Sweet Jesus (8 page)

Where did you park?

Harlan had her robe and nightgown gathered halfway up her back. Harl! she said, and his pants hit the floor.

Quiet, wife, he said, his voice hardening. I’m ride here with you.

Connie’s arms were in the sink, her hands splayed on the stainless steel by a drain that needed bleaching. Always elbow-deep in dishwater, she thought, and it wasn’t even her own
thought – somebody else had said it once – and her husband slid into her from behind.

Connie rose onto the balls of her feet. It was a seesaw of want, don’t want. The vanishing in and out between self-consciousness and pleasure. Harlan had her nightclothes dragged over her head and she could feel his hot wet mouth on the back of her neck. It left a cool patch, like opening a tiny window, when he straightened up to come, the compulsion tightening him into an arc, like a metal ruler pulled back at the tip to flick and oh! the exquisite agony of succumbing. He collapsed forward, shuddering in waves, while Connie took his weight on her wrists, wedging her elbows against the edge of the sink. She felt a drop like warm wax on her back, then another, and understood that Harlan was crying.

Harl, she said. Talk to me.

Harlan fell to his knees.

What’s the matter with you? Connie said, turning around and straightening her clothes.

I don’t want to lose you. His face pressed tight against her thighs.

Connie knew this was his weakness and rarely enjoyed reassuring him, but tonight it seemed more urgent. Why would you lose me? she asked and wanted to know. Harlan’s face was grey in the moonlight, a blue sheen around his wet eyes.

I gotta go to bed, he said. I’m so tired.

Connie watched her husband stumble out of the kitchen, holding up his pants. Something frightening about this pathetic vulnerability. A serious foreboding set in. She felt the urge to panic, sound the alarm, but she didn’t even know what the matter was. And besides, she had to be strong for the kids. Always everything for the kids. When she got to the bedroom, Harlan was curled up on the bed asleep. She sat beside him and
stroked the damp hair at his temple, as she did for her children. Hannah had once told her that a person’s smell is most purely itself at the temples, so Connie bent down and smelled him there. A familiar smell, like salt water and corn husks. And then a sudden wave of love and yearning. Oh, Harlan Foster, you better not be up to something unholy.

T
he ward had the oppressive tranquility of an evacuated building. Zeus had arrived and gone to his locker and put on his lab coat and old, brown leather clown shoes. He picked up his props and made his way down the hall, lifting his knees high and peeling his long soles off the floor, the fine orange hair on either side of his head undulating like seaweed. A gentle rap at the door. If a child looked interested, he’d walk into their room and begin the soft magic of distraction. But, lately, whatever courage he had ever possessed seemed to be failing him. Fenton hadn’t come with him for nearly three weeks, and they’d always worked together. Now he was beginning to understand it was Fenton at his side that had ever made the job bearable. It really
was
like standing at the heart of an abandoned building, uncertain as to its stability. He kept waiting for the hospital to collapse in a white cloud of lethal dust, the whole planet falling to rubble and ruin, coming down in carnage.

Zeus carried a red toolbox and a toy accordion that played the first few bars of ‘The Teddy Bear’s Picnic.’ He stopped
outside Sam’s room and put his things down. He took a pair of white disposable gloves out of his pocket and wiggled his fingers elaborately into their vinyl sockets. From the same pocket, he removed a hospital mask, raised it into the air, stretched it with his fingers like a cat’s cradle, and slipped it over his mouth and nose. He picked up his accordion and gave it a squeeze. He let the music play to the half-closed door of Sam’s room, then gently pushed it open with his foot. Hey, champ, want a visitor?

Zeus! The boy in the bed smacked his hands together once and held them there. His joy was like a salve. The children saved him, day after day. They reached him in his solitary orbit and touched his heart. Zeus picked up his toolbox and flippered into Sam’s room like a scuba diver.

Sam was seven years old and his head looked small on the big white pillow. He had the thin, semi-translucent skin of a tadpole and a clear oxygen tube belted around his face. Zeus held out his hand. Sam shook it weakly and Zeus flopped up and down like a rag doll. He bent his knees and sank beneath the bed, then shot back into the air as fast as Sam could shake his hand. Sam’s eyes shone. He laughed from his belly. His teeth were grey. Zeus loved his playfulness. The attitude that said, I will be happy. I have nothing to lose – except my life.

When Sam had stopped laughing over the handshake, he grew very serious. When’s Fenton coming back? he asked.

Fenton’s on holiday, Zeus said.

A
long
holiday.

Zeus nodded helplessly.

I love Fenton.

I love him too, Zeus said, and as he did, he was stunned again by how much.

Is Fenton going to die?

One day, Zeus said, but probably not for a while.

Will he die before me?

Well, Zeus said, getting onto the bed beside Sam, careful not to snag or dislodge any of his tubes, when exactly are you planning to leave us? He pulled a small pad and pen out of his breast pocket and got ready to write it down.

Before I grow up.

Not if you decide what you want to be when you grow up, then you’ll have to grow up first. Do you know what you want to be when you grow up?

I want to be an annie
-theezeegist
, Sam said. So I can put my doctors to sleep.

Zeus had to swallow. How do you spell that?

Sam shrugged and Zeus drew a picture of a doctor with a mask asleep on the floor under a squiggle of
zzz
’s beside a hospital bed in which a child sat upright, holding a squirting syringe. He gave the drawing to Sam and Sam studied it.

Zeus crossed his ankles. Sam, Zeus said, do you believe in moments of consciousness?

Moments of
cushy –
what’s it called?

Zeus rescued him. They’re moments in life when you’re really alive, that nobody can take away from you and that never die.

Like when my sister got into a fight with Anne Jansen because she said I was faking being sick so I wouldn’t have to go to school? Sam asked, panting a little.

Yeah, Zeus said, like that. He waited until Sam’s breathing was restful again. He was so easily exhausted, even talking was an exertion that could wear him out.

They’re like the pieces of a puzzle, Zeus said. You know, like if you put them all together, they’d show you a picture of who you are, and what’s important to you.

Like my sister.

Because she defended you, Zeus said, and Sam whispered, That’s right.

Yep, that’s called a moment of
cushiness
, Zeus said and reached down and hauled his toolbox onto his lap. He clattered around until he’d extracted two spaghetti balloons and a small hand pump. He returned the toolbox to the floor and pumped up the first balloon until it shot past the end of the bed. He started to pinch and twist the balloon into a sword. The balloon squeaked like sneakers on a gym floor.

I remember when I was very young, Zeus said, swimming in a big outdoor pool. There was a boy there, and the other kids were teasing him. They were pretending to play catch with him, but always throwing the ball too high, or right at his head. It was just a beach ball, but I’m sure it hurt a bit when he got hit in the face. It must have been embarrassing, but he wasn’t letting it get to him. He just kept playing, you know? He really wanted to be included, even though they were making fun of him. God, it made me so sad, and my sadness was like this physical sensation. It was like a crushing in my chest. I remember sinking to the bottom of the pool and watching the legs of all the other swimmers. I remember how peaceful it was down there, being able to watch without being seen. Because it had made me feel strange, you know? Why was I so sad, when all the other kids found it so funny?

Zeus stabbed the air with his balloon sword and said, Ah-ha!

He gave the sword to Sam, then inflated the other balloon and looped it around Sam’s wrist to gauge the size he would need to make the handle for a shield. When he slipped it off, Sam let his hand rest on Zeus’s leg. It was such a sweet feeling. The emotional terrain here was so perilous, he thought, but if he could force a gentle nonchalance, for the sake of the
children, then it made him feel heroic. Because the children in palliative care were on the brink of an incomprehensible kind of vanishing, and Zeus knew a thing or two about vanishing.

His real parents had been so young when they’d had him – young and crazy and way too into drugs. The small adobe house of his childhood had been full of laughter and screaming matches, but always outside the sun was bright and the sky that vivid New Mexican blue and the clouds obliterating in their whiteness. And often there was a car rally, or a festival with a bonfire crackling into the stars, and sometimes he would have to find his own way home because his parents had forgotten about him. Once, he slept on a hillside and woke frozen to the bone and the woman who drove him said, You should come and live with me, but Zeus said no because when he got home, there were enchiladas smothered in green chili and kisses from his mother and the flowery smell of her dark hair. She’d make him rice pudding – then the whole house would smell of cinnamon. And he’d watch his father slide under a car in his grease monkey suit and out again, the muscles in his arms flexing and making his tattoos come to life – making the lion roar and the flaming heart stabbed with a knife look like it was pumping with blood.

Were these details even accurate, or had he invented them? His mother, Frieda Monterey, was only sixteen when she’d had him. High heels, tight jeans, a black t-shirt, and red lace. Skinny as a skeleton was how he remembered her.

And his father, José Gabriel Ortega, who was a small man, like himself, drove a low-rider that he was constantly working on. A 1978 Ford Thunderbird, with an airbrushed panorama of the famous church on one side and a tableau of his life on the other, depicting run-ins with the law, a dead brother, two dead cousins, and a portrait of Zeus and his mother with the words
ámale por siempre
on a banner above their heads.

When Zeus was eight years old, his dad got arrested and sentenced to six years in prison for drug trafficking. Zeus remembered thinking he’d be fourteen when his dad got out. Then his mother’s habit got worse, and she was declared unfit by Child Protection Services. Smile now, you can cry later, she’d whispered into his ear as two female police officers came to take him away. He was put in foster care, and sent to a household with five delinquent boys. He was the youngest and he hated it there. He kept running away and trying to find his way back home. Until he met Rose Crowe.

Tell me another story, Sam said.

Well, Zeus said, let me see. He finished off Sam’s shield with a final twist of balloon. There was this other time, he said. I went to this summer camp once, somewhere in New Mexico. Must have been for poor Latino kids. Anyways, I was about your age, Sam. You ever been to summer camp?

Sam shook his head.

Well, I loved it. I mean, I loved being out there in nature, but people were always telling us what to do and when to do it. One day, I don’t know where everybody was, but I just started running around like a crazy guy. There was this cliff that dropped down to the river with a rope attached for lessons in repelling. That’s when you use a rope to climb up and down a cliff. It was only for the older campers, though, and you were supposed to wear a safety harness and a helmet. I’d never done it before, but I knew I could do it. I grabbed the rope and jumped off the edge, and kept leaping, swinging out into the air and landing back against the cliff with my feet. It was amazing. I felt so free and happy, and the world seemed so beautiful.

You didn’t fall? Sam said.

No, Zeus said, I was never afraid of that.

Sam stared at the window and the two of them went quiet, Zeus wandering off into the fog of nostalgia. Moments of consciousness, he thought. Why did he remember that moment and not another one? Why couldn’t he remember more about his mother? In a fit of anger, at the age of twelve, he’d destroyed the only pictures he had of her, and could no longer really recall what she looked like. There was Rose, the woman who adopted him, but she was like a photograph left out in the sun. She’d cry a lot and then apologize. I’m trying to be better, she’d said a hundred times, and falling short. Then she’d ask for his forgiveness. Well, Zeus got tired of forgiving her. Sometimes he felt that if he opened up her mouth, all he’d see was crumpled paper.

Do you have cancer too? Sam said quietly, pointing to Zeus’s bald head.

Cancer
? Zeus said and frantically slapped the top of his head. Sam looked so sad that Zeus leaned closer and whispered, Under this rubber dome, I have a full head of hair.

I wish I could have my hair back, Sam said. My head gets cold sometimes.

Zeus felt like ripping his wig off and shaving his own head out of compassion. You like the Chicago Blackhawks?

Sam nodded and seemed to shrink into the mattress, like the air was going out of him. He was depleted now.

We need to get you a toque, Zeus said and got off the bed and reached into his pocket. He had a yellow beak like a little girls’ hair clip he could press onto the tip of his index finger. He slipped his hand out and pushed it through his other fist, birthing the magic. With his white glove he made the movement of a bird trying to fly away. With his other hand he pulled it back and held it to his chest and stroked it. He looked at Sam and nodded towards the bird. He wordlessly encouraged him
to reach out and pet it. When he did, the bird tried to fly away again, but Zeus caught it and put it on Sam’s head. The bird flapped around on his bald scalp.