JERUSALEM IN MINIATURE
David McKenna
Suzanne yells “Don’t stop,” her heart tearing with grief and guilt, with glee at the thought of redemption, with fear she’ll die and be forever undone for submitting to the beast who’s pounding her to jelly on the back seat of her Dodge Dart Swinger. Her head collides repeatedly with the armrest, till it feels she’s broken down the door to a place she didn’t want to enter. It’s all there: the ruby ring on his finger, the dirt under his nails, the skull-and-crossbones tattoo on his chest melding with her vision of a leather-clad corpse grinning in a roadside ditch. Worst of all is the smell of leather.
Ultracool bucks against her till an implosion sucks up the air and fills the night with red light that withers all doubt. The ring is Tim O’Mara’s. He’s dead and his old buddy, her lover man, is his killer. But the corpse could be hers, the fire on the horizon a sign of her appointed hour. Her glimpse into the ditch is a small advance on the wages of sin or, unless she’s truly undone, a final reminder that she need not be tempted above what she’s able. She envisions her route of escape, the very words with which to begin, even as her flesh is rocked by waves of sinful bliss.
“Our father who art in heaven,” she mumbles, clutching at the collar of Ultracool’s leather jacket and gasping as he slams her into a shuddering clinch that persists until her heart is all but stilled.
Ultracool chuckles. “Thy kingdom come.”
Suzanne slips from under him, adjusts her leather skirt, and looks around the parking lot of the burger joint while climbing up front to the driver’s seat. A crowded van floats by. Moon-faced children suck soda pop through straws and stare into darkness, which is now lit with the slim hope of salvation.
How simple it seems, this greatest of gifts, after a lifetime of assuming it would never be hers. His love strikes like lightning. “God is good,” she shouts, pressing her boot on the gas pedal. “He that believeth shall not come into condemnation.”
The car screeches onto the highway as Ultracool tumbles into the front seat on the passenger side. “My daddy read the Good Book too, but that ain’t what he said.”
She tries to imagine the creature who spawned this hellhound, her one and only for more than a year now, who rips out the throats of those who trust him. “Your daddy should have read it more often.”
He reaches into the glove compartment for his Ray-Ban Predator Extension sunglasses, next to the clear plastic sack of white powder they’re delivering to a well-respected man of property who lives in the first glass tower east of the river.
“Praise Jesus,” Ultracool exclaims, apparently convinced she’s acting out a comedy routine. “Maybe he should have put the Good Book down and lightened up a little.”
He tells her about the time his father held him next to the coal furnace and said the boy would burn a million years in fire much hotter before he got to heaven. If he got to heaven.
Suzanne feels great pain, for him and Tim and his other victims, and is giddy with gratitude for her own potential deliverance. “Top this,” she says, steering off the highway at 70 miles an hour, hitting the brakes to avoid the guardrail on the ramp that leads to South Philadelphia.
“My daddy took me to see Texas Chainsaw Massacre when I was 8. It started like this: ‘The following story is based on an incident that took place Feb. 5, 1962.’ That’s the exact day I was born.”
She runs a red light turning onto Greys Ferry Avenue, near the river. Ultracool grips the dash and waits for the car to straighten before readjusting his wraparounds.
“Daddy was a Pentecostal,” Suzanne explains. “He said the chainsaw is for children who go stumbling in the dark or talk to strangers instead of staying home and praying for the Holy Ghost to descend. God sends a madman to chop off their body parts. Later on, when I couldn’t sleep, daddy was very angry.” Memory intensifies the gooey ache between her legs.
“I couldn’t sleep either,” Ultracool says, lighting a cheroot. “For weeks I dreamed of the devil, standing next to the furnace and hissing for me to join him. So I did. Turns out he’s a puny guy with a big pitchfork.”
“Sounds like my daddy,” Suzanne says, smelling sulfur and cigar smoke, and watching the sky to the south glow red where the refinery towers are belching flame. “Great Balls of Fire” comes on the radio and she smiles. A religious song, how fitting.
“Do you ever think of getting redeemed?” she says, opening her eyes wide and trying to guess what goes on behind his glasses. “Paying for your sins by spilling your own blood, or wearing ugly clothes, or listening to folk music. Suffering?”
She feels divine hands guiding hers and doesn’t bother to look at the road, not until Ultracool’s mouth twitches.
“You mean the Jesus Christ thing,” he says smoothly. “Have myself nailed to a board on my dad’s behalf.”
“On the world’s behalf,” she says, narrowly missing a thin woman limping to the shopping complex on the far side of the road. “To escape hellfire.”
Ultracool takes a long pull on his cheroot and lets smoke drift out of his mouth and up his nose. Suzanne opens her window to let in the night air, which smells of burning oil. Fire creeps inward from her throat and gut and through every passage leading from her nostrils. Everything hurts: eye makeup, bra straps, the car seat against her bare, chafed legs. Her high heels are pinching, her toes blistered. The ring touched her flesh and woke her to an agony of sensation. She remembers the flash of it when Tim shook her margaritas, always on the house; that first taste of the salt he rimmed her glass with so carefully; the ring glittering on his long thin hand when he pushed away her tip money and tried to sound tough. Your money’s no good here, honey.
“I remember a fast food joint in Wildwood where the waitress was a midget on roller skates,” Ultracool recalls. “She said ‘That’ll be five bucks.’ I was so high, I couldn’t pay up.”
“You never pay,” Suzanne says, remembering his cold hands on her and the people who’ve disappeared since he started dealing cocaine. Out of sight, out of mind. It didn’t quite register, how many of Ultracool’s customers and colleagues weren’t there anymore. Then tonight she peered into the ditch and saw Tim, the only man who ever sent her roses.
Ultracool continues, “The guy in the car behind me yells ‘Come on, pal,’ so I say ‘Give me a minute. How many times do you see a midget waitress on roller skates?’ The guy says, ‘I see her every day, at dinner time.’ Then he waves to the midget and says, ‘How-de-do, Loon.’ “
“Yeah, so what?” Suzanne says, breathing hard and praying for time. No one challenges Ultracool. Rumor has it even bullets bounce off.
“The point is, it’s been done,” he says, reaching under her jacket to pinch a nipple. “The Christ thing doesn’t impress anyone anymore, so why bother?”
“For the sake of your immortal soul,” Suzanne says, mimicking a drunken preacher from her childhood. “For the sake of my soul.”
“I’ll ruminate on that,” Ultracool says, removing his hand from her breast. “You know, chew it real slow.”
Suzanne watches him roll down his window and toss the cheroot. He pops something into his mouth, sucks on it, spits into the night. Olives. The fleshy Middle Eastern kind, with pits. Like meat in the mouth. She can still taste him.
“That wasn’t even new in Christ’s time, being nailed to a board, but it was a good time to start a religion,” Ultracool says. “People were tired of the ancient Rome scene. They stopped taking baths and wore hair shirts.”
“To get redeemed,” Suzanne shouts, stretching to check her blazing eyes in the rear-view. She always knew their fire would be more suitable if she believed in something.
“But they still felt guilty as shit,” he says. “They needed a real bad-ass, like Jesus, to lift the weight off their shoulders and carry it.”
The sky brightens and dims. A police car roars by, roof lights flashing. Ultracool says, “Slow down, you’re doing seventy. That prick must be doing a hundred.”
Great balls of fire. Each time Jerry Lee sings the refrain, the sky lights up. Then, when it darkens again, she sees flames on the horizon. Pentecostal flames, served up by the Holy Ghost, to rescue the most degenerate sinners, even killers and traffickers in false gods.
“They nailed him to a board in Jerusalem, and the sky went dark when he died,” Ultracool intones. “Signs were everywhere. Disease and famine, dead men rising.”
“Ghostly visitations,” she adds.
“Prestidigitation,” he says.
The song ends. Suzanne switches off the radio and exclaims, “We need another sign.”
Ultracool says, “I need another big, fat line. Drive on, Suzy Q.”
She speeds around a curve, toward the skyscrapers a few miles north, past the dark streets of Greys Ferry where they grew up and Ultracool used to deal when he was a small-timer. Tall letters on a well-lit billboard to their right spell out:
JERUSALEM IN MINIATURE
AVE MARIA GROTTO
MOUNT GROVE
The message registers only after they’ve passed it.
“How’s that for a sign?” Suzanne says, veering off the main drag and roaring up a dark, narrow street. “To all who’ve sinned and fall short of God’s glory.”
“Don’t linger, lady love,” Ultracool says. “I have a package to deliver, and this is not my favorite neighborhood. Too many homeys who don’t know how to do business.”
“I want to see the sign again. To make sure it’s real.”
Suzanne drives the wrong way up several one-way streets, and into the glare of approaching headlights. She swings the Dodge into the only parking space on the street, jumps the curb and rams a phone pole at 15 miles an hour. The other car, a new red Lincoln, doesn’t even slow down.
“Blinded by the light,” she says, climbing out with Ultracool to inspect the damage. “Great balls of fire.”
“Jezebel,” he replies coolly, spitting an olive pit at the car’s bent fender. “Better to tie a millstone around your neck than play chicken when I’m holding.”
The billboard is just up ahead, looming high and wide as a movie screen at a drive-in. It shimmers like a holy vision with the light of a dozen high-wattage lamps. A photo on the billboard depicts a model of ancient Jerusalem, with squat buildings and winding streets. Next to the photo is a painting of Jesus Christ wearing thorns and bearing the cross, his face twisted with anguish and beatific pleasure.
Christ’s eyes cry out to Suzanne. What a splendid burden. She nearly faints at the heat of that day, the exquisite certainty of the nails. She feels the thorns in her skull, the splinters in her sunburnt shoulder, and smells olive oil on the bystanders.
No, that’s Ultracool.
“Ave Maria Grotto must be some kind of theme park,” he’s saying. “Jesus in Tiny Town. Eight tickets to hang on the cross for three minutes, 24 to do the Resurrection.”
The sound of new voices wakes her from her wide-eyed reverie. “Jesus bloody Christ,” Ultracool says calmly. “You should have kept going.”
Four young men surround them before she can answer. The tallest steps up to Ultracool with his hand outstretched and engages him in a jailhouse handshake, over and under with the knuckles.
“It’s my man Jack Crockett,” the tall man says to his fellows, pointing at Ultracool. “Me and this dude used to do business. We even did time together in Holmesburg.”
“You got the wrong dude,” Ultracool says. “The name’s Ultracool.”
“That’s his new name,” Suzanne tells the tall man. “He went to City Hall last year and had it changed.”
“What’s with you, woman?” Ultracool says. She hears a slight inflection of ebbing patience. The billboard lights shine in his glasses.
“Jack moves a lot of coke,” the tall man says, still pointing. “Maybe he’s holding some for his old buddy Jasper. You holding anything, Jack?”
“That’s a fine looking leather you wearin’,” says one of Jasper’s friends. “You buy that with coke money?”
“I’m a born-again,” Ultracool says suavely. “I don’t trifle with that junk.”
Ultracool offers each man a smoke, then lights a cheroot for himself with slow, reassuring movements. She’s seen how fast he can move those hands. The ring flashes. It fit on Tim’s index finger. Ultracool wears it on his pinky.
“He’s holding enough coke to buy a Lamborghini Diablo,” she says loudly. “He’s lying because he doesn’t think he’s ready to be redeemed.”
“The bitch is kooked,” Ultracool says to Jasper. “You want coke, talk to her.”
Suzanne smiles at Ultracool. “It’s time, lover. Nary a one of us can walk with the devil forever.”
She feels the air go staticky and wonders how long before Ultracool sweats blood. She’ll smell it on him. But he looks cool as ever when the car with the whirling roof lights pulls onto the street and screeches to a halt a few feet from them.
An extra-large cop jumps out, shoves Ultracool against Suzanne’s car, and says, “Let’s see some I.D., leather boy.”
Jasper and his friends melt back into the dark, but Suzanne is sure Ultracool will remain at the center of attention.
“This guy’s name is Ultracool, one word,” the big cop says, handing his partner Ultracool’s driver’s license. “Are you impressed? I’m impressed.”
“He’s the chosen one,” Suzanne says, reaching through the window of her car to open the glove compartment. “God the Father chose him to be redeemed.”
The glare of approaching headlights distracts them. A gleaming red car brakes. An elderly man in a shiny blue suit steps out and says, “That’s him, Officer. He almost smacked my brand-new Lincoln head-on.”
Suzanne approaches the big cop and dangles the bag of white powder. “This belongs to him,” she says, nodding toward Ultracool. “I have nothing to do with him.”
The other cop snatches the bag and says “I’ll take care of the contraband.” He drags her to the patrol car, sits her in the back and closes the door. She’s read in the newspapers that dope often disappears after a drug bust, and that busted dealers often turn up dead. That Philly drug cops are like outlaw bikers, except their gang is legal.
She watches the big cop frisk Ultracool and cuff his hands behind his back. Ultracool’s glasses fall off when the cop turns him around again. His eyes look as pretty and fearless as when he pushed up her skirt and wrapped her legs around him.
“Don’t be deceived,” she shouts from the car, squeezing her thighs together. “Behold his lying eyes.”
“Somebody get my glasses,” Ultracool says.
A van pulls up behind the patrol car and two more cops emerge. “Yo Frank,” the big cop says to one of the new arrivals. “Mr. Ultracool here wants me to put his sunglasses back on him.”
The new cop says, “Well, fuckhead, you heard the man.”
The big cop covers Ultracool’s eyes with the wraparounds, propping them carefully. One of the lenses is cracked and the other missing. The cops laugh out loud at Ultracool standing expressionless in the glare of the billboard lights, with hands bound and broken glasses in place.
“Hey, Ultracool,” the big cop asks, “are you the king of the coke dealers?”
“Bust his ass,” the elderly man says. “Take him downtown and bust his ass.”
“Yes,” Suzanne chimes in. “We’ll all get well when he’s redeemed.”
Each time she shouts the word, she stretches the double E sound a little further. The sound of it, the sensation, is liberating.
“Let’s go, lover,” the big cop says, grabbing Ultracool by his leather coat and walking him toward the van.
“You don’t know what you’re doing,” Ultracool says. “Even if my father forgives you, my attorney won’t.”
Suzanne twists around in the patrol car to watch the cop push Ultracool into the back of the van. His ordeal will cleanse her, God willing. She pictures herself in a cool stone room with spices and oils, weeping and waiting, but knows she won’t see him again. Not in this world.
“Hallelujah, baby,” she cries before the cop slams the doors of the van. “I’ll tell everyone you were here.”
