John walked in through the front room and I took him to my bedroom. There He was, all white and bearded lying dead on the floor. John stopped dead in his tracks, robbed of anything intelligent to say. I stood beside him, trying to look at the old man with a pronounced forehead. John reached out with his foot and shook the dead man’s shoulder.
“Hey!” I smacked John. “Don’t kick Him.”
“I didn’t kick Him. I jostled Him.”
“Fine. Don’t jostle Him. I’m pretty sure that’s one of the commandments.”
“Yeah, along with the other four that got dropped by Mel Brooks. Are you sure it’s really...you know?”
“He appeared in my room in a beam of white light. Does that sound like anything else?”
John ran his hands over his face. He walked over to the kitchen and rummaged through my cabinets. I followed him. He was taking out cleaning chemicals and trash bags. I was standing there with my hands on my hips. John wasn’t too pleased about that. He leered at me.
“What are you doing?”
“Me? I’m trying to find some way to get rid of the body. What the fuck are you doing?”
“I don’t know. I never know what to do in these situations, that’s why I called you. So are you going to like...make acid and melt him in my bathtub?”
“Yes. I’m going to melt Him in your bathtub. Then I’m going to take the remaining slurry, combine it with pig feed, and have the hogs eat what’s left.”
“That’s a good plan.”
“I’m getting disinfectant that isn’t going to bleach the shit out of your carpet.”
“Are you sure you should be cursing?”
“You’re the one that killed Him!”
He grumbled and went to the garage to grab some power tools. I followed him into that threshold, watching him get a drill, an ax, a hammer. It seemed like a lot of tools just to tear out my floorboards, but I trusted John to get the job done.
“If you’re going to just follow me around can you at least tell me what happened?”
“I killed God.”
“Yeah, I got that when you told me that on the phone. I need details.”
“Um...how do I begin?”
John groaned. “There was a big beam of light and that old man in white appeared.”
“Yeah. He said to me, ‘Paul, I’ve come to you in your hour of need.’”
“What were you doing before the beam of light appeared?”
“I was doing my taxes.”
“Your hour of need is doing your taxes?!”
“I had unpaid parking tickets I found in a box I labeled important. It’s there with all of my pay stubs on the floor. There’s some under his feet.”
“I don’t believe this shit. My dad chops his own fucking hand off, but your hour of need is doing your God Damn taxes.”
I looked toward the bedroom. “Do you think He can hear us?”
“What else?” John gathered everything he needed into a utility box. He went into the kitchen, got what he needed from there, and then dropped everything on the floor of my bedroom. He’d put on work gloves, but he wasn’t ready to get started. We were both staring at the man upstairs, face-up on the carpet.
“I told Him that I didn’t need his help, but he said that he knew I did because he heard the prayer from my heart. I told him I didn’t make any prayers, that I don’t believe in God, and then he just dropped down dead.”
John started clapping. There was no enthusiasm behind it.
“What are you doing?”
“You’ve never seen Hook?” John laid garbage bags down.
“What are you doing now?”
He yanked out a roll of five bags. Then there was that leer again. “Are you gonna ask me twenty questions or are you going to help me?”
I grabbed some bags and put them on top of everything I could find. John took the bags out of my hand when I put one on top of the dresser. He was acting like I was stupid when he was the one who didn’t explain himself properly. The box of trash bags was empty. He looked around at the room. There was black plastic covering the carpet from the closet to the door. The bed looked prepped for surgery.
“You grab the feet. We need to move him on top of the bags.”
“Are we going to wrap him up?”
“What did I say about the fucking questions?”
“Fine.” He felt like a pig taken out of the fridge.
“Lift on three.”
The old man didn’t budge. John had to crouch down and use his legs to get the torso up off the carpet. I wasn’t getting any lift on my end, despite a shooting pain dancing up my pelvic bone. We rolled him over instead. His white robe felt like the morning mist.
John was staring at the old man for a long time. His breathing slowly picked up. Beads of sweat rolled over his brow. “Fuck it.” He picked up the axe. “Okay, now I need you to hold his leg steady.”
“What? I can’t do that. I barely have any upper body strength.”
“Well, I can’t chop him up and keep him steady, so unless you want to find out if God’s blood is really made of wine, grab his foot.”
I gestured a cross in front of me, knelt down, and looked away.
I was sweaty and itchy from my shoulders down to my butt crack. It made me feel like I’d sprayed diarrhea all over my Levi’s. John was pouring water over his face. The gallon of water emptied quickly. I tossed the last bit of dirt onto the hole and gave it a little pat with the back end of the shovel.
“What the fuck was that?”
“I don’t know. Aren’t we supposed to pat it down?”
John leered. “Does the pile look obvious to you? Like, does it look like we buried a body out here?”
“I don’t know. Maybe.”
I got our fourth gallon of water and poured it into my mouth. I couldn’t drink fast enough and the rest rolled over my skin like a waterfall of goody goodness. John went to pat the dirt. He was smacking it down like a mad man. I leaned against the shovel and gasped. He paced for the fourth time that hour. There was nothing but dirt and wildlife as far as the eye could see. He patted me on the back.
“I think this could work.”
I cleared my throat. “Hey. Do you...uh, think we should say some words?”
John basked on the air, shook his head, and waved me on.
“Here lies God. He was a good man, or deity, or whatever. I didn’t really know Him long, but in the short time that I have known Him, he seemed like a cool God. The kind that tried to help people even if they didn’t want it. Um…” I looked at John. “You want to say anything?”
“He was a good looking guy for His age. Not a day over thirteen billion.” John opened the trunk of the car.
“Aren’t we supposed to sing amazing grace?”
John stripped. “Bring me the water.”
I did. He poured it over his body. It got awkward trying not to look at him, so I got naked too. He threw our clothes into a trash bag and we changed into my third set of clothes for the day. We were supposed to drive back to the city and pass out, but all that digging worked up an appetite. I was so hungry I ordered a patty melt with fries and an egg, bacon, and pancake breakfast.
“What if He didn’t really die?” I asked John. “Like what if all of this was some kind of test.”
“You said you prayed for mercy and forgiveness right after he died.”
“I did, but you didn’t. There’s all that stuff in the bible about saving the souls of other people.”
“I never believed in God. I grew up Buddhist.”
I stuffed a quarter of two pancakes into my mouth.
“I don’t think it was God.”
My mouth was full, but it didn’t keep me from trying to talk.
“God shows up and he’s this generic, stereotypical depiction of Him? He’s got the long white beard, flowing robes, and all of that shit? I don’t buy it. If you ask me, it was more likely a demon or something trying to fuck with you.”
I pocketed most of my food in one cheek. “How do you know it wasn’t one of those subconscious things? Like if He appeared before you, He would’ve been a fat bald guy made of gold.”
“You really don’t know shit about Buddhism, do you?”
“You can’t eat cows.”
John took a bite from his steak.
“How did you know how to hide the body?”
He shrugged. “I watched too many mob movies growing up.”
My fries had grown cold and the cheese on my patty melt had gone hard. “Did your Dad really chop off his hand?”
He stared down at the diner table. I dropped it. Normally, I never would’ve asked John about his family. I knew that he never talked about them for a reason. It was kind of like religion and politics, I could sense when something wasn’t on the table. When he started talking about Buddhism, I felt like something had changed between us, but I didn’t really know anything about anything.
“He went crazy. Not like...mad or upset but nuthouse crazy. He tried talking to...he wasn’t a priest, but he wasn’t a witch doctor. I was too young to know the details, I just know that he tried getting help from different people - spiritual leaders at the temple. None of it helped, so he took some kind of hallucinogen. He believed that there were bugs in his hand, and he cut it open to show me and my mom. That was the last night I saw either of them.”
I don’t know if it was the callous attitude he carried around with him or the stress of chopping up and burying a body, but I didn’t feel anything from his story. It was too fantastical and unbelievably insensitive. Someone who’d grown up with a mentally unstable father wouldn’t call their Dad, “crazy.” People just didn’t work that way.
“Are you fucking with me?” I asked him.
John stared at me for a long time. He didn’t eat. He didn’t swallow. He didn’t wipe the A1 off his cheek. He didn’t clear his throat. He didn’t even look when the server came back with our check. He barely even blinked. When I finally reached for the check, he grabbed a napkin and wiped off his face.
“After all the shit that happened today, you don’t believe that my dad took mushroom tea and chopped his own hand off?”
I put my share on the table. “It didn’t happen to me.”
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