"Too bad, man."
"Yeah."
Brando went back to doing his thing, now up to the Blanche Dubois rape scene.
I watched for another minute or two and then backed away to the cardboard playhouse.
I climbed inside and yanked the string and closed the paper window.
It was dark but comfortable.
Outside, Juba leaned down to the window and hissed against it.
"If you go to sleep you may never awaken again.
We didn't."
"
Ya
pays yer money and
ya
takes yer chances," I said.
"You've just crawled into your own grave."
I was getting a little tired of his constant nettling.
I might've felt guilty, but not enough for me to keep putting up with it.
"Have you found Jonah yet?"
"No."
"Then stop pestering me and go look."
I heard the cartilage in his knees, elbows and spine crackling as he stood and kept standing up to his full height before finally moving off.
Nell talked through the ceiling and said, "Pleasant dreams."
I could still smell bacon frying and the stink of my father's breath.
I slept
.
11
C
ome find me
, Nicodemus said, and there was a hint of fear in his voice.
God's got us all out on the rock, he does.
It started with me but I guess it's gotta end with you, that's the way of things.
Sometimes our sacrifices are spurned.
By God or by our kin.
Just go on and ask Cain
hisself
.
He was damned, but he was the chosen one.
Just like you
.
My father liked to play to my vanity even though I wasn't vain.
It was part of his myth in the making.
Jonah hasn't got any more need of you now, and for that alone you ought to get on your knee and be thankful.
A child can be a disagreeable thing.
It grows heavy.
There's a need to drop our sacks by the roadside
.
As if I could do that, as if I would ever do that.
He must've had the bottle again, something to give him a backbone.
When he said my son's name it clutched in his throat and came out like a jagged piece of terror.
You're flesh of my flesh.
What's yours is mine.
We're still family, despite everything.
The blood in your veins runs only because I willed it to be done.
But the suffering, that there is your debt to be paid, and
so's
mine.
You owe that much
.
Talk about a Christ complex, give it a rest.
Funny how he never mentioned murder.
His lips pulled off his dry teeth and settled into a grim smile.
I knew I was going to kill him and wondered if Jonah would eventually feel the need to do the same to me.
That would be all right.
We've laid out on the rock.
It's where we all wind up '
neath
the eye 'a God
.
I took it as metaphor.
Maybe it was true.
Sometimes the old man was inside my head, and sometimes it was just the hurricane
.
12
A
fter I'd quit my ministry at fourteen, I watched my father losing his messiah inch by inch and day by day, just as I was.
We drank together and got into bar brawls three or four nights a week, and as the money ran out we formed a sort of peace with our ruin.
Or so I thought until the day he tried to murder me.
Nicodemus had never been any good with the cash when it was rolling in.
Even when he was loaded he played the horses and gave most of it away in bizarre fits of charity.
He did some hard-line preaching of his own for a while as I sat in the back pew watching, pondering what the true intent was behind his words.
He chose obscure passages from the Bible and made haphazard leaps in logic trying to understand the ways of God.
It got them tittering in their seats now and then.
He carried his conflicts right into the pulpit, the same way I'd done.
Often when he raged about sin and trespasses he broke down into sobs or wracking laughter.
If he could get away with it, he pretended to fall into a spell of tongues, but usually they caught him faking it and left him there.
We shared a pint down at the river once, just before he was about to do a group baptism, and the sun and the lilacs helped us to get a good high going.
He wound up holding some chunky teenager beneath the water too long and nearly drowned the kid in the muddy bottoms.
Nicodemus left his congregation long before they left him.
He had plenty of guns but chose to do me in with a frying pan.
He stalked outside my bedroom one morning when I was hung-over and sleeping with Miss Chastity Flo, the only town whore who still had most of her teeth.
She had a way about her that kept a wounded man oozing but alive.
She'd bruised a couple of my vertebrae, broken the headboard, and swallowed my last half pint of whiskey.
I was down to cooking sherry.
It'd been a rough night.
The agony had already started in my sleep and I awoke with my stomach twisted with the approach of evil.
I fell out of bed and went to my knees, gasping and grinding my back teeth together.
Miss Chastity Flo opened her eyes, yawned and started to laugh.
She thought it was kind of funny and sexy, what I was doing down there, and she leaned back on the bed and spread her legs father apart.
I was drunk and groggy and the swirling black energy of
wrongness
skewered through my chest.
I twitched and gouged the dirty floor with my fingernails until they cracked.
Nicodemus stepped in, wearing his frock coat and hat, ready to give his last sermon, holding his frying pan.
When she spotted him she said, "Is he gonna cook us breakfast in bed?"
"Get out, go on!" I yelled.
"But I'm sort of hungry.
I could use some scrambled eggs and sausage.
You worked me up an appetite, son.
Ain't
ya
at least gonna feed me after all I done for you last night?"
"Go," I moaned.
"The hammer's about to fall."
"Are you two
kiddin
' me?
You got any more scotch in the house.
This sherry ain't worth shit."
Nicodemus started his swing, but he couldn't raise the heavy iron skillet high enough with his bad arm to fully connect with the back of my head.
He caught me with only a glancing blow and proceeded to hunt me around the house, shrieking verse from the Old Testament and generally getting his quotes wrong.
Miss Chastity Flo thought it was all very mystical, mysterious and entertaining–me scrambling with my naked white ass hanging out, the old man screaming with his pan–until he stopped in his tracks, wheeled and went after her.
I could barely see with the blood in my eyes.
His first swing caught her in the mouth and there went her teeth.
I was wrong, some of them were fake.
I saw a partial bridge go flying.
The searing in my guts grew much worse.
Miss Chastity Flo tried to talk with her crushed lips, to beg or argue with Nicodemus about the evils of murder, but she didn't have much time as he brought the skillet down twice more on the sweet spot of her skull.
The pan rang out with two nice notes, one low and one high, like a choir getting in tune.
Miss Chastity Flo's ears spurted red and her eyes rolled up.
Nicodemus, whom I'd seen in all in his many states of being, fooled me this time with his insanity.
It was both familiar and yet altogether new.
And like the skillet, he was now filled with a unique and absurd purpose.
I leaned against the far wall and sat heavily as my father approached.
His face glowed with unshakable resolution.
I cocked my head at him and my blood sluiced across my brow.
I think I was smiling.
I'd been waiting for this for a long time, in one manner or another.
I wanted to die, or so I'd thought.
This was an opportunity not to be missed.
I couldn't do it by myself, and I'd been waiting for the finality of his fist to strike.
I wondered if he would tell me that God had set him upon this righteous path or if he'd bear up beneath his own feelings.
He'd always hated me.
Right from the first second when I'd lunged from my dying mother's womb and fallen into his mighty hand.
On the stage, I'd offered possible redemption to those who asked and those who didn't.
But as a drunkard and a failure, I mirrored only his own guilt and doom.
I wore his face.
As he came closer, his fury so evident and well lit, I did something I'd never done before.
I preached at him.
I hurled hellfire.
He screamed as if I'd tossed embers into his eyes and he ran screeching out of the house and down the dirt road.
I called the sheriff's office but was so sick on sherry that by the time they got there I wasn't making much sense.
They soon grew disgusted and worked me over some.
It was understandable.
Half the folks in the county were related to Miss Chastity Flo by stock or marriage, and I was at least partly responsible for her death.
But justice for whores is short in coming, and after a few days they let me go.
I went home and looked at my father's footprints in the dust.
Nicodemus hadn't returned to the shack and never would.
I set it on fire and watched it blaze down to ashes while my guts crawled with a hint of depravity to come.
The flames would follow.
13
W
hen I stirred again I felt clear and capable.
I'd broken onto a new track and could get someplace now.
The playhouse was stale and rank with my own breath, and when I pulled the string to open the cardboard window it was like letting in a new morning.
I climbed out and
Fishboy
Lenny happily waved to me and said, "
Mwoop
,
ftssshawww
."
"Hey, buddy."
"
Mwaoop
."
I could feel the awful tension building inside me again, black and seeping, but I didn't resist, I tried to ride the crest.
Engulfed from the inside out, I shuddered so violently I nearly bit through my tongue.
The sweat did a slow skid down my neck.
Whatever was about to hit this time would lead me to my vengeance or death or salvation.
I didn't much care which it would be so long as it was soon.
Lala
spun past and she wasn't pregnant anymore.
"Jesus holy Christ," I whispered.
She saw me and kept walking, shambling in an odd fashion.
She no longer moved quickly and easily through the obstacles of the Works.
Obviously she was in some pain and a nasty hitch wrecked her careful stride.
The hem of her dress was dappled with crimson and still wet and dripping.
Lester slid around in her grasp and gazed backward over her shoulder, as if he had a score to settle with someone they'd just left behind.
I got up close and
Lala
stopped, frowning.
She didn't meet my eyes.
Lester did, his head moving in a jerky way, back and forth.
I realized he was imitating my own gestures, and that I was quivering badly.