JESUS CURED MY HERPES

AFTER I GOT KICKED OUT of The Code, I started driving out to the airport at night to watch the planes take off. I’d find an empty side street and sit on the hood of my car for hours. Sometimes the planes passed right over me, so low I could almost touch them. You could watch them for several minutes before they disappeared into the clouds overhead. There were always clouds over the airport.

There were other people out there who watched the planes, too. Most just parked on the street like me, but there was one group of men that met in front of a twenty-four hour garage. They were always there whenever I drove past, no matter what time of night. Five or six of them sitting in a circle of lawn chairs at the edge of the garage’s parking lot, staring up at the sky and drinking beer from cans.

Once, I parked behind their row of trucks and wandered over to the edge of their circle. “Mind if I join you?” I asked. They all looked at me for a moment and then made noises like this was okay with them. One of them reached into a cooler at his feet and pulled out a beer, tossed it to me.

They didn’t say anything at all as they waited for the next plane to pass, just kept staring up at the empty sky. I looked over at the garage. The doors were open, and inside I could see two men in grease-stained overalls bent over the engine of a car. One man would touch a part of the engine and shake his head, then the other man would do the same with another part of the engine. In the doorway of the garage, a woman was talking on a cell phone. “You don’t understand,” I heard her say, “I’m stuck here. I can’t go anywhere.”

A plane passed a couple of hundred feet over us just then. Over the noise of its engines, the man beside me shouted, “DC-10. Series 10. General Electric CF6-6 engines. 40,000 pounds takeoff thrust. Two hundred and fifty passengers, three cockpit crew. First flight made in 1970.” The other men nodded and lifted their beer cans to their lips. Nobody said anything else until the next plane came. Then the man next to the first one who had spoken said, “737. 800 model. General Electric CFM56-7B engines. 27,300 pounds thrust. 189 passengers. First launched in 1965.” They all nodded again and drank some more.

One of the mechanics got behind the wheel of the car and tried to start it up. The engine turned over and over but didn’t catch. The other mechanic looked at the woman and shook his head. “I don’t even know where I am,” she shouted into her phone.

The men went around the circle until it was my turn. When the next plane passed overhead, they all looked at me. I looked up at the plane. “United Airlines,” I said. “Probably going to New York.” They kept staring at me until the next plane came, but even then they didn’t say anything. They didn’t speak again the whole time I was there, and they didn’t offer me another beer after I finished the first one.

In the garage, one of the mechanics closed the hood of the car. The other one went over to a coffeemaker in the corner and poured himself a cup. The woman put her cell phone in her purse and looked up and down the street. Then she went over to the car and sat behind the wheel, started turning over the engine herself. It made a slow grinding noise, like the engine was tearing itself apart underneath the hood. I could hear it all the way back to my car.

AND ONCE I SAW a plane struck by lightning. It was only a hundred feet or so off the ground when the lightning hit it, so quickly that all I really saw was the afterimage. There were two bolts — one came down from the clouds, while the other rose up from the wet ground — and they met somewhere in the fuselage. I couldn’t see anything but white for a moment because of the lightning, but I felt the vibration from the thunder where I sat on the car.

I waited for the plane to fall from the sky but it didn’t. Instead, it kept on rising into the sky, until it disappeared in the clouds. It was as if the lightning had never happened, or I had imagined it. For a moment I thought that perhaps everyone on board was dead, that the lightning had electrocuted them all in their seats, and that the plane was flying on its own now. I had a vision of it continuing to rise up into the sky, perhaps all the way out of the atmosphere and into orbit, everyone inside melted into their seats.

When I went home later that night, I turned on the television and watched for any stories about the plane. There was nothing, though, just a few brief sound bites about the salvage operation of a different plane that had gone down in the ocean a few days earlier. Nothing at all about any planes being struck by lightning. It was as if I were the only person in the world who even knew it had happened.

ANOTHER TIME I STOPPED at a twenty-four-hour coffee shop by the airport. It was surrounded by overgrown grass fields, and empty coffee cups and plastic bags filled the ditches at the side of the road. There was a tractor trailer with a cargo of live cows in the parking lot. A couple of them turned their heads to look at me through the slats of the trailer as I went inside, but the others just kept on staring at each other.

The driver of the truck was inside, looking at a road map spread out across the counter. He was following lines on it with a yellowed finger and shaking his head. “I just have no idea how I got here,” he kept saying to the woman behind the counter, who wasn’t paying him any attention at all.

I sat down with a coffee by the window, where I could still see the lights of the planes taking off from one of the runways. Every now and then one of the cows outside made a long, low noise, like the sound of a car horn slowed down. The truck driver pushed his hat around on his head each time he heard the noise, but he didn’t look up from the map.

After a while, two women and a man all wearing the same kind of T-shirt came in. The T-shirt was black with the word BLESSING in red across their breasts. I watched their reflections in the glass as they went up to the counter.

“Last night I started shaking all over in bed,” one of the women was saying. “It went on for ten minutes. I know because I was looking right at the clock the whole time. But I couldn’t stop it.”

“I had that electrical feeling myself,” the other woman said. “You know, all the hair on my body was standing on end.”

“It was like someone else had taken me over.”

“It actually gave my cat a shock when he came over to see what was going on. He ran into the other room and wouldn’t come near me all day today.”

“I never felt a thing,” the man said. “Haven’t for a long time.” He was going bald, and the whole time they were in there he kept pushing the hair he had over the bald spot.

“Stanley tried to climb on top of me during the middle of it,” the first woman said, shaking her head. “He pretended he was in a rapture and couldn’t control himself.”

“That man,” the other woman laughed.

The first woman bought an eclair and bit off one end, began sucking the cream out from inside. “But don’t you worry,” she said through a mouthful of cream, “I put a stop to that soon enough.”

“I’d like to feel it again,” the man said, frowning into his coffee. “Just one more time.”

Both women laid their hands on him. “Maybe tonight.”

“Yes, maybe tonight.”

“Maybe,” the man said, but he kept on staring into his coffee.

“Jesus Christ,” the truck driver said, slamming his hand down on the map. “This doesn’t make any sense at all.” He stared out at his truck and sighed.

The people in the T-shirts looked away from him and didn’t say anything else until they were on their way out. One of the women stopped at my table and bent over me. “I saw you watching us,” she said.

“I wasn’t,” I told her.

“Would you like to talk about God?” she asked me.

“I don’t think so,” I said.

“Well, would you like to see him then?”

I WENT OUT with them to their car. The cows were pushing against each other in the back of the truck now, rocking the trailer from side to side. The woman who’d spoken to me said, “They feel it too.”

“Feel what?” I asked.

“You’ll see,” she said, and for some reason the others laughed.

I left my car in the lot and got in the back of theirs, along with the man, who introduced himself as Hank. The woman who’d talked to me first said her name was Helen. The other woman, the driver, never introduced herself at all.

We went about a mile or so down the street, to a building that looked as if it had once been a warehouse, or maybe a factory. The parking lot was already full of cars, and the front doors of the place were wide open, lighting up a crowd of people standing outside. “Looks like the non-believers are out again tonight,” Hank said.

“Atheists?” I asked, looking at the crowd. They held signs in their hands and were shouting at everyone that went inside.

“Oh no, they’re Christians,” he said.

“I thought you were the Christians.”

“We are,” he said.

“I don’t understand,” I told him.

“They’re just jealous,” Helen said from the front seat. “The Lord doesn’t touch them like he touches us.”

“I’m not so sure about this,” I told them, but I got out of the car and followed them to the building anyway.

The people outside all wore the same kind of T-shirt, too, but this one was white with a red cross on the front. Other than that, these people didn’t look any different from the people I was with. Their signs said things like JESUS DIED FOR YOUR SINS, NOT YOUR SEX and GOD DOESN’T BARK. “Satan!” they shouted at us as we approached. “Satan! Satan! Satan!” And one of them, a woman who looked a little like my dead grandmother, sprayed me with a Windex bottle.

“Hey hey hey,” I said, but Hank took me by the arm and guided me through the doors. “Don’t worry about it,” he said. “It’s only holy water.”

“Do that again and I’ll press charges,” I shouted back at her over my shoulder.

The inside of the building was a large room filled with folding metal chairs. They were spread out in loose rows, with plenty of room between the rows and with a large aisle running down the middle of the room. The aisle ended in a large open area on the other side of the room, over which a giant wooden crucifix and carved Christ hung from the wall. Christ’s body was all contorted, like he was having a seizure, and he looked like he was laughing or screaming, I couldn’t tell which.

We sat at the back of the room, because most of the seats were already taken. There were other people wearing the BLESSING T-shirt here, but most were dressed in normal clothes or what I imagined passed for normal clothes with this crowd. Everyone was smiling and talking to the people around them. It looked like the sort of religious rally you see on television, but I’d always thought those things were staged.

“Good turnout,” said the woman whose name I still didn’t know. “God must have called a lot of people.”

“It’s going to be a special night,” Helen said, nodding her head.

Hank didn’t say anything at all, just stared at the Christ hanging over the stage.

After some time, a couple of the men in the audience got up and closed the doors. I heard one last “Satan!” from outside. Everyone seemed to stop talking and look at the Christ at the same time.

I could hear my own breathing, my heartbeat in my ears. Then the women around me began murmuring softly, too low for me to catch the words. Soon everyone in the crowd seemed to be talking softly to themselves, even Hank — everyone but me, that is. I kept waiting for something else to happen. I was getting hungry.

Then a woman stood up in the middle of the room, knocking her chair to the ground. “Jesus cured my herpes!” she shrieked. She pushed her way to the end of her row and ran down the aisle. Once she was underneath the Christ on the wall, she fell to the ground and started rolling around on the carpet, still shrieking the same words over and over. “Jesus cured my herpes! Jesus cured my herpes!”

I looked around the room, but nobody else seemed to be paying much attention to this. A pair of older ladies near me were even smiling and nodding at the woman rolling around on the ground.

A man in a suit near the front stood up and shouted, “Jesus turned my cavities into gold teeth!” He fell to his knees and started kissing the carpet. There were murmurs of “Hallelujah” and “Amen” from the crowd. A few rows in front of us, another man, this one in a post-office uniform, stood up and started weeping loudly.

“I think I’m going to leave,” I said, but Hank put his hand on my leg. “Not yet,” he said. “Not until you feel it.”

“Feel what?” I asked.

“Just wait,” he said. He didn’t take his hand off my leg.

The murmuring in the crowd grew louder, and now I could hear some of what the people around me were saying. “Please, God, take me,” a woman sitting directly in front of me whispered. “Just one more year,” a man a few chairs down said. “Make it stop eating me,” someone behind me said.

Then, as if on cue, a dozen or so people scattered around the room all stood up at once and began shrieking gibberish at the people around them. They acted as if they were saying things that made sense, but I couldn’t understand a word of it. The entire front row of people fell to the floor and started convulsing there, as if they were all having simultaneous fits.

I watched it spread through the crowd, like some sort of virus. People ran hollering to the front of the room, where they fell to the ground and barked like dogs. Others writhed up and down the aisle like snakes. A man tore open his shirt, and the woman sitting beside him began kissing his breast, pecking at it like a bird. The air filled with screams and cries and hysterical laughter.

Beside me, Helen began laughing and fell to the floor. She caught hold of one of my pant legs with a hand and tried to pull me down after her, but I hung on to the chair. A few seconds later, Hank slowly slid off his chair, then started shaking and convulsing on the ground. His hand was still on my other leg, stroking up and down it. I kept pushing it away, but he kept putting it back. All around us, people were falling to the floor, touching each other all over, screaming hysterically.

Then the woman whose name I didn’t know laid her hands on either side of my head and kissed me on the lips. I could taste the cream from the eclair, could smell her perfume. I went to push her away, but it was too late. It was as if someone else had taken control of my body.

I fell to the floor and felt myself shaking, flopping around like I’d been Tazered. My hands were everywhere on Helen and Hank’s bodies, their hands everywhere on mine. The woman whose name I didn’t know crowed like a rooster. I tried to scream but could only manage a long sigh. My whole body was burning.

Later, when I was away from that place and back in my car, I passed off what happened there as some sort of crowd hysteria. I’d read about that sort of thing before, how a few people in a crowd could cause everyone else to act the same way. It wasn’t God, I decided, but some sort of psychological thing. Or maybe some sort of chemical pumped in through the air vents. Whichever. The important thing was it didn’t last.

At some point during the night — it could have been hours or minutes after I fell to the floor, I couldn’t tell — the protestors from outside opened the doors and ran in. They started spraying the people closest to the doors with their Windex bottles, all the while shouting, “Get thee hence, Satan!” and “In the name of God I evict thee!”

None of the holy water actually reached me, but once the doors to outside were open, I suddenly had control of my body again. I got up and ran for the doors. Hank reached after me, howling, but I kicked him away. A protestor waved a sign at me — something about one of the passages in Luke — and I pushed her to the ground, stumbled outside.

It was raining out now, but I didn’t care. I kept running, through the parking lot and down the road, back to the coffee shop. Once a car came from the direction of the church or whatever it was, and I hid in the grass at the side of the road, burying myself in the plastic bags there. For a while, I could still hear screams and laughter from behind me, even through the rain. My body was still burning from whatever it was that had happened in the church, but it faded a little more with the sound of each plane that passed overhead.

I never felt that way again in my life.

I SAW THE FIRST of the cows about fifty feet or so from the coffee shop. It was lying in the middle of the road, bellowing loudly. All four of its legs looked to be broken. It swung its head wildly at me, so I walked along the shoulder until I was past it.

There were two more in the coffee shop’s parking lot. One lay just at the entrance to the drive-through. It was dead, its neck broken, head twisted around to lie along the top of its own spine. The other one was lying on the ground behind my car. There didn’t seem to be anything wrong with it — it turned its head to look at me as I walked up — but it was blocking my way out of there.

The truck that had been carrying the cows was parked about a hundred feet away from the coffee shop. The back door of the trailer hung brokenly from its hinges, and I could see it was empty inside now. The cows were everywhere, more lying on the asphalt, others wandering up and down the road or grazing on the grass at the side.

The truck driver was standing by the rear of his truck and talking to the woman from the coffee shop as I walked up. “It’s the damnedest thing I ever saw,” he said, running his hand over the broken door. “They just started going crazy in there. For a moment, I thought they were going to tip the trailer. But then they busted out the back.” He pushed his cap up and down on his head. “Bolt in the door must have rusted right through.”

“Well, you can’t just leave them here,” the woman said. “It’s bad for business.”

“That’s right,” I said. “One of those cows is blocking my car.”

We all watched one of the cows piss on the road for a moment, and then the woman said, “You’ll have to round them up.”

“And how am I supposed to do that?” the truck driver said. “Without getting trampled to death, that is.”

“How’d you get them in the first time?” she asked.

“That’s not my job,” he said, shaking his head. “They’ve got special places for that.”

“We could herd them with my car,” I said, “if we can move the cow behind it.”

They both looked at me for a moment, and then the truck driver said, “No, there’s a very definite policy for moments like this.” He went up to the cab of the truck and came back with a rifle. “How’d you like to make fifty bucks?” he asked me.

“That all depends,” I said.

He waited until a plane was passing overhead, then shot the cow that had pissed on the road. It fell to the ground without making a noise and shook there for a moment. Several of the grazing cows looked over their shoulders at us and then moved a few feet deeper into the grass. For some reason, steam was rising from their hides now.

“I’m going to need help dragging them back into the truck,” he said, chambering another round. “I can’t move them on my own.”

“I don’t know,” I said.

“Make it a hundred then,” he said. “But that’s all I’ve got on me.”

“I’m going back inside,” the woman said. “I’ve got to make fresh coffee.”

“I could sure use another coffee now,” the truck driver said. Another plane passed over us, and he shot one of the cows lying on the road. This one had a single broken leg. It tried to get up as the driver approached but it couldn’t stand. Its eyes rolled wildly as he put the gun against its head and pulled the trigger.

He’d killed three more cows by the time the woman came out with coffee for each of us. “It’s fresh,” she said, “and on the house.” She looked around at the dead cows and shook her head. “Given the circumstances and all.”

We stood there for a moment, blowing steam from our coffee. Then the truck driver sighed. “I’m never going to make that deadline now.”

He shot one of the grazing cows square in the head, but this one didn’t go down. I saw bone chips fly off into the gravel at the side of the road, and blood sprayed as far as my shoes, but the cow just shook its head and stared at the truck driver.

“God’s looking out for that one,” the woman said.

The trucker lifted his cap off and then settled it back on his head. I saw that he was bald underneath. He fired another shot into the cow’s head, and more blood and bone chips flew. The cow staggered this time but still didn’t go down. It started running down the road. And now the surviving cows started after it, bellowing at us as they passed. Even the one that had been lying behind my car got up and went with them.

The truck driver aimed at the wounded cow once more, but this time his gun jammed. He worked at it for a moment, then swore and threw the gun to the ground. I was half expecting it to go off, but it never did.

“That was almost miraculous,” the woman said. When the truck driver looked at her, she added, “For the cow, I mean.”

“That wasn’t anything but a jammed round,” the driver said.

We watched the cows go down the road, leaving a trail of blood behind them. About two or three hundred feet down, they suddenly swerved into the field, heading towards the airport’s lights. Even from this distance, we could see the cloud of steam rising from their hides.

“Well, if it wasn’t a miracle,” the woman said, “then I think it’s as close as we’re going to get.”

© Peter Darbyshire

 
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