The cold chill remained like he had stepped unprotected into the burst of a winter wind. His teeth might even start chattering. With no one around, Anthony knew he could do what no rational person would. He could do it and never speak of it, ignore it outright as the silly delusions that strike all of us in the nighttime.
“Delaney?” he whispered.
The radio came on. The music rocked through the car like a shotgun blast. Instead of her pop station, it was the oldies disk stuck in the player. He wasn’t old enough to have known the oldies, but his parents used to sing to them all the time and so listening to the music was a way to keep them singing.
The song was “Sleepwalk” by Santo & Johnny. Instrumentals used to be very popular at one time in America’s musical history and “Sleepwalk” had been one of the bigger hits in that category. It was a soothing melody that lovers could admire the stars to (and then make out to), or slow dance to, or simply appreciate in the serenity of a dying day as the sun’s light faded to dark.
Delaney and he used to dance (he trying to dance, she mocking his moves) to this tune in particular. She said all the songs on the CD were lame, but she always tolerated them whenever he offered to put on the radio. “You wouldn’t like my music,” she told him. “It’s too cool for you.” Then they’d laugh--
always
they’d laugh.
The song faded out and the radio died with it. The next song (“You Belong to Me”) didn’t come on, neither did that static that often interrupted his listening--broken speakers. Only the song and then nothing. The light from the radio’s face faded to a glimmer and passed away.
That was for you, Dad
.
He would never be sure if hat be suree heard Delaney say those words or if he had conjured them himself, but those five words came to him in the post-song quiet and he sobbed. The tears poured out with greater ferocity than they had at the wake or would tomorrow at the funeral. He cried and cried until all the pain had been purged and he was completely numb. He grieved for Delaney, for his family, but mostly for himself.
Sometime later, Anthony got out of the car, headed back inside and stopped. He went back to the car, stood before the destroyed hood. He was challenging faith, whatever of that he even had anymore, but he couldn’t simply walk away. He wished he could go inside, drink a beer and pass out on the couch and always remember his moment in the car with Delaney playing him some song she called lame.
That was for you, Dad
.
Not fully aware of what he was thinking, Anthony mused,
What we want, what we in our deepest hearts truly desire to be true, is not what we seek to discover. We always hunt for the scientific explanation, the true answer that will shine with the stark light of a hot summer sun and confirm for us our cynicism. We ignore our innate belief in the enigmatic; we may want the inscrutable to be true but we do all we can to debunk it, rationalize it, and explain it away. That which cannot be explained is not worth our time, yet these anomalies are glimpses into the atavistic heart of primal man, who knew no difference between ghosts and memories, miracles and thunderstorms.
Anthony opened the hood and stared into the darker corners of our vision where truth is not reality. When it comes to matters of the heart, there is no reality.
The car battery, as he suspected, was gone. The two battery cables hung loose and wide like the yearning arms of a forgotten child.
6
Two guys Brendan didn’t know had dragged his father to the bathroom. Dad had freaked out on the guy in the wrinkled suit who had walked in with his arm over Brendan’s shoulders, practically mutilated the man’s face. Dad had never been violent before, not even an occasional spanking. Tyler never mentioned any well of hidden rage, either, so when Dad started pummeling the guy in the face, Brendan stood back, frozen. Someone pushed him out of the way, saying something about it not being appropriate for him to see Anthony this way. But that concern faded quickly once the bathroom door shut, and the men were safely tucked away in the bathroom. Dad’s screams (rage or pain?) vibrated from inside the bathroom and conjured images in Brendan’s mind of ravaged bodies in a subway tunnel.
An older lady with enough eye shadow to give her huge, hollow orbs for eyes asked him if he was alright and he assured her, whoever she was, that he would be fine, that he just wanted some time with his sister. Mentioning Delaney gave the woman pause; she nodded, said yes of course, and turned away. Instead of going to Delaney, Brendan went to the bleeding guy on the floor, who everybody was ignoring except another guy in an identical suit, but with far fewer wrinkles. This second guy was taller and slimmer, his hair perfectly gelled.
“Are you okay?” Brendan asked.
The stocky guy smiled a crescent of blood. “I’ll be fine.” He sucked away the blood as it started to dribble down his chin.
The tall one was wiping away the blood from a small gash on the guy’s cheek. “He doesn’t need stitches or anything,” the man said. “He’ll be just fine. Your old man’s got a good arm, but he mostly took him by surprise.”
“Why did he hit you?”
“Sometimes God likes to test us,” the injured man said.
The tall one introduced themselves as Dwayne the bleeding one on the floor and Ellis his reluctant helper in this unfortunate turn of events. Dwayne said that if he was so reluctant he could stop wiping his face like he was some baby. Ellis told him that we were all babies in God’s eyes and Dwayne said that God should be the one wiping his chin then.
They were friends, maybe close colleagues, perhaps even lovers. Brendan had never met out-and-out homosexuals before. Ellis would be the effeminate one. Dwayne was too bulky to play any role other than husband. Either way, the bickering between them made Brendan smile and he forgot for a moment his dad’s wails echoing in the bathroom and all the people milling around no longer discussing the tragedy of a bowling ball and a car but of a middle aged man under incredible stress. He was bound to break at some point, they reasoned.
Dwayne was up, hunched and touching his face like it might fall off. Ellis gave him the bloody handkerchief he had been using and told him to apply pressure to the gash. Dwayne tried and recoiled at the pain.
“Let’s go outside before these people start asking any questions,” Ellis said.
Dwayne nodded and they started out, the crowds parting wide for them. Brendan waited a moment and followed. He trailed them at a ten-foot distance to the parking lot where Ellis helped Dwayne into a large black car with white-wall tires. He shut the passenger door and turned to Brendan.
“I am very sorry about your sister, young man. God is a wonderful giver, but he is the cruelest taker.”
“Thanks.” Who were these guys? Why had they come here? “Do you know my father?”
Ellis thought about that. “In a way. We were summoned to him.”
“What do you mean?”
“God wanted us to intervene. So, we did.”
“That’s why my dad kicked his ass?”
Ellis squatted. “We saw your father last Saturday morning, a mere few hours before your sister died. Is that a coincidence?”
Brendan shrugged. How would he know? These guys had nothing to do with Delaney’s death, with that damn bowling ball.
“There are no coincidences. There is only God’s plan.”
“You’re preachers?”
He smiled. His many teeth comprised the mouth of a shark. Yet, Brendan was not scared. He was intrigued. Something about these men . . .
“Do you go to church?” Ellis asked. “Maybe with your father.”
“No. We go on Christmas Eve. That’s it. Catholic, I think.”
“Sounds like you’ve lost your way.”
“I thought I knew what I was doing,” Brendan said, slipping into his memory of last Saturday. “I thought that things would work out, that it was what needed to be done.”
“What do you mean?”
“The gods demanded a sacrifice.”
“Gods?”
He should be cautious; he could offend them, might have already. Dad beat Dwayne until he bleed and now Brendan could put the icing on that cake with his mythological gods who wanted Brendan to kill someone in order to protect his family. That hadn’t worked out, of course. All that capriciousness again.
“I guess I’m just really confused.”
Ellis was nodding. “I marvel at your sincerity. You’re a special boy.”
“That’s what your buddy said.”
“We’re from a church nearby. Do you want to see it?”
“Now?”
Alarms went off and Brendan’s brain switched into
CODE RED CODE RED KIDNAPPER ALERT RUN AWAY RUN AWAY
. Since kindergarten, he had been taught to flee from suspicious strangers, to run like all hell if someone offered him a ride. In fifth grade, the DARE cop showed them a video from an actual sting operation in which a stranger abducted two kids off the street once he lured them to within an arm’s reach of the car. Brendan had suffered nightmares for weeks. The cop warned that “anybody” could be a kidnapper, even if the person “looks nice.” He hadn’t said anything about priests.
“It won’t take long,” Ellis said.
“To a church?”
“You might find what you’re seeking.”
“Like what?”
“Answers.”
* * *
Brendan’s science teacher, Mr. Cantor, once explained in class how quickly a fire can consume a house; his own house had fallen victim to a garbage can full of smoldering ashes from the fireplace. “Fire rages rapidly,” Mr. Cantor said, “gobbling all the oxygen it can which, in turn, fuels the fire, making it larger and hotter.” In such moments, when people are forced to bear witness to awe-inspiring horror, many panic. That was why fire drills existed--if people practice enough for a horrible event then, hopefully, they would respond automatically when the real thing happens. However, sometimes people lose control. Sometimes they respond like animals.
“Animals,” Mr. Cantor said, “are excellent survivors, but they suffer fear just like us, and in a brutal fire, very often the animal tries to hide instead of flee. My cat hid behind the downstairs sofa when the fire erupted. I tried to find him and couldn’t. He died because he panicked, because he had no idea how to handle the fear.”
That memory of Mr. Cantor and his poor, dead cat came to Brendan as he listened to his father’s wails reverberate out of the funeral home and more and more people exited the building as if the wails were smoke; these people assembled on the wrap-around porch in small clusters. Dad’s eruption was the fire and Brendan was the cat. He needed to flee, not to hide.
“I don’t know,” Brendan said.
“It’s okay, son,” Ellis said. “God can wait a lifetime for you. But you need to ask yourself if you can wait a lifetime for Him.”
* * *
Brendan got in the car behind the driver’s seat. He hoped someone would notice this so that just in case these guys tied him up and left him for dead somewhere a witness could assist the police, but no one else was outside. They were all waiting for the fire to burn out.
They drove out of town toward the City of Newburgh. Brendan had been over here a few times when Mom and Dad took him to a restaurant on the Hudson River and he enjoyed his first taste of lobster. The river seemed more like an ocean, a dark one hiding all kinds of underwater creatures. Dad offered to rent a row boat and take him out; Brendan feigned illness and the excursion was delayed indefinitely.
Dwayne flipped down his visor and exaxcuisor anmined his face in the vanity mirror. He removed the handkerchief long enough for blood to resume flowing before reapplying pressure. “Son of a bitch, that hurts.”
Ellis tapped him on the knee and Dwayne’s eyes found Brendan’s in the mirror. He murmured an apology. “Your father caught me off guard, it’s no big deal.”
“What did you mean when you said God likes to test us?” Brendan asked.
Dwayne started to answer, stopped, flipped the visor back up.
“That is a loaded question to start with,” Ellis said. “It might be better first if you explained what
you
mean by the gods demanding a sacrifice.”
They drove down Broadway, which in no way resembled the bright lights and upbeat tempo of its New York City counterpart. In Newburgh, Broadway was wide and low with dying shops and wandering pedestrians. This was the place where people went to buy drugs at night or pick up hookers. During the day, people used the Laundromat and browsed the Thrift Shop. The locals ate the pizza and sandwiches at the places that sold cigarettes and potato chips on the same shelf. The visitors, like Brendan and his family, either dined at the upscale places that were hidden in this area like diamonds in coal or went down to the river where white college kids drank until they vomited on their shoes.
These guys could probably sell Brendan on the street or even exchange him for heroin or something. His father always made sure the car doors were locked on their trips out here. Why did he get in this car?
“Your church is on this street?”
“Newburgh was once the Crown Jewel of the Hudson Valley. Did you know that?”
“What happened?”
“Lots of things. Economic downturn, substance abuse. Mostly, a loss of faith.”
“In God?”
“In humanity.”
Brendan shouldn’t be here. He only wanted to get away from his dad, but now he could end up strapped to a bed in a dirty storage room where perverts took turns doing things to him. He tried the door handle--locked. The car smelled of body odor and farts. Brendan gagged.
Their church was a sagging building wedged between Paul’s Pawn Shop and Nailed Nails Beauty Salon. The glass front had been filled with two giant images of Jesus suffering on the cross. Beneath that it read: HE DIED FOR YOUR SINS. LET HIM EMPOWER YOU. SERVICES THURSDAY – SATURDAY 7PM, SUNDAY 10 AM.
They parked and both Ellis and Dwayne got out. Brendan’s door still wouldn’t open. “Whoa,” Ellis said, opening the door for him, “it’s a safety lock. Relax.” Then Brendan was out of the car, free, and running down the double-wide sidewalk, the cool air refreshing his face, cleansing his lungs. There had to be a cop around here somewhere, had to be. This was a dangerous area--cops would be patrolling. People jumped out of his way; someone called him “a little fag” and another person laughed, saying, “that’s it--run, white boy, run!”
Brendan passed store fronts so rapidly that the glow from the inside lights created a streaking haze like something from a dream. Dwayne and Ellis were running after him, maybe yelling for someone to grab that kid, grab him and you can have a free taste. The block ended and Brendan turned left, spinning his head back down the sidewalk to check if Dwayne and Ellis were, in fact, doing what he feared, and Brendan crashed into something hard, maybe a wall, and tumbled backwards onto the concrete.
A large black man with an enormous belly stood over him like a beast over injured prey. “Better watch where you going,” the man said. His puffy jacket lent him even more girth; he might have anything hidden under that coat--knife, gun, rope, duct-tape.
Brendan was back in school but not in Mr. Cantor’s class listening to a stupid story about a scared cat ( a story that would, years later, get him into this mess), but to the directions from the DARE cop about how to escape a kidnapper. “If someone is trying to grab you or hurt you, don’t play fair. All bets are off. Kick them in their groin. Grab their hair. Bite them. And, above all, make as much noise as possible.
The man started to say something else, to move closer, too, and Brendan released a howl with every once of air and shred of energy he mustered. It might have been the death-cry of a stabbing victim or the hysterical scream of Dad in the funeral home.
The man glanced around, but didn’t run. He wasn’t afraid. He knew he would be okay. He could do whatever he wanted to this white boy because nobody around here wanted the police showing up, asking questions.
The man reached for Brendan with a huge, monstrous hand, like comically inflated one, only made from stone. Brendan screamed harder, throat burning, and readied himself to play as dirty as he had to. This man’s balls were probably the size of baseballs, so it shouldn’t be tough to hit and even crush.
The hand came closer (
the hand of God
) and Brendan wished with all his might that he had brought some kind of weapon: a knife, a pen, shard of broken glass. He raised his feet and fisted his hands, resembling a wailing child.
“What are you doing?” This question broke through Brendan’s screams and the mighty hand withdrew. Dwayne stood behind Brendan, dress shoes inches away.
“Helping this kid,” the big guy said.
“He’s with me,” Dwayne said.
“Then you deal with him.”
“That any way to talk to a man of God?”
The big guy shook his head. “You a false prophet.”
Brendan blinked and Dwayne was in the big guy’s face, nose to nose. “I’ll drop your big black ass right here, right now. You know why? Cause God’s in my heart and He guides my punches.”
“Get the fuck out my face,” the big guy said, yet he was backing up and then, miraculously, walking down the sidewalk. He disappeared into the night and Dwayne turned to Brendan.
“I know you’re scared,” he said. “I’ll drive you right back to the funeral home. Ellis and I are not going to hurt you. We are men of God.”
When Dwayne held out his hand (
God’s in my heart and He guides my punches
), Brendan accepted the help.
Ellis was standing outside the church. “Are we going in or going home?” he asked.
Neither Brendan nor Dwayne said anything, so Ellis unlatched the combination lock. Just because Dwayne had helped him, didn’t mean Brendan should trust these men, but he couldn’t run away again. There had to be another way. The metal grate that slid down over the glass front rattled when Brendan passed beneath it.
The place stank of flowers. He didn’t see any flowers, however. Past the entrance, the place opened up into a large structure that could serve any number of functions from pizza joint to modest theater.e oest the Rectangular card tables with metal folding chairs were arranged throughout the room like a cafeteria. On each table stacks of fliers appeared to be grouped in some kind of order. Religious posters, most depicting Jesus either on the cross, ascending to heaven, or offering a chalice of wine, decorated the walls. Fluorescent lights gave the room an unhealthy, almost alien glow. At a far table on the right, three people (two women, one man) all dressed in some sort of black suit, were folding fliers and building individual stacks.
“This is your church?” Brendan asked.
“Not quite,” Ellis said.
The three people folding fliers turned and one woman jumped to her feet and trotted toward them. Her ensemble did not hide her large, bouncing breasts. When she drew closer, she stopped, covered her mouth, and then ran the rest of the way to Dwayne. “What happened? Are you in pain? This is terrible.”
Dwayne waved her off. “Just one of God’s trials.”
She put her arms around him without clutching and guided him to a chair. “Let me help you.” She touched his hand and he lowered the handkerchief. She didn’t say anything for a moment, composing herself. “I’ll have to stitch it some. It shouldn’t hurt much.”
“So much for my pretty face, eh?”
She smiled. “It was never that pretty to begin with.”
Then he had her on his lap and was planting a large, powerful kiss on her. Brendan hadn’t been to many churches but so far this one wasn’t following the usual protocol. The woman laughed, batted him away playfully and then told him to sit tight while she gathered supplies. She went into a room on the left that might be a bathroom.
“She’s wonderful,” Dwayne said to no one in particular. “Only wish I’d met her first.”
Brendan opened his mouth to ask what he meant and Ellis said, “Let’s go into the Empowerment Temple, Brendan.”
“The what?”
His smile betrayed neither jocularity nor sincerity; with one hand on Brendan’s shoulder, Ellis led him through the room past all the tables and the only other two people there. Two large wooden doors stood closed at the end of the room. The smell of fresh flowers plumed from the other side of the doors like a smoke cloud pushing into a room. That smell was the odor of Delaney’s viewing room. Flowers crowded around her coffin in such potent colors that they seemed to taunt her with their vibrancy. He shouldn’t be here; he should be with Delaney. But what if whatever was behind these doors offered a more genuine path to safety than he had previously found? What if there really was only one true powerful God? That was worth a few more minutes, at least.
“This is your church, through here?”
“It isn’t much,” Ellis said, “but this is where we find God.”
He pushed where the doors joined. They swung open as if floating. They were thick doors, padded with insulation. The aroma of flowers rolled out, momentarily suffocating all other senses. This room was half the size of the first room and instead of florescent ceiling lights, candles provided the only illumination. There might have been hundreds of them, set up on small tables, in specially designed racks, arranged in some type of pattern across the floor or, apparently, placed haphazardly to provide additional light where the kneeling people needed it. There were no chairs, only small rugs on which the fifteen or so people in the room knelt. The only sound was the faint hungry crackle of all the flames.
On the far wall hung a full-sized, three-dimensional Jesus on the cross. It was so life-like that for a moment Brendan thought it was a person standing up, arms wide as if welcoming everyone in a big hug. In fact, this Jesus was larger than life. Brendan walked into the Empowerment Temple, Ellis shutting the doors behind him to block the fluorescent light, and Jesus grew bigger. The statue (stone or wood?) was taller than Ellis, which meant the sculpture was at least six-feet tall, maybe closer to seven. Because of Jesus’ stage of emaciation, the figure was barely as wide as Brendan but the detail attended to the face, especially those pained eyes, bespoke not only talent but something less concrete than that, something otherworldly. This was a god you could speak to, not simply a symbol or some imaginary figment in the clouds. This was a god who understood pain. No wonder so many people were in here; they knew that if they asked hard enough and for long enough, this god, this Jesus, would answer. It had to, it was so damn real.