Sarah (8 page)

‘Get out of here, Pooh,’ Le Loup says calmly.

Pooh starts to say something, but Le Loup pulls back his fist, so she runs out, slamming the door.

‘We gotta practice our miracles,’ he says, gently tugging at my hair.

The rain never came that night. The sky boomed, flashed, and squeezed out a few fat droplets, but no more than that. That miracle was clearly the jurisdiction of a saint triumphing over the sorcery of a black snake. Some whispered about the ash trees that burnt up in flashes of lightning, just the sort of conniving sign of a black snake. But Stella said there is always plenty of heretical jealous folks around to spread nasty rumors.

Pooh made hardly any money that night as well. All the truckers came to see me, laid out on zebra-striped satin sheets. They whispered their prayers for a Kenworth’s Limited Edition truck with a heated waterbed in the cab and for the strange burning sensation in their groin areas to be cast from them. Le Loup lit candles and shook the trucker’s hands a little too hard until they were more generous in the collection plate.

The TV crews and reporters didn’t show up, but all the lizards still took Mary Kay Cosmetics lessons and stocked up on camera-friendly earth tones so they would be well prepared.

Pooh told everyone that would listen that she now had the ability to know what every trick wanted without them ever having to utter an often humiliating word of it. She just knew. The Jackalope had given her the second sight. But not many folks listened. Le Loup stuffed the money she handed him into his boots then pushed her away. Pooh would drag her astonished customers up to Le Loup’s for them to testify about her extraordinary capabilities, but when her johns saw the glowing halo above my head they were struck dumb. The carefully concealed lights Le Loup had rigged did cast quite a glow, similar to that of the Jackalope’s natural effulgence. Le Loup explained that it was necessary to highlight my subtle luminescence to the truckers whose sight had been ruined by driving long night hauls. Pooh’s customers would overhear the other truckers attesting to the miracles their visits with me had wrought, and they’d drop to their knees. The large tips they were to hand to Le Loup in gratitude for Pooh’s newfound aptitudes were quickly placed on the collection plate with an extra fifty dollars or so along with an attached prayer that they too might have the blessing of being able to haul overloaded rigs right through weigh stations without nary a blink from an inspector. Pooh would nudge and then slap at her dates to try to bring them around to their original mission. But they ignored her and muttered their praises to me, the new patron saint of truckers. Pooh would try to regale Le Loup with what her johns were to say, then she’d grab at her tip as her trick placed it on the offering plate. I’d shout to her as soon as I saw Le Loup’s fist rise back behind him. She’d raise her eyes from the money to look at me, her eyes burning with indignant rage. The fist would get to her before I could find words.

Le Loup never baptized me. He never climbed atop me and took me like a wild animal in the night, as I heard all his lizards tell of as they displayed his claw marks. He never sank his teeth into my neck, giving me his brand for life, depositing his saliva into my blood so the need to sate his appetites would pump through my heart forever with ever-increasing urgency.

Le Loup only pats my head and fluffs my socks. Just like Glad had done. No truckers diddle me, even. Like a museum piece, no one is permitted any physical contact with me, except for private specially arranged sessions for those who wish to contribute more profusely to the collection plate. As the patron presses my hand to his heart, I close my eyes under the radiating heat from the spotlights. Sometimes the patron squeezes my hand so hard it feels as if it is breaking, but I bite my lip and say nothing that would cause Le Loup to take the touch away.

The dresses Glad had me wearing look like potato sacks next to the frilly, lacy dresses Le Loup has me in. I feel like a doily quilt displayed on the bed.

Le Loup doesn’t even touch me to help me get dressed. If I tell him I can’t reach a zipper down my back, it goes unzipped.

‘He’s not wanting to soil you,’ Stella says while feeding me in bed, as she does all my meals. ‘Once he sees that smooth puerile sacred skin of yours’—she quivers—‘well, he might be tempted to baptize you and damn his soul forever.’

‘And his fuckin’ collection plate,’ Pooh spits.

‘What’s that lump under your blouse?’ Le Loup says one day when I’m wearing an unusually tight silken top.

‘It’s a cross, isn’t it? She always wears it,’ Petunia tells him. ‘It’s gotta be one of them folk-made carved crosses, so sweet … I always see it through her clothes.’

I nod and try to cover the penis bone outline with my hand.

‘It’s too big,’ Le Loup says while counting out stacks of money. ‘I’ll buy you a proper dainty one from the Pay Mart.’

I reluctantly take off and toss my raccoon bone out the window and under one of the huge bright yellow skunk cabbage leaves.

I envy Pooh, in her tight leather miniskirts, sequined silver halters, and precarious heels, handing fatter and fatter wads of money to Le Loup that he, without acknowledging her, stuffs into his boots.

‘I hope your innards don’t give up on us anytime soon,’ Le Loup says through his half grin, after having to install velvet ropes for keeping all my worshippers queued to avoid the fistfights and sporadic gunshot taken to line jumpers.

‘Even desperate lizards on line to see the Jackalope don’t need no goddarned gates to keep them in order,’ Stella laughs.

‘I guess the truckers are more desperate to get the inspectors off their backs than you lizards are to get on yours for a trucker,’ Lymon says as he turns over his whole paycheck so he can fondle my feet.

Sometimes, when my palm is resting above one of Pooh’s johns’ hearts, I can feel my second sight beginning to unfurl. It comes to me in a hazy sensation, like trying to recall a particular scent from childhood. I sense what position they favor, whether they like to be spanked and chastised for being naughty, or what nasty words they are partial to having moaned into their ear.

Pooh stopped bringing in her tricks to testify to Le Loup after a particular trucker she had brought in who hauled an eighteen-wheeler filled with Kingsford charcoal briquettes ended up contributing to have a visit with me. As I pressed my palm to his beaded forehead, I suddenly saw flashes of lustings from the trucker that were so black and deviant I could only shudder and shake. Everyone took my tremors as a sign of divine sanction, and Le Loup later whispered in my ear how I must incorporate that more often. Since I’d never done anything except lie there and occasionally fall asleep, my outburst caused deeper levels of allegiance and adoration toward me. But Pooh knew what had caused my trembling. She saw me staring at the thick finger marks around her neck and the blue pallor her face still carried. Pooh had anticipated what he would do to her. She had used her second sight to know that it was the lack of surprise in her eyes, the lack of struggle on her part that would cause him to lose interest and to loosen his grip. She was the first not to end up face-down in a ditch at the side of the road. His inability to strangle her left him in a sobbing heap and Pooh was able to convince him to tell Le Loup, without mentioning any dead bodies of course. She was truly a psychic lot lizard, and deserving of media attention if anyone was.

I knew Pooh had believed the Kingsford trucker was too dark to be swayed by any God-fearing fervency, but the trucker was so unsteadied by Pooh’s lack of terror and his own resulting impotence that, as they approached Le Loup’s and he heard other truckers discussing how they were all going to visit the patron saint of truckers, he thought now might be a chance to petition for a return to his old murderously crafty self.

After I had removed my hand from the trucker’s head, Pooh and I just stared at each other in silence. Something passed between us, like walking in on someone masturbating in a toilet stall. I had become a part of something private. My body had experienced the fear she had deadened herself to. Likewise, I could feel she now knew something about me. Something secret. Pooh nodded her head solemnly at me as if conceding defeat, but gave an insinuating smile and wink of her eyes, indicating that next time she would be the one leaving me in humiliation.

‘You’re gonna walk on water today,’ Le Loup calls down matter-of-factly from high up on a ladder as he changes one of my spotlights before we open for morning worship.

‘I never did that before,’ I say.

‘Well, I’m sure Jesus had a touch of the nerves his first time too.’ He laughs his gruff humorless laugh and tosses a burnt-out red bulb next to me.

‘A contingent of Baptist truck drivers from up North are coming down to see you. Yankee Baptists!’ He spits and it lands near the bulb. ‘But they got cash,’ he says under his breath as he climbs down the ladder, ‘so we’re gonna give them a miracle…’

I can’t help but stare at his oversized hands as they grip the ladder tightly, the same way I’ve seen him grip one of his girl’s wrists as he’d drag her into another room.

‘Go get yourself dressed. In that little pink thing I got you. We gotta get the show on the road.’ He slaps his hands together and I jump. I’ve heard those slaps followed by cries from the girls he pulls into the other room. I’ve heard them beg and apologize and swear whatever will never happen again.

‘Let’s go!’ He claps his hands once more and I jump again. I slide myself off the bed and head to the dressing room that he built for me.

I’ve waited for him to use his hands on me. I’ve held out my wrist for him to grab and drag me into the other room. I even spilled cherry cola on my white pinafore on purpose. I knew he whipped Pooh for putting runs too fast into the stockings he had bought her. I sat on the edge of the bed and watched his face turn the shade of turnip tops, and his hands open and close like a caught fish gasping for air. I just sat there and waited. Just like I would do with Sarah. After she’d come home after being gone for a week or more and she’d just float in and say nothing to me, I’d go into her suitcase and take out something that meant something to her, and I’d hurt it. Lay it out for her to see, slashed and bleeding with her ketchup from one of her little packs. I’d sit and wait for her to notice. I’d also lay the belt out next to me.

Le Loup just grunted and snorted like he was a vacuum with some blockage.

‘This cost a lot didn’t it?’ I said, sounding as careless as I could and holding myself back from apologizing.

‘Umm!’ he grunted.

‘Are you mad at me?’ I said, making my tone as cloying as possible.

Le Loup stood stiffly with his back to me. His fists tightened and I felt breathless as he slowly turned to me on his heels.

‘Tell Pooh to get her ass in to see me as soon as she gets here.’ He smiled tightly at me, the hollows alongside his mouth looking like deep, empty canyons.

Later that day I heard him slapping Pooh because she had shut the door too loudly.

I never provoked him on purpose after that.

The sun has just nearly descended when Le Loup finishes his Baptist-tailored sermon and I emerge from my hiding place behind a thick patch of hemlock, spruce, and myrtle trees. Le Loup has set up his trick lighting hid under the alder, laurel, and willow shrubs, so there is an eerie red-lit haze obscuring the murky water in front of me. Twenty or so Yankee truckers are standing on the bank opposite me, clutching Bibles with one hand and their falsified logbooks with the other.

Stella and Petunia are at my side. They have as much contempt for Yankee truckers, Baptist wannabe’s, as any of the Three Crutches folk, plus they are well acquainted with indulging themselves in the petty sin of a paltry ruse in the interest of commerce.

‘Not much different than telling a john he makes me come so hard my eyes almost knock loose!’ Petunia pointed out.

Le Loup added, ‘Supernatural occurrences never happen up North, because Yanks have no space left in their hearts, in their minds, and on their land for a miracle of the Lord to have a chance to take seed.’

Everyone nodded furiously in agreement.

‘That’s why they all flock down here to borrow our divine manifestations!’ Lymon snapped.

‘Well, there’s enough miraculous occurrences here to share, even with Yanks,’ Le Loup said while patting his wallet.

And as those Yanks sat in the diner, no one pointed out to them the new menus printed up with triple the prices. And nobody offered the teary-eyed Yanks a lemon wedge or a blessed spray of the healing mist for their burning eyes, except for a small courtesy fee, which was neither small nor extended with much courtesy.

As I gaze at the Yankee truckers lined up on the other side of the bog, I notice all of them swabbing frantically at their wet eyes. But whether that’s from the moving fervent adoration of Le Loup’s oration or the open potato sack full of fresh-cut ramps, which lies hidden in the cotton grass behind them, is anybody’s guess.

Gasps rise from the audience as I move more into view.

Le Loup had finally settled on putting me in a charming little German dirndl with matching red velvet bows in my hair. Mary Grace did my makeup using her new Mary Kay products. I felt the pride a trucker must feel in taking a virgin, watching Mary Grace’s finger leave its prints on the unblemished pressed powder’s surfaces, the plastic protective shields cast to the ground.

Le Loup invites the truckers to toss heavy rocks attached to fishing lines into the water to prove there is no hidden platform beneath the surface of the water.

The rocks splash, cast in at various depths of the water. We all watch in silence as the reels spin out after the rocks until the spindles are emptied.

‘Gentlemen, as you can see…’ Le Loup announces.

‘There is no platform under there,’ one of the northerners certifies and they all murmur agreements.