The Church Men

Jackie reached behind the driver’s seat into the sleeper where Jah and I were sitting side by side. She fumbled for a moment and retrieved a small dirty old cooler. I heard glass clinking together as it was pulled forward. Opening the top and reaching into the water she pulled out a very warm beer. Offering the remaining bottles to any takers, we all declined. Jackie unscrewed the cap of a Lone Star and took a big slug, pulled a cigarette from the pack on the leather dashboard, lit it and laughed.

She took another draw on the beer and said, “You boys are all worked up about fake news and altered reality and this AI shit. You was never a little girl in West Texas, raised by a daddy and granddaddy who was bible tyrants. They was a goddamn cult of rapists and TV and radio preachers. My daddy called it ‘dominion.’ Us women we needed to be controlled and tamed, like wild dogs he said. I never bought into their reality any more than I’ll buy into this horseshit today.

“I was a pretty girl or so I was told, but bullheaded, like my mama. They thought they broke her too. They didn’t. We was poor, dirt poor. Hell, the house I was born in—yeah house, not hospital—didn’t even have a floor, just dirt. It wasn’t until Chevron came through and found the church’s land, most everybody’s land, was full of oil. Then everything changed.

“Poor is a way of life, it’s like being smart or stupid or short or tall. It’s just something you live and accept. You’re always aware of it, every goddamn day, feeling like less than everyone else, but you just learn to live it. Then when the big oil money come through everything changed, because now you had all these poor, dumb saps, most never got past seventh or eighth grade, all the sudden is rich up to their asses and no idea how to be rich, because all they know how to be is poor.

“Big houses that ended up looking just like the shacks they was born into, shit like boats and motorcycles all over the yards, and rooms inside the house filled with crap from Walmart and the dollar store. And big expensive cars that ended up on cement blocks, kind of hilarious, but sad too.

“They gave up the meth for coke and dope. Fucking tweakers now running around with Rolex watches and a pound of gold chain around their necks.

“My mama and me, we didn’t change much. A lot of us women didn’t. As the county got richer so did my daddy and his daddy, and man, it became like watching a sad cartoon, I’ll tell you.

“They got washed up and put on some clean pants and a shirt, and suddenly they was big and worldly and important men, but they was still dirt poor inside and just as full of shit as they’d ever been. That stuff is in your guts, poverty, it don’t leave you and you don’t leave it. They was still the same weak and angry broken men they always was and they took that anger and shame out on us girls.

“Some wise man said one time that poverty is violence. He was right. But funny thing was, my daddy and them other men, they got some money and they started to act worse than them other rich men that had kept them down and under their thumbs all those years.

“My mama, she killed my daddy and his daddy. It was never proved, but after she found out I’d been raped by a group of them churchmen, while some others lined up for their turn or watched, she made some supper for all them at the church one night. They was all dead in a week. The story was a bad can of potatoes in some stew, botulism, but mama told me it was chopped up death cap mushrooms. They grow all over Texas. I’ve been told they taste good too, except they destroy your liver and kill you in a couple of days. Hell, one mushroom could kill three or four men. Mama, she was known for her beef stew with lots and lots of mushrooms!”

Jackie smiled the most genuine smile I’d even seen on her face at that memory.

“Don’t fuck with a cowgirl, you should all know that. But to my point, boys, for some of us it’s always been an illusion, a lie. Security and being safe in your own home, safe in your own skin, safe with even your own family, that’s all make-believe. We just learn to take it and roll with it and figure it out. After the first time I was raped in the church my mama was going to the law, until I told her that one of the lawman was the third one in the line. That’s when she decided to make dinner for them instead.

“I left Pecos County when I was fourteen and I never came back. Mama, she inherited all my daddy’s money and his daddy’s and all the money from the church land. You’d never know it though. She just sits and knits and reads and drinks tea on her front porch. She bought the house I was born in and spent some of that big money to fix it up, even had some men come and build in a floor and a new refrigerator and stove and shit, even a real washing machine.

“She’s a rich old lady, but she’s never let on. She donates money to women’s shelters and food banks. She says those men may have fucked us first, but we fucked them last. And to me none of it is real. Never was, never will be. It all can come easy and fast and go just as easy. I’ll make my own reality just like I always did; just like my mama taught me.

“It all comes down to what you know in your gut to be right, compared to whatever bullshit someone is preaching at you. We all know our own truth. I just trust mine more than most others do. My mama, she taught me that.

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