gods with a little g Read online

  PREVISION

  From my perch on a wooden stool behind the counter, I watch the angel disappear along with the daylight. I see a lot of Rosary’s comings and goings from this spot where I keep the shoppe’s books after school. There are the regularly scheduled donut pickups across the lot at the Donut Hole. There are the unscheduled walk-ins here at the shoppe. And there is the angel, drifting in and out with the shadows, wanting to hold us all together or lay us all to waste.

  * * *

  I don’t know that anyone wakes up in the morning with plans to have her fortune told. It’s a thing a body decides as the day slips away and takes with it all its expectations, all the power and hope it rolled in with. People pull into the Psychic Encounter Shoppe starting in the late afternoon, surprised to find themselves there but hungry for something a donut cannot provide and faith does not ensure. What they want is that sweet little illusion of control, and my aunt Beverly, resident psychic, serves it right up.

  When a car pulls into the shoppe’s lot, I close the curtains around my counter to give the illusion of privacy. The curtains are made from Aunt Bev’s old sheets, tie-dyed, and when they are fully closed, there’s a comforting feeling of being cocooned in rainbow vomit. I pull my feet up onto the rung of the stool so the sight of my frayed and graffitied Converse peeking out from under the tie-dye won’t ruin the mood. I listen to the shy voice of a new customer admitting to a weakness for the future. I fold their shame into a rose.

  DRINKING GAMES FOR TEENS

  Thanks to the refinery’s constant smoke and flame, the sun doesn’t set in Rosary so much as it crashes for the night. As the sun gives up in Rosary today, Peggy, she said her name was, finally stops thanking Aunt Bev for all the truth she’s been given, for Aunt Bev’s odd reassurance, “You will always have money, but then you will always lose it.” This is the psychic’s refrain, and Peggy, having eaten it up, is better now. When she leaves, Aunt Bev pulls my curtains open, drops money in the safe. She washes her hands like a doctor wrapping up after an exam. Then she dims the light to rest her eyes, and in the fresh darkness, a new mystery unfolds in the empty lot.

  There is something between the angel’s wings, a bulky shadow, and it doesn’t move.

  Aunt Bev settles on the couch with a small green pillow over her eyes. I bring her a glass of water, then grab the broom as quietly as I can to gather all the psychic dust left by Peggy and her desperate need. I sweep it outside and then slip out the door after it.

  It’s quiet out and I can hear my feet crunching on the dry, packed dirt, so I slip off my shoes and carry them. I will risk a little tetanus to be a better sneak. The shadow in the lot is lit from inside with a floating warm light and in ten more barefoot steps I am close enough to see that this shadow has a rain flap and is staked to the ground.

  I knock on its zippered door. With my voice. Because it would be stupid to knock on a tent.

  “Knock knock.”

  The light inside stops moving and there’s rustling, shuffling. The sounds of something being hidden. Then throat-clearing, and in a tone that is trying to reassure me that there’s nothing to see here, that I’ve interrupted nothing, a greeting. “Just a second.”

  I recognize Cy’s voice, from wasted afternoons at Fast Eddie’s Tire Salvage, of course, but before that, from wasted weeks at Bible camp last year. That was when he was first trying to be a Dickhead but couldn’t really cut it. When he still liked to be called Cyrus.

  Cy’s mouth is all braces. And braces just don’t fit the reputation of a badass that most Dickheads want to pretend they deserve. Braces tell a story of many, many trips to the orthodontist, with a parent, and Dickheads deny hanging out with or obeying parents. Braces tell a story of hygiene and care. Dickheads don’t wash because that would destroy the stink that grows underneath their balls, stink they like to reach down and gather onto their fingers and then rub on other Dickheads’ faces in the genuine hope of making them puke. Braces tell a story of giving a fuck. And Dickheads don’t do that.

  They also don’t have tents.

  Once Cy figures out which zipper goes which way to actually open the door, he looks relieved to see it’s me. He peeks his head out to make sure I’m alone and whispers, “Come in.”

  I climb into the tent and offer a standard Dickhead greeting.

  “What the fuck, Cy?”

  Cy is sitting on a fancy sleeping bag and moves over for me to join him. It’s silky under my hand, plush, a burgundy color. I didn’t know sleeping bags came in burgundy. His super-cool flashlight sits steady in the middle of the tent now like a lantern, pointing up at the plastic sky. It’s nice in here.

  There’s a pillow.

  None of these are accessories that will improve Cy’s Dickhead reputation.

  “I got kicked out,” he says. The story of getting kicked out doesn’t match any of the stories told by the braces that shine across his teeth. I don’t know what to say.

  He reaches behind the pillow. The pillowcase has orange flowers planted across it, and looking at it makes me wish for my own bed, has me feeling tired of all the Cys and Peggys of the world, of all their confusion and need.

  There’s more of that rustling as he opens the paper bag he’s stashed and pulls out beers. We crack them open and say, “Fuck Fast Eddie.”

  * * *

  We have barely made it through that first beer when there’s a banging from outside, metal against metal. It is coming from the direction of the shoppe and I realize that I forgot to lock the door when I left. I scramble my way out of the tent, whispering a scream at myself, “No, no, no.”

  I run across the lot toward the shoppe, its front door, and the man standing there with a hammer in his hand. It shines like hot iron under the shoppe’s red porchlight as he swings it against the door one more time. He doesn’t hear me coming and I’m already in the parking lot when Cy climbs out of the tent after me, his flashlight on full blast. With Cy’s light behind me, my shadow falls giant over the shoppe’s front window, the palm painted there on the glass. The man and his hammer freeze. And then he runs for a truck I can just make out a little way up the road.

  Two nails have been driven into the gold and silver mandala Aunt Bev painted on the shoppe’s front door, and hanging from them is a piece of cardboard. Written across it in bright red marker: LEVITICUS 20.

  Aunt Bev is on the couch, right where I left her, but she’s sitting up now. When she sees the look on my face, the cardboard in my hand, she holds her fingers to her temples and says, “Let me guess.” For a real psychic she does a pretty good impersonation of a fake one. She moans and rolls her eyes back in her head. “I’m getting something … a white man. With a hammer. And something about my being an abomination of all that is holy? Does this mean anything to you?”

  She’s trying to make me laugh with that question. The psychic’s stock-in-trade. Does this mean anything to you?

  But this does mean something to me. It means that anonymous letters aren’t enough anymore for the Thumpers who want Aunt Bev gone, scared off like the last Rosary psychic, like the last Catholic family and their church, like anyone who doesn’t speak English like it is the first language they ever tasted and ain’t it great. They all ran off, were run off, exhausted by Rosary’s hate. Or worse. If the threats are being walked right up to the front door now, what’s to stop them from turning the handle, from going right inside?

  Locking the door would be a good start.

  Because when Leviticus is delivered after dark with red ink and hardware, it is a threat. Leviticus 20, the Bible’s instructions about how to handle those doing evil in the sight of the Lord, “stone them with stones,” it says. Not very poetic, but it gets the point across.

  None of this is news to Aunt Bev. She already knows. She probably knew before I left the shoppe, maybe that’s why she looked so tired. And she didn’t tell me. Because I’m supposed to know this stuff myself, but I was distracted by Cy’s stupid tent and I was drinking a beer and I forg
ot to lock the door. Selfish. So selfish to forget that in this town, every threat comes with a promise.

  Before I can say any of this, Cy comes into the shoppe, his flashlight still set to blinding. “I think he thought I was the cops, he was running so fast.”

  As Cy clicks off his light, Aunt Bev takes LEVITICUS 20 from me, uncurling my fingers from around the cardboard. She rips it in half, drops it in the trash, and says, “Stones, maybe, but this”—she nods toward the garbage can—“this will never hurt me. Now go on with your friends. I’m going to bed.”

  As she heads for her room, she adds, “Lock the door this time.”

  A GULP OF SWALLOWS

  Sissy. She’s blond and curly, always, I don’t even know if it’s natural or not. It’s pretty glorious, though. She’s usually quiet, but when she’s not, she’s saying something so weird, it’s funny. Or so funny, it’s weird. She’s too pretty to be as funny as she is, a fact we have all learned from the movies.

  Sissy’s at the end of the greasy corduroy couch that sits in the center of the tire yard’s cement bay floor. Next to her is Bird, and everyone always knows right where Bird is. You can’t take your eyes off him. Especially if you want to. Believe me, I have tried. Then Mo, and she’s half under Bird or half over him, somehow half of her is always missing along with half of her clothes, which are always too few, too short, too cold. Half of her face is behind her hair, which is blond too, like Sis’s, but flat and stringy, like she’s always just come in from the rain. I get cold looking at Mo. Aunt Bev says pay attention to that, the feeling in your body when you’re with someone, the temperatures that repeat around them. I just think that Mo should put on a sweatshirt.

  Next to Mo there’s Cy. Or there might be me. Sweatshirt on, hood up, bundled against the chill no one else seems to feel.

  On the table in front of us, which is not a table but a stack of pallets, there are beers. On the floor around us, there are beers. Under our backpacks with our supposed futures inside, there are beers.

  * * *

  Cy. Bird. Mo. Sissy is lying across the couch, her head partly covering Mo’s legs, which are bare below the tattoos on the inside of her left thigh, little v’s floating up and up toward her vagina, vortex, vying for some kind of warmth up there. Sissy is humming “Amazing Grace.” It’s not unpleasant.

  Cy and I have the map that slides behind the cracked plastic case on the wall by Fast Eddie’s office. It’s one of those old-time maps from when the tire yard was just a gas station without a city on a road to somewhere else. We’re choosing different destinations based on how far we think we could go on a single tank of gas in my dad’s retired post office jeep. This will never happen, involving, as it does, us, driving, and somewhere else. The game is to guess the mileage. Whoever’s guess is the farthest off from what we measure using our pinkie fingers as guides against the map’s legend, that person has to drink.

  * * *

  Sissy. Mo is focused across the warehouse, watching for Bird to come out of the bathroom. Cy is on his feet, taking this chance to move into Bird’s spot, which is empty now and still warm, so he can grab the last beer from the bag at Mo’s feet. Sissy’s response to this is made clear by the impressive belch she makes after she beats Cy to the beer he was wanting and drains it in almost one gulp. She crumples the can in her hand and throws it at Cy, who sits back down where he was.

  Cy is Bird’s disciple, made in his image or whatever, except less handsome and less tough, or maybe it’s just that he actually has something to lose and Bird does not. Mainly, he is kept busy taking orders from Bird or waiting to take orders from Bird. In their spare time, Bird and Cy beat up on each other for fun. When Bird isn’t going to school, he calls Cy and Cy stays home too. Like a good little shadow. Otherwise, they are the same, white—like we all are, like it seems all of Rosary is now—young, and dumb as the used tires wasting around us.

  * * *

  Sissy. Mo. Cy is bent down tying his shoes like his life depends on it. The longer he takes, the less climbing he has to do. Cy is afraid of heights and Bird is climbing the tires, a series of steel racks that are bolted into the walls of the warehouse, which means Cy has to climb too.

  The used tires are sorted onto these racks according to a plan that’s only clear to Fast Eddie and maybe God. Brand or style? Or wear? It might be about whether you can see the top of that president’s head when you stick a dime in the tread. I’m not old enough to vote yet, but so far this seems about the only practical use for a president’s head that I’ve heard.

  Bird is going to hang upside down from the highest rack of tires until the top of his head is filled with blood and he’ll look so peaceful doing it that pretty soon we’ll all join him. Me, Sissy, Mo, and Cy. Upside-down Dickheads. If we let our shirts fall, let gravity cover our faces, if we don’t tuck the hems into the top of our pants to hide our tits, Eddie will come out of his office and toss us beers. The game then is to catch them and drink them upside down. It’s harder than you think.

  TEENS GONE WILD

  The tire yard’s customers call him Ed. We don’t call him anything. We flash our tits, we get our beer. We say, “Fuck Fast Eddie,” as we cheers, and then we swallow them down.

  No one worries about being caught when the bay of Fast Eddie’s Tire Salvage turns into Fast Eddie’s Teenage Wild Kingdom. When school lets out, the last bell rings into the wind changing direction over Rosario Bay and the smell from the refinery begins its afternoon tour of streets and houses. The smell is so bad that no one wonders that Eddie’s door comes rolling down by 3:30 p.m., and no one wants to go outside and see where the kids have gone anyway. We run to the tire yard from our different directions, over the back fence, through the side door, jump into the bay from the front lot, but once inside we all do the same things. We climb the walls of tires, swing from the rafters, and wait for the beer to pour once Bird or another Dickhead jumps onto the door, holds on there as his weight rolls the big metal door down, shutting us in with the wasted tire smells, asphalt, and spent rubber. It gets in our hair and soaks into our skin, but no one can smell it over the smells from the refinery in the afternoon air.

  Climbing on the spent tires that are waiting to be burned or retreaded or for one more chance at the road, soaking up the petroleum through our skin, getting drunk on cheap beer, we don’t worry about being caught because we already are. We’ll know how these tires feel our whole lives, whether we succeed at rolling out of here or not. We see it at home, when we go there, we see it on the faces of parents too tired to hope.

  My dad wasn’t always one of those tired kind. When my mom was alive he was different, whole. When she died, though, he fell right apart, and I’ve been collecting the pieces of him since.

  NIGHT OF THE LIVING DAD

  Parents come in all kinds of monster. My mom, for example, is a ghost.

  My dad is basically a zombie, like the kind in those old movies from back when zombies were a piece of cake. Dad is just another sad old white person in his Sunday best. Too single-minded and slow to be dangerous, he ends up being more annoying than anything else. He just keeps on trudging.

  If I were going to put Dad out of my misery, I’d start by cutting him up into tiny, thoughtful pieces. I’d cube him, like the top chefs do on television. Hold his flesh down tight under my fingertips, my knuckles a guide for the blade. Then I’d place these pieces of him far from each other, a distance too hard to travel without a brain to scoot them along. I’d keep his hands away from his wrists, put one shoulder under the kitchen sink, an elbow under the back porch. And even if I did this, he wouldn’t change. One hand would still crawl toward his wallet, still pull out his bank card to help preserve Rosary’s heritage and then again for every infomercial about starving children, still pull out a wad of cash for the collection plate on Sundays. Giving out money is as natural to Dad as holding his dick while pissing, the cash arcs out in a stream.

  I could bury his feet on either end of the block. And even if I d
id this, worked through his tendons and gristle, tore him apart, his feet would still stuff themselves into his orthopedic shoes in the morning, walk themselves to the retired postal jeep that we pretend is a car a normal family might have, and push the gas pedal down until he arrived at the post office to work another shift on the march toward infinity. Or retirement. Same difference.

  Would anyone at the PO even notice if Dad’s feet came to work without his face because I’d hidden it in our mailbox? And when some other gray-skinned zombie shuddered up in his little postal jeep, picked up Dad’s face, rode around with it all day, and then dropped it in the bin back at the station, would that finally be enough to put the postmark to Dad’s dead-letter life?

  Probably not. Probably no one would notice the difference. And I probably won’t dismember my dad today even if I would be doing him a favor. Today I’ll keep him together.

  Again.

  WAYS TO CLOSE A PRAYER

  When Mom was first in and out of the hospital, I was too young to really get who was in charge. It was supposed to be them, Mom and Dad together, the big bosses. Mom and Dad and sometimes God. But the way Mom and Dad talked about her getting better was confusing. They didn’t seem to agree on who to trust, argued quietly, politely as ever, about where to put our faith. Like faith was some kind of cash we’d been keeping under the mattress and now we needed a safer spot for it in case the house burned down. They talked about God, like before, like always, but also about doctors, lots of them, and their words all kind of ran together, so I did my best to sort it out.