Читать книгу Anxious Gravity - Jeff Wells - Страница 10

The Cliffside Baptist youth retreated to 100 acres of Muskoka scrub 90 miles north of the city; an investment property of a Hong Kong émigré who’d given his life to Christ in a recent “I Found It!” campaign. There were four counsellors and two dozen campers: mostly God bullies who wore Jesus, the Real Thing t-shirts and rattled off the names of born again athletes as though introducing the home team’s starting line for the Judgement Bowl. One or two others were my friends, and a few more near-friends, who agreed that, like the swarming black flies and our peeling noses, fellowship was a nuisance tag-along to the fun and food.

Our tents were pitched on a narrow, weedy carpet between shallow Lake Oompah and an outhouse that had the barbed reek of thriving faecal coliform. The boys preferred, like boys of most faiths might, to disappear into the bush to piss on the dogwood and wipe their asses with handfuls of mature maple leaves. The few girls held their noses and voided their bowels with fearsome modesty.

Up the road half a mile there was a field cleared for us. Most afternoons and evenings, between Bible Study and campfire singsperation, we’d be there, playing interminable games of Softball. The preaching didn’t convince me God was good, but so long as He let me hang out in the outfield with Patti Hula I didn’t mind him overmuch. Christ and Marx could have been a law firm from the end of the world for all I cared: from that unnumbered inning when we split a pack of banana-flavoured Bubble Yum, Patti was my Alpha and Omega. She was a year older and almost a foot shorter than me, with shoulder-length hair as red and rich as a Saviour’s blood. Her breasts were small — half a mouthful, I imagined. She was handsome, not beautiful, and then only just; but she hooked me with her loopy grin out there near the ragweed and gopher holes. More than once I shouted “It’s yours!” just to watch her trifling nipples poke at her sweaty-T as she stretched to catch a pop fly.

Patti came from what was politely called an “unchurched” family, and didn’t know Eve from Adam. She’d been invited by her friend Marinda Learner, who undoubtedly was hoping for an easy conversion and another crown across the Jordan. It didn’t look good for Marinda. The Word of the Lord neither hardened Patti’s heart as it had the pharaoh’s nor melted it like Simon Peter’s. She was curious, certainly, and listened with considered attention to the stories from the life of Elisha, though she would do the same for snippets from any unfamiliar heroic fantasy. Hobbits and prophets, Christ and Frodo, magic rings and resurrections from the dead — she absorbed it all, but that she was expected to accept Jesus into her heart left no sensible impression.

Every night I’d strategize to plant a big wet one, or even a hard one, on Patti Hula. She wore a roomy vinyl poncho in foul weather, almost big enough for two, so maybe I could say, “Got a hand under there I can hold on to?” Maybe not. If it were hot and there were no counsellors in sight, I could offer to massage oil into her shoulders while she lay by the shore with her eyes closed and her lips slightly parted. If it were hot… The thought of sweat pooling in the small of Pattis back while I kneaded her freckled flesh reminded my hand of a rhythm never far from my mind.

Coward that I am, we didn’t touch until the final campfire.

Our evening conflagrations were set on the lip of a cliff almost a mile from the lake: a Precambrian wall 60 feet high, poking through the mossy earth like an old shark’s tooth. Though the cliff stood at right angle to the world, along the winding footpath from the shore and our tents, the slope barely registered. The clearing was a dirty circle of ragweed 80 feet across, proscribed by adolescent spruce and a licorice night sky. There was a sickly-looking bush half over the cliff’s edge next to which, once the girls had retired to their tents, some male counsellors would stage urination contests, not noticing the dirt they pissed out of it’s arthritic grasp.

Pastor Filmore was to arrive our last night in order to deliver the closer: our final campfire message. It would stink of sulphur and Christian gore, full of lf-you-should-die-tonight logic, crafted to literally scare the hell out of us, and the bejeezus into us.

“Last year out at Burke’s Falls all that Lake of Fire stuff terrified me so much I nearly got born again and again and again,” Terry MacRury told me after breakfast on the morning of our last full day. “It’s not like his sermons back home. Here he really let’s it all hang out.”

Filmore had been scaring kids shitless for ten years’ worth of these retreats, almost all of them held on the sprawling grounds of a well-appointed evangelical camp outside Elmdale. But rents were up and collections were down, and for a time it was feared the Cliffside retreat would be downsized to an evening of nanaimo bars and gospel records in the church auditorium. Filmore, I was told, thanked God frequently in his sermons for providing the property through the charity of a recent convert, though he’d visited the site only once.

We’d expected him to arrive in time to share our evening chili and Tang, but when the last spoon of Laura Secord butterscotch pudding was licked clean and he hadn’t shown, camp leader Drew Tallboys called the other counsellors aside for a whispered huddle. I sidled up to Patti, who was waiting with Marinda for a pair of dragonflies to leave their mosquito net so they could grab some snacks and flashlights for the campfire.

Sarcasm sloshing everywhere, I muttered, “Gee, I sure hope he isn’t lost.”

“Say it ain’t so,” Patti smiled. She wouldn’t mind either way, but it was nice to hear her play along. Marinda frowned and sighed heavily. Then she knelt down, plucked a half-buried stone and tossed it at their tent flap. One dragonfly buzzed towards the lake, the second towards a weaving, screaming Marinda.

Five minutes later, after a brief prayer, the huddle broke. Tallboys announced that Curtis Drieger — coincidentally, winner of the previous night’s pissing contest — would remain at lakeside to await Filmore’s unmistakable burgundy Buick LeSabre. The rest of us would accompany Tallboys and two other counsellors up the footpath to the cliff for our campfire.

The first 30 minutes each evening we humiliated ourselves for Christ’s sake with nonsense songs. I preferred Yano Leimerman’s lesson on Paul’s use of the aorist imperative in Ephesians 6:13 to one more chorus of “Rocco Ate My Taco.” Singing was bad enough. The broad, spastic gestures by the light of a gibbous moon made it unbearable.

These were not selections from the Baptist hymnody — they came later — and there wasn’t even one vague allusion among them to the propitiatory work of our Saviour. “Rocco Ate Mt Taco” could just as easily be sung by an assembly of abjuring Shinto youth, or a pimply gang of pointy-eared Trekkie conventioneers while awaiting a celebrity Q & A with George Takei. We were a mandala of mock flagellants and nutty professors, exorcising our demons of frivolity by exhaustion and embarrassment, in order to be good and good and tired for the gospel songs, sermon and sloppy confessions of thought, word and deed that inevitably followed.

Everyone but Patti and I had finished eating and were beginning a crowd pleaser called “We’re from Nairobi” when I noticed two figures stamping towards the clearing.

We’re from Nairobi and we’re on best team

We do the watusi we’re seven feet tall.

Patti still had a couple of marshmallows melting on her whittled maple twig, and I had room for at least one more Shopsy’s dog, so I coolly lifted one from Tallboys’ bag while he kept on singing and thrashing and impaled it to half its length through the circular seam of its prick end.

The cannibals may eat us

But they’ll never beat us

‘Cause we’re from Nairobi and we’re on the ball.

Sing along! Sing ALONG!! SING ALONG!!!

I’d refused to join in since Leimerman had led the group through the opening number, “Rodney the Round-Eyed Chinaman.” It was an ugly doggerel of pigeon English which frequently required both hands pulling one’s eyelids tight or forming the point of a coolie’s hat above one’s head. I chose to protest silently, eating early and often throughout the song, filling my hands and mouth as much as possible, She might just have been hungry, but Patti did the same.

“We’re from Nairobi” called for us to leap up at the end of each verse, beat our arms and stomp our feet wildly, and chant “Ungawa! Ungawa! Ungawa! Ungawa! Ungawa! Ungawa! UngaWAWAa!!” It was a favourite of the counsellors.

As the second verse began, Drieger ambled out of the darkness, while Pastor Filmore stepped softly into deeper shadows. He disappeared to my right, in the direction of the counsellors’ piss-bathed bush. I ate my hot dog and didn’t think much of it, until during the chorus I heard the scrabbling of rubber soles on rock and a shower of gravel off the cliff face.

“Um, I think maybe —”

“Pastor?” Drieger looked puzzled as he entered our circle and the fire danced in his eyes. The singing stopped. “Pastor Filmore? He was right behind me …”

“He’s fallen over the cliff!” Terry’s voice was a mix of horror and delight at having scooped the rest of us.

“Oh, my Lord! No!”

Patti was on her feet and with me as we scampered to the edge of the rock, where Tallboys fell to his belly and slithered until his head and shoulders were suspended in space. He cupped his hands to his mouth and bleated Filmore’s name. Then we all called.

“Shut up!” Tallboys snapped. But there was no one answering. No sound at all.

“Drew,” said Drieger calmly as he knelt beside him, “we’ve got to go down there.”

Tallboys nodded. “You and me.” He threw himself erect, ran to the circle and grabbed the nearest pair of flashlights. He whispered a brief something to Yano, who had been hanging back close to the fire, and disappeared with Drieger.

“Everybody now, come on, back away from the edge there,” said Yano with a tremulous voice. He wasn’t built for life in the bush — his arms and legs were marked with appalling bruises from turning over in his sleep — but as a recent graduate of Overcomer Bible Institute, Yano commanded respect as the camp’s uncontested spiritual leader. (Though he wouldn’t join the other counsellors in their pissing contests, he also refused to cast judgement upon them, deciding it was between them and the Lord.) In the gross physicality of Muskoka he seemed like a skittish house cat left with strangers for a weekend, looking for a low table to crawl beneath. “Let’s gather around the campfire and pray,” he suggested.

Patti moved towards Yano on the opposite side of the fire, and I moved towards Patti to close the circle. I barely noticed when Patti took my hand. I glanced at her and saw her eyes were shut tight, her mouth open and moving without making a sound.

“Oh Lord,” Marinda began uncertainly, and then was racked with sobs. “Please, Lord —”

“Jesus,” whimpered Terry. “I just —”

“Please let Pastor Filmore be okay.”

“Yes, God.” It was Patti. I knew it was her more by the tensing of her palm than by the sound of her voice. It was remote and humourless. It was as if I’d never heard it before.

“God,” I managed to say after a long silence “just make everything better.” Yelps of aniens and tears surrounded me. Then I squeezed my eyes shut.

I opened them at last during Yano’s scripturally-rich yet rambling prayer, at the sound of voices and cracking twigs outside our small circle. I squinted through the smoke and falling cinders and could make out three figures in the flames, burning yet unconsumed. The large shape in the middle had his arms outstretched upon the shoulders of his two companions. As he approached, I saw across his forehead a dark slash of blood. His shirt was ripped at the belly where it had snagged on a branch. At first his face seemed expressionless, but as he drew closer I realized it had jammed at a singular moment of astonishment. Yano poured a cup of grape Freshee from his thermos and rushed to his side. Patti squeezed my damp palm even harder.

“He landed between two huge boulders!” Tallboys shouted. “A little to either side and he’d be dead for sure!” He handed Yano the flashlight he’d grabbed, who then set it down within the fire circle.

“You used this flashlight?” Patti breathed. “It’s mine. I’ve been trying to get it to work for days.” She took her hand from mine and pressed it to her forehead. “It’s a miracle,” she whispered, trying to understand.

“I’m a miracle,” Filmore mumbled as he passed us, a dribble of blood streaking his cheek and spotting the grass at Patti’s feet. Then he stopped and looked back at me with wide, vacant eyes.

“You,” he said, feebly pointing. “I was coming up behind you. Sneak up. Surprise. You weren’t singing. Meant to surprise. Supposed to be funny. Jesus…!”

Five minutes later I knelt with Patti and two others beyond the circle of the fire, where the black flies were thickest, and asked Jesus to enter my dumbfounded heart.