Anyone on the lam’s a friend of mine, the goy’s saying as Benjamin sidesteps idolatrous Madonna statuettes, the shrouding vestments, censers extinguished, and the meltfilled, birdbathing, dogdished fonts and collectionplates stacked. I know a victim and you, friend, whatever your name is, are you ever Him; the goy stooping Him through a hole ripped in the fence, squeezing Him in — its links stabbed through with the voice of the wind, as if in warning but which: flee thither, or don’t; the chains bind His flesh, slice and gash at His pudge. There’s no infiltration here, he promises, serious lockdown, my perimeters are ultrasecure, and he releases a bush back into the wild, on the other side of the fence snapping it into its planting to screen. The goy stands with his hands on his log, proud and beaming, as if after a kind word, a compliment or thanks. He takes from his helmet’s spike its rotted apple and with wrinkly lips lays into the mold, a white fuzzed sheen the same shade as the flesh beneath, he gnaws from it a hunk, spits out half a worm and now has two teeth remaining: you want a bite? he asks, then swipes the mud and the moustache stray from the fruit and with an empty smile offers it out.
But Benjamin’s otherwise occupied, turned…to that incongruous wall just beyond: a height of irreconcilably colored bricks, loosening from their laying, their cracks covered over with paperings, scrawl — so much so that it’s all drossed, weighted down, leaning to topple with wind.
This here’s my church, the goy says, replacing the apple and with a sweep of filthy hand beckoning closer, the fingers webbish and flicking dirt from their flail, HQ of LAFF’s what we’re calling it this week, the Libertarian Armed Faction or Front, haven’t yet made up my mind…you might know our work? Forget it…and he raises his rasp for His attention: I’m known as the Most rt. Irreverend Lemuel Leeds, Chaplain-in-Chief, Joysey Irregulars, the first, last, and only division of its kind, thank you kindly…Benjamin, though, He can’t be distracted, diverted, over here, this’a’way, despite how with hands and fingers and nails sharper than shivs or drops of weather and with slitted eyes and snakish tongue, too, Leeds persists in showing off his station, its militant amenities, the lately newest improvements he’s happiest about, the first line of trenches freshly dug, the dock only recently planned: what I’m saying is, you’re safe. Secure, for now. Amid this openness, veiled. A pox upon the shaved pate of the earth.
At the foot of the wall, the lone structural survivor of disaster, a boiler’s bankrupting explosion, a gristmill’s wheel rolled amuck: a ruin of destroyed foundations, blackened bricks and gray, too, and others in all of near sunset’s shades held aloft with mossy mortar — are a number of portapotties, Chamber of Commerce white if sullied, and reeking of waste, piss, and antiseptic fluid, scattered amongst what have to be hundreds of monitors heaped haphazardly, their screens scoopedopen, the wiry guts and circuitry cleared, then refilled with sandy soil; they’re being used as planters, hosting the growth of what might still flower or fructify winter: tuberous roots, black and brown and other wasteshaded, turdy starchy things that’ll squat in the stomach for seasons. Benjamin extends a fat finger to knob, to turn their volumes up to silence, as if for the edification of a flock absent from the multitudinous religious furnishings surrounding: rickety pews arranged in sloppy rows, a rattily cushioned kneeler at front, a hassock turned splintery lectern topped with a rock to prevent it from being blown away that’s how grievous it is, and how weak. And then further, as He wanders a looping, around — the house, the old homestead failed by its flimsy wood and globbed white paint: on the inside of that wall outside papered and graffitied heavily with all manner of misprint and image, and there kept safe from the weather, Leed’s oversized trailer, doublewide, without hitch, surrounded with scrap and junk not waste or the dump of materials found but more like hunks and even rooms of the trailer that’ve fallen off over time, undersky. Off its cinderblocks, though, and sinking slowly into the wet, it strikes Him as nature itself, as if so overgrown and for so long it’s become, finally, organic, embodied, incorporated, ingrown: the stairs leading to the door are stumps; its roof the slatted rows of long dead trees the wind might’ve swept into shelter.
