Skinny Dipping in a Dirty Pond by Lis Anna-Langston

Author:Lis Anna-Langston
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Turtle Mountain Stories via Indie Author Project
Published: 2022-03-19T00:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER NINETEEN

Chicken Pox & Other Disasters

On Sunday morning I woke to the sound of a bus idling at the curb in front of our house. Since we were the last house on a dead-end street such odd occurrences aroused my suspicions. I’d fallen asleep on the couch after playing checkers with Stan all night and only had to lift my head slightly to see through the curtains.

My grandmother breezed through the room, wearing a wig and lipstick, carrying her pocketbook. I rolled over, listening to the sound of the engine outside.

When she saw my eyes open, she stopped. “I’m going out,” she said. “Get Stan to help you make breakfast.”

“Where are you going?” I turned back to the window. Waiting at the curb was a big white bus with bright blue letters painted on the side. The moving Tabernacle of Faith.

Someone in our house had summoned Jesus.

“I’m going to church,” she stated emphatically. “They’re going to pick me up and drop me off. You can go next week if you want.”

I slumped back down in my blanket. I’d been getting enough of the snake in my Bible class at school. She breezed past again on the way to the door.

I waited until the bus pulled away from the curb before I ran to wake Stan up. When I rounded the corner to his room, he was sitting up in bed, staring out the window at the big puffs of exhaust trailing behind the Tabernacle.

“Did you see that?” I pointed.

He nodded.

“What do you suppose she’s doing?”

“I don’t know,” he said.

Between the two of us we were absolutely clueless, so I looked up the Tabernacle of Faith in the phone book. I found the listing and dragged the phone book into the kitchen where Stan was making coffee.

I pointed to the address. “It’s on Chestnut Street.”

“That’s kind of far,” he said, as he scooped coffee into the pot.

Something scraped the floor upstairs. Our eyes shot to the ceiling.

The weight of Thurman’s demons bore down hard lately. Spell after spell came week after week. It had never been that bad. My grandmother gave him four times as much Thorazine. The medicine made his eyelids droop, but nothing made the Voices shut up. They lived in the house now. He talked to them all day long. They heckled him incessantly and he started taping pictures of witch doctors to the bathroom mirror. Day after day the entire upstairs smelled like a reefer pit. He paced and talked to the Voices until he couldn’t take it anymore then went to buy malt liquor.

When the movement upstairs stopped, we determined the Beast wasn’t awake yet.

Stan went back to making coffee. With his brow knotted together in a perplexed way that was a novelty on Stan’s face, he asked, “Why do you suppose Mother went to church?”

I jerked my thumb toward the ceiling. “I bet it has something to do with you know who up there.”

“But how did she find them? Maybe God called her in a dream.

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