The Dirty Parts of the Bible: A Novel (7 page)

When I fixed the shade back on the lamp, she leaned over and clicked it on. The girl looked younger than she sounded—maybe sixteen or seventeen—with a powdered round face, bright red lips, blonde curls, and dark Theda Bara eyes. Her shoulders were bare, and she was wearing nothing but a sheet below them.

I backed up against the door and felt for the handle.

She looked me up and down. “My, you’re a young one. I think I’ll call you babyface.”

She was calling
me
young? I gripped the doorknob, ready to run.

She straightened out the blankets and pillows around her. “Well, aren’t you going to sit down?”

I was confused—if this was her room, why did she want me to stay? And if it was my room, why didn’t she get out?

“Don’t stand there looking stupid, babyface.”

I eased over to a wingback chair in the corner, ready to sort things out. “The lady downstairs told me room eight,” I started.

The girl frowned and slapped the edge of the bed. “Over
here
, silly.” That’s when it dawned on me where I was—and what she was.

Temptress. Harlot. Whore.
The words I’d heard in a thousand sermons echoed in my head. This was the sort of girl Father had always warned me about.

She didn’t look particularly loose or fallen, whatever that meant. She was kind of cute, actually. I sat on the far end of the bed, with my back to her, then twisted around sideways.

She laughed. “Shy, are we? What’s your name, babyface?”

I wondered whether I should make something up, but I was too tired to get creative. “Tobias. Tobias Henry.”

She scooted up against the headboard, a sheet still covering her chest. “Tobias … that sounds like something out of the Bible.”

My face turned red. “No. There’s no Tobias in the Bible.”

She snapped her fingers. “I got it—you’re another one from the Bible college, ain’t you?”

“I don’t read the Bible.” My mouth twitched. “I don’t even believe in God.” The evangelist’s Bible was still in my pack, crying out against me.

Desperate to change the subject, I asked the first question that came to mind. “Say, are you a Harvey girl?”

She crossed her arms. “What’s that supposed to mean?”

“I don’t know. I just thought—”

“No, I’m a fucking Sister of Charity,” she said. This girl could out-cuss my Mama.

I asked the next thing that came to mind. “Are you French?”

“Look, babyface. I don’t get paid to answer stupid questions.” With that, she hurled a pillow. I ducked and it glanced off my shoulder.

When I looked at her again, the sheet was down around her waist and her breasts were there right in the open, dangling like golden apples. My mouth fell open. I could only bear to look for a second, then I took a sudden interest in the wallpaper pattern.

“What’s the matter?” she asked. “You look like you’ve never seen a girl before.”

I hadn’t. Well, aside from one photograph, some cartoon drawings, and a hundred-thousand fantasies. But none of that prepared me for the real thing.

This was an unexpected opportunity. My goal had always been to get married and make love to a beautiful girl before the Rapture. But if there wasn’t going to be any Rapture, and no Judgment, why wait?

I needed some time to think it all over. Finally, I said, “Do you mind if we just talked for a while?”

“
Talk?
I’ve
been
talking, babyface. What do you want to talk about?”

Well, it would be nice to talk about sex, for one thing. I’d never had a chance to talk to anyone about it before. For all the time I spent thinking about girls, I didn’t know the first thing about what to do with them. All I knew about making love I’d learned from dirty comics and Mama’s health books. The comics didn’t offer much practical guidance; and those health books scared the dickens out of me, with their diagrams of female genitalia that resembled giant, man-eating tarantulas.

“Well,” she said, “what are you waiting for? Afraid I’ll bite?”

Maybe she would. I thought about that tarantula lurking under the sheet.

She looked at the clock on the wall. “Look, babyface, I ain’t got all night. Let’s get this over with.”

“I paid for the whole night,” I said. “The lady gave me a special.”

“Damn it all,” she said. “That’s money out of
my
pocket. You’d better be a big tipper.”

I thought she was talking about penis size. Did girls like them big? The thought terrified me. I’d never taken my shirt off in front of a girl, much less my shorts.

“What’s wrong—can’t get it up?”

That was the least of my problems—I was stiff as a flagpole. Finally, I decided to shut off my brain and let
that
part of me do the thinking. I climbed up onto the bed, and when I got close enough she grabbed my shirt and pulled me down onto her. Her breath was hot on my neck and her breasts were warm and soft against my chest, like bread dough. “Let’s see what you’re made of, babyface.”

I sat up, straddling her waist, and tried to unbutton my pants with trembling fingers. The room seemed to be spinning around me. My head was swimming. Everything went blurry. I closed my eyes and tried to steady myself.

When I opened my eyes again, the girl’s nipples were staring back at me like a pair of red eyes. And that’s when I saw the bruise. Just below her breasts, on her left rib, there was a brown and purple blotch with veins spidering out. That wasn’t the sort of tarantula I was expecting.

Who had hurt her—the big lady downstairs? Some Chicago businessman?
My flagpole went limp as a noodle.

“Listen,” I said, climbing off of her. “I—I’m too tired to do anything. I just came here looking for a place to sleep. You’re a beautiful girl and all, but—”

“If you want me to suck you off—”

“No—that’s not it. Really, I’m tired. So I’m going to take the floor and you can have the bed to yourself.”

For the first time, she didn’t say anything. I flattened out a blanket that had fallen off the bed and picked up the pillow she’d thrown. I curled up and listened to her breathing up above. It sounded like she was sniffling.

Why should I care? Why couldn’t I just have my way with her? For whatever reason, I couldn’t do it. If sex was just about power—the weak over the strong, the rich over the poor—I didn’t want it. I’d rather jerk myself off than pay a girl to pretend like she loved me.

I started thinking about Charlie Chaplin—how he rescued the Gamin, and how the two of them found a shack by the railroad tracks and made it a home. I imagined running away with the girl. We could find a cabin somewhere in the Ozarks. We could grow a garden and raise chickens.

Raising chickens with the girl sounded more appealing than screwing her—? What kind of fool notion was that? I knew less about raising chickens than I did about sex, if such a thing was possible.

Finally, I screwed up the courage to ask. “Have you ever thought about marriage?”

She let out a sharp laugh. “I told you—I don’t answer stupid questions.”

“I’ll bet there’s lots of fellows that want to marry you.”

Another pillow came sailing over the edge of the bed, hitting me in the face. “Go to sleep. I don’t talk to drunks.”

The pillow was damp with tears.

I
woke up thinking of Hosea. That’s the curse of being a preacher’s son—you wake up in the same room with a naked girl for the first time in your life, and what’s on your mind? Bible stories.

Hosea was the prophet whom God commanded to marry a prostitute. I once asked Father if God would ever tell someone today to do something like that. “No,” he said. “That was a special revelation, so that Hosea could stand as a sign of God’s faithfulness at a time when the people of Israel were whoring after foreign gods.”

But if God commanded it once, why couldn’t he do it again? His people weren’t any more faithful today than they were in Bible times. Was God telling me to marry this girl?

I stared up at the ceiling and listened for God, but didn’t hear anything—not even the girl’s breathing.

The folks at Remus Baptist had a direct telephone line to God. “The Lord told me,” they’d always say, or, “The Lord laid it on my heart.” But God never spoke to me. I used to lie awake at night begging for a few words—even a simple “hello”—just so I’d know he was there, but I never got a peep out of him. Maybe it was just as well. If I ever heard the voice of God, I’d shit my britches.

According to my father, God’s main way of speaking was through the Bible. And Hosea wasn’t the only biblical precedent for marrying a loose woman. In Sunday school, they made it sound like the women of the Bible were a bunch of pious schoolmarms—but nothing could be further from the truth. Take Tamar, for instance. She disguises herself as a harlot and sleeps with her own father-in-law, just to prove what a hypocrite he is. Or Ruth. When Ruth spots a man she likes, she gets him drunk, strips off his clothes, and hops into bed with him. When he wakes up the next morning, he has no choice but to marry her.

And Tamar and Ruth weren’t the fallen women of the Bible—they were the righteous ones. In fact, Matthew puts them on Jesus’ family tree, along with that other seductress, Bathsheba. These women were Jesus’ great-grandmothers! If they were alive today, I thought, you wouldn’t find them at a Sunday school picnic. You’d be a lot more likely to find them in the Pink Palace.

If Father ever complained about me marrying a whore, I’d tell him to go read his Bible. What a day
that
would be.

I lay on the floor daydreaming about all this for quite a while. All this time, I didn’t hear a peep coming from the bed above—the girl sure was a sound sleeper. Then I noticed that the door was slightly open. And next to the door, my extra change of clothes was strewn out on the floor. I climbed up to check the bed.

It was empty. I looked under the sheets, checked the other side, threw open the closet, searched every corner of the room. She was gone—and all my money with her.

+ + +

I paced the room thinking about what to do next. I couldn’t go downstairs and face the mademoiselle—she’d just laugh at me. There was a fire escape outside. I was terrified of heights, but that seemed like the best exit. I unlatched the window.

Then I heard a ruckus in the hallway—someone yelling and kicking and scratching at the walls. Another satisfied customer, I thought. The commotion grew louder and closer. I shook at the old window, trying to wrestle it open. But before I could escape, my door burst open. Mademoiselle Colette stomped into the room, dragging the girl behind.

The mademoiselle threw her onto the bed. “You little slut,” she said. “We don’t treat our customers this way.” The girl’s face was streaked with eye shadow and she had a new bruise on her arm.

Mademoiselle Colette handed me a wad of bills, then pressed her fat knee against the girl’s chest. “Apologize to the gentleman,” she demanded.

I grabbed the mademoiselle’s hand and shoved the money back in her plump fingers. “She didn’t steal it,” I said. “Really—I gave it to her.”

The mademoiselle released the girl and waddled backwards, leering at me. “She’s not worth it.”

I stepped between the two of them. “Well, I think she is.” My voice was shaking. “It’s my money, anyhow—isn’t it for me to decide?”

“If that’s what you want,” Mademoiselle Colette laughed. “But I get my commission.” She stuffed half of the money into her dress and threw the rest onto the floor. “Fuck her again,” she growled. “Till you get your money’s worth.” Then she stomped out and slammed the door.

I picked up the bills and laid them on the bed, next to the girl. “Here you go,” I said. “Keep it. Get out of here.” She didn’t say anything—just kept her face buried in the sheets. I wanted to ask if she’d come to Texas with me. I wanted to ask if she knew anything about raising chickens. But instead of asking another stupid question, I squeezed out the window and onto the fire escape.