by R. A. Nelson
And it would have been my fault.
“How could that have been your fault?” Miss Wanda Joy says, just like she can hear my thoughts. “Did you bring the sickness on that child?”
“No, ma’am.”
“Did you make the decision to bring her to a spiritual healer?”
“No, ma’am.”
“Well, then. But she didn’t die, did she? That’s what’s important. Come on, let’s get to bed.”
And she walks away, leaving me standing inside the sound of the water I can’t see.
The next morning I’m riding in the truck cab with Certain Certain. We head out of Verbena and pass a bunch of small towns that all look alike: tractor parts stores, old brick schools, squashy frame houses, gas stations.
Tell you the truth, I’m sick to death of little towns. But Miss Wanda Joy says big cities like Nashville and Memphis and Birmingham are all wanting to charge you for a space to put up the tent or even park the motor home.
“Let them burn in their iniquity,” she likes to say.
But whenever I see those big lights creeping past the windows, I feel this yearning spread through my whole body, like my soul is pushing at the seams.
Today I’m drifting in and out of my memories of that girl in the blue dress. The way her golden hair hung on her shoulders. How hot her skin was. What it felt like to put my hand on her face.
Certain Certain fiddles with the radio. Don’t strike me down, Lord, but country music reminds me too much of being stuck inside a trailer next door to the chemical factory. My original momma was always listening to one sad song after another, till it got to feeling like torture, trapped in somebody else’s messed-up life.
Last fall I heard a car pumping music out of these big, booming speakers that was so wild, loose, hungry—I couldn’t understand the words, but I could understand the feeling. The kids in that car are probably going straight to hell. But here’s my awful secret: I would’ve followed them right out of the fairgrounds if I could. Just to keep listening.
We pull off at a rest stop and get out to stretch our legs. Miss Wanda Joy always makes us park far away from everybody else. Older men sit at tables and watch the girls. Girls. A couple of kids are throwing a Frisbee around. What would it be like to have a brother or a sister? What would they think of me?
Inside, the air-conditioning feels good. There are computers where you can touch the screen and find out information about the Smoky Mountains, the Gulf, New Orleans, caves, state parks. This is my dream, to see each and every one of these places. Not like a tourist, but to find the one that’s right for me. Get a claim to a piece of it and don’t ever let it go. I believe I could sit still in the same house forever. Living on the road will do that to you.
Coming out of the welcome center with my hands full of brochures, I run into a group of kids ganged up around the entrance. There are at least nine of them, all wearing black and yellow T-shirts that say CONOVER HIGH YELLOW JACKETS. A couple of the bigger boys step in my way.
“Hey, can you tell us where the bathroom is?” one of them says. “I need to go real bad.”
“It’s right in there,” I say, feeling squirmy. Some of the girls start giggling. The two big boys are still blocking my way.
“You have to drop a deuce?” the second one says to me. A big, barrel-chested boy maybe a couple of years older than me, with ham-bone fists.
“Excuse me?” I say.
A bunch of them bust out laughing, braying like mules.
“Excuse me!” the first boy says, trying to imitate my voice and nearly choking on himself. “Did you really just say that?”
The other one, the one with the fists, turns to the girls. “Hey, this guy just polluted the whole place. I think I can smell it.” He sniffs the air and wrinkles his face up, cussing. “Didn’t you flush? It’s that little silver handle.”
“Maybe they don’t have indoor plumbing in Jesus Land,” the first one says.
I start forward again, but they push together in front of me.
“Look at that hair,” a girl says, laughing. I feel my face go hot. “He’s got preacher hair.” She takes out something small and black, flips it open. It’s a cell phone. She holds it up between the heads of the tall boys and aims it at me. “I’ve got to get a picture of this.”
“Wait a minute,” the first kid says. He has a big potato face. “Don’t take it yet. Hey, Preacher Hair, your shirt’s tucked in. You want me to help you with that?”
He grabs at my shirt and starts to jerk it out. I knock at his hands and drop all my brochures. They scatter all over the sidewalk, some of them laying open: Clingman’s Dome, Tuckaleechee Caverns, Rock City, Port Saint Joe. I bend down to pick them up, but the kids are stepping on them, kicking them around. I get the ones I can.
“Will you move, please?” I say, trying to get at the other ones. Nobody moves. Finally I just give up and straighten back up.
“How old are you, boy?” the first kid says.
“Sixteen. Nearly.”
“You’re one of them hard-core Baptists, aren’t you? Can’t dance, can’t chew gum, got to hold it with rubber gloves to take a leak.”
“Naw, he can’t be Baptist,” the second boy says. “My cousin’s a Baptist. They’re not that weird. Church of Christ maybe.”
“Church of God?” somebody says in the back.
“Nope. None of them are this strange,” Ham-Fist says. “He’s Penicoastal. Yeah, baby. That’s where you whip out your Peni and take it coastal.”
“Fundamentalist,” somebody says. “Emphasis on the mental.”
“Oh, you guys are so mean” another girl says. But she’s grinning when she says it. “Leave him alone, Brett. Let him go.”
“What’s your problem?” I say to the one she called Brett.
“That your bus over there?” he says.
I don’t look, but I know where he’s pointing.
“That’s it, isn’t it?” he says. “Bet it’s full of damn snakes. I heard y’all milk ’em and wave them around in church. I saw it on the Discovery Channel. No, Animal Planet.” He laughs.
I start walking again; he steps in the way.
“Let me go,” I say, baring my teeth a little.
“I bet that bus stinks like a mofo, doesn’t it? All those snakes crawling around in there.” He turns to the girl with the cell phone. “You know what snakes smell like, don’t you, Genna?”
“Hell no,” the girl says.
“Like two people doing it.”
“How would you know?”
“I’ll show you sometime.”
“So that’s your momma sitting over there?” Ham-Fist says, pointing at the stone picnic table where Miss Wanda Joy is sitting with Sugar Tom and Certain Certain.
“No—” I start, but he cuts me off.
“Your momma and your daddy. No wonder you’re messed up. She’s one of those bitches never washes her hair, right? Keeps it blowed up like a football on top of her head, except for the part in back where it’s running down to her ass. Hasn’t cut that tail since she was born, right? Otherwise she goes straight to hell, doesn’t she?”
“Shut your mouth,” I say, feeling my jaw tighten.
“Ooh, I’m pissing my pants, Preacher Hair.”
“Let him alone, Tommy. Let him go. That’s enough.” It’s the same girl as before, the one in the back. She’s not smiling now.
“Aw, we’re just messing with you, right?” Brett says. “He knows we’re just messing with him, don’t you?”
I feel every muscle in my body tightening now, feel a white-hot rage building up behind my eyes. What Sugar Tom calls a “righteous fire.”
“Look out now, Brett,” Tommy Ham-Fist says. “Watch those eyes. He’s fixing to kick your ass.”
“You want to kick my ass, don’t you, Preacher Hair?” Brett says. “You believe I’m going to hell, don’t you? Look, you got me all scared and everything. You really do. So I tell you what I’m gonna do. I’m gonna make it
up to you. Isn’t that right, Genna?”
The girl with the cell phone clicks it shut and drops it into her pocket. “What?”
“Make it up to him,” Brett says. “That’s what we should do.”
He smiles at the girl, Genna. She doesn’t seem to know what he wants. Then her mouth falls open, and you can see something change in her eyes. She grins at Brett.
“You sure?” He nods and lets her come forward. “Okay,” Genna says.
She stands facing me and grabs the edge of her shirt, hauls it up to her chin. I can see them for just the tiniest little split second. Her bosoms. She’s showing them to me. Genna yanks her shirt back down.
It happens so fast, I don’t know if the other kids can even see, the way Tommy and Brett are bunched up around her. Then the whole gang laughs like crazy and pushes past me into the welcome center. I’m standing there holding my breath and my brochures like a broken dog.
“Have a deviled egg,” Sugar Tom says when I get back to the picnic table.
I push the plate away. “No thanks. I’m not hungry.”
I lay my brochures out and start pretending to go through them. I feel my mouth bunching, tears coming, and my jaw clenching. They are evil. Evil.
“What did they say to you?” Miss Wanda Joy asks. Those eyes don’t miss a thing. “Did they say something profane?”
“No, ma’am,” I say. “Not so much.”
The Conover High kids are coming back out now. Miss Wanda Joy gets up, pulling her dress from between her legs. “Well, maybe I’ll just go have a talk with them and find out for myself.”
“No.” I say it so sharp, it surprises even me. “Please. Let’s just leave.”
But she is already on her way over there, long skirts dragging the grass. My face is burning. I glance at her, and she is standing in the group of Conover kids, looking like a person out of the pioneer days. She is taller than any of them, except Tommy and Brett. I can tell by the way they are slouching, they want to get smart with her. But they don’t dare; who could, staring into those blazing eyes?
What could she be saying to them?
“Second Samuel, chapter thirteen, verse thirteen,” Sugar Tom says, croaking a little. “‘Whither shall I cause my shame to go?’”
I look at my hands. Does it show that much?
The Conover kids seem kind of subdued after Miss Wanda Joy leaves. But the minute we climb into the motor home, I can hear them out the open window.
“Little Texassssssss, Little Texassssssss, Little Texasssssssssssssss!”
Hissing like serpents.
We’re back on the interstate. I’m wondering, What would it be like to touch that Genna girl there? Soft? Warm?
Forgive me, Lord.
“Your face is red as a prickly pear,” Certain Certain says. “Them boys mess with you?”
“Yes, sir. And she just had to make it worse,” I say.
Certain Certain downshifts, making the gears grind. “Don’t let ’em get to you, boy,” he says. “Proverbs, chapter one, verse twenty-two. ‘Scorners delight in their scorning, and fools hate knowledge.’”
I turn my head to the window and close my eyes. She didn’t even have any underclothes on, I think. Nothing but pure skin. Soft, pale, round, and pinkish.
My fingers tremble, so I pick up the map to give them something to do. Why would somebody show something so mysterious and secret and sweet, for all the world to see? What kind of person would do that to her soul?
And how do you get to know a girl like that?
The feeling I had in that dream is coming back. Like whatever is me, the inside me, is all of a sudden collecting right in the middle. Everything below my belt buckle seems like it’s tightening and lifting, drawing every ounce of heat in my body.
I unfold the map and lay it across my legs. Snakes. Hellfire. Damnation. Heaven. Soft. Lucy. Lucy. I press down on the map and talk to Certain Certain without looking at him.
“Did you … did you ever have … I mean, did you have a girlfriend when you were my age?”
He chuckles. “Be more accurate to ask, was there ever a time I didn’t have me a girlfriend? How far we talking ’bout going back into prehistory, Lightning?”
“You don’t have a girlfriend now.”
“I’ve sowed all the wild oats I’ll ever need to sow.”
“But what if everybody did that?”
“Did what?”
“You know. Did what we’re always telling them in services. Stopped … lusting. There wouldn’t be any babies. The human race would die out.”
Certain Certain scratches his chin. I can see the slave tag flash in the sun. “You don’t have to worry about that anytime soon, believe me.”
“But what if… what if you were my age and somebody … they showed you their …”
“What?”
“I can’t say it.”
“Titties? That the word you hunting for?”
My hands keep pressing the map.
“Let me tell you something,” Certain Certain says. “You think the world just woke up and happened yesterday, don’t you?”
“No I don’t.”
“Yes you do. Young people … y’all think you invented everything. Everything new to y’all is new to anybody who ever lived.” He spits out his window. “Think I didn’t never slip around behind my daddy’s corncrib with some pretty little gal now and again? Shoot. Some of them little gals ’bout near tore me up.”
“But… didn’t you ever think they were crazy when they did that?”
“Mo’ crazy the better.”
“No, so crazy they would … wreck your whole life?”
“Shoot, boy. Don’t take a crazy gal to do that. Sane as Jane will do. You ask anybody.”
“Do you ever wish… do you ever think about how maybe things could’ve turned out different?”
“Different don’t matter,” Certain Certain says. “What matters is, did they turn out for the best? For me they did. I know what you worried about. You worried are you going to be stuck in the ministry business your whole life? Is that all you ever going to know? All you ever supposed to know? Isn’t that right?”
“Yes, sir.”
“I knew it. Here’s the thing I learned. There’s my plan, there’s your plan, there’s His plan. His plan is the one that counts. His plan is the one workin’ in our lives every second of every day, whether we know it or not. Sometimes it seems like the worst thing in the world, way things work out for you in life. But it’s all part of His plan, and when you look back on things, you see it more clear. Fifteen, shoot. Everything’s in front of you, boy. Plenty of time for His plan to unfold in your life. Let go and let God.”
I’ve been saying the same thing to congregations for years. “I was hoping for something a little more specific,” I say.
“Lord ain’t into specifics,” Certain Certain says. “That’s your part. Lord is into faith.”
I turn back to the window and watch the world pass by, wondering what goes on inside all those houses. Is there a kid right now, right there, in that little blue house—somebody my age? Does he have a girlfriend?
Or maybe it’s a girl. Is she like that Genna girl? Ready to lift her shirt up and laugh? Or Lucy… could Lucy ever be that way? No. I don’t believe it. Lucy wouldn’t do that. Would she?
Cobbville, Mississippi.
The Burger King is fringed with Queen Anne’s lace and thorny purple bull thistles. Sugar Tom sits at one of the outside tables trailing blue cigarette smoke.
“I’ll never forget the first time it hit home with me,” he says. “I was twelve, thirteen years old. I remember exactly where I was standing—next to the only lamppost that survived the burning of Atlanta in the Civil War. Corner of Whitehall and Alabama.
“Well, out of the clear blue this skinny gal with Shirley Temple hair came up and dang near took my arm off, she shook it so hard. ‘It’s you,’ she kept saying. ‘It’s you.’ Like I was some kind of wonder. I didn’t know her fr
om Adam’s house cat. She drug me into a little diner and forced me to eat a patty melt while she sat there smiling like a simpleton and telling me how amazing I was. I’m telling you, Ronald Earl, it was downright disturbing.”
Certain Certain shows up holding two vanilla shakes for him and Sugar Tom and a strawberry one for me. Miss Wanda Joy is waiting in the motor home. She doesn’t believe in sweets.
“You know what you are to them, Ronald Earl?” Sugar Tom goes on, his cheeks caving in from sucking. “Show people. That’s what it comes down to. And you can’t change that once it gets fixed in folks’ heads.”
“But what if… what if I just want to meet somebody?” I say. “Someone who doesn’t care about all that stuff? Somebody who just wants to know me for me?”
Sugar Tom coughs into his hand, nearly touching his eyeball with the cigarette ash.
“You get a dog,” he says.
“Saddle up,” Certain Certain says.
Turns out the only setup spot is another cow pasture. Miss Wanda Joy is not one tiny bit pleased. She has to make some quick changes to the poster, and we have to rush around town making copies at the Kinkos and covering up the old ones.
Come see the legendary evangelist
as we share with you
the glory of our Lord
and His promise of
everlasting redemption.
The Faith Tabernacle Revival Meeting
will be held in the Wilbanks pasture
on Leadmine Road
tomorrow night,
June 13, six o’clock.
Be there and Be Saved!
You ever try to shoot a staple gun into a telephone pole?
With all the extra work, it’s dark by the time we get the tent set up. Certain Certain aims the truck lights across the pasture, showing humps of grass and staring red eyes. Cows are funny. It’s like they have just one brain amongst them, and all of them have to share it.
“Mind the coyotes,” Mr. Wilbanks says, and waddles off without smiling.
“Getting too old for this,” Certain Certain says. He settles into a folding chair behind the stage. “My momma didn’t raise no circus roustabout.”
