Only Begotten Daughter (32 page)

The crowd grumbled indignantly, yet to Julie his conviction seemed wonderfully tentative, his devotion to Sheila gloriously incomplete.

“Will you receive the teachings of Revelationism?” Nick Shiner persisted.

Bix seemed to think it over. “I shall receive the Kingdom of Impermanence,” he said hesitantly.

Yes, his faith was shakable, she felt, his sanity savable. She
knew it.

Nick Shiner plucked a fat chunk of brick from the ground. Inspired, his covigilantes bent down and, like peasants harvesting potatoes, equipped themselves—bricks, rocks, soda bottles, sections of lead pipe, bits of cinder block. To Julie the moment seemed arcane, forbidden. You saw such incidents in the movies, read about them in history books—you were never actually there for one.

“Tell us you accept the truth,” demanded Nick Shiner, massaging his brick as if making a snowball.

Julie tightened her grip on the cutters. This murder would be worse than most, there being so much of him, all that superfluous flesh to hew away, that extra span of skull to shatter.

“I accept the Covenant of Uncertainty,” said Bix.

Legs powered by instinct, resolve flowing from she-knew-not-where, Julie marched to the pink wall. What was courage? Doing what comes unnaturally, Aunt Georgina used to say.

“Hey, you!” a vigilante called.

“Stop!”

“Get away!”

“Out!”

Reaching Bix’s side, she kissed him. Smack, right on the lips, like those watermelon kisses Phoebe used to give her.

His muzzy eyes fixed on her. His mind seemed locked in ice, a glacier-sealed mammoth, but now a warmer epoch was coming, her Miocene lips. She kissed him again. How could she love this oversized nose, these dual chins, these sixty extra pounds? She did.

“Hey, I
know
you,” Nick Shiner called from behind her.

Julie’s heart hurled itself against her sternum: get out, they’ll kill you, run.

“I gave you a ride last week,” said Nick Shiner. “Come take a brick, lady. There’s plenty of bricks.”

Another kiss. Yes, this was surely the cure; her Miocene lips would suck the fog from his brain.

“We don’t kiss these people, lady,” said Nick Shiner. “Didn’t they beat you up? Where does kissing figure in?”

Get out? Run? No, she was free now, no more infinite potential weighing her down. She faced Nick Shiner and, stooping, snatched up a wad of pebbles embedded in cement. The disproportion was at once terrible and comic. On one side: a Camden mob brimming with bricks, stones, glass, and metal. On the other: Julie Katz armed with nothing but her brother’s best line. She debated which source to use. The King James? Revised Standard? New International? Douay? She settled on the version Max Von Sydow had spoken in one of Georgina’s favorite movies,
The Greatest Story Ever Told.

“‘Let him among you who is without sin’”—Julie held the concrete glob at arm’s length, proffering it—“‘cast the first stone.’”

Nick Shiner said, “Huh?”

Julie raised her voice. “‘Let him among you who is without sin cast the first stone.’”

“What?”

“Here, Shiner. Take it.”

He scowled. Julie could almost hear the sputters of rusty neurons firing in his brain. She imagined a severely retarded adolescent, a boy wholly ignorant of the sexual act, who is one day shown
Playboy.
A response occurs, a fully realized hard-on. So it was with Shiner, a response, an ethical erection. She’d tapped something basic here.

“Well?” Julie pressed her advantage. “Are you sinless?”

Shiner took a backward step. A small one, nothing to depend on for long, but still a backward step. “That’s hardly the point, lady,” he said resentfully. “The point is—”

“Sheila! Sheila!”

Julie spun around. Bix was gasping. His eyes were as wide as a lemur’s.

“My sweet Sheila!” he cried. “My sweet Sheila of the
Moon
!”

“Not Sheila, darling.” She seized his hand. “Mere Julie.”

“He called you Sheila!” Nick Shiner shouted accusingly. “He called you Sheila of the
Moon
!”

Julie screamed, “Let’s go!”

“Go?” said Bix.

“We’re crossing the Delaware!”

Shiner wailed, “He called you Sheila! You’re
her
!”

Together they hobbled across the lot, Bix moaning as the sharp trash cut through his moccasins. Even before Julie and Bix reached Front Street, Shiner’s gang was on the move, breathing down their necks as they entered the Irish Tavern and rushed into the sewers.

“Not Sheila?” said Bix.

“Julie. Your old pal Julie. No divinity. I gave it up.”

Like Jesus’ good line, the maze of tunnels bought them a reprieve. Vigilante footfalls echoed everywhere, but no bricks arrived, no bottles or cinder blocks. Leading now, Bix selected the route most likely to bring them to the river. Heat, moisture, and a primal stench fell upon Julie’s senses; heat, moisture, stench, and … a glow? A glow, a comforting radiance, beckoning.

Their entwined fingers tightened. Like an expanding iris, the glow grew from pinprick to hole to gateway of light.

“Will you make it disappear?” Bix asked as they reached a plug of barbed wire the size of a forsythia bush.

“No powers, Bix. I meant it.” Julie pulled out the cutters. “I use these instead.”

She scissored madly. The barbs tore her Eurocut slacks, snagged her cowhide jacket, bit her thighs. She felt like a baby performing its own cesarean section, knifing its way into the world. The river loomed up. Swarming with gulls, a garbage scow rumbled south toward the ocean. Julie stretched into the daylight and surveyed the drop—ten feet, no more than twelve. A Philadelphia police cruiser glided noiselessly under the Benjamin Franklin Bridge.

“We’ve got to go in there!” Julie pointed to the languid currents, dark and bubbly like coagulated Pepsi.

“That’s crazy.” Bix drew up beside her.

A brick spiraled past Julie’s brow. She turned. Raising their pitching arms, the vigilantes released a volley. Rocks ricocheted off the cylindrical walls. A half-full ketchup bottle sailed over the severed wires, exploding at Bix’s feet like a blood bomb.

“Can’t you, er,
part it
?”

“Ow!” A chunk of brick bounced off Julie’s knee. “Shit!”

She closed her eyes, grabbed Bix’s bathrobe sash, and jumped.

They embraced as they fell, holding fast to each other even as they smashed into the river. The Delaware snapped shut. Down, down they plunged, a baptism of sludge, the water growing ever colder, denser, fouler. Oh, glorious cesspool, she thought, wellspring of avant-garde diseases, laboratory for state-of-the-art carcinogens, surely no vigilantes would follow.

She arched her back and, rising, guided Bix to the surface.

The scow cruised toward them, its entourage of gulls hovering and screeching, pecking at the cargo like dilettante vultures. “There!” Julie sputtered. Whichever force had sent the scow, God or luck or Heisenbergian uncertainty, had thought of everything, including the mooring line trailing from the stern. “Grab on!”

A minute of frenzied splashing brought the rope in reach. Bix went first, scaling the hull with a fevered and wholly uncharacteristic dexterity. Together they flopped over the transom and tumbled into the blessed mush.

“Look, honey.” Spitting out the Delaware, Julie pulled Melanie’s wallet from her pocket. Burning nails lay imbedded in her kneecap. “Six hundred bucks.” She slipped out a hundred-dollar bill, saturated but functional. “We won’t starve.”

Bix sneezed. “How about a pizza tonight?”

“My favorite.” They crept toward each other, pushing through heaped refuse and thick walls of fetor. Meeting, they hugged passionately, bobbing up and down on a beach of coffee grounds. “Tomorrow we’ll do the zoo.”

“And the day after that we’ll get married.”

“Married?”

“My parents were married,” said Bix. “I truly believe it made life less horrible for them.”

She let herself relax, enjoying the pungent, vital moment, the sultry garbage, growling river, outraged gulls, domestic fantasies—a baby flashed through her mind, lolling groggily against her chest, milk leaking from its rosebud mouth—and above all the throb of the scow as it bore them toward the Philadelphia Naval Shipyard and freedom.

The Reverend Billy Milk—mayor of New Jerusalem, grandpastor of the Revelationist Church, executive producer of the Circus of Joy, and chairman of the New Jersey Inquisition—shuffled morosely onto the west balcony of the Holy Palace and surveyed the city below. In his good eye the sun blazed hotly, ricocheting off the shining walls and soaring towers, but as usual the truth lay in his phantom eye, by which account a satanic frost descended, sealing the twelve gates, freezing the sacred river, and killing the Tree of Life.

Disgrace,
rasped the ocean.
Ignominy,
taunted the wind. Gas lines, bread lines, coal lines, powdered milk lines, and then, when you finally got to the head of a line, inflation. In Billy Milk’s republic it took a sack of currency to buy a sack of flour. Disgrace, ignominy. The mining of Raritan Bay and the patrolling of the Hudson River were costing the Trenton junta eighty-five thousand mammons a day, a bill the American Congress was no longer willing to foot. Disgrace, ignominy, inflation, debt, and, worst of all, no Second Coming. Yes, the Circus was keeping people’s minds off the shortages, but what did that matter when its purpose remained unrealized? Billy bit his inner cheeks, bringing the pain he deserved. Blood washed over his teeth. How many more sinners must the Circus process before the Parousia? How many more must the flames punish, the bullets chastise, the arrows devour, the swords consume?

Then there was his son. Archshepherd Timothy: devout, bright-eyed, God-fearing—and something else, something difficult to name. Zeal was a fine impulse, a godly emotion, but … “Our Savior won’t return unless his people have known suffering,” Timothy insisted whenever he snuffed a candle with his palm. “An archshepherd cannot be a stranger to penance,” he would explain as he shoved hat pins under his fingernails or loaded his boots with broken glass.

A tear rolled down Billy’s gullied face. God takes your wife and gives you a son. You do your best—the check to the diaper service every second Friday, endless hours in the supermarket buying Similac and Gerber Strained Sweet Potatoes and calibrated spoons for shunting Septra down his throat in hopes of knocking out his latest ear infection, a thousand trips to playgrounds and day-care centers and strange houses where Timothy is playing with some boy whose name you can’t remember. You single-handedly organize his fourth birthday party. Half the children are blind like Timothy; they are wizards at pinning the tail on the donkey. You organize his fifth birthday party: Come As Your Favorite Bible Character. His sixth, seventh, eighth, nearly a dozen birthday parties. You do all this, and your son’s closet ends up filled with whips, dangling into the darkness like a normal man’s belts and ties. Could such be the proper destiny for a child to whom the angels had given eyes?

Billy’s gaze drifted to the Tomas de Torquemada Memorial Arena, a great bowl-shaped amphitheater jammed with tier upon tier of enthralled spectators. Bestriding the western gate was a fifty-foot marble statue of Saint John the Divine receiving the Revelation, his left hand gripping a quill pen, his right holding aloft a scroll in which Billy’s brilliant engineer—the grandson of the man who did Giants Stadium—had embedded a billboard-sized television monitor. A matinee was in progress. On the monitor, a man stood bound to a wooden post: a papist, hence a papist’s chastisement, the one inflicted on Saint Sebastian. A dozen men in diamond-patterned harlequin tights loaded their crossbows.

People were wrong about inquisitions, Billy felt. Look at the word: an inquisition was merely a questioning process. The court’s purpose was leading lambs to the fold, not the slaughter; torture and the Circus were persuasions of last resort. Even the Spanish autos-da-fé, most debatable of Billy’s inspirations, had probably burned fewer than three thousand, a tittle compared with the output of the same era’s secular courts.

Turning from the Circus, Billy went to his desk and opened the top file. His good eye raced past the plea (not guilty) and the verdict (guilty), settling on the evidence. “The defendant, one ‘Brother Zeta,’ was apprehended while conducting Uncertaintist services in an abandoned Hoboken subway,” Harry Phelps, former Cape May orthodontist and current inquisitor general, had written.

Billy took up his fountain pen. The hand that now countersigned the execution order was white and withered, its veins like strands of blue twine. So many years stored in that hand, and what, really, had it accomplished? A believers’ republic, a New Jerusalem—good enough. But God had made Billy a father, and he’d failed. God had appointed him gatekeeper for Jesus, and he’d failed.

Billy’s commandant entered on the run, gasping, his smile testifying to good news. A fine specimen of believer, Peter Scortia, the kind of soldier who could have kept the Holy Land from infidel hands for a millennium. Hard to imagine he’d once managed Scortia’s Jiffy Dry Cleaning in Teaneck.

Good news. Or possibly even … the
best
news, the very Second Coming? More likely the news concerned the stranger at Peter’s side, a cherubic man dressed in brown corduroys and a blue blazer.

“He works for us,” Peter explained. “Carries sinners out of the city. His name’s Nick.”

“Nick Shiner,” said the cherub. “It’s an honor, Reverend. Being here, I mean. Not the hauling.”

Billy kept his monocular gaze locked on Peter. If you looked directly at people of Nick Shiner’s station, they often ended up pressing their advantage, telling you their opinions about taxes and bread lines. “Is Mr. Shiner unhappy with his situation?”

“That’s not why he came,” said Peter.

“I wouldn’t mind a couple of free passes on occasion,” said the truck driver.

“He’s seen someone,” said Peter. “In Camden.”

“I’m sure it’s her,” said Nick Shiner. “I remember how she looked from that picture they always ran with her advice. She’s gotten older, but it’s her.”

“What is Mr. Shiner talking about?” Billy focused on the Distinguished Service Cross that Peter had received for flushing out a family of sodomites in East Orange.