The Name of the World - Denis Johnson [30]
She was all dressed up in a black-and-white pantsuit with pads that gave her sharp shoulders. Ankle-high white booties on her feet. The first strong impression was that of a crew member in a science-fiction tale. I waited just outside the store, hoping to say hi, but she came out the other exit. I trailed her through the parking lot and called her name, but she didn’t acknowledge this man in a baking blacktop car park, brown paper bag of groceries dangling at his side in a single-handed grip, shouting, “Flower! Flower!”
I stood watching while she got aboard her hatchback, and then I went to my new used German and followed her. I was living last night’s dream, only in a setting not of hallways but of shimmering black streets.
Flower wasn’t going fast. I could have pulled alongside and signaled, but I didn’t. We went about a mile out the Old Highway and then left onto a narrow concrete road that shot west with never a turning through fields of alfalfa, fields of barley, fields of knee-high rows of corn.
I kept the windows down. The world was mute and pungent, brilliantly green. A few miles along Flower turned left again into the gravel lot of a gray one-storey building and parked among a lot of other cars gathered together in the midst of this flat vastness. Nothing else to see but a distant pair of concrete grain elevators standing above the horizon. Every small sound came up crisp and then the breeze took it far away, the small steady wind across the crust of the world, the click of her door and her heels and toes on the gravel. Flower glanced my way without curiosity as she headed into the place.
It was a cheap structure almost on the order of a mobile home, but much larger inside than it had seemed. A wide hallway went either way out of a foyer where scores of people stood around without having to crowd. A sense of offices, meeting rooms, classrooms down institutional corridors. Directly ahead, double doors opened onto a chamber big enough, from what I could see, to accommodate hundreds. I thought I glimpsed church pews. Folks were wandering inside there to sit. I spotted Flower easily among all the farmers and the farmers’ wives. She stood by the double doors in her black-and-white pantsuit, maybe a bit harlequinesque but very stylish and expensive looking, talking in sign language with a young boy about sixteen. He must have been a deaf boy. I was fascinated. Without voices to help them they used whatever they had, both their faces animated, exploding with emotion, while the quick lively gestures shot down their arms and out their fingers; they worked at it like silent-film actors. And suddenly, reminded of the old silent films, I was struck with an understanding of the empty peace the boy inhabited. He had a thin, elegant face, blond hair, blue eyes, clear complexion. None of the erupting skin or awkwardness of adolescence.
The people seemed friendly. Wherever I looked I got a nod and a smile. In a minute I was approached by two men. One told me I was welcome. The other said they’d just begun their summer schedule here. Therefore, the first told me, this wasn’t Bible Study, as I’d probably expected.
I didn’t bother telling them I’d expected nothing, or anything but this: I’d stumbled into Sing Night. They were some sort of religious fellowship, and this building was their church. One of my hosts led me into the large room, which was filled with many dozens of rustic wooden pews and fronted by a podium. We stood in the back while my companion, a man as small as I but more solid, in jeans and a long-sleeved white shirt, surveyed the place. One wide center aisle cut the room in half. The rows were filling up, women in the left-hand section, men in the right.
My host addressed me as a needy spirit, a groping soul. “We aren’t about doctrine so much. We do have a pamphlet, but we aren’t about doctrine, like I say. Did you get a—” The other man reappeared and handed me their pamphlet. “Here,