The window in her father's bedroom was locked; he'd even wedged a branch into the side groove to assure that if a pane broke the window couldn't be raised, he who assured people that there was an afterlife, that faith in Jesus could set you free from life's worry and fear. His bed was unmade and she knew he hadn't been back to the house.
After the service, Mulhoffer, surrounded by trustees, listened to the Deerpath Creek pastor talk about how his congregation used marketing techniques, phoning local residents to decide what services the church would offer, how their business components were thriving, the health club, the day-care center, the mechanic's shop, all of which attracted more people to the Lord. She'd slipped past them and into her dad's office, where he was standing by the window with a cigarette, blowing smoke through the screen, his body as languid as the smoke.
“I am utterly demoralized,” he said. “They don't have to fire me because if I ever have to share the altar again with that jackass, I'll quit.” He couldn't handle competition. Ginger knew that was why her father had chosen the ministry, because it kept him above the fray of the free market. And too, he preferred dealing with women and children; other men always made him nervous. Exhausted, he was probably napping on his office floor now, dreaming of the Latin mass or Bonhoeffer's plot to assassinate Hitler.
Up close, the sodden branch spilled wood pulp, and his bed reeked a little. Ginger knew he hadn't changed his sheets in weeks. She worried that like Christ, her father would allow brutish and ignorant people to hurt him or that he'd take martyrdom to the extreme and harm himself. He'd seen enough suicides: fat Mr. Reinholt electrified by a clock radio in his own tub, and the German lady who'd used her son's BB gun to shoot herself in the corner of the eye. Just this summer a teenager hung himself with an electrical cord off a beam in his basement. There was something contagious about suicide, like those kids who gassed themselves in Bergen. Her father's faith might not sustain him against the congregation's endless onslaught of private misery. He'd even admitted that sometimes he felt like a human trash receptacle and that he knew his flock was roaming away.
A lady in pink sweatpants on her way home from aerobics at the health club picked Ginger up along the highway. Her car smelled like cream as it just begins to curdle, and the woman talked about her word-processing job at the insurance company and how her husband, a guy named Chuck, had recently found the Lord.
I didn't know he was lost, Ginger thought as the lady pulled up in front of the welfare hotel downtown.
“This is no place for a girl like you,” the lady said. Ginger assured her she was meeting her father at his church down the block and that it wasn't dangerous down here.
“No more than the mall parking lot where that woman got molested,” she said.
The lady looked skeptical but unlocked the doors and let Ginger off at the curb.
Staring up at the brick hotel filled with dim blue light as if the moon lingered inside, she saw that only one window on the second floor was illuminated by a dangling bulb. A man in a wrinkled white shirt and dark dress pants stood by the window. Like her father in his robes and the old Germans from the church downtown, the man looked antiquated and exhausted by his connection to history, so different than the pastel suburban types sprung fully formed out of the mall's water fountains. Ginger figured something catastrophic had happened to the man, something that ended his life's narrative, that trapped him in a time out of time, somewhere around 1958.
Next to the hotel was the wig shop run by a Chinese man who smoked opium and did tattooing on the side. Before the accident Ted saved for a little red dragon with sapphire blue eyes. Styrofoam heads with starchy, flamboyant wigs peopled the storefront window. Usually there were several men who stood outside the liquor store, but because of blue laws the place was closed until Monday morning. A red-faced guy in a windbreaker sat in an old Pontiac parked out front and flashed Ginger a cynical smile that set off his hacking smoker's cough.
She felt like she was walking on a movie set, that the buildings were one-dimensional. It was that creeping Disneyland feeling again, where everything was make-believe, one attraction as false and inauthentic as the next.
In the parking lot, adjacent to the liquor store and across from the church, lay a dead pigeon and a bunch of rusty engine parts. A fire blazed up out of a chemical canister and two round-shouldered men in hooded sweatshirts passed a quart of beer between them. A couple of naked dolls hung in the bushes under the boarded-up windows of the church; hair cropped with blunt children's scissors, their fat bellies streaked with mud. Below the arch of headless angels, the red doors were padlocked and so she walked around to the side door, where graffiti tags spread over the gray stone. Ginger swung the side door open, saw the light on in the hallway and her father's black raincoat thrown over the radiator. She glanced into his old office, where an open box of bulletins and an ancient carbon copier lay in the middle of the floor. She climbed the stairs to the choir loft, narrow and smelling like oiled wood. The angle of the curve always reminded her of the spiral stairs to fairy tale towers. Somebody lived up here. A blanket was folded over a pew and a paper plate of chicken bones balanced on the organ keyboard. Ginger tiptoed to the railing and looked over at her father standing alone in the light of a single candle.
The silver cross was gone, as were the tall candleholders and the red glass eternal flame. The slab of marble that served as the altar table and the cherry-wood carvings of the apostles had been ripped out. Everything was sold to pay the new church's mortgage. Her father spread his black shirt out so the dark sleeves hung over the raw wood. He stood in his white T-shirt. The tiny glass decanter of red wine and the tin of communion wafers sat ceremoniously on the black fabric. His lips moved silently as he held up a round wafer, broke it, and offered half to the wall. Ginger tipped back on her heels to see that he'd taped up Sandy's school picture and was now pretending to make her eat. Eventually he placed the wafer in his own mouth and picked up the silver chalice, offering it first to God and then to Sandy's lips. Ginger sunk her fingernails into the fat of her palm as she watched him drink from the cup, then place it carefully back with the other implements, shiny and strange in the candlelight, as the innards of a freshly killed cat.
As she came around the side of the church Ginger lost her footing on the weed-ridden sidewalk. In the lot across the street she saw Sandy Patrick hovering between two men, her blurry figure flittering among orange flames. Pale and insubstantial as an angel, Sandy wore her mother's oversized raincoat and a pair of electric blue pumps. Foundation streaked down her neck, silver eye shadow glittered under her brow, and on each cheek was a heavy spot of sparkling rouge. One of the men laughed, the girl said something, and Ginger recognized her voice from the hippie's house and from Steve's apartment.