by Ann Stewart McBee
Chelsea’s limp is too perfect. It pulls her evenly to one side then the other, her little pumps clacking in a nice rhythm on the boards. I tell her that a disease called Legg Calvé Perthes has to cause an uneven, ugly limp. She stops, closes her eyes, and I know she is imagining a stabbing pain in her hip. I hear her say, I can’t be afraid of ugly in her head.
The cicadas in Ohio have already shuffled out of their holes here in Ohio. They are especially loud in the locust tree that grows next to the porch, underneath Chelsea’s bedroom window. Some people call cicadas locusts, but that’s not where the name of the tree comes from. It’s named after the locusts John the Baptist ate. There are five perfectly round holes in the dirt around the roots. Tiny little sets of brown armor, split down the back, cling to the bark with tiny little hooks. There are lot of little branches growing out of the trunk too. Those are called volunteers. Chelsea showed me how to use them like steps to get to the bigger branches up high – the ones that lead right to her window.
Chelsea is what Pastor Pete calls a plant. She’s perfect for the job, because she’s a good actor, and pretty, but not too pretty. She’s not made up, and she doesn’t tease and spray her hair stiff. She has long unruly hair that she pulls away from her face and pins on top of her head with a barrette. It’s a kind of temperamental blonde – some of it is almost brown, some of it looks like corn silk. On the outside, she looks just like you imagine a good Christian girl does. Her inside is something very different, but when she’s mimicking degenerative hip disease in front of that crowd, you can’t tell. Her white-knuckle praying looks real. Her tears look real.
The screen door squeals open, bending the refrain of the bugs and then breaking it when it bangs back shut. That’s the kind of rhythm Chelsea should be going for, I think. Her mom, all home-perm and pleated pants, brings us Diet Cokes and chocolate covered peanut butter balls in a crystal bowl. Chelsea sits a Christian length away from me on the porch swing, as her mom tucks one bottle under her arm and opens the other. They are very cold, and immediately start to sweat.
“Just one buckeye now, Chelsea Lynn. The rest are for Sam.”
“Sure, Mom.”
“I mean it.”
“I said okay.” Chelsea looks down, stops the swing with her feet.
“Will you listen to that?” Chelsea’s mom says when the cicadas start their screaming again. “I’m gonna need a pair of ear plugs to sleep.”
“It puts me to sleep actually. It’s like white noise,” Chelsea says.
Her mom ignores her. “Sam, sweetheart, is there anything else I can get you?”
“No thank you,” I say. “I’m fine.” My own words in my head bounce against the cicadas. It feels like static.
“We’re so glad to have you and Pastor Pete with us. You need anything, you let me know, okay?” She leans down and gives me a playful slap on the knee.
“I was going to take Sam to see the garden,” Chelsea says. “Mom’s real proud of her rock garden, huh Mom?”
“That’s a good idea. I’ll let Dad and Pastor Pete know once they’re done.”
When she goes back inside, Chelsea pops a whole peanut butter ball into her mouth, then another – boom. Her distance away from me on the swing becomes less Christian. The cicadas get louder in waves. They tell me what to say.
“So your mom grows rocks. That’s pretty awesome.”
Chelsea licks her fingers and laughs. “That’s not what rock garden means. Come on.”
Of course I know what a rock garden is, but I just follow her quietly off the porch and down a steep-sloping hill, cushy with professionally-mowed grass. At the bottom I see an oval-shaped section of the grass that’s been replaced by a layer of smooth stones, and disrupted by neatly separated azalea and rhododendron bushes and some other plants that look like succulents. Two massively tall cottonwood trees grow right in the middle. We stop at the edge of the oval, and I say something like that’s cool. The cicadas disagree. Throbbing and thrumming, they tell me about shame and anger. They confess they feel guilty about breaking the lock Chelsea’s mom put on the freezer. Chelsea loves mint chip ice cream. It’s her mom’s fault that she fantasizes about cutting the soft parts of her upper thighs off with a cheese knife. She hates the word “chunky.”
“You’re cool,” Chelsea says. “That thing you pulled off at the revival was insane. How did you even do that?”
It’s a secret, say the cicadas. But the truth is I don’t know how I knew about the young guy named Aaron and his ulcer. Or how I knew about the Vietnam vet named Dennis and his nightmares. I don’t know how I knew a lady named Alice had so much pain in her hands she couldn’t knit anymore. I also knew her husband takes all her pain pills, but I didn’t say that. I didn’t say that Aaron mostly prays for his zits to go away. I didn’t mention that Dennis shot a little girl right in the face.
“It just came to me,” I say. “I swear.”
“Don’t do that.”
“But it’s true.”
“Then it’s a miracle. You’re like a real prophet.”
She takes me by the shoulder and turns me to face her, then stands on her tiptoes and kisses me on the mouth. I put my arms around her warm middle, gently, because the cicadas have told me it’s bruised from being pinched – hard. I pry her lips apart with my tongue and feel her teeth open and her tongue unfolding against mine. After a few seconds, she pulls me by the hand into the garden to a place behind the big trees where the house isn’t visible. She leans back against the tree with her hands behind her so her white jeans don’t touch the bark. I step forward and put one hand on her hip, using the other to balance myself against the tree while I kiss her again, long and deep. Her mouth tastes like peanut butter.
There was a guy named Peter Popoff who used to do healing revivals like Pete’s. He didn’t have a partner or use snakes like we do, but he wore a radio transmitter, and after working the crowd for information, his wife would send him messages. This one has a bad knee. That one has crippling back pain. This one has stomach cancer. That one has asthma. When you get people in the spirit, they begin to believe you can heal them, and that’s all it takes. Just some biblical nonsense and a tap to the forehead or the chest. But Peter Popoff was easier to believe, because it seemed to his followers that the Lord spoke to him. Instead, it was his wife. Sometimes, if the ailing faithful was a woman, she’d get jealous, and her messages were nasty. Don’t touch her tits or I’ll cut your dick off!
These holy rollers can be someone completely different behind a closed door. On stage so benevolent and kind. When the tent comes down, danger. You tell me how you did that. You tell me right now, damn you. Pete’s hand clamped down on my neck like the rattlesnake that bit me in Indiana. It was the rattlesnake, I told him, just to stop him from whatever he was about to do. I’ve never taken a beatdown from an adult before, and I was truly scared. He pushed me down to my knees on the floor of the trailer. Pray, he bellowed. You get on your knees and you pray. I don’t really pray, but I’m excellent at pretending. This time I wasn’t pretending. I really prayed for him to calm down. I prayed for the tour to be cancelled.
The tour will never be cancelled now, I realize, as I’m kissing Chelsea against the tree in her mother’s rock garden. Right now, Pete is telling her dad that a miracle has occurred, and the Lord has chosen Samuel Dwyer, son of Donna Lynn, whom the Lord saw fit to bring to him, to be the Lord’s divine answering service. To be truthful, he’s not much of a godly child, but the Lord works through him like nothing I’ve seen. Now he’s asking Chelsea’s dad for money – ten thousand dollars. He’s going to extend the tour out West. Chelsea’s sweet tongue turns bitter in my mouth. I pull away from her.
“We shouldn’t,” I say, even though I want to so, so badly. A boner presses against my zipper, and I’m grateful I have untucked my shirt.
“Yeah we better get back.”
Then I notice that just above her head, a fresh cicada is breaking out of its nymph exoskeleton. Its wings are still folded up, and its body is the color of a lima bean. But its eyes are already flaming red.
“Look,” I say and point. Chelsea turns and looks up. She lets out a little gasp that seems cute to me because of what I know. Chelsea has a kind of epilepsy that started when she was very little. To control the seizures, she took a medication that made her starving all the time. So she got fat. Not morbidly obese, just normal fat. But even when her seizures became less and less frequent, and they could change her medication, it was hard to get thin. She has a taste for sweets that won’t go away, and she’s constantly fearful of the baby fat that’s left. It makes her have terrible thoughts. I myself have thoughts just like that from time to time.
“It’s a sign from God. I know it,” Chelsea says and moves in to take a closer look. “God speaks through the cicadas…can’t you hear it?”
I make a face like I’m listening carefully, but I know it’s nothing to do with God. It’s nature. I know because I did my tenth grade bio project on insect sounds. The cicada has an organ that makes a noise when its muscles pull on it. Energy in, sound waves out. It’s a mating call, and sometimes a distress signal. It means I love you, or it means something is eating me! If the female likes what she hears, she flicks her wings. It sounds like turning a switch. Sometime this evening, a bat will swoop down and gobble up that hatching cicada, because that’s the only reason they exist. Just snacks for birds and bats and the occasional skunk. But Chelsea really believes this is a message. Right now she’s very happy. I want to put my arms around her and congratulate her.
We walk slowly back up the hill, and when I see her dad and Pete on the porch, the cicadas scold me for not staying beneath those trees. Chelsea runs up the steps and dives under her father’s arm. Her dad is also a believer. He’ll cough up the money all right, because he feels guilty for using his daughter to fool folks into believing. But after what happened, he knows it was the right thing to do all along. It’s all a part of the Lord’s plan.
But it’s not a part of my plan. When we leave, I will tell Pete that it was all an act. I met Alice at the picnic. I met Dennis in a restroom. I met Aaron while getting an ice cream. He sold me a mint chip cone. We got to talking. People tell me things, and I listen – that’s all.
Ann Stewart McBee was born in Kalamazoo, Michigan. She graduated with a PhD in creative writing at the University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee. She has published fiction and poetry in The Pinch, Southeast Review, and Prime Number Review, among others. She now teaches English at Des Moines Area Community College.