The Ranger - Ace Atkins [75]
“Jesus Christ,” Lena leaned over to Charley and whispered. “They gonna start that business? We won’t be out of here till midnight.”
“Shush. Hadn’t you ever heard an unbridled soul speak?”
Lena whispered again to Charley, this time saying she had to pee pee, and he looked real aggravated as he stood to let her and the baby out, not even offering to help her a little bit, everyone too concentrated on Brother Davis, lost and wandering, picking manna from the air, proud as hell of that cordless microphone, where he could leap off the stage and touch folks’ hands like he was a damn Kenny Chesney. Gowrie and his daddy sat in the last row, not even bothering to dress for the night service. Gowrie had on an old Army coat, the hair on his face about the same stubbled length as that on his head. His daddy wore a ragged T-shirt that read HAULIN’ ASS, with a girl wearing a thong riding a motorcycle.
Gowrie winked at her and reached out to touch the baby—some kind of gesture of forgiveness—as she turned and gave him her backside, shouldering the door and heading into the lobby.
A card table had been set up with free Bibles with plastic covers and tons of pamphlets on the End Times, and those comic books you see in gas-station bathrooms about men humping each other or drinking bottles marked with XXX, as if liquor came like that anymore.
She sat in a hard plastic seat and leafed through them as she pulled up her sweater and set the baby to her breast, the baby finding her nipple as easy as you please. Lena saw one comic where Jesus appeared at a bar and the man was too drunk to even realize there was a man with long hair and a beard—wearing a robe and sandals, no less—trying to chat him up.
“How old is she?” asked the woman behind the card table, knowing the baby was a girl on account of the pink blanket.
“One day.”
“She sure is hungry.”
Lena rocked her in that hard school seat.
“Y’all should be alone,” the woman said.
Lena heard someone strumming an electric guitar, and the drum machine kicked in, an off-key voice singing some Christian rock.
“I would like that.”
She led Lena down a long hallway and back behind what would’ve been the screen of the old theater. The noise was muffled by a big concrete wall, and she could sit there without men coming in and craning their heads to look at her young titties. She closed her eyes, falling asleep for a long while, not dreaming but dead asleep, then breaking awake and back, feeling the baby suckle on her, her body feeling hollow and bled out and spent. Hands shaky and hungry, wishing that son of a bitch onstage would get done with what he had to say so they could get to that food she’d been promised. Brother Davis’s words sounded as if they were coming from the bottom of the sea or an old worn-out videotape:
“They will see the bloodstained path that was in my death in my resurrection.
“When you say you can’t or shouldn’t, know that I have gone before you. I have prepared the way. And know I am working through you. Hallelujah!”
“Hallelujah,” Lena said, very small, snuggling her baby. “Get done, you asshole preacher.”
She rocked the child among the stage props that had been made by children, castles and dragons and sheep and robes. She fell asleep again to the pounding of words and a wave of nonsensical stuttering going over the people like water. She stood and walked in the dim light, running her hands over the piles of plastic swords and fake trees, looking for a way out.
Against the back wall was another card table, two of them pushed together, lined with piles of guns and fat bundles of cash.
Holy shit. Cash.
For a moment Lena felt like a spell had come over her, and she stepped toward the table, reaching for the pile of money, smiling, feeling like it might actually be a real thing—a holy prayer answered!—when the door slammed open and two of Gowrie’s boys rolled through it, full of piss and beer, pushing at her and asking her what in God’s name did she think she was doing by breaking in back here?
“I had to feed my baby, you morons.