Life on the Preservation, US Edition (5 page)

Z
ACH’S
VW
ANGLED
into the curb across from XXX GIRLZ. In the middle of the street Ian straddled the Indian. He studied the sloppy turf-claiming gang tags. It wasn’t his shit to know, but he should have at least recognized one or two. All he could think was: You dumbshit. Meaning Zach, for coming back here alone.

CHAPTER THREE

OAKDALE, WA., 2013

F
OR A MOMENT
Billy’s face went blank. Then what Kylie had said about Father Jim being outside sank in. Billy lurched to his feet, knocking over a few beer bottles.

“What do you mean, he’s outside?”

“I saw him at the bedroom window, when I woke up a few minutes ago. Only I wasn’t really awake yet. I think he was there before, too. I had a feeling about it.”

“He was
watching?
Jesus Christ. Was he alone?”

“I don’t know. I think so.”

Billy crossed the room and pulled out the middle drawer of his father’s roll top desk. He reached in and came up with a revolver, a big one, with a long barrel. He hefted the weapon, seemed to reconsider, then put it back and took out a much smaller gun, an automatic.

“What’s that for?” Kylie said.

Somebody knocked on the front door.

They looked at the door then at each other. Billy dropped the magazine out of the automatic’s grip, glanced at the little bullets, slapped it back in. The weapon was so small it was almost like a toy.

Kylie said, “Father Jim didn’t mean to hurt Dr. Lee.”

“No?”

“I think Jim was drunk when he hit him. He stopped drinking after that and made everybody else stop, too. Remember? Billy, you get drunk, too. One time when you were drunk you smashed that Pepsi machine with a hammer.”

“That was different. The Pepsi machine deserved it. The dentist didn’t. Why are you defending him, anyway?”

“I’m
not
defending him.” But she knew she was and didn’t even understand it herself.

“He groomed you and then he raped you. It’s rape whether you let him do it or not, because you were only like sixteen. You have to not romanticize it.”

Heat rose in Kylie’s cheeks. Billy was right, she knew that, but a piece of her fought against accepting the truth. She had told herself that what she had with Jim was a
relationship
– a forbidden one, but a relationship, anyway. Romeo and Juliet were forbidden, too. Society was always forbidding relationships that didn’t look normal from the outside. Kylie didn’t have to give up anything for this interpretation of what had gone on between her and Father Jim. How sick to think of herself as a kid raped by a pedophile. Sick, but there it was.

Somebody knocked on the door again. Louder

“Don’t shoot him,” Kylie said. Now she was mad at
Billy
for saying the truth so meanly when before they had always talked around the edges of it.

“I don’t plan to.” Billy lifted his shirt and tucked the automatic under the waist of his jeans. He pulled his shirt back over it, but the handle stuck out of the gap where the buttons were missing. Adjusting the gun didn’t help. Even when the grip didn’t stick out in the open, his stomach was too big and the gun bulged obviously under the stretched shirt. He ended up switching it to his back pocket.

Kylie bit her lip, watching Billy anxiously. Despite it all, she wanted to believe everybody, including Father Jim, had a good ‘core’. (Kylie’s mother was always talking about people’s ‘cores’.) One of the few things she remembered from her childhood was the priest reading his Bible to her in her own living room, like she was somebody special. She knew he didn’t go to the other girl’s houses. He read to her like she pretended her father used to read to her. Probably that was just more of Jim’s sick grooming. But the man on the front porch wasn’t the pervert Billy talked about. He wasn’t even the forbidden lover, who could touch her face so tenderly one time and another be pounding into her with his engorged, razor-nicked cock, his face all knotted up with pain and the filthy things he was saying. The man on the porch was a trigger, and if the trigger got pulled the last good feelings in Kylie’s world would blow up and be gone forever.

“I’m going to open the door,” Billy said. “Talk to him. You wait in the kitchen and listen. If he gets too nutty go out the back door and run to your mother’s house, okay?”

“Define ‘too nutty’.”

“Kylie, will you
please
do what I tell you, just this one time?”

“What are
you
going to do if he gets ‘too nutty’, shoot him with your gun?”

“I won’t have to. He isn’t completely out of his mind. Guys get really sane when a gun is pointed at them. Trust me.”

It was like a line someone would say in the cowboy movies Billy watched, not something Billy himself would say. He delivered the line without much conviction, Kylie thought.

“Why don’t we both go out the back door right now,” she said. She could feel the big-ass God finger trembling on the trigger. Kylie wasn’t mad at Billy anymore; but with all her heart she didn’t want him to open that door. “If nobody’s home,” she said, “maybe he’ll go away.”

“I’m not sneaking out the back door of my own damn house.”

“Why not?”

Somebody
pounded
on the front door. “Kylie, for Christ’s sake.”

So Kylie stood in the kitchen. She heard Billy unlocking the front door, and she peered around the corner to see what happened next. Billy opened the door. Jim stood there, a big man framed in a doorway that seemed almost too small to admit him. He wore his usual overcoat and that floppy black hat. Like Billy, Father Jim suffered only the very early stages of the sickness.

There was no talking. Father Jim made a sudden movement. Actually it had started as soon as Billy opened the door. The movement concluded with a downward swing, and Billy collapsed, never having reached for the toy automatic. Guns evidently only made guys sane if guys actually
saw
them.

Ice water flooded Kylie’s bloodstream.

She staggered out of the kitchen and pointed. “Leave him alone!” Her voice shook.

“Girl,” Father Jim said. “You are not right.”

He stepped over Billy’s body, grasping the Louisville slugger midway up in his big left hand. Kylie turned to run. He covered the distance between them in a few strides and caught her by the hair, hauling her back. She screamed, wrenched away from him, hair ripping from her scalp. Bright needles of pain lit her up. She bolted through the kitchen, hit the back door, struggled with the lock, got it open and threw herself outside.

Kylie was eighteen years old. In junior high school she had run the 440. She could
haul ass
. If she wanted to get away from Father Jim she could certainly do it by sprinting across town to her mother’s house. But Kylie wasn’t interested in running away; she was interested in knocking Father Jim’s head off with a shovel. The trigger was pulled. Fuck his core. She kept seeing Billy crumple and Jim standing over him with his stupid bat, and she was furious.
Furious
.

She ran to the garden shed and grabbed at wooden handles, discarding rakes, hoes, an edger, until she found the shovel. It had a handle almost as tall as she was and a square steel blade.

She spun around with it, but the priest wasn’t there. She stepped into the yard. The night sky was starless and black, the air damp with an expectation of rain. High up, a faint glitter occurred in the atmosphere, as if the stars had been crushed to microscopic powder and sown by a miserly hand. Kylie let it distract her a moment, and Father Jim got her, his arm an iron bar locked across her throat. She dropped the shovel and clawed at him. She thrashed and kicked. Kylie was five foot one and weighed one hundred and five pounds. Father Jim was built to Biblical proportions. He increased the pressure on her throat. Her vision throbbed and she went limp.

When she came to, Jim had her slung over his shoulder, her head hanging straight down, the taste of vomit in the back of her mouth. Kylie’s head pounded. She swallowed and it hurt because of the crushing pressure Jim had applied to her throat. Though it felt like she’d been unconscious a long time it couldn’t have been more than a minute. He carried her through Billy’s house, crossing the open dining area toward the hallway to the bathroom and bedrooms. Billy lay sprawled by the open front door, where Father Jim had left him. Only not quite. He was in a different position, having stretched out his right hand, reaching forward, dragging himself, his face down. Kylie saw this very briefly, and then they passed into the hallway.

Jim dumped her on the bed. The candle still glowed calmly next to the Yeats book. Now captured in the black window glass were a bed, a girl, a candle and a tall man with straggly gray hair; he had lost his hat. Kylie tried to sit up. Sickening pain swooned through her head. The priest pushed her firmly back down and held her there.

“Don’t move,” he said, his hand hard against her chest.

“I’ll tell my mother,” Kylie said.

“You have to get right. I finally realized that was the problem. Even your mother realizes it and accepts it. Maggie isn’t stupid.”

“I don’t know what you’re
talking
about.”

“Lie still now.”

He removed a ball of twine from his overcoat pocket. Kylie stared at it. He grabbed her right wrist and pulled her arm over her head and began tying her to the bed post. Kylie tried to pull free, and he squeezed her wrist so hard she thought it would snap.

“Lie
still
.”

“Don’t do that, please don’t.”

He quickly finished with the left wrist. When he reached for her right she swung her fist into his neck with all the strength she could summon, which wasn’t much. But it was enough to make him gag and back away from her. It didn’t matter, though. Before she could even try to untie her left wrist, Father Jim struck her an open-handed blow across the face, his callused hand like an oak plank. The blow left her mostly insensible while he finished tying her. After a while she regained some presence of mind. Her wrists were secured to the headboard posts and her ankles were tied to the footboard posts, her legs spread wide apart. He had removed her pants.

At first she didn’t see him. Then his voice came out of the darkness in the corner of the room, where the candlelight barely reached his eyes. He was sitting in a chair, holding something in his lap, contemplating it. Kylie couldn’t see what the thing was.

“When God’s Judgment befell the Earth,” he said, “I thought He had forsaken us, and I despaired. I imbibed and became cruel to my brothers.” Father Jim spoke in a measured, practiced tone, as if delivering one of his pickup truck sermons, as if he had rehearsed the words.

“My faith broke utterly,” he continued. “Broke upon the rock of my despair. In my mind there
was
no God. But in time I came to realize that of course the Creator was indeed in perpetual residence, and that He had a plan. He always has a plan.”

Kylie pulled at her restraints. The twine dug into her skin.

“‘Be as little children,’” Father Jim said. “This was the Lord’s admonishment. And after God smote the world those who remained did became as children, and the filthiness of men and women was eradicated and we were cleansed by the purifying rain.
I
was made right, and I perceived the wickedness of my former life, and my days of fornication ended. So The Judgment was in fact a Great Cleansing. For me, for everyone. Everyone except you. Do you see?”

“Jim?”

“Yes?”

“Can you please untie me?”

“In good time.”

“It hurts, and I can’t feel my fingers anymore.” The second part wasn’t true, but Kylie wanted Father Jim to feel sorry for her. She remembered him touching her cheek tenderly when they were lovers, touching the same cheek that now stung after his slap.

“I’ve been praying for a solution to our dilemma,” he said.

“What dilemma?”

“Remember. Be as little children. You are the only one among us who is not.”

“That isn’t
my
fault.”

“No, it’s mine. I defiled us both with my lust. Now I will undo that which I defiled and put you right. Before the purifying Judgment, Kylie, many Middle Eastern and African nations – Somalia, for example – practiced a ritual of female genital alteration. Did you know that?”

“What?” Kylie tasted her gorge and struggled to hold it down.

“One advantage of the procedure, especially Type 2,” Jim went on, now in a kind of lecturing voice, as if he were reading directly from a text book, “was that it inhibited females from experiencing sexual stimulation. It’s all right there in the
National Geographic.”

Kylie’s heart began to beat faster.

“Type 2,” Father Jim said, “is Excision.” She strained to see what he was handling in his lap. Finally it caught a gleam of candlelight, a gleam that slid along its blade.

CHAPTER FOUR

SEATTLE, OCTOBER 5, 2012

A
CROSS THE STREET
from XXX GIRLZ Ian tweaked the throttle, which, contrary to anything that made sense, was on the
left
side. His dad could just as easily have switched it to the right handlebar, but that would have been ‘inauthentic’. The Chief’s engine rattled and coughed (authentically), flirted with dying, soldiered on. In Ian’s mind somebody screamed and a door opened to take him in and maybe never let him out again. Ian closed his eyes tight. Pain throbbed at his temples. He anchored himself to the throttle and followed the pain down. He began to feel distant and borne up, yet still anchored to the Indian’s shuddering throttle; Zen And The Art Of Mindfucking.

Ian opened his eyes, looked at his watch. High noon, October fifth.

Am I even here?
Yes. The question was: how many times before? Ian clenched his jaw, made tight, shaking fists, concentrating. Something like a subcutaneous electric current prickled under his skin. His memory dimmed, brightened, dimmed again. He
had
been here, many times. That’s how it felt. The breeze was winter cold on his face. (Later the day would warm toward a ghost of summer, and people would crowd the streets, a perfect day until the rain arrived late in the night; he knew this day so well).