There are worse places to be abandoned than Portland, Oregon: Oklahoma City, for one, Arkansas for another.
Later, when the guilt finally caught up with him, creeping up the neck of his fifteenth Corona, Jimmy Orange turned to the Mexican barman who had lately become his sole confidant and muttered self-righteously, ‘There’s worse places to leave your woman than Oregon: Oklahoma City for one. I thought long and hard about leaving Martha in Portland. She should thank her lucky stars I didn’t dump her in Idaho.’
And the Mexican barman, blessed as he was with little more than game show American, caught only the barest hint of sentiment and slid the white man a sixteenth Corona, transferring the lime slice from one bottle to the next. Jimmy Orange was long past appreciating aesthetics.
‘Sí, sir,’ he nodded, all the time noting the sixteenth drink on the tab, and automatically adding a seventeenth bottle for himself.
‘Portland, Oregon … Very rainy. Much, much rains.’ In the year nineteen hundred and ninety five the rain in Portland fell mostly in the winter months, occasionally beginning on the first day of fall and stretching willfully into spring. The seasons split the city in half. For eight calendar months, seven on a leap year, the rain rained incessantly, stirring the Willamette to a seething mass of piss and mud and sin. The streets were streams and aspiring rivers, nursing impossible ambitions of Venice, of Oxford and Egyptian canals.
All infants born during the rainy season swam long before they found their standing feet. The older residents grew flippers, plundering thickly through the sweaty streets. They congregated on the buses, emanating the deep stench of damp wool and just-drowned dog. The smell was their own local peculiarity, deeply comforting to the homegrown and offensive to the few tourists who visited Portland during monsoon season. These peculiar locals stalwartly refused the comfort of an umbrella, choosing to wear their hair short and frizzy, long in the summer months. They hid their smiles behind enormous beards, all their fickle joys hibernating through the watery season. They ran on tar, dark coffee and good intentions. Their pant legs decayed slowly, turning moist and mushy; moldering from the ankle up. They relished the growing potential of damp living. Most Portlanders believed themselves capable of sprouting an extra inch every winter and consequently spent the summer months receding into their own skin. They did their sinning in secret, hiding behind the daily shower curtain.
All the city’s darker elements – the cross-dressing kids on the late-night bus, the crusty bums beneath the Burnside bridge, the meth labs flaming and strip bars belching elderly men into the early evening fog, the churches crumbling into cocktail bars and under-age punk clubs – all were ritually drenched, baptized beneath a sheath of never-ending sky sulk. Terrible things took place in the rain and blurred, as beneath a sheaf of greaseproof paper, no one seemed to notice.
When the summer months finally freckled their way up the Willamette, peaking wistfully over the Steel Bridge, it was a future city they found already blooming in anticipation. Every second street boasted a green grass park. The squirrels, recently released from their storm drains, oscillated up and down the telephone wires, humping and fuzzing like greased electricity. The trees shook their spindly fingers – once, twice, for miracle luck – and gave birth to wild, broccoli babies until all the streets ran thick with cloudy greens. The local children sped bare-chested through the downtown sprinklers. The crusty bums emerged from beneath the Burnside Bridge, peeling back their plaid shirts to reveal chests, backs and lumberjack necks already tanned the sweet-talking color of beef jerky. The entire city sprouted wheels and cycled madly up and down Hawthorne Boulevard, running stop lights until all the little last drops of winter dew drained from their heels. No serious Portlander spent a single ounce of summer time indoors.
The best and most blessed thing about Portland, Oregon – twin, spliced city of the Pacific Northwest – was the taste; the taste of youth and hope and bottled water, which lingered long into the summer, eclipsing the thought of October showers and those dank, beery days ahead. And this taste was tart, sharp and toothpaste-clean; the freshly scent of an entire city just laundered.
There were worse places to leave your woman than Portland, Oregon in late summer. It would be many, many years before Malcolm’s mother came to appreciate this fact.
On the morning after the grand departure, Martha Orange woke early, turned her underwear inside-out – for it had been almost a week since she’d last had the opportunity to launder – and prepared to face the weekend alone. Whilst Malcolm dozed on the other side of the queen-size, his mother rescued Ross from the trouser drawer where she’d managed to wedge him for the evening and fed him half a lukewarm bottle, briefly heated beneath the bathroom faucet. Once finished, she burped the baby over the crook of her elbow, returned him to his sports bag and set about fixing breakfast for Malcolm and herself. First she split a fresh bottle of Mountain Dew evenly between two Dixie Cups. Then she opened a pack of miniature Oreos, arranged six cookies each on two squares of toilet paper and, for nutritional value, emptied a box of raisins on top of each makeshift plate. Breakfast preparations complete, Martha Orange switched the bedroom’s grainy television set to the Mexican channel, pumped up the volume and waited for her son to rouse.
Malcolm Orange, who had been wrenched from yet another dinosaur dream, took almost two minutes to work out where he was. It was a relatively exotic experience to find himself sleeping in an actual bed. To wake as sole occupant of a bed too large by far, both forwards and sideways, was a luxury beyond Malcolm’s wildest imagination. For a brief and beautiful moment he imagined himself finally adopted into a normal family. The reality hit him like a midlife crisis.
‘Your dad’s not coming back, Malcolm,’ his mother announced, sliding his toilet paper breakfast across the bedspread. ‘Better enjoy these Oreos. They might be the last cookies we can afford for a good long while.’
Worse things had happened in Texas.
Malcolm Orange chose to ignore the disappearance of his long-loathed father, an occurrence he’d been petitioning the Almighty for, for the better part of three years (occasionally turning to Allah when the Jesus God fell silent). Instead of rising to meet his mother’s mounting panic, he yawned deeply, lay back on two fat blue pillows and relished the sensation of eating breakfast cookies in a giant bed.
Martha Orange perched her backside on the edge of the bed, naked feet wedged against the radiator, and fed herself Oreos absentmindedly, all the time staring at the Mexican couple arguing on the television screen.
From his vantage point at the stern of their bed, Malcolm Orange scrutinized the back of his mother’s head. Five feet removed, with her neck obscured by a generous sheath of auburn hair, his mother could easily pass for any age or race. In the right shirt or the wrong pants she might even be mistaken for a girlish boy. Only her shoulder blades, straining beneath the faded soccer shirt she wore at night, revealed anything concrete about the stranger sharing Malcolm’s bed. Martha Orange was struggling to climb out of her own skin.
Malcolm’s mother had not always been this strained. He remembered her enormously in his preschool days. During those early years when the road had seemed golden, temporary and paved with twenty-five different Oklahoma exits, Martha Orange had lived loud and footloose from one state to the next. She was young and beautiful and paraded her youth in catalogue dresses and six-inch shorts, slashed from the remnants of old Levis. Malcolm Orange knew his mother was beautiful beyond ordinary mothers. Strange men offered her cigarettes and soda pop on the gas station forecourt. Upon noticing Martha, even from behind, other mothers automatically paused to fix their hair, settling their skirt tails self-consciously. Elderly gentlemen slobbered into their summer vests when she walked past. And in Arkansas, once on a cloudy afternoon, two older boys had arrested Malcolm atop the play structure outside McDonald’s, eager to discuss his mother. The larger of the two was wearing a Mötley Crüe T-shirt. Malcolm Orange did not know what Mötley Crüe was but was nonetheless awed.
‘Is that your mama, kid?’ the second boy asked. (He was larger and wearing a white shirt with the sleeves pulled off at the shoulder. Tiny shards of cotton thread and shirt fabric were beginning to unravel around his upper arms.)
Malcolm Orange nodded. He was barely five years old and not yet wary of teenage boys.
‘She’s smokin’ hot,’ the Mötley Crüe boy said, accompanying his observation with a long, low whistle, reminiscent of a just-boiled kettle.
‘I’d give her one,’ the second boy added and though Malcolm Orange wasn’t entirely sure what the boy wanted to give her, he knew it wasn’t something worth discussing with his mother and took the opportunity to shove the boy, elbow first, off the play structure. The resulting injury and subsequent howling forced the Oranges to make yet another of their infamous speedy getaways. Five-year-old Malcolm was thrust violently into the backseat of the Volvo, landing unceremoniously in his grandmother’s lap with both feet wedged under his Step Nana’s enormous thighs. He had barely enough time to turn himself right side up before the interrogation began.
‘What the hell was that about Malcolm?’ his father yelled, face fuming in the rearview mirror.
‘You can’t go pushing older kids around, Malcolm!’ his mother continued. ‘You’ll get your ass kicked if you do.’
‘They said mean things,’ whispered Malcolm.
‘You’ve got to rise above it, Malcolm,’ said his father, ‘you can’t go punching every no-good Johnny who calls you names.’
‘What sort of mean things?’ his mother asked, already beginning to display a righteous tendency towards ignoring her husband.
‘Don’t want to say …’ replied Malcolm, remaining tight-lipped in the backseat.
‘Malcolm, you can tell me. I’m your mama, you can tell me anything.’
‘I can’t tell you this, mama. You’ll just get mad with me.’
‘We’re already mad with you, Malcolm. Tell us now,’ his father fumed, ‘or so help me, I will leave you at the next Greyhound station.’
And, because he could not bring himself to hurt his mother, who was beautiful in his eyes, like a Christmas tree angel, or Jesus’ own mama, Malcolm decided to crucify his father instead, ‘They said you were ugly Papa, like a gorilla, and that you smelled like fried onions.’ (Malcolm Orange, not yet officially schooled, awarded himself two proud points for ingenuity. Both these insults were for the most part true, though the onion thing was seasonal and seemed markedly worse during summer months.)
In the rearview mirror, with his sunglasses shoved, Miami Vice style, high on his forehead, Malcolm’s father turned the color of pickled beetroot and thumped the inside section of his steering wheel so it emitted a tiny, strangled parp.
‘Punk ass kids!’ he yelled. ‘I’m going to turn this car around and teach them a thing or two about respect.’
‘Rise above it, Jimmy,’ his wife replied, sharp as polished piss. She turned to stare out the passenger window. In the wing mirror Malcolm could see a bent back reflection of his mother’s naked face. She was grinning wildly with one hand covering her jaw. Aged just five years old, with only five states to compare, Malcolm Orange suddenly realized that his was the most beautiful and best mother in the whole of the United States.
As the years rolled the Oranges all across America with an ever-depleting cargo of elderly relatives, Malcolm began to better understand the fragile wonder of the woman who had given birth to him in the dugout of a Detroit baseball field. Her highs were loud and cloudless, her lows parchment thin and each year more frequent than the last. As he progressed from childhood towards the possibility of something equating to puberty Malcolm Orange kept a tally of his mother’s ups and downs. These findings were recorded, collated and eventually analyzed in the same dime store notepad which held his ‘Lamp Posts of America’ and ‘Miles between Dairy Queens’ research projects; two important pieces of scientific investigative research he one day hoped to present to the President of the United States.
Observing his mother now on this, the first morning of her enforced widowhood, Malcolm Orange struggled to recall a single skyscraper day in the last eighteen months of road raging. (He made a mental note to check his research notes later when his mother wasn’t in the room.) Terrified that he might, for the first time in two years, cry without the believable excuse of chicken pox or funerals, Malcolm dug his heels further into the folded sheets and forced his head to remember the way his mother had once been, many years ago when she was oftentimes hilarious and ill-inclined to daytime television.
He remembered her twirling down the aisles of Walmart dancing arm in arm with her own elderly – but not yet crazy – mother whilst the overhead speakers pumped Kenny Rogers into the shampoo section. He remembered her rhinestone heels, stolen from the shoe department of the Goodwill; left foot stuffed down the back of his pushchair, right foot concealed inside his sweater vest. Malcolm, who was young enough to escape jail and old enough to know better, had held his tongue, relishing the thrill of illegal, complicit adventuring. He remembered her ordering ice cream for breakfast on at least fifteen separate occasions, most often going for pistachio over any of the more obvious flavors.
Malcolm Orange remembered her singing; holy smokes, there had also been fabulous singing.
Malcolm’s mother kept a shoebox of country and western cassettes under the Volvo’s passenger seat, insisting upon their ongoing presence, even as perfectly good toaster ovens and umbrellas fell victim to the packing whims of Jimmy Orange. With the windows fully recoiled she liked to pass the miles singing lustily along with Dolly Parton and Tammy Wynette while the mid-western winds whipped her hair into a wild nest of earthy tendrils. Approaching this diner or that interstate motel she’d quit her singing to roll the windows up and, with a single, fluid motion, well-rehearsed, whisk her hair north, south, east and west, securing the nestled mountain neatly with an old shoelace. Seated directly behind his mother, Malcolm Orange soon learnt to draw breath and close his eyes when the hairspray emerged from the glove compartment, ready to coat his mother’s hair – and, by proxy, the occupants of the Volvo’s cramped back-seat – in a sticky layer of breath-quenching hair glue.
Finally, there was the knitting; yards and yards of blue and white striped scarf which filled the front seat of the Volvo and threatened to spill into the backseat, strangling the occupants in a mile or more of wool mix yarn. This same scarf had been knitting for longer than Malcolm had existed and ran like a constant, stripy seam through all his childhood memories. Having reached saturation point in the year nineteen hundred and eighty eight, Martha Orange had simply begun to unravel the earliest sections of the scarf and proceeded to knit on, using the raveled thread; a stroke of knitting genius which had eventually formed a colossal, nautical-themed Möbius strip.
Malcolm was not to know the origin of this never-ending scarf but he soon became familiar with the aura of deep, tantric peace which came over his mother each time she picked up her needles. Watching her fingers flying from the backseat, Malcolm thought of the ancient Mexican ladies who populated the doorways of most every city he’d ever lived in, knotty fingers feeding rosary beads left to right in an endless parody of activity.
(Martha Orange’s knitting was conceived in youthful hope and yet had, over the years, slowly pickled to become a form of quiet, costless therapy; an adult attempt at thumb sucking. The scarf had begun on the first morning of Martha Orange’s honeymoon. Having loved her long into the night in a fashion rarely seen or sampled in rural Oklahoma, having offered up his grandma’s antique ring for a wedding band, and ponyed up for a proper hotel – one of the cheaper rooms in one of the cheaper hotels advertised on the Vegas strip – Jimmy Orange had been slowly rising in the estimation of the freshly-baked Mrs Orange.
Rolling over to meet his eye, she’d smiled silently, bit her lip to avoid inhaling last night’s whiskey breath and audibly wondered what the future might hold for the Oranges.
‘Baby,’ he’d whispered, as he ran his fingers up and down her perfect legs, rubbing the stench of stale sex and motor oil deep into her shins, ‘one year from now I’ll have you knocked up and rocking in a little cabin somewhere in Alaska, just you and me and a hound dog. I’ll keep you fat and naked and you can knit me scarves and sweaters to keep the frostbite out.’
Thereafter, Malcolm’s mother had crept out of bed, grinning ear to ear with the bed sheets wrapped modestly round her chest and silently thanked the Lord for a man who did not smell like manure, who was more than moderately handsome and, most importantly, going places fast. She’d showered quickly with the bathroom door open, still scared her new husband might slip off without her and, whilst Malcolm’s father completed his bathroom ablutions, cast off and commenced the scarf which would keep her fingers in constant anticipation of Alaska for the next thirteen years.)
Malcolm Orange loved his mother. She was beautiful to him like a TV chef or a first grade teacher, but he no longer knew what to say to her. She was unraveling before his eyes, a forty-foot scarf left one decade too long in the damp.
‘Now your dad’s gone,’ she muttered, raising her voice in competition with the angry Hispanic sentiments now flooding the bedroom, ‘I should get some kind of skill. I’m only good for cooking and cleaning. Maybe I could learn computers or Spanish. A bit of Spanish would come in handy round here. There’s Mexicans everywhere.’
‘Sure, mama,’ Malcolm Orange answered. ‘Learn Spanish. Maybe you can get a job in Taco Bell.’
‘You don’t need Spanish in Taco Bell, Malcolm. They have those little pictures on cards to point at when you order.’
‘We could move to Mexico if you learned Spanish, mama.’
Preoccupied with the notion of learning a second language, Martha Orange ignored her eldest son, pumped up the volume on the TV set and administered her first of many, many thousands of impromptu kisses to the crummy remote which lived on the nightstand.
Portland, Oregon was wasted on Martha Orange. It would take her almost three days to gather enough energy to leave the motel room. During the interim she would survive on gas station candy and soda, fetched by Malcolm three times daily from the Texaco across the road. Eventually the motel owner – a slack-faced Asian man in an Adidas tracksuit – appeared at their door, cordless telephone in hand, and threatened to call the cops if they did not check out immediately. The remaining Oranges packed their belongings, Ross included, into two sports bags and a garbage sack, left the room ankle deep in candy wrappers and stumbled, bleary-eyed, into the city which was to become their home.
(Martha Orange, finally convinced that Alaska would never come to pass, abandoned her scarf beneath the queen-size bed. It hibernated there for several months, unnoticed by a series of incompetent housekeepers until the autumn damp caused its well-fluffed fibers to swell further, forcing the lower left side of the bed two inches off the carpet. Surrendering her scarf, Martha Orange would later come to realize, had left her sadder and somehow more perturbed than the loss of a full-grown husband.)
Sitting on the curb of the motel’s parking lot, Malcolm and his mother considered their options.
‘You could do waitressing again, mama,’ Malcolm suggested.
‘What would I do with Ross?’ she replied.
‘I could mind him.’
‘Don’t be ridiculous, Malcolm. You’re only eleven. You’re supposed to be in school.’
Malcolm Orange held his tongue. This, he realized, was not the moment to defend his twelfth birthday or point out that most of Ross’s practical care already fell at his feet.
‘We could go to a church and ask God for help. Maybe he’d let us sleep there for a while.’
Malcolm’s mother said nothing. She crossed her legs at the ankle and stared plaintively upwards. Malcolm assumed her pre-occupied with the act of fervent prayer.
‘I could sell lemonade,’ he continued. ‘Though I don’t think we have a jug for making it in … you could do laundry for rich folks … we could live in a tent at least ’til the rain starts … you could take your clothes off for money. I saw it on TV. It pays really well.’
Malcolm Orange had spent most of his formative years moving forwards at a rate of some sixty-five miles per hour and with the disappearance of his father had been suddenly and unceremoniously thrust into the possibility of a permanent zip code. The hope of normal American living filled him with a terrible, excruciating excitement, pinching, as excitement often did, at the neck of his bladder. Malcolm could not see anything beyond a semi-permanent silver lining to all the Oranges’ troubles. He bounced around on the curb, itching like a kid caught short, and waited for his mother to join in with his enthusiasm.
Conversely, Portland, Oregon was wasted on Martha Orange for she could not see past the Volvo-shaped hole in the parking lot. She drew both knees to her chin, clasping her hands across her shins like a belt buckle, and began to rock slowly, coaxing the sadness out of her fingernails. A single tear peaked out of her left eye and rolled down her cheek, losing momentum and disappearing into the skin around her nose. She wiped her face with the back of her hand and felt fifty-eight years old at least.
‘I’ll learn Spanish,’ she said, ‘I’ll learn Spanish. There’s a lot you can do with Spanish.’
‘And in the meantime what will we do for food?’ Malcolm asked, genuinely concerned by the tremulous hunger which was already beginning to gnaw at the inside of his lungs. ‘We need to make enough money for eating. It shouldn’t be too hard to find a job of some sorts. You’ve got a lot of options, mama. You could do the laundry thing again, though we didn’t make a lot off that in Idaho, or take your clothes off for strangers, or ask God to help us out.’
And because she had no money for tents and knew in her darkest heart that no one in Portland, Oregon would pay to see a thirty-seven-year-old stripper with deep-veined nursing breasts, Martha Orange reluctantly agreed to ask God for help.
It was a significant stretch, for neither Malcolm Orange nor his mother entirely believed in a benevolent God.
Martha Orange had been brought up Presbyterian with a new church hat and frock twice yearly. Even after almost fifteen years of practiced religiosity she had never admitted, even to herself, that it was the promise of a new dress, combined with the ominous threat of her father’s belt buckle, which kept her regularly attending the meeting house long past her thirteenth birthday. God himself seemed many million miles beyond Oklahoma, hovering on the edge of some ancient nursery rhyme, mythical, bearded and seasonal as Santa Claus
Martha Orange was not a believer in the strictest sense of belief.
Her own father had died of the cancer six weeks before her fifteenth birthday, shriveling slowly into a small, raisin-skinned man who took his liquids from a baby bottle and spent two hours straining to expel his daily shit. Martha, as the oldest child, had been contracted to lead the nightly prayer shift, reading aloud from the ancient leather-bound King James and endlessly repeating the Lord’s Prayer (for it was the only prayer she felt confident to deliver convincingly). During this evening ritual a thin, peaceful veil habitually descended over her father’s face. And though Martha wrestled against the peace that passes all understanding, cherry-picking passages of bloody wrath and Revelation and reading them with mounting anger over his wasted frame, her father smiled on, beaming beatifically at the ceiling fan.
‘The Lord giveth,’ he would whisper as each nightly reading came to a close, ‘and the Lord taketh away. Blessed be the name of the Lord.’ Though the drugs were by this stage turning his mind to mush, he’d still sounded believably contrite.
Young Martha, deep-filled with righteous anger, could not bear his faith. It slid around her like a constricting hunger, ridiculous and yet perversely insatiable. Eventually, when the evening drove her to breaking point she’d quit her father’s bedside and carry her consternation to the back barn where she smoked contraband packs of Lucky Strikes and raged against the Almighty for his bloody-minded ability to favor the fine art of taking away.
God, she’d finally concluded at fifteen years old, flat on her back beneath her father’s freshly-promoted foreman, was for halfwits and folks who couldn’t sort themselves out.
By the age of ten, with a dozen or more funerals under his belt, Malcolm Orange was all but ready to agree with his mother. If God was good and God was love Malcolm could not help but wonder why he seemed to throw himself with such great gusto into so many acts of willful destruction and suffering; floods and famines and plagues and elderly grandparents whisked into the next world halfway through Ghostbusters. Furthermore, the Almighty, until very recently, had not seen fit to answer a single one of Malcolm’s prayers.
Malcolm Orange knew exactly how many prayers God had yet to answer. He was keeping a list.
Over the course of the last decade Malcolm Orange had daily prayed a series of humble, selfless prayers, which in his small opinion, were absolutely achievable by a God who claimed (with little significant evidence) to have created the entire universe in less than a week, to have walked barefoot on the sea and, on one notable occasion, brought himself back from the dead, bursting from an underground tomb in a move ripped right out of an X-Men strip. On paper, God was someone worth believing in. In reality he had yet to deliver on the dogs, the bunk beds, the death rays or kick-ass siblings Malcolm Orange had asked for over the last ten years. Malcolm Orange felt entirely justified in distrusting God, for God had purposefully stricken him with chicken pox on three separate occasions, bounced him round America like a five-foot ping pong ball and added insult to injury with the arrival of the mild-mannered Ross, who in Malcolm’s opinion was simply another example of the Almighty taking the piss from on high.
However, in light of his father’s untimely exit, Malcolm Orange was now prepared to give God a second chance, considering all those smaller unanswered demands a mere preamble of faith to this, the ultimate answer to prayer.
‘I think we should ask God for help, mama,’ Malcolm said. ‘I have a feeling he’ll listen this time.’
‘OK,’ his mother replied. She sounded like a birthday balloon deflating.
‘Which God should we ask?’
‘Our God, Malcolm. You get born with one God and you’re kind of stuck with that one … unless you marry someone foreign. Then you’re allowed to change your God for a different one. That’s the way religion works.’
‘So, you didn’t get to change Gods when you married Papa?’
‘Well,’ she said, smiling sadly, ‘that’s a fine question to be asking, sweetheart. I didn’t get a different God from your dad. I ended up giving up the only God I got. Your daddy wasn’t a big one for religion.’
‘No ma’am, Papa didn’t believe in any God at all.’ Malcolm replied, nodding fervently. ‘Sure, once I asked him for a Bible and he gave me a book of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory instead and said there was more sense in going to the movies than reading the G-D Bible. And I never even bothered reading Charlie and the Chocolate Factory because I didn’t want to make God mad, but I didn’t want to make Papa mad either, so I pretended real good that I was reading it for miles and miles in the backseat of the car.’
Malcolm Orange’s mother laughed, leaning back on the curb to let the noise out. Malcolm laughed too. He wasn’t sure why they were laughing but it made a welcome change from melancholy Spanish.
‘Mama,’ he asked cautiously, when he was almost sure the laughter had run its course. ‘Is it the Jesus God that belongs to us?’
‘Yes,’ she said, scuffing his sneaker affectionately with the toe of her sandal, ‘ours is the Jesus God.’
‘Good,’ replied Malcolm, ‘he’s the one who made the world so we should be alright.’
After which the remaining Oranges shared a Snickers bar, gathered their resolve and wandered across 82nd street into the residential part of town. They’d barely gone five blocks before they stumbled across their first church.
‘Evangel Baptist Church,’ Malcolm read aloud from the street-side sign. ‘Is this the kind of church where our God lives, mama?’
‘Baptist,’ murmured his mother, rolling the words round the inside of her mouth like a brave new taste, as yet undecided. ‘Yeah, Malcolm, I think Baptist will be just fine. There were good Baptist folks at the end of our road in Oklahoma. The day after he passed they brought us a whole suckling pig for my pa’s funeral. I think Baptist might be just the ticket today.’
They climbed the four steps to the church door. A homeless person of indeterminate gender was dozing noisily under the porch, the greater part of his or her body covered by a mossy green tarp. One arm emerged from beneath the tarpaulin’s edge, sporting, at the furthermost end, a salami pink hand hooked round a shopping cart. Malcolm’s mother stepped carefully over the homeless person, motioning with a finger for Malcolm to be quiet. She tried the church door and upon finding it open stepped inside, deposited her possessions on the foyer floor and assisted her son as he swung himself clumsily over the homeless doorstop.
Malcolm Orange had never before been inside a proper church. All Orange funerals had, for financial reasons, been conducted in funeral crematoriums and Dairy Queen parking lots. He hesitated on the threshold of the sanctuary, adjusted his tube socks and considered the possibility of what might lie behind the enormous mahogany doors.
The better part of Malcolm Orange trilled with a curious longing to see where the Jesus God lived. However, he was also reasonably terrified, having read enough comic books to acknowledge the possibility of winged beings: angels, saints and ill-imagined demons hanging from the interior roof beams. Furthermore, Malcolm Orange remained convinced that God – who knew everything, even invisible nighttime indiscretions – was still pissed about Malcolm’s bigger sins: the naked lady programs and cancer lies, the tail ends of umpteen cigarettes smoked to the nub and the many, many booger balls, surreptitiously rolled and wedged down the inside of the Volvo’s seatbelt holders. Malcolm’s bowels began to churn in the customary manner. In such circumstances a bout of nerve-induced diarrhea seemed all but inevitable.
All things considered, Malcolm Orange thought it best to go second. If someone was to be struck down upon entry, he preferred it not to be him.
With one hand on the small of his mother’s back he wedged the sanctuary doors open and ushered her inside. She shuffled forward and disappeared into deep, all-encompassing darkness. The doors closed behind her backside with a moist, snowy whoosh. Malcolm Orange stood on his heels, rocking forwards and slowly backwards in time to his own breath. He felt eleven years old – closer to ten than twelve – and terribly far from home. Thirty seconds later, realizing that his pilgrim mother had left him standing solo in the church’s darkly lit foyer, he gathered his guts and slipped into the darkness behind her.
(Whilst Malcolm Orange and his mother investigated the inner sanctum of Evangel Baptist, Ross, who even for a young infant, prematurely born, seemed above-averagely fond of sleeping, dozed lazily in his sports bag under the welcome table. Ten minutes into the escapade he would be discovered by an elderly cleaning lady who, in an early morning attempt to make the 7:43 bus, had rushed out of her house at 7:38, leaving her seeing glasses marooned on the nightstand. Ill-equipped to differentiate between babies and sports clothes, she would unsuspectingly throw Ross into the lost property cupboard, the final straw in a morning of visual faux pas which had included mixing the pew Bibles with the hymnbooks, polishing the pulpit with toilet cleaner, and, perhaps most worryingly, mistaking the pastor’s wife for the enormous lady who came to do the flowers on Friday afternoons.
‘You just don’t think to check for babies,’ she would later confess, mortified. ‘You just assume a sports bag’s gonna be full of gym clothes or sneakers, not babies.’
‘Not to worry,’ Mrs Orange would reply, fishing her youngest son out of the lost property cupboard where he had become entangled in a pair of long-abandoned swim goggles, ‘there’s not a day goes by when I don’t forget about Ross.’
‘He’s a very forgettable baby,’ Malcolm would automatically add, receiving a bitter clip around the ears for his impertinence.)
Inside the sanctuary the blackout blinds had been drawn as they most often were on weekdays; a church-wide policy designed to preserve the royal blue carpet from the sort of daily fading which had sent the last two royal blue carpets to their early graves. Mrs Orange had progressed a mere two feet up the aisle and, not yet adjusted to the darkness, Malcolm found himself banging into her back.
In the pitch black with the Jesus God watching, Malcolm Orange felt incredibly protective of his mother. He slipped his arms round her waist and stood on his uppermost tiptoes, attempting to rest his chin reassuringly on her shoulder. Through her shirt he could feel the outline of her shoulder bones, curving like a pair of polished doorknobs atop each arm. They were moving up and down slowly, independent of her elbows. Without looking he could tell she was crying.
‘Mama,’ he asked, whispering into her left ear, though he knew it was pointless to try and conceal even the slightest secret from God, ‘shall I talk to him for both of us?’
‘Yes,’ she replied and the sound of tears was unmistakable, a choked catch at the back of her throat, clasping like the moment before a truly satisfying sniff.
‘Should we kneel?’
‘It’s dark in here. I don’t think it really matters.’
‘God sees everything, mama, even things that happen underground. He has special eyes for seeing everything.’
So they kneeled, bare, naked knees burrowing into the royal blue carpet. Twenty seconds into the prayer Malcolm’s thighs began to ache from the pressure. Thirty seconds in his shins followed suit, throbbing from underuse. (Reliable though it had been, the Volvo had offered little opportunity for exercise; consequently all the Oranges – Ross excepted – were hideously unfit and prone to breathless huffing at the merest hint of an incline.) To his left Martha Orange was similarly preoccupied with the muscle burn creeping up and down the back of her perfectly tanned thighs.
‘Make it quick, Malcolm,’ she whispered, adjusting her weight from one leg to another.
Malcolm was a mere two lines into the Lord’s Prayer, feeling the need to begin with something familiar. He was taking his time, relishing a captive audience and pronouncing each word with showy, theatrical intent.
‘Our Father,’ he proclaimed, rolling his eyes towards the ceiling, ‘Who ART in Heaven. Hallowed be THY name … and also Jesus be THY name,’ he quickly added to avoid confusion with other, lesser-known Gods who might be listening in on their conversation.
‘Malcolm!’ his mother hissed, poking him viciously in the rib cage, ‘get to the important bit.’
Exasperated by his own mother, who did not seem to understand the etiquette associated with prayer, Malcolm Orange prematurely abandoned the Lord’s Prayer, raised his hands like a deep south Revivalist and addressed God in the very voice his father usually reserved for parking attendants and persnickety authorities of all ilk and persuasion.
(‘If you want something done, Malcolm,’ Jimmy Orange had explained on several occasions, ‘speak up like a man. Shout if you can and if you got yourself a gun, it never hurts to let folks know. Folks won’t give you nothing if you go round talking like a pussy. Find yourself a man voice and get used to it.’
Thereafter, Malcolm had been keen to find his own man voice and had eventually trained himself to speak in a fashion which he felt most keenly resembled Wolverine, the most masculine man he had yet to discover. He practiced his man voice on fence posts across America and, when his confidence had finally peaked, made a failed attempt at intimidating the Dairy Queen checkout girl into giving him a free ice cream.
‘Dammit, woman, get your fat ass over here and take my order,’ he’d barked over the countertop. ‘Two small fries, a chicken strips basket, three Diet Cokes and throw in a G-D Blizzard for free. I been freezin’ my butt off out here for the last two hours, waitin’ for you to get your act together.’
Satisfied by his delivery, Malcolm Orange had risen up on tiptoes to clock the woman’s reaction. Two feet from his nose, safely ensconced behind a large slab of security glass, a well-built African American lady was giving him the kind of look oft-delivered by his mother, mere seconds before a good slapping.
‘Young man,’ she’d said, depressing the intercom button so the four people in the line behind Malcolm could also hear her comeback, ‘you better thank the good Lord that I ain’t your mama. I’d tan your hide for that speech if you were one of mine.’
Not to be outdone, Malcolm Orange had held his ground and continued in his best man voice, ‘Woman, you don’t want to be messing with me. My papa’s got a gun in the car and he probably won’t let me use it myself but I might ask him to shoot you for me.’
Thereafter, the possibility of a Butterfinger Blizzard, even at full retail price, slid swiftly out of the picture and Malcolm Orange had found himself making a desperate run for the Volvo’s backseat, anxious to avoid the imminent arrival of the cops.
‘Sorry Papa,’ he’d muttered from the safety of the backseat, ‘they’re all out of chicken strips, soda and fries. Worst Dairy Queen I’ve ever been to. We’ll have to go somewhere else I guess. We should probably go pretty quick.’
During the short drive from Dairy Queen to Burger King, Malcolm Orange had peered out the Volvo’s back window, scanning the road for cop cars and surreptitiously practicing his man voice.
‘What in blue hell are you doing with your voice, Malcolm?’ his father had asked. ‘You sound like Pee-wee Herman.’
Having ascertained that this mumbled squeak was Malcolm’s attempt at a man voice, the adults in the car had mocked him at intervals for the next two days, performing progressively hysterical Malcolm impressions every time the car fell silent.
Malcolm Orange refused to be dissuaded. He ignored their mockery and placed his man voice on the back burner, secretly hoping the opportunity for intimidation might arise sooner rather than later.)
‘Hello God,’ Malcolm Orange yelled, raising his voice against the possibility that God might be otherwise occupied with some other urgent conversation. ‘Hallowed be thy name. We need a place to stay and my mom needs a job so we can eat. Can we stay here in your house, please?’
‘You can’t stay here, son,’ God replied. He sounded an awful lot more Southern than Malcolm Orange had expected.
‘God Almighty,’ whispered Mrs Orange, immediately realizing her own profanity and clamping a muffled hand over her mouth. ‘I wasn’t expecting an actual answer.’
Malcolm, on the other hand, had secretly suspected that today might be the very day on which God redeemed himself and, thus convinced, proceeded boldly.
‘Bullshit,’ he said. ‘You’ve got more than enough room here for the three of us. Why can’t we stay just for a couple of nights?’
‘No swearing in the house of the Lord,’ God replied. He seemed to be moving closer in the dark.
‘Sorry,’ said Malcolm Orange.
‘Sorry,’ said Martha Orange.
‘No harm done,’ said God. ‘Seems y’all are in a bit of a pickle. Hard times makes good folks forget their manners. Listen, I’ll just put the lights on and maybe we can wander over to Dunkin’ Donuts and see what I can do to help you out.’
‘Awesome,’ said Malcolm Orange, who had already in his secret heart forgiven God for the chicken pox and the lack of death rays and was beginning to consider the possibility of forgetting the entire Ross mix-up.
‘Cover your eyes, Malcolm,’ shouted his mother, who had enough Old Testament knowledge to know that looking God in the eye, be it accidental or self-initiated over a large cappuccino, never ended well.
And with a wry little disclaimer of ‘Let there be light’, God flicked the light switch and flooded the sanctuary with a raw, halogen glow.
God was an African American man – five foot eight at a generous estimate – dressed head to toe in a sinless white suit.
For the first time in over three years, Malcolm Orange was speechless. Real life God, he suddenly realized, was just as disappointing as all the real life people he claimed to have magicked into existence.
Martha Orange, raised on a diet of conservatively illustrated Ladybird books, knew full well that God was old and olive-colored and particularly well-bearded and as the man standing in front of her was none of the above, nor even trying, was reasonably relieved to discover the Oranges had not accidentally rolled into the unveiled presence of the Almighty.
‘You’re not God, are you?’ she asked somewhat hesitantly. It was not the kind of question she was accustomed to asking strangers.
‘Goodness, no. Never claimed to be,’ the man replied, laughing hard and loose like a plate of barely set Jell-O. ‘I’m just Steve.’
‘Steve who?’ asked Malcolm who always preferred full and formal names over half-assed first names.
‘Steve Marten,’ Steve replied.
‘Like the actor?’ asked Mrs Orange.
‘Bingo ma’am. But mine’s spelt with an e instead of an i.’
‘Sounds the same to me,’ muttered Malcolm, who’d never heard of Steve Martin, either with or without an i. ‘What were you doing hanging out in the dark pretending to be God?’
Steve Marten let out another belly laugh and, bending his skinny legs, lowered himself down to Malcolm’s level, a move which Malcolm Orange never ceased to find infinitely patronizing. ‘I never claimed to be God, young sir. I was just taking a nap on the front pew after I got the hall floors polished.’
‘So, if you’re not God and you’re just Steve Marten, you won’t be able to help us much will you?’
‘Depends on what you’re looking for in the way of help. The offer of a coffee still stands. There’s a Dunkin’ Donuts three blocks from here. I’d be more than happy to buy you good folks a snack, looks like you could both do with a bit of sustenance.’
‘And what about after that?’ Malcolm Orange asked, dredging the pit of his swagger for the last remnants of a man voice. ‘Seems to me we’re still screwed whether you buy us a coffee or not.’
‘Malcolm!’ his mother exclaimed, stretching to deliver a swift, admonishing clip to her son’s right ear. ‘Don’t be so rude. Mr Marten is terribly kind to offer us a coffee. Apologize now before I skin you alive.’
Malcolm Orange mumbled a half-hearted apology while Steve Marten belly laughed his way out of the sanctuary and all the way down to Dunkin’ Donuts, where he bought them drinks and pastries and offered to put a good word in at the Baptist Retirement Village on the edge of town.
‘My youngest sister’s been working there for three years now,’ Steve Marten explained over his caramel macchiato, milk foam clinging to his upper lip. ‘It’s not so bad, if you don’t mind wiping old folks’ butts and smelling like porridge. They’re always looking for new starts. I’ll get our Marge to put in a good word for you.’
And true to his word, for Steve Marten was a born-again Christian and struggled to lie, even on his tax returns, Malcolm’s mother found herself starting in the retirement community just two days later. Less than a week thereafter, the Oranges were offered an empty retirement chalet in return for an extra night shift and a thirty percent cut of Mrs Orange’s pay packet. Malcolm Orange duly located his tennis racquet, packed his extra pants into a carrier bag and moved into his first permanent home of the last five years.
‘Mama,’ Malcolm Orange said, as they ate their first meal at the new kitchen table; a meager mishmash of Kentucky Fried Chicken and ramen noodles, picked straight from the packets, ‘I think God kind of did help us out, don’t you?’
‘Definitely,’ agreed his mother, though she knew it had all been the doing of Steve Marten, the floor polisher, who had for his excessive Christian charity demanded, and been duly awarded, fifteen sweaty minutes in the broom cupboard, alone with Martha Orange.
‘The Lord works in mysterious ways, his wonders to perform,’ she mumbled through a mouthful of fried chicken, and could not help but wonder when she’d first begun to sound exactly like her own, long-gone father.