Killing the Buddha Page 16

  Then there’d been the one in Tampa. The one he’d seen in a dream. He’d heard God’s voice call him to this one. Meet me there. God’s voice. It had been sweeter than cool water on a hot day, kinder than the girl who’d loved him when he was seventeen. It sounded, he said, like the sweet nothings God had whispered to him long ago through wind rushing over the purr of a 428 Cobra muscle car. James peered under the bus’s hood, staring at its huge, cold engine. “I had a ’sixty-one T-Bird,” he said, “that could outrun anything in Alabama, even the law.”

  But they don’t just chase you, they sneak up on you. The sheriff had caught him unawares, thrown him in jail for Godspeed and reckless driving. James had sat in his cell, waiting for word from God. When it didn’t come, he took a fork and some ink and into his own flesh carved the word of his own: L-O-V-E. “And I planned to do the other,” he said, pointing to each of the blank fingers on his right hand and reading the letters that weren’t there. “H-A-T-E.”

  “Like the movie?” we asked. James looked at us then his hand and frowned, as if we’d mentioned something long forgotten. “Maybe…,” he said.

  Maybe like Robert Mitchum’s murderous preacher in The Night of the Hunter. “Would you like me to tell you the little story of right hand, left hand?” he asks. He holds up his left hand to show off its inscription: “H-A-T-E. It was with this left hand that old brother Cain struck the blow that laid his brother low.” Then he holds up his right: “L-O-V-E: You see these fingers, dear hearts? These fingers has veins that run right to the soul of man. The right hand, friends: the hand of love.” His hands lock together, fingers intertwined into the shape of a temple. “These fingers, dear hearts, is always a-warring and a-tugging, one agint the other. Now watch ’em: Old brother left hand, left hand HATE’s a-fighting, and looks like LOVE’s a goner.” Left hand wrestles right, the temple is tipping. “But wait a minute, wait a minute!” Right hand pushes, inches back to even ground. “Hot dog, LOVE’s a-winning!” The hands struggle, left over right, right over left. “Yessirree. It’s LOVE that won, and old left hand HATE is down for the count!”

  “The fingers I wrote love on swoll up like sausages,” James said. “And then they took my fork away.” And then they took James away too. “A general called the jail, said I was AWOL. Said I was needed back in Vietnam.”

  When James had arrived in Tampa the week before we met him, the church God had promised him was no longer there. “They torn it down,” said James. “I found my church and they torn it down.” Since then he’d wandered. “There’s a church waiting for me, gotta be,” he said. Who hasn’t felt the same? Who hasn’t given up the looking?

  We drove down to the gas station and filled up our tank, then the red jug for James. Inside we bought a gallon of water, a loaf of Wonder wheat, some jam, and a jar of Skippy. “Mm,” said the woman behind the counter. “P B and J.” It didn’t seem worth mentioning that the food was for a man who was stranded on the side of the road and looked like he was dying of dehydration.

  When we got back, James received the sandwich fixings and the gas with the same disregard with which he had endured the heat. So we said good-bye and started to leave. Then he stepped forward, and we moved back. He was close enough for us to see the sores along his hairline. “I wanna shake your hands,” he said. Then he did. His grip was soft. If, when you were a child, you ever picked up a dead bird, a sparrow or a robin that you wanted to bury, then you’ve felt James’s hand. Lifelessly heavy and lighter than it should be, and most of all dry.

  He pressed his toothless gums together as he held on and nodded a little. Maybe he would be a preacher, maybe one day he’d hold someone still with the power of his cloudy blue eyes and the hollow bones of the hand that had escaped H-A-T-E, and whisper his secret into his victim’s ear: the wisdom of Job running a finger over his own scars, the gospel of a sword-tongued street-corner ranter, shouting not salvation nor deliverance but disease: “You’re just like me.”

  Then James let go, and his arms and ours fell slowly, and we stepped away from each other, all of us left with nothing to say. So we wished him luck—which he declined, explaining that he didn’t need it—and got back on the highway. At the gas station, we stopped again to wash our hands.

  Let him kiss me with the kisses of his mouth!

  SONG OF SONGS 1:2

  Song of Songs

  BY DARCEY STEINKE

  BOUGAINVILLEA petals blew around on the stone floor with a sound dry and melodic as you came into me. This was in that period of extreme weather. Heat waves followed by days of freezing rain. In that time of omens, large, medium, small, and extrasmall like the fact that your older sister adored cantaloupe while the younger one preferred sunflower seeds. And how in that small subterranean room with the twin beds and the walnut wardrobe, we were always cold. Staying under the comforter, both our bodies so thin that when we fucked our hipbones made a clicking sound a bit like a record skipping, and there was your pale skin, your heart beating in your chest with a wet sound like water swishing through a pipe. That sound along with the click of our hips illuminated everything, so I could see deep down into the hole, the fine blond hairs on my mother’s cheek as well as bits of green glass in the dirt of Mrs. Johanson’s garden. I saw everything all the way down into the night, drunk as I was on a thousand gin and tonics, because everybody wanted you, boys and girls. I desired not your body, which I already knew I could never make mine, but the you in the glittering asphalt, the you in the gas oven’s blue flame, the you in the pattern of bubble in the glass of Coke. I had to convince you to come away from your computer and lay down with me on the futon because thinking has always been hard. I mean why make yourself into a clock when you can learn the names of the flowers. Once in the car, as we passed a bed of wildflowers, I exclaimed, forgetting your prohibition, I love larkspur, and you flew into a rage. You also claimed that sunsets, the raspberry sky over Brooklyn, didn’t really affect you all that much. You loathed yourself more stylishly than I was accustomed to, and so at first when I loved you without knowing you it was like loving God.

  Unable to sleep, you’d get up and stand by the fire. Nothing in the flame’s light, not the mantel marble or the splintered mirror above it, suggested the modern world. You could have been a blacksmith in a La Tour painting, with your well-developed chest now gone soft in middle age. In the morning, we left the island and drove to a hotel in Norfolk, ate Chinese food, and watched E.T. at the theater. This was before pay-per-view, before even cable in that stone age when I ran around in my macramé bikini, my skin the color of milk chocolate. My white panties, your hard cock, our tan skin, we fucked every couple hours and got so high I put my hand through the headboard, through the wall, and into the chest of the man next door. His heart like a peony, and I knew he had found a little peace and so had I by loving your head of soft hair, your gray eyes, yours my first body and I was scared every time you took your shirt off, your narrow shoulders shocked me back into childhood and made me miss the subtle erotics of my family. My mother’s cleavage. My little brother’s belly button. My dad’s fleshy upper arms. Light from the stereo illuminated the glass beads hanging over your doorway and sure it was sexy in there. All kinds of stuff happened. Later, after we both came two hundred times, you’d kneel next to the porcelain tub and read to me. Your body, pressed against mine, had the exact weight of a daydream as we lay down together on the flatbed boat, pontoons I think they call them, with a dozen red-and-white-striped seats. We lay together on the AstroTurf. Rock music from the other side of the lake, teenagers laughing, your body covered with freckles. Your pelvis like a bowl of clean water as you said the word cacophony and the radiators clanged and you tapped your empty cigarette box against my fingers which were clenched tight around a shot glass of bourbon, the liquid melting in several directions, and I knew we were over the guardrail parked in your orange Volkswagen looking out on the lights of the valley while terrible pop music played. We made out ferociously, the crotch of my jeans as wet a
s a washcloth. Oh, my love, my perfect one, my one of the seventies sideburns and redneck appeal.

  Once kissing on a blanket spread out underneath a Sunday school bus you undid your pants and your cock slipped out. The prehistoric urgency of your hard-on and the sea-lamprey-like slit at the top haunted me so that later as I lay in my childhood bed I couldn’t sleep, so I got up to watch television and there you’d be mending your fishing nets with a thick wooden needle. You’d tell by the movement of the cedar branch in your yard if that morning the fishing would be worthwhile. If not you’d load split logs into the woodstove and we’d sleep, your chest pressed against my back, your hand on my hip. This was around the time I locked myself into the ladies’ room of the restaurant where I worked, sat down on the closed toilet seat, and said I love you, to no one in particular. Afterward I went into the walk-in with the bartender and we lay down on a flat of strawberries, and when I came out, the back of my white waitressing blouse looked like it was splattered with blood. But it was the milk in her breasts that haunted you, your wife standing drunk on the grass between your house and your neighbors’, her panties stuffed into her back pocket, milk, as you said many times, still in her tits. You told this story in the holy space engendered after mutually fulfilling sex, as well as another incident. How you sat in a café across the street watching your father wait for you. After fifteen minutes he checked his watch, after forty he left. You looked like a paper doll cut out from the moon, and so during the blizzard I fled my parents’ split-level and met you behind the Hardee’s. You’d built a campfire. Brought a bottle of strawberry Boone’s Farm wine. Ice crystallized on the rust stains of your beard. But you hated nature, and when forced to hike up Mount Lavernea with the German couple you kept stopping, hands spread wide, a cynical expression infusing your features.

  These things stay with me, and so when I’m finally with you on the other side I’ll remember how we went to the Log Cabin restaurant for breakfast but stayed all day drinking Bloody Marys. You were fascinated with locker-room slang. And you loved to sleep in your clothes, particularly your sweater vest and janitor pants. I remember as we sat in the red leather booth, bits of refracted disco ball light spinning, how I scanned your features—brown eyes with black lashes, thicket of silver hair, acne scars—for some clue as to why Paris is called the City of Light. When, up on all fours, your cock rooted inside me, I asked you if you felt it, you always said yes. After the second glass of wine, I noticed that your green eyes looked like tiny planet earths, and you told the waitress the soup was delicious, and me that my profile was killing you. Later you kneeled down to unbuckle my silver shoes, talking all the while about how if Eve hadn’t eaten the apple there’d be no reason for language, that words were needed only to define our separateness from God. Later when I saw you pull the girl onto your lap, my heart broke and I threw my donut down and ran out of the loft, down the stairs onto the Chinatown street. I no longer had you to love so I decided to love the world. But that was hard, as the world, if you haven’t noticed, is not that easy to love what with fast-food wrappers blowing around the subway tracks where I waited in my slip dress for the Q train. I rode that fucker all the way out to Brooklyn, where I ran past the picnic tables and the BBQ grills to the shore of the lake to see if the flowers were on the trees. Pitching squares of chocolate to the ducks, I said with each over-hand throw, My love, my own, I have looked for you everywhere, particularly in the pelvic region of the male species but also in red wine and hardcover books. Sometimes you make the back of my head tingle and subsequently I confuse being known with being obliterated. Why make me wait for union when I’m willing to crawl into the tree, grab hold of your blossoms, and fuck the dirt, my love, my beautiful one, quick before it’s too late, grab my hand in the cab and kiss the nape of my neck and work that alchemy that changes everything into you. My beloved, my holy one, there is a melon in the fridge, split in half, covered in Saran Wrap. I got it from a gray-haired man who was anxious to get back to his book on genealogy. This melon is for you. I’m waiting to feed you this melon, chunk by chunk, right down to the rind.

  Nashville, Tennessee

  Like clothing you will change them

  and they will be changed.

  PSALM 102:26

  WE were eating ribs when we saw him, his hair long and brown, his beard thick and biblical like Christ’s or Charlie Manson’s. His eyes looked like eight balls with the numbers blacked out and his bony knees were white as skulls. But it was his ribs that drew our attention, pulling our gazes up from oversize plates to the half dozen televisions that hung suspended above the bar. The camera zoomed in on a photographic still of black-and-white bones pressed against skin, a rib cage like two skeletal hands just barely supporting what was left of John Walker Lindh.

  The TVs were silent, but everyone knew who he was. The story of the California Catholic boy who had become the “American Taliban” had been in the news for weeks. Now came the report they were sending him home. Waylon Jennings’s voice rumbled through the bar’s sound system, a country twang standing in for CNN commentary: “Mamas, don’t let your babies grow up to be cowboys.”

  Waylon had died just the day before, and now he was everywhere, on every TV and radio station in Nashville. So was John Walker. The “Ramblin’ Man” and the kid who got lost in Afghanistan, joined for a moment by death, war, and the American belief that by changing your clothes—donning a black cowboy hat or a white Muslim kufi—you can become what you please.

  “Don’t let ’em pick guitars or drive them old trucks…” The picture on the TV changed: his thin, white body bound by black tape in what looked like a coffin, his gaunt face darkened by blood and dirt as if he’d been pulled out of a tomb instead of up from a basement flooded with water. A rag covered his eyes, a torn strip of cloth on which soldiers had scrawled curses. What did they write? The picture was grainy; we couldn’t read the words. Mother-fucker? Cocksucker? That’s what the men at the tables around us said as they glared at the screens. “Son-of-a-bitch,” muttered one man. “Son-of-a-whore.” Maybe there had been a wit among John Walker’s captors, a joker, a sardonic ex–altar boy who had thought to inscribe “King of the Jihad” across his prisoner’s eyes.

  We finished our ribs and headed out the door. We’d been making the rounds of both bars and churches in Nashville, watching for a story of overnight salvation, the kind country music is known for, the kind we’d just seen on TV. Somewhere in the city there was a man writing a song that would tell the story—

  I started lookin’ around for a light out of the dim

  And the first thing I heard that made sense was the word

  Of Mohammed, peace be upon him

  STEVE EARLE, “JOHN WALKER’S BLUES”

  —the pious light of Sunday mornings chasing dim and raucous Saturday nights; the constant cycle of putting on the fancy suit, then chafing and stripping and starting again. To John Walker his homeland had been as one permanent Saturday night, too dark, too free, too naked. He must have wanted to start again.

  It didn’t seem an accident that there were as many bars as churches in Nashville, or that at least one was both: Greater St. John’s Baptist Church, a white-brick box with two steeples like horns poking into the underbelly of an interstate overpass. A local porn king had bought Greater St. John’s, rechristened it Confessions, and filled it with brass poles, pink neon, and naked women. Fifteen dollars got you a seat in the sanctuary, where the pews had been replaced by barstools, the baptismal made into private booths equipped with leather chairs, low to the ground and easy for a dancer to straddle.

  We headed for the back of the building on a Saturday night. Down a short flight of stone stairs, through a locked glass door guarded by a buzzer and a closed-circuit surveillance system, in the same church basement that once held Baptist soup kitchens and Baptist potlucks, there was now a “bookstore,” staffed by three women bound by too-tight black lingerie. When we arrived they shuffled into formation like they were line-dancing at
a honky-tonk bar. One looked too young for this kind of work, her face pink and child-puffy, as if she’d just woken cranky from a nap. Another clearly couldn’t give a damn or a fuck or even tell the difference; she was almost too drunk to stand. And then there was their captain, stocky from the hips to the knees, strong in the shoulders. She glared indifferently. Elastic garters sliced into her thighs, yellow bruises dotted her arms, a C-section scar ran up her belly.

  “Twenty-five for every fifteen minutes,” she said. “Plus tip.”

  “Out front? The stage dancers?” Too-Young cooed, “Those girls only tease.” She took a step closer, leaning in. “We please.

  “For three hundred,” she added, “you get it all.”

  “But we only want an interview,” we said. “We just want to know what it’s like for you to do this kind of work in a church.”

  The drunk one laughed, snorting and stumbling. “Go talk to a nun,” she said.

  The captain shook her head. “Why don’t you ask God?”

  The next morning, on the suburban outskirts of town, we went to a mosque that had been bought and paid for with the help of a man named Yusuf Islam, also known as Cat Stevens. Inside, the mosque looked the same as any other middle-class American Islamic center: men and women lining their shoes up in the hallway and stepping sock-footed onto the carpets that covered the prayer hall, a big room cleared for devotion and adorned with the names of God in ornate Arabic calligraphy. The women prayed on one side, the men on the other, though they intermingled and whispered: Remember to pick up Pop-Tarts for the children! When is Mohammed’s piano recital? Men dressed in robes over Dockers and women in modern, shoulder-length veils tried to help us as we fumbled through the routine, pointing us due east toward Mecca when we got down on our knees and tapped the floor with our foreheads, directing us with gestures like good-natured traffic cops to stand, to bow, to sit and listen.