“I don't know, Harold,” the chubby lady said. “People say it looks just like her.”
The guy grunted and then yanked up hard on the seat of his pants, where I guess it was binding him some.
“Pretty soon the stupid people will take over the whole world, and there won't be anything left for educated, intelligent folks like us to do except sit at home and moan for the good old days when you could reason with people.”
“Quit being so cynical, Harold,” the chubby lady said. “Maybe she really is some kind of a message from aliens, like your friend Joe says. Or maybe she's an alien herself who's just landed on earth, and those steps are her spaceship.”
The guy grunted and rubbed his chin a little, like he was thinking it over. They kept the line moving along pretty fast, and finally the bearded guy and the little chubby lady shuffled up near the steps and sort of bent down and started squinting at Mary. They reminded me of people staring in at the polar bears at the zoo. I knew because Dad took me once to the big zoo down in Pittsburgh after I'd been bugging him about it for a long time. Then he spent the whole drive back home griping about how expensive it was and how the country was going down the drain.
“It doesn't look like anything but a dirty old block of concrete to me,” the guy finally said, straightening back up again. “No self-respecting aliens would ever travel in a spaceship as sorry as that.”
“I don't know, Harold,” the chubby lady said. “See her little eyes and her cute little nose. I think she even has a mouth too, although it's not much of a mouth. It'd be nice if she had some teeth. Maybe the town ought to chisel some in for her. I doubt if the aliens would mind. They must be friendly, or else they would have blown us all to bits by now.”
The guy snorted and then scratched himself some more.
“It's all television's fault. Do you know if they got any good restaurants in this stupid little town?”
Then they left and it was my turn. I didn't know what to do with my hands, so I just folded them in front of me like I did at church sometimes. When I got to the bottom step I wasn't sure if I was supposed to kneel or not, but since we never kneeled at our church I decided not to. I waited for Mary to say something, but she just kept staring at me with those big sad brown eyes. Her face looked even more baked into the concrete and permanent than it did before, which I was glad about since I'd been a little worried that she might fade away under the hot sun.
I wondered if I should ask her for a favor, like most of the other folks were doing. But I didn't have a runny nose or a scratchy throat or anything much that was bothering me. I looked over at Carlos, who was smiling at me real bright and happy now. It made me feel pretty important, since it wasn't like he was doing that for everybody in line. Then I remembered what Carlos had told me to say, and I asked her in a loud whisper if she'd do another miracle to prove she was real so that the town wouldn't bulldoze her.
“Healing up that old guy just now was pretty sweet, but not everybody got to see it. Couldn't you do something way up in the sky, like paint some shiny message up on the clouds where nobody could miss it?”
When she didn't answer right away, I started climbing up the steps to get a better view. I still didn't see her lips moving any, but I wasn't sure that being Jesus's mom she needed to move her lips to talk. Then I noticed that instead of two tears on her face, now there were seven. I knew because I counted them on my fingers three times. They were all just tiny yellow specks like before, and they were on both cheeks now. But the biggest change was to her mouth. Before it was sort of straight across, like I told you, not really smiling but not frowning either. But now she was smiling.
It wasn't exactly a huge knock-your-socks-off smile, but it was a smile, all right. She reminded me a little of how Mom grinned sometimes when she was watching her favorite soap opera, like she was enjoying herself but wasn't exactly ready to bust out laughing either. I wondered how it could have happened, and then I wondered why she was smiling with all those tears on her cheeks. Then I thought that maybe it had something to do with how she'd healed the old guy with the shakes, by smiling at him, I mean, and maybe crying over him a little too.
Carlos finally strolled over and gave me a little shove and told me to hurry up because plenty of other folks were waiting to see her. I looked back at some guy and his wife giving me stern looks and bouncing on their toes, so I jumped down the steps to get out of their way. Then I asked Carlos about the five extra tears on Mary's cheeks, and when it was exactly that she'd started smiling. Right away he gulped a little like he was nervous about something, or maybe he was just swallowing down the mint that he'd been sucking on. Anyway, he said he hadn't noticed any of it, but he said that his old eyes weren't nearly as sharp as mine. He said he'd check out my story once the line thinned out.
Then I asked him how Mary could heal people if she didn't at least talk to them a little, like asking them what's wrong and then saying you're healed or something, like those preachers on television were always doing. Carlos said that Mary didn't need to talk, because she had powers that were a lot stronger than our puny words could ever be.
“Words mostly just bounce right off you. Mary can sink deep down inside you where words can't go.”
“Sort of like some invisible power, you mean?”
“That's right.”
I thought about it a second.
“Is that how she heals people? By sinking down into them and fixing them up from the inside out?”
Carlos's dark eyes twinkled a little.
“It's a mystery how she does it, but you're probably on to something. Too bad you're not Catholic, Nate. You'd make a good priest, a lot better than some of the sad sacks we're stuck with these days.”
I wondered if he was taking a shot at Father Tom. I doubted it though, since they seemed like pretty close friends. I heard that Carlos even lived over at St. Sebastian's in the basement or somewhere like that.
“Is she gonna do anything else besides heal people?”
“What do you mean?”
“I don't know. Give everyone an iPod or something. I could sure use a new one since mine's busted, but Mom claims she can't afford it. Do you think if I asked her nice, Mary would give me one?”
Carlos gave his head a quick shake.
“I don't know. But if she has something in mind, I bet it's a lot more important than just handing out material things. It'll probably be something really fantastic and unexpected, something that will shake things up around here, maybe shake up the whole world. And besides, Mary doesn't need to show her face just to heal people. She can do that anytime she feels like it from her throne way up among the stars.”
I felt my heart beating a little faster, because nothing really important ever happened in Millridge. At least that was what Dad was always saying.
“Do you think it'll happen soon?”
“It's possible. But remember that God doesn't look at things the same way we do. Mary neither.”
Before I could ask how God and Mary looked at things, I got shoved backwards by some guy with a big butt who wanted to buy a box of little gold crosses that you could pin onto your clothes. Then some other people elbowed in ahead of me looking to buy some beads. They must have outweighed me by a hundred pounds apiece and didn't look to be in any rush.
I roamed around awhile until I finally found Mom jabbering with some neighborhood ladies. She must have wanted to go home now too, because she marched right over to me and asked if I'd had a good time at the ceremony.
“You didn't cause any trouble, did you?”
I shook my head.
“You should've paid more attention, Mom. You missed the best part.”
Then I told her about the old guy with the shakes getting healed, and right away she shook her head and said it must have been all in his mind somehow. She predicted that tomorrow morning the poor old fellow would wake up in exactly the same sorry fix as he was in before. I asked her how she could be so sure of that.
“I've been working in a hospital long enough to know a phony story when I hear one.” I told her that Carlos didn't think it was phony, but she claimed to know a lot more about it than Carlos did. Then she got that know-it-all-nurse-who's-also-your-mom sort of look.
“This unfortunate gentleman, who from your description may be suffering from Parkinson's disease, just got carried away with the emotion of the moment. There is no known cure for Parkinson's, although there's a new procedure called deep brain stimulation that offers much promise.”
When Mom talked real fancy like that, I always got a little suspicious, like she was trying to pull something over on me.
“That old guy looked pretty sour to me. I don't think he'd get carried away with much of anything if there wasn't a good reason. And why couldn't Mary use her invisible powers to sink down deep into his brain and shake things up a little, if that's all she had to do?”
Mom shook her head again, and then her eyes went kind of dark and creepy for a second or two, sort of like some of my teachers at school when they were yelling at us.
“There's always a rational explanation for these things. Now don't go spreading around that Mary can do miracles. It'll just get people's hopes up, and what's worse, they might postpone legitimate medical treatment.”
I figured she was just jealous that Mary could heal people way faster than she and those uppity doctors could over at the hospital. But I didn't say anything because I didn't want her to get all fired up, the way she used to sometimes when Dad was still around causing us trouble.
“Let's go home. I think we've seen enough miracles for one day.”
That was fine by me because it was getting pretty smelly, what with the heat and how close the people were all jammed together. Plus, I was getting so hungry from having missed breakfast that my belly was starting to growl a little.
We were pushing through the sweaty bodies when all of a sudden I heard someone shouting across the street near where the bars were. I worked my way through the crowd to a little open space where I could see better and spotted Tim Runyon standing near the curb waving a big pizza around and yelling that it was a miracle. The louder he yelled, the faster people tried to get away from him, and it wasn't long before I had a clear view. He was holding the pizza up high now and looking around at all the people with his nose way up in the air, like he was some snooty politician getting ready to give a big speech.
When everybody finally piped down, he began pointing at these two round slices of pepperoni at the top of the pizza and hollering that those were Mary's eyes. Next he pointed at this skinny sliver of green pepper on the bottom and called it her mouth. Then he giggled a little like I remembered Dad giggling whenever he'd been out drinking, real high and squeaky I mean. I guessed that the bars must have been doing a pretty good business too, just like Carlos, even though it wasn't even lunchtime yet. Then Tim bowed his head and made like he was praying to the pizza. But he wasn't really praying, because pretty soon he started squealing and shaking and laughing so hard that he almost dropped it.
Mom was busy frowning and rolling her eyes and saying what a big jerk Runyon was, but nobody including her looked to be in any rush to stop him. I thought about charging in there myself to stick up for Mary, but as big as he was Runyon would have just swatted me down like I was a fly. Then all of a sudden Father Tom shot out of the crowd in his white robe. He walked straight up to Runyon and asked him real nice if there was anything he could help him with.
Right away everybody in the crowd stopped their mumbling and whispering and looked to see if there was going to be a fight. Pastor Mike was there now too, standing straight and tall right at the edge of the crowd, like he was ready to back up Father Tom if he needed any help. Mom spotted Pastor Mike right after I did and gave him a wink, which made him blush a little even though he pretended not to notice her.
Runyon dropped the pizza and stomped on it and spit on it until it was pretty much ground down into the pavement. Then he started bouncing around on his toes and sticking his chest out at Father Tom and asking him if he wanted “to get it on.” Father Tom didn't say a word but just kept smiling kind of soft and sweet at Runyon. That must have really ticked Runyon off because he took a swing at Father Tom's head. Father Tom ducked under the punch real smooth and easy and right away Runyon fired another one at him. But Father Tom shifted out of the way of that one too like there was nothing to it. Then quick as a cat Father Tom reached out with his free hand, because he still had his Bible with him, and grabbed Runyon's wrist and bent it back a little.
Runyon dropped to his knees pretty quick, and then he started yelling and whimpering for Father Tom to please let him go.
“From now on you ought to be more respectful of people and their traditions, even those you disagree with,” Father Tom said real gentle and sweet.
“I promise,” Runyon, the big coward, squealed right away.
He kept on squealing too, so sharp and loud that it was stinging my ears. Finally Father Tom took pity on him and let him up. But instead of thanking him, Runyon rubbed his wrist a little and then stomped away, swearing and shaking his fist at all the people laughing at him now.
“You'll hear from me again,” Runyon hollered at Father Tom before he ducked into a bar.
Father Tom didn't seem too worried and went right back over to where Carlos was helping some cripples limp up close to Mary. I kept watching to see if she healed any of them too. But it didn't look like it because they were still pretty gimpy after they'd finished saying their prayers. Of course, I figured that there could always be a delayed reaction, like sometimes happened on those doctor shows on TV. Then I remembered Pastor Mike and looked around to see what he was up to, but I couldn't find him anywhere.