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Good News

Thomas Horan

    It was Morning in America. A Pharisee would argue that, strictly speaking, it was Sunday afternoon—July 13th—in Bethlehem, Illinois. Tent revival season. Demolition derbies and greased pigs. But in the bigger scheme of things, it was Morning in America. The sun was resurrecting Old Glory over sprinkled lawns and misty fields of corn. A rosy-fingered dawn.
    Americans were being reborn. We were shaking off the old rust of recession and retreat and putting on a shiny new plastic coat of success. We were better off. We were handing out five-pound blocks of cheese to anyone who needed them. We were spreading the gospel of democracy and 2-for-1 Big Macs. We were launching astronauts into outer space and returning them safely to earth. There was no stopping us, no limit to the things we could do. This was our Second Coming.
    Here was the place. Bethlehem was a manger town, three silos and a slaughterhouse, on the banks of the Wabash. A bible Acropolis smack in the middle of the fabled land of Corn and Beans. The people there were born Christians, but the sultry heat of July got under their skins. Folks began to chafe, to boil up, to stew in their juices. They took to spitting the bit and balking at the straight and narrow. They cast a covetous eye down the crooked, weedy path that leads to the fires of Hell. “At least that’d be a dry heat,” they’d say.
    Now was the time. The shepherds called their chickens home, to flock around the tent poles of Judah and Benjamin. Salvation here tonight. Baptism in the spirit. Babies and bath water. The crop was in the field. The tree was bearing its fruit. The harvest was nigh. Were you the wheat? Or the chaff?
    I was the prodigy, coming of age. This was the morning of my manhood. I was shaking off the rusty training wheels of childhood and climbing onto the shiny banana seat of maturity. I was extending myself, thrusting ahead into hairy mysteries and great expectations. I was coming into a heritage, stepping into a pair of shoes. Taking my place. Taking my time.
    Time, the pondering Jew once said, is relative. Greenwich Mean Time. Daylight Savings Time. Miller Time. The Old Man declared it was high time for me to get a job. My buddy Lazarre’s virgin sister Madeleine claimed every day was her time of the month. The best of times. The worst of times. Time for drinking beer, laying rubber, and kicking against the pricks.
    The Old Man was number one. He was older than dirt, knew it all, and laid down the law. In his house, it was, “My way, or the highway.” Everything was like that for him. Day or Night. Hot or Cold. Right or Wrong. He’d won the war, the Big One, Good versus Evil. That was his America, the First Coming. God, guns, and guts. The power and Old Glory forever and ever. Amen.
    Madeleine was number zero. She was seventeen, knew nothing, and laid nobody. In her pants, it was, “Abandon hope. Ye will never enter here.” Nothing worked on her. Hard nor easy. Slow nor fast. Beg nor barter. She was a war. I never won. Me versus Her. Hot versus Cold. That was our America, the never coming. Blood, sweat, and tears. The purity and Old Maidenhead forever and ever. Fuck me.
    At home, it was just me and the Old Man. The sainted mother was long dead. A broken heart. My older half-brother, Chris, took it on the heel and toe soon after. Chris was the Good Son, anointed from baptism. Chris got all A’s. Chris taught Sunday school. Chris obeyed the law, turned the other cheek, and walked on water. Whereas, I was basically the anti-Chris.
    Chris never laid eyes on his own father. When our mother kicked, she took her secrets with her, and orphan Chris joined the Service. He drew the short stick, Nam, and went MIA for almost six weeks. After he stumbled out of the jungle, against all odds and half-starved, dragging a high-rank Gook devil behind him, Chris was awarded his nation’s second-highest honor. By General Bradley himself, the shiniest brass in the bucket. Omar in the flesh. He stuck Chris in the ribs trying to pin It on him. Then he saluted. The Good Soldier, stoic, obedient, flanked by a Medal of Honor spinal on one hand and a Silver Star sniper on the other, quietly shed a little more blood, nourishing the tree of liberty.
    After his discharge, Chris got baptized a second time and starting going from arena to arena, throwing away people’s crutches and warning them against Jimmy Carter. Salvation here tonight. Bless you, Brother, for you have sinned. Hallelujah! Word got out. Crowds grew bigger. People started coming from miles away. Some were chosen. A movement was afoot.
    Religion inserted itself into politics, and Chris shot straight to the top of the Moral Majority ticket. Polls rose. Ranks swelled. Chris for all, and all for Chris. There was no stopping him. Straight as an arrow, heading for the big one, the immaculate nomination.
    Climax imminent, he was ass-ended by a Judas, an unpaid staffer who staged a man-to-man kiss at a prearranged place Thursday night. The back stabber got his thirty pieces and Chris got thirty-nine lashes in the press. Public opinion. At the convention, Chris was passed over for a Hollywood has-been, the Icon, Jelly Bellys and Grecian Formula 3:16.
    The Gypper extended his right wing and swept unto himself all those who had lately put their faith in Chris. Redbaiters. Whites First. Bluebloods for Tax Cuts. He looked straight through the teleprompter and announced the Good News. The People could enter into a new covenant, their debt to be paid later. By someone else. Hallelujah! His time had come. The land slid. The sea burned. Blood on the moon.
    The crowd rolled up Chris in a carpet and dumped him in a hole. Afterwards, Chris just drifted, ghostlike, dragging his Distinguished Service Cross around with him, a prophet without honor in his own country. Then, shaking the dust off his feet, he went under for the third time, got baptized for real, and went back out on the road, preaching wherever they set out a plate, two or three gathered together at the recollection of his name. He told them this dominion of vipers would pass away. He told them to turn away from Here and Now, to set their sights on There and Then, an alternative to this reality. The Kingdom to Come. I hadn’t seen him for four years.
    In Chris’s absence, I became the only child. I got all the chores. I got all the blame. I got all the questions. “Why can’t you be more like Chris?” I graduated from Bethlehem High—it was either pass me, or get me back, like a kidney stone—and went to work painting storage tanks and laying pipe for Imperial Oil. Ditch Witch. Tap and die. Thread lube and joint compound. I spent every paycheck on the Roadrunner.
    It was a hand-me-down from Chris, the Good Brother. In the Service, he’d built up a lot of back combat pay, and when he came home from the Shit, he blew his entire wad on a 1971 Plymouth two-door muscle job named after a solitary desert bird that lives on locusts and wild honey. Mopar 383 under the hood. Slicks on the mags. Four on the floor and Naugahyde on the buckets.
    Then he got baptized. Water on the brain, Chris went through the Phase, gave it all away, including the Roadrunner. He wrote my name on the pink slip with a gold Cross pen and mailed it to me inside a graduation card. “I didn’t think you could do it.” Then he gave the pen away, too.
    Chris’s legacy to me—rusty, impotent, in need of resurrection. A miracle waiting to happen. And it just so happened that my best friend Jobie was a certified automotive genius.
    He was also a worry wart and a world-champion complainer. To hear him tell it, all the shit in the world happened to Jobie. What did I care? He was the first and last mechanic, Saint Goodwrench of the grease gun, the return of Henry Ford. Jobie was as close as a brother. Like me, he yearned for a piece of ass he did not possess. Like me, he injected his frustrated passion into drag car makeovers. Juicing iron. Plugs and wires. Cranks and pistons. Manifolds and headers. Unlike me, Jobie could actually put a car back together.
    Jobie’s old man stood him to a speed shop of his own, a foreclosed Imperial Oil service station, complete with a hydraulic lift in the first bay and a rubber vendor in the mens room. He kept bottles of Stroh’s and Chocola in the old yank-type pop machine. Jobie wrenched his own rod, a Fucked Over Rebuilt Dodge pickemup with 460 cubic inches of pink slip menace throbbing under the hood. Chopped, dropped, and blowed, Jobie’s lowrider cruised every strip in the valley, owning every dragster’s ass from Terre Haute to Kingdom Come. When I asked him to help me cherry the Roadrunner, Jobie creamed in his jeans.
    In Jobie’s hands, the 383 was stripped, stroked, and bored over. Paycheck by paycheck, Jobie remade it in his own image, a fat-lobe cammed, intake-inducted, ethyl-sucking tranny trasher, Too Much Motor. Jobie crammed it in anyway, tearing a new hole in the firewall to make room for the headers. Paycheck. Holly double pumper 4-barrel. Paycheck. Hearst speed shifter. Paycheck. 4:10s in the ass end. Paycheck. The first time I torqued the tweaked-out Mopar and dumped the clutch, the drive shaft twisted off. Jobie shrugged his patient shrug and had a new one welded up. Paycheck.
    Finally, we sanded down the body, 600 grit, patched the holes with Bondo, and slapped on three coats of Magna Luxe Hi-Gloss, Sunrise Orange. Jobie christened the restored Plymouth America II, after a pony of his that had died. He painted the name across the hood by hand, the most beautiful scripture work you ever laid eyes on. Lazarre was impressed, although he’d never admit that to Jobie.
    Virgin Madeleine had the honor of being the first person to ride in the passenger seat. On the way to her house, she pretended not be scared when we topped 140 on Calvary Road. She even faked a yawn. Three times I offered to let her try the back seat, and three times she refused. I dropped her in the driveway of her house, out of sight of her father, who never cared for me in the slightest. Not even so much as a kiss. Fuck me.
    In December, I got fired from Imperial Oil for supposedly drinking on the job. Merry Christmas. In May, unemployment ran out. In June, the Old Man’s patience ran out. Happy Father’s Day. What could I do? This was his house, his kingdom on earth, and so long as I lived in his house, I’d live by his rules. So help me. He wrote the rules himself, in his own hand, on a tablet of yellow paper, then posted them on the door of the Harvest Gold Frigidaire:

    Rule number 1: I make the rules.
    Rule number 2: If you get any big ideas, refer to rule number 1.
    Rule number 3: You will not sign my name to checks.
    Rule number 4: You will remember trash day.
    Rule number 5: You will do your own laundry.
    Rule number 6: You will keep your grubby paws off my tools.
    Rule number 7: You will not steal gas from my truck.
    Rule number 8: You will have no parties in my house.
    Rule number 9: You will not commit adultery in my house.
    Rule number 10: You will not make up lies, excuses, or ridiculous stories.

    July came on worse than ever. The TV weatherman out of Terre Haute, the young one with the pouty lips and the freakish white hair—a meteorological Truman Capote—was blaming it on the advent of what he called El Niño. This El Niño was supposed to rupture weather patterns all over the world. There was talk of droughts, of floods, of tempests—even a new Ice Age.
    This El Niño mumbo jumbo got the impressionable souls of Bethlehem all worked up about Apocalypse. End Times. Judgment Day. They got real excited about it, even started looking forward to it. Some actually prayed for it. They’d get right down on the rug and flop and jerk, foaming at the mouth, babbling in strange tongues. Maranatha! People would tumble out of church and into the street, with eyes glazed over and pits pouring sweat, shouting, “He’s coming! He’s coming!”
    Saturday night, I crept into the house like a thief, carefully lugging a red Igloo flip-top cooler. Half a twelve pack of Stroh’s bottles sloshed and clunked around in the melting ice as I tiptoed down the hall and into the bathroom. The other bathroom door led into the Old Man’s bedroom, and I had to piss sitting down so as not to make enough noise to wake him.
    He worked at a candy factory over in Jerusalem, the county seat. I’d been inside that factory, seen its polished brass and its stained glass windows, the whole place so clean and neat you could literally eat off the floors. I’d seen the Old Man in his white paper hat, laboring over a big copper kettle, making toffee and nougat bars that people bought and ate all over the world. Think of the cavities! He was putting in six-day weeks, laying up inventory for the holidays. Halloween. Thanksgiving. Christmas. VD. If I woke him up now, I’d catch seven kinds of salty hell.
    I eased myself into my bedroom, closed the door, and slipped between the sheets, head spinning in the tomblike darkness. The last thing I heard was the Old Man’s snoring. The sleep of the just.
    I woke up Sunday afternoon with the sun coming through a slit in the window blind, pounding a headache into my hung over eyeballs. Afternoon. The Old Man would be getting off soon, punching the clock, cranking up his old Chevy truck and coming down the road toward home. I promised him three weeks ago, two weeks ago, one week ago that I’d paint the eaves and soffits of the house. Since I had nothing better to do. Best not to be here when he got home.
    I lay in bed sweating, feeling the onrush of my coming manhood, toying with the idea of popping a stitch in Madeleine’s pants under a persimmon tree. Then it hit me—she’d be at church today, needing a ride. I yanked myself out from between the sheets and shot through the door and down the hall to the kitchen, dissipating in the oily heat. The Old Man didn’t believe in air conditioning. “Suffering is good for the soul.”
    I stopped dead in my tracks, staring at the Harvest Gold Frigidaire in slack-jawed disbelief. The Old Man had wrapped a chain around the door and padlocked it. Taped to the chain was a piece of yellow note paper. The Old Man’s handwriting. The eleventh commandment. “You will not park your feet under my table for the rest of your life.” Fuck me.
    The freezer door was unlocked. Nothing in there but trays of ice cubes. I fetched the cooler from my bedroom and went back to the kitchen. I dumped the water—along with six detached, soggy labels—into the sink. I repacked the naked brown bottles in ice and dumped the empty trays into the sink along with the labels.
    The Old Man would be darkening the doorway any minute. Time to get out. Go Somewhere. Do Something. Lock the front door behind me. Put the key under the mat. Put the Igloo in the trunk of the Roadrunner. Put my ass in the driver’s seat. Hit the switch. Relish the fruits of my labor and Jobie’s genius. Jobie put no faith in the HEI distributor, called it a tow job waiting to happen. But that was Jobie. Worry, worry, worry.
    I felt a hot wind on my shoulder, blowing through the driver’s side window. Cruising east, through Bethlehem, toward the river. Just me and the Bird. Clutch. First. Clutch. Second. Clutch. Red light. The corner of Jerusalem Avenue and Main street. The only stoplight in town. Two blocks yonder, the town dipped, as from the top of a hill, sloping down toward the river bottoms and Gethsemane Park.
    Idle, one ear cocked to the sweet bloop-blop, bloop-blop of the 383 humping the motor mounts, rattling the stained glass windows of the Jerusalem Avenue Church of the Risen Christ. Molecules and octanes, squeezed together, tighter and tighter, hotter and hotter, set off by a spark, igniting the guts of the Mopar. 400 shaft horses detonating at 13 degrees before top dead center. Going nowhere.
    On the front lawn of the church, a skinny girl with straight blond hair bending over, picking up the trash after a Save Our Schools! bake sale, all legs and no ass. Cupcakes with pink frosting, jelly rolls, cream horns, lemon chiffons. Cutoff jeans and no panties. Hope and Faith, but no Charity. Madeleine.
    The stoplight turned green. I goosed the Mopar. Once. Twice. Three times. Finally, Madeleine stood up, looking in my direction, one hand full of butter cream frosted paper, the other pulling the yellow hair away from her face. No wave, no “hi,” just a pink bubblegum pout and cold blue eyes.
    “Hey, Honey!” I hollered. “Wanna candy my apple? Chiffon my lemon? Jelly my roll?”
    Madeleine turned and walked in through the door of the church, thoughtlessly pulling her shorts out of her ass crack.
    “Slut!” The light turned red. I mashed the accelerator and dumped the clutch, Dana Supertraking two side-by-side strips of smoking rubber and road oil. Burnt offerings to Charles Goodyear, Saint Vulcan of the Bias Ply. No one was watching. I did it just for the hell of it, the sheer joy of riding 400 unbridled horses. One solitary, red-hot Rod torquing its own lugnuts all the way across Main street and halfway down the next block. Paradise for one. Funsville, USA.
    Point made. I eased off the Go pedal and the thunder died away, leaving a cloud of blue tire smoke fleeing the scene ahead of a feverish summer wind. Under control now, the Roadrunner glided down the hill, a bird of prey soaring lazily toward Gethsemane Park and the river. I turned onto a gravel service road that led around the village water tower to the Viaduct, a railroad bridge, that stretched east over the river to Indiana. I pulled onto a sandy patch of ground on top of a little bluff overlooking the river, then parked in the shade of a tall persimmon tree. I killed the engine and silence descended like a dove. Peace, quiet, and a breeze. Time passing like a river. Beer:30.
    Out of the car and into the trunk. I grabbed a bottle from the cooler. Even the ice felt warm. Someone had driven 20-penny nails into the trunk of the persimmon tree, to give it more iron, in hopes that it would bear more fruit. Superstitious. I knocked three times, to summon the Devil, in hopes of making a deal. No answer.
    I jammed the cap of the beer bottle under the head of a nail and popped it off. I walked a ways out onto the Viaduct, drinking thoughtfully, sweating like a whore in church. There was enough shade coming off the trees along the bank that I could stand over the water without being in the sun. The bridge was an all-iron affair, painted silver, with streaks of rust beginning to show. A monument to the faded glories of the Industrial Revolution.
    Over my shoulder, I caught sight of a sandhill crane that came swooping downstream, against the wind, dropping toward the water. Heathen Indians believed that cranes carried messages from Heaven. This one was probably after a carp. It disappeared around a bend in the river.
    I took a leak over the side, watching a reflection of myself pouring water into water. The river took whatever I and I and the cornfields and little towns had to offer it and just kept right on going, in the same old direction and at the same old rate, past the same old places. World without end. Hallelujah! I smelled hot grease and cornbread. I heard a voice.
    “The Kingdom of Heaven is at hand!”
    I knew that voice. It came from downstream, around the bend. I doubled back along the Viaduct and made my way down the bank, toward the voice. I stumbled once, when the clump of pig weed I was holding onto broke loose, but I made it down to a sand bar without spilling my beer. The voice cried out again.
    “He who would be reborn, must first die the Death!”
    I rounded the bend, and there was Brother Chris, preaching an old-fashioned baptism revival. The shine of superstardom had tarnished and flaked off like dandruff. A bald spot had eroded into the center of the missionary mullet, leaving a ring of sun-bleached, spiky locks circling the pate like a crown. Tied in the back, a Nazareth Hair-of-the-Dog ponytail dangled down to the crack of his ass. The Prodigal Son of a Bitch Returned. The very picture.
    I saw a picnic table all laid out for the traditional post-dunk fish fry. The Feast of Covered Dishes. I peeked under some of the lids. Homemade noodles and oyster dressings. String bean casseroles. Cucumber-onion salads and cheesy potatoes. Pork roasts and persimmon puddings. An iron kettle over a wood fire, frying up catfish fillets as big as my fist. Pitchers of sweet tea and sassafras tea and cherry Kool-Aid.
    A line of sweaty, penitent rednecks, male and female, snaked down the beach and into the water, waiting in the shallows for their turn. Some in cutoff jeans and T-shirts. Some in bathing suits, wrapped in old bed sheets. A few with their heads shaved. At the end of the line—Chris, preaching and baptizing to beat the band.
    I opened my arms in salutation. “Behold the Homo!” I said.
    Chris had his hands full with Big Martha. Little Martha died when we were in high school, a do-it-yourself 12-gauge abortion. Afterward, Big Martha became a regular fixture at these revival rinse-and-repent sheep dips. The ghost of a mother, doomed to wander from one salvation to the next, a prisoner of conscience. Bless her, Brother, for she has sinned. A truly compassionate savior might simply hold her under and put her out of her misery, but that kind of mercy doesn’t sit well with the front pew.
    Big Martha came up blissfully and Chris wiped away the last of her transgressions with a dirty towel. Then he gave her a gentle shove down the Straight and Narrow, back to the land of promises and cucumber salad. Hallelujah! She waddled past me, a wet throbbing sound, a slow, metrical swish-swash, her face contorted into a cruel mask of hope. Poor Martha.
    Chris took one glance in my direction and said nothing. Another soul went under.
    “What’s the matter?” I said. “Don’t you know me?”
    “I know thee to be a sinner.”
    “Me? Me?”
    “Come and receive the gift of Life.”
    “I can’t swim.”
    “It’s only waist deep.”
    “You can drown in three feet of water.”
    “Or in a bottle.”
    “Lot you know!”
    I turned to address the crowd. “Hear me, you generation of nose wipers! When yonder river has dried up and blowed away, on that day shall ye see me give up the Stroh’s!” I turned back and winged the bottle over Chris’s head. It hit the water with an empty slap, then drifted downstream along with everything else.
    Nobody laughed. They just stood there, three dozen or so sticks in the mud, chafing impatiently, glaring at me like the world was going to end in five minutes and they were missing the Pony Express to Heaven on account of me.
    To hell with them. If they wanted to waste a perfectly good Sunday afternoon slogging around the bottoms in 98-degree heat, getting river rash and listening to a had-been visionary blather on about the wages of sin, it was no skin off my ass. I snitched a waxed-paper brick of Rice Krispies squares from the picnic table and trudged back up the bank.
    The baking disk of the sun began to dip itself into a wine-dark sea of clouds. I saw the village water tower, a monument to the Golden Age of Eisenhower, ablaze in the glory of the twilight’s last gleaming. Let the churchies inherit the beach. I would climb above them, through the purple haze, and kiss the sky.
    The congregation started singing behind my back, “The Wheat and the Chaff,” and some rectified prick flung a wad of fertile grey river mud past my left ear. It hit the trunk of a sycamore tree with a wet slap. I ignored it. I had bigger fish to fry.
    Back to the Roadrunner. I hauled the Igloo out of the trunk and set off down a shortcut through the woods to the water tower. The heat of the day had driven the mosquitoes into their hiding places, so that was a mercy, anyhow. The cicadas started up their infernal buzz-saw racket, drowning out the caterwauling of the Baptists in my rear.
    The water tower stood on four skinny iron legs, with one thick vertical column extending from the underbelly of the main tank downward until it sank into the ground. A spiral staircase wound around the center column, up to an iron catwalk that encircled the whole tank. I screwed up my courage and mounted the stairs.
    One step at a time. Don’t look up. Don’t look down. Left. Right. Onward and upward, Christian Soldier. I reached the iron catwalk, nosebleed high and out of breath. I thumped the cooler against the side of the huge water tank, and I heard a nice ringing sound, answered by a deep, hollow tone from below.
    From up here, looking east over the Wabash, I could see the towering spire of the Damascus Baptist Seminary school shining blood-red in the light of the early sunset. I grabbed a beer from the cooler and walked around the other side. I watched the sun going down behind Jerusalem, seven miles to the west.
    Outside Jerusalem, the gas tower of the Imperial Oil company refinery jetted more heat and haze into the summer sky, immune to the protests and pickets of Greenpeace. Imperial employed half the county. Unto Caesar what is Caesar’s.
    South of Jerusalem, the hamlet of Cana, birthplace of the sainted mother. All the towns around here had biblical names. Hebron. Cana. Galilee. Jericho. The French adventurer and real estate speculator Jean LaMotte named this valley “Palestine,” because, he said, it was a land of milk and honey. He lied, but the biblical theme stuck.
    I peeked over the railing looking for milk and honey, but my head started spinning so badly I had to turn, fast, and look at something else. A stack of metal cans, green and black paint. Brushes, rollers, scrapers, sanders, wire brushes. A bottle of whiskey. A maintenance crew had been up here, scraping away the rust and painting the water tower. They had got as far as the “BE” in “BETHLEHEM” before they knocked off for the weekend.
    I finished my beer and found a screwdriver. I popped the lid off a bucket of black paint and went to work. This was the good paint, oil-based enamel, the kind of paint that lasts a lifetime. The oil penetrates the surface of the metal, like a root system, binding the pigment to the steel. The enamel hardens into a shiny, durable, plastic coating, shielding the metal from time and the elements. The quality was in. The name was going on.
    It took another bucket of paint and four more beers to turn “BE” into “BEER HEAVEN.” By the time I finished, the sun was long down, and I was painting by the glow of the Bethlehem city street lamps beneath me. Hungry, I unwrapped the wax-paper brick and found cornbread instead. I stepped back to admire my handiwork, and toppled over the railing.
    For a split second, I felt myself falling, the world spinning away into an inky black hole. Then, a miracle. I was lifted up by a band of angels and dumped back onto the steel mesh of the catwalk. Saved. Hallelujah! The spinning continued, so I closed my eyes, waiting for it to stop.
    When I opened my eyes, it seemed much later. I felt damp with morning dew. I rose to my feet, hungry, thirsty, alive. To the west, the gas tower of the refinery blazed fierce and orange. I looked out over the wider world, over the farmhouses and utility buildings and little hamlets. I saw pole light after pole light, stretching away for miles in every direction, some alone and some in clusters and some in galaxies, until they reached the horizon and kept on going, on up into the sky, one continuous and unending universe of lights.
    A silvery twilight glimmered over the eastern horizon. I wanted to live. I wanted to set off monster explosions. I wanted to rule empires. I wanted teenaged atomic cheerleader sluts to rub persimmon pudding all over my body. I wanted another beer.
    Down below, a cock crowed. Once. Twice. Three times. It was morning in America.

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