As the World Ends
Tim figures out what we knew all along
[Welcome back to the Mad Art Project. This story picks up immediately after Blessed Jesus Hold My Hand. Need to catch up? Check out the Table of Contents.]
On Donnie Ross’s side porch, out of the wind, I turned my jacket collar back down. I tapped at the door again.
Heavy treads crossed the floor. Someone opened the loose woven red curtain to peer at me. A couple of fingers tenting the curtain, that’s all I saw. My face, I imagine, was a white smudge against the night. The curtain dropped again. Then someone turned a couple of bolts and opened the door.
I was standing sandwiched between the screen door propped open behind me and the house door, with its glass pains and flecking white paint, opened inward. The man shadowed in the doorway, light behind him, leaned one shoulder on the left-hand doorjamb and rested the other hand high up on the right-hand doorjamb. Comfy as biscuits, see, but blocking the light. He might have been an inch above eye-to-eye with me, but he loomed over me a bit.
I imagined eyes glinting at me from under his heavy brows.
Of course I didn’t see eyes — just shadow.
“Well, well, well,” he said. “The changeling. I wondered when you’d turn up.”
I sat catty cornered across from Donnie Ross at his kitchen table, a whiskey-and-water at my elbow, an RC Cola at his, the locked side door behind me, while he told me his story.
His voice was twangy and mellifluous. He spoke softly, but at his words an echo went around the kitchen, hissing off the brass cookware hanging from the pan rail.
I was entranced, and became moreso at every word. But at the same time, all the while I describe this, imagine I’m thinking at every moment, Where is Jethra?
Where? Where?
The question pounded in my head more urgently every second even as I seemed to get further away from the answer. It was like one of those nightmares where you’re trying to complete some task to stop the world from ending. The clock reads 12:59, then 12:60, and you know something’s up. But despite the black clouds and whipping wind outside you go on about your business. Then later the clock reads 49:19, and you keep getting distracted and rush around further and further from whatever it is you’re trying to accomplish, and by the time the windows break and you look at the clock one last time the numerals are spilling off:
99:9999999 9 9 9 9
As the world ends, you wake up.
I hadn’t waked up.
Donnie Ross started as he had so many sermons — yes, I’d looked him up on YouTube by this time — with the creation of space and time, the forging of the globe, the Fall of Adam and the birth of —
fairies.
“You can imagine my despair.” He leaned closer. His breath touched my cheek. Diabetes breath, I thought. Heavy and sweet as overripe fruit. “You know the gifts of the spirit, I’m sure. Teaching, faith, healing, works, discernment, speaking in tongues, and the interpretation of tongues. Out of these, speaking is my gift. Speech in all its forms, I reckon — addressing the crowd, counseling with the troubled soul, giving voice to the language of the spirit.”
I reached for my glass, an excuse to move away from him. I understood where he was going with counseling with the troubled soul, all right.
The only light in the room came from a covered lamp. I lifted my drink through the light welling around the amber glass of the shade. Though I could swear I hadn’t done more than touch the rim to my lips, there wasn’t any more left than would cover the three half-melted ice cubes at the bottom of the glass.
I hadn’t asked for whiskey, you understand, but he insisted. “From my uncle’s still, up along Fiery Gizzard. You’ll hurt my feelings if you turn him down.”
For the first time I tasted the drink.
Not whiskey.
Something sweeter, and faintly rotten.
As I swallowed, the hands on the wooden clock on the wall shifted forward 20 minutes. And as if the two of us sat on an axel in the middle of a wheel, the room lurched something like 15 degrees counterclockwise, so the clock that had been at Donnie’s left shoulder now peered at me over his right.
I’d missed the heart of the story. How had I missed what I came here to hear?
Donnie Ross continued:
“My despair, when I learned at the end of that long night, that hard travail, that my gift did not come from God.” He pulled a big red bandana out of his pocket and wiped his face. “Instead, it was a gift from the Devil.”
He cupped my elbow with his hand. Warm, meaty palm, meet sharp cold bones.
Lordy.
“I couldn’t give it up, though, without losing my power.” He looked past me, remembering, maybe. He met my eyes again. “And who does that? You, clearly, but you’re hardly a man … don’t get upset, I mean no harm.”
I wasn’t upset. He went on:
“I decided, though, to take what he forced on me and use it to stick him in the gut. I might go to Hell for it — I’m sure I will — but I’m going to use my gift to wrest all the souls I can out of his grip and bring them to the foot of the Cross.”
Spare me.
His grip moved up to my tricep. I’m not sure when I took off my wool jacket and hung it over the back of my chair. I’m always cold — always — but his hand warmed me.
But enough of that. I’ve told you more than enough already. Rather than titillate you with details you certainly don’t deserve, I’ll tell you baldly what I felt: Arousal. Longing. Contempt. Deep caution. And a question pounding like a pulse:
Where was Jethra?
Somewhere making mad art projects, of course. One of us knew how to stick to her purpose. Thinking of Jethra I realized it wasn’t too late. If Donnie Ross was done with me he would have gotten rid of me by now. Yet here he was, wasting his time and his not inconsiderable arts, and for what?
“I heard the sheriff sent a deputy round by my place today,” I said.
“Did he now?”
“He did.” I got out of his grasp. “Don’t waste my time telling me you don’t know why he was there.”
Those full lips parted in a smile. Good god. “He was there,” said Donnie Ross with slow relish, “because when your car was recovered from Bad Oak River, they found a cardigan sweater inside. A pink sweater with cherry-shaped buttons. That sweater belonged to Jethra Holloway.”
Of course it did.
The pleasant drunk drained out of me, leaving me stupid and shaking. Oh, how I’d been had.
I saw now how it was all set up, false detour barriers and all. They needed a stooge and I showed up on cue. A man who knew Jethra long ago. A man with a secret he hadn’t shared with anyone since he left her behind back on Jan. 1, 2002. Or if it wasn’t that secret — which could be just my paranoia and probably doesn’t matter to anyone else in the world — it could be the connection that Jethra so stubbornly wove into each iteration of her mad art project. Diotima the Priestess … she called me. She alone. The father, or mother, of the so-called babies she named in every damned Instagram post.
Donnie Ross swirled his RC Cola in his glass. He was watching me.
Where was Jethra?
He had his stooge already. That was Door A.
Yet here we still were. There had to be a Door B.
That Jethra. I shouldn’t have trusted her any more than I should’ve trusted you. But it’s too late for that now, I suppose.
Where was she? She hadn’t drowned in my car, that was sure. When I found her I would make her sorry she got me into this, sorry she ever fell in love with me, I would make her rue the day — but before I could sharpen my tongue on her thick stupid hide I had to rescue her first.
If she needed rescuing. Maybe she just ran off.
She wouldn’t run off, though. She’d see her mad art project through to its conclusion. She’d angled to be arrested for years. Now it had happened, she would play out the story somehow. She was the most boneheaded, the most tenacious, the bravest, the most wildly gifted —
And Donnie Ross had put his mitts on her cardigan with the plastic cherry buttons.
My eye fell to his hand. Warm brown, broad across the knuckles, with a couple of old scars and strong, shapely fingers. I imagined him rubbing the cherry-red knit between his finger and thumb.
May the world end, I thought, if only he’ll touch my face. I tore my gaze off his hand and met his smile.
Oh, so much worse. I closed my eyes. Amber lights spun around me in the dark. I felt myself pinwheeling down. The world was ending and Jethra was still lost and I didn’t much mind if only I could land with my head on his thigh —
He had her cardigan because he had her.
Donnie Ross had Jethra somewhere.
All the country in me came to the surface.
Oh no. Oh HELL no.
The world might end one day, but not with me happy. This was only petty magic. I was entranced, ensorcelled, and, why not say it, starting to cum in my drawers, but my fingers itched first for his fat throat, then for the temptingly convenient weight of the Sig Sauer at my hip.
But I couldn’t hurt him yet. He had Jethra.
Behind door B, he needed me for whatever plot or connivance or sorcery he was planning for her.
I lifted my eyelids. My voice was husky with rage, but I suppose it worked. I licked my lips.
“Tell me how I can help you.”