Sweet Jesus (7 page)

Harlan accelerated down a stretch of highway so familiar he had it memorized. How awful it was to have a life that finally resembled what his father’s life had been – recklessly irresponsible. What memories he had of him, they’d been surfacing more and more of late, and less damningly so than ever before. He thought about how, when he was eleven years old, his father just up and left him to fend for himself in an apartment full of women, and while he never grew accustomed to the painful longing in his heart, he did over time forget the cause of it. Besides, the women in his life had long ago cornered the market on displays of emotion and expected him to be strong, not needy, but to show manly composure, even offer assistance.

His mother was so reliant. She started helping herself to his money when he was just a boy. At the age of twelve, he got a paper route. One evening, at the end of his first month, he left the apartment – with his shiny new hole-punch and a stack of customer cards held together by a big silver ring – and went to collect payment. He met the grumpy, fat housewives and the sweet young mothers, and found out who had dogs and whose house smelled bad and what people ate for dinner. When he got home and tallied it all up, he’d made forty-seven dollars, including tips. His first earnings! He ran into his mother’s bedroom and waved the bills in the air.

Let me see that, his mother said, transferring the cigarette to her mouth and holding out her hand. Harlan gave her the money and she said, Boy, you must be the smartest kid on the block, look at all this dough. Am I ever lucky or what? She kept twenty and handed him the rest.

What? she asked with her chin, tucking the bill into the bosom of her bright yellow nightgown, between soft papery
breasts that were, when his mother hugged him, the source of either delirious comfort or smothering panic. She rolled over onto her other side like a huge caterpillar and resumed her reading. A magic beanstalk of smoke tendrilled up from her hip. The ceiling was beginning to turn yellow. He could still see her now, clutching one of her thick, corner-store paperbacks, with the black-and-crimson covers, embossed with gold lettering – a woman in a scarlet bodice, holding on to some long-haired, bare-chested pirate, on top of a windswept cliff somewhere in the Caribbean, a plume of black smoke rising from the burning topsails of a full-rigged ship on the horizon.

Like his wife, Harlan’s mother always feared the worst, but she had none of Connie’s good intentions or energetic willfulness. Misery is fond of company, and the bitterness Harlan’s mother felt at her own failed wish for love in the dancehalls of the Okanagan Valley resurfaced as the implied wish that everyone else in her life should fail as well.

There were tears on his cheeks. Harlan was crying again and this annoyed him no end. He flicked them off with a finger. How many times had he cried today? He couldn’t remember, but it was a lot. When he cried as a boy, his sisters made fun of him. They hugged him too, lavishly, almost sexually – they were very expressive, very indulgent – but not before making him feel like a sissy. Shame on you for crying, Harley. Have you ever seen a boy cry like this, Jodes?

No, and if I did, I’d kick him where it counts.

They laughed into their cans of root beer and rye. Everything was a joke to them. They made him feel ridiculous.

When a parade of undeserving boyfriends started traipsing through the apartment, expecting nothing less than the fawning submission of his older sisters and trampling on his instinct to be protective, Harlan was too young to object, too
powerless to stop it. When they spoke in lewd terms about his sisters, Harlan felt a thing subside in him like an exhausted muscle, a blueness spreading out. What’s more, his desire to protect his sisters was matched by the embarrassment he suffered, the shame he felt over their poor taste. He couldn’t help confusing good taste with moral superiority, and so there was disdain for his family mixed in with his jealousy and pity, and all of this sat heavy on his love.

He remembered how his sisters would squeeze into the hall mirror, popping their mouths with last-minute lip gloss, while a V8 engine revved at the curb. At least they have each other, he’d think, as they fluttered blue eye shadow and kissed him on the head. He could smell their black-market Poison for hours after they had left. And always they carried these little vinyl purses jammed with menthol cigarettes and spearmint gum and God knows what else. Out the door and Harlan would kneel on the sofa and pull the polyester sheers aside to watch them leave with a mixture of envy and scorn, aware of their own drastic, wildcat need for escape.

And when they were gone, to a tavern somewhere, or a pool hall or a bowling alley, he’d eat a dozen doughnuts. The small cheap ones with the sharp baking soda tang all covered in sweet white powder. They came twelve to a box and you could find them almost anywhere, in the basements of department stores, pharmacies even. He’d eat them until the sting in his mouth and the ache in his gut was a mild distraction to the desolation he felt. Sometimes he’d slip eight doughnuts on the fingers of both hands and make them beg for mercy before he ate them.

One evening, Harlan’s mother surprised him by joining him on the sofa to watch the girls leave the building. Jodie had cut the neck out of her t-shirt and by the time she reached
the curb, it had slipped down off her shoulder. Harlan’s mother had said, If there’s anything a whore can’t resist, it’s her nature.
Whore
was his mother’s favourite word. It denoted the two things that were missing in her life – sex and money.

But Jodie had looked good that night, he recalled now, in her Santana jeans, Nike high-tops, and peacock-feather earrings. He wished he had told her so. And if that was her nature, so be it, for who can resist their nature anyway?

Harlan was stopped at a red light, sitting at an empty intersection waiting for the light to turn green. The streetlights giving the outdoors an indoor appearance. Not a car or another human being in sight. The pavement light grey. The intersection tidy and the roads straight. Despite his mother’s best attempts to keep him down and close at hand, the first thing he did when he graduated from high school was join the army. He wanted to hear the constant and merciless barrage of commands exhorting him towards his own excellence, bellowed out through the loudspeakers morning, noon and night. He did not improve, he excelled. And quickly acquired the nickname Overkill, for how much time he spent polishing his boots.

He kept to himself and nobody could say of him that he wasn’t a good kid. He seemed to have things pretty well sorted out. His marks were okay. He had a couple of friends. He didn’t binge-drink like the guys in his barracks, though he did like a good all-you-can-eat buffet on the weekends. He spent three years in the military and didn’t think anything was missing until the day he met a girl who took him to a Leighton Ford crusade, where he’d first felt the powerful love of God. How certain he’d been of God’s love for him at the moment of his conversion. He’d been nineteen years old. He was overcome. He found himself on all fours, on a grey meadow of industrial carpet, in an auditorium full of folding chairs, under harsh
fluorescent lighting, weeping like a baby. The service was over and most of the congregants had stood up and were collecting their songbooks and Bibles and quietly, peacefully, making their way home. While others, like himself, were being prayed for in small groups.

Dear Father in Heaven, shower this man with your love, we beg you. Let him feel the power of your Holy Spirit move within him. Let him feel the breath of your Holy Spirit like a flame on his tongue, that he should be set free in your mercy, to go forth and witness to the glory of your word, in the name of your son, Jesus Christ. Amen.

He remembered a young Indian man who sat down cross-legged in front of him and opened his Bible. The pages made a wet sound. He put his hand on the back of Harlan’s neck and leaned forward until their foreheads were touching. He said in a heartfelt voice, And his father, when he saw him coming, ran to meet him. Such was his happiness.

And such
was
his happiness, he thought. It had lasted well into his early thirties and seen him through two university degrees, his marriage to Connie, and the birth of his three children, so how had he lost it? How had he forfeited the purity of a life surrendered in humility? All he knew was that it had been a long time since he’d felt the reassurance of his faith, and God seemed so remote these days. He needed the communion wine, he wanted the blood of the lamb smeared across his face. Something to wallow in. To match the intensity of his self-loathing. Here I am, Harlan thought, three blocks from home, turning left when I should be turning right. A father unable to turn the wheels of his vehicle towards his family.

His head was reeling and he counted up his drinks – four beers and the last third of a bottle of rum he’d mixed with
Coke back at the office. Harlan pulled over. A quiet suburban street. Turn the engine off. Crack open another beer. Take a slurp. The lawns were so green in the lamplight, neat as buzz cuts, shaved right down to the curb. Harlan lay his head on the wheel. He could hear the sound of water. Like a rushing river, with its banks burst. He saw his sisters, standing upright and stoic in a miniature full-rigged ship, the size of a rowboat, taking a hairpin turn in a swirl of whitewater. He was watching and waving at them from the balcony of a convention centre. They looked like pilgrims on the
Mayflower
. Then suddenly, in a row, three loud and startling knocks.

Harlan lifted his head and a teenaged girl in a red hoodie quickly backed away from the window. She looked alarmed. Are you okay? her lips said.

Harlan lowered the window. Sure, he said in a breezy manner. Juzz ah, his mouth was numb.

I thought maybe you’d had a heart attack, she said.

No, I’m fine, thanks, Harlan said, swallowing, then yawning vigorously.

The girl turned around. He’s fine! she shouted at the house behind her. In a bright doorway, an old woman stood, shaking her head. Something like a crucifix glinted on her chest. The young woman – who was so pretty and fresh-faced and wholesome-looking – shoved her hands in her back pockets and nodded. Well, that’s good, she said. Have a good night, and she left.

Harlan felt exposed, embarrassed, as if he’d just been caught in a lewd act. There was something about her, though. What was it? And then he realized. He recognized her. She went to his church. Harlan started the car and drove home.

Connie heard the bleep of Harlan’s car alarm before he walked through the door. It was one-thirty in the morning. Her husband was carrying the soft leather briefcase she’d bought him last year, but she had the funny impression it was empty by the way it folded on the table when he put it down. Where have you been? she said, leaning back against the counter with a mug in her hands. She had her reading glasses on and the lenses went snowy as she blew on her tea.

Harlan came forward and held her by the elbows and looked at her the way a child might – an orphaned child, standing in line, waiting to be adopted. Then he hugged her, aggressively. Connie had to brace her arm against his chest to swing her mug out of the way. She put it down on the counter and Harlan got his arms around her. He was rubbing his hands all over her back, as if he could gather up everything that had gone astray.

You’re messing up my –

He held her tight – tight enough to sprocket her glasses at an odd angle off her face. A cold snap on the collar of his gore-tex jacket was nudging her lip up into a snarl. Ya smell good, he said.

I had a shower, Connie said, pushing him away. Aw, Harl, I think you’ve bent my glasses again.

Thass why I told you titanium.

Connie put them down and opened and tucked and retied her bathrobe.

Harlan snaked an arm around her waist and bent sideways to scoop the hem of her nightgown and slide a hand up her thigh.

Your hands are freezing, she said.

But your skin’s so warm.

Let’s go to bed, she said, but Harlan ignored her. He was paying attention to the curve of her hip, the temptation of her
slim waist. He reached up through the neck of her nightgown and held her jaw, then the back of her neck. He kissed her.

Where’ve you been, Harl? What’s the matter with you? You stink of booze.

Harlan turned his wife around and put his face into her hair.

Come on, sweetheart, she said. It’s time for bed.

But instead he pushed her forward, gently but firmly, over the sink. Connie had always loved how entitled her husband behaved when it came to sex – how confident he was. In everything else, Harlan had such doubt, but during sex he had authority. Connie could relax. She had no responsibilities, nothing to do. It was like faith – a kind of thrilling surrender. Only, recently, he’d gotten sloppier, a little morose, a little too needy. A bit of that old, familiar self-pity creeping in and sullying her pleasure. The pot-lights in the ceiling were giving off their ivory glow and the blinds were open. People can see us, Connie said, but Harlan had his ear to her shoulder blade. She reached sideways and flicked the lights off. The outside leapt up to press its nose against the glass. There was moonlight on the spruce needles that carpeted a patch of lawn beside the garage, where Connie could never get the grass to grow despite having hired a landscaper and spread three bags of blended fescue. She could see the back wheels of Harlan’s Jeep where they weren’t supposed to be.