by Ellen Morris Prewitt.
Jesus woke in the morning before the sun rose. He dressed quietly in the dark apartment until he dropped a sandal, waking Salt.
“Where you going, Jesus?” Salt rose on one elbow. The lacquered blond wig that usually rode his head like a helmet had fallen off in sleep, leaving him bald as a newborn baby. Jesus stared, causing Salt’s eyes to roll upward. “What? I got a squirrel on my head or something?”
“Didn’t mean to bother you,” Jesus apologized. Salt was his lone disciple this go round on earth, and he was grateful to the little man for giving him a place to stay. “I saw a park with a bluff overlooking the river. I want to get there before dawn breaks.”
Salt threw off the covers. “I’ll go with you. Cain’t be walking in downtown Memphis in the dark by yourself.”
After Salt hurriedly dressed, hopping into snakeskin cowboy boots, they descended the stairs (the high rise elevator wasn’t working again) and entered the greying morning.
“Uh, river’s thata way, Jesus.” Salt pointed right.
Jesus was so lost. He’d been disoriented ever since he’d descended from heaven, sliding like a pat of butter into the geographic bowl of grits that was the lower Mississippi River basin. When he’d landed on Union Avenue, his long hair slapped his cheeks. It stung, and Jesus realized he’d arrived embodied. A fleshy covering wrapped his celestial energy, shaping his cosmic self into a man’s body. Almost simultaneous to his arrival, the reason for his earthly visit retreated from his grasp like a midnight possum rustling into the bushes.
“Oh, fudge,” he said.
It quickly became evident he’d arrived with no divine powers, his connection with the Holy Spirit as fritzy as bad wiring in an electrical storm. Only Salt, a formerly homeless man, had succumbed to his efforts to gain followers. Then a demoniac stabbed Jesus at the Stop-n-Go, sending a torrent of blood gushing from his side, and he found himself at a low point, emotionally. Salt extended his kindness, opening his apartment so Jesus could heal indoors. A nice respite (even if the air conditioning never worked), but Jesus was no closer to discovering why he’d called himself back to earth.
With a chattering Salt leading the way, the two friends arrived at the grassy park on the edge of the Mississippi River. A clutch of cyclists blocked the park entrance, some with trailers hitched to the back of their bikes.
“Breakfast burrito brigade.” Salt dug the toe of his boot into the grass. A lightening bolt zigzagged across the snakeskin. “They hand out burritos to the fellas sleeping rough in the park. Want a burrito? They won’t mind a few extra mouths.”
At their approach, a man wearing a do-rag held out two burritos oozing chili. “Jesus loves you.” The man held onto Jesus’s burrito a moment longer than necessary, insisting on connection.
Jesus accepted the wrapped burrito. “Salt and I love you too.”
The pair walked beneath tall leafy oaks, skirting metal trash cans stuffed with crumpled burrito wrappers. Ahead of them, the park dropped into nowhere with the Mississippi River beyond. The river was black as an iron skillet. The trees on the far shore humped like ghost mountains beneath a cloudy sky, quelling Jesus’s hopes for a brilliant sunrise. Also, apparently, they were facing west.
“The cholesterol special.” Salt maneuvered to get a purchase on his burrito, opening his mouth and biting with a ferocious chomp, his big teeth clicking.
Munching, Salt smiled, his cheeks full. It was a form of communication—if silent—and Salt couldn’t go long without communicating. Swallowing, he pointed at Jesus’s dripping burrito that he hadn’t bitten into yet. “You need to eat that. Losing blood, you need some red meat. I was kidding about the cholesterol. You don’t have to worry about cholesterol, skinny as you are. Though it doesn’t always attack big folks. Lot of it’s genetic. If your father had high cholesterol, you could have it too. Don’t suppose you know your father’s cholesterol level?”
Jesus shrugged, stepping to the lip of the bluff. Below, a tangle of streets, railroad tracks, and outbuildings finally gave way to water. The tracks reminded him of the stitching holding his side together. Even now he could feel the slow seep of blood.
“What about his LDL, HDL?”
Jesus shook his head.
“Triglycerides?”
Jesus stared at him. “May I say grace?”
Salt threw his hands in the air. “Oh, my goodness, yes!” He quickly wiped his fingers with the burrito wrapper, as if that could erase the fact he’d already eaten, and bent his neck in prayer.
Jesus closed his eyes. He drew a deep breath, raising his arms, careful to keep the burrito level. Chili still dripped onto his wrist. “Abba…things aren’t going so well down here. I was stabbed, and it won’t quite bleeding, and I feel like my energy is seeping out with it. I just ask that—”
“Listen to yourself!” The voice of God thundered through the oaks.
“Amen,” Salt said.
Jesus glanced at his follower, who was working a burrito morsel from between his teeth and appeared to have heard nothing.
“Listen to myself?” Jesus addressed the space above the bluffs. “You want to be a little more specific?”
“Go back to the beginning!” God boomed.
“Don’t talk to yourself, Jesus. They’ll lock you up.” Salt wiped his mouth with the crook of his elbow.
“Start over, are you saying?” Jesus asked and waited, but his self did not answer.
Okay, he said to him…selves. “Are you telling me I’ve missed something?”
But his question produced nothing more than a wince from Salt.
Thoughtful, Jesus sat cross-legged on the grass. God meant for Jesus to literally listen to himself. His attitude, maybe.
“Whatcha thinking, buddy?” Salt asked.
Jesus glanced at the little man. Salt’s face was so open, trusting, that Jesus confessed. “I have no idea what I’m doing here, Salt. I’m trying to be humble, but I don’t really like starting at the bottom again.”
“No one likes being the lowest rung on the ladder. But my mama always said, if you wanna sing the blues, you gotta pay your dues.”
The words “ladder” and “blues” set off a cry in Jesus’s brain, the same cry that had sounded the Horn of Desperation, catapulting him off his majestic throne and into the Cloud of Unknowing which he’d crossed with a hiccup in his belly before descending onto the earthly plane where he sought the epicenter of the horn’s blast—it’s coming from Chicago; no, Louisiana, no Arkansas— and drifted, until he was awash in Memphis where the horn lengthened and mellowed and blended with the harp, we’re talking a blues harp, and the wiggling of Elvis gyrated with the shaking of Jerry Lee while the Man in Black’s laugh made Carl Perkins hop—“go stomp on his foot!”—and John Lee growled at B.B.’s got-it-made velvet voice as Bo diddled and Willie scribbled and Roy ran the scales and Mississippi Morris rocked blind until all of it was pushed aside and parted by a thin, drawn out wailing.
A woman.
Singing the blues.
The woman’s wail replayed in Jesus’s brain. “A woman’s wail brought me to Memphis.”
“A woman’s well? You mean like Jacob’s well in the Bible?”
“Not a well.” Jesus swallowed the vowel. “A wa-il.”
“Jonah and?”
“A wail, a cry, a lament.”
“Oh.”
“A woman’s wailing sounded the Horn of Desperation. I’m surprised the old fella could still blow, it’s been so long since someone sent up a cry sufficient to trigger it.”
“Old blues men can fool you. They got more get-up-n-go left in ‘em than you’d think.”
“Whoever she is, she called me here in personified body. That’s an extraordinary thing to happen.”
“A lady calls for your body, you need to be grateful. What’s next, buddy?”
“Union Avenue.”
“Okey dokey.” Salt popped up like toast. “After you.”
They walked empty sidewalks, all the sane folks driven indoors by the heat. Jesus, who’d spent three days in Hell, was cool as a cucumber, but the plants gasped, the birds panted from the oppressive temperatures. At the spot on Union Avenue where Jesus had first set foot on earth, a trench gaped. He hadn’t seen that before. A clutch of sweaty picketers stood guard over the hole.
“What’s this?” Jesus pointed to the empty trench.
“Eleven skeletons found right here.” Salt spread his legs, warming to his subject. “What I’m thinking, the bones were pirates. The water rascals did something they shouldn’t have and Zip! their comrades marched them off the pirate ship, up the hill, and shoved ‘em in a hole.”
“Pirates? That’s strange.”
“Well, newspaper says they were slaves. I like my story better.”
“Hey!” One of the picketers shouted at Jesus. “You’re not from the Power Company are you? Did the Power Company send you?” The woman nodded at her fellow picketers, urging them to agree with her.
“Crazies,” Salt said behind his hand. “Don’t get involved, Jesus.”
“Why would the Power Company have sent me?” Jesus pointed to his “Be Green, Do Green” tee-shirt.
“To run us off so they can re-start their work,” the woman answered. “You see that transformer there?” She pointed to a steel pole with a grey box adhered to the side like a giant sucking insect. “When their shovels hit those skeleton bones, they were digging to lay a power line for the new prison. But why does it need such a huge power source? Something’s fishy, I know it.” She glared at Jesus. “He knows it.”
“Rest assured,” Jesus told the woman. “I have no connection whatsoever to the Power Company. In fact, I have my hands full at the moment.”
Jesus squatted by the trench, poking the dirt walls, wet from the nearby river. He rubbed the gritty mud between his fingers. A vision flashed across his brain—Memphis, a shattering supernova, a flaring mass of helium gas, a brilliant spalling of light the warping wailing exploding firecracker that was Memphis—and he no longer wanted to re-gather the energy seeping from his side. Instead, he wanted to split wide open, connecting his divine energy with the wind and water, dirt and spit, blood and guts of the city until he became once again a throbbing ball of indestructible love.
“What?” Salt leaned, peering closely into Jesus’s face.
“I believe I’ve arrived in a Great Metanoia.” Jesus stood, hiking his khakis onto his thin hips.
“You arrived in Greater Memphis.” Salt corrected his friend.
“A Great Metanoia. A time of great change,” Jesus explained, referring to the rare moments when a dogleg occurred in the spiritual evolution of humanity; when a spaghetti junction on the Kingdom of God Interstellar Highway System tangled into reality; when the time for change grew as strong as the urgent need for a pregnant mother to PUSH; when, in a word, humanity found itself in a Great Metanoia.
“A what?”
“The Big Bang—that was a Great Metanoia. Gandhi and King, the nonviolent movement. That was a Great Metanoia. And me, you know, my birth. Another Great Metanoia. It’s an epoch time.”
“Uh, Jesus?”
“Hmmmm?”
“Not sure you want to put yourself in that group. Gandhi. King. Those folks died.”
“Exactly. I think I’m in Memphis because Memphis is in a new beginning. And in the beginning was the word.”
Salt sat in silence then said, “Well, as my mama always said, in for a penny, in for a nickel.”
As the two men walked off, behind them, the prison hungry for power loomed.