Bill left Pastor Wilson’s as the sun was creeping below the low hills in the west. There was a local dive bar just around the corner, and he thought he’d stop in for a bite—maybe even a drink. Two years of sobriety was something Bill considered a serious accomplishment, something he attributed to Pastor Wilson almost completely. But he decided that if there was ever a reason to take a brief step off the wagon, it was weighing the option to become the local sin eater. Besides, it was just a step. He had no intention of ever falling again.
He walked over crumbling concrete sidewalks, heaping slabs driven from the earth by tree roots and ice, and turned into a doorway. A forgotten classic rock band poured through old jukebox speakers inside the dimly lit bar. The air was thick with fried cheese, stale beer, and the particularly pungent aroma of sweat. There was a group of young men by a pool table, halfheartedly chalking their cues and laughing. Bill recognized one of them from his apartment building. Dave? Derron? He couldn’t remember.
He walked up to the bar and ordered a cheeseburger with fries, one beer, and a shot. He finished the drinks before the food came and ordered another round when it did. He ate and pretended to watch the TV that hung over the shelves lined with dusty liquor bottles. His mind drifted easily enough to the night Pastor Wilson found him. The night he killed Lana. The booze began to do its work, and like beer running out of the tap, the memories flowed.
Hazy memories, images like old black-and-white photos, grainy and unclear, came to him. Lana on the ground, Bill on top of her, pounding her face like a butcher tenderizing meat. Hamburger meat. And wasn’t that the thought that always came to him when these memories surfaced? Hamburger meat. He looked down at his plate and pushed it away.
Bill was knocked forward. Something had struck his back with considerable force. His front teeth clanked on the thick pint glass he was drinking from, and he winced at the pain. Beer spilled down his shirt and onto the polished wooden bar top. He turned his head as Dave/Derron was steadying himself, dusting the front of his button-down shirt, searching for balance.
“Watch where you’re going,” Bill said. He turned back toward the bar.
“Hey, fuck you, man,” Dave/Derron said.
Bill set the glass down and lifted his head. He caught the bartender’s eye. The bartender gave him a look that said let it go. Bill nodded and went back to his thoughts.
Didn’t he love her? Yes. He thought he did anyway, but you couldn’t do that to someone you love. You couldn’t—
Icy liquid ran down his back. His spine stiffened as it trickled down and settled into the seat of his pants. Bill stood and turned. Dave/Derron, an empty beer glass in hand, laughing.
The world melted away. The long wooden bar disappeared as if behind a cloud of smoke. The faces that had been looking at him turned into gray blobs, featureless and lifeless. All he could see was Dave/Derron standing in front of him, laughing like the cocky kid he was—but Bill didn’t hear any sound come out of his mouth. The kid’s lips stretched in slow motion, revealing two rows of neat, white teeth. Bill had the sudden urge to rearrange those teeth.
Bill too moved in slow motion, pulling his fist back behind his head like it was tied to a bungee cord—and then it suddenly shot forward. The cord had snapped. It landed with lunatic force on Dave/Derron’s chin, and the world reappeared. Noise blasted into his ears like someone had turned on the record player with the needle already wedged in the dusty grooves. Beer splattered on the floor, and a schoolyard moan drowned out what was coming from the jukebox. Dave/Derron fell to the floor, sprawled out on his back, looking more shocked than hurt.
“You motherfucker,” Dave/Derron began, but Bill jumped on him.
Bill pummeled his face and chest, and blood stained the rims of the kid’s teeth like red grout around porcelain tile. There was screaming, and Bill thought he heard someone say something about cops. Maybe it was the bartender. Maybe it was one of the kid’s buddies. Bill didn’t know. He kept wailing as the struggling mass beneath him was reduced into nothing more than weak jerks and twitches.
He couldn’t stop. He felt Dave/Derron’s skull indent under his fists. The world was fading again, and when he looked down he didn’t see the kid from his apartment building. He saw Lana. He saw hamburger meat. A voice from outside, from above, from somewhere, from nowhere at all. Pastor Wilson. Get out, the voice said.
Bill stopped punching. He looked up at the horrified bartender. There was a cordless phone wedged between his left ear and shoulder, his eyes like the moon—round and shiny. He was talking, and as Bill watched, his voice faded in.
“..1776 Lundquist Street… I don’t know, six-five, six-six, just hurry, I think he just fuckin’ killed this kid.”
Bill wiped his nose with the back of one bloodied hand, threw a twenty on the bar, and walked outside. The crowd parted around him like they were iron filings and Bill was the opposite pole. He went around back and hopped a chain-link fence that spanned the rear of the bar’s property and landed on brown grass with a thud. A tired-looking mutt tied to a dilapidated doghouse barked at him, but Bill didn’t notice. There was another fence that ran along the side yard toward the road and ran into the back corner of the house. Bill hopped it and walked back to Pastor Wilson’s.
When he opened the door, the pastor saw the blood on Bill’s hands and shook his head.
“My son.”
Sirens rose and fell. Pastor Wilson stuck his head out of the door and looked around.
“I need your word,” the pastor said. “I need you to agree.”
Bill fell to his knees. The world threatened to come undone like it had so many times before. Bill struggled to keep the tears from falling.
“Yes, yes, whatever you say, whatever you need, I’ll do,” Bill said, jerking his head in rhythm with the approaching sirens.
Pastor Wilson looked down at Bill, and for a moment Bill wasn’t sure if he would be welcomed back in. He brought his hands up and realized that the pastor had been looking at the blood—looking at it like a disappointed father looks at an F on a report card. Panic flooded him.
“Please, I need your help. Anything you say, anything you need,” Bill said.
Pastor Wilson sighed.
“Your sins poison the very air you breathe. You, you wretch!” he spat, narrowly and expertly missing Bill’s face. “Say yes.”
***
“Bill, I’d like you to meet Julia.”
The three of them sat in the Hall. The day was exceptionally hot, and the ceiling fans that hung above them only succeeded in moving the warm air around the room.
“Hi,” Bill said.
Her skin was yellowish and taut. Her hair was black and wispy like smoke, and she avoided his eyes. Bill studied her face, trying to place how he knew her.
“Julia is a whore,” Pastor Wilson said. His words were often blunt, but these were sharp, and Julia winced at their bite.
“A whore and a junkie. Show him your arm, sweetheart.”
Julia pulled her sleeve up above her elbow and showed Bill her forearm. It was scabbed and bruised and lined with rows of pockmarks. The skin looked thin and brittle like tissue paper, and Bill wondered if it crackled when touched.
Bill nodded his head, and Julia pulled her sleeve down.
“You two have a lot in common,” Pastor Wilson continued, standing. “You both walk the same path—the one that, unfortunately, leads straight to the Devil’s doorstep.”
He climbed the stage, raised his hands above his head, and spoke to the ceiling.
“Julia stands shrouded in darkness, my Lord, doomed to suffer in this life and the next. Bill, on the other hand? Well, Bill stands in limbo. One foot in darkness, the other in light—something the Chinese might call the yin and the yang.”
He turned and faced them. Bill saw something in the pastor’s eyes that he hadn’t before. They looked blank, two-dimensional.
“But they know not the path to salvation. They would say that the mind of a man straddles that line between light and dark, and that this is good! That this is the way! But the Lord tells us that it is not. Only He can show us the way, and only He stands in the light.”
Pastor Wilson sat on the stage and let his feet hang just above the carpet.
“Bill has made great strides on his journey with the Lord, haven’t you, Bill?”
Bill nodded his head, but in his mind he saw hamburger meat.
“Sure you have, but you aren’t perfect. Far from it. Do I have that right?”
He nodded again.
“Sure, and that’s just fine. After all, to sin is human.”
He laughed at this—raucous, almost lunatic squeals. Bill and Julia smiled awkwardly.
“Bill is trying to pull his foot out of the darkness, but he has met resistance. Murder. The sins of his past are too great—they taunt him, they push him further from the light. They are what keep his foot stuck in the mud. He must make a sacrifice, and he must help others. That, my dear Julia, is why he has agreed to consume your sins.
“Why don’t you tell us about it tonight, Brother Bill? Tell us the story of you, of your sins. How you got your foot stuck so deep in the mud. You know about Julia’s sins—enough to work with, I think. She should know yours too.”
Bill twisted his hands into a knot and stared at the carpet.
“Sometimes I lose control. I see red. That’s all.”
“Is it?”
“When you scrape away the fat, yeah. It is.”
“Did you love her?”
“Yes.”
“What about that boy in the bar? Did you love him, too?”
“No, I—”
“Was it easy to kill them? What is it, Bill? What is it that sets those murderous hands of yours to work?”
The pastor was smiling.
Bill’s hands tightened around each other like a knotted doorstop. The world began to fade. His eyes were locked onto the carpet now, and he tried to imagine himself riding along the waves on that Seussian ship—that impossible ship with its impossible shapes—bobbing in the sea, far away from here. He mouthed the words, heard them in his head as if someone were screaming to him from above the crashing waves, high on the mast of that wavering ship.
Pastor Wilson stepped down from the stage and stood before them. He tapped Bill on the shoulder. His head snapped up, and he met the pastor’s eyes. He was holding a manila folder under his right arm, his gray hair shining in the dim light like a thundercloud.
“Let us begin.”
***
Bill had never seen the rest of Pastor Wilson’s home. It had the pleasant smell of cinnamon and something else that Bill thought smelled like smoke, but sweeter—autumnal—like burning leaves. They walked through a dimly lit hallway with crucifixes hung next to prints of Christ and his Disciples. There was one wooden frame among the cheap plastic ones. Hung in the center of the wall: Mother Mary weeping over Christ’s limp body.
They walked into a room with a chair beside a small table. There was a copy of the Bible on the table. Its edges were tattered and worn, and the gold-stamped words on the cover were faded, blending with the soft black leather. They went into the kitchen.
There was a table off to the side with one wooden chair and two folding chairs from the Hall. There was a plate on the table with a butter knife, a loaf of bread, a jar of peanut butter, and grape jelly. Pastor Wilson pulled the wooden chair out from beneath the table and offered it to Julia. She smiled faintly and sat.
“Is that it?” Bill said. “A sandwich?”
Pastor Wilson smiled and sat. He pointed to the arrangement on the table and nodded to Julia.
Her birdlike hands were steady as she scraped the jelly onto a slice of bread. Her hair fell over her eyes and covered the acne that lined her forehead like red granite. She worked with the concentration of a surgeon and the skill of a painter, carefully applying the layers of jelly and peanut butter on separate slices of bread, making sure they didn’t spill over the crust and onto the plate. She finished and married the two slices together. Finally, she dug the knife into the bread and cut the sandwich into two triangles. She slid the plate over to Bill, but Pastor Wilson stopped her.
“This is an ancient ritual, one that predates even the papacy. It is powerful—sacred. There are words that must be said. A short prayer, or a pledge, if you will, that will urge the Lord to forgive the sins of both parties.”
He set the folder on the table and removed a sheet of paper. He handed it to Julia.
She cleared her throat. Her voice was as thin as her hair, and she spoke with the confidence and assurity of a recently beaten child.
“By thy grace, by thy will, by thy mercy, and by thy spirit, I come to you, my Lord, as an unworthy sinner, and I beg of thee: allow your servant to absolve me of my sins by consuming them as the disciples consumed your flesh. On my life, I beseech thee. On my knees, I beseech thee. On my—”
“Hold on, girl,” Pastor Wilson interrupted. “Didn’t your mother ever tell you that actions speak louder than words? Perform in action what you would say with your lips. Only then can the Lord see, as well as hear, that you mean what you say.”
She slithered down to her knees and sniffled, and her voice broke as she read on.
“On my knees, I beseech thee. With my soul, I beseech thee. My blood—”
She looked up. Her eyes wide. Almost beautiful.
“Go on,” Pastor Wilson said, twirling his index finger impatiently. “Go on.”
“My blood I offer up as a sacrifice to the sin eater.”
She spat the last line out like poisoned candy. The silence that followed was brief, broken suddenly by a metallic sound. Bill and Julia looked up at Pastor Wilson. He held a switchblade in his hand and offered it to Julia by the hilt.
Light danced on the polished blade and caught Bill’s eye.
“Hang on a second, you said—” Bill started.
“What did I say?!” The words flew from Pastor Wilson’s lips like a bullet. His voice was rough—glass pulverized in a stone mortar—and his head spun round until his eyes landed on Bill’s.
“You have a dozen lifetimes of sin hanging over you, boy, and unless you wanna wander through this life drunk and alone before you spend the rest of eternity in hell, you’ll do as I say.” Pastor Wilson turned from Bill and spoke to Julia through gritted teeth.
“Go on,” he said.
“I—I can’t, I, you said the food—”
Pastor Wilson took a deep breath, exhaled through his mouth, and spoke more calmly.
“Food is a stand-in for flesh. But blood is where the sacrifice lies,” he scoffed. “Did you think it’d be that easy? Make a man a sandwich and then all your whoring and drugging would be forgiven? If that was the case, all you’d have to do is find yourself a husband and await the Lord’s eternal embrace.”
He forced the hilt into her palm and closed her fingers around it.
Julia held the blade against her skin and took a deep breath. The knife flashed, and she yelped. A brilliant red streak crisscrossed the lines on her palm and grew. Blood fell onto the linoleum, and she moved her dripping hand over the sandwich. The white bread quickly stained. Bill looked on in horror as it dripped like sap from a tree.
She shook her hand and waited until the blood stopped falling. Then she looked at Pastor Wilson. He nodded, and she stood.
“You’re up, Bill,” he said.
But Bill didn’t move. He stared at the sandwich as if it were a pulsing pile of maggots. Pastor Wilson stood from his chair.
“Now!”
Bill took the sandwich and ate.
