Coloring Christ: An Excerpt from Paperboy: A Dysfunctional Novel by Bob Thurber
Monday, June 16, 1969—In the checkout lane Mrs. Brown, who goes to our church, aligns her shopping cart behind my mother, then squeezes around the side. She bends slightly forward across the narrow space, almost touching me. She says, “Excuse me,” then extracts a TV Guide from the rack above my head. My mother doesn’t notice. She’s busy unloading.
Our cart contains eight items: bananas, milk, a pound of baloney, a few cans of Campbell’s soup, and a box of Kotex. Mrs. Brown’s cart looks like she won a contest, and I wonder if she’s rich on top of being beautiful. All I really know about her is that she’s married to a lawyer and that she teaches Sunday school at the First Congregational Church. Kelly had her there for sixth grade, but the next year, when it was my turn, I quit Sunday school after a month. I complained to my mother that Mrs. Brown was a crazy woman and a bad teacher, a nut case who was too strict about which crayons I was allowed to use when coloring the Lord Jesus.
Twice I colored Jesus’ face a dark brown. Once I made his face yellow and his robe purple. At the last supper I colored him and Judas the same bright red as Mrs. Brown’s long, manicured nails. Mom doesn’t like anyone screaming at her kids except her, so I said that Mrs. Brown had scolded me about my color usage.
“Scolded you how?”
“Screamed her head off in front of everyone. I was scared. I thought she was going to belt me.”
Mom mulled that over a few seconds then said she had never heard of such a thing.
“Jesus is Jesus, no matter what crayons you use.”
That was the first and only time my mother let me quit anything just because I wanted to. The truth, though, is Mrs. Brown never said an unkind word to me, never raised her voice. The reality is I found her too beautiful to look at her. Sitting in her classroom gave me a stomachache. And in those moments when I dared look her way, I always stared too long, which usually resulted in an over- whelming urge to pee.
In the checkout line she holds the open TV Guide to her face and I watch her eyes. I look, then look away, waiting for her to recognize me. My stomach warms a little. She flips through the pages too fast to be reading and I wonder if she’s hiding, if Mrs. Brown has already recognized who she is standing behind and is simply snubbing us.
I decide I should alert my mother who hates snobs, but I don’t move or say anything. I stare at the Pall Mall ad on the back cover of TV Guide, waiting for Mrs. Brown to peek. Her hair is high and tight like my mother’s. Her earrings are small white balls, probably real pearls. I move my gaze down her chest to the flare of her hips. I’m all the way to Mrs. Brown’s ankles when my mother nudges me. “Help unload,” she says.
I lift a couple of soup cans onto the conveyor belt. I put the bananas up there too. My mother lines up the rest. The clerk punches the keys, rings us up in seconds, then gives the total. My mother rattles things in her purse. “How much?” she says, and the clerk repeats the amount.
While Mom fishes for the money, digging out the exact change, I sneak another peek at Mrs. Brown who is patiently waiting her turn, her red lipstick neatly confined within the borders of her mouth. She is around my mother’s age, a pretty woman with auburn hair and a snobby manner. What gets me, what bothered me from the start, are her nails. Long and curved, slick with red varnish, more than twice the length of my mother’s nails. I want her fingers inside my mouth, the sharp tips dancing on my tongue. Some mornings in Sunday school, while coloring the robe of Christ, I got dizzy dreaming of how those nails would look wrapped around my cock.
ABOUT PAPERBOY: It's 1969 and the entire nation is waiting for the United States to win the space race and put the first man on the moon. Meanwhile, fourteen-year-old Jack Fisher--malnourished and battered, abandoned by his father, neglected by his mother, manipulated by his older sister, harangued by his boss, and shortchanged by customers--is delivering newspapers in downtown Pawtucket and trying to keep his family from self-destructing completely.
As the whole world holds its breath to see what will become of the Apollo 11 astronauts, Jack clings to his daily mantra, "Things will get better." But in this poignant debut novel by award-winning short story writer Bob Thurber, things do not get better; they get drastically worse, at space-age speed.
Labels: Bob Thurber, Casperian Books, excerpt, fiction, novel, Paperboy
posted by nthWORD at
5:48 AM
0 Comments:
Post a Comment
<< Home