Who Trumped Your God?
Her story won’t let go. I constantly see her shadow exit the corner bar and slip into the night along the sidewalk to her apartment. Crushed by life. We follow her from the neighborhood tavern up the back wooden stairs, her hand on the railing. She knows where the splinters are (no metaphor here). Voyeurs, we enter behind and feed on emotion and refute our complicity in her pain. We deny we crucify to lap at her suffering, and we thank the gods it is not us. And the way to assure it is not is to make sure it is her. She is unaware of this, what we do. She is an innocent, a vengeful weeping angel and we are the slaves of Russell— which is not without its benefits. But we would be imbalanced without her and our gratitude takes the form of cruelty.
She peels off the black overcoat purchased at Salvation Army, not because she can’t afford a new one, but because it suits her existence: a mantle forlorn. She boils tea water and sits and flips on the TV and assesses her drunk. Three beers are all she drank until Russell came in and either banished her of she left because of him. She’s the only one who resists him. Russell is one scary fucker and the rest of us local barflies succumb to his opiate, to the malignity that holds out the promise of sex and money and power and a softball league championship—thought the last is doubtful. He mimes the mob affectation: glib, confident, I’m your best buddy but don’t fuck with me and the boys because the bogeyman will get you. He has no scruples and women obey him, which is ironic because he detests them for anything besides serving his whang. He lives for fellatio. It’s his religion.
Cassie is more fertile ground. She still attends mass on Sunday at the neighborhood Catholic Church where she regularly takes communion to absolve her sin. About confession she is less devout. She doesn’t trust the local priest with her secrets. She gets the sense he is a pedophile by the way he avoids her eye, and the way his lips are too sweet and full for an ascetic man. She attends with her old mother who still lives in the Chicago-style brick bungalow Cassie grew up in. Her father is long dead.
She was married for two years to Eli but the marriage ended in divorce court the day he slept with her best friend and thought she wouldn’t know, and believed it could go on, him, a godless Mormon. But years have passed, ten, maybe 15, and here she is in her thirties with extra pounds and a cashier job at convenience store. Her mother is her only family. Cassie is not beautiful or athletic and has been blessed with only one gift: the ability to see through others, except for those she believes are friends. Love is really blind. At night she dreams of a Brazilian shoeshine boy whose customers become great dancers after receiving his polish and shine. But he remains wretched and destitute and the new hoofers are unaware of the gift’s origin. The thankless fools thrive in love with partners who admire dancers in this Latin American culture. The boy, like Cassie, is oblivious of his good works, of their injury.
At her workplace she collects ten dollar bills from Lotto-tics she calls them. The one in a million opportunity to leave poverty behind. It takes no effort to see through them. Their mask is veneer thin and bleak. Stacks of cigarette cartons fill the walls behind her and customers hack out money for them. They pay for gas, buy newspapers. They dress in the strangest clothes: Bermuda shorts and sleeveless undershirts, shapeless shifts and hot pants, holes in blue jeans, suits with the wrong tie, like her tie with Eli, asshole. Mostly they are slovenly and overweight and they don’t realize anything but what is in front of them or is being chewed. It’s not that they don’t care. They look around and see themselves and eat more chips and drink more beer and suck up to Russell like he was a Slurpy.
Three pre-teen black boys come in. They drop their bikes in disheveled heaps on the concrete in front and are armed with pain. One boy will be legit and lay down fifty cents for candy and distract her while the others pillage. She sees it all the time. The owner is an Arab who professes to be a Christian but she knows he does it to delude intolerant redneck customers. Since she likes the man she will put a stop to the shoplifting. If he mistreated her she would not.
“Hey,” she spots them in the mirror and yells. “Get yer mitts out of the ice cream bin if yer not gone to buy.”
“I’m going to pray for you now, Russell,”
she tells
him but can’t bring herself to do the deed even though it is revenge
upon him.
The Blessed Virgin would hear her counterfeit prayer’s ill intent. It
would
wound her enemy and wake him to Burns’ “… vast, unbottom’d, boundless
pit."--in another word, hell.
She enters the back door like the regulars do, near the kitchen and the men’s can, and she looks down the length of the dark wood bar to assess the patrons hunched over drinks on a slow Tuesday night. CNN is on the tube and Ray wipes the bar with a white rage.
“What are you mad at, Ray?” Cassie asks him.
“You want a Mic, Cassie?”
“A mick, a polack, a wop…I don’t care,” she says.
“How about a Dago?” Jose beside her asks.
She turns to him, a cigarette dangling from his brown lips, a black moustache above a hopeless, crooked smile, his moist eyes bloodshot with drink and she wonders if he is drunk enough to get him to her apartment, and sober enough to screw her. Jose would be primarily incidental, she wants his animal flesh, the rouser, the provocateur to strum her chords.
She leans into him and lays a hand on his knee and says, “Do you have a cigarette, Jose?”
He fiddles a pack out of a breast pocket. This is how she gets laid, like a thief. Cassie sees his wife at home watching television but her libido compels her to embark on this mortal sin she will have to confess to the fat-lipped priest. Jose’s groin stirs to life and transforms Cassie’s uncommon mien into a truer beauty.
She has to move quickly because unsanctioned sex will wake Russell. At any moment he will stab in the back door with his knowing satisfied smirk that Cassie recognizes as transubstantiated pain. Jose lights the cigarette for her and she presses her warmth and femininity into him, liberating his compunction. She inhales and hoods her eyes and watches him effect the Latin lover who prides himself on his knowledge and sexual mastery of woman. She thinks she may get lucky tonight but the beast stirs in its lair. She exhales smoke over Jose to cloak him from Russell’s province and eye.
“I see you in here, don’t I?” he touches his moustache with his forefinger.
Cassie dispenses with the preliminaries. “I’ve got a problem,” she rallies. She will castigate herself afterwards, wear a hairshirt for a week.
He lowers his voice and places a hairy knuckled hand on top of hers, which still rests on his knee and feels like a heating pad, and says, “I am here to serve.” She grows more beautiful by the moment, for him a Madonna on whom to perfect his guilt.
“The pilot light went out in my stove.”
Immediately he leaps to the rescue. “That can be very dangerous. Joo will have to relight it.”
“I don’t know how.”
“I weel help you.”
She grabs his hand and says, “Let’s go. I live near here.”
He gulps down his beer. This is getting out of hand. Her heart pounds and she avoids Ray’s eye that for the first time bears a torch for her. It is too late now. Her heart pounds harder and her vision diminishes. Joes’s hand is like braided hair in hers and he stumbles obediently behind her to the back door that she dreads will open. God grant me this blasphemy, this adultery, this need. Things have gotten miserably, inexorably twisted in the social and gospel mind and she is out the door and into the cold drizzly night that threatens sleet. Jose slips and swears and goes half way down to the sidewalk but Cassie hauls him up and clutches him like a falcon hooking prey. Her apartment is near. If she can get him there she will have his hardness and his seed, his blood and his memory of her.
But the chill sobers him and a car pulls into the lot behind the tavern. Inside is Russell. She vacillates. He has not caught sight of her, and Jose is an indistinguishable knob. The myopic Russell sees a patterned blur through one-inch lenses. She hauls the Mexican across the street.
“Why are we going?” he asks, "Texas?"
In one minute Ray will let slip that she and Jose have disappeared in the night and Russell will be furious. Though he will not show it, he will manifest it and Jose will later pay for and suffer the pleasure. The apartment is on the next block. Automobile headlight beams shine like criminal minds.
“To my apartment. You’re going to light my pilot.” He is getting too lucid. She has bourbon to stoke his fire. She pictures Russell talking to Ray who hates him like the rest of us who do not understand our hate is the mirror of Russell’s pulse. She sees Russell draw his wallet out, his porcine hide stuffed with swag, his eyes aglow with radioactive green. His soul alive as long as he breathes the air.
Cassie is almost there.
“Tell me,” Jose says. “Who trumped your god?”