gods with a little g Read online

  I would go through the official bedside-with-parents prayers, the ones Dad started leading me through because Mom was too tired to tuck me in. Mom’s church, the one that used to fly through the air at bedtime, brought alive by her two hands, sat closed and quiet in the embroidered pockets of her robe, all its people wrapped around a tissue she never seemed to let go of anymore. At bedtimes now, it was the Church of Dad, a serious place where nothing rhymed. I would go through those prayers with him and then, once the light in the hall was off, I’d slip out of bed, knees back to the carpet, and pray for real.

  I would start by crossing Rudolph’s white feet on top of each other and petting him until he started purring. A cat’s prayer, I figured. Then I’d whisper into my folded hands what I couldn’t say with Dad listening.

  Doctor God, it’s me again.

  Thank You for taking care of Mommy like Daddy says You are.

  I know You are busy and have all the sparrows of the field to keep an eye on, but I was hoping that You could please not be late anymore to Mommy’s appointments and keeping her waiting with the sick people and that same old copy of Family Circle with the meat loaf recipe, especially when she is getting better and is always early.

  It makes her tired. And I hate meat loaf.

  Amen. And in Your light.

  And if You could point some of that light to the insurance stuff she has to work on instead of playing with me, just enough so all the papers would catch on fire and burn up like your bushes in the Bible, that would make us all feel better too.

  In Jesus’s name. And when He takes over Your practice, maybe He could get some new magazines.

  SHADOW OF THE VALLEY

  All my prayers didn’t work. Neither did Dad’s.

  Before Mom was sick, when she would tuck me in, she’d stay by my bed until I was asleep, or she thought I was. She would kiss my forehead, pulling the blankets up one more time before she turned away. I’d open my eyes then and watch her go, watching until she turned off the hall light. Just as she flipped the switch, I’d close my eyes tight, so the light would burn her shape into the darkness, a blazing pure white against the black of my eyelids and the night, more real than any electricity. That’s how prayers with Mom felt too. Like the God we were talking to was bigger, brighter, more powerful than all the darkness around us.

  Nothing else ever felt as real.

  RELIGIOUS ORGANIZATIONS

  The city of Rosary’s Yellow Pages contains twenty-seven churches. The main thing these churches have in common is an inability to have the letter t appear in their names, or anywhere in their listings, without turning it into a cross at least once. The idea of Jesus Himself hanging right in there for our sins must appear smack-dab in the middle of an address or the center of a pastor’s name. God help those who can’t help themselves.

  Under C, for Crosses and Their Misuses, and under F, for Fraternal Organizations and General Fuckery, you’ll find The Council for the Peaceful Reconciliation of Rosary and Sky. The council takes up most of Dad’s time on Thursday evenings and the first Saturday afternoon of every month. Its focus is on ideas like reform, family values, increased revenues, and extending the benefits of its own membership. Dad’s job as a council member seems mostly to be about writing extremely awkward correspondence. The letters are mainly to people who were made to feel unwelcome when Rosary was first incorporated, when McClure County broke out into angry red cities just like this one, the way a teenager breaks out in zits. The people who would have none of Rosary’s anger and isolation, these are the people Rosary wishes would return, so we can prove how nice we can play if you just give us a chance. Rosary is like that bully in the schoolyard who looks around when the dust settles and says, “Where did everybody go?”

  BEAT CUTE

  Violence does help pass the time. In this way, Bird is like Rosary High’s own time machine. A day might be dragging on, the clock clearly broken, and the next thing you know, Bird is smashing someone’s head into a locker and it’s time to go home. He usually reserves his best efforts for the Thumpers, but sooner or later we all take a turn.

  Today, it’s mine. And I’m not alone. There’s a new guy at school. He is hard to miss in his XXL button-down and a precisely knotted tie that screams hard-core Thumper. At least, that is what I’m thinking as we pass each other in the quad and he smiles down at me like he cannot wait to share the Good News. His look is so sincere, so open, that even I am kind of caught up for a second, and this is the exact moment when Bird decides to welcome him to Rosary High by knocking his head and my head straight into each other. Hard. Hard enough that the new kid throws up, chocolate milk and red licorice, all over the three of us. A pretty weird diet for high school.

  Not that I know he’s thrown up, because I’m passed out on the hot cement of the quad and dreaming of sugar melting in an Easy-Bake Oven, the black scar ruining the pink metal and my mouth watering. When I open my eyes, it’s to Bird kicking this kid in his big, soft stomach, Bird saying, “You messed up my shoes, you pig,” and the new guy not saying anything, even when Bird kicks him again, his chocolate and sticky red Converse leaving streaks on the fancy shirt, streaks that look like smears of shit and blood, and even when Bird kicks him again and shouts, “Is that all? What else is in you?”

  The new kid says nothing.

  And he still doesn’t say anything when a girl I’ve never seen before either, with long brown hair and tight jeans, comes up behind Bird, flips her Technicolor bangs back, and says, “Spencer Doncaster.” Like she is taking roll. Like she is dying to get her ass kicked too. And then she says it again.

  “Spencer Doncaster, that’s my brother you’re fucking with.”

  Only teachers call Bird by his real name. And even they look a little scared when they do.

  When Bird turns around to explain this to the new girl, she hits him across the face with the long side of her forearm before he can. I am thinking that this is a really good way to break an arm and I am hypnotized by the mess of silver bangle bracelets flashing and jingling in the sun as she swings back and hits him again. Her bangles come away as red as licorice with Bird’s blood and he can barely push “Fucker” out of his swollen lips, lips still too kissable, more kissable than is right.

  She leans down to her brother and strokes his head. “Win, you okay?”

  He doesn’t answer her. He speaks to me.

  “Hi.”

  That smile again.

  “Hi,” I say. And, “You got a little something on your shirt.” All I can manage before teachers are there with Jay, Rosary High’s security guard, and we are all escorted to the principal’s office.

  REPENTANCE

  “Helen.” Dad is out of breath, which is typical, his shoes squeaking across the tile as he lurches over to me, leans down, and looks in my eyes to see if I am okay. “Helen?”

  He seems to be himself and I am relieved. Sometimes, by the end of the day, Dad is falling apart, and I spend some time bringing him tea, making up things about school that seem like they might have happened to a person who wanted to be there, that seem like he would feel good hearing. But this is only lunchtime and he looks good. I nod at him and scoot to the end of the bench so he can sit down. He can be a total embarrassment—he is a dad—but sometimes even when he isn’t being embarrassing, when he is wearing his postal uniform, I have a hard time talking to him. Since the day he picked me up from fifth grade, took me out of a math test so we could go to the hospital and say goodbye to Mom. He knows this and sits in silence.

  Now we are only waiting for the parents of the new kids to arrive so they will have someone to represent them in the principal’s office, in this reconciling we are always expected to have whenever there is an incident of “campus violence.” I heard Mrs. Curran, the secretary, giving directions to Rosary High when she called the number in their file. The Epsworthy family has just moved to town.

  And coming down the hallway is their leader.

  “Don’t even think about
repenting, sinners, you don’t have time for that shit. Excuse me. You don’t have time for that crap. This place is going to blow sky-high! Get a load of that!”

  * * *

  Once we become friends, I learn that Winthrop and Rainbolene Epsworthy never expect their mom. Even though she is alive, mostly, she never leaves the house. Their dad, though, is almost never in it. He drives around Rosary in this van painted with sheaves of wheat and LOST CITY BREAD written on the side, bought from some bakery where they used to live in Alaska, near another refinery there. And though there is a speaker mounted to the top of the van that connects to a microphone he uses freely to broadcast the troubles of his current lost city, Rosary, all of which he relates to the existence of Rosary’s oil refinery—and to boost the sales of the life insurance policies it is his business to sell—this isn’t enough for him. Mr. Epsworthy needs to be heard.

  * * *

  When Mr. Epsworthy sees my dad, he narrows his eyes and sniffs. As if he knows all about it, what it is to fall apart every day and have your kid put you back together and how that can kind of stink. The vomit on Winthrop doesn’t faze Mr. Epsworthy at all, though. He hugs Winthrop and Rainbolene before he even says a word to them, holds Winthrop’s cheek to the light to better see his bruises, and then touches his shirt where the cloth has dried red.

  “It’s not blood, Pop,” Winthrop says.

  Mr. Epsworthy sniffs up and down Winthrop’s shirtfront. “A little blood,” he says, “but mostly … licorice?” He has a very good nose.

  Winthrop nods.

  “Your mom packed licorice in your bag today.” Mr. Epsworthy doesn’t sound like a crazy person anymore, or an insurance salesman. He sounds like a dad. And like all the dads I know, especially my own, he sounds like he has just lost a fight.

  Winthrop nods again, and for the first time since I opened my eyes in the quad and saw his face, I think he might cry. “And I ate all of it.”

  Mr. Epsworthy puts his arm around his son, and then Winthrop looks less like a giant man-baby, roly-poly in his stomach and face, stretching his ruined shirt and bursting the top of his dress pants. He just looks like someone’s kid, being held like he needs to be held, until we hear Principal Harrison opening her door and Mr. Epsworthy lets him go.

  A FAKE CHINESE RUBBER PLANT

  “Before I call in Spencer and Mrs. Doncaster, I want to have a quick chat with your two families in private,” Principal Harrison says, so we follow her into her office as if we have a choice. First Winthrop and Rainbolene and their dad, then me and mine, who is dragging his feet, as usual. There is barely room for all of us between the file cabinets and a too-tall, sad plant leaning in toward the lamp on the desk like it could possibly get the nurturing it needs from that light, enough so it can uproot and walk out of here.

  Harrison’s chair wheels screech like someone just put the Haunted House Sounds album on in the library next door and she clasps her hands over a stack of papers that might have been there since before computers were invented. Her joined hands in this pose of patience let us know that she is going to be very reasonable about this.

  She aims her reasonable self first toward Winthrop. “Winthrop. Are you all right?”

  He looks pretty bad and, based on what I saw between him and his dad in the waiting room, I expect he’ll lose it when he talks about Bird beating on him. But he doesn’t talk about Bird at all.

  “Nothing happened, Mrs. Harrison,” Winthrop says.

  My dad groans when he hears this, but no one pays attention when postmen groan. Winthrop and Rainbolene’s dad is lost in reading the earthquake safety poster on the back of Harrison’s door, sometimes laughing out loud and saying softly, “Get a load of that.” And Rainbolene, who is twisting her bracelets around her wrist, scratching blood off the silver, doesn’t even look up.

  “Excuse me?”

  “Nothing happened, Mrs. Harrison. I fell.”

  “But … there’s blood.” She looks at his shirt, linen, I think, and a pale pink. Too nice for Rosary High, and so Rosary High, in the form of Bird’s fists and feet, made sure it would never be coming back.

  “It’s licorice.” Rainbolene offers this without looking up. “That’s licorice on Win’s shirt and some chocolate drink. Slim Kwik? It’s not blood.” She looks at the clock above the door. “Can we go now, Mrs. Harrison? I don’t want to miss final period because my brother is clumsy.”

  “Mr. Epsworthy!” Harrison says then. Her effort at patience collects like spit in the corners of her mouth but her eyes do not rest even for a moment on Rainbolene. There is no earthquake safety poster to prepare Rosary High’s principal for the fact of a student like Rainbolene in her midst. One who knows herself and what she’s capable of so well, one who makes the very fact of Principal Harrison, and the gates she is there to keep, perfectly irrelevant.

  “Find an interior wall!” Mr. Epsworthy giggles. “Cover your head!” But he pulls himself away from the poster he’s been reading and says, “Principal”—he reads the nameplate at the edge of her desk—“Harrison.” And he makes a short bow as he says her last name. “It all boils down to this…”

  As soon as Winthrop and Rainbolene hear these words they sit down together on the small bench under Harrison’s sad fern. Then Winthrop gives Rainbolene a little push and he pats the seat that has opened up between them. He gives me that smile, one that says either he’s here to save my soul or we’re going to hell anyway, so let’s make the most of it. And I sit down.

  Mr. Epsworthy says, “Roanoke.”

  Rain looks carefully at her nails then, they are short and perfect and painted a light green that reminds me of lime snow cones. I realize that she is studying her nails because she is trying not to laugh.

  “Everybody loves Atlantis, there’s a hotel named after it, for crying out loud, but Vegas hasn’t cornered the market on Sodom and Gomorrah, all the lost cities are celebrated, in fact, all the lost things.”

  Principal Harrison looks like she’s the one whose head is hurting.

  “Do you watch any crime dramas, Mrs. Harrison? Any police procedurals?” When he says these words, “crime dramas” and “police procedurals,” Epsworthy’s voice slows down, falls into a whisper. It is riveting for one second and then it is boring, and that seems to be part of the plan. “Everyone is in search of the perfect crime, the perfect criminal, maybe her own perfect escape. We lovers of the lost continents are in search of the perfect decadence.”

  As he returns to the ancient cities, his voice rises again. On either side of me, Winthrop and Rainbolene move their mouths in chorus with him as he says, “Transcendent decadence.”

  Harrison tries to interrupt him, but her protests turn to silent blushing at his next words.

  “Orgies! Indulgence! In these stories of what we’ve lost, there are no children. We want to know that they deserved it, those populations that disappeared, so there can’t be any children. If there were children among them, then they must have all been innocents, which means we are going to have to try harder, to be like them, to be worthy.” His hands lift. His fingers wiggle.

  Epsworthy’s version of the chosen ones reminds me of my mother’s clasped hands, the pretend people there, wiggling. I see her lifting her index fingers together, touching their tips. Here is the church, here is the steeple. Her wedding ring flashing in the light from my bedside. Open the door—she’d flip her hands over—and see all the people, and as she wiggled her fingers I’d snuggle into the blankets, heaven right at hand, all around me in the form of my mom and Rudolph, my partner in prayer. Rudolph loved this show as much as I did, we’d watch Mom’s fingers together, hypnotized. Again, I said to her, always, again, and she’d do it again and again until I was ready for sleep, safe in the idea that eternity was in my mother’s grasp.

  “Again,” I say. Out loud. That bump on my head must have done more damage than I thought. And I am so embarrassed. But not as much as when Mr. Epsworthy turns to me and repeats what I can’t believe I�
��ve said.

  “Yes, by God, again, there’s a smart one there. It’s all going to happen again.” And he lifts his hands to the pressboard sky of Harrison’s office once more. His fingers are the people of a lost colony that has nothing to do whatsoever with schoolyard bullying, a colony ascended to the stars.

  We all fall silent, transfixed by the tiny rapture before us. Harrison’s eyes follow those fingers to the perforated ceiling, and Dad, well, there’s nothing he likes better than the end of days. Even though he’s all but worn out from rising again, he’s excited for everyone else to join him.

  Mr. Epsworthy takes a deep breath. Gathers himself. “Does that answer your question?”

  Of course it doesn’t answer her question about what happened in the quad, but it certainly has made it so she isn’t going to ask Mr. Epsworthy another one, probably ever. I feel like I should applaud, and I push my hands between my knees so I won’t. I look at my dad, standing as still as stone, as dead as Epsworthy is alive, and we all wait for Harrison. She has started tidying the withered pile of papers on her desk, positioning her stapler just so.

  “Well.” She clears her throat. “I think we are close to wrapping this up.”

  Has she forgotten about me? I hold my breath. But no such luck. The haze that Epsworthy created in the room to protect his own children doesn’t cover me.

  “Helen, let’s hear your side of the story.” She takes in my safe position between Winthrop and Rainbolene and then points to the chair right before her. “Join me.”

  As I stand, Winthrop whispers in a tiny cartoon voice, “I’ll miss you!” and Dad tries to catch my eye, to stare me into doing what I know he thinks is the right thing here. For Dad, right always means the biblical right, black-and-white right. When I don’t look at him, he keeps angling my way, until he almost falls over.