Jake is (derelict) wrote in rooms, @ 2015-08-08 16:53:00 |
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The pastor, she let him sleep long. A couch, with a blanket all over itching but Jake, he was tired and his face was sticky with a mess of tears and mucous and his heart was all one dull ache and he slept with his arms tight around his head until the light and the heat woke him. It wasn't permanent, she was real clear over coffee with Jake yawning and trying to smooth his hair down some to look polite. He'd have to find himself somewhere to go but the pastor, she'd listened to him in the back of that church that was all utilitarian and nothing of white paint and wide windows like home, but was still a comfort. Jake figured on there being something between his grandparents and something between the free-fall drop of believing none of it mattered, because believing they were wrong didn't do a damn thing to wipe out ten years of cookies and milk and football games and loving even when he screamed hoarse the times Graham hung up the phone until he stopped coming to the phone in the first place. There had to be, because backward didn't make a person all they were but the pastor had been real calm and real clear on God not being made to hate a single person. And that? That part Jake found was new. The God he'd grown up loving on was stern. Real strict, but you knew what the rules were and you lived longside them, and as long as you colored between the lines set down you were fine. That was a lot like living with his grandaddy who made it real clear about curfews and girls and schoolwork and football and in between all of that, you could get on and live. Carson had been tucked in there, Carson who had been enough in the girl column to keep his grandaddy sweet, but Carson who hadn't bothered him any about being a girl with a boy. And he hoped wherever Carson was it wasn't home, where being pregnant with some boy's baby when you weren't wedded was enough to get you looked at all over. So there was something on in between that kind of love and the absence of it, the feeling like the candle had been blown out in the middle of the night when you counted on it being there. But Jake, he hadn't figured out what the middle looked like but folks here seemed set on it being present. He found himself a place in a handful of hours. It wasn't permanent, it was a hostel that he remembered the last time he'd been in Vegas, before. And maybe there was something real wrong about living like he hadn't gotten a thing when he knew Clem's house in Marvel was waiting on him, disappointment soaked into the walls like the place needed airing out. But Jake, he figured he wasn't going on back there until he didn't feel guilt painting his throat shut, and maybe he should have given it all on back to his aunt but that would've been worse somehow. The hostel was real noisy. Last time he'd been there he'd been thinking on whoever it was who'd murdered his mom. Real set on finding him too. But he'd been there a night, maybe two by the time the hotel flung him in with the dead and Jake hadn't had real long to go looking for anything. There wasn't nothing to go looking for and Jake didn't want to look up the old house, see someone else living in it like it had never been, the family who'd lived under the roof until blood and nightmares. He talked instead. Listened some, to the noise and the hectic and a bunch of young folk real silly with being free first time around. And he sketched, and when he went on back to the church the pastor suggested if he was gonna sit around and wait for God to come talk to him, he might well help out. He painted, white over faded walls and Jake he took the quiet during the heat, alone in a church where no one said a thing and he listened. He heard her preach too. Listened to her tell the world that God just loved on people, no matter who they were. The Old Testament, the one his grandparents loved real well, she didn't dwell on much. The New, the part his grandaddy never much read, that part she read from real sincere. Jake, he listened with blisters on his palms from painting long, and he waited, back of the church to hear on this God, and he waited for Graham, the book in his lap. Graham who loved his grandparents much as Jake himself did, and about the only person Jake thought might know where the line was, the space between one and the next. But Graham, he tailed off some between writing and Jake figured maybe that was about the man the girl, the artist, said loved Graham clear as day. The people from the congregation and the coffee after the service with stale donuts donated from the store down the street, they talked about violence and they talked about loving being real simple, real easy. The harder you fought, the harder it hurt and Jake recognized that better than he recognized snatches of the Bible no one had read out approving at the dinner table. And Jake, he was real tired of all that fighting. Paint, and God and the noise of the hostel and there wasn't nothing there to fight with even if he hadn't been. |