Hell on Church Street (4 page)

I won’t disgrace myself by repeating the tired, Vincent Lombardi-meets-Apostle Paul bullshit platitudes I fed him, but he seemed to like it and said goodbye to us.

“A good man,” Sister Card told me. “He’ll be running this church one day.”

Behind Sister Card,
she
walked by again and Sister Card motioned at her. The girl turned and came toward us. My heart slowed and I felt sweat trickle down my scalp. She looked at me and smiled—a polite smile only, but a smile that made me want to fall down. Sister Card said, “You’ve met our daughter, Angela.”

I almost yelped when she said it, but I just nodded. “Yes. I believe we met briefly.”

Angela didn’t look at me and told her mother, “I’m going outside.”

“Okay,” Sister Card said. She watched her daughter wander out of the room. Then she patted my back. “It will do her good, I think, to have another positive role model in this church.”

“I hope so,” I said.

“So how about coming over on Tuesday night? Would that be good for you?”

“It would be divine,” I said.

I spent the next day setting up my new home. I’d been given a small, white clapboard house that was less than five minutes away from Brother Card’s parsonage and ten minutes away from the church. We were all located on Church Street: me on one end, the Cards in the middle, the church at the other end. My little shack had originally been the home of some ancient pillar of the church
who
had maintained in her will that the house be set aside for the youth minister or sold to profit the youth group.

Brother Card explained to me the old lady had a “burden for the young people” which is
churchspeak
for “she liked kids” and he’d never even entertained the idea of selling the house.

So I moved in and didn’t have to pay rent. The house was too small for more than one person to live there, and it smelled like mothballs and old linen, but I aired it out, bought some candles and moved in my stuff. Now, since this was pre-internet, I had acquired by that time a substantial pornographic VCR collection. I knew that the discovery of this little treasure trove would be the end of my career, so I had it situated neatly in a locked trunk in my closet. I kept the VCR in the bedroom and the key to the trunk in my pocket.

That night, however, as I sat watching a video of a woman having sex with two men, my thoughts drifted. I thought of Angela—not pornographic thoughts, understand. These were clean thoughts, thoughts of marriage, of babies. I’m not a monster, you know. I dreamed of being married to Angela and being a preacher and having the youth group over to the house to watch Christian videos and eat popcorn. Square fantasies, you understand.
Fantasies of normalcy and virtue.
As the woman on the screen was turned into a human sponge, I dreamed of holding my sweet Angela’s hand and telling her how very much I loved her.

So, you see, starting out I had good intentions.

Chapter Four

When I showed up at the Cards’ house for dinner, I was wearing a turtleneck, clean khakis and some new penny loafers. I looked like a geek, but that helped, too. I had gotten a little bigger since school, but I was still a slight man, skinny and pale, and my hair had begun to thin a little. I wore glasses, and I had attempted a beard but nothing much happened there. My chin wouldn’t produce more than a few pathetic wires, so I gave up trying to look like a man’s idea of a man and opted instead for the small, sensitive look. People seemed to like it, all in all. Women weren’t drawn to me, of course, but I looked (and acted) harmless and people tended to regard me that way.

It goes back to that fundamental truth of life I was talking about earlier. People
wanted
me to be a geek. They wanted me harmless and meek. The timidity I
wore
as a mask was a comfort to people:
well, we know he’s okay. Look at him.
Women could assume I was sweet; men could assume I was weak. It’s what everyone wanted; I made them all feel good about themselves. And hell, sometimes I felt good about making them feel good.

Sister Card answered the door wearing a t-shirt with a picture of puppies on it. She smelled like onions, and in her left hand she held a butcher knife. I looked down and ever so causally noted the knife.

“I hope that’s not for me,” I said.

She looked down at the knife and burst into laughter. “No. I completely forgot I was holding it. Heck, that must look odd.”

I shook my head, and she let me into the house. It was warm and bright. Thomas Kincaid prints of small country homes hung on the wall. The television was blaring in the living room, but no one was watching it.

She gestured at a long blue sofa. “You can sit down if you’d like. Brother Card will be out in a minute.”

I said okay, but I thought it odd that she was relegating me to the living room. I took this as a sign she didn’t like me—a suspicion I was rarely wrong about with people.

“Would you like a drink?” she asked as she walked toward the kitchen. “We have Cokes and sweet tea.”

“No thank you,” I said. I took my seat on the couch, and she retreated into the kitchen. I watched her go. From where I sat, I could see a scented candle burning in the middle of a long dining room table.

I looked around. The coffee table was wrought iron with a freshly cleaned glass top. On the television, some steroid-thickened gorillas chased a football down a snowy field while a freezing congregation of the brainless cheered them. Turning away from that, I noticed pictures of the family along the wall. I stood up and investigated them.

There she was. Angela—or a collection of different
Angelas
, like variations on a theme: a little girl in blonde pigtails and a Pac-Man shirt holding a paint brush and a turtle with a shiny pink shell; a pimply twelve year-old with a noticeable gut and a barely perceivable training bra, standing with her older brother in front of the house; and finally, a teenager squeezed into a flag line outfit, a smile on her wide face as she poses with a much thinner, prettier cheerleader. I stared into her eyes. Was there anything there?
Anything crying out for help?

“That’s the family wall,” she said.

I turned and she stood at the entrance to a long hallway. She was wearing a plain blue t-shirt and shorts.

“Yeah,” I said calmly. I pointed at the family picture in the middle. “Is this your brother?”

She nodded. “Yeah. Gabe. He’s twenty-seven.”

“Hmm. Where’s he at?”

She seemed bored by the question and flopped down on the stuffed chair next to the couch. “He’s in grad school in Illinois.” Hands in her lap, knees close together, she stared at the television.

I sat down in the easy chair next to her. My hands were moist and my scalp itched. “Do you like football?” I asked.

Wrinkling her soft brow she said, “Not really, but it’s the only television in the house. My father likes to watch it.”

Being an astute observer of people, I noted that the term
my father
(as opposed to
Dad
) was a distant one. It was a title, not a name. It didn’t have to mean anything, but it was something to tuck away.

“But not you,” I said.

“I like basketball,” she said and smiled, and something in how she said it told me she was in love with a basketball player.

“Basketball’s cool,” I said.

“Did you play sports?” she asked.

“No,” I said. “I have the physical prowess of a hippopotamus.”

She laughed—a sweet, involuntary little giggle. I was pleased she didn’t seem to take my sarcasm as a fat joke.

Sister Card came into the room. She was still holding that goddamn butcher knife.

“What’s the joke?” she asked with a smile plastered on her face.

Could she see through me?

“Nothing,” her daughter said. She didn’t sulk when she said it, but the warmth went out of her.

“Well, why don’t you help me finish dinner, Angela?” Sister Card said.

The girl shot me a look, and I had to walk a very thin wire in returning it. I couldn’t roll my eyes—that would be too much—but I gave her a little grin that could be interpreted by her mother as
See you later, kid. Do what your mother says,
but could also be read by the girl as
I think she’s stupid, too.

It worked, and she grinned back and passed Brother Card on her way out of the room. He and I shook hands.

He wore slacks and a short-sleeve button-up dress shirt and looked like he’d just come from the church. “Sorry to be so long,” he said. “I was on the phone with Mrs.
Dyess
.”

I won’t bore you with his inane conversation over the next fifteen minutes, but much of it surrounded this Mrs.
Dyess
, an old widow in the church who was fighting off a terminal case of cancer. I acted interested (no, I acted concerned,
moved
even), quoted scriptures and promised to pray for her. Card, satisfied, finally sat back in the chair and stared at the television.

“Your daughter told me she doesn’t like football,” I said.

“Did she?” He watched the quarterback lick his fingers.

“Said she was more of a basketball fan.”

He turned slowly and looked at me and then glanced back at the kitchen doorway. We could hear running water and the beeping of a microwave. Leaning in he said, “It’s this boy at school. He’s on the basketball team.” He shook his head. “Brother, you don’t know what worry is until you have a child, until you have a girl. My boy, Gabe, he’s always been fine. Good grades, kept his head about girls, and now he’s off in school studying to be a
periodontist
. I’m sure he’s lived it up a little, but he always stayed in church, always stayed close to the Lord.” He hung his head. “But Angela…”

“You’ve had problems?”

He jerked his head toward the kitchen and stood up. I followed him and we walked through the kitchen—where Sister Card was pulling a tinfoil-covered dish from the oven and Angela was sitting at the island twirling salad tongs on her index finger—and Sister Card gave us a
five minute
deadline for dinner. Angela watched me as I followed her father through a door and into the backyard. The air was bitter, but Brother Card didn’t mind. I stuck my hands in my pockets.

“She’s never had quite the same head on her shoulders that Gabe has,” Brother Card said. He hooked his thumbs on the empty belt loops on his slacks and whistled. “I don’t know. You pray for them, you raise them in the ways of the Lord, but at the end of the day they have to decide on their own.”

“What is it about this boy on the basketball team that you disapprove of?” I asked.

He took a deep breath. “He’s Catholic.” Shaking his head, he said, “I talked to her. I sat Angela down in my office at the church, just like I would anyone else, and I said, ‘Do you believe that Mary was some sort of goddess?’ And she said, ‘No.’ And I said, ‘Do you see anywhere in the Bible where it says we should pray to statues?’ And she said, ‘No.’ ‘Well, do you think we should commit ourselves to people who do?’ And again, she says, ‘No.’
So
I explained that dating was a big thing and that we shouldn’t date the unsaved because the Lord told us not to be unequally yoked together with unbelievers.”

“What’d she say?”

He shook his head and kicked a rock. “Oh, she tried to tell me that Catholics weren’t idolaters, weren’t drunks, weren’t worshippers of that pagan in Rome.” Abruptly, he looked at me, so nakedly seeking affirmation that I wanted to laugh in his face. The second fundamental truth of this life is this: we only really trust people who share our prejudices.