Rockets Versus Gravity (3 page)

So, in letters four feet tall, the next message on the billboard read simply:

JESUS is COMING!

Pastor Okonjo was pleased. That would put a few extra bodies in the pews and a few extra dollars on the collection plate.

Within two nights, though, the message had become:

JESUS is COMING!

Look Busy!

Clementine's father went to see Pastor Okonjo right away. The pastor, after once again praying, consulting the scriptures, and meditating on the issue, decreed that Clementine's father would climb the billboard with a can of white spray paint and obliterate the offending words. The vandal would see that his blasphemy was being actively resisted, and the coward would move on to other victims with less pure resolve.

Clementine's father did as he was instructed. He eradicated the offensive black words, the white paint jetting from the can with hissing, evangelical fury.

Yet, within another two nights, the message became:

JESUS is COMING!

Hide the booze!

Clementine's father did not go to the pastor this time. This was personal now.

He climbed the frame again, and, with dignity and fervour, he once again sprayed good clean white over the offensive back letters.

Then, for the next week, Clementine's father sat on the front porch at night with his twelve-gauge shotgun laid across his lap. This was his God-given property, and he would protect it from evil. He rocked back and forth, levelling his steely gaze at the billboard across the field, waiting to see if the vandal would have the audacity to reappear. He would not forgive those who trespassed against him.

By the evening of the seventh day, her father decided that the danger had passed, and he eventually came inside to watch reruns of
7th Heaven
on TV.

Clementine stayed up late that night, gazing through her small window, hoping to catch a glimpse of the elusive spray-paint hoodlum. He never appeared, though, and eventually she lay back on her bed and, surrounded by dancing purple phalluses and gyrating pink vulvas, stirred her whirlpool until her desires were sucked under and drowned once again.

On the morning of the eighth day, the message on the billboard read:

JESUS is COMING!

Oh god, oh god, oh god!

N
ow it is Sunday, and today at church, the parishioners are particularly incensed that the vandal didn't spell “God” with a capital
G
, and most are far too flustered to even mention the … the …
connotation
… in the vandal's most recent blasphemy.

Pastor Okonjo, in one of his more rousing sermons, intones that the vandal has declared Holy War, and that reaction from the church will be swift and just.

Within a week, the billboard will have a new message:

JUDGMENT DAY is COMING

No one will have the gall to mess with
that
message, the pastor reckons. No one will have anything funny to say about
that
.

And, as it turns out, no one does. The vandal will not strike again.

In the shadowy back left corner of the church, a young man in a black leather jacket sits quietly in an otherwise unoccupied pew, casually twisting the simple silver ring that encircles his left-hand ring finger.

Clockwise,
counter-clockwise
. Clockwise,
counter-clockwise
.

No one in the agitated congregation seems to notice him, no one but Clementine, that is.

“Mother,” she asks at the end of the service, “are we staying for the after-service luncheon?”

“No,” her mother says, shooting an icy glance at Clementine's father. “It's cheaper for us to eat at home.”

“Well,” Clementine says, all saccharine sweetness, “would it be all right if I stayed behind to help the ladies pour the tea?”

Of course this is all right with her mother! She wants to see Clementine kept busy.
The Devil makes work for idle hands.

As soon as she sees her parents drive away in their pickup truck, Clementine walks across the street to where the young man in the leather jacket sits on a park bench beside the cenotaph.

“So, you're new to the church, aren't you?”

“I'm pretty familiar to the church, actually,” he says, pausing to light a cigarette. “But if you mean that my presence is unfamiliar inside this particular building, then yes, you are correct.”

Slender tendrils of smoke curl around his wrist like ghostly serpents.

She asks him, “Is that black spray paint on your fingers?”

“Is that a halo hovering over your head?”

She blushes a little. “No. Definitely not.”

“Good,” he says. “Saints are boring. Most of them, anyway.”

“You know a lot of saints, do you?”

“All of 'em. Every single one.”

He holds the lit cigarette out toward her.

“I don't smoke,” she says.

“Ah. Not a sinner, then.”

“I don't think smoking's a sin,” she says. “Spray painting graffiti on billboards probably isn't, either. But I'm not sure that doing either one is good for your health in the long run.”

“I was just being funny. Jesus doesn't mind. Neither does Brooklyn Tripp. They've both got a sense of humour.”

“How do you know that?”

He takes a long drag and then exhales white smoke. “I just do.” He raises the cigarette to his lips once again. “Want to sit?”

She does.

Her heart throbs. It's like he's from another time. Not from the days of her namesake great-grandmother, but not from this era, either. He is from someplace in between, a more liberated age, a place in time where Clementine wants to be.

“You should probably get some blinds for your bedroom window,” he says.

Clementine's breath catches in her throat.

“Somebody might see you,” he says. “Somebody might start believing in love at first sight.”

Clementine's mouth drops open. Could he see her in her bedroom from his perch upon the billboard? Clementine knows that she should find this weird. She should find this creepy. But she doesn't. She finds it stimulating. She finds it sexy. She is filled with want. “You've got a beautiful mouth,” he says.

She is drawn to the calm confidence in his cool blue eyes. She wants to reach out and touch his sculptured-stone jaw. She longs to lean forward and kiss his round, moist lips.

She hears herself saying, “Thank you.”

“You aren't going to run away now?”

“No.”

“Aren't you afraid that I might be dangerous?”

“A little bit.”

“I'm only dangerous to those who intend to cause harm. And you don't intend to harm anyone, do you?”

“No.”

As he raises his smoke once again, his silver ring glints in the afternoon sunlight.

“Is that a wedding ring?” Clementine asks. “Are you a married man?”

He tosses the cigarette aside. “Nah. I bought this ring at the pawn shop right up the street from here. I always like to pick up a little souvenir from each town I pass through.”

He twists the ring between the thumb and index finger of his right hand.

Clockwise,
counter-clockwise
. Clockwise,
counter-clockwise
.

Finally, it pops over the bulbous knuckle of his left-hand ring finger.

“The guy at the pawnshop said that some lumberjack — named Bobby, he thought — brought the ring in a while back. The guy had found it wedged into one of the seams of a log flume, of all places, so Bobby, if that was his name, traded it for a pewter whiskey flask. That was the story, anyway. Everything has a story. Every single thing.”

He offers the ring to Clementine. She takes it and reads aloud the inscription engraved inside the simple loop: “
Forever More.”

“I think that the engraver might have made a mistake, though,” he says. “I think it should read ‘For Evermore.' ”

“What's the difference?” Clementine wonders.

“There's a profound difference,” he says.

She extends her arm to hand the ring back to him, but he says, “Keep it. It's yours.”

Clementine knows that the ladylike thing would be to protest, but she doesn't. She closes her fingers around the ring and holds it against her chest.

“So,” she says, leaning toward him, “did you enjoy watching me sleeping?”

She is surprised when his face flushes. He looks away for a moment before he says, “I wasn't watching. I just happened to see.” Then he grins a sly, mischievous little smile. “And you weren't sleeping.”

Clementine's jaw drops open again.

“It's the most beautiful thing I've seen in a long, long time,” he says. “It's the first honest moment I've seen in this town. It's the first thing that anyone has done that wasn't disguising itself as something else.”

Clementine knows that she should get up and walk away, run away even, but those eyes. Those lips. He generates some strange kind of gravity that holds her in his orbit.

F
or the seventh Sunday in a row, Clementine volunteers to stay behind to help at the after-service luncheon.

In the cab of the pickup truck, Clementine's mother sighs. “Our girl is growing up.”

Her father nods as he steers the pickup around the ruts in the laneway. “She's been a woman for some time now, Pearl. You were younger than she is when we got together.”

Pearl turns on the bench seat, reaches out to pat her husband's thigh. “I'm sorry if I'm hard sometimes, Darryl. I do love you, y'know.”

Darryl grins shyly. “I know, Pearl. I know.”

He brings the truck to a gentle halt in front of the old farmhouse. It rocks back and forth on its rusty springs.

At the same moment, in the forest behind the cenotaph across the street from the church, Clementine is leaning back against the trunk of an ancient tree, entwined with Aleksander, rocking back and forth at a similar frequency. The silver ring lies between her breasts, on the same slender chain that carries her crucifix.

This is the first time that they have coupled like this. Aleksander has pleasured her in other ways: spiralling his dextrous tongue against her sweet spot as she lies back on the spongy ground with her legs spread wide, fingering her from behind as she stands with one leg wrapped around a smooth-barked tree trunk.

But this time is different. It's beyond anything else. Clementine feels untethered from time, free in space. Each stroke fills her with a pulse of warm red light

Light on, light off. Light on, light off.

Light on.

Light on.

Light ON.

They collapse against the body of the tree, bonded together by shared heat and mingled sweat and the dénouement of mutual breathing.

When Clementine whispers, “Oh, God,” she means it. She is a believer once again.

“Well, well,” a voice rasps from over Aleksander's shoulder, “what have we here?”

Aleksander spins around. Clementine pushes her dress back down below her knees.

It takes Aleksander a moment to recognize Captain Football and his posse; they have replaced their
purple-and
-white team jackets with dark, Sunday-best suits.

This will not be predictable. There is a new variable that changes the equation.

“Run, Clementine,” he whispers in her ear. “Run. Now. Go.”

Clementine runs. By the time she bursts out of the forest, Captain Football and his minions will have repaid Aleksander's single punch and two kicks many, many times over.

Aleksander's internal organs rupture as Captain Football delivers kick after kick after kick. He rages, “Stop smiling, you fucking freak!”

But Aleksander continues smiling. A destiny more terrible than this one has been averted.

One by one, the minions disappear. The last one to turn away says, “Fuck, man, he's had enough!”

But the kicker keeps kicking, long after Aleksander's smile has frozen on his face.

C
lementine turns the plastic crank to open the cheap venetian blinds, and she peers out through her tiny bedroom window. The workers are preparing to paste a new billboard over the previous one.

Her father figured that he had better start allowing the commercial advertising again, with another mouth to feed and all. That ten percent revenue would buy a lot of baby food. Maybe some of it could even go into a college fund or something like that.

When Clementine could hide it no longer and the time came to reveal her pregnancy, she had expected her mother to strike her over and over again, to scream the word
bastard
, to sermonize about the “sin of carnal knowledge outside the sanctity of marriage.” But Clementine's mother just reached for her knitting needles and said, “Well, I'd best start knitting you some baby clothes, then.”

Maybe her mother reckoned that Clementine had already been punished enough.

When Clementine was subpoenaed to testify at the trial, she couldn't answer a single question without breaking down in tears. Fortunately, several of Captain Football's former teammates had come forward, and the prosecutor was able to convict him; not for murder, but for a reduced charge of manslaughter, with a sentence of the minimum four years.

Captain Football's father could afford to hire a very expensive defence attorney. In this world, nothing is ever really an eye for an eye, and Clementine cried over this realization for a very long time.

The teammates who came forward were made to suffer. They were called “rats,” and there were sidewalk whispers and barroom shouts about the heinous crime of “snitching on a teammate.” Clementine cried over this injustice, too.