Salvation City - By Sigrid Nunez Page 0,1

every day make fun of the elbow bump. They shake hands and they hug one another, even though Pastor Wyatt says the disease that spared them all this time around is neither the last nor the worst of its kind. Other plagues are coming, he says, smiling. And he thinks they will be here soon.

Pastor Wyatt’s hands are of a whiteness and a softness that make Cole think of milk, of goose down, of freshly washed and bleached flannel sheets. It is impossible to imagine flu germs, or germs of any kind, lurking on such clean hands. Pastor Wyatt has never been sick a day in his life. If anyone else made such a claim, Cole would surely doubt it. But if Pastor Wyatt says it, he thinks it must be true.

Most marvelous are the fingernails, each tipped with a perfect little white crescent moon. He knows these nails are the work of Tracy, Pastor Wyatt’s wife. He has caught her giving Pastor Wyatt manicures. Not that they try to hide it. They do the manicures right at the kitchen table, usually while listening to the radio. There is a television in the house, but Pastor Wyatt disapproves of television—the idiot box, he calls it—and Cole isn’t allowed to watch much. But the radio is often on, playing Christian twang (Tracy’s thing; Cole and Pastor Wyatt prefer Christian rock), or tuned to some talk show or sermon. Pastor Wyatt himself is a regular guest on the local station, on a weekly program called Heaven’s A-Poppin’!

When he sees Tracy doing Pastor Wyatt’s nails, Cole is embarrassed, almost as if he’d caught them having sex. He has no idea if Pastor Wyatt and Tracy have sex; he chooses to think they do not. He is a hundred percent certain he will never catch them having sex. He will never see either of them naked. It simply must not be allowed to happen. If it happens, he will have to die.

He thinks of the time he saw his parents lying naked on top of their covers, in broad daylight—the shades were up, sun fell across the bed—and how it was one of the worst moments of his life. He would have given all his toys to undo it.

First his parents pretended it never happened. Then something—most likely his behavior—must have changed their minds, and they insisted on talking about it. Which Cole would not do. Worst of all was when they tried teasing him about it. He would have given all his toys a second time for them just to forget it. Secretly he had vowed that no one would ever see him naked.

About sex he knew then just enough to feel shame. Certain photos he’d seen—ripped from magazines and passed around at school—had left him with images of unhealthy-looking grayish-pink flesh, like meat that had turned, and hideous tufts of dark hair where hair shouldn’t even be, images that soured his stomach. It would have taken a miracle to connect them with the time he stumbled on Jade Korsky during a game of hide-and-seek. In the dark closet their teeth had clicked together like magnets, and they had tongued her cherry cough drop back and forth till it was the size of a lentil.

The moment he heard what intercourse was, instinct told him it was true. The knowledge had brought an anxious and bewildering sorrow, a feeling that would return when he learned what his mother’s box of tampons was for. He did not share the excitement about these matters other boys couldn’t hide. From what he could tell, his responses weren’t normal, and he would not dream of revealing them.

Sometime—he cannot say exactly how long, maybe a year—sometime after he’d walked in on his parents lying naked, he walked in on them fighting and heard his mother say, “We never fuck anymore anyway, what the fuck do you care?” When they saw him they tried to explain, but only halfheartedly. And it was this halfheartedness that had enraged him, moving him to perhaps his first real effort at sarcasm. “Sure. I know. You guys were just rehearsing for a play.”

No one had tried to stop him as he turned on his heel. He remembers his cold satisfaction, leaving them speechless behind him. He remembers thinking, Now they’ll know how much I’ve grown up.

But he is not sure anymore if in fact it was his mother he heard that day. Maybe it was his father. This has become a familiar problem. Cole