The Life of Hope (2 page)

“Ah, the Hoper.”

So the next afternoon (having spent the morning trying to write despite my rumsick state; I’d managed to complete a single paragraph), I hopped on the moped and roared into Hope. The road to Hope was up and down and full of curves, and although I had to assist the vehicle by pedaling when cresting a hill, on the descent I could really fly, and the noise reverberating inside my motorcycle helmet was deafening. Gophers and rabbits, snoozing in the warm sun, would wake with a start, mumble animalese for “Oh, fuck!” and hurry off to the side of the road. I flushed any number of crows, ravens and red-winged blackbirds from the thickets; the birds would rise to a height of twenty feet and peer down apprehensively. Only a goshawk, alone and high in the sky, seemed indifferent, circling and not caring a tinker’s cuss about the asshole on the moped.

Sometime during the night, vandals had been up to no good, although not much of it. Whereas the green WELCOME TO HOPE sign used to record a round POP. 1,000, someone had crossed out the final 0 and added underneath a bent and hasty 1.
In the middle of Hope, Ontario, is a tree-lined oval of green grass, perhaps one hundred feet long, that the townspeople perversely insist on calling The Square. I leaned the moped up against a tree, chained and locked it securely. There were benches and pigeons in the Square, garbage cans and a water fountain. I had a sip of water and spat it out on the grass. The water was warm, almost hot, and bitter.

At one end of the Square was a cannon, the barrel filled with candywrappers and condoms. At the other was a tall granite obelisk that announced TO OUR GLORIOUS DEAD. In the middle of the Square was a statue. I wandered over.

The statue was green and mouldy, especially around the base, and I suspected that dogs and drunks made frequent use of it as a leaking post. The man who was the statue had one arm raised, tiny fingers pointed at the clouds, and in the other hand he held a large book. He was dressed in a way that looked vaguely clerical, a stiff collar and a coat with long, mournful tails. The statue-man’s face was rather odd—one eye was made much larger than the other, and both were set well back, hidden by shadow underneath the forehead. The man sported a beard and long hair, giving him a stern, almost biblical aspect.

Then something about the statue caught my eye. It had a stone boner. At first I was sure that this was some trick of the sunlight and shadow, but a closer inspection proved me wrong. The statue was clearly possessed of an erect penis. It lurked underneath the marble trousers, cocked slightly to the right to avoid meeting the waistband. It was a huge thing, this stone boner, perhaps ten inches long and thick as a baby’s forearm. I giggled, reached out and touched the thing gingerly. “Poor guy,” I laughed out loud. I bent down to read the tarnished plaque, eager to find out the identity of this man with the eternal hard-on. It was:

Even in the weak candlelight, the girl’s face was a startling red. She looked as if she might explode suddenly, like a shotgun shell that had been tossed into a campfire.

Joseph Benton Hope studied her, pleased though slightly alarmed. He imagined the Spirit of the Lord moving through her, flowing in her veins and mixing gloriously with the humors, activating the corpuscles to produce this brilliant hematic display. Joseph Benton Hope shifted slightly in his seat.

The girl’s chest was heaving, the shape of her bosom defined regularly and almost perfectly against the white fabric of her smock. J. B. Hope rose to his feet suddenly, leaping up as though his chair was aflame. The red girl merely raised her eyes to follow, obedient and calm.

The other young woman, dark and dour, reared back in fright and then giggled. Hope silenced her with a quick and jagged look, knowing how frightening his eyes could be. His right was large and blue and motionless (it was glass), the other small, dark and quick.

“And they brought unto him also infants,” J. Benton Hope intoned in his queer, croaky voice, “that he would touch them. But when his disciples saw it, they rebuked them …” Hope forgot his place. The red girl had taken to rocking back and forth in rhythm with his words, or perhaps he had taken to gasping them out in strict time to her rocking. Joseph Benton Hope remained silent for many moments before speaking again.

“But Jesus called unto them, and said, ‘Suffer naked children to come unto me, and forbid them not, for of such is the Kingdom of Heaven.’ ”

Some small portion of Hope’s mind registered a complaint over the substitution of the word “naked.” The Lord Himself placed it on my tongue, countered Hope silently and with faith, for which he was rewarded by a Vision of the red girl naked. She was no older than seventeen, this girl, and the fat that rounded her belly and behind was still fresh and icily pink. Her breasts were swollen (Hope had a theory about the female bosom, that the right breast was the home of the amative soul, while the left housed the propagative—it was a complicated theory, and what it boiled down to was that in moments of excitement the breasts would become swollen) and her sex was silky. The Vision was gone in an instant, and left behind in Joseph Hope a strange, choking sensation. Wishing to dispel it, Hope clenched his tiny hand and stabbed it upwards toward Heaven.

The thunder alarmed even Hope, coming as it did at the instant his fist was thrust to the limit of his reach. It was a loud peal, as if the cloud that produced it sat on the roof of his own house. Hope shook his fist then, and the thunder seemed to boil and bubble at his command. Sensing it would die soon, Hope let his hand drop slowly. By the time it was once more at his side, the clangor had been replaced by another sound, the soft sound of rain falling to the earth.

Remarkably, it was the other girl, the dour and dark one, who seemed most affected. Her eyes were closed, and she seemed to be having some difficulty breathing. This girl parted her lips (the bottom lip, Hope noticed, was twisted in the middle by a thin, white scar) and whispered the single word, “Yes.”

“Yes,” Joseph Hope repeated, letting the word fall as softly as the rain.

And now the red girl did explode. She shouted “Yes!” with such vigor that two of the buttons on her tight bodice flew away. (J. B. Hope’s theory about the female bosom seemed beyond doubt at this point.) The red girl ran to the window and pressed her face against the glass. “It’s raining!”

Hope had to stifle a desire to snap,
Of course it’s raining, we
knew it was raining
. Instead he beamed magnificently and watched the pitchings of the girl’s chest.

The dour and dark girl said, so quietly that it was almost inaudible, “To wash away the sins of this wicked, wicked place.” J. B. Hope thought initially that she was referring to his own house, number forty-two Dutton Street, but then realized she was being more general and meant the world, or at least the entire state of Massachusetts.

Meanwhile the red girl seemed to be losing more and more buttons, and the fabric had torn around one of her armpits. Joseph could see the crisp white of an undergarment and a thin slice of red flesh. The entire area around her armpit was damp (a huge area, Hope noted, a wet ring larger than he’d seen on anyone before), and large beads of perspiration sat on the girl’s forehead and upper lip.

The other girl stood up. She was tall, much taller than Joseph B. Hope, and slender. “I’m going to arise and be baptized, and have my sins washed away,” she announced, much as she might have announced her intention of going to the market. She made for the door, and Hope was reminded of her clumsy gait. Her left foot was in a special boot, one with a three-inch sole. Hope pursed his mouth, as if to spit out some slight bitterness.

The red girl was now clothed only in her undergarments, although Joseph hadn’t noticed her taking off her dress. It was possible, Hope thought, that the garment had simply blown away from her swelling body. “Yes!” shouted the red girl, and she bolted for the door as though it was somehow important that she precede the crippled girl through it. “Suffer naked children to come unto me!” sang the red girl, and Joseph Benton Hope said, “Actually …” and then fell silent. This was, after all, a Bible study, and he’d had half a mind to explain that the word “naked” was used in a metaphorical sense—maybe even half a mind to admit that the word wasn’t there in the first place, that it should be “little.” But the girls were already outside.

J. B. Hope moved to his window and looked out upon the streets of Lowell. Across from his house, beside the dark Merrimack, was a boot factory, and Joseph wondered whether it had manufactured the special boot for the crippled girl. (The
crippled girl was soaking wet and still fully dressed, although she was struggling frantically to remove her clothes.)

Was it indeed possible, wondered Joseph Benton Hope, that the factory opposite made nothing save boots for crippled feet? (The red girl was now naked, her undergarments slipping to her ankles with the first touch of rain. The rain had mixed with her sweat, and the red girl was glistening.) J. B. Hope pondered, almost idly, how much of this he had wanted to happen. He’d certainly wanted to see the red girl denuded, but hadn’t the Lord already granted him that Vision? (Although, gazing at the red girl through the window, Joseph noted certain discrepancies. Her breasts, for example, were more ponderous, dragged toward her belly by gravity. Perhaps the Vision was of the girl in Heaven, where all is free of earthbound forces.) Hope felt no true desire to have amorous congress with the red girl, although he did have an erection. Hope touched it, shifted it to a more comfortable position. It was J. B. Hope’s theory that his penis was not engorged with blood, as so many thought, but rather with the Spirit of the Lord. Therefore, should he have amorous congress with the red girl, he would merely be placing the Spirit of the Lord directly inside her. (The crippled girl had finally torn off her dress, and she now stood sternly corseted despite her slender frame. The red girl was smiling toward the sky, and it hadn’t occurred to her that the crippled girl might require assistance.)

A church bell began to chime in the distance, and Joseph Hope absentmindedly counted along. When it reached nine he scowled, and with the tenth toll Hope rapped his tiny knuckles against the pane with annoyance. At any moment the crippled girl’s father would arrive in his buggy. (The red girl had helped the other after all, and now the crippled girl was bare-chested. For some reason the crippled girl turned away in order to pull down her bloomers, and Joseph saw a shallow and shadowed posterior emerge. She was naked now, except for her boots. The crippled girl spread her arms toward Heaven, the elbow joints bending awkwardly backward. The red girl pointed at the cripple’s boots and laughed.)

“Silly,” muttered Joseph, in reference to any number of things, not just the red girl’s adolescent scorn. Suddenly Joseph had
desire so strong that it hurt, made him spit out air and fog the window. Joseph Benton Hope realized that his erection had vanished, the Spirit gone uselessly elsewhere. He also realized that he could hear the sound of horses’ hooves. Joseph Benton Hope wanted to go fishing.

Joseph spoke aloud, saying, “Even unto this present hour we both hunger, and thirst, and are buffeted, and have no common dwellingplace …”

Joseph Benton Hope decided to leave Lowell, Massachusetts.

Across from the Square were the shops of Hope. There was, among other things, Delanoy’s IGA, which would supply my grocery needs, not that I have many; a liquor store (where I hoped to open a charge account); two of the three taverns spotted the night before; a butcher’s shop, a bank, a bakery, and something called Edgar’s Bait, Tackle and Taxidermy.

Edgar’s display window was a strange thing to behold. A handwritten sign taped to the glass proclaimed LIVE WORMS, CRAWLERS, MINNOWS. The tackle portion of his trade was represented by an assortment of hooks and lures that appeared to have been flung in angrily. There were any number of stuffed fish, a stuffed skunk, and then, as if to show that he didn’t merely stuff trifles, there was a stuffed bear’s foot. Give me a bigger window, Edgar seemed to be saying, and boy you’d really see something! Edgar’s display window also inexplicably contained a violin, a dressmaker’s dummy and a Ouija board.

Inside the shop there was comparatively little. Almost all of
Edgar’s stock seemed to be in the window. There were a few rods lined up along a wall, and there was a long counter with some books on it, scuzzy mimeographed things with cardboard covers, obviously written by and for the locals—
What to Look Out For at Lookout Lake
, by Lt. Col. Alan Skinner (ret’d),
Hunting & Killing Grizzlies
, by S. and L. McDiarmid and
Fishing for Ol’ Mossback
, by Gregory Opdycke.

Behind this counter stood Edgar.

Upon seeing Edgar I wondered why the shop wasn’t called Edgar’s Bait, Tackle, Taxidermy and Axe-murder. He was as evil-looking a man as I’ve ever seen, his head bald, his face covered by a prickly black beard. Edgar was also immense, a good half foot above six feet, muscled like a mountain. I guessed he was somewhere around forty-five years old, but the T-shirt he had on, several sizes too small for his chest and arms, bore the name of a popular heavy metal band. Edgar stared at me as if he meant to damn me to Hell. He removed something from his mouth, maybe the butt of a cigar, probably the leg of some cute forest-dwelling animal, and barked, “Yeah?”