Lucky's Girl (28 page)

When they’d got going with their iPads it was like a pressure valve had been released. One moment the tension was a black cloud, then next they could happily ignore him.

He’d left them like this when Errol had shown up with a shamefaced look. Jenny glanced at him and wrinkled her nose. Jake didn’t even look up.
The guy who’d shit himself
.

He’d stepped out, following Errol out back to the pier. He took one of Errol’s Hamm’s, exhaling hard and loud. He felt the same way. Everything was fucked.

His kids thought Lucky was Jesus.

“I talked for a long time with Frankie today and Jerry too, Kenny.”

“So they’re scared of Lucky too.”

“Yeah. Kenny I gotta tell ya, I’ve seen some shit in my life, but Lucky’s performance over the last few days beats all. How the fuck does a guy get away with that shit? Put aside the wolves for a second, if that’s even possible, and ask yourself how a guy walks into a funeral dressed in bed sheets like… like a Monty fucking Python skit and convinces everyone that he’s…”

“Jesus. The name you’re looking for is
Jesus
.”

“Jesus doesn’t cause teenage girls to tear each other’s guts out…”

Neither of them spoke for several moments. Probably neither of them had spoken about a little girl named Mary for more than twenty years, or about another little girl called Christie. A little girl who’d become a murderer for reasons neither of them had been able to really explain.

But that reason had a name: Lucky.

Some
thing
Lucky could do to people, some affect he had, some
thing
which was hard to acknowledge or focus on, some
thing
that had now returned.

“I don’t know what to say, Errol, the whole thing is so hazy. I remember Christie. I remember her dying, I remember a few days of wandering around town aimlessly, after which I left. I got the fuck out. I started my life over, never looking back. I swear, Errol, nothing here has changed, it’s just gotten greyer and deader. I forgot this place. I never so much as gave it a passing thought. I forgot what had happened, and now my family won’t leave.”

“You’re the only one I ever saw leave, Kenny.”

“What the hell is that supposed to mean, Errol? Plenty of people leave.”

“Plenty of people die, but they don’t leave, Kenny, something keeps them here.”

“Alcoholism. Poverty. Welfare. The Rev and Abby and…”

“And now Lucky. Lemme guess, Kenny, your kids really want to go to church, right?”

“Yeah, it’s complicated but you know the story. Their mom… what happened to Jenny. They just need to have some kind of stability. I can’t pack them up again. They can’t take it. My son hates me. He’s
eight
. Eight-year-olds don’t hate their fathers. Mine does, and my daughter is inching in that same direction. I can’t pack them up, besides if I did that it’d be a slam dunk for their grandfather to try to take them away from me. He’s got the money, he can get some lawyer to call me an unfit parent. Fucking asshole!”

“So you’re gonna stay?”

“Next few days. Let them decompress. Maybe they’ll hear those wolves and want to leave.”

“And if they want to go to church?”

“I’ll tell them we’re Lutheran.”

“Yeah right, that’ll work.”

Neither man spoke for a few moments, just stood and gazed out at the empty lake. Kenny turned to Errol with surprise printed across his face.

“
Jerry
. Jesus Christ, Errol, I’ve been so wrapped up in my own head about this whole thing that I’d forgotten about Jerry. After the funeral we’d got out of there as fast as I could drag the kids away. He had a heart attack?”

“He saw Lucky, he saw what was happening and it gave right out.”

“He looked awful.”

“He’s been in the hospital. Left against doctor’s orders. On a bunch of pills.”

“Drinking on a bunch of pills?”

“Yeah.”

On the little pier behind old Frank McCord’s cabin they tried to wrap their heads around all of this. So often in life things would get so complex, so convoluted that people despaired of ever being able to explain their situation to another or to extricate themselves from it, but this was different.

Lucky was different.

And both men were stuck.

Kenny was stuck because of the complexities of a life which had gone sideways, Errol was stuck because of his illicit venture.

“Errol… my uncle never told me about what had happened with Lucky. What happened to him, where he’d split to. All I knew was Mary and Christie were dead and that I couldn’t be here anymore.”

A panicky look crossed Errol’s face, making him quickly look away.

Kenny squinted at the mailman. “What happened, Errol?”

***

They walked out the big front doors and around the side of the church. It was old, having been built in the early part of the 1900s, and had then been brought back to life by The Rev and Abby. Every few years it received a fresh coat of brilliant white paint. Volunteers would swarm over the roof on a regular basis. This place was the seat of their lives. They weren’t going to let it fall into ruin.

They walked past the little stained glass windows and the lines of parked cars to where the water’s edge had once been. The night was huge, black and dotted with giant glossy stars which could only be seen far away from the rush and press of the rest of the world. As the crowd scurried from the grassy shores down into the dry lakebed, the sheer enormity above hushed them. It was like they’d never seen its cyclopean majesty.

They were guided by the starlight across the empty lake bottom to the little pier jutting out from Grove Island. Lucky was lit from behind by the orange glow of a small campfire. He towered above them, tall and stern, a giant black silhouette. He wasn’t wearing his suit from this morning, or the robes from the day of the funeral. He was in black motorcycle leathers, jeans, t-shirt, and bandana.

They stood at his feet, awed and intimidated. He looked down at them with his hands on his hips, shaking his head in disappointment.

“I thought I’d told you people to come to my church tonight. Why are you all late? Was there something more important than hearing the Great News?”

They murmured, looking at their feet. No one had an answer for his questions. No one even knew what he’d meant.

“People.
Really
. Is this all coincidence? You and me and the way it’s all fallen together? Do you really think Our God is that careless, that he doesn’t have a plan?”

This time they were silent. No hushed whispers, no confused glances. Lucky was his father’s son if nothing else, and he was holding them in the palm of his hand.

“No. We were meant to be together; this isn’t all just blind ugly chance.”

He paused and sighed sadly. “But I can’t tell. I don’t know if you want me, I can’t even tell if you care at all. If I sow seed on barren soil and selfish hearts, nothing will come of it. Our God is willing to give, but your minds must be open to take. Are you ready to hear the Great News?”

There was a low murmur of assent, but they were still awed by this place and by their new leader.

Lucky howled out loud, “I can’t hear you!”

They yelled, “Yes!”

“Again!”

“Yes!” louder and louder they went until they were screaming at the tops of their lungs. When they were done they discerned the outline of Lucky’s smile in the flicker of firelight. He squatted down at the edge of the pier, shifting his weight to sit with his legs hanging over the edge.

His demeanor was totally different. He looked a little uncertain, but no speaker like Lucky is really ever actually uncertain, they know what they’re doing every time.

“Guys, go ahead and sit down, we’ve got a lot of things to talk about and I might need your help understanding some things. I want to know you guys. I want to know… I want to know so many things…”

He looked down, shaking his head sadly as a single tear rolled down his face.

“We owe so much to my mom and dad. I’m so proud of them, they’ve done so much for this town, but still I wonder…”

He remained silent for a moment until Shelly eagerly prompted, “What, Lucky?”

He looked out over the horizon, their eyes scanning over his profile.

Another person asked, “What do you wonder, Lucky?”

He nodded as if settling on a difficult choice. “He never told you.”

They looked at each other and then back to him.
Told us what Lucky?

He nodded, thinking carefully. “My dad, The Rev, he knew things…”

They were even more curious now, they
had
to know.

He exhaled loudly. “My grandfather was a tent revival guy back in the 30’s. He brought out rattlesnakes, holding them with his bare hands. One time a
faithless
man tried to prove him a fake and he grabbed one. It bit him. Grandpa laid hands on the man and the poison fell from the wound…”

Lucky paused for a moment. “Dad could do those things too, but he thought that the world would think that the miracle was more important than the
source
of the miracle. So I guess he never showed you. I guess he never told you…”

The crowd all stared wide-eyed at this cross between a sermon and a campfire tale. “Our God makes these things possible. The age of miracles is now. Our God is here,
now
. Will you open your hearts and minds to him?”

They shouted from their seats. “Yes!”

He paused for a few moments before looking through the throng illuminated by the soft flicker of flames. His face grew stern. “Things are gonna change around here. Our God is a mighty God; he requires much. What are you willing to give?”

They waited, silent, but they didn’t know what their God required.

“Dedication. Commitment. And I’m not talking about any of this lazy ass crap that people call Christianity. If you want results, you gotta give
everything
.”

He continued. “In my time here, and everywhere else I’ve been, I’ve seen the same thing over and over. The
System
. People say,
well that’s just life, that’s just the way the world is
. They call me a dreamer and say I’m unrealistic. That the world is a broken and fallen place…”

He leaned back and shouted. “I say bullshit to all of that!”

The congregation was stunned by his coarseness, but they were still his. Their new leader was no mere preacher, he was a prophet and a revolutionary. “
Consider the lilies of the field
. Whatever happened to that? Look around you. Look at the tree, at the stars and the fire. That’s not broken, it isn’t fallen, it’s perfect! Perfect! Look at yourselves, feel the pulse in your veins, the breath in your chest, the blood pumping in your heart.”

He paused, with each and every one listening to their breaths and feeling their hearts beating in their chests. “You’re just like Blackie, did you know that? And there’s nothing broken about that. You’re perfect, just the way Our God intended. It’s the System, it’s the whole System which exists to break you, and break us. To stand between you and your path, between you and nature, between you and one another, and then finally, between you and Our God!”

Tears were freely falling down his cheeks now. He whispered out into the night. “Then one day, you look in the mirror and you just don’t care. You don’t. You’ve got booze and taxes and jobs and the news but you can’t remember your own name. Your own nature…”

He jumped up and shouted. “Well fuck that! I didn’t come here for funerals. I came here for resurrections. Our God is
here
, Our God is
now
. Make up your mind.
This
is Our Church.
This
is Our World. If you don’t want any of this… then there’s that old wooden barn you’ve been dutifully sitting in for the last million years. Sitting and waiting, wondering and hoping. Out here, in Our Church, we don’t peddle hope. We produce results.
No more hope. Never again
.”

None of them got up to walk back to the old church. All were enraptured. Lucky was a giant, commanding that they stand up and be counted. They all stood as one. He whispered, but its sibilance cut through the night sky.

“I’m for the living, let the dying bury the dead. Are you with the living, or are you with the dead?”

They whispered back. “We are yours.”

Then he smiled and laughed. “Then we start tonight. Did you know that we can speak in tongues, not just alone, but as a group? That’s where we’re gonna start tonight. It’s gonna be strange for you, but have faith, Our God will never let us down. Let’s start with something easy, repeat after me…
Ket-mat-na-roz, keh-pi-uh, ja-quey, tae-lae, bas-nef-tek
”

And the stars became brighter in the eyes of the congregation, so bright they believed they could reach out and touch them.

CHAPTER 7

She held a baking tray with some lasagna stuff and some green whipped Jello topped with walnuts and pineapples. Poor people picnic food. The lasagna stuff looked like burnt road kill while the green Jello stuff looked like cheap sci-fi alien spew. But goddam that lasagna smelled good. His wife would’ve given him that look which said, “no way my kids are eating that white trash crap,” but she was dead and he was unclear on their eating arrangement for the rest of the day.