A Gentle Hell Read online

  “I raised my kids better than that,” Mimi said, as my partner Thatch and I zipped up her daughter’s already-blue corpse into a body bag. The remaining children, who had Mimi’s dull green feral eyes and slack faces, hovered close to me.

  “I can make you some sweet tea before you go,” Mimi said.

  “Goddamn it woman,” Mimi’s boyfriend, whom I only knew as the boyfriend, called from his recliner, “nobody wants your goddamn sweet tea.”

  “We’re very busy tonight, Mimi,” I said, “as you can see.”

  I indicated the body bag.

  “Perhaps some other time, then. Come on kids, it’s past your bedtime,” she said.

  But the children followed me out to where my police cruiser and an ambulance waited on the street. The paramedic was asleep in the front seat of the ambulance. Thatch and I put the girl’s body in the back. When I turned around there the children were, silent and sharp-faced in the dark.

  “Are you married?” one of the girls asked Thatch. She was about sixteen years old, sick-skinny, with white hair like a powdered Christmas tree.

  “Yep,” Thatch said, “twelve years now.”

  She turned to me. “What is your name?” she asked. “Are you married?”

  “Officer Redding,” I said. “And no.”

  “Why not?” she asked.

  I looked over at Thatch. He shrugged. I looked back over at the girl, her brothers and sisters surrounding her like she was a satellite while they made hunger eyes and bit their hands.

  “I don’t like the thought of someone else having a say in what I do or who I am,” I said.

  “All relationships are about control,” she said. “What’s your first name, Officer Redding? My name’s Tuesday.”

  “I’m sorry, we don’t really have time for this,” I said.

  “It’s Bill,” Thatch said.

  “My sister didn’t kill herself,” Tuesday said.

  “What do you mean?”

  “Will you marry me under the dogwood tree, Bill? Julie wanted to be married under the dogwood tree. We were all so mad at Julie. She was going to leave us and she was the only one who took care of us.”

  “Tuesday, what do you mean your sister didn’t kill herself?”

  I looked over at Thatch again. He was on his cell phone text-messaging someone, while there we were, surrounded by twelve children and empty Oklahoma farmland. The night rose like smoke. The stars and half-moon sliced off the ends of our fingers. I heard nothing but the children’s slow dance breath and my ribcage breaking and Thatch’s phone going click-click-click.

  Tuesday moved toward me and I realized how tall she was, taller than me or Thatch, her bones a church ceiling.

  “Did you know God died this week?” she whispered, her lips electric against my forehead.

  “Yes,” I said.

  “The preacher says God is inside all of us, but Momma said only rich people get to be God. I think she might be right.”

  “Did someone kill your sister, Tuesday?” I asked.

  She grabbed my hair in her fist and pulled my head back. She kissed me on the forehead.

  “That’s all you’re going to get,” she said, “until after we’re married.”

  She released me. I jerked back and hit my head on the ambulance. Thatch continued to text-message. Click click click. Tuesday and the children fled into the dark and disappeared, as if swallowed by a thick, black-tongued wave.

  I woke the paramedic up by banging on the window and dragged Thatch to the squad car.

  “I think we might have a murder case,” I said as I drove back into town. “You heard what that girl said, didn’t you, Thatch?”

  “Who would murder one of Mimi’s poor, white-trash children? That girl was just messing with you.”

  **********

  When I got back home I couldn’t sleep so I watched late-night news. They were still showing the footage from when the Triple Goddess went to the White House. Everyone in America knew the country belonged to the gods, and not the politicians, but nobody really knew what to think of this new era. The Triple Goddess was a stunner, no doubt, wearing six-inch heels and cruel shadows, walking across the White House lawn in the same dresses that Angelina Jolie wore at the Grammy’s. She had tall, severe bodies, because Cosmo said the most successful women were the tallest, and the most beautiful, but she was a goddess and the bodies couldn’t look too innocent, or welcoming, and could only be sexual in the most alien way.

  “Now that the demiurge is dead,” she said into the microphones with her brass, slow-over-the-water voices, “we will see vast improvements in the quality of life in this country. I’ve already drawn up a nationwide health care plan for the middle class, as well as a plan for several new worship centers to be built in forty-four states.”

  Everyone knew the Triple Goddess killed Jehovah. There were three bodies of the incarnate, all-Supreme Being. There were three trash bags of summer-heated, red exposed fetid god flesh that washed up on the Gulf of Mexico. It couldn’t get much more dark and symbolic than that. She tore Jehovah apart, probably while He was out on his pontoon shark fishing, and then made sure America knew He wasn’t in charge anymore.

  The station received another emergency call from Mimi’s trailer. A domestic abuse call. Thatch and I drove out there in the tar dark.

  “Fuck,” Thatch said while we were on the road, “no cell-phone service here. And they say nationwide coverage.”

  I said nothing.

  “The Triple Goddess is going to start regulating the cell phone companies. So they’ll stop ripping people off. That’s what I heard.”

  “That’s nice,” I said.

  Thatch and I drove up to Mimi’s trailer. All the children were out in the yard, and I had to slam on the brakes to keep from driving over Mimi as she ran across the street chasing her boyfriend with a metal meat tenderizer.

  “Goddamn it,” Thatch said.

  I got out of the squad car. Tuesday ran around to my side of the car.

  “What’s going on here?” I asked her. She’d been the one who made the call.

  “Momma and her boyfriend got into a fight again,” she said.

  Thatch took out across the road and into the empty field after Mimi and her boyfriend, one hand on his gun holster. He got about halfway across the field before he caught up with Mimi. Thatch tackled her and went down in the sick yellow grass with Mimi on top of him, her flailing her limbs in the air. The boyfriend was still running across the field, thinking Mimi was still following him. Thatch wrested Mimi underneath him and pried the meat tenderizer out of her hand. Mimi tried to scratch Thatch’s face. He grabbed her wrists and pulled them above her head.

  It was about this time the boyfriend realized he wasn’t being chased anymore, turned around, and screamed across the field, “Yeah, teach that bitch a lesson!”

  I moved to help Thatch. Tuesday reached out and took my wrist.

  “It’ll be okay,” she said. “Momma gets tired easy. Don’t arrest her; I just wanted you to scare some sense into her. It’s been like this all day.”

  “That’s not protocol,” I said. “We get a disturbance call like this, we can’t just leave.”

  I pulled my wrist away from Tuesday’s grasp. I turned back toward the field.

  Tuesday moved fast, grabbed my arm.

  “Bill,” she said.

  I looked back at her. She was bent down toward me, her spine twisted, the bones of her face and limbs hard and struck with half-light from the dog-tongued moon, and when she tilted her head and stared at me I saw right through her feral green eyes, right straight through, into that sticky hollow place where all wounded children lived. I knew this place. A place called, my Daddy left me before I could say goodbye, I live with a mother that doesn’t even exist, a place called, please don’t leave me.

  “Bill,” she said again, “please don't arrest her.”

  Thatch took Mimi back through the field and across the street to where the children waited
on the lawn. We calmed down Mimi and her boyfriend and then we left.

  “Hey Bill,” Thatch said on the way back to the station, through the fog-black tar road, “did you notice there was only eleven children outside?”

  “What? What do you mean only eleven?”

  “I only counted eleven outside,” he said, “and I remember there being twelve.”

  “Maybe one of them was around back, or inside the trailer,” I said, but when I said it my stomach bottomed out and I knew it wasn’t true.

  “Hey, my wife Linda, you remember her, right?” Thatch said. “Well, she met a prophet of the Triple Goddess a few days ago and he invited us to dinner. You want to come along?”

  I laughed.

  “I’m serious,” he said, “Linda says this guy is legit. I mean, he’s a little strange, but all prophets are, you know, that’s part of their charm.”

  “A prophet. In this damn town,” I said.

  “Just tell me if you want to go. Linda says she wants you to go.”

  Linda, I thought. Christ. The name for all blank-faced, beat-poor wives. The name for those who make cherry pies and wear aprons in the summertime.

  “Bill,” Thatch said to get my attention.

  “Yeah,” I said, “yeah, whatever, I’ll go.”

  **********

  The prophet of the Triple Goddess lived a few miles out of town beside a silo wrecked by an F-5 hurricane and a trash pit filled with Grandma’s furniture and glass Coke bottles warped flat by the heat. The prophet drove a Kia with a bumper sticker plastered on the back that read, “I’ll give up my gun when you pry it from my cold dead fingers.” He also had a lot of white, ragged-eared cats. Thatch and I, and Linda, dressed in a pink dress with ruffles and click-click-click heels, walked up to the door.

  “Knock,” I told Thatch.

  “You do it,” he said.

  I looked back and Linda was bending over petting one of the gnarled cats.

  I knocked on the door.

  The prophet of the Triple Goddess was forty pushing fifty, with a pepper-colored comb-over and a sagging body. He wore a wife-beater and green camouflage pants, T-shades and a wooden Buddhist prayer necklace, a mala, wound around one wrist. One of the cats tried to run into the house and he nudged it away with his foot.

  “Come inside,” he said, his face slack. “I ordered Pizza Hut.”

  So Linda, Thatch, the prophet, and I sat around the prophet’s cramped kitchen table eating pepperoni pizza off of blue china and drinking chardonnay from coffee mugs. The walls were covered with writing in an indecipherable language. When Linda got up to go to the bathroom she had to walk through a maze of notebooks and stacks of computer paper.

  “So, why did the Triple Goddess choose you?” Thatch asked the prophet.

  Because I am nothing without her,” he said.

  “It's strange,” I said, “that the Triple Goddess of America chooses you as a prophet, when you live out in the middle of fucking nowhere.”

  “I get to travel,” he said. “Next month I’m going to Oklahoma City.”

  “Tell me how the Triple Goddess chose you,” Thatch said. “I’m curious. I’m genuinely curious.”

  Thatch and I exchanged looks. Linda was still in the bathroom.

  “I found the Triple Goddess in a bottle of honey,” he said, “do you want to see it? I still have the bottle. It looks like a bear. The bottle does.”

  “I didn’t know she could fit inside a bottle of honey,” Thatch said.

  “The Triple Goddess is everywhere,” the prophet said.

  “Then why does she stick herself in a honey bottle?” Thatch said, “doesn’t make much sense if you ask me.”

  The prophet’s neck became splotchy red. He had dull, lizard eyes. I shouldn’t have been scrutinizing him so closely. I wasn’t one to judge who the gods made into their prophets. The gods loved ugly people. Muhammad and John Smith and Moses and Elijah and L. Ron Hubbard were chosen, I think, because of it. Because they were simply strange. Everybody would believe in a prophet who had straight teeth and a pediatric degree and made love to his wife on a regular schedule. It took real faith to believe in these sick and crooked-fingered misanthropes.

  Linda came back from the bathroom.

  “Hey sweetie,” Thatch said, “our host was just telling us about how he became a prophet of the Triple Goddess.”

  Linda sat down and tried to look interested.

  “Well,” the prophet continued, “she was in this honey bottle, right. And when I twisted open the lid she called me from the depths, straight to the bottom, and a pink light shone all around me, blinding me. She said, 'from these depths, I have chosen you. Just as I have come to you through the sweetness of honey, so will I make your words sweet to the people. You are to write for me a gospel that will be read for the next two thousand years.' I must have passed out after that, because I woke up on the kitchen floor and all those damn cats were on top of me.”

  “Fascinating,” Linda said.

  I looked out the nearby window. From across about an acre of deadwood and trash I saw Mimi’s trailer.

  “Hey, I didn’t realize you lived so close to Mimi,” I said.

  “Oh, Mimi,” the prophet said. “Yeah, we grew up together. We’re good friends.”

  I said nothing.

  “I mean, we used to be. As you can see, I have a lot of work to do, so I don’t have much time for visitors. Or a romantic relationship. You understand,” the prophet said.

  “Of course,” Thatch said. I saw him roll his eyes.

  “But, you know, the Goddess doesn’t say I have to be completely abstinent. Since She is now inside of me I no longer get sick. My seed is special. Blessed. I could impregnate your wife if you wanted.”

  Linda tightened her hands on her napkin and looked down. I looked down at my plate.

  “I thought you said the Triple Goddess was in everyone,” Thatch said, “that She was everywhere. So why would you be any more special than anyone else?”

  “Because She’s inside of me more than you,” the prophet said.

  And I thought, dear dead God, he actually believes what he says. He believes that inside this sallow, pudding skin and heat-heavy face lives a special divinity. Something struck him in the face from a honey bottle, that saved him from influenza and diphtheria, that pushes its way through his sperm, that turns his fingers into matchsticks to fill papers and papers and then the walls when he’s run out of paper, something that asphyxiates him in the night hours with its presence, and yet, something that, despite all the desire to be powerful and grandiose and important, is still so horribly mundane.

  **********

  “I’m so sorry,” Linda said to me on the way back home. She rode up in the front seat with Thatch, and turned around to talk to me in the back. “I had no idea he would be like that.” “It’s all right, he didn’t offer to impregnate me, Linda,” I said.

  Thatch laughed. Linda laughed nervously.

  “I just don’t know what to think of all of this,” Linda said. “This Triple Goddess, the death of Jehovah. It’s such a scandal.”

  “We’re just repeating history, babe,” Thatch said, “cyclic life and death, karma dharma, whatever, it’s all the same damn thing.”

  “Well I don’t believe that,” Linda said. “I refuse to believe that we’re just like – like animals running on a track.”

  “Refuse it all what you want,” Thatch said, “reality isn’t going away anytime soon.”

  When I went back home and lay in bed I knew that back in Mimi’s trailer a tall frail girl with white hair and feral eyes and cricket bones lay down between ten brothers and sisters sleeping like dogs. Her eyes were open, limbs collapsed and breathed upon. She waited in the dark for the windows to scratch, the doorknob to rattle. She kept watch knowing she couldn’t stay alive. Already two were gone.

  Darling, darling, this world never changes. Your brothers and sisters are ghosts.

  **********

  T
uesday’s dead sister was named Julie. We didn’t know the name of the other missing child, and we never got a call, but both Thatch and I knew another child was gone. When I pulled Julie's blue and congealed body out of her drawer Thatch said, “a regular sleeping beauty, don’t you think?”

  “It’s definitely a suicide,” the coroner said, “don’t know why you had to make me come down here for this.”

  “How do you know?” I asked.

  “Well, her wrists are slashed.”

  “So she’s the only one who can slash her wrists?” I said.

  “Come off of it, Bill,” Thatch said, “obviously this guy isn’t winning any coroner-of-the-year awards, but who would kill a girl like this? Probably didn’t have an enemy in the world.”

  “You don’t need enemies,” I said, “just predators.”

  I turned back to the coroner. “I’m not going to let this rest,” I said.

  “She’s going to rest whether you want her to or not,” the coroner said.

  “Julie wanted to be married under the dogwood tree,” I said.

  “What are you talking about?” Thatch said.

  “That’s what Tuesday told me. Julie wanted to be married under the dogwood tree. Why would a girl kill herself if she was going to be married? It doesn't make any sense.”

  “I don't know, Bill, you know that family out there is crazy,” Thatch said.

  “Yes,” I said.

  I looked over at the coroner.

  “What are you wearing?” I asked.

  He wore a necklace consisting of three interlocking rings.

  “It’s a symbol of the Triple Goddess,” he said, reaching up to touch the necklace. “My wife was still a Jehovah supporter, even after he died, but I made her throw away all of our crucifixes.”

  I looked back at Julie. Her face shone in sick fluorescence, the congealed blood black against her cut wrists.

  On the way out of the building Thatch’s cell phone rang. He answered.

  “It’s for you,” he said. He held the phone out to me.

  “Another one of my sisters is missing,” the person on the phone said.