“That’s your van waiting out on Main Street,” Naomi said. “Maybe you’d better pack up and get ready to go.”
“I’m all ready to go. All I have to do is leave. I just wish I could make you listen. I like you, Naomi. You’ve been good to me. I don’t want to see you go to Hell.”
There is no such thing as hell, Naomi wanted to say. Instead, she stood up and began shooing Beatrix in the direction of the door.
“You’d better hurry now, Beatrix. You don’t want to miss your ride and get stuck out here with me.”
“I wouldn’t mind being stuck out here with you if I knew I could convert you. I’d do anything to convert you.”
“Go.”
Naomi nearly shoved Beatrix out the door and onto the second-floor landing. Beatrix moved with stubborn leadenness, a prehistoric, dinosaur-sized donkey with a mind of her own.
“Go,” Naomi said again.
Beatrix went down a few steps and looked back sorrowfully. Naomi thought she was going to cry.
“Please,” Beatrix said. “Please think about it. You don’t know what will happen to you, if you don’t get born again. You don’t understand. And the forces of good always need help. They really do.”
“You’d better hurry, Beatrix. It’s getting later by the second.”
Beatrix hesitated, a mass of fat and bone. Then she turned and began to head on down the stairs again.
A few seconds later, looking down on Main Street, Naomi saw Beatrix come through the library’s front door and make her way to a big white van. The van had a gold cross painted on the side of it and the words JESUS CHRIST IS LORD painted in red. The side door slid open and hands reached out. Beatrix hoisted herself upward and disappeared into the dark.
The cigarette in Naomi’s hand had burned down to the filter again. She had forgotten she was even holding it. She pitched the butt into the wastebasket and sat down. Her computer screen was blank. Thunder and lightning had finally put her system down.
Hello! Naomi thought. This is your class correspondent, Naomi Brent!
She put her hand up to the gold chain she wore around her neck and fingered it. She had been given the chain, and the plain gold cross that hung on it, when she was twelve. She had worn it ever since without thinking about it. Half the time these days, she didn’t even realize it was there.
Well, I realize it now, Naomi thought.
She put her hands around to the back of her neck and undid the little spring clasp.
Then she dumped the whole thing, chain and cross, into the wastepaper basket.
7
BOBBY MARSH WAS SUPPOSED to take the church van out to Dedham Corners, pick up old Mrs. Michaels and her husband, and drive on back to the church on the Hartford Road. This was the little green van, the wimpy one, not the big white one with JESUS IS LORD painted on the side of it. Bobby used to drive bigger trucks than that van could ever be, but he’d had a few accidents, and the Reverend Holborn didn’t like to trust him. Nobody trusted Bobby much anymore. He knew that. Less than five years ago; when he’d still been in high school, he’d been a real comer. He hadn’t been “college material,” as the guidance counselors liked to put it. He hadn’t been one of those guys who was being packaged like a gift sausage and sent away to Vanderbilt or Chapel Hill. Even so, he’d had a lot going for him. Bobby could remember, with perfect clarity, all those late fall afternoons of his senior year. The rich girls sitting in their open-topped cars in the parking lot of the Burger King out at Dedham Corners. The sharp knobs of the hooks on Jerri Lynn Carver’s bra as they wrestled in the back of Bobby’s father’s Ford pickup, parked in the trees out on Caravansary Lane. Bobby Marsh had been a good-looking boy at seventeen, good-looking enough so that even girls like Jerri Lynn Carver, who was going away to Sweet Briar after graduation, wanted to make out with him. In the years since all that had ended, Bobby had decided that there wasn’t much else those girls had wanted of him. He still saw them sometimes, on Main Street, when they were at home visiting their parents. They had big gold wedding rings on their fingers and the kinds of clothes you saw in magazines and they pretended that they didn’t really know him. That was why he had come to trust so much in the Lord. There didn’t seem to be anyone else he could trust in. Once his life had been all sex, sex, sex, and it had made him miserable. Now his life was all praise, praise, praise, and it made him—
—angry.
Dedham Corners was right ahead, a big splash of concrete and asphalt and mock-brick facing. When Bobby Marsh was a small boy, Dedham Corners hadn’t been anything but a wide place in the road with a gas station. Now there were three gas stations, a Burger King and a McDonald’s, a 7-Eleven, a Kmart, and more. All the plate glass windows were boarded up, but all the lights were blazing. The sky was dark and the rain was coming down in slanting assaults, like electrons bombarding an atom in one of those educational in-school movies. Bobby couldn’t remember what had made him so angry. Maybe it was everything and nothing at all. All he knew was that ever since he had joined the Reverend Holborn’s church, ever since he had met Ginny and married her, something inside him had been bubbling up, getting ready to explode. It was crazy, really. He loved Ginny. He loved Tiffany. He loved the church, too, which had given him the only sane life he had ever known. Bobby Marsh knew that his growing up would have been much different—much better—if either of his parents had managed to get religion. Instead, his father got beer and his mother got laundry. His father worked until he was so drunk they had to fire him. His mother worked without ceasing, like a slave woman, carrying big plastic baskets full of dirty clothes up and down the side streets of Bellerton, driving out to Conover to buy her own clothes at the second-hand stores. They had a small place on a dirt road far out in the country, away from the sea. The roof leaked and the porch sagged and the yard was littered with pieces of dead machines. Jerri Lynn Carver’s family had a big Greek revival right in the middle of town. Suellen Chambers’s family had a split-level in a new subdivision right off the highway. It had all been rigged from the beginning, and Bobby Marsh knew it. He just didn’t know what to do about it.