GOSPEL
G.D. Brown
I was still breaking into cars when I found the gospel tape. The whole gang was out with flashlights, Blind Liza, Peter, others who came by the house that night. The neighborhoods had gone purple under the blanket of dark, our dark, and we found there the cheap nothings left outside by people who were better off than we were—outdated electronics, pocket change. I didn’t actually need to break into the car with the cassette tape. The window was already shattered glass in the passenger seat, shards on top of the plastic case. Thinking back, I must have pocketed the cassette because I hadn’t seen one in so long. I didn’t even know whether I could still swipe a tape deck. That extra challenge must have given me sticky fingers. So, I stuffed the tape into my bag with my treasures: my remaining jewelry, the GPS systems, whatever else we’d pilfered that night.
“Loni, come get a handful of this,” Peter said from across the street.
I followed him and filled my raincoat pockets with dimes and nickels, the silver change from a cupholder. My hands were sweaty. They stank like metal on account of the coins. We were nearly as south as Dallas, and it was summer. We looked like fools in our heavy coats, but we needed the pockets. Blind Liza, who was just nearsighted, wore her parka, fur on the hood and all that. She was crosseyed and feeling up the cars with her window punch and then turning her ugly face away when the spring-loaded punch transformed the windows into little hills of glass.
We didn’t always use the tool, though, the window punch. We’d cover whole streets just yanking on car doors in tidy neighborhoods on the other side of the interstate. The sound of constant traffic gave us cover there, and we had plenty of space to disappear when someone set off a car alarm. Anywhere there’s a highway, there’s a good place to break into cars. I figure there are folks like Peter and Blind Liza in every town of more than a couple thousand, checking car doors and busting the occasional window with a ten-dollar tool stolen from the local auto parts store. We the people fill our bodies thanks to old coins and cash from the great American pawn shops.
***
I don’t sleep the way I should. For a while, I thought it was restless legs, like someone in a commercial jerking their legs across the bed in the dark. Now, my whole body trembles, and I smother myself in blankets. The bottoms of my dreams split open before I can realize them. My bones jump through my skin and have me shivering. I’m up for hours like that, shaking and watching the shadows on my bedroom wall sway into the morning. My body knows something I do not know. I say that I am reborn. I have not yet learned to fear.
I didn’t figure in the downsides of living alone until my sleep troubles started. I am hardly worried about break-ins or the types of injuries that leave old folks alone on the floor. I am healthy. I can buy a gun. Late at night, though, bathed in blue light from the muted television, I feel the wide space between my twitching body and the door, between me and whoever else is counting sheep in the next room over. I try to watch the flashing TV, but the shows in those hours leave me feeling alien in the filler time that’s really meant for no one. Sometimes, I think of the songs from the tape and mouth the words to myself in the dark. Sometimes I say prayers I’ve heard from the lips of happy people. I become lost in the spiritual transaction. I cannot tell whether I’m buying something or selling something. Spiritual or otherwise, it’s always one or the other, always buying or selling.
***
The gospel tape was in my bag of loot, a canvas knapsack I kept beside my mattress. I didn’t play it for nearly a month. Then Peter found an old boombox in a ditch, a truck-bed casualty, and he said I could have it. The CD player didn’t work. No self-respecting pawnshop would pay much for a boombox with a working CD player, much less Peter’s corroded plastic box with its radio antenna and tape deck. I cleaned it with a washrag and poured my bag of loot out onto the floor, tossed aside the tarnished locket from my birth mother and a bundle of copper wiring in my search for the tape and its Jesus magic. The singers on the cover were pressed clothes and hands on shoulders. I was a woman with a mattress and a bag of stolen goods in borrowed real estate. In a few days I’d be somewhere else. And then somewhere else again. I found a working power outlet. The tape found its way into the deck. The buttons stuck in their places and then popped back to attention. I pressed them each in turn until they remembered why it was they were made. Then the tape was whirring along, and I heard the voices of those flat-pressed people from the cover.
The voices were angular and turning over one another, and then they were settling into each other and rising. They used words like “grace” and looked forward to something beyond their moment, something beyond my moment, squatting in the house. Only one of the boombox speakers worked. The notes were thin and tinny. Still, they were magic. They overcame me, found their way to my head with their simple weight, like they were written for the type of woman who needed easy words, who had already heard the difficult words of everyone else.
I was humming, sitting cross-legged on somebody else’s linoleum floor. The other people huddled about the house didn’t notice. When the first side ended, I wanted to listen to it again, to save the second side for later. The rewind button was smashed off the boombox. So, I took out the tape and twisted the tiny wheels back to the beginning. After the third or fourth time, I knew most of the words, and my humming turned to singing. The borrowed words felt their way through me, and my throat somehow opened in ways I hadn’t known before, not when I was singing in the middle school choir, not when I was listening to my mom’s radio as a kid. I tasted each syllable, new ways of dancing in my mouth, buttery and soft and then louder. The rest of them, Blind Liza, Peter, a man in a stained ball cap, came over to me, and they sang with me too. Peter said he thought he knew the song. I called him Saint Peter. We had nowhere to be, so we sat there together amongst our scattered belongings, my mattress and Blind Liza’s recycling bin full of stuffed animals. We kept the lights off. Peter had a space heater, and we sat around it that night like a campfire, singing until the man in the ball cap fell asleep. Then we were quiet, muttering only to ourselves. That night, I held the boombox to my chest as I slept.
***
The night is conquering my room through the inch-wide slats in my blinds. The heavy dark has grown cold and foreign. Moonlight pales my skin. I bought a cat, though I’m supposed to say I adopted it instead. It is gray and striped, and it spends most of its time beneath my bed, hidden between my suitcase and a nylon guitar case I found behind the stage at a church. Sometimes the cat curls up between my legs. When I am home and awake and panicking in the early morning, I want to pray that it will come out and sleep near me, where I can feel its breathing and listen to it purr. Sometimes I hope it will leave my legs and crawl up to my face. When that happens, I will pet the cat, and it will be worth the money spent on kibble and litter.
I think it is a boy. At least, that’s what I remember. There is paperwork from the shelter that should clear it up, but I’ve lost it. The dusty sheets gather in piles on my kitchen counter. When I sweep the paper into a plastic garbage bag with my arm, the shelter notes will be gone, and there will be nothing else to do about it. I will clear off my dirty clothes and sit on my bed, the only place for me to sit, and I will call for the cat then. I will do so with respect. Even when it comes to pick the kibble from its dish, I will not spread its legs or demand any answers concerning its sex. It makes little difference to me. I will be someone the cat can trust, and I will take it at its word.
I do not share my bed with anyone else. My work demands that I am chaste, or rather, it demands that I am not caught being unchaste. Most days, I am too tired to sneak, to hide, to avoid the eyes of other people, much less to first catch someone’s eyes and then hide from all the other eyes. I have long spent my time hiding from eyes. And though I am lonely, I do not want to imagine the sort of terror that would come with finding another sack of flesh beneath my blanket. When I awake and I am shaking, or when I am unable to sleep, rolling back and forth, making sweaty my fitted sheet, I fear the shocked, open mouth of the onlooker, the annoyed and half-sleeping groan from across the bed. So, I must listen for the cat and say it is enough. I hear the shuffling beneath the bed or the hop onto the comforter. I wait for that movement that will break apart the heavy dark bleeding in through my open blinds, the silence on my chest and legs.
***
We were all piling up on one another in a house without water when Peter told us which churches would give up the most money. It was summertime. The big windows on the east side of the house got hot in the mornings, and we made beds from our clothes and lay still in our underwear most of the day. I’d lost my mattress when the cops turned us out of the last house and back into the street, lost the boombox too. I was sure to take the tape, though. I kept it in my coat pocket. The cops had talked about ownership and the law, and then they went back to houses and air conditioning. We found the house without water before morning. Sometimes Blind Liza would panhandle by some on-ramp or another. Otherwise, we spent most of our time there in the sun, praying for the evening cool and then heading out to find more electronics and copper so we could eat.
Peter said the church up the road handed out money to folks like us if we went with any regularity, said it was so big that no one would recognize you anyway. I started going every now and again, first with him and then by myself, finding an open chair near the back of the church after they started singing, blending in with the rest of the bodies when they stood and raised their hands, the smiling mass of mostly-pink faces shot up on the giant screens on either side of the stage. After the service, I’d find one of the greeters, one of the “hospitality ministers,” all white-toothed and holy, and I’d say something about my “situation,” and they’d mention the “benevolence fund,” a wholly insufficient road with no end that I could find, no help outside a fruit basket and a toothbrush unless I could cough up an address or a phone number. Sometimes they’d tell me to go to such and such shelter, and then they’d look me in the eye with a practiced seriousness that faded and often turned to a few bucks stuffed into my open hand, a pushover parent in artfully faded jeans.
I was surprised at how seldom the greeters turned to prayer when I found them after service. Only the brave ones would lay their hands on me the way they made such a show of rubbing their grimy palms on nearly everyone else when the cameras were rolling. The more clever greeters remembered their stacks of church bulletins and told me to tear off the prayer request form inside. This would allow me more prayers and allow them personal space from the stinking woman with her hands out.
It was on one of those bulletins that I saw the announcement about the talent show. “Sing a praise unto the Lord,” it read. I thought about the tape. I thought about the way I’d taken to singing it each night before I lost the boombox. I thought about the way Blind Liza told me she liked my voice. There wasn’t much else for me to do.
***
Without its physicality, fear wouldn’t be half as bad as it is, though I still figure it’s the mental strain that, as a single factor, is the worst of it. Either way, I could stand to be scared without my body’s playing along. My shoulders climb up to my ears and turn heavy and throbbing. My stomach falls into itself. Food won’t pass my lips. I get headaches. In the night, when the sky is black and I can hear the ceaseless pinging in my ears, my body is at war with itself, fighting to keep safe from whatever poison that my brain is convinced will kill me. My organs and muscles fight to purge the potential danger. Only when the sun rises, when I have worn my stubborn limbs to exhaustion and passed over every thought that will fit inside my head, will I find safety in my bed, in any bed.
Often, it happens this way: My eyes fly open as I am set to collide with something in a dream, no, not a dream, a near-dream, the unintelligible thoughts between sleep and wakefulness. I am lying on my back, and I am uncomfortable. I get up to check the door to my apartment. It is locked. It is always locked. I return to my bed, this time laying on my right side. My shoulders begin to tense, and I roll onto my left side. The jumping sensation begins in my legs. I realize that they had first jumped in order to wake me. I roll onto my right side again. The movement spreads into tense jerking. My back, by this point, is twisted into knots. The pulsing in my body, the jumping and shaking, feels as if my entire being is expanding, but my skin, my bones, my rigid muscles, these parts of me will not allow this expansion. They cannot allow this expansion. I am a finite woman. My joints ache. The ringing in my ears has filled my head with lies.
I understand that I am afraid. I wonder whether there is anything to fear, anything at all that can take from me. I am thinking now about the cat. I am crying, because not even the cat will come to comfort me. I seek a comforter. It is now when I want to pray, and it is now that I feel that I am not capable of prayer, that I do not know, or perhaps do not want to know, the words. I tell myself it will soon be morning.
“Not long now,” I whisper. “Not long now.”
I am never right.
***
I was pressing the tape into the chest of a man with a clipboard at the side of the church stage.
“I don’t know the music,” I was saying, “but you can just play the tape. I know the words.”
He was shaking his head, laughing while he wrote on his clipboard.
“You can hold onto that,” he said. “The band reads the music off their iPads.”
I read him the name of the song off the cassette case.
“What key?” he asked.
“I told you, I don’t know the music.”
He said the band would play it as written then, and I was sure that would be fine. He added my name to the list of names that would be singing “unto the Lord.” Half an hour later, I was standing up on the stage with the band, following a boy who’d played the trumpet, “Amazing Grace.” The man with the clipboard had told me it was my turn to sing, and I was standing there under those hot lights with my sticky clothes and my hairy legs, not a spot of makeup. The drummer clicked his sticks together, and then I was singing, just like I did back at the house, looking down at my dirty shoes. I don’t know that I was scared of the people out in the audience. I could hardly see them on account of the lights, and I wasn’t naked or anything, just heard. The band didn’t sound anything like the tape, too rushed and clinking, but I knew the song well enough to find my way through their playing. Once, I looked up and saw the words projected on a screen at the back of the room. I didn’t need it, though, so I went back to looking at my feet as I finished the song. Then the people clapped, and someone was up there singing another song by the time I was out in the lobby.
Since I was done with my part, I thought I’d go back to the house and tell Blind Liza what I’d done. On my way outside, though, a man who looked like one of the church greeters flagged me down and told me he’d liked my singing.
“You ever done that before?” he asked. He smelled like rubbing alcohol and sandalwood. I hoped he couldn’t smell me.
“Sing? I do it every night.”
I began to shuffle away from the man, to keep a distance between us, a buffer.
“In front of people?” he asked.
“No one important,” I said, pausing.
“Is God not important?”
He smiled at me then. His big cheeks stretched like rubber around his shining teeth.
“If He’s listening to someone like me,” I said.
***
There are commercials for cellphone apps that teach people how to find peace. The people in these commercials close their eyes slowly to show how relaxed they are. I do not have the sort of phone that can use these apps. My phone opens like a clam. Its buttons click under my fingernails, which have grown long and painted beneath my church money. That’s what I call my paychecks, my church money. It is first gathered into a dish or a cloth bag or a plastic bucket, and then Arlen cuts me a check that will pay my rent, my phone bill, more food than I could eat in a week. He tells me that my cup is running over. I believe him, ask him to forgive my unbelief.
I only want a nicer phone when I am awake at night, when I cannot sleep. My legs are jerking, I am sweating and shivering, and I am trying to picture the faces of those women in the commercials for the apps. I want to pay my church money to find something like peace. I want to close my eyes and see only darkness. Surely even my wrinkled dollars would pay for one good night’s sleep.
I think about the ways that monks once had to give up their entire lives for something like enlightenment. They could not have sex. They could not marry. I have done both, and though I don’t see either possibility in my future, I have no desire to make that monk’s commitment. I am only willing to give away my money, only willing to skip a few meals to pay the difference. This is a time when I can make my bed in heaven with green woven paper. Gurus are available toll-free, same with embroidered prayer clothes and stone beads. Still, I am shaking, alone in my apartment with enough money to keep on in my apartment with my cable channels and my flip phone, to be off the street, though I am now wide awake with fear. One day, when the trembling stops, people will pay me to learn my secrets, and I will then have to choose between an app on a cellphone and a sung prayer at a country church. Either way, I will line my dollars in threes—a cassette tape, an adopted cat, a night without sleep. And then I will laugh so hard that I again begin to shake.
***
Arlen, the man from outside the church, had me singing for him five or six times a month on Sunday mornings or Sunday nights before I paid cash for my first month’s rent in an apartment. At first, I’d told him I didn’t know any of the church songs that weren’t on my tape, but he said I’d learn, promised to teach me. He just needed someone to come sing with him when he preached, someone with a testimony. He said he’d buy my dinner any day I sang, just as long as I kept my mouth clean and did whatever he told me, whatever God told me. And then he prayed for me, hands on my shoulders and all, and when he was done, I had forty dollars and plans for Sunday dinner.
My new apartment was clear across town from where I’d been staying with Peter and Blind Liza. I didn’t tell them anything about it before I left, just took my loot bag and my cassette tape and cleared out when we all went out to hit a neighborhood in the suburb just across the housing development, where people left their cars parked out in their driveways, unlocked and smelling like oiled leather. We all went out and left the house empty as it had been before we showed up. Then they took a turn down some street or other, and I walked alone to my new apartment, where Arlen had helped me put down my first month’s rent. It was easy as that. The footfalls of my former roommates barely made any sound in the night behind me. Like Lot’s wife, I turned back once to watch them disappear, and like Lot’s wife, it would have liked to kill me. Then they were gone, turned a corner, and I wondered how long they kept on like that before they noticed I wasn’t there. I danced the thought away to my apartment.
That apartment, it turns out, was emptier than any of the vacant houses I’d called my home for the bulk of my adult life. Inside, I now had a kitchen, a bathroom, and a space where I’d one day put a mattress and a plastic desk, a TV and a garage-sale sofa, my new signs of living. There were lines on the carpet where the unit had been cleaned before my arrival. The toilet was still white, the way the toilets were when we first found them in the model homes. I sat on the toilet for what felt like hours that first night, not because I needed to use it for so long, but because I, at last, had a private place where I could pee, where I could be alone. It was also the only seat in the whole place.
I laid out my bag of loot on the kitchen counter, which now included my mother’s locket, a portable CD player without any headphones, a ziploc bag of AA batteries, a box of baby wipes, the tape, and a Bible from Arlen. These distant objects did not fill my new space. Before long, the money I’d make from singing at the tiny churches would harden into other objects, the bulk that would overflow the $400-a-month rooms that were built for my living. For now, though, I watched my dark outline against the kitchen light in the sliding glass door across the apartment. Even in my bulky coat, my misfit pants, and flyaways, I saw the skinny woman who would be on stage again next Sunday. I commemorated the moment with a song from the tape, acapella and echoing against even this small room.
When my mind was emptied and ready for sleep, I clutched my tape and ran my fingers over the vacuumed carpet until I fell asleep, using my loot bag as a pillow. A fluorescent bulb outside my window flashed as I, hours later, again lay awake. I’d forgotten to shut the blinds, and I could hear the traffic from the interstate a few blocks away. Then there were the first waking visions of Peter and of Blind Liza, their pockets full of change from cupholders and useless electronics. Then came the shaking, my restless legs, and another singing gig in a one-horse town with Arlen in only three days’ time.
***
I can’t quote the Bible like Arlen can. Those onion-skin words don’t interest me. They are too thin, too easy to tear. I never had a Bible when I was out on the street, and still I have this apartment where I can sit and shiver by myself, where I am capable of movement. When Arlen talks about Hell, though, I imagine it something like this, a place where I am shaking too much to hum and where the cat that I bought and paid for and fed full of wet food refuses my lap. I’m sure the book would say as much if I had been the one to write it, but God never asked any women, much less a second-rate traveling gospel singer, to write down His commandments, or maybe no woman wanted to lend their writing to the kind of stories that would forever be remembered as His Holy Word.
Perhaps it is due to the passage of those thin words through my painted, doubting lips that my stomach has grown cold. As I lie here, though, I tend to believe that it would be lips that would grow cold if that were the case. Again, forgive me my unbelief. There is an airplane somewhere over my house. I can hear it. I will blame it for my wakefulness. I will say that I’m awake only because I am afraid that the plane will drop bombs on my apartment, and I will say that I’ve been healed. This will happen on a tiny church stage in a town that looks like every other town in this part of the world. Arlen will give me money when I’m done. Then I will return home and tremble again with fear and shame. The night will swallow me whole, and I will feel its stomach begin to melt me down to black rings beneath my eyes. Perhaps then I will buy a phone or learn a Bible verse. The cat almost certainly will not be around.
***
The church was plain white once. When I showed up there with Arlen, though, it was stained blue-green with mildew. The sign out front was missing too many letters for me to make out what it was trying to say. There were probably 75 people crammed inside, residents of Barnsdall or the Southern Caney River Valley or Sapulpa or wherever it was Arlen had driven us. Those flapping gums and dirty jeans began to blend together after a few months. They all became green and frowning as I later stacked up the money they’d paid us for singing about Jesus.
Wherever we were, whatever podunk town needed a hired hand for a second round of Sunday church (this time, in the evening), I remember the hollow feeling of my voice, the missing weight behind my words, like trying to shit on a days-empty stomach. The people were praying while I sang, eyes closed and all. I hid there out in front of them, my singing voice covering my shame. Arlen soon nodded and talked about Jesus and took their money. I sat in a folding chair at the side of the stage and then came back up to sing a song from the tape that Arlen had learned to play on the piano. These were melodies that I could believe in, rising and falling and southern, the way I’d learned to talk and sing as we traveled more for Arlen’s preaching. The church people loved it.
After it was over, we were outside together, Arlen and I, and he was telling me where it was that the pastor was going to feed us before we drove home. I wasn’t hungry then. I’d gained back any weight I’d lost while living with Peter and Blind Liza. My stomach was still turning in on itself, searching for the weight of those words I sang, and I didn’t want to go with Arlen and the pastor to eat. I wanted to go home and try to sleep. However, Arlen had a rule, something he’d laid out for me the very week I started singing for him. He said we would always go eat with the pastor if they asked us, said it was good for business. I didn’t have a car. An hour later, we were leaving the greasy spoon where the pastor had fed us. The moon was out, and though it was miles away, I could still see the mildew blue of the dirty church, even when I closed my eyes. The words of borrowed hymns were still locked in there. Like ghosts, they sought their meanings so they could quit their empty wandering.
We were standing out in the parking lot, Arlen grunting at me to get in the van he drove and spitting his nasal drainage out onto the pavement, when I heard the splash of a shattering window and then again and again and then car alarms.
I thought of an old life then, a life with no apartment. I thought of the cassette tape I kept in my pocket. I thought of a whole line of cars weeping their missing cassette tapes and stereos and cupholder change. I thought of Peter and Blind Liza and the way we’d smelled bitter with our dirty hands. I thought of the empty spaces on the floor of every abandoned house and the quiet they now kept between them. I wept into my hand. Arlen wrote out my check and drove me back to my apartment, never asking what it was that had me so worked up that night.
***
Sometimes I sing old pop songs in bars on Saturday nights, but it doesn’t hardly make me any money. I can’t drink when I’m out and about like that, for fear that someone from the next morning’s congregation will see and call me a harlot in front of all those strangers. It’s a wonder Arlen lets me sing in bars at all. We call the buildings “venues,” but nobody’s there for music unless they themselves are playing. I have a tip jar, and it’s like a giant, glass pocket filled with coins that would otherwise end up in cupholders. I take those coins for myself before they end up in the hands of my friends, of the people I used to call my friends.
Tonight, I’m at a bar in Wichita, the furthest I’ve been from home. When I’m done I stand outside the back of the venue and smell cigarette smoke and listen to the loose notes that make their way from the bar and into the alley. Then I walk the block by myself to breathe-in the night with my hands in my pockets. I look at all the cars that line the street and wonder what’s inside of them. I still have the tape in my coat pocket, but the coat’s new and lined with wool. I’m running my finger along the edge of the cassette case on some such Wichita street with its occasional neon and the mostly-closed shops that line it when I see the highway, and then I hear the familiar pop and shattering of a window punch against glass.
The woman’s wearing a parka with the hood up when I see her. Glass sparkles at her feet. She’s nearly beneath the streetlight, and I can see her face lined in fur. There’s a girl and her boyfriend walking over to the car, and soon they’re leaning on it, her head on his chest, and then they’re kissing. The woman in the parka is just a few feet off, watching them. And I’m there too, on the city street. The young people don’t see the broken glass. They keep their world locked tight, if only for a few final moments.
“I seen who done it,” the woman says. She’s directly beneath the streetlight now. The girl and her boyfriend straighten up a bit, but they are hardly ashamed. The woman points to their car, and only then do they notice the broken window. They don’t seem bothered by the break-in. They can’t be more than twenty years old. I see them from just across the street.
“I seen who broke your window,” the woman says. The boy is holding himself by the hair and ignoring her. The girl is peering inside the car to see what they are missing. They are not missing much. There has not been time enough to lose very much. Finally, the boy asks the woman who’s responsible for the broken window.
“They went down the street,” the woman says. She points toward the highway. The boy thinks that these words mean something. He’s calling the police, he says. The girl still hasn’t found anything missing, and they’re both starting to panic. The woman’s soon disappeared, though, at least from them, and I find her in an alley behind a bar or a restaurant, somewhere noisy and half-drunk and darker than where she was standing before. I can very nearly hear the night’s coins jingling in her coat pockets.
We don’t talk, but I feel she knows that I know, or that she knows that I think I know. She’s a few steps ahead of me. We’re walking in a single file for half a block, a block, two blocks, and we’re both breathing hard, weaving around dumpsters and short concrete steps. She has no reason not to run. I do not remember what it is like to run, to worry about being caught. Now I am catching, or I am capable of catching. No one will catch me. I have already been caught. I am putting the cassette tape into her hand, and I am walking back to the bar to play another song when the woman throws the tape to nowhere in particular. I feel my shoulders rest down lower than they have in months. I think I will have a beer tonight. I wonder if the Gideons have left a Bible in my room, if they would miss it. The woman calls out, but I am caught up in ideas about what Arlen will tell the pastor at tomorrow’s church when I do not show up for service.
THE END
about the writer
G.D. Brown has worked as a literary editor and as an award-winning newswriter. His literary work has appeared in or is set to appear in Full Stop, The Woven Tale Press, Oyster River Pages, Jokes Review, Westview, PopMatters, Oracle Fine Arts Review, The Tulsa Voice, and elsewhere. He is a Goddard College MFA graduate and lives in Milwaukee, Wisconsin.