You Don't Know About Me (2 page)

And that's just what happens when you start thinking about the pornosphere. It's like trail biking behind a bike bunny on a bumpy track. Her jiggly parts make you dizzy and you go blind to the
real
bumps. It's one of the rigid rules of mountain biking: Beware of male blindness; it leads to the kiss of dirt.

Okay, I'm jumping ahead. Back to the facts of me, and the how and why of me bombing into the world.

In the summer of 1993, when Mom was single, and still Tilda
Hayes
, she belonged to a fundamentalist group called the Jesus Brigade. One weekend, the J-Brigade got on one of those riverboats that go up and down the Mississippi. The boat was filled with sinful gamblers. The J-Brigade was there to witness for Christ, especially to gamblers with empty pockets and empty hearts.

While Mom was witnessing to this one gambler, his heart swung wide open. By the time she turned him from his evil ways he was not only slain by the Lord, he was slain by Tilda Hayes. After that, he joined the J-Brigade and joined Tilda at the altar. His name was Richard Allbright. He was so in love with her, and Jesus, that he quickly became a reverend. Not the kind who goes to school and gets a degree. The kind who gets a tricked-out piece of paper in the mail and starts circuit preaching in one-room churches in Arkansas, Louisiana, and Mississippi.

After they got married Tilda got pregnant. As she was belly-packing me around she said she had a real good feeling and a real bad feeling. The good feeling came from me pedaling around inside her. The bad feeling came from watching her husband's preaching star rise too fast. One
day, when her bad feeling was super bad, she did one of her providence checks. She was going to find out what the Lord had in store. She shut her eyes and prayed till she felt the Spirit. She opened her Bible, finger-planted on a verse, and looked to see what God had to tell her.
For everyone who exalts himself shall be humbled, and he who humbles himself shall be exalted.
Mom's heart trembled.

The next day, my father was driving home after a week on the circuit. He got caught in a hailstorm but kept hammering for Little Rock. Taking a corner, his car left the road and plunged into the Arkansas River. He tried to get out. He didn't. His spirit went to heaven. According to Mom, so much of his body went to the catfish that when they found his car there wasn't enough left of Richard Allbright to bury. He never got a grave we could visit.

I didn't even know what my father looked like. All his pictures were torched in a trailer fire when I was a baby. The fire incinerated the paper that made him a reverend too, and the family Bible recording their marriage and my birth.

But my father wasn't like one of those metal bits that chips off inside your bike frame and you can't get to; my father wasn't unobtanium. The stories Mom told me about meeting him on the riverboat and watching him preach in tiny churches put a movie in my head. She said I even looked like him. Especially my nose, a big beak of a thing. To see him all I had to do was stand in front of the mirror and age-up. I'd slick down my stick-up hair. I'd use a piece of charcoal to smear on a five o'clock shadow. I'd squint till things got blurry. And there he'd be: Reverend Richard
Allbright, behind his pulpit. I'd push my voice down and preach a sermon on anything in the Bible. If there was one thing Reverend Allbright and his son knew, it was the Good Book. It was
our
cardinal point.

And that's how my compass of Mother-Christ-Bible-homeschool, with my dad's face shimmering in the glass, kept me carving a line in the trail of the Lord. Those were the facts of me. From
The Book of Tilda
, anyway.

Then, at fifteen years and eleven months old, my compass got smashed. I went ripping off trail. Gonzo off trail.

Halfway through last summer we moved. We drove up from Tulsa in a heat wave that made me sticky as a glazed doughnut. The temperature didn't slip below a hundred till after sunset.

I was asleep in the front seat, in the zonk-bag, as we drove through Kansas City and into town #17, Independence, Missouri. I woke up with my neck sweat-stuck to the back of the seat. It made a twacky sound in my ear as it unstuck.

Mom held the MapQuest directions she'd printed up at the Tulsa library in one hand, the wheel in the other. “Rise and navigate,” she said. “We're here.”

I checked out the new “here.” The street was lined with stores and a couple food places, all closed. The place was
bizarro-empty for a Saturday night. That was probably why Mom picked it. Independence was independent of sinners.

The real reason we were moving to town #17 was because we had to blow out of town #16. Mom had done more than give the Assembly of Assemblies a scripture-spanking for having a steeple stuck in the pornosphere. She'd climbed into the steeple with cable cutters and severed the “tentacles of Satan.”

The facts of Mom went like this:

• Forty-two
  
• Tall, thin
  
• Straight brown hair cut halfway down her neck Sometimes a gray hair sprang from the brown
  
• A face that was still pretty but could pinch tight and show lines
  
• Gray eyes that got super intense, especially when they were juiced with the Spirit
  
• Leader of the New J-Brigade
  

The New J-Brigade was an army of two: her and me. We didn't just show up for the big battles at abortion clinics and courthouses that married homosexuals. We specialized in the little scraps with Satan. We were ninja warriors for the Lord, playing Whac-a-Mole with demons wherever they popped up.

In Memphis we took on Satan at Piggly Wiggly. We armed ourselves with black markers, went into the supermarket, and blotted out the word “devil” wherever we found it. We eliminated the devil from devil's food cake, Devil Dogs, and Devil's Duel Sauce. We were annihilating
the devil pictures on bottles of Mean Devil Woman Cajun Hot Sauce when the cops stopped us from completely casting Satan out of Piggly Wiggly. The store's security cameras caught us on tape and we made the local news. When everyone knows you and your mom are crazy criminals for Christ, and she gets hit with a fine she can't pay, it's time to disappear. That's when we left town #7 for town #8.

But the Piggly Wiggly Incursion was a picnic compared with the time we took on a motorcycle gang. In Topeka, Kansas, Mom had a job as a motel clerk. A biker gang roared up and checked in for the night. The trouble began when Mom spotted the slogan on their New Hampshire license plates.
LIVE FREE OR DIE
, it said in raised green letters.

Later that night, we drove to the motel with ball-peen hammers. Mom told me the slogan was a blasphemy to the Lord. “Live Free or Die” denied God's control over our lives and encouraged people to be libertines and hedonists.

We were halfway through hammering the
LIVE FREE OR DIE
slogans to flat-out oblivion when the biker gang poured out of a bar across the street. I did my own take on Live Free or Die and ran. A biker grabbed me. I didn't know what was more pucker-up petrifying, the mega-hairy guy holding me, or Mom whaling on a license plate and shouting, “We are sheep in the midst of wolves doing His work!” Another guy grabbed her as she yelled, “If we perish, we perish!”

I screamed, “I don't wanna perish!”

God must've heard me. A cop car shot into the parking lot just before the bikers pulped us with their mondo boots. After we were taken away, the cops said they would've put
Mom in jail for the night if it weren't for me. She must've known she was going to get fined again, or worse. That night we packed the U-Haul and left the state in our righteous dust.

As we drove to town #10—Des Moines, Iowa—Mom informed me that we were “antinomians.” I'd never heard the word and thought maybe an antinomian was someone who hated gnomes, like those plastic ones in people's yards. Mom had taught me that gnomes and leprechauns were antiangels who worked for the devil. So I thought maybe our next mission was going to be kidnapping lawn gnomes and stoning them to death.

I was wrong. She told me an antinomian is someone who knows there's two kinds of law: the law of the land and the law of God. When an antinomian has to choose between following one or the other, he always chooses God's law. That's another thing about Mom's brand of homeschooling. When you're on the run, some of it's car-schooling.

But Mom was good at more than whaling holy on Satan. She could always find a job. Being a super-fast typist, she got a lot of work doing data entry. She'd usually go to work after dinner. That way she could homeschool me during the day. Sometimes it freaked me out to be alone at night. But it wasn't like I was
alone
alone. “Don't ever be scared,” she'd say. “Your Heavenly Father is in the house looking after you.” If I ever really got scared I'd lock myself in the bathroom, stand in front of the mirror, and become Reverend Allbright. When my father preached a mirror sermon, I wasn't afraid of anything.

Her biggest talent was field trips. My favorite was
Orni-theology Day. Ornithology is the study of birds. Orni-theology is the witness of God's awesome feathered creatures. She loved bird-watching. I did too, especially the outdoors part. We'd go to bird sanctuaries or flyways where birds flocked over by the thousands.

One fall day when I was twelve, we were at a flyway outside Omaha. I had my fingers wrapped around a cup of hot chocolate. We were watching zillions of starlings flying south. They were an endless black sheet, wafting up and down in slow motion. Mom told me we were like migrating birds.

“How?” I asked.

“Because we rise on the wings of faith and soar in the flyway of God's work.”

We watched the starlings washboarding overhead until my neck ached. I took a sip of cocoa and looked at her. Mom's face was calm and peaceful. I'd never seen her look so pretty. I got why Richard Allbright had fallen in love with her.

She caught me looking. “Why are you smiling?” she asked.

“It's not fair,” I said.

“What's that?”

I touched my nose. “I'm the one with a beak, but you're the one who wants to be up there with the birds.”

She laughed and hugged me so tight I spilled hot chocolate on her coat. She didn't care. “Okay, we're birds. But we need a bird name. What should we be?”

A name popped into my head. “How 'bout Whac-a-Moles?”

She didn't get it, so I explained how sometimes it felt like we were playing Whac-a-Mole with the devil.

“That's it,” she announced. “We're Jesus-throated Whac-a-Moles.”

On that first night, driving into town #17, those were the facts of Mom. So I thought.

As we drove down the main street, I groped on the floor for the flashlight so I could read the MapQuest directions. I found the flashlight and looked up. What I saw jolted me fully awake. A white coffin gleamed in a store window. We cruised past it.
THE CASKET OUTLET
, the store sign said.

What kind of town has a coffin store on its main street? I wondered if the place was filled with vampires who liked to go coffin shopping. Then I had one of my gonzo thoughts. Maybe this town is perfect for me. First, I'll cruise into the Casket Outlet and slip inside the white one in the window. I'll go Rip van Winkle and sleep for two years and one month. Then, the day I turn eighteen, I'll rocket out of the coffin and start living the life I want to live.

The U-Haul banged on the hitch, yanking me back to Planet Reality. We were stopped at the end of the street.

“Which way, Magellan,” Mom said, “left or right?”

We drove down a hill into a ramshackle neighborhood. After a few turns we pulled in front of a tiny house with a
yellow porch light. It was barely a house, something between a shack and a doghouse. Its little front porch, which once had two columns, was down to one. The porch roof was so small one column was plenty. I'd seen things go missing from houses, like the time the landlord took away our toilet when we were late paying rent. But I'd never seen a one-pillar porch. “Mom,” I said, “the last trailer we lived in was bigger.”

“It's roomier than it looks.”

“How do you know?”

“I saw pictures on a computer.” She forced a smile. “And there's a pretty birdbath in the backyard.”

Another fact about Mom. When it comes to things, like a house, one perfect detail can blind her to all its flaws. When it comes to people, one imperfection can blind her to all that's good.

She patted my arm. “I promise, things will be different here.”

“That's what you say every time,” I mumbled.

She shot me a look but didn't say anything. It wasn't like she could. I was right. She had said it before.

I got out, stretched my crampy legs, and looked around. Moving was a hassle, but there was one thing about it that was cool. New neighbors. House #17 had a full set: on each side, across the street, and behind. Whenever Mom reminded me that all our migrating was part of God's plan, I wondered if His plan included me seeing neighbor women half-dressed or naked. When it happened, I got confused about the message the Almighty was sending. I mean, when He let me see a half-dressed girl or a naked lady, He was
obviously leading me into temptation and warning me not to covet my neighbor's windows. But when He filled windows with a saggy old woman or a naked man, what was He telling me then? The world needed more curtain makers?

Before going to bed we said a prayer and thanked God for delivering us to Independence. I added a couple silent bits: (1) I thanked Him for getting me out of summer Bible camp, which I would not be mentioning to Mom in case she had plain forgotten about it. And (2) I reminded Him that when it came to neighbors, He'd been hitting me with the curtain-maker message a lot lately. If He wanted to be sure my heart was fortified against lust, I was overdue for some carnal temptation.