Gloria’s first surprise, the slapping screen door. She is upstairs before the youngest kid gets home, napping mid-fold among the towels, sleeping off cake and brandy before doors and dogs crash in.
Gloria! Crash, coughing, raspy breath.
Gloria? repeats Abe. Sweetness slipped in among the phlegm and dog hair in his mouth. Dogs whap his thighs. Screen door opens again, Out Out, and clicks shut on two bewildered dogs.
Gloria shouts down, It’s three in the afternoon!
I know. Fuck it. I had to get out of there. Can I come up? he says, climbing the stairs in socks. I need your sweet love. Right now, he says. He’d slugged some back, too, driving home in the truck.
Gloria lies still while he noses her up and down. The arthritis in her hips flares and she says, No, reaches her hands to his stubbled chin and pulls him up, kisses his prickly lips. What happened?
You’re too fuckin’ beautiful.
C’mon, tell me, what’s the it you’re fuckin’?
Lonely, Gloria. Fuckin’ lonely.
I know, she says, and adds, It’s Friday. The Elgin’ll be filling up. Go. I’ll sort the kids and catch up with you . . . maybe shave first.
He partially obeys, leaves the house, but another bar enters his thoughts while starting the truck. He also thinks to call Ben, the new guy at work, and off he goes to this other bar, and that’s where he meets Jesus of America. It will be a brawl that ends abruptly for him in a fateful wound and a new faith in the wrath of God. So Gloria is also surprised when, an hour later, she gets Ben’s call from the hospital regarding her Abe.
What happened, was . . . Mary.
Mary appeared to be at home in this place and, if you could catch her eye, living far away at the same time. Jesus had taken a seat in the middle of the room, choosing a smallish table among heavy assorted sizes of them; round, steel-banded wood tops and cast pedestals. His was half-way between the bar and the saloon doors that, upon leaving, swing open into a commercial foyer with an industrial concrete stairwell going up and down on one side and a bank of lock boxes on the other. The main door was brushed steel, impeccably clean. No posters taped to it, a tiny black angel etched above the door knob. The facade was red-brown brick, weathered and black-pointed, matching the style of the two-story warehouses that subtracted lost-and-gone colour from the fading glory of this street in this part of the city. Inside, Jesus was surrounded by dimly-lit warmth with a theme of unrequited money.
Mary came out of the Women’s, walked past Jesus and slid into a booth for two along the wall. Above her fluttered a large patch of bad cheques, mementoes of money gone wrong. These hung on the wall like butterflies on a cork board, pinned by roofing nails, violently driven. Mary had a round face, puffy today at the low end of an endocrine cycle, and a long neck glimpsed now and again through a curtain of mouse-brown hair, bangs over deep-set eyes. She wore a pink-flowered pale-green cotton dress like that of a Laura in a prairie school, two-room, sparse. Her boots were untied factory units that would not slip dismounting into a slick of oil on hot pavement. After sitting only a few seconds, Mary got up and went back to Jesus to ask whether he’d like something from the bar. Her tall elegance and shoe-polish scent startled our Master.
Ah . . . yes, he said. Can you pour a draft on the bitter side for me?
Sure. I have one for you.
He was immediately attracted to the ease with which she negotiated his indecision, also the pivot on one toe and the drape that creased her ass in the motion.
Mary returned and sat opposite Jesus; set a mug of beer gently before him.
Who are you and what are you doing here?
I’m Jesus, drifting between missions, I think.
Mary glanced at the ceiling. This is a dangerous place for missions, she said, but a good place to look for one. Welcome, she said. I’m Mary. Mother Rose when the game starts.
Why dangerous? Why Mother?
One and the same she said. You waiting for orders from on high, or more your own boss?
Whew, I don’t know. Good question. I’ve been cut off. So no, not expecting to see any writing on the wall here. Cut off.
Shit. Maybe you did come through the right door. There are jobs here for a drifter with special powers, and she looked up again. Maybe come back when the place fills up. The local colour show up after five. If I remember my flannelgraph, you prefer to work a crowd.
Just then they both heard the heavy click of the front door followed by the muffled knock of a key-filled jacket pocket against the spring-back gates. Without hesitation Abe walked past Jesus and Mary’s table to the bar. He smelled of the rage she knew him by, no shave.
I’ll be mother, she announced, and strode over to the bar, stood next to him, a barstool between them. Then familiarity, instant relaxation. What can I get you?
What’s on the menu?
One girl or two?
I’ll wait for my friend, he said. In the meantime, I’ll have a shot.
Of what?
You choose and double it twice; one for you.
She lingered by him for two seconds, then with a boot on the stool’s foot rail, she lunged her torso over the bar and slid back with a bottle and three shot glasses in her fingers. She felt the fire that ignited in both men and dampened it with fingers of liquor for the three of them.
Jesus sidled over.
Mother Rose introduced them. Jesus, this is Abe, Abe, Jesus.
Pleasure, said Abe.
Pleasure? said Jesus.
Which is it? asked Mother Rose, insistent, her eyes darting back and forth between them. You two gonna fight?
The two men drank alone, Jesus the bitter beer back at his table, Abe the same plus shots from the bottle that Mary left at her booth where he now sat under the bad cheques. She disappeared through the saloon doors and clunked up the steps; probably up, thought Jesus; Abe knew it was up.
Ben knew nothing about it when he arrived, new to the place. He sat across from Abe. Abe got up, went over to the bar, poured a mug of bitter draft for Ben and came back with it and Mary’s shot glass, red-lipped. It’s got the kiss you want, he told Ben.
What do you mean?
I’ll introduce you.
Just then the barmaid, Geraldine, still Gerald at her day job in boiler maintenance at the ship yard, burst in from the back with a song, Piaf, and a dance à la Pina Bausch, and patrons, mostly men, banged their way in through the squeak and slam of those sprung and double-hinged saloon doors. Ben wanted to know more about the kiss.
What about the kiss? he asked, too loud, compensating for the increased noise bouncing off the wall against which he leaned, bad cheques fluttering anew when breezes crossed the room from doors opening front and back, smells of rumbling bikes, warm pavement, cooking surfaces heating up in the kitchen.
Jesus’ attention drew to Ben’s question. Abe noticed and waved him over. Jesus picked up his chair and used it to lean on when he arrived at their booth.
You tell him, Abe said, picking up the smudged glass and rolling the red lipgloss in Jesus’ direction as he approached. Whose lips were these and what were you thinking?
The lips of Mary, your Mother Rose, said Jesus. Now you want to hit me?
The fight didn’t take long to organize. Hit you? No, said Abe. Hitting guys who think they’re Jesus . . . isn’t that like perpetuating the cycle of violence?
You want it to stop?
What, the violence?
Yeah. That, or killing Jesus over and over. If you kill every fucking Jesus that comes along, that might just do it, don’t you think? Slake the blood lust until the next one and the next one.
Not how it works, said Abe, banging his fist on the table. Ben jumped, face puzzled, out of the loop. I thought this was about red lips, he said; darted his eyes between Jesus and Abe, settling on Abe.
Mary’s or Mother’s? asked Jesus straightening his stance, awkward but also looking steadily at Abe.
Faded blue denim, black leather and odd bits of colour in headbands, ball caps and belts were filling the room, now increasingly focussed on the standoff. Just then a silent procession emerged through the saloon doors from the floors above. Here were two men — one in ornate buttoned pyjamas, primarily orange with lime-green and other hurting hues, clearly in charge, another suited in biker gear, black leather and brass accoutrements — and five women in assorted denim and leather designs, and also wearing black-lace gloves, a marker not likely to be replicated by customers. Customers quickly shifted their gazes to the entourage and back again to Jesus and Abe. The owner, his body guard and the sex workers, apprized and ready for the fight, took their seats at a table for ten, mysteriously reserved.
Abe had no choice. He jabbed Jesus’ nose twice, not to destabilize but to hurt and draw first blood. It worked. Jesus hesitated, wiped his left hand through the blood and lifted his right to fend off another blow. You cocksucker, he screamed. When Abe’s next swing, a right hook and not tentative, hit the palm of his hand, Jesus grabbed the fist with both hands and pulled Abe’s entire weight and momentum past him and into a table of teenage goths, one of which was knocked off her chair. Abe calmly recovered and helped the fallen one up. Another righted the table and they all headed for the door. But before they got there, and before the next blow, pyjama man gathered them up in his arms and sat them down at his table, gesturing kindly towards the show as compensation. Jesus took in the kindness all around and caught a glimpse of Ben behind him, on his feet, picking up his chair. A moment of lapsed moral fortitude immediately descended on our Lord so that when Ben threw the chair, he ducked and watched with interest the flight of heavy rotating hardwood above him. The top rail drove into Abe’s forehead, knocking him back a step, and one of the flying chair’s legs pivoted into his crotch, splitting a testicle. Abe crumpled to the floor. The whistles and shrieks of encouragement that had risen into the air through which the chair had flown, just as suddenly died. Not only had Abe stepped back onto the shard-spiked butt of a broken bottle, severing an artery and two tendons in his left ankle, but he’d thrown up. His head lay in a pool of puke, his feet in an expanding puddle of blood. The violence was over that quick. A kind of reverence parted the people in his path as Jesus walked through his audience to the door and out onto the street. He was left alone to greet, first two cops in a fast car with good brakes, then two first responders in an ambulance, lights ablaze. The ambulance left first, with the body; then the cops emerged, about to leave but not without satisfying their curiosity. They say the winner in there was Jesus. You Jesus?
Yes.
ID?
Jesus dug a tattered green card, Alien 4A, out of his buttoned shirt pocket.
Junior cop grabs it, squints. Illegals carry these, he snorts. Address?
Nazareth, Pennsylvania, sir.
Nazareth? Funny. Cuff him, said the superior, but at that moment pyjama man stepped into the winking lights. Iridescent blue patches on his bottoms winked back. He put his arm around Jesus, gave him a kiss and said, The Iscariot gives him a thumbs up — up his ass!
The cops laugh with him.
Jesus too, nervously.
Get out of here, the boss says to Jesus, and all go separate ways.
grant loewen 