The Dirty Parts of the Bible (5 page)

Tall and gaunt, he looked like a stretched-out, funhouse-mirror image of my father. Maybe that’s why I felt sorry for him. I wanted to pull him aside and tell him that this sort of talk may get you an “amen” at Remus Baptist, but it will only get you rotten tomatoes from a train full of Chicagoans.

The evangelist lowered his voice to a whisper. “Listen friends, I’m here to help you. To
warn
you. Your children are being lied to—led like innocent sheep to the slaughter. Let me ask you this: does anyone here really believe that his ancestor was a monkey?”

A shout came from the back—“
Yours
sure was.”

The passengers broke out laughing again. It was sport for them but torture for me. As ridiculous as the evangelist was, he was one of my people.

“Friends,” he said. “This is not a laughing matter. Tarry not, O sinners. The angel of death might claim your soul this very hour.” I made the mistake of looking the evangelist in the face, and he locked his eyes on me. “
You there
. Have you settled your account with your maker? If this train were to fall off these tracks, would your soul to his bosom fly?”

At that moment, a crash like thunder shook the train. We jolted forward in our seats and the evangelist tumbled backwards, head over heels. A woman screamed.
We’re all going to die
, I thought.
And me without ever getting to make love—or even getting to see a real live naked girl. I’d settle for that. But no—

“Take me, Lord!” the evangelist cried. “I’m ready to go home!”

The brakes shrieked like a band of demons, sending a shower of red sparks past the windows. An awful smell—like burning rubber—filled the car. When the train finally ground to a halt, we all looked at each other in shocked silence.
Was the evangelist right? Had we arrived in hell?

The back door slid open and the porter poked in his head. “Everyone all right in here? There’s some cattle on the tracks. Nothing to worry about—we’ll have ’em cleared off in no time.”

Everyone breathed a sigh of relief and went back to chattering and crinkling their newspapers. The evangelist brushed off his suit and slunk back to his seat, disappointed that this sinful old world was still spinning.

+ + +

Thankfully, the evangelist got up to leave at the next stop. After the doors closed, I saw he’d left his Bible behind. Had he forgotten it, or left on purpose? Was his faith shaken, or was it meant to be a lifeline for my damned soul?

The little brown Bible lay right in the middle of his seat, looking like a sacred dropping from a man who ate, drank, and shat Scripture.

I wanted to let it smolder there, but I was afraid people migh think that it was my Bible and I was a preacher, too. So I picked it up and buried it in a travel magazine.

Growing up, the Bible was as much a part of life as the air I breathed. There were no atheists in Remus—only believers and backsliders. I knew there were folks out there in the wide world who denied the Scriptures, but I’d never met any. Now, here I was in a car full of heathens, embarrassed even to be seen with the Good Book.

A few miles down the track, I cracked open the musty book—careful to keep it inside the magazine—and leafed through its yellowed pages. I was used to hiding magazines inside my Bible so I’d have something to read during Father’s sermons. I never would have dreamed that someday I’d be doing it the other way around. But the wasteland of Illinois had driven me to Scripture reading. It wasn’t just out of boredom, though; witnessing the evangelist’s humiliation ripped the bandage off my old doubts.

I wanted to believe the Bible. But every time I tried to read it, I got confused. It wasn’t that I got lost halfway through, either—my troubles started on the first page. In Genesis 1, it says that God created the plants first, then the animals, and people last. But in Genesis 2, it says that God created Adam first, then the plants, then the animals, and Eve last. Which was it? Not even God can have it both ways.

Then comes the talking snake and the angel with the flaming sword. Actually, the idea of a talking snake didn’t stretch my imagination too much. But after Adam and Eve get kicked out of the Garden of Eden, God posts an angel with a flaming sword at the garden gate to make sure nobody ever tries moving back in. That means that the Garden—and the angel with the flaming sword—are still there today, somewhere on the banks of the Euphrates. What if someone sent an army to conquer Eden? Sure, an angel with a flaming sword can hold off Arab raiders on camelback—but how about a fleet of tanks?

Then there’s Cain’s wife. At the start of Genesis 4, Eve gives birth to two sons, Cain and Abel. After he kills Abel, Cain goes off and finds himself a wife. Cain and his wife have children of their own, then grandchildren, then great-grandchildren, then great-great grandchildren. And then—and only then—Adam and Eve, who are still alive and kicking, give birth to their third child. So if Adam and Eve are the parents of the whole human race, where did Cain’s wife come from?

After that, there’s a lot of begetting—which gets rather dull, even if it does involve sex. My interest perked up again with Genesis 6, where the beautiful girls come in. The girls are so beautiful, in fact, that angels swoop down from heaven and knock them up. Then the girls give birth to a race of giants. This story didn’t seem entirely implausible to me: if I was stuck in heaven all day, I sure as heck would have flown down to get a closer look at Emily Apple.

Right after the giants are born, God gets mad at everybody and decides to destroy the whole world and start over. He takes Noah, the one righteous man on earth, and tells him to build a boat big enough to hold his family and two of every sort of animal. Every sort of animal, that is, except dinosaurs. Why didn’t Noah save the dinosaurs, if God told him to bring two of
every
creature?

My father believed that dinosaurs weren’t on the ark because they never really existed. It was all a hoax to lure people away from Scripture. The time he took me to Chicago, we visited the Field Museum and saw the Brontosaurus and Tyrannosaurus skeletons. My eyes were wide with wonder, but Father just chuckled. “Those Godless evolutionists glue a pile of chicken bones together and fool everybody. Well they can’t fool Malachi Henry.
Chickensaurs
, that’s what they are.” Awfully big chickens, I thought.

Fresh off the ark, Noah throws a party where he gets punch drunk and strips off his clothes. When his youngest son, Ham, sees Noah’s wrinkled old pecker, Noah curses Ham and his children forever. And this is the one righteous man on earth?

After that, there’s more begetting—Noah’s family has to get busy to repopulate the earth—and then things get dull again. A few chapters later, Abraham shows up. Abraham is an old man with a barren wife, and he wants nothing more than children. So God cuts a deal with him: God will give Abraham more children than he can count—if Abraham agrees to circumcise himself.

I first heard the word
circumcision
in Sunday school, the morning Eddie Quackenbush raised his hand and said, “Mrs. Pike, I was trying to read my Scriptures last night before bed, but there’s one word that’s got me puzzled and I can’t figure out what it means.”

Old Lady Pike’s face lit up—Eddie was the last child on earth you’d expect to read the Bible on his own volition. “I’m so glad you asked, Edward. Now which word is that?”

“Circumcision.”

Eddie never got an answer, because the old hag turned purple and ran out of the room.

Later, I asked my father what it meant. “It’s the removal of the foreskin of the penis,” he said.

It took me a minute to get over the shock of Father saying the word
penis
. “Re—removing? As in, cut—cut—cutting off?”

“That’s right. With a knife.”

I looked down at my crotch. “Did—did I have that done to me?”

He frowned. “Of course. It’s a sign that your body is consecrated to God, every member of it.”

The blood drained from my face. And from my injured member, too. From that day on, I was haunted by the ghost of my foreskin. What did it look like? Would girls like me better if I still had one? Did chopping it off stunt my growth? Was that I why I still hadn’t hit
puberty?

After Abraham gives his 99-year-old pecker a shave, the lowly foreskin becomes a major player in the Bible. It becomes the defining mark of God’s chosen people. Things really get crazy in the Book of Samuel, when David slaughters 200 Philistines, circumcises their corpses, and brings the bloody foreskins to King Saul on a silver platter—in exchange for the king’s daughter. And this was the same David who killed Goliath? Every Baptist boy’s hero? Author of the Book of Psalms?

My life would be a lot less confusing, I thought, if only God had told Abraham to cut the whole damn thing off.

+ + +

The idea that we evolved from monkeys was tough to swallow. But what was the alternative? Flaming swords, fornicating angels, faked dinosaurs, and Philistine foreskins? No wonder the Chicagoans heckled that old evangelist.

As far as I could see, there were only two possibilities. Either the evangelist was right—and my father with him—or the Chicagoans were right.

If the evangelist was right, this life was nothing more than a waiting room for the next. The only thing on earth that mattered was placing your reservation for eternity. And, considering how I preferred the French Lady over Jesus, I’d already bought my ticket to that warm place down South.

But if the Chicagoans were right, there was no hell—and no heaven, either. This life was all there is. You’re born, you eat, you shit, you screw, you die.

Funny thing was, the Chicagoans seemed happy, while the evangelist—sure of his eternal reward—didn’t. Then I realized why: if no one’s keeping score, there are no rules. If there is no Judgment Day, you can do whatever you want. Forget about laws and obligations—follow your whims and enjoy life while it lasts.

As we pulled into St. Louis, the last ember of my childhood faith flew out the window and disappeared in a stream of smoke. For the first time in my life, I was free to do whatever I wanted.

Bring on the Harvey Girls.

CHAPTER 7

F
RED
Harvey’s restaurant was right inside the station, so all I had to do was follow the scent of succulent flesh. My belly was as famished for food as my eyes were for pretty girls.

A man in a tuxedo showed me to a table in back, where I scanned the menu and the room. Once I got my bearings, I couldn’t believe my eyes.
Those
were the Harvey Girls? Beautiful in form and spirit?

What a crock. They looked like a bunch of damn Pilgrims in a Thanksgiving Day pageant, with their starched white collars and black dresses that touched
the floor. You couldn’t even see their forms. Aside from their hands and faces, you wouldn’t know they had bodies at all.

My waitress looked and talked like a prissy school marm. I always figured I was damned to wind up with a girl like that—mousy, pious, with thin lips, pencil-drawn eyebrows, and granny glasses. That was the only sort of girl who’d ever want to marry a preacher’s boy. She wouldn’t give me so much as a kiss before we were married. And after were got hitched, she’d undress in the dark so I’d never get to see her naked.

The acme of femininity? Those Harvey Girls were straight out of my worst nightmares. I chowed down my hamburger and got the hell out of there.

Unlike Chicago Union Station, they had bathrooms in St. Louis. In fact, they had two different kinds: White and Colored. It took me a minute to figure out that
Colored
didn’t mean red and blue toilets. In Remus, nobody was scared to use the same john as a black man. I knew from experience: white shit doesn’t look any different from colored.

Remus had quite a few Negroes, known as the Old Settlers. Nobody knew how they got there—maybe the Underground Railroad—but they’d been there as long as anyone could remember. My best friend at school, Sammy Swisher, was one of them.

Walking to school together one winter morning, Sammy and I found a dead skunk, frozen stiff. The whole rest of the way, we played skunk hockey, kicking it back and forth over the ice. When we got to school, there was a note on the door: no class—Ms. Steinke was home sick. That gave Sammy an idea.

We went inside and propped the skunk up in her chair. I found a pair of Ms. Steinke’s wire glasses in the desk drawer, and set them on its nose. To top it all off—Sammy wrote “Ms. Stinky” in huge letters across the blackboard.

Mrs. Steinke never lived it down. Neither did she ever catch the culprits. She suspected Sammy, but he had a perfect alibi: he’d been with the preacher’s son all day.

+ + +

My experiment in doing whatever I wanted was off to a poor start, but the possibilities before me were endless. First thing, I left the station and walked until I came to the Fox Theater. When I saw the sign out front, I couldn’t believe my luck:
Modern Times
was playing—Charlie Chaplin’s new movie.