August Prather Is Not Dead Yet

Chapter 1-3

“Well, hell-o, Father Losha,” a twang with a high octave pierced their ear drums.

“Hi Susan.” Lyosha stepped over the threshold only to be grabbed in a bear hug. The woman looked as though she was going to annihilate him, pro-wrestler style.

“Well how have you been? You know, not a day goes by that I don’t think about you up at that funny little church all alone and with no ladies around to cook and to clean for you, when here, you have gone and bought yourself a little nun.” Susan let Lyosha go and focused her powers on Garnet who was stunned as though struck by one of those poison-tipped needles shot out of hollowed reeds in the sss.

“Now to who do I owe the pleasure?”

Garnet kept standing there. She could not step over the threshold into that house.

Lyosha’s smile was crooked. He nudged Garnet with an elbow. The woman did not respond.

“This is Sister Katherine,” Lyosha introduced her. “She doesn’t speak English, sorry.”

Then Lyosha recited something in Russian. Garnet waited until he’d finished and then she nodded when he stopped.

“Oh, she’s just come over from that third world country y’all are from? She must feel so privileged to see decent houses and eat decent meals.” Here she turned to Garnet. “Welcome to our little piece of God’s green goodness.”

“It is not a f-” Lyosha started but Garnet stepped on his foot. “Fine place. A good place. She’s from a bad place. Things are very bad. Where she is from. That place.”

“Oh well, thank you. It is so good that y’all are here now in the greatest country on earth, especially since.” She took Lyosha to the side. “She was probably a prostitute. I watched a show about it on the news. It’s true, almost all the women have to work at night just to buy bread and potatoes . . . and wear them headscarves.”

“Okay.” Lyosha wrenched his arm out of her false nailed fingers. “I’ve got to . . .”

“Ask her about it.” She eyed him sternly. “I’ll bet she’ll tell you. I’ll bet she’s had at least one forced abortion. The prostitution rings are all run by the mafia and . . .”

“Mom!” a female voice reeked from the kitchen. “Mom, you’re embarrassing me. We have company.”

A girl tramped in from the kitchen. She was maybe fourteen, but she looked like an old raccoon woman. Her eyes were blue and black with makeup. Her skin glowed with layers of highlighter. She spoke with a whining cough. Her hair grew blonde out of the seeded soil of dark roots.

“Momma, get JJ Alexson a margarita,” the creature barked.

“Faith.” The beadles crawled out of their nests and glittered, then retreated. “Honey, what are you doing home so soon? Now say hello to Father Lyosha and Sister Katherine.”

“Hello,” Faith let the word slobber like honey. “Momma, what are they doing here?”

“Well, Princess Faith, they are going to get rid of our little problem.” Her smile was going as wide as it could.

“Momma, we don’t have a problem. Momma, all the kids at school will think I live in a crazy people’s house if they know . . . Momma, I brought JJ Alexson home early from practice because he said his momma don’t let him drink. I told him you let us drink all we want so we came over here.” She stamped her foot at her mother and flung hair over her shoulder, then stamped her foot again. Garnet expected a charge to come next. There wasn’t one. There was surrender.

“Oh, baby, thank you for coming here to get drinks instead of going off to some sleazy bar in the city. And JJ Alexson is the nicest boy, you make sure he knows that he can come here any time he likes,” she whispered in her daughter’s ear. “And you make sure not to drink too much. You know where all the good beer is at.”

“But Momma.” Faith made a pout. The earth shifted. “I want margaritas. I dunno how to make margaritas.”

“Okay, Princess Faith, I’ll help you in a minute. We just have to . . .”

“Momma! I told you I don’t want them to do that thing while JJ is here!”

“Well, they’ll only be a little while, and they’ll mostly be upstairs.”

“Aw . . . okay, fine.”

Faith left the room.

“I’ll just do a quick sweep through here.” Lyosha set the briefcase on the floor and opened it. Inside were three bibles, four amperes, and a rosary. Lyosha took his phone out and went over to a closet, where he placed it into the stereo system of the house. The Mormon Tabernacle choir sang an eminent Ave Maria. Lyosha took an ampere and went across the room, putting solution on his finger and rubbing it in the sign of the cross on the corners of the room. He went around to other rooms downstairs.

“Do you know if Lyosha is a communist?” the woman asked now that she and Garnet were alone in the foyer.

“No,” Garnet answered, dumbly feigning an accent.

“What about you? You want us to give lazy, welfare-sucking tramps a chance to waste more of my money?” she asked. Garnet noticed she was wearing heels and pearls with acid-wash jeans. “People are so wasteful. I try so hard to help the poor, Sister, really I do. But they are just so wasteful.”

There were photographs on the wall of little dogs in ballerina costumes and drunken teenagers on yachts and more family pictures. Each time the parents, a beefy bald guy and the lovely Miss Susan, looked more and more pretentious. Each time with more and more children in the pictures. The one over the fireplace had eight children in various stages of production, all smiling little paper smiles. There were also two ugly dogs and a deer skull in the photograph. The frame was gilded and covered in jade and rhinestones.

“So wasteful, we can’t trust them. They all do drugs and things and they all just waste our money that was so hard-earned.” Garnet saw that the oldest picture on the wall had the happy couple being married. The bald guy looked about forty and young Susan looked sixteen. “I know it’s God’s will and all, but I pray for them so hard that those poor women will find decent men to marry them up and turn them into good Christian women like me. Their children can have a stable home and a big happy family. That’s the way God intended things to be—a big strong man bringing bread to his little wife and their big brood of sweet children.”

Garnet stood there.

“Oh, what a silly little woman I am, forgetting you can’t speak a lick of English. Well, learn it soon. You’re in our country, now,” she chided grabbing Garnet’s wrist. “Let me show you my cross collection . . .”

“I need Sister Katherine to assist me upstairs,” Lyosha broke in. He had to have a short game of tug-of-war with Garnet’s body before she got away with him, up the stairs and into a guest bedroom.

Garnet let out a breath.

“f**k,” was the first word out of her mouth. “Thank you for getting me out of that.”

She sat down on the bed shaking her head.

“Yeah, Susan is . . . well, what did you think of her?” Lyosha grinned, opening his suitcase back up.

“Holy shit.”

“Pretty much,” he laughed and handed her a Bible. “Let’s get some real work done.”

“Um . . .” Garnet fingered the cover. “Now isn’t the time but . . . I don’t really think this will work.”

“What do you mean? I guess I’ve had too many experiences to know how to convince someone else, but . . . let me think . . . Did you ever even once consider that it could be true? I mean scientists haven’t been able to really prove away . . .”

“I guess . . . when I was little. But I learned a lot about it and . . . I mean I really tried with the whole thing and the more I learned the more I saw it as useless.”

“Okay, that’s weird. Usually the more evidence people see, the more convinced they get . . .” Lyosha shrugged. “But, they are kind of useless. They don’t really do anything.”

“Wait . . . what are you talking about?” Garnet looked up from the bible in her lap.

“Ghosts. What did you think?”

“Oh . . . I . . . I thought you were talking about God.”

“Seriously?” Lyosha grinned. “f**k no. God? Wow. Really? No way.”

“Yeah.” Garnet looked away setting the bible down. “I thought you were trying to convince me that there was a God.”

“What a waste of time. To be honest with you, I don’t care. I don’t care if you think there’s a God. I don’t care if there is a God.” Lyosha opened a second bible and took out a small video recording device. In the third bible, there was a thermal imaging camera. “But ghosts are very real.”

Garnet opened her bible and found an EMF reader.

“I know what this is. I used to ghost hunt with this club for a little while.” She looked at it, turning it on. “What’s the base reading for the house?”

“With all the electronics? Five. Wait until I turn the lights off, okay?”

They started scanning the room, Garnet wasn’t picking up any electric forces that were abnormal and the thermal didn’t see any heat patterns.

“That’s new. We didn’t have one of those when I was with the club . . .”

“Did you ever see anything?”

“Yeah, there were a couple of weird images. I heard a voice in my ear once,” Garnet sighed. “But it wasn’t really what I was looking for.”

“What was it you were looking for?”

“Just answers, I guess. I used to look for answers.”

“Did you find anything?”

“No. I just sort of stopped looking. It didn’t really matter. Things just seemed to happen at random and living day to day, living to get by, became a distraction. No more looking for anything.” Garnet was sitting on the bed again.

“Were you afraid of what you might find?”

“What do you mean?”

“You know, people like the woman downstairs. She has no idea what things mean. She would worship Fluffy the Éclair if that’s what everyone around her did. She doesn’t want to know real things. She hides from them, defends against them. But because of that, she’ll live a long life; unfulfilled, yet happy.” Lyosha sat beside Garnet. “You’re afraid of becoming her, but you don’t want to be like August. I know because that’s how I am. I’m terrified that once I find something valuable, everlastingly valuable, I won’t get to keep it. That’s why . . .”

Lyosha cut off, clamping a hand over his mouth.

“What’s wrong?” Garnet asked.

“I don’t know you, so I was nervous about bringing you here. I was afraid that you’d actually like Susan.”

“If you hadn’t made me Russian, I wouldn’t have known what to say to her. I don’t know what to say to people like that.”

“Let’s get the f**k out of here.”

AWAYThey all piled into August’s Prius with luggage in the trunk and set off down the road. At first it was quiet—Mitya sat in the front and Lyosha and Garnet sat in the back. No one said anything for a while. They just drove and that was all right. Everyone seemed to be enjoying the thoughts in their head.

Then August turned to Garnet.

“That manuscript you were reading is still back there, right? In case you get bored.” She turned back to the road. They were passing by another suburban deathtrap.

“Thanks,” Garnet choked. “You knew the whole time that’s why I snuck into your car, didn’t you?”

Lyosha looked to Garnet, Mitya looked to August. But August didn’t turn.

“Yes,” she said.

Then she turned on the stereo and ridiculous melodic dubstep music vibrated through the waves of sterile desert heat. They were off.