Wild Child and Other Stories

BULLETPROOF

The Sticker

I don’t have any children — I’m not even married, not anymore — but last month, though I was fried from my commute and looking forward to nothing more complicated than the bar, the TV and the microwave dinner, in that order, I made a point of attending the Thursday-evening meeting of the Smithstown School Board. On an empty stomach. Sans alcohol. Why? Because of Melanie Albert’s ninth-grade biology textbook — or, actually, the sticker affixed to the cover of it. This is the book with the close-up of the swallowtail butterfly against a field of pure environmental green, standard issue, used in ten thousand schools across the land, and it came to my attention when her father, Dave, and I were unwinding after work at the Granite Grill a week earlier.

The Granite is our local watering hole, and it doesn’t have much to recommend it, beyond the fact that it’s there. Its virtues reside mainly in what it doesn’t offer, I suppose — no waiters wrestling with their consciences, no chef striving to demonstrate his ability to fuse the Ethiopian and Korean culinary traditions, no music other than the hits of the eighties, piped in through a service that plumbs the deep cuts so that you get to hear The Clash doing “Wrong ’Em Boyo” and David Byrne’s “Swamp,” from his days with Talking Heads, instead of the same unvarying eternal crap you get on the radio. And it’s dimly lighted. Very dimly lighted. All you see, really, beyond the shifting colors of the TV, is the soft backlit glow of the bottles on display behind the bar dissolving into a hundred soothing glints of gold and copper. It’s relaxing — so relaxing I’ve found myself drifting off to dreamland right there in the grip of my barstool, one hand clenched round the stem of the glass, the other bracing up a chin as heavy as all the slag heaps of the earth combined. You could say it’s my second home. Or maybe my first.

We’d just settled into our stools, my right hand going instinctively to the bowl of artificial bar snacks while the Mets careened round the bases on the wide-screen TV and Rick, the bartender, stirred and strained my first Sidecar of the evening, when I became aware of Dave, off to my left, digging something out of his briefcase. There was a thump beside me and I turned my head.

“What’s that?” I said. The title, in fluorescent orange, leapt out at me: An Introduction to Biology. “A little light reading?”

Dave — he was my age, forty-three, and he didn’t bother to dye his hair or counteract the wrinkles eroding his forehead and chewing away at the corners of his eyes because he accepted who he was and he had no qualms about letting the world in on it — just stared at me. He’d given up tennis. Given up poker. And when I called him on a Saturday morning to go out for a hike or a spin up the river in my speedboat with the twin Merc 575s that’ll shear the hair right off your head, he was always busy.

“What?” I said.

He tapped the cover of the book. “Don’t you notice anything?”

My drink had come, iced, sugared, as necessary as oxygen. The Mets scored again. I took a sip.

“The sticker,” he said. “Don’t you see the sticker?”

Prodded, I took notice of it, a lemon-yellow circle the size of a silver dollar, inside of which was a disclaimer printed in sober black letters. The theory of evolution as put forth in this text, it read, is just that, a theory, and should not be confused with fact. “Yeah,” I said.

“So?”

He clenched his jaw. Gave me a long hard look. “Don’t you know what this means?”

I thought about that a moment, turning the book over in one hand before setting it back down on the bar. I worked at the sticker with my thumbnail. It was immovable, as if it had been fused to the cover using a revolutionary new process. “Sucker’s really on there,” I said. I gave him a grin. “You wouldn’t happen to have any sandpaper on you, would you?”

“It’s not fucking funny, Cal. You can laugh — you haven’t got a kid in school. But if you believe in anything, if you believe in what’s happening to this country, what’s happening right here in our own community—” He broke off, so wrought up he couldn’t go on. His face was flushed. He picked up his beer and set it down again.

“You’re talking about the fact that we’re living in a theocracy now, right? A theocracy at war with another theocracy?”

“Why do you always have to make a joke out of everything?”

“Bible-thumpers,” I said, but without conviction. I was in a bar.

It had been a long day. I wanted to talk about nothing, sports, women, the subtle manipulations of the commercials for beer, cars, Palm Pilots. I didn’t want to delve beneath the surface. It was too cold down there, too dark and claustrophobic. “You can’t be serious,”

I said finally, giving ground. “Here? Thirty-five miles up the river from Manhattan?”

He was nodding, his eyes fixed on mine. “I don’t pay that much attention, I guess,” he said finally. “Or Katie either. I don’t even think we voted in the last school board election … I mean, it’s our own fault. It was just a slate of names, you know. Like the judges. Does anybody ever know the slightest thing about any of the judges on the ballot that comes round every November? Or the town supervisors?

Shit. You’d have to devote your life to it, know what I’m saying?”

Feelings were stirring in me — anger, resentment, helplessness.

My drink had gone warm. I said the only thing I could think to say:

“So what are you going to do?”

Jesus, and Where He Resides

It was raining that Thursday night, though the air was warm still, a last breath of summer before September gave way to October and the days began to wind down till the leaves littered the streets and the boat would have to come out of the water. I had a little trouble finding the place where they were holding the meeting — they’ve built a whole city’s worth of new buildings since I went to school, the population ratcheting up relentlessly even around here where there are zero jobs to be had and all everybody talks about is preserving the semi-rural feel, as if we were all dipping our own candles and greasing the wheels of our buggies. Which is another reason why I couldn’t find the place. It’s dark. The streetlights give out within a block of the junction of the state road and Main Street, and the big old black-barked oaks and elms everybody seems to love soak up the light till the roads might as well be tunnels in a coal mine. And I admit it: my eyes aren’t what they used to be. I’ve put off getting glasses because of the kind of statement they make — weakness, that is — and I’ve heard that once you begin to rely on them you can never go back to the naked eye, that’s it, and here’s your crutch forever. The next thing is reading glasses, and then you’re pottering around with those pathetic lanyards looped round your neck, murmuring, Has anybody seen my glasses?

Anyway, it was the cars that clued me. There must have been a hundred or more of them jamming every space in the parking lot behind the new elementary school, with the overflow parked on a lawn that was just a wet black void sucked out of the shadows. I pulled up within inches of the last car squeezed in on the grass — a cobalt-blue Suburban, humped and mountainous — and felt the wheels give ever so slightly before I shut down the ignition, figuring I’d worry about it later. I pulled up the collar of my coat and hurried along the walk toward the lights glowing in the distance.

The auditorium was packed, standing room only, and everybody looked angry — from the six school board members seated behind a collapsible table up onstage to the reporter from the local paper and the concerned parents and students warming the chairs and lining the walls like extras on a movie set. I caught a nostalgic whiff of floor wax, finger paint and formaldehyde, but it was short-lived, overwhelmed by the working odor of all that crush of humanity. The fact that everybody was wet to one degree or another didn’t help matters, the women’s hair hanging limp, the men’s jackets clinging at the shoulders and under the arms, umbrellas drooling, smears of wet black mud striping the linoleum underfoot. I could smell myself — what I was adding to the mix — in the bad cheese of my underarms and the sweet reek of mango-pineapple rising from the dissolved gel in my hair. It was very hot.

The door closed softly behind me and I found myself squeezed in between a gaunt leathery woman with a starburst of shellacked hair and a pock-faced man who looked as if he’d had a very bad day made worse by the dawning awareness that he was going to have to stand here amidst all these people, in this stink and this heat, till the last word was spoken and the doors opened to deliver him back out into the rain. I hunched my shoulders to make room and let my eyes roam over the crowd in the hope of spotting Dave and his wife. Not that it would matter — even if they’d saved a seat for me I couldn’t have got to them. But still, it gave me the smallest uptick of satisfaction to see them sitting there in the third row left, Katie’s head shrouded in a black scarf, as if she were attending a funeral, and Dave’s bald spot glowing like a poached egg in the graying nest of his hair.

What can I say? This was the most normal scene in the world, a scene replicated through the generations and across the continent, the flag drooping to one side of the podium, red velvet curtains disclosing the stage beyond, student art buckling away from the freshly painted walls while parents, teachers and students gathered in a civic forum to weigh all the pedagogical nuances of the curriculum. Standing there, the fluorescent lights glaring in my eyes and the steam of my fellow humans rising round me, I was plunged into a deep pool of nostalgia, thinking of my own parents, now dead, my own teachers, mostly dead, and myself, very much alive and well though in need of a drink. On some level it was strangely moving. I shifted my feet. Looked to the tiles of the ceiling as a way of neutering my emotions. It was then that I felt the door open behind me — a cold draft, the sizzle of rain — as a newcomer even tardier than I slipped in to join the gathering. A female. Young, pretty, with an overload of perfume. I gave her a glance as she edged in beside me. “Sorry,” she whispered. “No problem,” I said under my breath, and because I felt awkward and didn’t want to stare, I turned my attention back to the stage.

There was a general coughing and rustling, and then one of the school board members — a sour-looking woman with reading glasses dangling from her throat — leaned forward and reached for the microphone perched at the edge of the table. There was a thump followed by the hiss of static as she wrestled the thing away from its stand, and then her amplified voice came at us as if it had been there all along, just under the surface: “And since that concludes the formal business for the evening, we’re prepared to take your questions and comments at this point. One person at a time, please, and please come to the center aisle and use the microphone there so everybody can hear.”

The first speaker — a man in his thirties, narrow eyes, narrow shoulders, a cheap sportcoat and a turquoise bola tie he must have worn in the hope somebody would think him hip — rose to a spatter of applause and a cascade of hoots from the students against the wall. “Ba-oom!” they chanted. “Ba-oom!” In an instant the mood had been transformed from nervous anticipation to a kind of ecstasy. “Ba-oom!”

He took hold of the microphone, glanced over his shoulder at the students behind him and snapped, “That’ll be enough now, and I mean it,” until the chant died away. Then he half-turned to the audience — and this was awkward because he was addressing the board up onstage as well — and began by introducing himself. “My name is Robert Tannenbaum”—a burst of Ba-oom, Ba-oom! — “and as many of you know, I teach ninth-grade biology at Smithstown High. And I have a statement here, signed not only by the entire science department — with one notable exception — but the majority of the rest of the faculty as well.”

It was just a paragraph or so — he knew to keep it short — and as he read I couldn’t help watching the faces of the board members.

They were four men and two women, with the usual hairstyles and appurtenances, dressed in shades of brown and gray. They held themselves so stiffly their bones might have been fused, and they gazed out over the crowd while the teacher read his statement, their eyes barely registering him. The statement said simply that the faculty rejected the warning label the board had imposed on An Introduction to Biology as a violation of the Constitution’s separation of church and state. “No reputable scientist anywhere in the world,”

the teacher went on, lifting his head to stare directly at the woman with the microphone, “subscribes to the notion of Intelligent Design — or let’s call it by its real name, Creationism — as a viable scientific theory.” And now he swung round on the crowd and spread his arms wide: “Get real, people. There’s no debate here — just science and anti-science.”

A few members of the audience began stamping their feet. The man beside me pulled his lips back and hissed.

“And that’s the key phrase here, scientific theory — that is, testable, subject to peer review — and not a theological one, because that’s exactly what this is, trying to force religion into the classroom—”

“Atheist!” a woman cried out, but the teacher waved her off. “No theory is bulletproof,” he said, raising his voice now, “and we in the scientific community welcome debate — legitimate, scientific debate — and certainly theories mutate and evolve just like life on this planet, but—” “Ba-oom, Ba-oom!”

There was a building ferment, a muted undercurrent of dissent and anger, the students chanting, people shouting out, until the sour-looking woman — the chairwoman, or was she the super-intendent? — slammed the flat of her hand down on the table. “You’ll all get your chance,” she said, pinching her voice so that it shot splinters of steel through the microphone and out into the audience on a blast of feedback, “because everybody’s got the right to an opinion.” She glared down at the teacher, then lifted the reading glasses to the bridge of her nose and squinted at a sheet of paper she held up before her in an attempt to catch the light. “Thank you, Mr.

Tannenbaum,” she said. “We’ll hear now from the Reverend Doctor Micah Stiller, of the First Baptist Church. Reverend Stiller?”

I was transfixed. I’d had no idea. Here I’d taken the train into the city every day and slogged on back every night, lingered at the Granite, hiked the trails and rocketed my way up the river to feel the wind in my face and impress whatever woman I’d managed to cajole along with me, and all the while this Manichean struggle had been going on right up the street. The reverend (beard, off-the-rack suit, big black shoes the size of andirons) invoked God, Jesus and the Bible as the ultimate authorities on matters of creation, and then a whole snaking line of people trooped up to the microphone one after another to voice their opinions on everything from the Great Flood to the age of the earth (Ten thousand years! Are you out of your mind? the biology teacher shouted as he slammed out the side exit to a contrapuntal chorus of cheers and jeers), to recent advancements in space travel and the unraveling of the human genome and how close it was to the chimpanzee’s. And the garden slug’s.

At one point, Dave even got into the act. He stood abruptly, his face frozen in outrage, stalked up to the microphone and blurted, “If there’s no evolution, how come we all have to get a new flu shot each year?” Before anyone could answer him he was back in his seat and the chairwoman was clapping her hands for order. How much time had gone by I couldn’t say — an hour, an hour at least. My left leg seemed to have gone dead at the hip. I breathed perfume. Stole a look at the woman beside me and saw that she had beautiful hands and feet and a smile that sought out my own. She was thirty-five or so, blond, no hat, no coat, in a blue flocked dress cut just above her knees, and we were complicit. Or so I thought.

Finally, when things seemed to be winding down, a girl dressed in a white sweater and plaid skirt, with her hair cut close and her arms folded palm to elbow, came down the aisle as if she were walking a bed of hot coals and took hold of the microphone. Her hands trembled as she tried to adjust it to her height, but she couldn’t seem to loosen the catch. She stood there a moment, working at it, and when she saw that no one was going to help her, she went up on her tiptoes. “I just wanted to say,” she breathed, clutching the mike as if it were a wall she was trying to climb, “that my name is Mary-Louise Mohler and I’m a freshman at Smithstown High—”

Hoots, catcalls, two raw-faced kids in baseball hats leering from the far side of the auditorium, adult faces swiveling angrily, the clatter of the rain beyond the windows.

She stood there patiently till the noise died down and the sour-faced woman, attempting a smile, gestured for her to go ahead.

“I want everyone to know that the theory of evolution is only a theory, just like the sticker says—”

“What about Intelligent Design?” someone called out, and I was startled to see that it was Dave, half-risen from his seat. “I suppose that’s fact?” I couldn’t help laughing, but softly, softly, and turned to the woman beside me — the blonde. “To all the Jesus freaks, maybe,”

I whispered, and gave her an unequivocal grin. Which she ignored.

Her gaze was fixed on the girl. The auditorium had grown quiet. I raised my hand to my mouth to suppress an imaginary cough, shifted my weight and looked back down the aisle.

“It is,” the girl said quietly, dropping her eyes so she wouldn’t have to look Dave in the face. “It is fact and I’m the one to know it.”

She clenched her hands in front of her, rocked back on her heels and then rose up once more on point to let her soft feathery voice inhabit the microphone: “I know it because Jesus lives in my heart.”

The Weak

I was the first one out the door. The rain had let up, nothing more than a persistent drizzle now, the shrubs along the walk black with moisture and the air dense with the smell of it — the smell of nature, that is, wet, fungal, chaotic. And sweet. Infinitely sweet after the reek of that auditorium. I hurried down the walk and across the lot, thinking to get out ahead of the traffic. I was meeting Dave and Katie at the Granite for burgers and a drink or two and I could hardly wait for the postmortem, because I’d wanted to flag my hand and put a question to the girl in the plaid skirt, wanted to ask her just how provable her contention was. Could we thread one of those surgical mini-cameras up through the vein in her thigh and into her left ventricle just to see if we could find the Redeemer there? And what would He be doing? Sitting down to dinner? Frying up fish in a pan? At least Jonah had some elbow room. But then I guessed Jesus was capable of making himself very, very small — sub-microscopic even.

High comedy — Dave and I would have a real laugh over this one. My feet sailed on down the walk, across the lot and through the drizzle of the world, and I was thinking cold beer, medium-rare burger with extra cheese and two slices of Bermuda onion, until I reached my car and saw that I wasn’t going anywhere. The rear tires had sunk maybe half an inch into the grass-turned-to-mud, but that wasn’t the problem, or not the immediate problem. The immediate problem was the Mini Cooper (two-tone, red and black) backed up against my bumper and blocking me as effectively as if a wall had been erected round my car while the meeting was going down.

I was wearing a tan leather three-quarter-length overcoat that had caught my eye in the window of a shop on Fifth Avenue a month back and for which I’d paid too much, and it was on its way to being ruined. I didn’t have an umbrella. And I’d ignored the salesgirl, who’d given me a four-ounce plastic bottle of some waterproofing agent and made me swear to spray the coat with it the minute I got home. I could feel the coat drinking up the wet. A thin trickle, smelling of mango-pineapple, began to drip from the tip of my nose. I looked round me, thinking of the blond woman — this was her car, I was sure of it, and where in hell was she and how could she just block me in like that? — and then I opened the door of my car and slid in to wait.

Twenty of the longest minutes of my life crumbled round me as I sat there in the dark, smoking one of the cigarettes I’d promised myself to give up while the radio whispered and the windshield fogged over. Headlights illuminated me as one car after another backed out, swung round and rolled on out of the lot to freedom. I reminded myself, not for the first time, that patience, far from being a virtue, was just weakness in disguise. A mosquito beat itself up out of nowhere to settle on the back of my neck so I could put an end to its existence before it had its opportunity to produce more mosquitoes to send out into a world of exposed necks, arms and midriffs. Midriffs. I began to think about midriffs and then the blond woman and what hers might look like if she were wearing something less formal than a flocked blue dress that buttoned all the way up to the collar and I pulled on my cigarette and drummed my fingers on the dash and felt my lids grow heavy.

Finally — and it was my bad luck that the last two cars left in the whole place were the ones blocking me in — I heard voices and glanced in the rearview mirror to see three figures emerging from the gloom. Women. “All right, then,” one of them called out, and here she was — the chairwoman, her big white block of a face looming up on the passenger side of my car like a calving glacier as the Suburban flashed its lights and gurgled in appreciation of her—“you have a good night. And feel good. You did real well tonight, honey.”

The door slammed. The Suburban roared. Red brake lights, a great powerful churning of tires and the song of the steering mechanism, and then she was gone. I shifted my eyes to the other side, and there she was, the blonde, framed in the driver’s side mirror. Right next to her daughter, in the plaid skirt and damp white sweater.

I froze. Absolutely. I was motionless. I didn’t draw breath. The girl and her mother climbed into the Mini Cooper and I wanted to shrink down in my seat, crawl into the well under the steering wheel, vanish altogether, but I couldn’t do a thing. I heard the engine start up — they were on their way; in a second they’d be gone — and for all I’d been through, for all the rumbling of my stomach and the craving for alcohol that was almost like a need and the strangeness of that overstuffed auditorium and the testimony I’d witnessed, I felt a yearning so powerful it took me out of myself till I didn’t know where I was. And then I heard the harsh message of the wheels slipping and then an accelerating whine as they fought for purchase in the mud. She had no idea, this woman — not the faintest notion — of how to rock a car out of a hole in a yielding surface. She accelerated. The wheels spun. Then she did it again. And again.

I watched the door swing open, watched her legs emerge from the car as she reached down to remove her shoes and step out onto the grass to assess the situation while her daughter’s torso faded in soft focus behind the fogged-over windshield. And because I was weak, because I hadn’t dated anybody in a month and more and couldn’t stand to see those shining bare legs and glistening feet stained with mud and didn’t care whether Jesus and all the saints in heaven were involved in the equation or not, I got out of my car, looked her full in the face over the glare of the headlights and said,

“Can I help?”

The Fit

I never did get to the Granite that night. I called Dave on my cell and he sounded annoyed — wound up from the meeting and eager to take it out on somebody — but the Mini Cooper was in deeper than it looked and by the time we were able to free it I was in no shape for anything but bed. My coat was ruined. Ditto my shoes. Both pantlegs were greased with mud, my hands dense with it, my fingernails blackened. I should have given up, the term lost cause hammered like a spike into the back of my brain, but I was feeling demonstrative — and maybe just a little bit ashamed of myself over the Jesus freak comment. We were ten minutes into it, the drizzle thickening to rain, the miniature wheels digging deeper and the daughter and I straining against the rear bumper, when the woman behind the wheel — the blonde, the mother — stuck her head out the window and gave me my out. “You know,” she called over the ticking of the engine and the soft beat of the rain, “maybe I should just call Triple A?”

I came up alongside the car so I could see the pale node of her face wrapped in her shining hair and her eyes like liquid fire. The interior of the car sank away into the shadows beyond her. I couldn’t see her shoulders or her torso or her legs. Just her face, like a picture in a frame. “No,” I said, “no need. We can get it out.”

The daughter chimed in then — Mary-Louise. She was standing on the far side of the car, hands on hips. There was a spatter of mud on her sweater. “Come on, Mom,” she said with an edge of exasperation. “Try it again.” She looked to me, then bent to brace herself against the bumper. “Come on,” she said, “one more time.”

I watched the mother’s face. She squeezed her eyes shut a moment so that a little hieroglyph of flesh appeared over the bridge of her nose, then she gave me the full benefit of her gaze and it came to me that she hadn’t heard what I’d said back in the auditorium, that there was no animosity, none at all. I wasn’t on trial. I was just a helpful stranger, the Good Samaritan himself. “I’m Lynnese Mohler,”

she said, and here was her hand, the nails done in a metallic shade of blue or lavender, slipping free of the darkness to take hold of my own. “And this is my daughter, Mary-Louise.”

“Calvin Jessup.” I leaned toward her, toward the smell of her, her perfume and what lay beneath it. “But people call me Cal. My friends, anyway.” I was smiling. Broadly. Stupidly. The rain quickened.

“Come on, Mom.”

“I want to thank you for your help — you’re really sweet. I mean it. But are you sure I shouldn’t call Triple A? It’s nothing. I mean, they don’t even charge—”

I straightened up and gave her an elaborate shrug, feeling the accumulated weight of every cell and fiber of my one hundred and eighty-seven pounds. I didn’t need alcohol. Didn’t need a burger. All I needed was to push this car out of the ditch. “If you want to wait here in the dark,” I said. “But I really think we can get you out if you just—”

“You have to rock the car, Mom.” The girl — what was she, fourteen, fifteen? Was that ninth grade? I couldn’t remember

— slapped the side of the car with her open palm. “We almost had it there that last time, so just, come on, start it up and then you go back and forth — you know, the way Dad showed us.”

Lynnese glanced up at me, then ducked her head and shook it side to side so that her hair, dense with moisture, fell loose to screen her face. “I’m divorced,” she said.

Behind us, across the lot, the lights of the auditorium faded briefly and then blinked out. “Yeah,” I said. “So am I.”

The Fittest

A week later I was sitting with Dave at the Granite, enjoying my second Sidecar of the evening and watching the first round of the playoffs that wouldn’t feature the Mets (this year, anyway), thinking about Lynnese while Dave went on about the lawsuit he and twelve of the other parents were filing against the school district. I liked Dave. He was one of my oldest friends. And I agreed with him both in principle and fact, but when he got on his high horse, when he got Serious with a capital S, he tended to repeat himself to the point of stupefaction. I was listening to him, feeding him the appropriate responses (“Uh-huh, uh-huh — really?”) at the appropriate junctures, yet I was tuning him out too.

I wanted to talk about Lynnese and what had happened between us in the past week, but I couldn’t. I’d never been comfortable exposing my feelings, which was why people like Dave accused me of making a joke of everything, and I couldn’t even mention her — not to Dave — without feeling like a traitor to the cause. “I’m a Christian,” she told me on the occasion of our first date, before I’d even had a chance to ice the beer or rev up the engines or ask her if she’d like to release the stern line and help cast us off (which was a simple way to involve anybody in the process of what we were about to do, because there’s no pretense in boating and the thrill of being out on the water takes you right back to your childhood, automatically — boom — just like that). The sun was high, Indian summer, a Saturday delivered from the heavens, and I was planning to take her up the river to a floating restaurant-cum-club where we could have cocktails on the deck, listen to reggae (and dance, maybe dance, if she was up for it) and get dinner too. She was wearing shorts. Her hair was its own kind of rapture. “Hi,” I said. “Hi,” she said back.

“Where’s Mary-Louise?” I asked, secretly thrilled that she’d come alone and all the while dreading the intrusion of that child with Jesus in her heart, half-expecting her to pop up out of the backseat of the Mini Cooper or come strolling out of the bushes, and she told me that Mary-Louise was out in the woods hiking—“Up Breakneck Ridge? Where that trail loops behind the mountain to where those lakes are? She loves nature,” she said. “Every least thing, the way she focuses on it — it’s just a shame they won’t let her alone in school, in biology. She could be a scientist, a doctor, anything.” I didn’t have much to say to that. I held out a hand to help her into the boat. She anchored her legs, the hull rocking beneath us, and leveled her eyes on me. “I’m a Christian,” she said.

Well, all right. I’d seen her twice since, and she was as lively, smart and well-informed as anybody I knew — and if I’d expected some sort of sackcloth-and-ashes approach to the intimate moments of an exploratory relationship, well, there went another prejudice.

She was hot. And I was intrigued. Really intrigued. (Though I wouldn’t want to call it love or infatuation or anything more specific than that after what I’d gone through with my ex-wife and the three or four women who came after her.)

“We’re going to break them,” Dave was saying. “I swear to you.

There was that case in Pennsylvania and before that in Kansas, but these people just don’t learn. And they’ve got bucks behind them.

Big bucks.”

“You want to call them fanatics,” was what I said.

“That’s right,” he said. “They’re fanatics.”

The Petitions

Before the trial, there were the petitions. Trials require a whole lot of steam, time to maneuver for position, war chests, thrusts and counter-thrusts, but petitions require nothing more than footwork and a filing fee. Within a week of the meeting, petitioners were everywhere. You couldn’t go into the grocery, the post office or the library without sidestepping a fold-up table with two or three clench-jawed women sitting behind it in a welter of pens, Styrofoam cups, ledgers and homemade signs. And men, men too. Men like Dave, and on the other side of the issue, men like the reverend and the pock-marked man who’d stood beside me in the auditorium distending his lips and puffing up his cheeks to express his opinion of the proceedings. I’d taken a lot of things for granted. Some of us might have lived at the end of long driveways and maybe we didn’t get involved in community issues because that sort of rah-rah business didn’t mesh with our personalities, but as far as I knew we’d always been a community in agreement — save the trees, confine the tourists, preserve the old houses on Main Street, clean up the river and educate the kids to keep them from becoming a drag on society.

Now I saw how wrong I was.

Of course, Dave came into the Granite and laid his petition right out on the bar and I was one of the first to sign it — and not just out of social pressure, Rick and half a dozen of the regulars looking over my shoulder while Elvis Costello sang “My Aim Is True” and my burger sizzled on the grill and the late sun melted across the wall, but because it was the right thing to do. “People can believe what they want,” Dave said, giving a little speech for the bar, “but that doesn’t make it the truth. And it sure as shit doesn’t make it science.”

I signed. Sure, I signed. He would have killed me if I didn’t.

And then I was coming up the hill from the station, the trees fired with the season and dusk coming down over the river behind me, everything so changeless and pure it was as if I’d stepped back in time, when I remembered I needed to pick up a few things at the deli. I didn’t cook much — I let Tom Scoville, the chef at the Granite, take care of that — but I ate cereal for breakfast, slipped the odd frozen dinner into the microwave or went through the elaborate ritual of slicing Swiss and folding it between two slices of rye. I was out of milk, butter, bread. And as I’d walked down the hill to the train that morning I’d reminded myself to remind myself when I came back up.

I was deep in my post-work oblivion, thinking nothing, and the pockmarked man took me by surprise. Suddenly he was standing there, right in front of the door of Gravenites’ Deli, not exactly blocking my access, but taking up space in a way I didn’t like. Up close, I saw that the pock-marks were a remnant of an epidermal war he was fighting not only on his face but his scalp and throat as well. He smelled like roast beef. “Hello, brother,” he said, thrusting a clipboard at me.

I was in no mood. “I’m an only child,” I said.

Unfazed — I don’t even think he heard me — he just kept talking,

“There’s a battle going on here for the souls of our children. And we all have to get involved.”

“Not me,” I said, trying to maneuver past him. “What I have to get is a quart of milk.”

“I saw you at the meeting,” he said, and now he was blocking my way. “You know damn well what this is all about.” Behind him, in the depths of the store, I could see people lined up waiting for cold cuts, sandwiches, a slice of pizza. Thirty seconds had gone by, thirty seconds out of my life.

I moved for the door and the clipboard flew up like a bird.

“What side you on?” he said. “Because there’s only one side to this — God’s side.”

“Get the fuck out of my way.”

His eyes jumped and steadied and something hard settled into his face. “Don’t use that language with me.”

The whole world dissolved in that instant, as if the movie had slipped off the reel, and a long sorrow opened up inside me. What was going on here had nothing to do with Dave or school boards or Lynnese or her daughter either — it was just some stranger getting in my face, and nobody gets in my face. Some redneck. Some yahoo with a complexion like a cheese grater and bad breath on top of it.

So I shoved him and he lurched back against the window and everybody in Gravenites’ Deli looked up at the concussion as the plate glass contracted and snapped back again. He came at me before I could get a second shove in, his hands at the collar of my shirt, bunching the material there, and he was the one cursing now, “Jesus, Jesus, Jesus!”

It was over in a minute, the way most lights are. I grabbed both his hands and flung them away from me even as my shirt — green Tencel, in a banana-leaf pattern, eighty-seven bucks on sale — ripped down the front and I gave him a parting shove that sent him into the empty steel framework of the bicycle rack, where his legs got tangled up and he went down hard on the sidewalk. Then I was stalking up the street, the blood screaming in my ears and everything so distorted I thought I was losing my sight.

I felt contaminated. Angry with myself but more angry with him and everybody like him, the narrow, the bigoted, the fanatics, because that was what they were, their hope masquerading as certainty, desperation plucking at your sleeve, plucking, always plucking and pushing. In college — I think it was my sophomore year — I took a course called “Philosophy of Religion” by way of fulfilling an elective requirement, but also because I wanted ammunition against my Catholic mother and the fraud the priests and rabbis and mullahs were perpetrating on people too ignorant and scared to know better. Throughout my childhood I’d been the victim of a scam, of the panoply of God and His angels, of goodness everlasting and the answer to the mystery Mary-Louise carried in her heart and laid out for all to see, and I wanted this certified college course and this middle-aged professor with a pouf of discolored hair and a birthmark in the shape of Lake Erie on his forehead to confirm it. I knew Paley’s argument from design, knew about the watch and the watchmaker, and I knew now that these people — these Jesus freaks — were trundling out the same old argument dressed in new clothes. Intricacy requires design, that was what they said. And design requires a designer. That was as far as they could see, that was it, case closed: God exists. And the earth is ten thousand years old, just like the Bible says.

I went up the sidewalk, my legs churning against the grade with the fierce regularity of my rage, my quadriceps muscles flexing and releasing, the anterior cruciate ligaments aligning and realigning themselves in my knees, the chambers of my Jesus-less heart pumping like the slick-working intricate parts of the intricate machine they were, and the whole debate reduced to a naked clipboard and a torn shirt. I was two blocks from the Granite. I couldn’t see. I couldn’t think. I crossed one street, then the next, and the hill sank ahead of me until the familiar yellow awning of the bar came into view, cars parked out front, lights glowing against the twilight and all the trees down the block masked in shadow.

That was when my vision suddenly came clear and I spotted Lynnese. She was sitting behind a card table in front of the bookstore, Mary-Louise perched on a folding chair beside her with her back arched so perfectly she might have been auditioning for junior cotillion. They were fifty feet from me. I saw a mug imprinted with the hopeful yellow slash of a smiley face, front and center, right in the middle of the table, saw Mary-Louise’s pink backpack at her feet and the sprawl of her books and homework. And I saw the clipboard. Cheap dun plastic, the shining metallic clip. Saw it all at the very moment Lynnese lifted her eyes and flashed me a smile with wings on it.

My reaction? Truthfully? I made as if I didn’t see her. Suddenly I had to cross the street — this was very compelling, an absolute necessity, because even though crossing the street would take me away from the Granite and I’d have to walk a block in the opposite direction and then double back, I had an urgent errand over there on the other side of the street, in that antique shop I’d passed a hundred times and never yet set foot in.

Mutation, and How It Operates in Nature

And then it was a Sunday toward the end of the month, warmer than it should have been at this time of year, and I was out in the woods on the trail behind Breakneck Ridge, enjoying the weight of my daypack and the way the trees caught the wind and shook out their colors. I had two hot dog buns with me, two all-beef wieners, yellow mustard in a disposable packet and a bottle of red wine I’d decanted into my bota bag, and I was planning on a good six- or seven-mile loop and lunch beside a creek I liked to visit, especially in the fall when the bugs were down. The World Series was on, but it featured two teams that didn’t excite me all that much and I figured the Granite could do without me, at least for the afternoon — I’d been in and out all week anyway, mostly when Dave wasn’t there. Nothing against Dave — I just needed a little time to myself. Nights were getting cold. The season was almost gone.

I felt the climb as a burn in my lungs and I realized I wasn’t in the kind of shape I should have been — the walk up from the train was one thing, but the ridge was another thing altogether. I was thinking about the philosophy of religion professor and a trick he’d played on the class one Friday afternoon when all we wanted, collectively, was to get out the door and head downtown for beer, loud music and whatever association we could make with the opposite sex. He put a drawing up on the blackboard, nothing very elaborate, just lines and shadings, that appeared to be a scene out of nature, a crag, a pine tree, a scattering of boulders. He didn’t identify it as a trompe l’oeil, but that was what it was, a trick of the eye, a deception, sweet and simple. There’s a hidden figure here, he told us, and when you see it — and please don’t reveal it to anyone else — you’re welcome to leave. Just concentrate. That’s all it takes. One by one, my classmates gave out with expressions of surprise, wondered a moment over the subtlety of the lesson, packed up their books and left. I was the last one. I stared at that crag, that pine tree, till they were imprinted on my brain, increasingly frustrated — there was nothing there, I was sure of it, and the others were faking it in order to curry favor and not least to get out of the classroom and into the sunlit arena of that Friday afternoon. When finally I did see it — a representation of Jesus leaping clear of the background, his halo a pine bough, a boulder for his cheek — all I felt was disappointment. It was a cheap trick, that was all. What did it prove? That anybody can be fooled? That we can’t trust the evidence of our five senses when five senses are all we’ve got?

It had rained the night before and the path was slick beneath my feet. I came within an ace of losing my balance on a switchback with a considerable drop to it and that drove the professor and his drawing right out of my head. There was the sound of running water everywhere, a thousand little streams sprung up overnight to churn away at the side of the mountain, and the wind picked up so that the branches of the trees rattled overhead and the leaves came down like confetti. I was almost to the creek where I was planning to gather up some damp twigs and get a fire going so I could roast my wieners and take in the glory of the day from a new perspective, when I came around a bend in the trail and saw a figure up ahead. A girl.

Dressed in khaki shorts and a denim jacket. Her back was to me and she was bent at the waist in a patch of sun just off the trail, as if she were looking for something.

I stopped where I was. It was always awkward meeting people on the trail — they’d come for solitude and so had I, and a woman alone would always view a man with suspicion, and rightfully so.

There’d been attacks, even out here. It took me a moment, poised there with my feet still in their tracks, before I recognized her, Mary-Louise, bent over in a column of sunlight with her blond hair clipped short and the back of her neck so white it was like an ache.

For a moment, I didn’t know what to do — I was about to turn away and tiptoe back down the trail, but she turned her face to me as if she’d known all along that I was there and I scuffed my hiking boots on the dirt just to make some noise, and said, “Hi. Hi, Mary-Louise.” And then a joke, lame, admittedly, but the best I could manage under the circumstances: “I see you’ve stepped up in the world.”

She’d turned back to whatever it was that had caught her attention and when she looked at me again she put a single finger to her lips and then gestured for me to come closer. I moved up the path as stealthily as I could, one slow step at a time. When I reached her, when I was standing over her and seeing what she was seeing — a snake, a blacksnake stretched out across a fallen log in the full glare of the sun, its scales trapping the light like a fresh coat of paint — she gave me such a look of pride you’d think she’d created it herself. “It’s a blacksnake,” I said. “A big one too. They can get to be ten feet long, you know.”

“Eight feet,” she said. “Maximum. The record’s a hundred and one inches.”

“And you didn’t have to shush me — I mean, it’s not as if they can hear.”

“They feel the vibrations. And they can see.”

We both looked down at it. Its eyes were open, its tongue flicking. There was no hurry in it because the sun was a thing it needed and the season was going fast and soon it would be underground. Or dead. “You know,” I said, “it’s really a black racer—”

“Coluber constrictor,” she said without turning her head. “That’s the scientific name.”

The wind beat at the trees and a shadow chased violently across the ground, but the snake never moved. “Yeah,” I said, out of my league now. “It’s amazing how fast they can move if they want to. I saw one once, when I was a kid, and it was in this swamp. A couple of inches of water, anyway, and it went after a frog like you couldn’t believe.”

“They move by contracting the muscles of their ribs. All snakes have at least a hundred vertebrae and some as many as four hundred, did you know that?”

“But no legs. Their lizard cousins have legs, though, and how do you think they got them? And out west — I saw one once in the Sierras — they have a legless lizard, just like a snake, but it’s not.” I should have left it, but I couldn’t. “Why do you suppose that is? I think — no, I know — it’s because of evolution, and that legless lizard is a link between the snakes, who don’t need legs to crawl into tight spaces, and the lizards that can get up and run. Like us.” She didn’t say anything. The trees dipped and rose again. The snake lay still.

“Once,” she said, turning all the way round to stare at me as if I were the wonder of nature and the snake no more than incidental,

“in the spring? I was with my mother and we were standing outside my friend Sarah’s house, a farmhouse, but it’s not a farm really, just an old stone place with a barn. Right there, while we were saying goodbye and getting ready to walk to our car, these snakes began to come out of a hole in the ground right where we were standing.

Garter snakes.”

I wanted to tell her that they balled up like a skein of yarn to survive the winter, hundreds of them sometimes, that they gave birth to live young and that the babies were on their own after that, but I didn’t. “Red and yellow stripes,” I said. “And black.”

She nodded. Her eyes went distant at the memory. “They were like ribbons,” she said. “Ribbons of God.”