Planes of Sunday - Chapter 49

49.
“First Church of Chris”

The upwards lilt of the word “yes” when spoken aloud, like the upwards rise of the dome of cheeks when one’s mouth is smiling, so that if a child says, “Let’s play a game. I’m going to cover my hand with my mouth and you try to guess if I’m frowning or smiling,” the other child can tell by the cheeks. That triumphant upwards lilt when someone he actually wants says yes to sex, and he is guaranteed at least a few minutes to try to discover or recover something vital.

About forty minutes passed with their breathing and each thing they said and their sex so absorbing like it could only be if it was the last or first time.

Christopher mumbled, “I’ve only ever wanted you,” at one point, when she had him in her mouth, but she didn’t hear him, or else pretended not to. Finally, Pammy and then Christopher sat up and brushed the gravel and tiny pieces of trash off their clothing as they heard the teasing voices of teenaged boys in the distance, and one deep, carefully meted out voice and a girl’s voice that nervously rolled from flirtatious to unfriendly in the space of five words.

“Hey, do you have anything else on you?” the deep voice asked.

“No, but I could get you some crystal meth in like an hour. A friend of mine lives right around here.”

“Oh, no, that’s cool. My friend Joe was good friends with Timmy Tank from that band GI Joe and he told me that right before Tim died, he told Joe never to fuck with that stuff.”

“Well maybe that’s why he died,” said the female voice. Pammy could imagine how Jenkins was nodding his head and grinning at this. As the group came into view, she saw him pat the girl on her head.

For a breath-held moment, Christopher felt as though a party were about to start getting good, which was still one of his favorite feelings, even in this half-alive time of his when he had just sworn off the one thing, the drug, that had given him real comfort. He had had to swear off the drug that was what he had always wanted from life since the age of eleven, that aloofness and password into the realm of the subterranean; he had had to swear off that dubious angel, fun, just to convince his mom that he could be a good person. The feeling of anticipation quickly faded and Christopher became protective of the body sitting next to his, like a young boy who wants to be a good man and has learned that men express tenderness through the avenue of discipline. “Straighten yourself out, your dumb boyfriend and his little rats are coming.” She looked at him with injury in her eyes but then, sushing him, pressed her pointer finger vertically across his lips so that it rested in the divot above his top lip, the space on a body named an “angel spot” by Humphrey Bogart when he was making Bacall fall in love with him in the movie Key Largo. She’d watched that movie with him one night on TV, when they were fifteen and tired from staying up the previous night. Shirley watched it too, sitting on the couch with them, a giant metallic bowl of popcorn on her lap. Shirley had fallen asleep before it ended, and Pammy and Christopher went into the bedroom she remembers as dark and familiar. Together, quietly, each had listened as virginity cooed like a huddled pigeon, both of them thinking something like, “This is really it.”