The day she left, Helen’s last words to him were, “Make God the center.” He’d tried, but Burt was tired of apologizing. How much contrition did one man have to drag up before he could be free of eternal condemnation by a bunch of celestial busybodies? God didn’t understand how hard it is to be a man. And sometimes, if you’re unlucky, He answers your prayers and still gets it wrong in the end.
It was then that he caught a few phrases and realized Marcus was talking to him. He was sure he heard “eternal damnation” and the words “sorry prick.”
Burt stalked to the bedroom and finally tuned the radio. “What mischief are you up to, Mr. Marcus in the Morning?” The static drained away and it was as if Marcus was standing in Burt’s bedroom, yelling at him.
“…if you believe in reincarnation, let me tell you what that is, friends and neighbors,” Marcus said. “Reincarnation is a hamster wheel.”
“Okay,” Burt said. What happened to the usual mix of Johnny Cash, Stompin’ Tom Connors and Elvis?
“If you believe there’s an old man in the sky watching your every move, how can you ever get naked or evacuate your bowels? I’ll tell you what your fascist God makes us. A damned
ant farm!
And I use the term ‘damned’ not carelessly, but advisedly.”
“Jesus!” said Burt.
As if he had heard Burt, Marcus said, “Jesus won’t help you now. Jesus died to get his Dad in a forgiving mood. Would you let one child, your
favorite
no less, die just so you could forgive your other children?
That we might live
,
my ass!
”
He almost skidded and fell as he headed downstairs for the phone. “Jesus!” Burt cried. It was half an exclamation. The rest was a call for help.
Marcus figured he had less than a minute to go, so he did his best to pour it all out before Donegal, the station manager, came banging through the door to haul him off the mic and out of the booth. He couldn’t help thinking of his hero, Reverend Ted, who had been hauled away from his pulpit one memorable Sunday morning by a bunch of angry congregants. They hadn’t appreciated the nuances of his drunken speech against religion.
Rev. Ted had been dead for years now, but people all the way to Bangor still talked about the Sunday the crazy reverend went off his nut. Marcus felt he owed the old minister something. Though his tirade had been lost on most of the congregation, Marcus counted that as the beginning of his journey away from a guilty conscience. Rev. Ted had woken him from the slavery of his born again sleep. Ted had gotten drunk on communion wine and, with slurred words, convinced Marcus to become an atheist, free to be dead forever.
“I’ll get to our sponsors, Hankerson’s Car Wash and Chigley’s Roofing, in just a moment. By the way, the views of your humble radio host are exactly the same as our noble sponsors ’cause they know I’m only laying the beautiful truth on you!”
For the first time since he spun jazz records for the one to five shift in college, Marcus was having fun at his job. Of course, the check tucked safely into his breast pocket had really kicked him into high gear. He’d use the money to get a tent and some supplies for the summer ahead. No need to touch the principle. A million dollars freed a guy up and knocked the shit off your boots. He’d leave Poeticule Bay and this lousy job in a blaze of glory.
“You know the beauty of these heavies I’m laying on you, brothers and sisters? The beauty is, you too can be godless and free. You don’t have to feel guilty anymore. Say your child is dying. Guess what? It’s a bad genetic bounce in a random universe. There’s no one to plead your case to. If God’s too busy to save your child from a horrible disease without you having to beg, what kind of monster is your god, anyway?
I’d
save your child in a heartbeat if
I
was omnipotent and I’m just a simple know-nothing guy about to be unemployed. Think about that! If your God has less compassion than I do, what are you worshipping? You’d be better off praying to me and begging for my help and forgiveness and sending
me
lots of moolah! How about it folks? I can always use more. Maybe I’ll pull a Pope and use the cash you send me to fill up my basement with fine antique works of art the world will never see! Sure, I
could
use it to feed the poor, but unlike what religion does,
I’m
not going to lie to you.”
The board’s red lights blinked at him. “Our lines are jammed. Everyone wants to talk to their new God, the inimitable me, but you can call me Marcus!” He added brightly, “Marcus in the Morning!”
“This is James Chigley of Chigley Roofing,” an angry voice came over his headphones. “I was just having breakfast and heard your show and I think I might just toss my cookies—”
“No need to thank me, James. Enjoy your meal. I bless you for making this show possible.”
“I don’t—”
“—know what you did before I came into your life? In the old days, before me, you could beat your wife and feel terrible about it all the way to church where your priest said it was okay.”
“Hey! I don’t know what you’re talking about. I’m not even Catholic!”
“Never mind that. Ask your
wife’s
forgiveness. That, my friend, is the way to heaven right here on earth. Right here, right now.”
Marcus leaned back and looked through the glass door of his booth. His boss’s door was still closed, so he was sure Clarence Donegal was still enjoying his morning nap. His boss made a great show of being the first of the day staff to arrive in the morning and the last to leave at night. Mostly Donegal napped and ate chicken from the restaurant next door. On summer afternoons Donegal went out with advertisers on the golf course. He slept with his door closed and played golf under the guise of “making sales calls.” Donegal told everyone he was the hardest working station manager in the business because his car was in the parking lot the longest of any employee at the radio station.
“Next caller! Gwen, you’re on with your new lord and saviour, Marcus in the Morning on 95.4, almost 95 and a half on your AM dial. What’s on your mind?”
“This is Gwen.”
“Yes, we know. Go ahead.”
“Do you mean me? This is Gwen.”
“Next caller. Bobby, Bobby, lay it on me!”
“I’m a Christian, mister. Are you seriously saying God is a figment of my imagination?”
“Exactly, Bobby, you’ve got it exactly right. He or she is a figment that’s draining away your life energy. Which Christian god do you believe in, by the way? The Old Testament god who’s always angry or the new testament God who took a chill pill who’s all about love except when He’s not?”
“I believe in both the God of the New and Old Testaments.”
“That’s no good. He’s supposed to be eternal and unchangeable so you really have to pick one. Get back to me on that and we’ll chat. Next caller!”
The secretaries from the front desk appeared from the front office: Sheila and the other Sheila. The young one waved her arms while the old one slapped a pad of paper against the glass of his booth. He looked up and flashed them a grin. The paper read, “Thirty-six angry calls!” He gave both women an energetic thumbs-up and shooed them away. As soon as they turned their backs he pumped both his middle fingers at them.
“Next up, Roger’s on Marcus in the Morning!”
“All I got to say is right on, man!”
“Nobody likes a suck up, Roger. I condemn you to the depths of hell for your impious thoughts about the hot check out lady at The Duck ’n Rush. She’s over eighty and deserves your respect, you utter pig!”
Laughter. “Rock on, man. You’re my new god—”
“
Blasphemer
!” Marcus yelled as he hung up.
“We’ve got to whip through these calls folks, because sometime soon Mr. Donegal is going to wake up from his morning nap and I’ll be off the air, so come on, Poeticule Bay, let’s have a little intellectual rigour before I blow out of this town for a little place I like to call Anytown Better, USA! I can see by the jammed lines that you have the number so let’s go to line two with Betty. Betty, what do you have to contribute to our religious discussion?”
Silence. Then he heard a tell-tale echo and hung up on Betty. “Betty is in love with the idea that she’ll hear herself on the radio someday. If you’re going to talk to me, you’ll have to turn down your radio. Betty, get over yourself. Buy a tape recorder and you’ll be able to hear yourself all day long without bugging the
sh
—um, bugging me. Whoops. With that breach of on-air etiquette we go to, line three. The queue says this is Burt.”
“This is Burt.”
“You’re off to a slow start, Burt. My divine finger is reaching out, much like in that famous painting of God giving life to Adam. The difference is, my finger’s over the button that will send you to oblivion. What’s your story, Burt?”
“I killed my daughter.”
Marcus spaced out a moment. “Tell me more,” he said finally.
“You’re saying God doesn’t exist, but I made a deal with Him. I prayed like crazy and…”
“Back up there, cowboy. How’d you kill your daughter?”
Marcus wasn’t sure if he should believe his caller and had his hand poised over the dump button, watching the clock hands skim around. “C’mon, Burt. Don’t leave us hanging. Who’d you kill?”
“I liked you better when you just let Johnny Cash sing.”
“Johnny didn’t sing. He talked his way through his songs and somehow nobody seemed to notice. What happened to your daughters, Burt?”
“Genie showed up at Audrey’s hospital bed drunk one night after she’d disappeared for three days. Genie ran away a lot. Anyway, Audrey didn’t mind, but Audrey was like that. Nothing phased her and she was just glad to see her sister. Audrey was always sunny…even acted pretty chipper fighting the Big C. Anyway, I chewed out Genie and Audrey got all upset and I went to the hospital chapel and I made myself a prayer. I asked God to take Genie instead of Audrey.”
“Interesting.”
“Sure. It didn’t happen to you.”
“God doesn’t answer prayers, Burt. Even if such a thing as God exists, and I won’t grant you that, he doesn’t interfere with our messed up world. If God cared about you, Audrey wouldn’t get cancer at all—that’s what mature grown-ups call the disease, by the way. Not ‘The Big C’—and there wouldn’t be so much suffering if God didn’t allow such flaws into his designs in the first place.”
The silence stretched out and, for a moment, Marcus thought the caller had put the receiver down quietly and was stepping back to blow his brains out. That would be awful and shocking. It would also make great radio for his exit from the business.
Burt took a long drink from his bottle of gin. He drank it straight, no ice. He was serious about getting the job done today and all that healthy orange juice was slowing down the process.
“I had two daughters,” he said into the phone, sending a message out to the living and the dead, if Genie and Helen were somehow listening.
“You have my attention, Burt,” Marcus said. “Lay it on me.”
“My eldest, Audrey. She got The Big C. Audrey was daddy’s girl. She couldn’t do wrong and nobody loved a daughter like I loved her.” He was breathing heavily. He could hear it through the phone but the more he tried to control it, the worse it got. Lots of things were like that.
“What happened to…Audrey, was it?”
“The Big C.”
“I’m sorry to hear it, Burt.”
“Are you? I wonder. People find it so goddamn interesting, like they can’t hear enough about it and can’t think enough about it as long as it’s happening to somebody else.”
“I hear your pain, Burt, but I’m not going to apologize for you tweaking my interest. You called me. Now what’s this about you killing somebody? Were you serious about that or are you just yanking me?”
“Audrey had the Big C and I…I loved her so much. I had another daughter. Genie. I dream of Genie with the light brown hair. You know that old song?”
“No.”
“Well, I do. And I still dream about her. I killed her, or God did.” Burt took another long drag of gin. “Genie was always wild. She was just born that way, like she was meant to be a wolf or something and there was some mistake along the way, like the stork got confused about the delivery.”
“What happened Burt, between you and me? It’s just us guys and a good chunk of Maine listening.”
Burt took a ragged breath, remembering his church-going days. Finally, he said, “I think there’s so much suffering because there’s so much sin everywhere.”
“Sure, sure,” Marcus said. “We’re all sinners according to religion, which is like blaming us for having two legs and two arms each and commanding us not to have heads. I told you, Burt, we’re all ants in the big plan, only there’s no plan. God doesn’t answer prayers, dude!”
“God answered
my
prayer that night.” Burt said. “Genie dropped dead behind the wheel of her car that night at the look off over Poeticule Bay. Aneurysm. She was only nineteen and her brain blew up. She just slumped forward and the car horn went on and on until somebody found her, white and cold.”
“I really am sorry to hear that, Burt. We all go one by one. We’re all dying, some by feet and others by inches.”
“That’s a pretty way of talking about something ugly, but let me tell you, right after that, Audrey started to get better. It was like…suddenly she had The Medium C and then The Little C. Then her scans were clear.”
“You think your deal with God came through and you traded one daughter for another?”
“I know it. The doctors couldn’t explain it. They just said things like this happen sometimes, as if that was an explanation.”
“I can tell you, Burt. You’re an innocent man.”
“I’m guilty. Audrey and my wife think so, too. They won’t have anything to do with me. I don’t blame them.”
“Burt, it’s all a big crapshoot. You got a bad bounce. Tell your wife and daughter that Marcus in the Morning forgives you your ignorance and they should, too. You’re not a monster. You’re human and we’re all guilty of that.”
Burt began to cry.