Personal Saviors
Wesley Gibson
Published by Chelsea Station Editions at Smashwords
New York
Personal Saviors by Wesley Gibson
copyright © 2011 by Wesley Gibson
All rights reserved.
No part of this book may be reproduced in any form without written permission from the publisher, except by a reviewer, who may quote brief passages in a review where appropriate credit is given; nor may any part of this book be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means—electronic, photocopying, recording, or other—without specific written permission from the publisher.
All of the names, characters, places, and incidents in this book are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Book design by Peachboy Distillery & Design
Cover painting “Like a Lamb to the Slaughter, Tom in his Easter Suit” by Linda Griggs, used by permission of the artist.
Published by Chelsea Station Editions
362 West 36th Street, Suite 2R
New York, NY 10018
www.chelseastationeditions.com
info@chelseastationeditions.com
Library of Congress Control Number: 2011931398
ISBN: 978-0-9832851-3-7
First U.S. edition, 2011
Chapters
Theirs was the only house. The rest was lots, acres of dirt cut up into rectangles by string and pink-ribboned stakes. It was a mile from the airport, this neighborhood that wasn’t yet; and bug sized planes inched across skies blue with summer, grey with storm, or fired in dusk. The ziggy zag of curly plane smoke zippered all these skies, and Paul liked to watch it unravel into white horsehair, white web, white glaze. He’d watch it into nothing. There wasn’t much else to do and these heat-striken Southern days could knock the will and desire for anything from almost anyone.
He hadn’t wanted to move here. Mamma had. Rupert had. Or Paul thought Rupert had. It was hard to know. Rupert lived in a tower called Rupert. He talked for beer; he talked at T.V. “Stupid bastards,” he’d yell to football. Paul thought Rupert would have been as happy in a tent, a cave, the back of a bus; as long as there was beer and somebody to bring it; as long as there was a window into other worlds where he spent his passion.
Mamma took tests in magazines. “No,” she’d say, firm-jawed, pen poised. Ink couldn’t be erased if it turned out you weren’t top ten, well-adjusted, properly managed. She tried to be honest.
“Do you feel you’re getting enough vegetables?” she’d ask, her black hair sparkling like newly mined coal under the table lamp she’d dragged closer. “Always. Most of the time. Sometimes. Hardly ever.”
Or. “Honey, do I show enough interest in your profession?” Rupert was a carpet layer, and he’d say, “Huh?” She wasn’t asking from inside a television.
You didn’t have to reply. She did it for you. “Most of the time,” she’d say, circling B. “Somewhat involved. I guess I could do better.”
Magazines were responsible for church. Almost never, she’d had to mark. Christmas and Easter had saved her from never.
“How much do you think you know about God?” she asked, chewing the cap to her pen. All her Papermates were dented from her teeth.
“Hmmm,” Paul said. He was eleven, almost twelve. He wanted to do well too. “He tells us what to do. He has a long beard and a long blue robe. He likes candles and grape juice is His blood. He lives in heaven where you get to go if you’re good after you die.”
“Anything else?”
“Oh, sure. Lots of stuff. Thou should not lie. The little pieces of stale bread are His body. Jesus was His son.”
“Somewhat knowledgeable.”
Church meant Sears: black ventilated shoes; a package of socks; a BOYS blue suit; a bowtie- polka-dotted; high heels for her. “What do you think?” she asked, profiling her foot in the mirror. They sniffed perfumes from her saturated wrists until their noses stung. After a few huffs, you couldn’t tell one from the other, but Paul pretended to. She loved samples.
That Sunday morning she made creamed chip beef on toast, standing by the stove with a spatula, pebbles of grease hopping from the pan to a frazzled robe, string dangling from the arms like bait. She wasn’t going herself. She knew all about religion.
Paul walked to the elementary school where they were holding services. There was no church yet. He kicked the same dirt clod all the way to meet God; and it streaked the baked pie of the new asphalt, which was as black as the new shoes it sucked at. By the time he got to the push-open doors, he’d kicked the softball of dirt into a marble.
The people in church were brethren; and they gathered in the elementary school cafeteria, which was vast as an airplane hangar and smelled of pink school cake. Windows were sunk into the walls high above his head; and he strained after the clouds floating by them, like barges of smoke.
Every cough was startling. The preacher’s altar was a lunch table draped with cloths bleached and starched into sacred. Reverend Farrel was a Chihuahua of a man in a blue BOYS suit from Sears. He said they didn’t need no fancy church to worship their Lord. All they needed was the Word, which they got; and two or more, which they got. They had everything they needed for salvation.
Paul’s feet just touched the floor. The molded plastic chair, no taller than him and the color of barracks, was hard and armless. Gripping the sides, his fingers explored the underside of the seat and discovered the imprint of teeth fossilized in gum.
Reverend Farrel screamed, red-faced, for him to come down, to give his life to Christ. If he didn’t, the gates of heaven would be shut to him forever. Jesus would say, “Go, for I never knew you.” You’d burn.
Then, in a hoarse, played-out voice, he asked his wife, Millie, to play “What a Friend We Have in Jesus.” She banged the keys as if she were trying to flush her friend Jesus out from inside the piano. Her face was pink with some passion.
Describe light; not the blisters of gold streaking trumpets on a football field, or the silver fissures of the stars, or the sun we are blind to, or the grey, shadowed hole of the moon, or the white breast of a forty watt bulb. Describe light. Light unstuck. Light unburdened. Light itself. Because if you asked Paul, after the first firsts of Farrel’s voice, to describe the glimmers of dread sparkling with hope, the infant inklings of his belief, winking like mica he’d discovered in his heart, you would have been asking for this: a description of light.
| | |
Helen’s son was in the doghouse. He’d done odd things before: vows of silence, wearing lipstick to bed, obsessive bathing. She could ignore silences, tutored in Rupert’s; and the baths had trickled away by themselves to one before bedtime. But the lipstick had bloodied her linens in red wax and she’d had to drag out the destruction-of-property lecture to get rid of that.
Helen pinned the kaput elastic of Rupert’s underwear to a frayed corner of dishrag, and glanced again to the small, doggy door. The sun had carved a slice of Paul’s leg from the dark. She couldn’t quite ignore this. Their Chihuahua, Peanuts, had been hit by an electrician. She’d told Paul last evening, and he hadn’t cried, but had gone silently into his room. Later, when she’d peeked in for goodnight, he’d been reading a Batman comic. “Night,” he’d said, not looking up.
She went over and bent down. You could still smell Peanuts, the fur and meat of him. “What’s up?” she said.
“Nothing.”
“You can’t do nothing in a dog house. You have to be doing something.”
He didn’t answer.
“You can tell me,” she said.
“I’m playing a trick on Rupert.”
“What kind of trick?”
“A trick-trick.”
“Have you done something to make Rupert mad?”
“No.”
She checked his voice for lies, couldn’t find any. “Is he looking for you?”
“Maybe.”
“Does he want to tell you something?”
“How should I know?”
She flicked the sunlit crescent of leg. “This better not be about anything to do with Rupert. I’d like some peace and quiet around here tonight if you two don’t mind.”
She walked back over her newly seeded yard. It was wisped in grass. She pinned a sheet to the other side of Rupert’s briefs. In several places, water-heavy towels were trying to drag the whole line to the ground.
She often felt like parenting was a complicated game she’d lost the rules to.
Magazine quizzes helped.
How often do you yell at your child?
Could your husband tell you the last time your child went to the dentist?
Does your child have unusual preoccupations?
What’s your child’s favorite meal?
If you had to save your husband, or your child, which would you chose?
| | |
The first time, she pulled up beside Paul in a hotshot of a car. Sin-red and gurgling gas, it wasn’t any taller than he was. He looked down on her.
“Hey,” he said, on his way home. All around them, brilliantined and Aqua-netted Christians, smelling of soap, souls polished as Tupperware, were opening the doors to station wagons and starting up fender-rusted Plymouths. Her hotrod spit sun in his eyes. He squinted, swallowed in heat, leaking all over.
“Need a ride?” she said. Rhinestone earrings, big as clams, glittered about the arc of her neck. She pulled her sunglasses down to the tip of her nose, a woman who thought she was a movie.
“Paul?” Reverend Farrel called. He was still shaking hands on the steps.
She called back, “I suppose it’s a crime to offer somebody a ride, hot as it is.”
“Paul!” Farrel’s voice lassoed him, and he shrugged her a goodbye.
The murmuring hand-shakers gathered around Farrel said she was Velvet Archer, a liquor-drinking, mini-dressing, home-wrecking, breast-baring, blaspheming heathen. Marriages shattered under her go-go boots.
She’ll come back to the Lord,” Reverend Farrel said. “She’s done this before.”
But she squealed out, backside twisting, garlanding the road in tire.
| | |
Paul thought she was asleep. They were watching reruns except they weren’t reruns to him. He only got to stay up this late in the summer. Rupert had already passed out. Moths kept slamming into the screens, lunging for the light. She was lying on the couch, her feet in his lap. Her toenail paint was chipped.
“Mamma,” he whispered, “why don’t you go to church?”
She didn’t open her eyes but said, “When I was six they baptized me against my will, and I thought they were drowning me. Never got over it.”
You could smell the night dew from the open window.
“But you have to go,” she yawned. “You need your religious education. You scored Needs Help in The Ladies’ Home Journal.”
| | |
Sometimes, when he was practicing whistling, not well, or when his face was smeared with sleep, or he smelled of his bath, or was studiously chewing a cookie to conclusion, or simply said, “Mamma?” Helen more than loved her son. He seemed essential: a primary color; red, yellow, blue; blood, sun, sky.
| | |
Cement mixers churned and hammers whacked. Crescents of underwear, snug against hipbones, smiled above clay-streaked jeans pouting from the weight of tool belts. Sweat snaked through the sawdust and plaster that furred their shirtless bodies; or if they were already hairy, the plaster greyed them prematurely and chips of sweat dewed the curls of their chests like an aftermath of exploded diamonds. Some had globes for bellies, but the stomachs of others were knotted in muscles. Tattoos—serpents and women and daggered hearts—writhed and shimmied and beat on their flexing biceps. One man, a carpenter, had three pink nubs where fingers should have been, and his wedding band hung dimly around his neck from a dog tag chain. The smell of cut wood burnt the air.
They worked fast, these men, one week scurrying over the skeleton of the house, the next, the house itself, filled out in Sheetrock, thick with appliances. To Paul they were as glamorous as gangsters, sitting on the fenders of pick-ups, draining thermoses and smoking, burned by the sun into coppery colors. He loved one. Then he’d love another.
That was where he met Denver, who could already sweat like a man and had tested shaving. He lived where Paul lived, a place where adults were the moon, stuck in the orbit of their adult lives. Boys were still comets, and they might crash anywhere.
Denver lived in a two-story they’d built in a month, and he was the only oher child in their soon-to-be neighborhood. His dad was clip-on ties and golf at the club. His mom was Peter Pan collars and “getting involved.” They both believed in the wars in Asia, and they said that, believed, like war was God. They were Methodists; and they weren’t like Mamma; they weren’t like Rupert. When Mamma believed anything, she believed it too hard, following all Ten Steps for Fulfillment in Marriage; and Rupert only seemed to have three opinions: less taxes, more guns, most people were commies. The Wrights weren’t like that. They held their opinions lightly, the way they held the Old Fashioneds and Manhattans they drank every night on the patio while the grill heated up. Mr. Wright was big on barbecuing.
There was a sister too, a long-haired-tossing teenager who doused herself in patchuli and thought the war was immoral. She and the Wrights fought.
But Paul didn’t know any of this yet. All he knew was that a boy skidded up on his stingray with some sugary crust around his mouth.
“What are you doing?” the boy asked.
“Nothing.”
“Want to do something?”
“What?”
“I don’t know. Play or something.”
“Wanna come to my house?”
“Sure.”
Denver rode in circles while Paul balanced on the recently dried curb. They passed a rancher with a SOLD sign wedged into the dirt, and a yard of toilets; but mostly they passed dirt, as far as you could see. It was a moon of a place.
“This is kind of a neat place to live, huh?” Denver said. “I already got like a radio some guy left in a sink, a caulk gun, and some knobs to something.”
“Yeah, I guess it’s neat, but I get pretty bored.”
“We oughta form a club or something, and when other kids move in, we’ll already be in it.”
“What kind of club?”
“Just a club. You know. You have to do things to get in it.”
“Oh, that kind of club,” though Paul had never been in a club his whole short life.
At Paul’s they played astronaut, slipping a crackle into their voices when they radioed Space Command, masking their faces with their hands for oxygen, lumbering in the slow-mo of no gravity, eating dirt that Denver claimed was dehydrated meatloaf. Paul only pretended to swallow. They battled Martians with a rake ray-gun and a lawn mower cosmic tank they dragged out from under the house.
The Martians decimated it, Denver said, pointing to the crawlspace, “That would make a neat clubhouse.”
“It’s awfully dark.”
“That’s the point, man. Come on.”
They could hear Paul’s mother rumbling overhead, making dinner. Paul wouldn’t let Denver close the door all the way, and a triangle of daylight painted itself over the cool dirt floor. Sharp points of mulch poked through the bag Paul leaned against. He felt like he was at a stick up. The ring of pans and slaps of cabinet and grinds of can opener were making him hungry. He’d had cheese and mustard for lunch.