softy stuff,” Cherry said. “It’s this or jail time, boy, which do you prefer? No one here in Peaches is gonna care a thing about it long as you’re married up nice under the hand of God.”
“Is this real?” he said to me.
“Strip it down, young man,” Cherry said. “Time to get saved.”
I looked at Cherry. “What are you doing?”
“I was sitting here thinking, now what’s in this for me? Then I saw a-clear. ’Bout time this old Cherry brings a new convert to Vern. Imagine the pennies in my heaven jar.”
Stringy looked at me. He touched my stomach. “I thought you were eighteen,” he said loudly, as if to some hidden recorder.
“I need me a man of sin,” I told her. “Not a saved man.”
“You don’t comply, girly,” Cherry snarled in my ear, “and I’ll call Vern up right now and tell him the truth easy as pie.” She looked him up and down. “Saved or not,” she said, “he don’t amount to a hill of beans. Vern won’t want that baby.”
“I’m gonna be a daddy,” Stringy said, his own world swirling and blinding him.
I nodded and hugged him and he slowly pulled his shirt off and stripped down to his black boxers.
“You taking those to heaven with you?” Cherry asked, prodding the elastic on his shorts with the cane. “Get naked. We ain’t got time to pussyfoot around. Sooner we get the two of you married, the better off that child will be and we can put this whole mess behind us.”
She filled the tub with several liters of soda and Stringy got in. Cherry stirred the liquid around him with her cane, speaking in her heavenly tongue. Click click rhombus a dadadadadad. Stringy’s soft penis bobbed in the brown soda. There were tears pooling in his closed eyes. His body began to shiver, spirit moving.
“Out demons!” Cherry screamed, and she banged the cupboards with the cane so the room shook. I sat on the toilet and peeled my cuticles until they bled. I didn’t know anything about him at all. Maybe he had been in a gang. Maybe those girls at Tent City were right to warn me.
“This is Stringy, and he comes to you today to be baptized into Gifts of the Spirit, may he heed your heavenly command and discard his ways of sin,” Cherry said. “Do you accept our Papa God into your heart for all of your days and submit to the hand of the church?”
I leaned in and watched him. This was always the best part. Transformation was a physical thing, I’d seen it before and I wondered if it would still be possible to my new critical eye. But here it was: Stringy looked tormented. He writhed around and pulled at his own skin like it was a suit he wanted to take off. Then there was a stillness. Moonlight shone in through the small window and made everything glow. Cherry looked at me. “He breathing?” she said, just as Stringy sat up gasping and choking for air. “I saw God!” he screamed. His eyes were electric and his neck veins bulged. “He said he was my own daddy! I never had a daddy and now I do!”
We cloaked him in a Virginia Slims beach towel and walked him naked to the front yard, where I stood next to him under a falling-down archway that used to have flowers growing over the top of it when Grampa was alive, and Cherry brought out my mother’s old Children’s Illustrated Bible and I held Stringy’s sticky hands. With his eyes still closed, she married us before God, and we said, I do.
He fell asleep on the baby mattress, his body a small ball. Now it was his bed, too, Cherry said, for we were made one in front of God.
I lay next to him and poked him awake. “You really see God?” I asked.
He grunted. “I’m hungover as fuck. I didn’t see no God.”
I crept to the bathroom and lay in the sticky tub and read. When I read it seemed time could stop. It seemed perhaps my life was just another book I was in and it was anyone’s guess what the real life was. Was Stringy saved or not? It wouldn’t matter, I decided. Either way we had defied Vern’s plan. He didn’t want us to be families, and somehow I’d convinced everyone that was what we were. I read some more. Nothing could soothe me this very way but books.