History of Wolves(68)

The sermon, or whatever it was called, began. A smoothfaced elderly man leaned over the lectern and read from the Bible and Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures. Occasionally, he stopped to take sips of water from a glass that caught tiny panels of light and disco-balled them around the room. I must have dozed off because the next thing I knew someone two pews in front of me was speaking into a cordless mike. She was an old lady with a silver bun, and she held that big mike in her tiny hand like an ice-cream cone. Mumming it with her lips, fuzzing the room with static. She explained she had been healed of a toothache by being nicer to a neighbor who’d complained about her yard. Her toothache had been a false belief in mortal mind that had tricked her into feeling pain. But Mary Baker Eddy taught us, through Jesus, to love thy neighbor. She said she’d left a pot of tulips on her neighbor’s driveway and the toothache disappeared.

A teenage kid went next. He wore polished leather shoes and a crisp white shirt rolled up to the elbows. He reminded me of the forensics boys from high school at first, except he had powerful tendons in his forearms and faint stubble, like someone who worked outside. He knew exactly how far to hold the microphone from his lips. When he paused, he smoothed a wrinkle in his pants very close to his crotch. He told a long, winding story about a test in school he hadn’t been able to study for, an AP exam, and then, thanking Our Beloved Founder, Mary Baker Eddy, he explained how he’d done well anyhow.

After that it was quiet for a long time. The pews creaked like branches and my head began to ache. The night birds started to trill outside and I longed to slouch down in my seat, lay my head against the cool wood of the pew. But I didn’t. I made myself sit straighter, pay attention. The last person to stand and take the microphone was another old woman. She said she’d been healed of the belief that her husband had died when she’d read this week’s lesson. She smiled brightly and touched her snow-white hair with one hand as she spoke. She said she had given in to the false assumption that her husband was matter, and for months she’d been unable to part with any of his things, his shoes or books or soap. But she finally poured the last of his Old Spice shampoo down the toilet when it came to her that we are reflections of Life, Harold too. There was no death for any of us, ever. I remember exactly how she put the next part, because my palms started to sweat. “Harold’s fine. Harold’s fine always. It’s not what you do but what you think that matters. Mary Baker Eddy tells us heaven and hell are ways of thinking. We need to know the truth of that, pray to understand that death is just the false belief that anything could ever end. There’s no going anywhere for any of us, not in reality. There’s only changing how you see things.”


I was on my way out afterward when the woman with the snowy hair stopped me at the door. Up close, her eyes were a filmy, glistening blue. She was wearing a beige linen dress and a diamond on her ring finger. “Would you like to sign in as a guest? We’re so happy to have you.” She’d gotten a clipboard and a flyer from somewhere and was handing them to me.

“Excuse me—” I said.

As I moved around her, I could smell the peppermint on her breath, the lilac perfume on her wrists, the chemical detergent on her dress. She smelled elaborately and intimately produced, scented with a whole life’s worth of good intentions. She must have been eighty years old at least, but there was something youthful in her face, enviably untroubled. I paused to study her more closely, despite myself. I wanted to hear more about the husband, Harold, and his shampoo. She must have seen my hesitation. “Are you new to the church?” She lifted the pen attached by a balled chain to her clipboard.

“Yes,” I said. Then I instantly regretted it. She looked so avid. “I mean this church,” I clarified, before stepping into the night. “I’m not—I mean, I’m not from around here.”


*


This was probably around mid-April. I remember a glint of green had already started showing on the willows by the river. Not long after, the leaves on the sidewalk trees burst out—a wallop of bright green everywhere you looked—and I went to the credit union after work one day to see how much money I’d saved. Afterward, I went to the hardware store to buy a screw for the doorknob Ann had been complaining about for months. While I was fixing that, since I was already on my knees in the bathroom, I decided to repair the leaky bathtub faucet. I pinched a crimped nest of hair from the drain with two fingers and put a new roll of toilet paper in the dispenser and gathered up all the towels to wash at the Laundromat. I left the towels in the dryer until they were so hot they burned my arms when I hugged them out. Then I folded them into warm, leaning towers and carried them home with my chin resting on top.

On my last day in town I went to Rom’s apartment at dawn.

Wind was battering the loose shingles on the old Victorian turrets. I used his key to get in, left my stuff by the door in a heap, and crept into his bed with my shoes and jacket on. He didn’t wake up as he pulled me to him, as he sunk his face in my hair. “Good-bye,” I said. I wanted him to wake up. I wanted to walk around on my hands and knees one more time, collared. But he barely stirred. He nestled his cock between my legs and fell into a deeper sleep.

The clock on his shelf shone its red numbers at me. Morning came in a single gray bar through a slat in the shades. I started to get hot in his arms in my jacket, sweaty. After a while I looked at the clock again and realized if I didn’t hurry I was going to miss my bus. I was going to miss my transfer to the Greyhound station across town and my ride up to Whitewood, where my mother would be waiting with Ms. Lundgren at the Burger King near the bus terminal. She hadn’t sounded especially happy to hear from me when I’d finally called. It had been two years since I’d spoken to her last, since my dad died, and all she said after a few stiff hellos, was, “It’s looking like it’s about time to sell some of the land.” As the sun came through the high window in Rom’s basement apartment, I wiggled my way out of his sleeping arms. I pulled out from under his grasp and that’s when he woke up at last—when he felt me leaving.