Black Jesus.

Simone Felice.

When Black Jesus came home from war a big pair of Stevie Wonder sungla.s.ses hung on his face. Not because they made him look cool. That wasn't it. They gave him the gla.s.ses to hide the wreck the little plastic bomb had made of his eyes. He fought in Baghdad. He fought in Sadr City and out along the river and down all the bad roads in between. He fought in the Red Zone. He fought in the Green Zone. But most of all he fought the voice inside that whispered, Boy, you don't belong.

All through the night his fat mom Debbie drove south to the Marine Corps Air Station in her battered Chrysler wagon. Light rain on the roads. Memorial Day. After she signed her name on a clipboard and showed ID, they led her down the hall and into a room where a kid sat in a chair by the window, his seared head turned to face the gla.s.s where the cold sun he won't see again fell like a coin. That's when she came to him and touched his pale hair and said, 'Who did this to you?'

'Mom?'

'I'm right here.'

'I wanna go home.'

'I know you do, pumpkin. I know you do.'

Driving back up the New York State Thruway in the dark, one loose headlight dancing on the road before them, she tunes the radio awhile till she finds her station. Soft hits, yesterday's favorites. Islands in the stream, that is what we are, no one in between, how could we be wrong, sail away with me to another world and we rely on each other, ah ha, from one lover to another, ah ha.

She's doing 54 miles an hour. All the signs they pa.s.s say 65 since they raised the speed limit twenty years ago, but she doesn't care. Debbie's got her own way of doing things. Everybody howls past the Chrysler tonight. The radio's low and easy, and for the life of her she can't keep her eyes on the road because she can't keep her eyes off the boy right here in the musty seat beside her, so rigid and thin in his soldier's best. So young. So haunted and real. Now they're pa.s.sing Exit 17. Now she's got a hold of his hand.

'Lot's changed since you been away, Lionel.'

He says nothing. Then he says, 'Like what?'

'Oh, I don't know.'

'Why'd you say it then?'

She looks at his face. Then she looks at the road. After a while she says, 'There's a couple things I forgot to tell you on the phone.'

'Forgot?'

'Yeah.'

'Okay, so tell me now.'

'I burnt our house down.'

'What?'

'Our house.'

'It's a trailer, Ma.'

'Our home. I burnt our home down.'

'By accident?'

'Yes by accident.'

'I don't believe it,' he says, his dark gla.s.ses fixed on her now.

'How come?'

''Cause I know you, Ma. You're a hustler. You're a stone-cold pimp.'

'Lionel!'

'What?'

'Where'd you learn a thing like that?'

'I don't know. Over there. Guys.'

'What a thing to call your mother! That ain't the way I raised you, is it? Hearin' you talk like that makes me wanna s.h.i.t in a bag and punch it.'

'Just tell me what happened.'

Unable to kill the little smile dawning at the corners of her mouth, the big woman breathes and glues her knee to the bottom of the steering wheel. She takes the window-crank with her free hand and twists the window down. She hasn't let go of his hand. She can't. And the cool night air cuts in.

'The Dairy Queen went belly up,' she tells him now above the hoa.r.s.e wind.

'Whatta you mean?'

'Belly up. s.h.i.t the bed.'

'It closed down?'

'I'm afraid so.'

'But I-'

'Shhh. Don't be sad. I know how much you loved going there when you were a kid.'

'What's the DQ got to do with our place?' he says and pulls his hand away.

His mother breathes. After she breathes she says, 'Everything. It's got everything to do with us now, honey.'

He doesn't know what to say to that.

'Lionel? Earth to Lionel?'

'Don't call me that anymore.'

She looks at him with a screwed-up face and says, 'Whatta you mean? It's your name.'

'I'm Black Jesus now.'

'Excuse me?'

'Black Jesus. It's what they call me.'

'Who?'

'The guys in my squad.'

'Why?'

'I guess 'cause I'm so white. And 'cause my last name's White. And 'cause I was born on Christmas Day.'

'I don't get it.'

'One of the guys' dads was a Georgia preacher. Told him all kinds of crazy s.h.i.t. Jesus married a hooker. Jesus was really a black man. s.h.i.t like that.'

'Nice.'

'It's called sarcasm, Ma. One time they had me stand on a oil barrel and hold my arms out like a scarecrow and-'

'They teased you?'

'They didn't mean nothin' by it. It was just their way of-'

A bird hits the windshield. The noise makes Lionel gasp and shake.

'What's that?' He needs to know, his fingers clamped tight to the corners of the seat now, his spine pressed against the imitation leather.

Debbie doesn't answer. Most of the bird went careening off the gla.s.s, but not all. What looks like it might be part of the head remains. An eye. Black feathers and paper-thin bone like a Chinese fan. Blood running in a fine, bright rivulet down the windshield. She watches it run, off course like the picture she's tried to make of their life together. And as she follows its slant movements down to where the wipers lie sleeping, she thinks, Lie to him, Debbie. Hasn't he tasted enough blood?

Again he asks his mother what it was that made the sound.

'Nothing,' she says and pulls the handle for the wiper fluid and follows the bloodied wipers with her eyes, side to side as they whine and dance away the last of the bird.

It's grown cold in the Chrysler. The soldier shivers. Debbie rolls the window back up. In the distance she sees a car by the roadside with its hazards blinking red. She thinks of her toolbox in the trunk, her tire iron, her jack. Drawing near, she sees they've got the hood up. Thin smoke rising. Ten to one it's the radiator. Maybe she ought to stop and lend a hand. Not tonight. Tonight she's got to get her baby home.

Pa.s.sing Exit 19, she draws a slow breath and says, 'Not everything burnt.'

He hears this and says, 'Like what?'

'Oh, I don't know. Like your Babar, for instance.'

The soldier keeps a poker face. Debbie turns her head to see how he's taken the news, a pirate's smile on her mouth.

A mile marker later he's asking, 'You went in after him?'

'Not exactly.'

'Firemen did?'

'Mmmmmmm, no.'

'Stop messin' with me, Ma.'

'I took him out the morning of.'

'Morning of what?'

'Day the house burnt up.'

'Trailer.'

'Home.'

'Not anymore.'

'Okay, I got him off your bed. Took a drive to the lake. Came back and the fire truck was in the driveway screamin' like a G.o.dd.a.m.n banshee. Neighbors gawkin'. Black smoke. Just like the movies. Stunk to high heaven but I couldn't help thinkin' it was kinda pretty, the smoke and fire and all.'

'Where's he now?'

'Babar?'

'Yeah.'

'Safe and sound.'

'Where at?'

'You'll see,' she says and pinches herself. What a wicked thing to say.

They drive the dark Thruway on until a sign for 'Exit 21: Catskill/Gay Paris/Cairo' looms loveless and plain in the headlights, an air of extraordinary permanence about its pose, like it wants you to think it's been here since before the trees. And you better believe it'll be leaning just the same when there's n.o.body left to ride these broken yellow lines home to nowhere.

She pays the toll lady with a fistful of nickels and two soft hits later they're idling hand in hand in the parking lot of the desperate everlasting summer afternoon she's dreamt up for them. Sad thing is n.o.body told her yesterday's not for sale. Not for a whole trailer full of insurance checks. Not for a thousand fishy kitchen fires. Yesterday's a dead bird. No calling it back.

Waddling around the hot hood with her boy's duffle bag over her shoulder, Debbie helps him from the car and takes him by the arm and leads him through the clean night air to the front door. Here they stand breathing. Wind in the trees. Nice moon. Silent, their poor little town. Smell of pine and garbage. They breathe and wait. One breath more. Then she touches the cool k.n.o.b and turns it and draws him inside.

Inside smells strange. Like ten thousand days of onion rings and ketchup's stale ghost. Cleaning product. Watered-down Mountain Dew. Rainbow sprinkles. Dead freezer. Dead laughter. Faint smell of milk gone bad but perfect somehow, prehistoric and sweet in a desperate sense. In this heady air he sways, feels his mother move in the dark. Listens as the heel of her hand hits the lights. Hears the lights tremble on in this empty place, hoping maybe they'll reach him this time. No dice.

Debbie'd had some kind of little speech planned for just this moment. She wanted to tell him he was all that mattered to her. Nothing else. That come what may she'd be his shelter, his faithful one, his eyes if he'd let her. That this world is mean and she's sorry she brought him into it but she had to because of dreams she had when she was a girl. She'd wanted to tell him she never knew his father's name because she'd hushed the man when he tried to tell it in his hot car so that all the man would ever be was a voice and a smell and a heaviness in the dark. She'd had it in her head all this time the way she'd usher her boy home from the h.e.l.l he'd lived, into the one place on earth she'd be sure he could smile. But the second she hit the switches and found him standing there in the hard light with that look on his face, all the ceremony fell out of her like a wet dead foal to the ground. So she keeps quiet. And suffers the sudden desert in her throat. And waits for him to open his mouth.

When he does, 'This is Dairy Queen,' he says.

'I did it for you.'

'We live here now?'

'Yeah. We live here now.'