claimed me at Gandy’s Rock. I mean, sharing space with a man who carried my bloody socks around with him was freaky enough, but I could feel something else lurking behind those socks. I forced myself back to that day at the doctor’s. I watched him pull the shards of glass from my feet. I heard the clink as they hit the metal pan. I’d forgotten the glass. I saw myself dropping my socks into the garbage can next to the sink. I’d forgotten the socks. I forced myself back further, and there was my distraught mother leaving the room. I’d forgotten my mother. And there was the doctor. Sitting at the end of the examining table, casually asking me questions. I saw myself, white, sick with dread, scared shitless by my own life. I watched my mouth open. I heard myself tell the doctor about Stan. And then, there it was, the deadly, dangerous thing crawling out of my mouth.

  I told him about Mr. Bernoffski.

  I told him about the flash of suicide.

  Before the list, before my father, before anyone else, when everything was still scary and crazy and raw, I told him.

  Then I fell into a bottle of Trazon and forgot.

  But Dr. Cramp didn’t forget. Oh no, he told Ted.

  Stunned. Stunning. Stunned. Me. Gaping at Cramp. His lips quivering. His eyes gleaming blind faith. His voice still holy. “When I saw the circles of blood, when I took your feet in my hands, I was overwhelmed by a vision of Christ on the Cross. It was incredibly powerful, just like that day in the helicopter. And it confirmed my belief that you’re—”

  I think it was about here that the shock lifted. And about ten milliseconds later I hit the street running. The only noise to be heard: bare feet slapping pavement and my name being hollered into the night.

  I was a good six or seven blocks up Water when the K-Car caught up to me. Ted was behind the wheel. Fucking Ted. I just kept sprinting in and out of darkness, hoofing it through puddles of streetlight, legs pumping, gut cramping, lungs burning, brain screaming.

  Ted rolled down his window and trolled along beside me. “Hold up,” he ordered, and “Calm down,” and “Would you stop for a minute.” A lot of shit like that.

  Finally he swung the car into a driveway up ahead and blocked the sidewalk and as much as he could of the road. But it wasn’t until he hopped out and threw his arms up like some horned-up traffic cop that I really paid him any attention. “Get the fuck out of my way,” I snapped, heading for the front of his shit box, but he was right there, stepping
in front of me. I tried going around back, but he shuffled sideways, arms out, doing this blockade dance sort of thing so I couldn’t get by. I tried pushing past him a few more times, but shit, I was burnt. After the sprint I was huffing for air, and the stitch in my side felt like another fucking fence wound. I leaned over, dropped my head and grabbed my knees.

  The Pastor hung over me, watching me gasp. “What are you doing, Luke?”

  I lifted my head and managed to spit out some words. “Catching my fucking breath. What’s it look like?”

  “It looks to me like you’re running away from God.”

  “Yeah? Well, I’m not. I’m running away from you, you fucking liar.” I sucked down more air, felt my breathing slow.

  “I never lied to you, Luke.”

  “Like fuck you didn’t. Your lies are the only reason I’m even here.”

  “Did something happen in the den with Michael?”

  My chest was still heaving, but I was upright and Ted was two inches in front of me. Even in the dull yellow glow of a streetlamp I could see the bags under his eyes, the push of paunch distorting the front of his tacky hockey sweater, the loose droop of skin along his jaw. I could see how stupid I was to have ever believed he had something to offer.

  “Yeah, something fucking happened in the den with Michael.” I twisted the name into a sneer. “He showed me my fucking socks. He showed me the fucking light. He showed me you have no in with God.”

  The Pastor’s hands found his hips. “Yes, well, Michael has a habit of talking too much. All I can tell you, Luke, is the Lord works in mysterious ways.”