Nightwoods - Charles Frazier [7]
At grown-up Bud’s new happy church that Lily made him go to, they talked about Jesus all the time, but never about Jesus’s blood. That would be embarrassing for this tame bunch of worshippers. Their church featured an arched stained-glass window picturing Jesus standing on green grass in a glowing yellow light beam against a blue sky. Jesus was sad-eyed and pretty, with his arms spread and his palms upraised, long yellow hair flowing to his shoulders and long white robes flowing to his white feet. Little children and lambs and other youngster livestock flocked around him.
For Bud, that vision was unsatisfactory. Disgusting, really, in its cartoonishness. For Lily’s benefit, Bud condensed whatever leftover inner religion he had into a bleeding heart tattoo covering the outer face of his left biceps. Fairly painful to receive and impossible to remove. Also a big artistic disappointment, since he had imagined it highly anatomical, but it came out more like a valentine.
Even at that, the tattoo accorded in some pleasing way with his necklace, a big black fossilized shark tooth. On their honeymoon, Lily had found it at low tide down at Surfside and had it wound in silver wire to hang on a leather thong against his sternum. The tooth was millions of years old, but you could still cut your finger on the serrated edges, which Bud did while the tattoo still wept, sealing his thinking about their harmony. Jesus’s blood and some big black-eyed shark reddening strange waters. Both expressing the exact same reality. The meaning of the necklace could be summed into one useful idea—adapted from the possibly true fact that sharks die if they stop swimming forward—useful for every single misstep in life. Move on. And the meaning of the tattoo was equally brief, and no argument about it. Everybody dies.
Now, Bud too had drawn considerable blood. He wasn’t always proud of it, and though he hadn’t actually confessed, things seemed pretty cut and dried in regard to his guilt. In jail awaiting trial, he noticed that everybody treated him like he was a terminal case. So before the court date, he wasted time trying and failing to get his mind right for sitting down in the big chair with a smirk on his face and sucking down a deep breath of gas.
BUD AND LILY HAD become a bad match immediately after the hot courtship ended. In short order, Bud realized marriage was not always going to be a fun time. Lily was not his dream lover anymore, not by a long stretch. Her children could pass for normal back then, but they were still a constant irritant. How could romance prevail with them always needing something contradictory to romance, such as ass wiping and nose blowing?
It could not, was the short answer.
Also, Lily owned her house outright due to the horny grocery-store-manager first husband who knocked her up with twins, then up and died before they were even born. It chapped Bud’s ass to live in another man’s house, even a dead one’s. Troublesome too that Lily had her own money. Some from the dead husband and some from work. She was a beautician. The State had issued her a license to cut and color hair, and she had an arrangement with an older woman down the street to watch the kids during Lily’s work hours at the beauty shop.
Bud’s strongest argument rested on the fact that he was the man, and therefore Lily should put the house in his name and quit her job. But it got nowhere, especially since Bud’s weekly check from the railroad wouldn’t at all cover the bills. Pulling a third of his weight was the best Bud could do, which seemed about right to him, give or take. Still, it irked him when Lily headed out mornings into the wide world looking pretty in her tight white beautician outfit and white crepe-sole shoes like she was in the medical profession. Most days, she would put her lipstick on and blot it with a rectangle of Kleenex and throw it in the toilet and walk out. There it would float, unflushed, a perfect