Chub’s multiple lacerations gave a striped effect to his long sunken face. The softest breeze stung like hot acid. He said, “I reckon I need stitches.”
Bode Gazzer, shaking his head: “No doctors till we git home.” Then he got a good look at Chub’s seeping cuts and, recognizing a threat to his new truck’s gorgeous upholstery, announced, “Band-Aids. That’s what we’ll get.”
He made a U-turn on the highway and drove back to town at high speed. His destination was the Grab N’Go, where they would purchase first-aid supplies and also settle a piece of militia business.
Shiner’s teenage years had been tolerable until his mother had gotten religion. Before then, she’d allowed him to play football without a helmet, shoot his.22 inside the city limits, go bass fishing with cherry bombs, smoke cigarets, bother the girls and skip school at least twice a week.
One night Shiner had returned home late from a Whitesnake concert in Tampa to find his mother waiting in the kitchen. She was wearing plastic thong sandals, a shortie nightgown and her ex-husband’s mustard blazer, left over from his days at Century 21—for Shiner, a jarring apparition. Wordlessly his mother had taken his hand and led him out the front door. In the moonlight they’d traipsed half a mile to the intersection where Sebring Street meets the highway. There Shiner’s mother had dropped to her knees and begun to pray. Not polite praying, either; moans and wails that fractured the peacefulness of the night.
Shiner had been further dumbfounded and embarrassed to watch his mother crawl into the road and nuzzle her cheek to the grimy pavement.
“Ma,” he’d said. “Cut it out.”
“Don’t you see Him?”
“See who? You’re gonna get runned over.”
“Shiner, don’t you see Him?” She’d bounced to her feet. “Son, it’s Jesus. Look there! Our Lord and Savior! Don’t you see His face in the road ?”
Shiner had walked to the spot and peered intently. “It’s just an oil stain, Ma. Or maybe brake fluid.”
“No! It’s the face of Jesus Christ.”
“OK, I’m outta here.”
“Shiner!”
He’d figured the Jesus thing would blow over once she’d sobered up, but he was wrong. His mother had spent the whole next day praying at the edge of the road, and the day after as well. Some vacationing Christians gave her an ice-blue parasol and a Styrofoam cooler full of soda pop. The following Saturday, a reporter from a TV station in Orlando came to town with a camera crew. Soon the Road-Stain Jesus was regionally famous, as was Shiner’s mother. Nothing much went right for him after that.
One day he came home to find her burning his collection of heavy-metal CDs, which she had taken to calling “devil wafers.” She forbade him to drink beer or smoke cigarets, and threatened to withhold his five-dollar weekly allowance if he didn’t stay home Friday nights and sing hymns. To get out of the house (and far away from the pilgrims who came regularly to snap his mother’s picture) Shiner joined the army. In less than a month he washed out of basic training, and returned to Grange twenty pounds lighter but infinitely more sullen than when he’d left. To a depressed job market Shiner brought neither an adequate education nor practical work skills, so he wound up working the graveyard shift at the Grab N’Go, doubles on Saturday. Not much happened except for the stickups, which occurred every second or third weekend. Some nights barely a half dozen customers came through the door, leaving Shiner loads of free time to paw through the latest Hustler or Swank. He was always careful to sneak the nudie magazines back to the frozen-food aisle, the only place in the store that was blocked from the fish-eye gaze of the security camera. Shiner would dissect the magazines and arrange his favorite snatch shots across the Plexiglas lid of the ice-cream freezer—it was colder than a frog’s balls back there, but he couldn’t risk getting caught at the front of the store. His mother would be ruined if her only son got fired for whacking off on the job, especially on videotape. Even though Shiner was mad at his Ma, he didn’t want to hurt her feelings.