House of Prayer No. 2 (16 page)

SATAN DEMANDS TO SIFT US
like sand through his fingers, and God, knowing everything, allows it. You stand on a chair at a table full of friends at a soundside bar not far from Jockey's Ridge, everyone beered and jazzed up on white powder, and you suddenly stand wearing black sunglasses because even at night in your circumstances, light hurts your eyes, and you want an amen from the table, and they give you an amen, and you start a ranting preach about the coming of the Lord in glo-ree.
Jee-zuz be praised
, and your table is laughing and shouting
Tell it!
as you have all seen this firsthand, and you proceed to tell it, you proceed to tell the parable of Jesus At the Carwash, and it begins,
Jesus saw a man, yuh, walking along the highway, yuh
, and you preach the gospel and compare it to the wash, rinse, and wax cycle of a carwash where Jesus is singing hymns and slinging rags on the hoods of cars in the parking lot, and, word of the Lord, you shout out for hallelujahs from the whole place at the end, and the whole place complies, shouting praise and ordering another round, and
in the men's room later a man comes up to you and says,
Brother, where do you preach?
and you have to tell him you don't preach, you're not a preacher, you were just messing around, and the man looks at you for a while, he may have come in late and just caught the praises, and he's disappointed at first that you don't preach nearby, and then he realizes the depth of the deception, and he's so disappointed in you that you go out in the parking lot and wait there for the rest of your crowd to finally come out much later.

YOU AND STEVE USE A BOOTH
in a restaurant in South Nags Head as an office from which to work your scams, Steve having recently started going out with a waitress there. You have taken on the names of Sven and Sven, dreaming up business ventures over home-style platters and free draft beer: taxis for drunks, boat painting. The people in charge of the boat railway where Steve has hoisted a prison warden's boat, the hull of which he'd been hired to scrape and repaint, notify him that his time has run out, so you run down there and slap anti-fouling paint onto the hull even as the railway owners are sliding the boat back into the water. You apply a wavy waterline from a rowboat.

The warden, a quiet man, comes down to check your progress one day.
Mark and Stephen
, he says;
one was stoned, and the other was a prophet
. At that time you are confused as to which was which. The warden likes you guys until you take his boat out all day when the Spanish mackerel are running, and in the afternoon, when you and Steve come back with hundreds of dollars' worth of fish, there is the warden on the dock with a flock of lost
children he is trying to shepherd from errant paths. They'd been waiting for you to return the boat for hours. Those are some terrible faces on those children.

YOU TAKE ONE LAST TRIP
with the notorious captain, this time earning the right to step aboard just as his trawler is about to leave the dock. You'd learned enough so that you are actually able to run the winches and read the lorans. With the money, you fulfill your promise to your father and return to your little college in a battered truck and with a beard, wild girlfriend only temporarily in tow. At Christmastime, when you go to her family's house, her sister, the one you should have met, says, having had a lot to drink, that the family is surprised that you are as normal as you are, since most everybody thinks your girlfriend is literally insane. That explains a lot. You take a last writing class with Jim Boatwright, and write about being on a trawler during a storm that rolls the trawler over and the captain has a heart attack and you and the rest of the crew, all teenagers, have to bring the boat back to the dock, the captain nailed into a locker because his body was getting all bruised up rolling around the floor of his cabin, autobiographical. You make two short films violating film school policy that cameras were not to leave the little Virginia town limits. You take the best camera down to Rodanthe on the Outer Banks both times. The first film is about a guy whose insane girlfriend leaves him and he decides not to stalk her. The second is about a lonely plane spotter, binoculars up to an empty sky, living in a tent in the dunes during World War II. One night something crawls out
of the surf, disembowels him on the beach, and then slips back beneath the waves. The star of the film is your friend with the melted face. Once, drunk, coming back from a lacrosse game, you two were walking along, and some people in a car were staring at him, and he leaned into their window as they leaned away and said,
I don't care anymore!
Your film professor likes both of your films. You watch them now and realize how empty and bleak and beautiful the seascape was back then, enhanced by the grainy black-and-white film, the foam, the birds, the sand, all shades of grey in the monochromatic winter light.

AFTER GRADUATION FROM COLLEGE
, you're living in your truck, driving through the country with a sleeping bag and a Coleman stove. You dig foundations for the world's largest shopping mall in South Carolina. You stay with your Cajun aunt and uncle in Louisiana, where your Uncle James tries to get you on with the union in the pipefitter's apprentice program. Meanwhile, you are working digging irrigation ditches, and one day you go into a convenience store to buy some beer and check out the magazines. There's an
Atlantic Monthly
in the rack, and you are surprised to see that you are a finalist in their American short story contest; the judge is John Updike. Boatwright had entered your trawler story without telling you. You swing the nose of your truck homeward.

YOU RENT A LITTLE HOUSE
on the Chesapeake Bay and support yourself taking pictures of houses for a realtor. A publisher sees
the
Atlantic Monthly
and sends you a letter asking if you have a novel, so you write a science fiction novel called
The Bug Hunters
. It's about shrimp farming in space on an aquatic planet where a father and a son shoot it out with .38 revolvers and there are Brazilian seafood pirates devoured by large eels. You send it to Boatwright for his opinion, and he sends you a note telling you,
You're wasting your time and your talent
. But you can't think of anything to write, so you read the Russian novelists.

You find a new girlfriend, and your new girlfriend's family has lived on a small island in the Chesapeake Bay since the beginning of time. Her father is a ship captain, and she can tap-dance. The realtor is letting you live in a falling-down house at the end of a partially submerged road, and it's on the grounds of an old Indian summer camp. The place is so haunted that some nights you drive completely around Mobjack Bay to spend the night with your girlfriend or her family.

One night when the girlfriend is looking at the scars across your hips and up and down the sides of your legs, she says she thinks the problem with your hips is a good thing, that without it you'd be an even bigger asshole than you already are.

The realtor drives a canary yellow Eldorado and wears madras shirts and is a good old boy selling waterfront estates to the Germans. He has seen you have a way of talking to the rich people about the history of the places, his properties are one river over from Jamestown and Williamsburg, and you have deeply read the history of the area.
This place dates from 1690, the original part of that farm is that long building they use for the barn now, note the long narrow gun ports through which they pointed
their muskets at the Indians
. Once, John Lennon and Yoko Ono come down and look at the place where there's the ghost of the girl who broke her neck on the staircase, but you never see her. When John Lennon and Yoko Ono buy the place, the first thing they do is put salt in the corners of the rooms to keep the ghosts away. Once, you are telling a rich German about the 250-year-old estate, and he cuts you off, saying,
Humff! Ze first thing I do is bulldoze it!
You have to tell him you don't think the Historical Commission is going to let him do that. You go up in the realtor's plane and take pictures for the brochures you are putting together, and the realtor wants to know what you want, how about selling the big estates with him, but you load up your truck and move to Richmond with your new girlfriend, whom you've convinced to go to college.

In Richmond, you work for a con artist selling coupon books, you work at the Capitol stuffing envelopes, your girlfriend gives you a black eye when you accidentally kiss a friend of hers after an Easter parade. After the breakup, you live with your friend David in Washington, D.C., where you run a copy machine for the National Organization for Women and stuff more envelopes for Ralph Nader. You see the police shoot a man at the National Monument in some sort of standoff protest. The
Washington Post
headline reads, “Lone Crusader Against Nuclear Madness Slain by Police.” The
Washington Times
says, “Mad Bomber Thwarted.” You can't pay your rent, so you camp out at a writers colony for a few weeks and read books by Graham Greene and Malcolm Lowry and write a story based on Art and his best friend's wife.

You drive to Virginia Beach and in the classified ads find a job
with a small ad agency writing copy for pizza and brassieres. It's a small shop the owners are running up their noses. One day a guy comes in looking for the owners, and you tell him they've gone “skiing,” and you ask him if you can help him. He sits down and says he had an argument with his father, who publishes a small military newspaper, and he just bought the newspaper from his father but has no idea how to do the editorial stuff, the writing, all he knows is sales. You tell him look no further, you are his man.