The Devil's Alphabet

Chapter 6

THE MOSQUITO, INVISIBLE in the dark, tiptoed across the skin of his biceps.

Pax sat on the front stoop, all the house’s lights turned off, and stared at the moonlit tops of the trees, waiting. When the bite came he didn’t flinch. It was a kind of pleasure to keep his arm perfectly still, to let the little thing insert its needle snout and drink from him. He could almost feel its tiny body fill up with blood.

Behind him his father’s snores augered through the walls. Last night the sound had gnawed at him, keeping him awake until the early morning. Pax didn’t fall asleep so much as lie still until sleep fell on him. Now the snoring seemed less like a personal attack. Not quite background noise yet, but getting there. A couple more nights, Pax thought, and he wouldn’t be able to sleep without it, like those people in Chicago with their bedrooms next to the El.

A couple more nights. He hadn’t called his manager to tell him he wasn’t coming back soon. He knew he should call in, negotiate for more time. But fuck it, his father was sick, and if they didn’t give him his shitty job back when he got back to town, well, there were plenty of shitty jobs.

So instead of thinking about his nonlife in Chicago he’d spent the day doing everything required of a dutiful son. He made Harlan breakfast, helped him to the toilet, even finished cutting his hair. His father’s size complicated everything. The quarter ton of flesh didn’t seem to be part of his father at all, but some great cargo he was forced to carry, a penitential weight. Pax knew that his body was an effect of the Changes, a symptom as inarguable as Deke’s powdered skin, but he couldn’t stop himself from thinking, Jesus, Dad, how did you let yourself get like this?

Pax helped him navigate back to the living room. Every movement had to be strategized, paced, evaluated. What would happen if he fell? There was no way Pax could get him up on his own. Finally he settled onto and into the creaking couch. Another task accomplished, another checkmark in Paxton’s column. When I leave, Pax thought, he won’t be able to say I didn’t help him. He won’t be able to say I didn’t try.

Harlan napped, and then in the afternoon Pax sat beside him and they watched TV together the way they always had, talking only during the commercials and saying nothing of consequence. His father liked the Discovery Channel. Animals killing animals and being killed, having sex, raising animal babies.

Paxton’s thoughts kept returning to the stack of legal papers he’d hidden under the bed. If his father sensed that Pax was distracted he didn’t mention it. He didn’t ask where Pax had been with Rhonda the day before, or when Pax was going back to the city. Both of them seemed determined to prove that they needed nothing of each other.

For dinner Pax made spaghetti and they ate on the couch together. His father fell asleep watching the news. Pax got a blanket from the hall closet and tucked it around his father’s shoulders. Harlan’s skin had started to swell and blister. Liquid gleamed on the backs of his hands.

When the snoring reached full production, Pax went into the kitchen and tore off a square of paper towel from the roll. He went back to the living room and crouched next to his father. A blister near his father’s knuckles had already split, weeping vintage. Pax touched a corner of the towel to the spot, let it soak up the substance. Then holding the darkened tip away from his fingers as if it were a lit match, he walked out to the front porch. It was evening but not yet fully dark.

He held the paper towel for a long time, not looking at it. He felt like he was readying himself to jump into a cold pool. He laughed at himself, then quickly opened his mouth and touched the tip of paper to his tongue—a quick, light tap. He felt nothing. After thirty seconds he touched it to his tongue again. Then he sat and waited for something to happen.

His arm itched, but he let the mosquito finish its meal. He felt its happy fullness as it lifted off from his skin. He could picture the world through its gemstone eyes, feel the weight in his thorax as he weaved drunkenly toward the trees, humming like a clarinet, winging mightily to keep his bloated body in the air. …

He slipped back into his body with a lurch. Something was watching him from the trees.

He sat very still. Not out of fear—though he realized that any other time he might have been afraid—but out of curiosity. About twenty feet up one of the big pines, he could just make out a dark mass that clung to the trunk. It had stopped moving as soon as he’d looked directly at it, or else it was about to move. He slowly tilted his head, trying to tease out its outline—but then headlights sliced through the trees and the spell was broken.

A car came down the drive. More chubs? Pax thought tiredly. He’d just about had it with the fat boys.

He pushed the paper towel into his pocket.

The vehicle parked behind his father’s car. It was a classic Ford Bronco from the seventies with a white hood and red body, big tires, shiny rims. It still looked good.

The cab lit up as the door opened, and a figure in a baseball cap climbed out of the truck and came around the hood. It was a beta man, dressed in a loose button shirt and jeans.

“How you doing, Tommy?” Pax said.

The man stopped abruptly. “I didn’t see you there,” Tommy Shields said in that soft voice. “I hope I—I know I’m coming awfully late. I just came to drop something off.”

“It’s fine. I was just getting some fresh air.” Pax decided that his own voice sounded perfectly normal. “My dad’s asleep, though, if you came to see him.”

Tommy gave no indication of hearing the old man’s snoring. “No, no,” he said. “It’s for you. I’m glad I caught you before you left town. I found something in Jo Lynn’s things, and I thought… well, I thought you might like it.”

“Just a second,” Pax said. He stood quickly and had to pause for a moment, lightheaded. He opened the front door and reached in to flick on the porch light. Gnats immediately converged on the light, fizzing. He blinked up at them.

“Are you okay?” Tommy said. “You don’t look so good.”

Pax turned back to him, shaking his head. “I’m fine. I was just… What you got there?”

Tommy lifted the thing in his hand. “Jo Lynn kept this on her dresser,” he said. “When we used to live together.”

It was a framed picture. Pax took it from him and tilted the glass face to catch the light. Pax, Jo, and Deke, twelve or thirteen years old, a couple summers before the Changes. They stood in bright sunlight, sheer gray rock behind them. The boys were skinny and shirtless, Deke in cutoff jeans and Pax in real swimming trunks. Jo wore a one-piece suit, her brown hair hanging to her shoulders, wet and straggly. The three of them beamed at the camera.

He didn’t remember the day the picture was taken—not exactly—but he felt the overlay of dozens of days like it: skin and sunlight and cold mountain water. “My parents used to take us all swimming,” Pax said. “This looks like it was up at the Little River.”

“She talked to me about you,” Tommy said. “You were important to her.”

“Well, Jo was—” He wanted to say, She was important to me too. But his life had made a lie of that. After leaving Switchcreek he’d never talked to Jo again, and never talked to anyone about her. Then he’d moved into the city and set about making his old life into fog, too indistinct for anyone to ask about or remember. Erasing the past was easy, like walking in a snowstorm. The footprints filled in by themselves.

Tommy said, “You don’t understand, she talked to me about what happened.” The beta looked at him, that flat dark face intending something that Pax couldn’t interpret. “She told me what you did together. You and Jo and Deke.”

Pax stood very still, a slight smile on his face. “We did a lot of stuff together. She was like a sister to us. My mother practically adopted her.”

“She told me, Paxton,” Tommy said. “You don’t have to pretend with me. I was her husband. When you raise children together, you share a trust. A bond.”

“A bond.”

“I know it’s hard for someone like you to understand, but Jo Lynn and I—”

Someone like me? “Jo Lynn left you, Tommy. She moved out on her own. So what kind of bond was that, exactly?”

“Jo Lynn made a bad decision. And the past couple years … well, she hadn’t been herself. If you were around, if you had talked to her, you would know that. She wasn’t the same person anymore.”

“Maybe she just figured out she didn’t need you—hell, didn’t need any of you. This husband thing …” He tried to remember what Aunt Rhonda had said about betas and husbands. “How’s that work exactly? You’re not the girls’ father, you’re not—”

“Maybe not their biological father, but I am their parent,” he said. “That’s the only way that counts.”

Pax almost laughed. He suddenly saw himself as Tommy saw him: a cocky skip, untouched by the Changes and untouchable, riding back into town to claim old rights he’d long abandoned. It was ludicrous, but a dozen other emotions jostled for Pax’s attention—anger, amusement, disgust, jealousy—and he felt them all at once. He couldn’t decide which of the emotions were his own and which were Tommy’s.

Pax said, “And now you’ve got the girls back, you’re keeping ’em, huh?”

Tommy closed his eyes, opened them. “Rainy and Sandra are my daughters. That’s not a secret, Paxton. Everyone in the Co-op knows that they mean everything to me.”

“And you’re the sole owner now.”

“Stop making it sound like that! This isn’t about—” Tommy shook his head and stepped forward. “I know what you’re thinking, Paxton. You’re remembering the old me. It’s true, I wasn’t the nicest guy. But the Changes woke me up, shook out all that bullshit. For the first time in my life I started thinking clear.”

“Born again,” Pax said. Tommy stared at him. “You don’t understand anything, do you?”

“Why don’t you explain it to me.”

Tommy turned and began to walk back toward the Bronco.

“Did you kill her, Tommy?” Pax said. “Come on, you can tell me, we’re buddies.” He realized that he was equally ready to strangle the little bald man or hug him. “Maybe you got angry that she took the kids away from you. That makes total sense. Anybody would sympathize with that.”

Tommy put a hand on the fender and looked over his shoulder at him. “I came to tell you that Jo forgave you, Paxton. For running out on her, for never calling, never asking about the girls.”

Pax blinked.

Tommy shook his head. “Me, I couldn’t let that pass. But Jo’s a better person than I am.”

Pax watched Tommy turn the four-wheel drive around and drive away. Then he rubbed his face with one hand, holding the picture to himself. Damn, he thought. This is mighty shit. He’d barely tasted the vintage. A dab. For a minute there he felt like he was halfway out of his skin and into Tommy’s.

He turned toward the house, the glass of the picture frame smooth under his thumb. Inside, his father was waiting for him, snores rattling the walls, his robe open like a medicine cabinet.

“Show us,” Pax said. It began as simply as that.

Jo tilted her head and said nothing. She sat in the armchair, one smooth leg draped over the arm. It had become so hard to read her new body that he couldn’t tell if she was angry, embarrassed, or amused.

“Oh! You Pretty Things” played on the boom box. Jo was into old Bowie, Ziggy Stardust and earlier. She’d declared Hunky Dory to be the official soundtrack of the Switchcreek Orphan Society. From “Changes” to “Kooks” to “The Bewlay Brothers”—their whole story was there.

“No,” she said finally. “All of us. Right now.”

Deke laughed, a thump like a drum. He lay sprawled across the floor, surrounded by crushed Budweiser cans. Six months after the Changes he was almost eight feet tall and still growing; during a growth spurt his back would sometimes seize up, paralyzing him. Growing pains, the argos called them, even though nobody knew if they were temporary, or if they’d be part of their lives forever. Deke’s preferred treatment was to lie flat on the floor and try to get drunk, which because of his giant body required the openmouthed throughput of a storm drain. Pax and Jo drank with him, less in solidarity than because the quarantine and curfew left them few other entertainment options.

“Y’all knock yourselves out,” Deke said.

Jo slipped out of her chair and stood with her hands on her hips. She wore gym shorts and a cropped tank top that showed her smooth, flat belly. Her skin gleamed in the light of the single floor lamp. “As chairperson of the SOS,” she said, looking down at Deke, “I’d like to make a motion.” Jo was chair, Deke president. Pax, as a half orphan, could not hold office, but he could vote.

“I second,” Pax said.

Pax fell on Deke, pinning him across his wide chest while Jo unsnapped his jean shorts and began to tug them down. Deke grunted and laughed, halfheartedly pushed Pax aside. Even buzzed and immobilized by back pain he could have thrown them across the room if he wanted.

Deke wasn’t wearing underwear. Pax had seen him naked dozens of times before the Changes, but this was the first time since.

“Well would you look at that,” Jo said. “You’d think you argo boys would be bigger.”

Deke roared, laughing, and reached for his pants. Jo pushed his hands away. “Come on now,” she said. “This is for science.”

Deke stopped struggling, and Pax, sprawled across his chest, looked down the length of his friend’s body. The sunken stomach, the hip bones like shovel blades, a patch of gray pubic hair like a tuft of straw. His penis seemed too short for his giant body, though it was wide as Paxton’s fist. Pax had no idea if all argos were shaped like this. Probably Deke didn’t know himself.

Jo pulled Deke’s shorts down his thighs. He raised his knees and she slid them the rest of the way off.

The atmosphere in the room had changed.

Jo touched her red-brown hand to Deke’s white thigh, only a few inches from his dick. She looked up and said, “You next, Paxton.”

Jo, as always, was in charge. Even changed, she was the referee, the intermediary. Later she’d tell him, What choice did they have? There were no books for their people. No skin mags, no soft-core movies on Cinemax to show them what their bodies were supposed to look like. It was no crime to be curious.

Paxton leaned back on his knees and pulled off his shirt. Then he stood and without looking at them slid down his shorts, stepped out of them. He was naked except for his white Hanes underwear.

“Everything,” Jo said.

He didn’t want to take off his underwear. He was already hard.

Jo stood and walked to him. She slipped off her tank top. She wore a dainty bra, startling white against her wine-dark skin. She reached behind her, performed tiny magic with her fingers, and the bra fell away.

Her chest was almost as flat as Paxton’s. Her nipples, dark red and small as dimes, were set a couple inches lower than he expected. She grasped Pax’s arms and guided him down to the floor so that he was lying shoulder to shoulder with Deke. Deke’s skin was cool and dry, and Paxton felt feverish.

Jo squatted over his legs and with both hands peeled the waistband over his rigid cock. “There we go,” she said.

Pax felt flushed with embarrassment and excitement. If she touched him he would explode.

“Your turn, Jo,” Deke said.

She seemed not to hear him. She was looking at their bodies, but seemed not to see them.

“Jo?” Pax said.

“You got nothing to worry about from us,” Deke said.

She pushed her thumbs into the waistband of her shorts and stepped out of them. Her crotch was a smooth mound, her cleft like the jot of a pencil. Everywhere she was hairless as clay, her skin dark as raspberry syrup.

“Nothing to see here, people,” she said. Her tone was light, but her voice trembled.

“Shush,” Deke said, and held up a hand. Pax shifted over, and Jo lowered herself to lie between them.

———

He woke to his father calling his name. Pax’s eyes opened to slits against the light. His father was looming over him, his shadowed face haloed by the overhead light. It was his father as he was before the Changes: the white shirt, the black pompadour.

“Wake up, now,” his father said sternly, in that voice that could rattle the back pews. He leaned down, abruptly becoming a fat old man in a robe. A chub. “We don’t have much time.”

Pax pulled himself upright, and the picture frame fell from his chest to his lap. It was deep in the night, 3:00 or 4:00 a.m. He’d passed out on the bed fully dressed, still wearing his shoes. “What’s wrong?” he asked. “What’s going on?”

“I’ve only got a little while ’til I’m mad as a hatter again,” his father said. Then, “Why aren’t you in your bedroom?”

Pax ignored the question, and his father turned and shuffled through the guest room door.

Pax rubbed a hand across his face. He felt shaky, unbalanced. He picked up the picture Tommy had given him and put it on the bookshelf next to the bed. This guest room had doubled as his mother’s library. She’d been a voracious reader: mysteries, romances, true crime, anything she could get her hands on. During the Changes, when she was burning up from fever, she’d made him read to her.

Pax got to his feet. The vintage still fizzed in his bloodstream. The room quivered with a strangeness that coyly refused to reveal itself, as if each book and article of furniture had been replaced by a subtly imperfect copy.

He found his father in the kitchen, trying to open a can of Campbell’s soup, the manual can opener almost lost in his huge hands.

“Here …,” Pax said, and reached to take the can from him.

“I got it,” his father said. Pax sat at the table. Eventually his father did manage to peel the lid away. He dumped the soup into a pot on the stove and stood there stirring with his back to the room.

“I suppose Rhonda took you to see her place yesterday,” his father said.

Pax was surprised he remembered her visit. “It was nice. Homey. Very clean.”

His father grunted. “You don’t think I can take care of myself.”

“I never said that,” Pax said, unable to keep the annoyance from his voice. He didn’t know if it was fatigue or the vintage, but his emotions kept teeter-tottering between anger and grief.

His father said, “I do things the way I want, when I want. I’m not going to go to her little … pet shop. All this—” He made a gesture that could have meant anything. “All this bother, I’m not usually like this. I manage just fine. God always provides a way.”

“If this is providing, then you must have really pissed him off.”

His father half turned. “Watch it, boy.”

“Not just you, the whole town,” Pax went on. “The Changes? Now that was Old Testament–quality smiting.”

“Not everything’s a punishment, Paxton. There are trials in life. Tests that teach us something.”

“Oh, got it,” Pax said. “The Job thing. God makes you into a monster, takes away your church, kills your wife—”

His father swung toward him. “Shut your mouth!”

Pax remained stock-still. He and his father locked eyes, but only for a moment. Pax looked away first, shook his head.

His father turned back to the stove.

Pax quickly pressed tears from his eyes. What the hell was the matter with him? He breathed deep, trying to master his emotions.

After a couple minutes his father brought the pot to the table. He set it on a hot pad and picked up a spoon. Pax raised an eyebrow.

His father looked up. “I can do this because it’s my house.”

“Yeah. If Mom could see you she’d kill you.”

“Trust me, she’s watching.”

Pax couldn’t watch, though—Harlan was practically inhaling the soup. He looked away, but still had to listen to him. After a few minutes, Paxton said, “You remember your first sermon after they reopened the church?” Even though the town was in quarantine, the churches and schools had been shut down for several months for fear of spreading TDS to the remaining townspeople who were unaffected. When his father was finally allowed to hold a service, the pews were almost empty and the cemetery almost full. “You preached on the plagues of Egypt.”

“Exodus twelve thirty,” his father said. “‘For there was not a house where there was not one dead.’”

“Jo said you had it wrong,” Pax said. “It wasn’t the plague story we were in, it was the Tower of Babel.”

His father wiped at his mouth, made a questioning sound.

“I don’t remember exactly how she put it,” Pax said. “Something about humans growing too proud again. If a multitude of languages didn’t teach us anything, then maybe a multitude of bodies would.”

His father grunted, then scraped the last of the soup from the pot. Pax rose and carried it to the sink.

“So what’s it going to be, then?” his father said. “Are you going to fight me on this?”

“I can’t take care of you,” Pax said tiredly. “I have my job, my—”

“I’m not asking you to take care of me!”

“You can’t do it yourself, Dad. And at Rhonda’s place you’d have your own room, home-cooked meals. They have big-screen TVs even. It’s chub paradise.”

“Don’t be funny with me. You’re doing this out of spite, Paxton. You’re still angry.”

“What are you talking about? I’m not angry about anything. I’m trying to help you.”

His father made a derisive sound. “I raised you. I know when you’re lying.”

“I’m going back to bed,” Pax said.

He stalked back to the guest bedroom. In the morning he’d talk to Rhonda, and by noon he’d be gone. He pulled back the bedclothes, unlidding the dank odor of mildew, and started unbuttoning his shirt.

His father’s shape filled the doorway and Pax dropped his hands.

“She’s selling the stuff,” his father said. “To the young chubs, and anybody else they can sell it to. They get high off it.”

“No she’s not.” Then: “How would you know anyway?”

“People talk. They come visit, say things. What else could she be doing with it?”

“Research,” Pax said. “Scientists are using it to search for a cure for … what happened to you. What’s happening to you.”

His father snorted. “What scientists? Where?”

“It’s a full research program, Dad. The government’s involved.” Actually, she hadn’t mentioned the government, but they’d have to get involved if the academics found a cure. No pharmaceutical company would bother to manufacture a drug good for only a few hundred hillbillies in east Tennessee.

“She told you that?” his father asked.

“You can ask her yourself in the morning—she’s coming by to get the papers. Try to be decent.”

Pax lay on the bed, trying to ignore the noise from the living room. His father had turned the TV on again. Finally Pax sat up, pulled out the stack of papers from beneath the bed, and found a pen on one of the shelves.

He turned to the first yellow sticky, and signed. He sat there on the bed until he’d signed and initialed every blank. Then he rolled onto his side, pulled the pillow over his ears, and tried to sleep.

His father had discovered them a year and a half after the Changes, on an April day drowning in cold rain. Jo and Deke had already dropped out of school, and Pax had skipped that morning to join them at Jo’s house for an impromptu meeting of the Switchcreek Orphan Society. He knocked at her door and Jo called out, What’s the password? She’d insisted that their society adopt a password, and a Morse code knock to go with it: three short, three long, three short.

Deke and Jo were already lying in a nest of blankets in the living room, and he’d felt a stab of jealousy. Then they stripped off his clothes and pulled him into their warmth. Although the three of them had stopped having intercourse weeks before, they still fooled around in other ways. Much of the time, however, they did nothing but lie together in a warm bundle. They talked about stopping even this, but the damage had already been done, and they’d been unable or unwilling to break this cocooning habit.

That morning Jo lay between them, Deke with his arm under both their shoulders, Pax with his head and hand against her round, smooth belly. She’d told them that she could feel the child—they didn’t yet know that there were two—rolling and moving. Pax had pressed gently down with his palm, afraid to hurt her or the baby, but so far had felt nothing but yielding flesh and a steady warmth.

Jo was terrified and excited—keyed up in a way she’d never felt before, she said. Paxton was merely terrified. It wasn’t just that she was pregnant; it was that she was the first person with TDS—argo, beta, or charlie—to carry a child. No one could tell them what the child inside Jo would look like, or even whether Jo’s new body could survive a pregnancy. Only Deke seemed calm.

The rain must have masked the sound of Harlan’s car. Pax found out later the school had called home to report his absence, but he never learned how his father knew to come directly to Jo’s house. He walked straight in—no coded knocks, no “S-O-S”—and froze in the doorway. For a moment his expression was quizzical. Only a moment. Harlan Martin was not the behemoth he would become, but the eighteen months since the Changes had doubled him: his weight, his strength, his anger. His father had developed a hair-trigger temper. And why not: His wife was dead, his church was falling apart, and his only son had insisted on defying him, disappointing him, disgracing him.

Pax scrambled to his feet. Harlan strode across the room and grabbed Paxton by both arms, spun and slammed him into the wall, shaking a framed photograph loose from its hook, and pinned him there. Jo screamed and perhaps Deke spoke, but Pax couldn’t remember anything that was said. He only remembered his father’s face, pressed close to his own, twisted by shock, fury, loathing—too many emotions to name.

“My God, Paxton,” his father said, his voice filled with disgust. “What in heaven’s name have you done?”

Paxton had fallen asleep to the sound of the television blaring in the next room, and when he jerked awake sunlight was pouring through the window and the TV still babbled from the living room. It felt like less than a minute had passed, but it must have been hours.

Behind the noise of the TV he heard the telephone ringing.

A few seconds more and the ringing stopped. He didn’t think his father owned an answering machine. He closed his eyes, lay there for a time, and then opened his eyes again. He couldn’t hear his father snoring.

He sat up, found his watch where he’d put it on the floor. Eight-thirty. He pulled on his pants and shirt, walked barefoot out to the living room. The couch was empty. He went to the kitchen, then opened the door to his father’s bedroom, then checked the bathroom.

“Shit,” Pax said aloud. His father was gone.

He went out into the backyard and circled around the house, calling his father’s name. The wet grass washed his feet. Both Pax’s Tempo and his father’s Crown Victoria were still parked in the driveway. The Crown Vic’s driver’s-side door was ajar.

He walked toward the car, a sick feeling in his stomach. He came around the back bumper to see through the open door—and there was no one inside. He started to shut the door, and then saw a set of keys hanging from the ignition.

Pax leaned in, turned the key. The engine didn’t even click. Stone dead. The dome light was off too.

He put the keys in his pocket and slammed the door. He was walking into the house when his cell phone began to vibrate.

It was Deke’s number. Pax flipped open the phone. “Tell me you know where my father is,” Pax said.

“He’s at the church,” Deke answered in that sub-basement voice. “You better hurry.”

“The church? What’s he doing at the church?”

“By the looks of it, getting ready to baptize somebody.”

Pax went into the bathroom, peed. At the sink he splashed his face with tepid water, ran his wet hands through his hair. In the mirror he looked like a wild man. His father’s son, all right.

It almost took him longer to get the Tempo started than to get to the church. It was just two and a half miles away down a twisty and hilly stretch of Piney Road. But his father must have walked there. How could a man who weighed six or seven hundred pounds walk it? Two days ago he could barely get off the couch.

Deke’s open-topped Jeep was in the parking lot, as well as a dark blue Buick. Pax parked, tiredly climbed the steps, and paused with his hand on the door. From inside someone called out, and even without being able to make out the words he recognized his father’s voice—his preaching voice.

The Reverend Harlan Martin was bringing the Word.

Pax pulled open the creaking door and went inside. The vestibule was dim and empty, but the double doors to the sanctuary were propped open. Inside, light shimmered from the yellow-paned windows on the eastern wall, making the tops of the pews gleam.

A broad aisle led down the center of the church to the raised pulpit. Set into the wall behind the pulpit was a recessed archway that contained the baptistry, a cement pool sunk below the floor.

His father stood in the pool, water up to his waist, praying or preaching or both at the same time.

His cheeks shone with tears. One hand gripped the panel of glass that acted as a kind of splash guard for the pool, and the other was raised above his head, fingers spread. He wore a white dress shirt, too tight to be buttoned over his stained T-shirt. His hair had been combed back from his head.

“Forgive us, Lord!” he called, his voice echoing. His eyes were tightly closed, his face anguished. Blisters stretched across his forehead and cheeks, larger than Pax had ever seen them. What he’d taken to be tears could have been oil from ruptured sacs.

His father clenched his raised hand into a fist, opened it again. “Let your mercy come down on us. Forgive us now, our weak flesh, our corruptible hearts …”

Deke and a beta woman in a skirt and loose shirt stood off to the side of the sanctuary, next to the organ, talking in low voices. They saw Pax and waved him forward.

As Pax drew closer to the pulpit he could smell the spicy-sour tang of vintage. His father was still praying—We ask you, Lord, hear us, Lord—eyes shut, hand up like a drowning man. For as long as Pax could remember his father prayed for “we” and “us.” Pleading on behalf of the entire church, or the world.

Deke said, “Paxton, have you met the Reverend Hooke?”

Pax recognized the woman’s clothing, if not her face. She’d worn a shirt and vest like that when she’d led the singing at the funeral. They shook hands, and Pax said, “I’m sorry about this, Reverend. How long has he been in there?”

“I got here a half hour ago,” Hooke said. “Who knows how long he was here before that—long enough to overflow the baptistry. I turned off the water as soon as I realized what was going on. I don’t even know how he got in.”

“Probably still got his keys,” Deke said. He was keeping his volume low, as if reluctant to disturb Harlan’s praying.

“Probably,” Pax said. “Or he could just come in the side door—you just have to yank on it to get it to unlatch. They ever fix that?”

Hooke did not seem amused. “He won’t listen to us at all, and of course we can’t go in after him—look at him.”

The blisters. They were afraid of touching him.

“Okay,” Pax said, “why don’t we let him finish? Whatever he’s doing.”

The reverend shook her head. “We can’t let him stay in there all day. Now Paxton, you may have heard that your father and I had our differences, but that’s got nothing to do with this. I respect him as a man of God. But it just isn’t safe to have him in there, not with … not in his condition. I told Deke we ought to call Aunt Rhonda, and have her boys—”

“But I said that was your call to make,” Deke said to Pax.

“No, you’re right,” Pax said. “My dad didn’t want to go with her, but … look at him.” He should have brought the papers with him. Rhonda had guards, gates, medical equipment—everything to stop this kind of thing from happening. “I don’t think I can handle this.”

“Well, today you’re gonna have to,” Deke said.

Pax felt his face flush. He didn’t look at Deke, instead turned to the reverend and said, “Call Aunt Rhonda. I’ll try to get him out of there. You have any rubber gloves? Or some plastic I can put over my hands?”

The Reverend Hooke said she had some garbage bags in her office, and Pax followed her up the steps of the pulpit and through the narrow door behind the podium, to the hallway that led back to the offices and Sunday school rooms. To their right was a door, left ajar, that opened onto the baptistry.

“I’ll be right back,” Hooke said, and headed down the hall.

Pax opened the baptistry door. Steps led down into the pool, and the water was as high as the top step. His father was within arm’s reach. His huge body almost filled the pool, and every movement sent water lapping over the edge.

This close, the smell of the vintage was strong, made heavier by the moisture in the air.

“Dad,” Pax said. Then, louder, “It’s me, Paxton. It’s time to go home.”

His father’s eyes remained closed. “—to die in the flesh, Lord,” he prayed. His voice bounced around the enclosed space, but it seemed both quieter and more desperate. “And yet to be resurrected in the spirit. We ask these things in your name, amen.”

“Dad, you’re hallucinating.”

The Reverend Harlan Martin opened his eyes, turned. His face looked like it had been pummeled, a mass of protuberances and swelling flesh. It took him a moment to focus on Pax through eyes closed almost to slits.

He smiled and extended an arm to him. “Don’t be afraid, Son,” he said, his voice low, as if to keep a congregation from hearing. “Take my arm and I’ll help you down.”

The surface of the water seemed oily, reflective.

“I’m not coming in there, Dad.” Pax breathed in through his mouth, tasting the vintage. “Step out now, okay? Can you climb out?”

His father glanced toward the front of the church. Who was he seeing, out there—and when? Pax remembered standing in this spot when he was twelve, his father reaching out to him exactly like this. Paxton’s mother had bought him a new white dress shirt and had told him to wear an undershirt so he wouldn’t look naked when the water soaked through.

His father chuckled, shook his head. “All righty then.” He turned toward Pax, sloshing water over the sides of the pool, and moved toward the steps.

“That’s it. Come on out and we’ll get you dried off,” Pax said.

His father grasped Paxton’s forearm, his fingers surprisingly strong.

It’s okay, Pax thought. His arm was covered by his sleeve, no skin contact. “Easy does it,” he said.

“That’s the spirit,” his father said. He backed up, pulling Pax down to the second step. Pax yelped and grabbed the door frame with his free hand. The water splashed cold against his shins.

“Dad! Stop it!”

“In the name of the Father,” his father said. He looped an arm around Pax’s waist. “And of the Son—”

He yanked Pax toward him. Pax lost his grip on the door frame and fell onto his father’s chest. The big man overbalanced and tipped backward and they plunged under the water.

Cold water surged into Pax’s ears, his mouth.

Pax’s left arm was smashed between his father’s body and the side of the pool, his right arm trapped at his side. Pax arched his back, trying to get his head up above the surface. His father’s arm cinched tighter, hugging him close.

Someone else was in the water with them. Pax felt something grip the back of his neck, slide down to tug at his elbow, freeing it. Pax reached up, found the top of the glass panel, and held on.

Pax got his legs under him, pushed. The arm around his waist loosened and his head broke the surface. He gasped, and immediately coughed up water.

From the sanctuary, murmurs of “amen.”

Deke stood in front of the baptistry, reaching down, his arm covered to the elbow by a black plastic bag. Behind him the room was full of light, the pews crowded. The women wore colorful summer dresses. The men, in white shirtsleeves because of the heat, draped their arms across the pew backs. All of them were unchanged—not an argo or chub or blank among them. The organ played “Rock of Ages.”

My church, Pax thought, but it was his father’s voice saying it. My church, my church. Pax felt the tightening in his chest, love and gratefulness and sorrow blossoming like heat.