gods with a little g

by Tupelo Hassman

  Dad and his scripture. He was raised a believer and always walked the talk, that’s why he came to Rosary in the first place. But since Mom died it’s like he’s had a Bible transplant for a heart just to save him from any new story being written there. He’s curled up in the Good Book like a tired old dog on a sofa cushion, grateful that someone somewhere has the answers, nose to tail, just waiting for the end.

  Harrison’s nameplate is plastic, not metal like it is pretending to be. I focus on that so I won’t have to see my dad’s God-fearing eyes. His daughter-fearing eyes. And I tell my side of the story, just like she asked.

  “That’s it, Principal Harrison. Winthrop fell.”

  Dad forgets himself then. Says, “Hell!”

  He never calls me that. For obvious reasons.

  “I practically fell on top of him. It’s lucky I wore black today.” I pluck at my black stretch pants, smooth my hands over my black hoodie, feel where the licorice-and-chocolate vomit has soaked into the fabric, hardly noticeable except to my fingers. I wear black every day, of course, but I dig my feet into their black Converse and dare her to call me a liar.

  Instead, she puts her head in her hands while Dad sputters in the background, caught in his own trap. “Hell!”

  Dad tries to leave others to their sins, even me. He leaves salvation to the sinner and her God. That’s why I don’t have to go to church if I don’t want to. And I don’t want to. And it’s why he just stands there in Principal Harrison’s office while I weave a tangled web, shaking his head and saying over and over again just one word: “Hell.”

  Poor Dad. For someone so devout to have me for a daughter and with the Devil’s playground for a nickname. That is a curse. Helen was my great-grandma’s name on my mom’s side. According to Aunt Bev, Great-Grandma had the gift, but so far as I can tell, the only gift that comes with my name is being able to trick my dad into cursing in the principal’s office.

  THE GIFT

  Aunt Bev’s shoppe is around the corner from us. Her bedroom and bathroom are in the back, both crowded with books and icons and a surprising number of cowboy boots. Up front there’s a stove and a small fridge next to the cash register, and the usual suspects: a round table with a velvet cloth, a crystal ball, and a box of tarot cards wrapped in purple silk. But don’t let the shoppe’s extra p and silent e fool you, Aunt Bev isn’t here to annoy you to death. She bought the storefront already named from the last Rosary psychic, who left, sick or scared of Rosary’s resistance to her work.

  And don’t let the “psychic” part fool you that much either. The back of Aunt Bev’s shoppe is open for business as much as, if not more than, the front.

  Aunt Bev doesn’t try to hide anything from me, she says, because I’ll see it all soon enough. I don’t know if she means I’ll see it soon enough because I’m growing up or because she insists I inherited Great-Grandma Helen’s gift and then a “backhanded blessing” on top of that when Mom died too young and became my eyes in the sky, a guide I am supposed to be able to rely on someday, some other day that is never today.

  I see it all either way. Aunt Bev can read fortunes. She can do other things too, with paper and rose water and tears, cast spells maybe. But her gift isn’t enough to make ends meet, what with the Thumpers trying to take away her business license and littering her front step with scripture and hate mail.

  Or maybe Aunt Bev isn’t broke, just bored. Of Rosary. Isn’t everyone? What I am sure about is that the ink in the shoppe’s ledger turned more black than red when she turned her hours upside down, started giving readings later at night, in private, and started conducting more business in the back bedroom than at the front table. She says, “They really listen to you, if you let them get close. If they think they know you, they let you know them.” She says it is all the same. Intimacy is intimacy. And that she chooses which customers to make fall all the way under her spell. She hardly has repeats for this kind of work. “Catch and release,” she says. If there’s any regret for one she wished she hadn’t let go, I can’t hear it.

  I’ve been hanging out at the shoppe since Mom got sick, when Aunt Bev started helping Dad take care of me full-time. I do her accounting while she works or rests between clients. “You gotta keep good books,” she says, and shows me how to account for “research,” also known as taking her niece to the old movies they run in Rosary, because “you have to know what stories people are feeding themselves, what stories will be getting in the way.” She teaches me which of the IRS’s categories are best for writing off sage and incense, “home office” or “business expense.” And she has me put some perfectly useful receipts aside. At the end of each quarter she burns these in the smudge pot. As an offering, she says. To keep the real balance.

  In her own way, Aunt Bev is just as devout as Dad except that where Dad holds the Bible, Aunt Bev has a pack of tarot cards bent at the corners, greasy with the oil of fingerprints and hope. And she’s never had to bother being born again because she never let anyone stop her from living in the first place.

  * * *

  Dad’s fear is that I’ll succumb to this temptation of prophecy, like Aunt Bev did. As if it were that easy. He’s afraid that I’ll become her apprentice and take over for her when she retires.

  She says he’ll get over it.

  They can go ahead and arm-wrestle for my soul all they want, I’ve got other mysteries on my mind.

  I peek between the curtains drawn around the office-kitchen nook, see how Aunt Bev lets her hand linger over the bloodred velvet that covers the circular table when she is reading a palm, holds it a bit longer depending on the customer. I see when she brushes against a hand as the customer chooses cards. Some of these sessions finish faster when she invites the client back for an extended reading after hours, which is my signal to close up the register and go on home. The next day I come in to see a charge slip that is double the usual reading fee, triple, even four times the usual payment. Aunt Bev says that you can’t put a monetary price on a spiritual exchange, but clearly she is working with some kind of algorithm, one far advanced of the math I’m learning at Rosary High.

  At first I thought the customers must be feeling Aunt Bev up, that they were French-kissing and messing around. I was too young to imagine what the different charges could be for, and Rosary internet, when Dad finally allowed us to have it, is zero help, quarantined as it is against sites that aren’t authorized by the City of Rosary’s Information Neutrality Office. In middle school, things became clearer. I learned from what I heard in the halls. Then, thanks to the staticky Sky Radio program geared to teens in distress that I can just barely tune in here at the shoppe, everything fell into place.

  It goes something like this: Aunt Bev charges double for a hand job, triple for a blow job, and quadruple for the trump card, as shooting stars spew over the lovers’ heads. Meanwhile, I’m sitting alone behind tie-dyed curtains with a crush on the world’s wrongest boy and I’ve never even been kissed.

  ACE OF WANDS

  Bird and his mom are finally invited into Principal Harrison’s office from the conference room, where they have been secluded like this is some kind of grand jury appearance. As they walk in, the office shrinks. We are all pressed against each other. I scoot the chair in closer to the desk and I’m glad I’m sitting down, because Bird is right behind me. I can feel the heat from his body. I can smell him, a stinging cleanness like bleach seeping out of his skin. I pull my sweatshirt around me. I’m freezing but then I’m too warm. Bird sends my body in all directions at once, cold and hot, empty and full. I can keep my distance at the tire yard and usually at school too, but here I am lost in the bright smell of his sweat, the violence like cologne. Mouth dry, underwear not.

  And what is there to say? It isn’t the first time, won’t be the last, even though Mrs. Doncaster, Bird’s mom, acts like it is. And Principal Harrison doesn’t have any ammunition, since we all lied. She can’t even force us to make the insincere apologies we’ve learned by heart or ga
g our way through the corresponding required statements of supposed forgiveness.

  All of those words aren’t for us anyway, but for them, for Mrs. Harrison and the parents in attendance. So they can sigh with relief and carry on with pretending that they’ve totally aced this role model thing. But not today.

  * * *

  Pretty much everyone at Rosary expects to get beat on by Bird at some point. It’s what he does. There are a few of us, though, who hang out with him despite the risk, or because of it. Because skin on skin is honest and in Rosary the only way we’re legally allowed to experience some of that is through violence. Even Security Guard Jay will tell kids to “leave room for the Holy Spirit” when they stand too close in the halls. The way he says it, like he’s being recorded, makes it clear that protecting us from touching each other in any way is a part of his job description.

  Jay is more like a guy who collects shopping carts at a grocery store than a security guard but he’s here anyway. Securing us. Or guarding us. Whatever it is he’s supposed to be doing, what he does is be nice to us, hold the doors open when we go in or out, and stop us from full-on fucking in the halls. Whenever someone starts a fight he’s on it, but if anyone starts making out behind a locker, he waits as long as he can and then runs really, really slowly in that direction, making sure his keys jingle and the walkie-talkie on his belt, which connects to Principal Harrison’s office when he pushes the button, is squawking away. But he doesn’t ever push that button until a teacher shows up or there’s blood. It’s almost like Jay trusts us to figure out our shit on our own. And that is precisely not what they are paying him to do.

  Next on the list of useless ideas had by the Rosary High School Board is the zero-tolerance rule for fighting. Everyone who is in a fight, or near a fight, or saw a fight out of the corner of their eye, no matter who started it or why, is put on an automatic three-day suspension. From school. At home. It’s almost as if, unlike Jay, the school board doesn’t want us to figure anything out. It’s almost like they want us to fail at learning to fight, at learning to protect ourselves, because the next thing you know, we’d be protecting ourselves from them.

  PUNISHED

  My three-day Rosary High vacation begins with Dad leaving for work, the door finally closing on the last of his many reminders about the studying he thinks I will do today. And then silence.

  And more silence.

  Aunt Bev will still be asleep. The tire yard isn’t open to Dickheads until school is out.

  Silence.

  I might actually study.

  And then the phone rings.

  Even after the meeting with Principal Harrison, even while I was giving Winthrop and Rainbolene my phone number, while Bird’s mom and my dad were talking, I didn’t notice Winthrop’s voice. I do notice it on the phone, though. There is no way to hide from its depth and strength, nowhere else for it to go but straight into my head, and when he says, “Helen Dedleder, this is Winthrop Epsworthy speaking. Do you want to come over to my house and not study?” I can even hear the smile on his face.

  CITY BLOCKS

  I grab my backpack in case Dad makes it home before I do and needs to believe I’m off somewhere studying. As I walk the five blocks to Winthrop and Rain’s house, I take in the new flyers plastered on the telephone poles lining San Pablo Boulevard.

  Rosary’s main street is one of a handful still named after some saint or other. The Rosary Bible Thumpers are pissed that the Catholics landed here before them and got to do all the murdering-slash-saving of the souls who were truly here first. What’s worse, this means the Catholics had the privilege of officially renaming everything. Part of what Dad does on the Reconciliation Council is the tedious paperwork required to officially rename bits of Rosary in ways that are more evangelically inclined. He’s very proud of Jesus Saves Parkway and Good News Avenue, but he refuses to consider my idea for the renaming of San Pablo Boulevard as What Would Jesus Drive.

  The Thumpers can’t stand that Rosary is named after a favored Catholic accessory. But what is a rosary except a bookmark for prayers? When this tiny suburb of Sky sprang up around the refinery, the oilmen were in such a rush to make their dollars, they grabbed for the name of the nearest landmark, Rosario Bay, whitewashed it, and were ready to go. Next, they threw up all of our houses at once. I mean, like, vomited them up. Spit them out. Each one the same. No one ever has to ask where a bathroom is in someone else’s house here. We know the way because the layout in one house is just like the next, from the grain of the paneling in the hallway to the bushes in the front yard and how high they grow. We could unpack each other’s groceries, fuck each other’s husbands or wives, and never realize that we didn’t actually make it home. Each of our houses is like one of those beads strung up on either side of the plastic Jesus weighing down all of Rosary, eternal in their sameness. Any shine they once had was rubbed away from years of worry until they became as identical to one another as our parents wish we would be to them.

  MASTURBATE THEATRE

  Winthrop and Rainbolene give me the tour of their house, all except the Epsworthys’ bedroom, where Mrs. Epsworthy is “taking her midday rest,” Rain says, with only the slightest eye roll. And their house is just like mine, except they are living the two-bedroom version of Rosary life and we have three, one for the little brother or sister I never got to have. And except that where our porch has the same polite nothing on it as most Rosary porches, the Epsworthys have placed a stone pagoda and their yard is dotted with dandelions.

  My dad goes out at night with a tiny spray bottle of weed killer and murders the dandelions when he thinks no one will notice. As far as I know, this is the only time he succumbs to pride. And here is an entire plot of them, the sins of a Rosary lawn, for all to see. And here is a pagoda, with no explanation at all. And in the Epsworthys’ kitchen, right in the middle of the day, we eat ice cream. I can’t decide if I’ve wandered into Sodom or Gomorrah, but I finish every bite.

  And then.

  We still have two and a half days left without school.

  The Epsworthys have an old stereo with a dial tuner and we sit around for a while on the living room floor, trying to get Sky Radio to come in. Every Rosary teenager, Thumpers too, tries for Sky Radio on any device they can access. It’s worth listening through the static because the doctor and his sidekick talk about sex and answer questions about sex and make jokes about sex and have live porn stars on to talk about performing sex acts for a living. Like all of these sex-related actions are choices a body can make with no shame. And most important, the hosts give shout-outs to Rosary kids like they know we’re listening. Like they know what we’re listening for.

  It won’t come in and I’m suddenly saying, “I can get it at my aunt’s shoppe if you want to come over there sometime.” I don’t want to explain Aunt Bev, don’t want to lose these new friends if the fact of her will drive them away, but I think this thought after I’ve already opened my big mouth.

  “Your aunt’s the psychic, right?” Winthrop says, and when I nod, barely, like maybe I can still hide this information by being noncommittal, he says, “Cool.” And then Rain says, as if she already knows about Aunt Bev too, “But what are we going to do now?” She kind of meows the “now,” like a bored little kid. It’s like everyone they know is related to some witch or other, so my situation is no big deal, and the acceptance of these two people settles around me like dandelion fluff from a wish I didn’t know I’d made.

  “We could put on a play,” Winthrop says.

  Rain jumps up. “Meet me in the bedroom.”

  In their bedroom, Win and I sit on the floor between their beds and Rain comes in with a big metal box and shuts the door quietly so as not to wake their mom. A minute later, and we are surrounded by Mr. Epsworthy’s collection of dirty books, reading lines out to each other, and I am laughing so hard it feels like the first time.

  SPEAKEASY

  After we have read through most of Mr. Epsworthy’s stash on the fi
rst day of Rosary High Porn Camp, I invite Winthrop and Rain to the tire yard. Which is kind of an awkward invitation to present.

  “Hey, do you guys want to go to Fast Eddie’s Tire Salvage and break the law with that guy who beat up Winthrop, a couple of weird girls, and an old perv? Is that something that sounds good to you?”

  I don’t put it quite like that.

  When it gets to be 3:30 and I know the Dickheads will be on their way to Fast Eddie’s, I make this slightly more enticing offer: “Hey, after school some of us get together at the tire yard and drink beer. Do you want to go?”

  * * *

  Since Winthrop and Rain didn’t rat Bird out in Principal Harrison’s office, I know they will be welcome. Or what passes for welcome in Dickhead language.

  Allow me to translate.

  When we arrive at the tire yard, Bird nods at Rain and gives Winthrop a “What’s up?” This is a standard greeting in many dialects but when spoken at the tire yard to a newcomer it translates roughly as “Fellow Traveler, you are welcome here.”

  Bird doesn’t expect an answer, and when he does not receive one it is revealed that the Epsworthys must have encountered other Dickheads in their travels and are familiar with our customs.

  We sit down, and Bird pushes the bag of beers at his feet toward us. In Dickhead this translates basically into “I have done you a wrong, which I now acknowledge. I would like you to forgive my past behavior. I share with you now the tools of forgetting.”

  Accepting the tools of forgetting without comment, as is appropriate, Winthrop and Rain open them and drink.