Our Lady of the Forest

  Quarters, Tom told Bob Hill, the bartender. Hill was a notorious drinker himself with leaky eyes and a parboiled look. I need quarters to give to the Koreans.

  I had to quit giving out laundromat quarters when I ran dry two hours ago with all these wackos coming in here.

  Religion wackos, yelled a drinker named Cunningham. They’re chewing quarters like communion wafers. And chugging holy beers.

  I only need two, Tom said.

  There’s none, said Bob Hill. I don’t have any. They cleaned me out, all my quarters.

  He wiped the counter and Tom said Jesus, it’s got to where you can’t even turn around in this god damn town anymore.

  Hill leaned back with his bar towel and shrugged. If they want to buy a drink, fine, the more the merrier, bring it on and bring your wallet, but if all they want is change for the laundromat they can go to hell. I’m not a bank, he added.

  Holy water, Cunningham barked. They’re all gonna get swamp fever from it. They all gonna get giard-ya.

  There was muttering from other unemployed loggers sitting at the bar and tables. I bow down to idols, someone called. Hey loan me some quarters, someone else called. Sid down Tom god damn it and drink you’re making me nervous standing there.

  They’ll all be shitting holy water next. We’ll be cleaning it out of the streets.

  Be quiet, Cunt-ingham. Cross is Catholic.

  Fuck all you people, Tom said.

  He went out. He got quarters from a stranger at the laundromat, a woman painted up like Tammy Faye Bakker, so much eye shadow it was tragic and ghostly and made you think of dead people. Of walking dead people. Maybe they were real. So here was this woman who looked lovelorn and dead but who carried a ten-dollar bank roll of quarters in her curio-shop acrylic coin purse. Men don’t do laundry, she said to Tom. They can’t figure out these machines.

  You just gotta kick them around, he answered. Push any button and kick.

  He shoved in his quarters and started the dryer. The lovelorn dead woman was folding her laundry and stacking it in a plastic basket and there was something nauseating about her perfume and Kmart wardrobe. Well did you get yourself any of the holy water? she asked. What holy water? Tom answered. I guess you weren’t up in the woods this afternoon. No because I work at night and that means I have to sleep in the daytime. Well today Our Ann found holy water in the ground. What do you mean found holy water? She dug it straight out of the ground up there like she was Bernadette at Lourdes.

  The dead woman had long fake fingernails and eyelashes and she made him feel that what she’d said must inherently be suspect or dubious. Her appearance cast a cloud of doubt over everything she uttered. We waited in line for two hours, she told Tom. And then we filled our water bottles with it. Healing water. From the ground.

  Healing water. Did she heal somebody?

  A lot of people are being healed.

  Is that true?

  There are miracles unfolding.

  Is that true? repeated Tom.

  The woman fluffed her lashes up with the plastic tip of a fingernail. Her makeup looked uncomfortable to Tom, the chemicals in it eating through her skin. Her eyes watered and a small ball of black detritus floated on her viscous cornea. She blinked incessantly in an attempt to dislodge it, painted mouth thrown open. I can see, she said, that you don’t believe me. But I swear by Jesus, it’s so, in his name. But maybe… hold on… are you saved?

  I guess I don’t know if I’m saved or not.

  Oh you’d know if you were, praise the Lord.

  Then I’m not I guess.

  Then I’ll pray for you.

  You wouldn’t be the first.

  Sounds like the devil’s got ahold of your soul.

  In a big way, answered Tom, and smiled.

  The dead woman shook her head as though saddened. Then she reached for more tangled laundry. A man’s briefs, a dish towel, dark slacks, a knee sock. Cosmetic surgery, Tom concluded. She’d had something surgical done to her face, the skin sanded down with a disk sander, blurred, so you couldn’t quite focus on it.

  Back to these miracles. These healing miracles. These miracles you mentioned, he said.

  Amen and glory.

  Get back to them. Get back to that subject.

  The blind made to see, the lame made to walk, a child with illness sanctified, a man in darkness redeemed.

  All of that happened?

  The Lord is good.

  A blind person got their sight back today?

  There was a terrible alcoholic called to the Lord. And a man who gave a hundred dollars to the Church of Our Forest Lady. And a child with psoriasis healed by the holy water. And a woman with arthritis cured!

  But what about the blind person?

  If there was one brought to the holy water I’m sure he’d come to see.

  So there wasn’t one.

  You ought to have seen that woman with arthritis begin to dance the rumba!

  So there wasn’t any blind person then.

  Ever one’s putting up a supply. Because they’re shutting it down tomorrow in the morning. They’re getting up No Trespassing signs and after that there won’t be any access to the holy healing waters.

  She’d folded her last washed article now. Tom imagined that with a high-pressure hose he could wash all the makeup from her face in ten minutes and see what she looked like, who she was. He wondered how long it took her in the morning and how long again at night to struggle with her artificial face. Now it dawned on him that underneath her cosmetic mask was somebody’s wrinkled grandmother. He could see how she’d look on a sofa, crocheting, or at a quilting bee or at a senior center eating lunch from a tray. If you didn’t look closely she was a whore in her mid-forties, Jezebel at the laundromat, but if you did she was a senior citizen desperate to be younger. Wearing a disguise wherever she went. She picked up her basket like someone with lumbago and said, I’ll pray for you.

  Prayers never hurt, Tom answered.

  She left. Tom started a load of darks and sat atop his machine listening to the dryer drums spin and to the agitators in the washers. Kim’s was warm, industrious, and friendly and he didn’t feel like leaving. Another woman came his way looking for a free machine and he said to her Pardon me, excuse me, sorry, I wasn’t up in the woods today, what’s this I hear about holy water?

  There’s holy water in the ground up there.

  That’s what I heard.

  It’s a miracle.

  Did she heal anybody?

  There were many healings.

  What kind exactly? What kind of healings?

  A man with a cane who didn’t need it any longer. He threw it off to the side and walked. I saw that with my own eyes, him throwing his cane away. And a woman who had that ringing in her ears. Tinnitus, they call it. Gone.

  While Tom waited for his laundry loads he interrogated whoever came close. Rheumatism in the right kneecap—gone. Migraine. Intestinal distress. Toothache. Bursitis. Heartburn. Tennis elbow. Nervous anxiety. Paranoid delusions. Neck pain. Constipation. A woman in a parka with liver spots dappling her face claimed that she herself had been freed from the constant misery of bunions. Ann of Oregon had blessed her at the altar, poured holy water across her feet, and after that the bunions on her toes which had been the bane of her existence until then ceased to cause her pain.

  Tom said, But are the bunions still there?

  They’re still there, but they just don’t hurt.

  How do you explain it?

  I don’t explain it.

  No pain?

  None at all. And I got healed in the nick of time. Because tomorrow the woods are shut down.

  Tom didn’t believe her. How could it be? Be honest, he said. Maybe you’ve got yourself talked into it. You talked yourself out of your bunions, maybe. Because you wanted to believe in being healed.

  If I did I guess that’s a miracle too.

  In a way, said Tom. You can look at it that way.

  I do, said the woma
n. Praise Mother Mary. It’s a miracle however you look at it, isn’t it? As long as the pain is gone?

  He still had time before night shift started, so he drove toward the North Fork Campground. He drove with less patience than usual and with a terrorizing frustration about other cars and twice he passed drivers who were doing fifty-two where the speed limit was fifty-five. Predictably there was no good radio reception except for a station that had once played country but now played pop music aimed at teenagers so he put in a cassette called The Legendary Hank Williams Senior chiefly because it was in the glove box—somebody had left it behind years before—Chains from My Heart and so on. Tom listened with resistance to it. Its emotional tenor was a mystery to him, an alien sensibility. No one could be that cheerful about sadness in a place where it rained with such unrelieved constancy, a long slow piss from heaven. He rifled through the glove box again and came up with Eleanor’s Dixie Chicks tape and threw that out the window—flip—with a therapeutic glee. My fishing pole’s broke, the creek is full of sand, my woman run away with another man.… With that frog in his throat like Gomer Pyle.

  At the campground Tom left his truck on the road shoulder and hiked toward the glow of the campfires and gas lamps and the lit windows of the campers and trailers. The scene reminded him of a Civil War painting he remembered seeing on the History Channel, crowds huddled close to comforting flames, a gargantuan army in abeyance for the night but in expectation of the morrow. A whole town of new Port-A-Potties was set up by the fee shed and two state patrol cars were parked on the median, side by side and head-to-toe so that the officers inside, hats off, radios crackling, could shoot the breeze, make comments about women, and chew gum with their elbows in the window frames, which taken altogether was bad PR, they ought to get out and off their asses and do something for their tax-paid salaries. Tom walked by feeling vaguely criminal: mattress theft, truck canopy hijacking, assaulting a fax machine with business cards. He made his way past Kay’s Religious Gifts which even at this hour was doing a lively trade in the garish light of kerosene lanterns, as was the bald man from Salt Lake City selling t-shirts from the back of his van, as was the food service truck run by Marysville teenagers who normally worked at horse shows. There was another retailer set up now with a banner reading NORTHWEST CATHOLIC SUPPLY and beside it a booth hawking soda pop, potato chips, candy bars, plastic water bottles, kindling, and flashlights. When the vendor turned around it was Eddie Wilkins Junior wearing a blue coin apron and a knit watch cap that made him look like a small-time burglar and making change from the apron pockets like a peanut peddler at a baseball game, Eddie who had at one time worked for Cross Logging and been arrested twice since then, once for growing marijuana plants, the other for pirating cedar. He had a small goatee now and indistinct sideburns and when he saw Tom he said, in a furtive aside, If you can’t beat ’em join ’em and praise the Lord for your conversion. I bought most of this crap at the Wal-Mart in Tacoma and just sell it off at markup.

  Ten sticks of kindling for five bucks though?

  Hey I’m a capitalist like anybody else.

  Whatever happened to business ethics?

  Whatever happened to supply and demand?

  Don’t you need a state business license?

  I got one for my booth at the Jubilee. Eddie stepped back out of earshot of pilgrims examining the bags of potato chips. But Tom—what’re you doing out here? I can give you a discount on the kindling.

  I’m a tourist, said Tom. Looking around. Think of it like the circus is in town and I’m hanging around behind the tents.

  Jesus, whispered Eddie. Sell ’em some popcorn. Or better yet—go fill some jugs in the river and sell ’em holy water.

  They can get it themselves, they don’t need me.

  Well sell it to the ones who can’t walk two miles between now and tomorrow morning.

  You do it. But get the right bottles. And labels. Get the right labels.

  You’re giving me, said Eddie, big ideas. Great big holy water Web site ideas. Want to go into it with me?

  I’m computer illiterate.

  That doesn’t matter.

  In the meantime get rich selling candy bars.

  Okay I will, said Eddie.

  Farther down the loop road of numbered campsites Tom saw coming toward him a battalion of pilgrims carrying empty jugs and flashlights. He stood aside to let them pass—they seemed to him like earnest children—and then he lit a cigarette and squatted with his back against a tree. Two days of sick leave, he remembered. On the other hand, if he didn’t show up, would that be the last straw on top of Nelson calling? And, he thought, what if it was? What if they fired him? His prison guard’s pittance, set against the vastness of his debt, was like throwing a handful of sand at the ocean, like pissing on a raging forest fire. Pocket change. Penny ante. What he really needed to do was skip town, set himself up with a fresh start somewhere, and just live quietly like a million other deadbeats down-and-out in small western places where nobody noticed or gave a fuck. Head south. Modesto or Flagstaff. Warm winds and barren spaces. Get another dumb-ass mindless job and a half-decent television set with rabbit ears until he worked his way up to cable. Sit around at night with a six-pack of Schlitz and a copy of Penthouse, jerk off, eat lunch-meat sandwiches, doze on the couch, every once in a while go fishing if he could figure out how to do it without a license. Live somewhere with a low heat bill and a lot of Mexicans always looking the other way, get beer at convenience stores, fast food in a bag, keep the truck full of gas, topped up. And fuck everybody. What did he owe? He was already worthless. Eleanor could come after him for alimony and his answer would be Hey, look, check my pockets! You can take home all the lint you want. And my television and my leftover beer, my boots and this package of taco shells.

  There was a booth that said AID STATION/LOST AND FOUND where a woman sat reading Reader’s Digest with a flashlight in her fist. Tom approached her with a straight-faced game plan. Hello, he said. Praise the Lord. Did anyone turn in a little lost cell phone? The woman folded back the corner of her page and he knew right away from that unconscious gesture that he had her number. Nokia? Yep. Flip phone? Yep. Afterward he called in sick for the night, it was a line where you left a recorded message, Tom felt grateful he didn’t have to bullshit directly to a warm living ear. Even so he allowed his voice to subside into a listless register, as if indeed he was flu-ridden. This is Tom Cross.… I can’t make my shift.… I’m sick tonight and sorry for the late notice but all day long I was hoping to make it and… uh… now I see I’m not going to get out there. Hoping to get better by tomorrow, thank you. Tom Cross. Thank you. Click. They probably figured the cell phone static meant he was parked in the woods somewhere, bent over a luscious divorcée’s tits, ever since he’d separated from Eleanor he could feel that assumption trailing him, that he lived now like an alpha dog in heat, the married guys always rooted for him, Go for it, they’d say. Get some!

  Tom went back to Eddie’s booth with a fresh cigarette stuck between his lips and his hands slipped into his jacket pockets. There were pilgrims buying soda pop so he had to wait while Eddie winked at him like a gypsy scam artist and suggested the pilgrims add candy bars to their transactions. Then Tom was up front. Old trick, he said. Real old trick. Except this time it’s serious, Eddie—no shit. Hey Eddie look over there, and he pointed just over Eddie’s shoulder and when Eddie turned he picked up a water bottle and put it inside his jacket. What was this, he said. Ninety-eight cents? For one of these plastic water bottles from Wal-Mart? I’ll tell you what I’ll give you a buck for it. He dropped a dollar on the table.

  Take two and bring me some holy water, Tom.

  How much are you going to mark it up?

  You getting water for your son that’s paralyzed?

  I’m getting it for you. Because you’re impotent, Eddie.

  Well I hope it works. Here, take a Snickers. Eddie tucked one into Tom’s jacket pocket and thrust a second water bottle at him. It’s a
ll fucking crazy, he observed.

  Holy water in a Wal-Mart plastic bottle.

  That’s America, said Eddie.

  Tom walked out of the campground on the trail marked, with a makeshift sign, OUR LADY OF THE FOREST TRAIL. In the sodden woods candles shimmered under trees and pilgrims hiked toward him announced by their roving flashlight beams. You’re late going up. It’s after ten-thirty. Well now or never, I guess, Tom answered. He met another group at an uphill bend. You’re going to need a flashlight with you it’s dark up there in certain sections. There’s a little one here in my pocket, lied Tom, but I’m trying to get my eyes to adjust. Farther along, close to Fryingpan Creek, a third party rested on a log, three women. Hello, said one. You’re a late-night traveler. Last chance for holy water, answered Tom.

  They’ve got the pool good and excavated now. It just keeps filling with holy water. You won’t have any problems.

  At the bridge a white gas lantern cast light and a man stood waiting with a five-gallon bucket. Who goes there? said Tom. That’s my line, said the man. A seeker, said Tom. Bless the Mother of God. We’re taking cash donations, urged the man, for building the Church of Our Lady of the Forest. Tom dropped a nickel into the bucket. You can put this job on your résumé, he said. That way if you apply for a toll-booth position you’ll have a little head start.