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  “That’s very kind of you, Reverend,” I said, “but I just spent all my savings—”

  “He’s givin you the vehicle, JAG!” Good Charlotte couldn’t help herself.

  The Reverend said his buddy’s truck was an older model with healthy mileage, but he reckoned it would do me right.

  I didn’t know how to respond. Good Charlotte had insisted God would provide. Was this simply good fortune or something else entirely? Was I perhaps—God forbid—praying when my mind wandered during the sermon? And was this the answer to my prayer, pre-ordained, as it were? I felt guilty now for daydreaming violence on the ex.

  I wanted to share my joy with Shannon. I could have called or messaged her, but that would have hurt us both too much. When we parted we agreed to respect the limits of our relationship. Realizing the unlikelihood of ever getting together again, we weren’t going to soil our memories by fantasizing a future that would never come to pass. She had her life, I had mine. Our personal struggles demanded personal attention. We both believed in living in the real world. If that meant good-bye, then we’d be grateful for the time we had and leave it at that.

  I took the bus straight home to update the First Church web site, paying particular care to the PRAISE JESUS photos. Every shot would depict the parishioners in a flattering light. No gaping mouths or vacant eyes, antsy children, scolding parents. Every face in the community would glow with the light of the Spirit. I uploaded the sermon, “On Charity & Forgiveness,” emailed the Reverend my thoughts on investing in extra storage and security. It was smart to err on the side of prudence, I explained. He commended my foresight.

  The FEAR NOT blog buzzed with activity on TOXIC TOYS, a response to breaking news on the discovery of dioxin on the plastic surface of toys, playpen decorations and teething rings. Dolls and accessories of the trendiest names in the kid market were being recalled by the millions. But tracing the source of the toxin was complicated by the production-distribution chain. Parts were manufactured in China, assembly took place in Taiwan, Mexico, Central America, and delivery involved a dozen multinational shipping powers. The contamination could have happened anywhere down the line. But the pundits singled out Mexico for public flogging. A few arguments said this was due to NAFTA contracts with the United States coming up on a deadline for renegotiation and the “overblown outcry” was a government-backed initiative to sway the terms in favor of the homeland.

  Though many dismissed this theory as “alien indoctrination” and “a wetback conspiracy,” one blogger attempted to show his support by posting computer-made images of the childhood heroes in strategic battle poses. There was Johnny Handi Wipe, draped in the green, white and red of the Mexican flag, blotting out the stars and stripes with his antibacterial superpowers. Barbie chatted on her pink cell phone while firing missile-shaped lipstick at pouty Uncle Sam in drag. Lawrence the Locomotive choochooed down the tracks toward a heavily armed border, lotus flowers bobbing in his rainbow caboose. I respected the artist’s effort but deleted this post and its rude detractors for inappropriateness.

  I did allow the following comments: “It’s an election year, so the establishment media are using every opportunity to ‘alienate’ the Latino population,” “Where’s the coverage on the Chinese who are also to blame?” “This is God’s way of punishing those who worship false gods,” “See what happens when y’all don’t shop American?” The rebuttals spurred debate on foreign policy, racial politics, the Wrath of God, the meaning of the Second Commandment and consumer choice in the global marketplace.

  I added to the threads from hysterical parents, who had done way too much research on the web and now worried on a host of exotic cancers. Citing doctors from the news reports who said toxic exposure would more often than not be trifling, I explained how the recall was ordered to head off any serious consequences before they could occur. I was also a concerned father, but there was no need to lose sleep over this. “The first reaction,” I wrote, “is often overreaction. Return the affected products to the store and replace them with something plastic-free, like stuffed Johnny Handi Wipes or Barbie coloring books. The recall’s a safety precaution, not cause for alarm. Have faith. Fear not.”

  I thought about my son. I had given him some Lawrence the Locomotives, but I couldn’t remember which kind. I didn’t even know if he still had them. The restraining order kept me from calling, but I couldn’t do nothing. The ex and her folks were not the type to monitor the media. I was sure they didn’t talk contemporary issues with neighbors either. I left a message for my attorney, instructing him to advise the ex on the toxic toys. I knew my son would be fine, but as Good Charlotte says, God helps those who help themselves.

  I’m a father who cares, brother. Please tell my son.

  TEN

  Two weeks later, I’d finished restoring the web sites of the ministries that kept me on after my e-security fail. Touched by the Reverend’s sermon on charity, I only charged half my original setup fee. It seemed the right thing to do. The church officials were delighted by what they called my “humble Christian kindness.” They said I would be rewarded ten times twenty times over. “Happy to be of service,” I told them.

  Cyrus and Bebe picked me up around noon for the road trip to meet my new ride. We each brought our own travel accessories: high-energy beverages, beef jerky, shiny bags of junk food and music. Bebe was driving her guppy-blue hybrid, a prized purchase, she explained, from her first adult paycheck. After graduating last spring with an IT degree, she scored a position at the city’s top tech firm, which served the mega churches and Bliss U, as well as some of the largest corporations in town. “It’s a miracle, really. Not that I’m a believer. But I’d never kick a gift horse in the teeth.” She cracked herself up as Cyrus stuffed her face full of corn chips.

  I envied their relationship. It seemed intimate and light, the upshot of limited sexual tension. I coveted her professional success, and at such a young age. But I didn’t have half her skills. “You are the woman, Bebe,” I said.

  “She’s the queen, JAG,” Cyrus said. “Queen of the Dirty South.”

  He gave her a loud wet smooch on the cheek. “Ewwww . . . yucky boy,” she said.

  The engine was stone silent as the car whooshed down the highway. I couldn’t grasp how it moved with such conviction and no noise whatsoever. It occurred to me there might be a lesson in this. If I could adopt a similar stealth approach toward the ex, maybe I could see my son sooner than later. Hypothetical fantasy, perhaps, but if I could frame it in the form of a prayer . . .

  A gushy wah-wah guitar startled me from my revelation. With the back seats to myself, I stretched out and listened. The tune (straight truth, bro): “Livin’ on a Prayer.” Once I recognized the melody I poked my head up front and hollered, “No way this is Cy’s!”

  “Hey,” Bebe said. “It’s hopeful and romantic, beatin the odds in a too cruel world with love, sweet love, darlin.”

  “Can’t argue with that,” Cyrus said. “And that Bon Jovi is hawt!”

  “Hair to die for,” Bebe said, mussing up her own. It had grown out some since I last saw her. “I’d do him.”

  “Now that—” Cyrus interrupted himself to scream the chorus off-key. We plugged our ears. “That is sayin somethin.”

  Bebe lowered the volume, torched a spliff. “Since the fallin out,” she whispered, holding the smoke in, “he gets a bitty bit amped up at the mere mention of the Almighty.” She filled the car with a soft skunk cloud. “Shush, Cy.” She patted his head, fixing the jay in his mouth. “Everythin’ll be alright.”

  Taking turns as DJ, we mixed quite a set list. In alphabetical order, as I recall, it went like this: Black Lips, Black Sabbath, Carter Family, C-Murder, Coltrane, Cypress Hill, Daft Punk, Dead Kennedys, Dresden Dolls, Eek-a-mouse, Freakwater, Heavy Trash, Idiot Flesh, Iron & Wine, Salem, Thievery Corporation. After a while I started writing down the less familiar names, so I’m sure I missed some groups from early on, but you get the gist.

&n
bsp; In between songs we chatted about music, bands Cyrus had booked at The End and last weekend’s Playpen jam, which I’d skipped due to work. Bebe clued me in on the best ways to smack hackers. Cyrus talked Emmalee. He’d come close to taking her on as a girlfriend, he explained, though he wasn’t yet ready for the straightjacket of capital C Commitment. I told them about Shannon and her healing hands and how until yesterday I’d been feeling off since she left.

  “She infected you,” Cyrus said.

  “No worries, JAG,” Bebe said. “Squirrelly tummies are normal. That’s what happens when you’re all stuck inside. Blame that bitch ex of yours, not your sexy lil fling.”

  I mostly leaned toward Bebe’s view, though I concerned myself with Cyrus’ every day while I felt bad. I considered the emergency room whenever I thought I’d pass out or puke or both. But I didn’t do either so I never called. In a queasy state of limbo I suffered alone, sipping ginger ale, finishing off the bourbon. All better now, I could bury this crisis and move on to the next.

  While Shannon and I promised not to contact one another, truth be told, we each broke down once or twice in that first week after she went home. We were in love. But neither of us was up for the sham of intimacy across state lines. “That’s self-abuse,” Shannon said. “And we’ve both got ex issues that need tendin.”

  I explained to Bebe and Cyrus how if we got back to town in time I would meet up with this other fallenangel Philomela. “You don’t wanna do that,” Cyrus said.

  “Ain’t she that Greek goddess chick,” Bebe said, “who bites the heads off her suitors?”

  “I can’t recollect exactly,” Cyrus said. “I think she’s the one who sleeps with strangers then fries up their nuts in an omelette served special at that roadside diner. What’s it called, the Scary Beeyatch Café? That’s where Sabbath was discovered.”

  “Bwaaaaaaa . . .” they screamed in unison as the eerie opening riff of “War Pigs” blared through the speakers. I called them both knuckleheads, sank back in my seat. Cyrus swung around at the power-chord break, banged his head at me to the hi-hat pulse, fading the volume when Ozzy came on. “Watch out for this ‘Philomela.’ Whoever she is, she’s namedroppin, JAG. Know what you’re gettin into.”

  “I know well enough,” I said. “Her profile’s no foolin.” I explained how when I was browsing fallenangels, an escape from the hellish workload, she seemed to be the most in need, desperate for release.

  Cyrus said these were code words for D-R-A-M-A.

  “Dumb ass.” Bebe silenced him. “Please, do go on, JAG.”

  Her write-up spelled out a cycle of abuse that started when the girl was just eight. Nearly every day her mother would yell at her: “I wish I never had you! I wish you were dead!” When the girl hit adolescence and her body changed, her mom would call her fat bitch, boss her around like a slave. The beatdown was neverending. It reminded me how the ex would go off on me—no fault of my own, nothing I could do to stop her—though I didn’t tell this to Cyrus and Bebe.

  After the girl moved away from home, she shacked up with an older man who she thought would save her. While never marrying, they soon had two kids together and life appeared to be on the upswing until her common-law husband, the father of her children, began laying into her just like her mother used to do. He would call her fat hoe, filthy slut, and a putdown I was too familiar with: stupid bitch. She said he’d shame her by nailing her with these names in public. He’d cut her with his latest barb, “Your pussy stinks like dead cat,” whenever she’d come in the bedroom.

  She was looking for “kindness, understanding, a little support. Not a relationship. Not a soulmate. Treat me right is all I ask,” she wrote in her profile. “I can’t get out because of my kids, but I need to connect with a good man now, or I don’t know what I’ll do. Please be serious, mature, professional, preferably Christian but I’m open to those of other faiths as long as your heart is pure.”

  “Sounds like trouble,” Cyrus said, cuing up another tune on his AweMediaPlayer.

  Shaking her head, Bebe tore off some jerky. “What would you get out of such a heavy hookup, JAG?”

  “It’s the craziest thing,” I told them as an acoustic six-string gave way to a high lonesome vocal: There’s a dark and a troubled side of life . . . “It goes back to Shannon. She did something to me, I don’t know, but I feel like kind of more in tune with who I am, who I should be, ya know?”

  “And who’s that, brotherman?” Cyrus ripped a chunk of cured cow out of Bebe’s hand. She socked him in the arm.

  “It’s hard to explain,” I said. “I need to be of service.” Keep on the sunny side . . . “If I think I can help—”

  “By freakin with a fallenangel,” Cyrus said, butting in. Bebe tried to punch him again, but he was ready for her. He caught her wrist in mid-lunge, pulled her fist to his lips, kissed her fingers one by one.

  “It’s more than that, say, if I can be a catalyst like, for healing, if I can be . . . like with this Philomela or whatever her name is, if I can be who she needs, a good man with a pure heart, then I can’t not, can I?” The Carter Family shored up my spirit as I spoke. You’ll be happy all your life . . . “That is, if I can.”

  “If ya caaaaaan . . .” Cyrus sang.

  “I hear ya, JAG,” sweet Bebe said.

  “Think of it this way,” I went on. “Philomela must be acting out from a place of pain, right? She was beaten by her mother, grew attached to that abuse, was drawn to it, even while she hated it, even as it nearly killed her. Yet when she fled, where’d she go? Right back where she started.”

  “But she didn’t know,” Bebe said.

  “She didn’t know. But she did wind up right back in the same hellhole. So there’s my calling, you could say, my mission, I don’t know, to be like, a light in the darkness, to light up the exits on the hellbound highway, show someone in a bad way how maybe there are paths that don’t lead down the same old road.”

  “And how do ya figure on Dr. Phillin this dream uh yours into reality?” Cyrus turned around to ask me.

  I leaned forward and sang, “A Love Supreme.”

  “Ahh!” He shoved me back.

  “Love, Cy! Love, Bebe! Peace, love and understanding.”

  “Woohoo!” Bebe shouted. “Testify, my brother.”

  “It’s all about compassion, right? Look, y’all know I’m no hippie. I used to stomp on the longhairs in high school, sometimes, just to do it, ya know. That’s cuz my so-called daddy was stomping on me. But now I see the light.”

  “Have you been saved, brotherman?”

  “Thanks to you, son of a preacherman. And Mr. John Coltrane. And one Shenandoah Brousseau. Most especially her.”

  “Sounds like a God delusion to me,” Cyrus said.

  “I think it’s a noble aim,” Bebe said. “Let’s blaze up another jay in honor of our very own Messiah. We can be Peter and Paul. You’re Peter.” She stuck Cyrus with her pointer finger. “For obvious reasons.”

  He ignored her, swinging around to face me again. “Fallenangels is sposed to be for easy ease, JAG.” He fixed me with his blood-ripped eyes.

  “Just be careful,” Bebe said.

  I smiled wide. “Fear not!” The Reverend would have been proud.

  _________

  Mr. Hank Parchman and his wife Abigail ran a small “choose ‘n’ cut” family business, a five-acre forest of Sand, Scotch and White pines for holiday revelers to hack down as they pleased. Fanning herself in the afternoon heat, Abigail explained how much of Augusta was rock and red clay, only good for growing weeds. She and her husband had been blessed with the right soil for contributing to the community.

  As we toured the farm, Cyrus reminisced on weekends after Turkey Day when the Reverend and Good Charlotte would drive him down here, while everyone else was at the mall, just to taste his Aunt Abby’s homebrewed hot chocolate. The Parchmans beamed at his retelling of this story, letting on how he used to get all crickety for the local hayrides. They addressed him
by his full birth name, Cyrus Osborn Puck. “Ozzy here was a regular Huckleberry Finn,” Bebe said. Cyrus threw up some devil horns, banged his head, stuck his tongue out at her. Osborn means “divine warrior,” he said. Bebe wasn’t impressed, but I was, kind of. Or maybe I was jealous, too self-conscious to tell them my given name.

  Cyrus called her an irregular tomboy. If he was Huck Finn, then she was Becky Thatcher. He raised an eyebrow for my amusement. I expected Bebe to thrash him, but as she later explained, she was minding her manners. The Parchmans ignored this childishness, gazing at the treetops, saluting the grace of God.

  I was moved by their indie way of making a living, but Cyrus said it was more a hobby than a profession. “Service to our friends and neighbors” is how Abigail put it. They worked the farm but a couple months a year. Otherwise, she did hospice care part-time while her husband supervised at the flag factory downtown.

  Working there since the early eighties upped Mr. Parchman’s casual interest in Americana to an obsession. To showcase his homegrown pride, he recently converted their two-car garage into a gallery stocked with dozens of historic American flags, real ones (won on eBay) and reproductions (purchased wholesale from his workplace). There were flags with battle scars from the Civil War, the Spanish American War and WWII, certified authentic by the American Institute of Historical Mementoes & Memorabilia. All the states south of the Mason-Dixon and east of the Mississippi were also represented alongside T-shirts, trucker caps, buttons, bumper stickers and shellacked wood carvings inscribed with slogans like These Colors Don’t Run, The President Is the Commander-in-Chief and Rebel Blood in My Veins, Yankee Blood in My Yard. The bobbleheads of political figures—Robert E. Lee, Jefferson Davis, Strom Thurmond—were the most fascinating objects in the room. Standing in front of a ceramic John Wilkes Booth, Mr. Parchman said, “I don’t condone the kinda violence this here bobblehead may symbolize. But it’s a first-rate collectible I couldn’t pass up.”