The reverend and Ginna hold hands while he pilots the minivan around town. A cross dangles from the rearview mirror. Beyond the windows you watch the sunset reflect off the clouds, turning the sky pink and blue. A cotton-candy light. A sky of cold winter branches and telephone wires. Billowing above a front door, there is a banner with the silhouette of The Pastor carrying the cross up a hill against a gold, yellow, and brown sky while dark outlines of his followers watch silently. You can’t turn a corner in town without seeing his name.
You drive the twilight until all but two sack dinners are gone. The reverend and his wife always give you the last two to take home.
Back at the double-wide, you set one of the brown sacks in front of Toby, who’s drawing and telling you about the ghost in the salad words you can never quite make out. He’s wearing both his hearing aids, but his language is still mush-mouthed:
“En dah it stans in feel an watches us.”
Five months home, and you’re starting to pick up the sounds: And Dad, it stands in the field and watches us.
Toby’s seven years old but looks smaller and younger. You’re not sure what he thinks of you. His hearing aids jut from the canals, clipped together around his neck so he doesn’t lose them.
“Where’s Mommy?” you ask. He points to the wall, which means out back of the double-wide in your small lot. You do not have to ask if he’s hungry because when he peers inside the sack his eyes light up, the ghost momentarily forgotten.
Out back, in the glare of the flashlight, you find Raquel covered in blood.
“He’s talking about that ghost again.”
She doesn’t look up from her work. “I know, he spooks me out. Like one of them possessed kids in the old movies.” From a low branch on the maple tree, she’s got an animal hanging by a bungee cord, its feet cut off, and she’s using a fleshing knife to take off the fur, pulling it down the body like a sock. “How was it?”
“ ’Bout what you’d expect. Rev gave me twenty bucks and two sack dinners for my time.”
Raquel pauses and scratches her nose with her forearm, the part that doesn’t have blood on it.
She examines the animal and resumes skinning. “Your mama still coming up Sunday?”
“Far as I know. Think she’ll hit church with us, but I don’t expect her to stay.”
“That’s good.”
Raquel does not indicate which part of this she thinks is good, the staying or the going. While you were away, your mom inserted herself into Raquel’s and Toby’s lives, driving up on her days off to serve as free childcare, throwing in money when she could after they made SNAP impossible. Raquel had needed the help, but you don’t blame her if she’s had enough of your mom at this point. She’s moved up to assistant general manager at Mickey D’s, but the pay bump was insignificant. Once you got out, you promised her you’d be bringing in some money, but now it’s more like you’re just another mouth for her to feed.
“What is that anyway? Coyote?” you ask.
“Stray.”
“A dog?”
“It’s protein, ain’t it? Some scientist wrote this thing that said we should all stop feeding the pets and start eating ’em.” Raquel bops her eyes. “Everyone on the news threw a fit, but I’m like, Not a bad idea. And we can take care of this stray problem to boot.” She finishes pulling the skin and fur free of the animal. It looks like a demon freshly crawled out of hell. “All Toby’s eating anymore is oatmeal and chocolate cake.”
The winds from the east carry the smell of the new petrochemical plant. If a headache had a scent, it would be this.
“I ain’t eating dog.”
“Then eat the oatmeal,” she snaps back.
“Toby’s in there with a sandwich right now.”
Raquel unhooks the dog to lay it on the ground. The butcher knife lies on a sheet of newspaper nearby.
“And what about tomorrow? And the next day?”
“Casey Wheeler and I are going hunting this weekend. There’ll be venison after that.”
“Oh sure, Casey. That country goat.”
She picks up the butcher knife and wags it in the air as she talks.
“You been to the store. We can’t afford to be paying that much for canned soups and beans and SpaghettiOs. The food bank is tapped out every time I go. People stealing all day at work, and the franchisees is expected to pay for armed security now. God forbid I lift a box of nuggets home! Well, I found a solution, so I’ll be putting that solution to work. You got a problem with it, Keeper, you can fuck off back to jail.”
Rather than argue, you stalk around to the front steps. You take a seat on the stoop and wish you had a beer. You can hear Toby has turned on the TV, and for whatever reason he’s watching the news. Across the river, the petrochemical plant glows green and purple and orange from the variety of lights within its guts, a fortress of steel and piping with a winking smokestack rising skyward. It’s uncommonly beautiful even though the smell probably has something to do with Toby’s asthma. You went looking for a job there, of course. “Keeper, they ain’t gonna hire the guy who took the fall for a terrorist attack,” Raquel said, rolling her eyes in that way you hate. You also hate that word. In the end, all you got charged with was trespassing, possession, and trafficking narcotics.
From inside, you hear the heat and timbre of The Pastor’s unmistakable voice rise over the babble.
“… The socialist media calls Love a tyrant, but I call him a coward. Lists are not enough. Walls are not enough. Drones are not enough. Land mines in the desert are a start, but we have to be willing to exert the ultimate punishment for lawbreakers. I’m talking about biblical law. We are witnessing God’s judgment on a sinful world. He has given us the tools, the means, now we must seize these tools and bring about His glory…”
“Toby, turn that shit off!” you yell but then remember he can’t hear you unless you’re beside him. You go inside the trailer, find Toby playing with a toy superhero, not really watching. You take the remote from his hand. He cries out, groping his small fingers for it and babbling in his private language. On the screen, The Pastor rocks on, and the crowd is going bonkers.
“They tell you this is their country, but I’m telling you right now my friends, they are wrong.”
A young woman weeps as she tries to reach out and touch The Pastor’s pant cuff on the stage. He holds his hand high and allows the fury of the rally to swell.
“This is OUR country. And I am your president already.”
You change the channel, and this sends Toby into a tantrum you cannot understand.
You’ve been looking for work since you got out, and the pickings have been slim. First off, you weren’t even sure Raquel would want you to come home. She got evicted from the rental house and couldn’t afford anything but the double-wide at the “nasty end of the lot.” After you were paroled, you went back to Kroger to beg Julian for your old job, which was humiliating and pointless. You struck out at an auto shop, the drive-throughs, every fast-food joint—Raquel couldn’t even get you in at her McDonald’s. Ex-felon, minor celeb around town because you made the national news for a day. You felt like you had both this big scarlet letter on you and nobody could care less about you.
You’d spent the entire first year in prison not believing that you ended up back there, this time for a stint you couldn’t just sleep through. Fifteen years was a different beast. The new correctional facility in Chillicothe looked state-of-the-art, but it was the same as when you were in Marion, maybe with a better coat of paint. On the grounds there were the squat cement boxes, a few annex trailers, and sheds with corrugated metal roofs; two wraparound chain-link fences topped with razor wire, and beyond those, the fields and tough industry in every direction. In the distance, you could see the peak of a chapel. Inside, nice white walls, orange-tiled floors, and the Prion corporate logo on everything. You sank into the day-to-day routine, learning how to avoid trouble in the yard, how much money it took to get anything decent from the canteen or send a message with JPay, how to stitch an ammunition belt for the US Army, which is what they had you doing in the garment factory. Cliques determined by race, geography, and severity of punishment. You kept your head down. You didn’t make friends. Five months in, another inmate on your cell block cut his wrists open with a coil of bedspring he’d somehow jimmied free. The guy survived and was transferred to a psych unit. His lesson taunted you, especially when you passed his cell with the carnal, salty scent of lingering blood. Raquel brought Toby to visit once to tell you he was hearing impaired. Not to mention the asthma. How he panicked when he couldn’t breathe. You wanted to be strong because your boy is so fragile. You first had to convince yourself you were even capable of such a thing. So when the opportunity to reduce your sentence came along you had to take it. You had to.