Anthem of a Reluctant Prophet

by Joanne Proulx

  I gagged up a big, hateful laugh for that lame biblical cliché. “Yeah, and so does Dr. Fucking Cramp.”

  This time I was too quick for Ted. I darted onto the street and started jogging. The Pastor fell in beside me, taking long, hurried strides.

  “Do you even know where you’re going?” he asked. “Or what you’re doing?”

  “No. But don’t worry, I’m used to it.”

  I kept charging along. Rushing to keep up, Ted took a while to lay the next thing on me. “Luke, do you have anything, anything at all, to believe in?”

  I was so ready for that one. “The godliness of humanity,” I said, getting a little more mileage out of the tiny trucker. But then something else, something original, came to me, and I stopped. And I turned to Ted. “You know what I believe in?”

  He couldn’t help himself. He smirked, already knowing it was going to be good, but I didn’t care.

  “Dancing with my mother,” I said. “Dancing with my mother.”

  The Pastor laughed, like I knew he would, before he started preaching. “Jesus said, ‘I am the way, and the truth, and the life. No one comes to God but through me.’” And his voice was calm but frustrated, as if he were talking to a moron, when he said, “That’s all there is to believe in, Luke. Dancing with your mother is a nice thing to do. Nothing more. There is only one path to God, and that is through Jesus Christ, our Lord and savior. Now, come on,” he said, reaching out to take my elbow, “get in the car.”

  I yanked my arm away. “I’m not getting in your fucking car, Ted. I’m not going anywhere with you.”

  “Listen, Luke. You’re just tired. You’ve had a—”

  This time it was me grabbing him. “Don’t fucking do that to me, Ted. Don’t try to tell me about myself. You don’t know me. You think you do, but you don’t. You decided I was evil before Laura even got near me. And you know why? You know why, Ted? Because something amazing happened to me, something completely out of this fucking world, and you couldn’t explain how something like that could happen to someone like me, right? It couldn’t be good. It couldn’t be godly. It had to be evil. Because I don’t belong to your church. And I don’t believe what you do. I sure don’t believe you can wave some magic wand over me, say some stupid prayer and bam! I’m golden. And you know what else? I don’t believe you had anything to do with who Stan was or what he believed in. Okay, Ted? Okay?”

  I was shaking his arm. And all of a sudden he wasn’t looking so goddamn hard and sure, and I could just tell he was wishing he’d spent a little more time banishing my rage as I squeezed the shit out of his elbow.

  “You want to know something else about me? I’ll tell you something. I’m not evil. I’m not playing on Satan’s team. I’m just a fucked-up kid who came to you because you said you could help me. Okay, Ted? Okay? And here’s another bone for you. I’m not as dumb as I fucking seem. At Stan’s funeral, at my friend’s funeral, I knew you were talking to me. I was paying attention, okay? It was Jesus who tasted death for every man, right, Ted? Isn’t that what you said? Isn’t that what you put in your fucking pamphlet? Well, guess what? Over the last seven months, I have tasted death. Not Jesus, Ted. Not Jesus. Me.” I punched a finger into my chest, hammered in the next four words. “I have tasted death.”

  The Pastor twisted his elbow from my hand and took a couple of steps back. When he was out of reach, he lifted his chin and looked down at me with narrowed eyes.

  “So tell me, Luke, what was that like?”

  I knew one thing. Whatever I said wouldn’t matter. I could see Ted in front of me, he was standing right there, but I knew he wouldn’t hear a word I said.

  “You’ll just have to wait and find out for yourself, asshole.”

  This time, when I started jogging away, the Pastor didn’t try to follow. But like I’ve said before, he’s the type who has to have the last word, and he did throw out a final farewell before I faded into the night.

  “You are not worthy of Christ,” he hollered at my back. “You are not worthy.”

  THIRTY-ONE

  When I look back on that head-to-head with the Pastor, I’m pretty sure the only untruth I told was saying I didn’t know where I was headed after I left him hollering up Water Street. Because that night, when I started running, I didn’t even have to think. My feet carried me down familiar roads and around corners I’d turned a thousand times before. And with every step, whatever spell I’d been under at the Cramps’ broke a little more, until my thoughts were clear and I was running hard and fast. Still, I couldn’t get where I was going—where I should have been all along—quick enough.

  I think I started getting scared a couple blocks from Delaney’s place. I think it was about then that I really started to freak. Whatever the doctor had slipped me had wiped me out for the last part of what was supposed to have been my buddy’s final day. We were already a good four, five hours into Fang’s tomorrow, and I didn’t know if he was dead or alive, if he was home lying in bed or swinging from a rope.

  As I charged down one empty street after another, I thought about the flash of despair he’d shown me at Gandy’s Rock, and the pained confession rolling from the back seat of the Sunbird, and I could see it—Fang chinning himself on that goddamn bar we’d installed in the bathroom doorway, biceps bulging, blue-snake veins popping, rope dangling loose. He’d hold himself there for a minute, because he could, because he was that strong, and only when he felt his arms starting to go would he bend his knees and let himself drop. Rope tight. Neck snapped. Game over. Jesus Christ.

  That image chased me all the way to Delaney’s back door.

  The backyard was dark and silent. No streetlamps. No blue TV flicker. No white TV noise. Nothing. I pushed my feet through the grass until I hit the concrete slab by the glass door—too black to throw a reflection. My heart was slamming. My breathing ragged. I found the handle and pulled. The door jumped open. My eyes were already on the bathroom when I hit the lights.

  Empty. The doorway was empty, the chin-up bar was empty, the couch was empty. When I went into Fang’s bedroom, he wasn’t there. I hollered his name. No answer. I climbed the stairs like a thief, slow and quiet, alert and scared, one shoulder dropped back, fingertips trailing the wall. It had been years since I’d been on the ground floor, but I knew my way around. Cupboard of a kitchen straight ahead—empty—box of a living room to the left. On the couch, a body, but right away I knew it wasn’t Fang.

  Lying on the sofa wearing this flimsy nightgown, Mrs. Delaney looked like a skinny little kid. A skinny little dead kid. I stared at her for what felt like a very long time, waiting for some sign of life—the rise and fall of her chest, a rasp of breath—but I didn’t find one. I forced myself across the living room. My hand was shaking as I turned the switch on the lamp near her head.

  In a blaze of light, Mrs. Delaney came alive. She threw up an arm, batting at the lamp, and moaned. Up close she didn’t look like a kid. She looked old and scrawny and sick. Up close I could see there wasn’t a whole lot left of the pretty, nervous mother who’d picked her son up at my place after work ten years back.

  “Mrs. Delaney?”

  She squinted at me. “Luke?” She said my name so gently it surprised me. I couldn’t tell if she was wasted or not.

  “Yeah, it’s me.”

  “What happened to you? Did you get in a fight?”

  I reached up and fingered the split lip, the swollen eye. I’d forgotten how I looked. “Yeah, I did. But listen, do you know where Fang is?”

  With a sigh, she sat up, rubbed her face roughly with both hands. “He called me at Eddie’s. Told me what was going on. He was so upset, I came right home. Jesus, Luke, he’s such a nice, sensitive kid, you know? This just isn’t fair.” She was sounding teary and drunk.

  “Listen, Mrs. Delaney, do you know where he is?” I was sounding tense and scared.

  She leaned over and turned the knob on the lamp, once, twice. The glare dropped to a glow. “He’s in my room. Sleepin
g.”

  I don’t really know what happened to my face then—it was already busted up, but it must have shattered some more when I heard the news.

  “Luke?” Mrs. Delaney said quietly. “It’s okay. He’s just down the hall.”

  FANG WAS ASLEEP in his mother’s bed. I thought about waking him up, but man, I was wiped. My legs were so soft, my gut was so soft, my bones were so soft, I’d barely made it down the hall. Curled up and breathing deeply, Fang didn’t take up a lot of space, so I collapsed beside him. The soles of my feet ached from pounding miles of hard pavement. It felt like they were cut up. I wasn’t sure. I didn’t look. And the hall light was flooding the bedroom, but I couldn’t be bothered getting up and turning it off. I just closed my eyes and sank into the mattress.

  I guess it was one of the mighty sighs that kept blasting out of me that eventually woke Fang up. He didn’t say anything or make any movement, but I could feel his heavy stare. I looked over. He was still balled up, but his eyes were open, although I could barely see them through all the hair.

  “What happened to you?” he asked.

  I shook my head. “What didn’t fucking happen to me?”

  “I mean, what happened to your face?”

  “Slater.”

  “Slater? Asshole.”

  “I started it.”

  “Asshole.”

  I snorted at that. Afterwards, we were both quiet. My thoughts tripped back and forth through the massive amount of life that had happened to me—to him—in the last twenty-four hours. I mean, it felt like a fucking decade since I’d kicked Fang out of bed and up Gandy’s Rock, but it was, like, barely yesterday. I didn’t want to keep lying there all mute. I knew I had shit to say to him. But like usual, I didn’t know where to begin. Finally I picked someplace close.

  “I saw your mom on the couch.”

  “Yeah.” He stretched his legs out, stuck an arm under his head. “She made me dinner. It sucked.”

  “Still. That’s cool.”

  “Yeah. Would have been nicer if she wasn’t hammered.”

  More silence as I searched around for something that would take us nearer to where we had to go.

  “My feet are fucking killing me.”

  “Your feet?”

  “I ran over here with no shoes on, Fang.” I sucked in some air, worked up another massive sigh. “I ran over here and … I had no shoes and I was so scared, I was so fucking scared.” I had trouble squeezing the last couple words up my throat. I didn’t really know why—there were too many reasons to choose from, I guess—but all of a sudden my chest was tight and my stomach was hard and I was fighting not to cry.

  Fang got up slowly and looked at my feet. “There’s gravel and shit in them. And one of them is cut.” He disappeared into the hall. I heard him rooting around in the bathroom, opening cupboards, slamming drawers. He was back in a minute, with a semi-fresh-looking towel, a faded green washcloth, a Band-Aid.

  “Lift up your legs,” he said. He slipped the towel under my heels then sat down on the end of the bed. “God, man, your feet are a fucking mess.”

  I didn’t say anything. I couldn’t say anything.

  “And there’s blood on the sheets.”

  “I’m sorry.” The words flew out, a thousand pounds of pressure behind them.

  “Don’t worry about it. They were dirty anyway. Here,” he said, holding out the cloth, “you better get cleaned up.”

  “I’m not sorry about the fucking sheets, Fang.”

  He dropped his arm, stared down at his hands. “Oh,” was all he said.

  “I’m sorry for bailing on you this afternoon. I’m really fucking sorry.”

  He gave a little shrug and started flicking the Band-Aid he was holding. With every snap of his finger the sterile paper crackled, the bandage jumped. “I know you’re crazy about her.”

  “I’ve been a total dick.”

  “No, you haven’t.”

  “Listen. Out at the rock, I didn’t even know what I was doing. I wasn’t even fucking sure.”

  “So, you weren’t sure. So it would have been easier to do nothing.” Fang brushed his Steven Tyler hair out of his eyes so we could get a good look at each other. “Listen, Luke, you didn’t do nothing. You saved my life, man. You dragged me out to that rock and you saved my life.”

  And God, I was so choked up I could barely tell him, “No, Fang, it was you saving me.”

  MRS. DELANEY was gone by the time I got up the next day. It was past noon, so I guess I’d given her plenty of time to head out. When I asked, Fang mumbled something about her already being back at Eddie’s. Until a couple hours ago I’d never even heard of Eddie, didn’t know who or what or where he was, and from the dark look on Fang’s face it was pretty obvious he wasn’t going to tell me.

  Seeing how we had the place to ourselves, we hung out upstairs for a change, eating cereal and watching a bit of mindless TV in the living room. It was already late afternoon when Fang handed me a pair of socks and some shoes and asked if I’d mind going to get a paper.

  I swung over to my place, and when I pushed through the front door I practically tripped over the White Stripes tickets lying on the floor of the hall, where in some other lifetime they’d dropped from a girl’s hand. I don’t know why I did it. I mean, I was grabbing the frozen dinners my mom had left me, anyway, thinking they’d come in handy at Fang’s, but I stuck the tickets back in the freezer, where I’d first found them. I guess, in some twisted crevice of my mind, I was thinking I could do a deep-freeze voodoo thing on them—you know, conjure a couple of cold tickets into another chance with the warm girl.

  On my way out, I hunted around for our copy of the Examiner, finally found it in the bush beside the front porch, one of the spastic paperboy’s favorite spots. Brushing off the damp leaves, I saw that Todd Delaney, Jack Kite and the rest of their bandstand buddies were front-page news. I read the article right there on the front lawn. There was a quote from Laura, letting the named men know that with God’s guidance she and the other members of the Concerned Citizens of McCreary Park, which meets at seven o’clock Wednesday nights at New Life in Christ Church, were ready to help them overcome their deviancy—a brutal old word if I’ve ever seen one.

  When I got back to Fang’s, I just sort of shoved the paper at him with an awkward grunt. He sat down at the kitchen table and, head in hands, started reading. I didn’t want to stand there watching him, but I didn’t want to leave him alone, either, so I got busy jamming the food I’d brought over into the near-empty fridge and the iced-up freezer.

  “Jesus,” he said, finally looking up, “do you think everybody’s going to start calling me Todd now? Because seriously, it sounds so much gayer than Fang.”

  We both laughed a bit, but to tell you the truth he looked pale as shit, hanging over the table, staring at his name blaring off the front page of the paper.

  Afterwards, I didn’t really know what to say, so I kind of wandered out of the silent kitchen, muttering something about needing a shower, and headed downstairs. The bathroom in the basement was totally skank, but shit, the chin-up bar was clean, and that’s all that really mattered. I hopped right in and cranked up the hot water, and man it felt good to wash away the filth and madness of the past few days. I’d just started lathering up my hair when I got nailed by the other side of yesterday’s death flash, the one that had dropped me to my knees outside Ted’s church.

  I pressed both hands to the wet tiles. Even then I barely managed to hold myself up. Because that day it happened again. The moment of death was a perfect repeat of the premonition itself. Clinging to the walls of that slippery shower, I felt a heart beat inside me. A breath fill my lungs. And I shook, I trembled, I lived and I died in the purity and fearlessness of a single note.

  Afterwards, in the sting and rush and the steam of Fang’s shower, I opened my mouth and let the water pour down my throat. I drank it in, I swallowed it down, and with every gulp all I could feel and taste and hear was th
at note floating inside me, filling me up, busting me open, setting loose all my music and my noise.

  THIRTY-TWO

  Fang and I spent the rest of the week hanging at his place. Neither one of us—but him in particular—was in any big rush to get back to school. We slept late every day, cruised around on our boards in the afternoons, and, except for some moms with little kids, we had the neighborhood to ourselves. We were always careful to be back at Delaney’s before school got out, and usually we’d grab some of my mom’s frozen food before crashing in the living room and listening to tunes. I think we were unofficially trying to find some common musical ground or something, because we ended up going back to all the stuff we’d grown up on, all the songs we knew by heart. I threw on some Offspring—“Pretty Fly,” “Original Prankster,” “Come Out and Play”—some Green Day, some Sum 41, the Nirvana Unplugged CD (which Fang had always loved). He chose tracks from Oasis and Sugar Ray and Smash Mouth. Still, it seemed his pick of the week was the Smashing Pumpkins’ Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness. He surprised me by playing the hardest track on the album, the raging “Bullet with Butterfly Wings,” aka “Rat in a Cage,” about twenty times in a row one day. We both threw ourselves around the room a bit when it was on, because truly, it’s an excellent tune, but I have to admit I was also sort of worried about why that infinitely sad, infinitely mad song was finally speaking to my buddy.

  And we never talked about Fang being gay. I guess what we were doing that week was hiding out, but it didn’t feel like that. It just felt like we’d chosen to spend a couple of easy days together, days when my list and his didn’t even exist. We took a TO and did whatever we wanted to do, which ended up being a lot of nothing. Time was soft. The music good. The world distant.

  We did smoke the odd joint, but it was definitely a secondary activity. And we did have the occasional visitor. Mrs. Delaney came back once or twice to see how her son was doing, but she never stayed too long, and she never seemed too sober. But the big visit happened Wednesday evening, one day after Fang’s name had hit the paper. That was the night the chicks showed up.