Baptism in Blood (7 page)

“The
they
in question being the women up at the camp?”

“That’s right. You wouldn’t believe how many of them have children. Though I don’t understand how a les­bian gets children, do you?”

“Maybe they aren’t all lesbians all of the time.”

Beatrix blushed. “But it isn’t only them,” she went on. “It’s him, too. That man with the house out on the beach.”

“Dr. David Sandler.”

“He’s not a real doctor. Not the kind that does operations. He’s just a college doctor. And he has that thing on the back of his car that, you know, says he worships Dar­win.”

Naomi sighed. Her cigarette had grown a long column of ash. She tapped it carefully into the palm of her hand, winced a little at the heat, and then dumped the ashes in the empty wastepaper basket. Here was a library, full of books—and as far as she knew Beatrix hadn’t read a single one of them. Beatrix said she read the Bible, but Naomi doubted it. What Beatrix did—Naomi knew this because she had done it herself, during her holy phase, when she was married to her second husband—was to open the book at random and read stray passages from it. It was a form of divination for people who didn’t believe in divination. Open the book at random and it will speak to you. Close your eyes and put your finger on a passage and that will be the answer to your prayers.

“Look,” Naomi said. “There’s nothing wrong with David Sandler. He doesn’t worship Darwin—”

“He’s an atheist.”

“Lots of people are atheists, Beatrix, including me more than half the time. You shouldn’t go around saying things like about how people worship Darwin or the Devil or whatever. It’s dangerous.”

“You mean because I might get sued? I wouldn’t care if I got sued. I’d think of it as a trial I was undergoing on behalf of the cross of Christ.”

“I think that’s very nice, Beatrix, but it’s utterly be­side the point. David Sandier isn’t going to sue you, for God’s sake—”

“—I wish you wouldn’t take the Lord’s name in vain—”

“—why would he bother? Now Zhondra Meyer might sue you, just out of mean-spiritedness, because she’s a world-class bitch—”

“—
Naomi
—”

“—but to tell you the truth, I don’t think she’s inter­ested, either. But it’s dangerous nonetheless, Beatrix, because talk like that gets out of hand. Talk like that can hurt people.”

Beatrix waddled over to the window, the lines set in her face, furious. She pressed her face against the glass and closed her eyes.

“Nothing can hurt
them,
” she said angrily. “They don’t even have to obey the law. They aren’t like the rest of us.”

“Which is supposed to mean what?”

Beatrix pulled herself away from the window. “A couple of us from church went to the child welfare people. About the children up there, you know, at the camp. With all those lesbians. It isn’t a wholesome situation. And that’s what the child welfare people are supposed to be for.”

Naomi’s cigarette had burned to the filter. She put it out against the metal side of the wastepaper basket and got another from her pack.

“I can’t believe this,” she said. “I can’t believe I’m hearing this.”

“They just said they’d already checked into the camp, and there was nothing there for them to concern themselves over, there wasn’t any abuse and neglect or anything like that—but what do you call bringing little children up around all that smuttiness? Isn’t that abuse and neglect?”

“No,” Naomi said.

Beatrix was oblivious. “Later on we found out that they had a lawyer, that Zhondra Meyer had hired a lawyer, a famous lawyer from New York. And the child welfare people were afraid of the lawyer, because everything is so clean up there and everybody is so rich. They were afraid of it getting in the papers and making them look silly.”

“Good,” Naomi said.

Beatrix was nearly in tears. “I wish you’d come to church with me, Naomi, I really do. I wish you’d accept Jesus Christ as your personal savior. Because we’re in the last days, you know. And in the end you’re going to have to choose.”

“That’s your van waiting out on Main Street,” Naomi said. “Maybe you’d better pack up and get ready to go.”

“I’m all ready to go. All I have to do is leave. I just wish I could make you listen. I like you, Naomi. You’ve been good to me. I don’t want to see you go to Hell.”

There is no such thing as hell,
Naomi wanted to say. Instead, she stood up and began shooing Beatrix in the direction of the door.

“You’d better hurry now, Beatrix. You don’t want to miss your ride and get stuck out here with me.”

“I wouldn’t mind being stuck out here with you if I knew I could convert you. I’d do anything to convert you.”

“Go.”

Naomi nearly shoved Beatrix out the door and onto the second-floor landing. Beatrix moved with stubborn leadenness, a prehistoric, dinosaur-sized donkey with a mind of her own.

“Go,” Naomi said again.

Beatrix went down a few steps and looked back sor­rowfully. Naomi thought she was going to cry.

“Please,” Beatrix said. “Please think about it. You don’t know what will happen to you, if you don’t get born again. You don’t understand. And the forces of good always need help. They really do.”

“You’d better hurry, Beatrix. It’s getting later by the second.”

Beatrix hesitated, a mass of fat and bone. Then she turned and began to head on down the stairs again.

A few seconds later, looking down on Main Street, Naomi saw Beatrix come through the library’s front door and make her way to a big white van. The van had a gold cross painted on the side of it and the words JESUS CHRIST IS LORD painted in red. The side door slid open and hands reached out. Beatrix hoisted herself upward and disappeared into the dark.

The cigarette in Naomi’s hand had burned down to the filter again. She had forgotten she was even holding it. She pitched the butt into the wastebasket and sat down. Her computer screen was blank. Thunder and lightning had fi­nally put her system down.

Hello!
Naomi thought.
This is your class correspon­dent, Naomi Brent!

She put her hand up to the gold chain she wore around her neck and fingered it. She had been given the chain, and the plain gold cross that hung on it, when she was twelve. She had worn it ever since without thinking about it. Half the time these days, she didn’t even realize it was there.

Well, I realize it now,
Naomi thought.

She put her hands around to the back of her neck and undid the little spring clasp.

Then she dumped the whole thing, chain and cross, into the wastepaper basket.

B
OBBY MARSH WAS SUPPOSED
to take the church van out to Dedham Corners, pick up old Mrs. Michaels and her husband, and drive on back to the church on the Hartford Road. This was the little green van, the wimpy one, not the big white one with JESUS IS LORD painted on the side of it. Bobby used to drive bigger trucks than that van could ever be, but he’d had a few accidents, and the Reverend Holborn didn’t like to trust him. Nobody trusted Bobby much anymore. He knew that. Less than five years ago; when he’d still been in high school, he’d been a real comer. He hadn’t been “college material,” as the guidance coun­selors liked to put it. He hadn’t been one of those guys who was being packaged like a gift sausage and sent away to Vanderbilt or Chapel Hill. Even so, he’d had a lot going for him. Bobby could remember, with perfect clarity, all those late fall afternoons of his senior year. The rich girls sitting in their open-topped cars in the parking lot of the Burger King out at Dedham Corners. The sharp knobs of the hooks on Jerri Lynn Carver’s bra as they wrestled in the back of Bobby’s father’s Ford pickup, parked in the trees out on Caravansary Lane. Bobby Marsh had been a good-looking boy at seventeen, good-looking enough so that even girls like Jerri Lynn Carver, who was going away to Sweet Briar after graduation, wanted to make out with him. In the years since all that had ended, Bobby had decided that there wasn’t much else those girls had wanted of him. He still saw them sometimes, on Main Street, when they were at home visiting their parents. They had big gold wedding rings on their fingers and the kinds of clothes you saw in magazines and they pretended that they didn’t really know him. That was why he had come to trust so much in the Lord. There didn’t seem to be anyone else he could trust in. Once his life had been all sex, sex, sex, and it had made him miserable. Now his life was all praise, praise, praise, and it made him—

—angry.

Dedham Corners was right ahead, a big splash of con­crete and asphalt and mock-brick facing. When Bobby Marsh was a small boy, Dedham Corners hadn’t been any­thing but a wide place in the road with a gas station. Now there were three gas stations, a Burger King and a McDon­ald’s, a 7-Eleven, a Kmart, and more. All the plate glass windows were boarded up, but all the lights were blazing. The sky was dark and the rain was coming down in slanting assaults, like electrons bombarding an atom in one of those educational in-school movies. Bobby couldn’t remember what had made him so angry. Maybe it was everything and nothing at all. All he knew was that ever since he had joined the Reverend Holborn’s church, ever since he had met Ginny and married her, something inside him had been bubbling up, getting ready to explode. It was crazy, really. He loved Ginny. He loved Tiffany. He loved the church, too, which had given him the only sane life he had ever known. Bobby Marsh knew that his growing up would have been much different—much better—if either of his parents had managed to get religion. Instead, his father got beer and his mother got laundry. His father worked until he was so drunk they had to fire him. His mother worked without ceasing, like a slave woman, carrying big plastic baskets full of dirty clothes up and down the side streets of Bellerton, driving out to Conover to buy her own clothes at the second-hand stores. They had a small place on a dirt road far out in the country, away from the sea. The roof leaked and the porch sagged and the yard was littered with pieces of dead machines. Jerri Lynn Carver’s family had a big Greek revival right in the middle of town. Suellen Cham­bers’s family had a split-level in a new subdivision right off the highway. It had all been rigged from the beginning, and Bobby Marsh knew it. He just didn’t know what to do about it.

(Jesus is Lord,
he thought now, half frantically, the words pumping through his brain like polished ball bear­ings, hitting each other and making his skull shake.
Jesus is Lord. Jesus is Lord. Jesus is Lord. Take me now Jesus be­cause I’m falling right into the pit of sin.)

Old Mrs. Michaels was standing under the roof over­hang near the side door to Burger King. Burger King was closed, but there wasn’t anywhere else on the strip for her to stand where she would be protected, even a little, from the rain. Bobby pulled into the parking lot and cut his en­gine. He could barely see through the windshield, the rain was that bad. Now that he was this close, though, he could see old
Mr.
Michaels, huddled behind his wife, blank-eyed and frightened. Mrs. Michaels was one of those big-stomached women who looked like they’d swallowed a basketball. She was wearing a bright orange sweat suit with the words CHRIST IS COMING BE PREPARED printed on the back of the sweatshirt. Mr. Michaels looked like he was wearing prison garb or pajamas. He was so thin, everything he put on his body sagged.

Bobby opened the door of the van and slid out. His thick-soled shit-kicker boots landed in the middle of a pud­dle and spattered water everywhere. He had water in his face, too, where the rain was hitting it. He put his hand up to shield his eyes and ran over to where the old people were standing.

“Praise the Lord,” Mrs. Michaels said, when Bobby reached her. “I thought you’d been drowned in this storm, I really did. I thought we were going to be stranded here forever.”

Bobby looked back at the van. “Maybe I ought to go get the side door open. Then we can run him right in and he won’t have to stand around in the rain.”

“It’s been the Devil’s own problem, keeping him out of the rain today,” Mrs. Michaels said. “Every time I take my eyes off him, he just wanders off. I’ve been driven to distraction.”

“Mmm,” Bobby said.

“I talked to the reverend about it,” Mrs. Michaels said, “but there wasn’t much he could tell me. Alzheimer’s disease, they call it nowadays. We just called it getting se­nile, in my time. That’s what it is. Just getting senile. He won’t ever get any better now.”

Bobby looked dubiously at old Mr. Michaels. His eyes were vacant. His hands were limp. He was staring at a blown-up picture of a Double Whopper.

“Maybe you could go to a healing,” Bobby said. “You know. Like they had down in Charlotte a couple of months ago. Maybe that would do him some good.”

“I don’t think so,” Mrs. Michaels said. “I been to healings when I was younger. Those preachers never did seem to like people who were going senile. No percentage in it, I’d expect.”

“Percentage?”

“Well, you couldn’t make them better, no matter what, now could you?” Mrs. Michaels was matter-of-fact. “Better to get those other things, the cancers and the ul­cers. Nobody knows if they’re healed or not at the end of the night. Things work out better that way.”

“But God can heal anything.” Bobby felt confused. “You just have to find somebody He’s given the gift of healing to. Then Christ will heal you and you’ll be whole.”

“Will you?”

The rain was getting worse by the second. Bobby felt himself getting worse, too, angrier and more agitated. He had always thought of Mrs. Michaels as one of the most solid members of the church. Now it seemed she wasn’t any such thing. She didn’t believe in healing. She didn’t believe in miracles. She was standing here telling him there were some things God just couldn’t do. Or she seemed to be telling him that.

Bobby looked her over one more time and decided he just didn’t like her. She was too bright and hard and cyni­cal. Her jaw was slack and there were lines on both sides of her face, slashed into the skin like wounds, set off by big blue tinkling earrings bought at the jewelry counter of a five-and-dime. Bobby didn’t like Mr. Michaels much, ei­ther, but that was just… reaction. It was hard to like somebody who drooled when you talked to him.