"Holy Crap!" — Religion in a small town and other tales of The Great American Westerly Midwest Read online

about a hundred times?”

  Johnny got off the horse shaking his head.

  He stomped up the slide without slipping, right up to Tommy, grabbing the sides.

  Only some kids could do that. Tommy was impressed and a little scared.

  “What?”

  So Tommy said it again.

  “God can’t be a woman,” said Johnny. And he turned and slid down.

  “Why?”

  “I dunno, but He’s a he, so how can he be a girl,” Johnny looked up and shouted.

  On Sunday Tommy came over to Johnny’s wearing his church clothes. They were school clothes, but now they were church clothes, too.

  Johnny and Tommy walked in with Johnny’s mom and dad, who didn’t know why Tommy was with them.

  Johnny said he wanted to show Tommy the upstairs so the two of them ran up to the balcony. They went way up to the front, the edge, The Ledge-Edge where you could lean over and look right down on people’s heads and see everyone coming in.

  Tommy poked Johnny to notice their teacher, Miss Tina, taking her seat.

  For a while they watched people and fought the urge to jump or fall on their heads, and watched the organ guy work the pedals.

  Johnny nudged Tommy and nodded and they both went on the lookout for God like they said they were gonna.

  They looked behind them and they looked below, and they looked on the altar and by the ceiling and down Miss Tina’s church clothes for God.

  [Nona]

  I’ve never actually believed in God.

  My parents were jello-blob-theory New Age hippies that had my brother and I searching for our “spirit animals.” It’s all kind of silly.

  I’ve always found being an atheist very freeing. Life is enough to deal with. I don’t want to have to worry about an afterlife, too.

  My partner’s mom is a fundamentalist Christian.

  She spends hours and hours of every day thinking about some poor guy’s brutal execution two millennia ago. She worries that me and her son are going to hell.

  She tells me she couldn’t live without a God, because what would be the point? — but I don’t know that living with it is really living.

  I actually think it’s kind of insane. No, I know it’s insane. It sure as shit doesn’t seem to make her happy or fulfilled.

  I think atheism immensely comforting. And inspiring. And freeing.

  It makes me want to do something fun an interesting every day. It also really makes me want to do some good for other people, whatever that means.

  ‘Cause, ya know, this is all there is.

  The good ol’ here and now, being decent to one another, helping each other out, being healthy and happy and safe. Isn’t that what everyone wants?

  Isn’t that why the churches try so hard, too?

  They want to be happy, to have then figured out and now figured out and the next day figured out, too — and then just say whew! and plop down and be happy.

  But are we just pygmies out in the backyard at midnight howling at the moon with all that stuff?

  Couldn’t we just take our bowling balls and our gas grills and fire them up and call that church just as easy? If there is a God she would probably just smile and say that’s close enough.

  I would think so.

  Wouldn’t you?

  [Nona, the next day]

  There’s been a lot of people over the years who have believed in God.

  There’s mom and dad and grandma.

  There’s Moses and Jesus.

  Jesus even thought he was God.

  And there’s been all the church people over the years, and monks and sisters and priests and people who sit n the dark with hoods over their heads their whole lives, talking to God.

  We are all pencils in the hands of God. Mother Teresa said that.

  Was she just nuts?

  Or what?

  There’s Thomas Merton for another one, and Teilhard de Chardin.

  And Bishop Spellman, St. Augustine, one million million grandma’s, and Henri Nouwen, the liberation theologians in Central America, and one million grandpa’s.

  And that’s not all. Not even close.

  They all thought about God, talked to God, listened to God, suffered stuff for God.

  But if there is no God, what was all that about?

  Just all big kids who believed in the Easter Bunny?

  Bill Hicks asked why we celebrate Easter with giant rabbits and eggs and chocolate. That shit isn’t in the bible and yet we haul it up from the basement to celebrate some God rising from the dead and our never-ever really dying. Never. Ever. … Ever.

  That’s a pretty big thing to be making up all that weird shit about.

  And you know what? If there is no heaven, we will never know.

  We will never fucking know.

  Sorry, but right?

  The only way we know, is if there is a God and is a heaven.

  Everybody who dies knows — or they’re just dead — but they can’t tell us.

  What about ghosts and the white light of near death experiences?

  Ghosts. Did we make them up, too?

  You ever dream? Those are weird.

  Your own mind makes up all that up on it’s own — all the speaker parts — acting parts, you and everybody else in your dream, all the sets and scenery, the plot, the rewrite, the subtext.

  We can make up a lot of stuff, even when we’re not trying.

  [Robert S. Thompson]

  So, they kept looking, because Johnny said they should, but they didn’t know where else to look, so they went to swing on the swings at the park.

  For a while they rocked and kicked and swang together, back and forth, back and forth.

  Then they got off rhythm and they swang like that those steel balls on a string or like the legs of a cross-country skier, back and forth, back and forth.

  They still talked, but louder and they got to singing about Dinah in the kitchen and then beer on the wall, and all covered on top of old smokey.

  They got dizzy and they let their feet drag, scuff, drag, scuff, until they finally stopped, and the world was back to normal. No singing.

  One of them got up and began to walk and the other just followed.

  They walked together to the school and through the playground, climbing over the monkey bars with their feet pulled up, sweating, faces going red, grunting, because the ground was hot lava.

  It was.

  They crossed the bridge over the little river, kind of shaking, stopping like businessmen, to throw a few rocks that were there, like a job that needed doing, then moving on to the next thing.

  They walked across the big mall parking lot, and it took about a million years to even get to where there were any cars parked.

  They went inside and one yawned and then the other.

  They followed a smell to the caramel popcorn place, then they began to mosey. One of them started to just walk on his heels, and then they both were.

  Johnny and Tommy wandered through the sporting goods store and the candy store.

  They stopped to stare in the window of a store with a stuffed purple Easter Bunny and some eggs and Santa Claus reading a long list of names from a long sheet of little paper.

  They took a long time in the toy section of Sears, touching the Spiderman, X-Man and Superman, Batman crime fighting team dolls.

  Then they each at the same time wondered what time it was and if they were in trouble.

  They hurried out of the store, turned one way, then the other, then stopped in front of the store they always stopped at and decided to go inside to take of the glass lids to smell the candles and touch the baby Jesus manger scene with the horses and sheep and the camels, one with two humps, one with one.

  And they didn’t touch the one because they couldn’t reach way far in the back.

  [Robert S. Thompson, the next day]

  Then something happened.

  Something big.

  Pretty big.

  Johnny and
Tommy had kind of given up looking for God. Not given up, not like they said they quit, but like they just hadn’t looked for a while.

  Instead they played and watched TV and ate popcorn Tommy’s mom made. And I heard for a while they were consumed with throwing whiffle ball curves.

  They played on Saturday on the construction site for the new drive-in bank, hiding from each other and Texas Rangers and throwing dirt clods.

  Then at school on Monday the whole class and the whole school started praying that a kid in one of the grades who was sick would not die.

  Each morning the teachers in all the classrooms asked their children to pray for the poor student who was sick and might die.

  This went on for two days and then all the way to Friday.

  And then over the weekend everyone forgot about the one who was dying, but on Monday again they wondered and asked each other and then the teacher how the sick kid was.

  He died, said the teacher.

  But we all prayed that he wouldn’t, they said.

  God had his own plan, said another teacher walking past.

  Then if God has his one plan anyway, why did we bother asking, said one of the children, who was then shushed by a hand over her mouth by the teacher.

  [Tommy]

  Hey.

  My Mom sang this song to me ‘cause she knew I was pretty worried about God.

  Imagine there’s no Heaven, she said.

  But I don’t really want to. I think heaven would be cool. Somebody said just imagine the best thing you can imagine and that’s what heaven is and that’s what you will get.

  The last thing I’m going to imagine is that there’s no such thing as heaven. And I’d like to know that my grandma and grandpa got their heaven. They really wanted it.

  I’d hate to have it be that when you die it’s just dark.

  That would be the worst thing.

  Imagine there is hell.

  And it is pitch dark and you can’t see anything and you are stepping carefully with your hands stretched out forever and ever and there