The Courts of Love

by Ellen Gilchrist

  So first I went over there a few times. Then I started believing the weird things he said. Then I said I’d go to the meeting. Then I let them blindfold me and got into the car and then I was at the church. I don’t deserve to live for being dumb enough to even talk to Charlie. Much less believe it made me somebody to have him like me.

  Days and weeks and hours have passed since I learned my cruel, costly, bitter, crushing, stupid lesson. I am alone in my room writing this in longhand on a legal pad. I have given up on the computer. He surfed it at night and slept all day. It was there he met other members of the cult he started. It was right there on the computer screen, where the CIA or the FBI could have read every word, that he got the idea to break into the Silas Mills Methodist Church and paint swastikas all over the walls and other stuff I don’t want to write down and then put thirteen-year-old virgins on the altar and initiate them into the cult with sex.

  I was not the first girl to be drugged and put upon that altar. I was the third and the main thing you must know about my dog, Queen Elizabeth, is that she bit him. They had brought her along in the car. I guess they were going to cut out her heart or something. Anyway, when they brought me into the church I started trying to get away. They’d given me some kind of pill Charlie stole from his mother’s bathroom but it quit working when I saw that mess on the walls. “Get me out of here,” I said.

  “Calm down,” Charlie says, and his stupid friend, Lamont, tries to get a half nelson on my arms, forgetting that my father wrestled in college and has taught me everything I need to know to protect myself. I elbowed him and when he reached for my neck I kicked him you know where—where it really hurts. About that time Queen Elizabeth broke free and bit Charlie on the shin. Not some tiny little bite that will heal in a few days but a real bite from the wildness that resides in even the most domesticated animal.

  Then the cops broke in. They were coming in every door and they were not in the mood to think anything was funny. It would have been better for me if I had been tied up or handcuffed but that’s water under the bridge.

  I am still a virgin, you’ll be glad to hear. Not that it matters after my name was in the papers. Well, not my name because that’s against the law, but enough so that everyone knows it was me. Not to mention my parents told everyone they knew. I hate that in them. They think the unexamined life is not worth leading and that you must live so that you can admit everything that happens. That was okay back in the sixties when they were young but it doesn’t work anymore. There are too many people now and most of them don’t think it is a cardinal sin to sit in judgment or be contemptuous.

  I have to wash the windows at the church every Saturday afternoon for the rest of my life. I owe them five hundred and sixty-two dollars for my part in the desecration of their paint job. I am paying it back out of my allowance and baby-sitting money until I go off in the fall to Lausanne or Saint Stephen’s in Austin or maybe All Saints in Vicksburg, Mississippi.

  Several times I have tried to make a list of the things that led up to me being on that altar. I have changed the order several times. I have left out a couple of events I do not think it’s good to dwell upon. This is the best I can do and I am going to put this on the Internet as a warning to other young girls like me. Here it is.

  Thinking I wanted to be a cheerleader and spend my afternoons jumping up and down and saying mindless, boring, repetitious cheers.

  Being told by my grandmother how she was the cheerleader in Pine Bluff and was also the homecoming queen.

  Being told by my mother that she was the cheerleader in Greenville and how popular she was.

  Ever reading or saying the word popular, which only means you are so dumb or stupid or easily influenced that you want a lot of people you don’t know to like you and vote for you for anything.

  Getting sucked into trying out for cheerleader.

  Not getting elected cheerleader by the panel of teachers who included an English teacher who had it in for me because I corrected her in class one day. She said T. S. Eliot was an Englishman when anybody knows he was born in St. Louis, Missouri.

  Losing interest in school and starting to make bad grades. Only how could I help it under the circumstances?

  Continuing to go to Webster Junior High School after I didn’t get elected. I should have made my dad put me in college. I should have taken the Graduate Record Exam. I bet I could have passed it. I am a lot smarter than many people who get into the University of Western Arkansas. Many people my father teaches can barely read English, much less Rilke.

  Well, that is all water under the bridge. That is spilled milk. I am going to be shipped off to boarding school with other girls who didn’t fit into the scheme of things. Well, I have to go now. I have to study biology for about three hours to make up for the two weeks I was running around with the cult and didn’t crack a book. Wish me luck. Don’t believe everything you hear about disturbed teenagers. Most of us are sadder than you know. Very, very sad. And I’ll tell you something else whether you want to believe it or not. It’s not our fault. I didn’t invent cheerleading. I didn’t dump it right down in the middle of junior high school to totally ruin the lives of everyone except the fourteen girls who make the squad. I’ll tell you something else. It ruins the lives of some of them. They peak too soon and are never that happy again.

  Update

  From Aurora Harris to anyone who received my parents’ incredibly stupid Christmas letter and believe anything it says about me. In the first place I do not look anything like that picture and did not know they were sending it out. I have never been as embarrassed as when I saw that photograph. Can you just see me sitting under a Christmas tree with a red hat on my head? That was one moment last Christmas Eve and Granddaddy made me let him take the picture. He is extremely rich and is leaving most of his money to me so I have to indulge him when he gets into something like buying a camera. He used to be a four-star general and people still call him General Drake. He is my mother’s father. My father’s father is an intellectual and a college professor and a noted biologist who once worked with Crick. It is sort of hilarious to have them in the same room since they are both egomaniacs and don’t like to share the spotlight. Mother is always thinking they should come and visit at the same time and show solidarity.

  Back to me. I have changed my whole outlook on life. I am still planning on going to medical school but I have decided now to be a psychiatrist. I have been talking to this woman psychiatrist and because of her I am not going to have to go off to school next year after all. She went to Johns Hopkins Medical School and has been through two training analyses and is so smart it blows my mind to even think about her much less talk to her about my family and the cheerleading crisis last year and being dragged onto that altar by Charlie Pope and almost initiated into a satanic cult. Dragged, my ass, she might say. You went gladly. Anything to escape the middle-class values my mother is espousing in order to save herself from worrying about the real fear and terror of every living human being, which is death and decay.

  You see, there isn’t any reason to spend your life dreading the inevitable. You might as well go on and live very fully in the present moment and get as much done as possible to help your fellow humans and sop up all the good karma you get from being useful and sleep like a baby.

  Her name is Diana Voss, this angel of enlightenment, and she is making me into a freak by teaching me all this stuff. Can you imagine talking to her for almost an hour three times a week and then walking into Fort Smith High School and looking around you at the pitiful insanity of most of the teenagers in the United States? Our dopey principal says we are the elite who will run the country one day. Can you just imagine these idiots trying to make the laws?

  I don’t think half of them can read the newspaper with any comprehension. Diana thinks I should go on and go to college and just skip high school but we haven’t told my parents yet. I think I’ll tell my grandfather Harris and let him arrange it. I could just go live with him
in Fayetteville. It’s only forty miles away and there is a good enough science department there for me to stay interested.

  The tree in that photograph you got sent by my mother isn’t even the tree that I remember from last year. The real tree is the one Dad brought home that shed all its needles by December 14 and we had to take it down and drag it out the door and who do you think had the job of vacuuming up the needles? Who do you think had to get blamed and feel guilty when the needles broke the Electrolux and we had to go to Wal-Mart at nine o’clock at night and buy a new vacuum sweeper? The tree in that photograph is a fake Christmas tree we ordered from the florist shop. It cost one hundred and ten dollars, money that could have been used to help Habitat for Humanity or Saint Jude’s. It is made out of the same petrochemicals that are responsible for the mild winters and terrible storms we have been having. If I have to explain that statement, don’t read on.

  Now that Christmas is over we are going to have to store that tree in the attic where it takes up all the room. Think of that tree stuffed into our attic with the boxes of Dad’s textbooks from college and the trunk with Mother’s old cheerleading and homecoming queen costumes and the daybed that belonged to my great-grandmother that no one wants but no one can bear to throw away. If you want to think Christmas, think about that tree up there all alone eleven months of the year, a completely useless, frivolous, retrograde symbol of a tribal ritual whose real purpose is to give people an excuse to wear red when the days are short and sunlight is in short supply.

  If you want to think about something good think about me, Aurora Harris, walking down the street disguised as a teenager, on my way to talk to the smartest woman I have ever met who is going to see to it that I escape enough of my conditioning to be able to move on out into the future. I’ll probably marry someone like Bill Gates or be someone Bill Gates will come to when he gets in trouble. I’m going to have a happy life and take as many people with me as I can save. Happy New Year.

  The Dog Who Delivered Papers to the Stars

  When Copey Culp’s wife stole his children and went home to her people, the first thing he did was take her dog out in the woods and shoot it. Fortunately for the dog, Copey was so mad he didn’t finish the job. He drove the dog to the outskirts of Harrisburg, parked by an old borrow pit, walked the dog to the edge of the woods, took aim with a four-ten, and shot it in the neck. The dog stared at Copey in surprise, shook for a moment, and fell to the ground. Copey felt awful about it. The minute he pulled the trigger he was sorry he had shot that dog. What if Sally Sue came back? He would have to lie to her about the dog and she could always tell when he was lying.

  He straightened up. He turned his back on the murder scene and walked back to the car with the gun broken over his arm. I had to do it, Copey was thinking. That goddamn dog has kept me awake for the last night. Plus, bit holes in all the newspapers and cost me hundreds of dollars in vet bills. If she wanted that dog she should have taken it with her.

  Sally would have taken it with her but she had to fit four kids and all their clothes into a 1986 Mazda station wagon and there wasn’t any place for a dog. She had thought she could send for it later when Copey settled down. She knew he didn’t like the dog. She even knew he might not be good to the dog and feed it right. But it never occurred to her that he would shoot it.

  The dog’s name was Dan. He was a golden retriever who already had a history when Sally Sue acquired him. He had come to Harrisburg with a crew who came to town to shoot background scenes for a movie about Frank and Jesse James. He had come with the truck that carries the dead horses for the shootout scenes. Whenever there is going to be a battle or a shootout in a movie they send this van full of dead stuffed horses to lie around the field after the shooting is done. Dan was the driver’s dog. “He has delivered papers to the stars,” the driver told Sally Sue. Sally Sue was on the set because her twin boys were extras in the film. Sally Sue was smart and kept her ear to the ground for ways to earn extra money so Copey wouldn’t have the whole burden on his shoulders. The twins had made two hundred dollars a day for five days. It was a huge windfall and Sally Sue was in an elated mood when they fell in love with the dog and the driver said they could have it.

  For two years Dan lived on Valley View with the Culps. Too many nights to mention he had awakened Copey by barking at passersby or squirrels. Also, if the Culps slept late and the door wasn’t open when the newspaper boy delivered the morning papers, Dan sometimes messed them up in his desire to deliver them. “Who all did he deliver to?” Sally Sue had asked the driver. “What stars?”

  “Sharon Stone for one,” the driver lied. “Brad Pitt. Winona Ryder. They all lived in my neighborhood. He’d collect the papers from the street and take them to each door.” It was true that Dan had been in the habit of delivering papers in the driver’s neighborhood. Some of the young people in the houses probably would end up being stars. Besides, the driver had to get rid of Dan. He had work waiting in New Jersey and it was winter. No one was going to rent him a decent room with a dog in the deal.

  “So where did you get him to begin with?” one of the twins asked.

  “Elizabeth Taylor owns the mother,” the driver said. “I heard the father belongs to Michael Jackson, but I can’t prove it.”

  A month later the movie crew packed up all the dead horses and dusty clothes and headed for New Jersey. The Culps were left with Dan. As I said, Sally Sue would have taken him to Kentucky if he had fit into the car. As it was he stayed on Valley View and wailed all night while Copey was mourning for his wife leaving him. Then Copey took him out and shot him.

  When Dan awoke it was the middle of the night. A badger had come by and nudged him. Then a shorthaired sheepdog had stopped and licked him on the face. After the sheepdog left, he opened his eyes and looked around. His neck felt like it was encased in a huge iron collar. It was all he could do to hold his head up long enough to limp over to a tree and lean against it while he licked the blood from his leg and paw. The blood was fresh and gave him new courage and he began to move in the direction of the road. He made it almost to the borrow pit before he collapsed again. The secretary to the president of the Bank of Harrisburg found him there on her way to work. She was dressed in a new, pale peach outfit, but she put vanity in its place and managed to get Dan into the backseat and drove him to the Harrisburg Animal Shelter. The young man and woman who ran the shelter took him inside and found a vet and by two that afternoon he was resting in a cage, heavily sedated and with a large piece of neck muscle missing, but alive. Morphine affects golden retrievers differently than it affects human beings. It takes their minds straight back to the past, to a place where they were happy. As his body healed, Dan dreamed he sat on the steps waiting for the paperboy to deliver the Los Angeles Times to the neighborhood of stucco cottages. The sun warmed the steps. The sound of a motor vibrated in the ground. It came nearer. A young boy leaned out the window and threw the papers in a pattern on the ground. One by one Dan picked them up and took them to the painted doors. It was Saturday and smiling faces opened the doors and petted him and thanked him for his help. When the driver woke he came out the door and took the paper Dan offered him and said so the neighbors all could hear, “Elizabeth Taylor gave me this dog. She trained him when he was a puppy to deliver the paper to her in the morning. He’s the goddamnedest dog to deliver a paper I ever saw in my life. I shouldn’t leave him outside like this. Someone’s going to steal him before it’s over. But what the hell, he can’t live if he can’t be out when the paper comes.”

  It was these Saturday mornings that Dan dreamed of now. When he woke it was harder and harder to move his neck or jump or even walk but the young man and woman had taken a liking to him and coaxed him along and petted him. He looked all over the cage and the floor and the yard for a paper to deliver but there was none to be seen. He delivered them in his dreams. Even after they stopped giving him shots, he could dream the Saturday mornings. Sometimes a door shut in his face without a smile. T
hen he woke and tried to lift his head.

  “We want to come out and shoot some video of the dogs,” a local television anchor told the boy who ran the shelter. “You know, feature a dog a week and see if we can get you some business. Run a voice-over, something like, This dog has seven days to live unless a home is found.”

  “Come on out,” the boy replied. “We have some nice fox terrier puppies. And we have a really pretty golden retriever but it’s been shot in the neck. I don’t know if anyone will adopt it.”

  “We can try.” That afternoon the television crew arrived. The cameras reminded Dan of better times. Perhaps the driver was coming back to take him to the Saturday mornings when he lived where there were many papers to deliver.

  He shone for the camera crew. He valiantly lifted his head and walked around the room. He sat on the sofa with the girl who ran the shelter and looked into the camera as if it were his friend.

  The video was on the five o’clock news, the six o’clock news, and the ten o’clock news. William Hagedorn saw it at five and was moved. He saw it again at ten and decided it was fate. At noon the next day he got into his car and drove to the shelter to look Dan over. He had a hard time finding the shelter as he was not from Harrisburg originally. He was from Champaign–Urbana, where his father was the head of the physics department at the university. He had come to Harrisburg because he had AIDS and he was trying to find a cheap place to live until he died. It might take a long time to die, he had decided. I want to go someplace small and quiet where no one knows me and no one will ask me questions. I want somewhere out of the way but near enough to home so that if I have to be hospitalized I can charter a plane and get back in a hurry. William had several hundred thousand dollars his grandmother had left him in her will. His grandmother had been born in Harrisburg and knew about the house where Frank and Jesse holed up in their last months of life. I guess if it was good enough for Frank and Jesse, it will be good enough for me, William decided. “Let me go,” he told his parents. “It’s not that far away. Grandmother always told me stories about Harrisburg. I think it’s fated that I go there to live.”