Jesus Saves

by Darcey Steinke

  On Saturday at approximately 1:00 A.M. police reported that a motorist driving south on Route 15 saw a young woman run across the Motel-8 parking lot toward the highway. “I couldn't believe my eyes,” the woman said. “because the girl was naked as a jaybird.”

  Mrs. Alper from Valdosta, Georgia, was returning from a visit with her sister in Lynchburg, Virginia, when she saw the young woman sprint across the motel parking lot. Because of the angle of the highway, Mrs. Alper lost sight of the girl and only spotted her again in her rearview mirror. “She must have fallen because there was a man with a beard lifting her off the ground.” Alper didn't report what she saw until the next morning. “I had to convince myself I hadn't fallen asleep and dreamt it,” she said.

  Local officials searched the hotel but no one fitting Alper's description was in residence. Mr. John Winslow, the night clerk, reported a man fitting the description had checked in alone the day before. When asked about the man's disappearance, Winslow responded that it wasn't particularly odd. “To avoid highway congestion and the heat, many people get early starts.”

  Police detective Bret McMullan, who's been handling the case from the beginning, says there is no way of knowing if the girl was Sandy Patrick. “For all we know, Mrs. Alper may have witnessed a domestic spat.” Nevertheless, McMullan told reporters they would follow up all leads.

  Patrick's mother, who is on leave from her job teaching kindergarten at Oak Grove Elementary School, says she's praying for the safe return of her daughter. “I know I'll see Sandy again,” Ruth Patrick said. “I just know she's coming home.”

  Ginger remembered Ruth Patrick's face in the window, her frosted hair pulled back into a pony tail, the Chinese neckline of her bathrobe exposing her pale throat. She wished she could will Sandy home, make her materialize on the lawn and hover toward the door. But Ginger saw Sandy lying in the woods, her hair pasted to her head with dew and spidery vermilion veins starting to fester like splattered blood on snow. Red ants crawled into her nostrils, along the bottom rows of lashes and between her parted purple lips.

  The church was drenched in tawdry, multicolored light. Rich washes of red and yellow soaked the walls and long green angles of light fell over the front pews and red carpet. In the old church the altar's guild—a handful of serious, middle-aged ladies, all with a reverence for good silver and table linens—took down the altar clothes and stored each ceremoniously in a carved cedar chest. But since the move to the new building, the women used plastic covers that Mrs. Mulhoffer ordered from a church catalogue, slipped them over the fabric on the altar, the pulpit, and the baptismal font so everything was dust proof and hermetically sealed.

  Behind the altar was the sacristy, a little kitchen with a sink and spigot, a bar of new soap beside a dried-up sponge. Cabinets above and below were the same poppy red color as the countertop and though she never turned them on, overhead there was a row of fluorescent lights. She set the box of fliers on the counter near the silver-tone tray of tiny individual communion glasses. Each held one sip of wine. The trustees said in winter everyone got the same cold and that they wanted to replace the common cup with this tray of plastic glasses, but Ginger knew they suspected that Mark Rutland was gay. A few times she'd seen him with a thin man resting on a cane by the waterfall in the mall. To the trustees, AIDS was just another bad curse come to them from the city, like crack and high taxes.

  She opened the cabinet over the sink where the long wax paper containers of unblessed wafers lay in rows like Ritz crackers. When she was little she'd found a whole pack in the backseat of her father's car and eaten everyone. Alongside the wafers stood bottles of Manischewitz grape wine. Downtown, homeless men drank Manischewitz in wrinkled brown bags. On Sundays, the wafers on the sterling plate and the wine in the medieval-style goblet took on aura and import, became what they called holy, but backstage their glamour was diminished, no more important now than saltine crackers and Boone's Farm wine. Holiness was like that, you could never trap it or examine its uncanny elements.

  She liked the old church better, but knew no place was really any more holy than any other. Once at Christmas, she went with her father to visit the old man who lived in a tin shack behind Mulhoffer's factory. Beside his bed hung a paint-by-numbers picture of Christ, a dirty silk scarf, and a gold dime-store locket that he said held a curl of his sister's hair. She took down a bottle, her hand hot on the cool curve of glass, and broke the seal, unscrewed the top, and drank, one mouthful, then another, until she could feel the fermented liquid warming her stomach, edging out the dull ache of her cramps.

  If her father's office was locked, she'd leave the box of fliers in the Bible study room where the trustees counted money after the service. Her father told her a good Sunday was when every adult gave twenty dollars and the wealthy ones forty. Then he could pay the mortgage on the new building, his own salary, hers, the organist's, and buy supplies for Sunday school and communion, then put some money into a savings account for the computer, the new hymnals, and a swing set the ladies’ guild wanted for the Sunday school children.

  As she turned the knob, the door opened and she walked into the office toward his desk. Rudolph Mueller had acquired the set of stoic mahogany office furniture at the same time as the stolen common cup. Carved along the bottom of the desk was a chain of roses and the bookshelves were buttressed and bridled like a cathedral. Every shelf was filled with books by obscure German theologians, their names embossed in gold on cracked leather bindings. On the walls were two portraits of beloved former ministers. One was of Reverend Dunheinzer, who, along with his angelic wife, started the church. He'd been famous for his commonsense sermons and his love of flowers and small children. The other, painted in a photorealistic style, was of a minister who'd had the church in the ‘50s, an overweight man with the fat face of a butcher. Fellowship was his forte and Klass told how in those days social events went on in the church basement almost every night. There was no portrait of the minister who owned a speedboat and had an affair with the organist, or the young man from Wisconsin who told so many lies he had to put his head in the oven and gas himself. Because the room was only half as big as the downtown office, with low ceilings made of corkboard, the furniture looked as if a crazy man had piled up file cabinets and bookcases, barricaded the door in fear of intruders or the great flood. The desk lamp showed a messy pile of yellow legal pads with her father's handwriting scribbled all the way down the pages. Her eyes continued to adjust in the murky light. His robes, both the cream-colored linen he'd worn yesterday and the sashes for Advent and Lent, lay scattered in a heap by the side of his desk. Hairs stood up on the back of her neck as the material shifted; gathers of cloth split and fell to one side and her father leaned up, his robes falling around him.

  His face, which was usually taut and ruddy as a pilgrim, was pockmarked and lined from pressing into the ceremonial robes. The outline of a dove branded his cheek and the braided pattern of brocade indented one temple.

  “Goodness,” he said, “I fell asleep.”

  “Are you sick?” She assumed he came in late last night and left before her this morning, but she could tell by his beard stubble that he'd been here all night.

  “No, no,” he said jumping up, lifting the robes onto the leather wingback chair where he began hanging each on a wooden hanger. His long-fingered hands trembled as he smoothed out the materials. “Did you see those hillbillies from Deerpath Creek sitting in the back pews yesterday? They talked throughout my sermon and held their hands up during the closing hymn.” A stole slipped off the hanger and he stooped over to retreive it. “This is not a tent revival, where toothless cowboys handle rattlesnakes and people run out of their seats to be healed by some charlatan. What would Luther say? He wouldn't like it,” her father calmed himself, “though ultimately it is his fault. With his fat hand he swept the virgin mother, all the saints, anything exotic and mysterious, right into the trash can. If only he hadn't made it clear that before God everyone who's been baptiz
ed is equal, if he hadn't turned God's rituals into a communist meeting of brothers , into a circle of friends, then there'd be no personal savior, no born again." He said these last words with profound disgust. “But it's not all Luther's fault. There was that horrible old hippie Karlstadt, with his imminent apocalypse and his low church love-ins.” His robes hung now, he walked wearily to the leather chair and fell into it, moodily unlatching his clerical collar.

  “The trustees came yesterday with several requests. They want me to cancel Klass's minibus. It's not economically viable according to them, and they want me to be more sensitive to the entertainment side of the service. Deerpath Creek has four thousand members and they said if we'd liven things up, use more modern church music, get a drummer and a couple of ladies who can really sing, we'd get more people and they'd be willing to give more too.” Her father was clearly disgusted. “They even went so far as to ask for aerobics classes in the basement.” He looked at her, his lips wet with saliva, and in his eyes she could see already what he was about to say next. “They even had the gall to tell me you're a bad example for the girls in the parish. They don't like how you dress and that you're seen with that boy. They call him a satanist.”

  “Write a letter to the synod,” Ginger said. “Tell them this place is going corporate and that you want another parish.”

  “No,” he said, “I can't do that anymore. I'm getting too old. I'm not smart enough to teach at the seminary and not slick enough for the big-city churches. If I leave here, it'll be to some tiny ten-pew church in the middle of nowhere. Besides, Mulhoffer's talking about pulling out of the synod anyway.”

  “So are you saying that I'm fired?”

  “Of course not,” her father said. “Just be more discreet, and try to clean up a little before church, wash your hair, maybe put on a little lipstick.”

  “Mulhoffer wants me to wear lipstick?” Ginger's voice went up high.

  “I'm sorry,” he said, “but he does.”

  Steve pulled the match across the sandpaper, threw it side-arm toward the greasy lake. There was something careless and decadent about the curve of his arm. She figured he'd done this before, figured he'd done about everything in this town one could do to get in trouble. Like a firefly the match arched above the oil-soaked weeds and settled on the gunky surface. The tiny flame quavered as it burnt down the cardboard, then flared up blue violet before squatting down again, moving forward on the water like the spirit of a snake.

  Ted had his arms around her; she pressed her back into his chest. Retribution was his idea and he held on to her so she'd know he'd take care of her, protect her the best he could.

  “Hell yeah!” Steve yelled. “I told you the fucker would burn.” His voice echoed off Mulhoffer's factory, which stood darkly in back of them. Surrounded by barbwire fences, a few big trucks sat in the back lot, but Ginger knew Mulhoffer would be too cheap to hire a night guard or even buy a German shepherd.

  Cement blocks were stacked near the pond, as were tin canisters. Across the field of fool's wheat and wild daisies was the back of Spring Run condominiums, Fox Ridge to the left, and on the other side, through the thin woods, a strip mall that sold only wholesale stuff, hair dresser supplies, and foreign engine parts. Steve pitched matches; some landed in the weeds and went out but a few sat on the surface like red water bugs before igniting, flaring up in tawdry greens and yellows, colors usually reserved for slutty eye shadow.

  Steve told them how a baby had been born dead at the hospital that day, that the doctor went crazy trying to get its lungs cleaned out. It was blue and the fetal monitor showed straight lines for several minutes, but then it made a little noise. Its eyes shot open and the damn thing screamed bloody murder. “That,” Steve said, “is what's known as risen from the dead.” Ted said one of his mother's friends had died on the operating table, saw white light, and a silver cross floating out of her stomach. But then the smell of ammonia, had forced her back to earth. And he'd heard about another case in North Carolina where a man had died and they put him in a coffin, but on the way to the graveyard he started knocking on the lid. Turned out God sent him back because he hadn't had time for his last confession and he had a serious sin against him, adultery or murder, Ted couldn't remember which.

  “Christ rose from the dead,” Ginger said. “That's the only person I know who's ever done it.”

  “Yeah,” Steve said, “now everybody wants to do it.” He twisted his last match off and struck it, but this one he let burn down until it singed his thumbnail, turned the tip black. Ginger watched the snake move along the furthest basement wall, then slide into the fiery lake. Every Christmas, after she said Happy Holidays, showed off her Christmas dress—usually red or green velvet with a lace collar—her father sent her down into the Mulhoffers’ basement to watch the toy train while he sat upstairs in the living room, thanking them over and over for their generous Christmas check.

  The train moved along the wall like a black snake, slithered out of Ruby Mountain, where tiny elves wearing red caps and kneesocks picked at the rock all night long. The engine's headlights splayed over leafless wintertime trees and banks of plastic snow. Cargo cars filled with red plastic chips, underlit by tiny hobby bulbs, looked like embers, like crimson jellyfish. The elves lifted their hats, leaned on their shovels, and waved. One danced around the lake, a crazy skipping jig, while he waved his arms and talked to himself. Wind moved in the trees, put out the creeping chemical fires, and smoke rose like swaying spirits from the surface of the lake.

  Ted wedged his car between two dumpsters at the back of Orchard Brook Mall. The backstairs reeked of cigarette smoke and boredom, of canned macaroni and Diet Cokes. In the dark, the snack machine gleamed and the soft drink dispenser hummed incessantly. Ted brought along the army blanket to spread over the new couches in case they decided to fuck and locked the department store door from the inside so they wouldn't need to worry about the janitor.

  In the furniture department, he led her to his favorite model room with the big green velour couch and the matching leather wingback chairs. The lamp shades were printed with tiny British manor houses and there were paintings on the walls of men in red riding jackets atop horses, chasing foxes, leaping over stone walls. Books bound in leather, their pages epoxied shut, sat on wooden shelves and near the green plastic plant was a photo book on the history of Kensington Palace. There were a slew of other knickknacks, a faux brass trumpet, horse figurines, one of a man with bagpipes and a kilt. There was a crest paperweight, not any specific family, just the generic kind women wore on T-shirts and middle-aged men on the pockets of their cotton sweaters. The place was dressed up for role-playing, all part of the same crazy Disneyland idea, suburban bathrooms transmuted into rural country stores and living rooms, like this one, into exclusive British men's clubs. Still, she liked the smell of all this new stuff, as intoxicating as gasoline fumes or pot smoke.

  “You can hang out here and watch television, while I do my security guard thing,” he said.

  The idea didn't really appeal to her, but she nodded just the same. He wouldn't have to leave for an hour and maybe by then she'd get used to the room, could think of this place like a house put together in a dream, where you walk from your childhood bedroom into your father's office to the rec room where you lost your virginity Ted turned on the televison and kicked his feet up on the coffee table. They watched a late-night mystery show where little girls ran backward because they saw angels. Their mother said one of them had levitated out of her bed and the other suddenly spoke perfect Latin. The second half told how a man tape-recorded the voice of his dead daughter threaded around the barking of a stray dog. The dog was white with pink eyes and sat regally on a dirty twin-size mattress in a trash-filled lot in Puerto Rico.

  “Maybe that's why I always feel so weird and not really like myself,” he motioned to the TV.

  “What do you mean?” Ginger asked. He was always talking about mystical shit, but if you didn't rein him in a little, Te
d sometimes satellited out around the farthest planet and headed for deep space.

  “It's like that night,” he said, shaking his head. “Everything was totally fucked up. You know the feeling; we've talked about it before. Somehow you sense that you're already dead.” He shifted in his chair. “I was drinking beers, making macaroni and cheese, but I turned up the heat too high and fried the fuck out of it. I burnt my hand on the pan's handle and got pissed off, felt myself building into a rage, so I took a ride in the car to chill out. Just started driving around, kind of cruising different spots, the way we did in high school, over to Pizza Hut, past the mall, down to the dump, out to the lake, back to the high-school parking lot, then around again. I started to get this feeling like I didn't exist, like I was invisible, so I drove back to the apartment. Steve was at work and it seemed like nobody lived there. The place looked all empty and shit, just a bunch of junk pushed against the walls. I went into Steve's room and got his gun from under the mattress. The weight in my lap steadied me. I drove into the 7-Eleven parking lot and sat for a long time, watching people go in and out, watching the fat guy working the cash register. I realized I was thinking about robbing the place so I started the car and got back on the highway. My hands were shaking. It was fucking cold and all I had was my jean jacket. Eventually I pulled off the highway onto that gravel road that leads down to the railroad yard and just sat there with the gun on the seat beside me. Then all of a sudden I felt good, sort of light-headed and thrilled, and I knew what I was going to do. I was going to end it all and so I put the gun to my cheek and even then it seemed like a joke, and I remembered I smiled at myself in the rearview mirror and then pulled the trigger. There was a great shatter of glass and next thing I knew, warm stuff was all over my neck and I felt really muzzy, but it was nice, really really high like I was weightless and my head was filled with light and I was floating, thinking how this time I'd really fucked up, then wondering who this poor guy was with blood on his shirt. Then I ran my tongue along my cheek and I felt the hole, the open air on the other side. I looked at the dark houses spread over the hills and I felt cold; my breath was thick as smoke, and that's when I passed out.”