Free Please by Peter Darbyshire Page B

the truck was inside, looking at a road map spread out across the counter. He was following lines on it with a yellowed finger and shaking his head. "I just have no idea how I got here," he kept saying to the woman behind the counter, who wasn't paying him any attention at all.
    I sat down with a coffee by the window, where I could still see the lights of the planes taking off from one of the runways. Every now and then one of the cows outside made a long, low noise, like the sound of a car horn slowed down. The truck driver pushed his hat around on his head each time he heard the noise, but he didn't look up from the map.
    After a while, two women and a man all wearing the same kind of T-shirt came in. The T-shirt was black with the word BLESSING in red across their breasts. I watched their reflections in the glass as they went up to the counter.
    "Last night I started shaking all over in bed," one of the women was saying. "It went on for ten minutes. I know because I was looking right at the clock the whole time. But I couldn't stop it."
    "I had that electrical feeling myself," the other woman said. "You know, all the hair on my body was standing on end."
    "It was like someone else had taken me over."
    "It actually gave my cat a shock when he came over to see what was going on. He ran into the other room and wouldn't come near me all day today."
    "I never felt a thing," the man said. "Haven't for a long time." He was going bald, and the whole time they were in there he kept pushing the hair he had over the bald spot.
    "Stanley tried to climb on top of me during the middle of it," the first woman said, shaking her head. "He pretended he was in a rapture and couldn't control himself."
    "That man," the other woman laughed.
    The first woman bought an eclair and bit off one end, began sucking the cream out from inside. "But don't you worry," she said through a mouthful of cream, "I put a stop to that soon enough."
    "I'd like to feel it again," the man said, frowning into his coffee. "Just one more time."
    Both women laid their hands on him. "Maybe tonight."
    "Yes, maybe tonight."
    "Maybe," the man said, but he kept on staring into his coffee.
    "Jesus Christ," the truck driver said, slamming his hand down on the map. "This doesn't make any sense at all." He stared out at his truck and sighed.
    The people in the T-shirts looked away from him and didn't say anything else until they were on their way out. One of the women stopped at my table and bent over me. "I saw you watching us," she said.
    "I wasn't," I told her.
    "Would you like to talk about God?" she asked me.
    "I don't think so," I said.
    "Well, would you like to see him then?"
----
    I WENT OUT with them to their car. The cows were pushing against each other in the back of the truck now, rocking the trailer from side to side. The woman who'd spoken to me said, "They feel it too."
    "Feel what?" I asked.
    "You'll see," she said, and for some reason the others laughed.
    I left my car in the lot and got in the back of theirs, along with the man, who introduced himself as Hank. The woman who'd talked to me first said her name was Helen. The other woman, the driver, never introduced herself at all.
    We went about a mile or so down the street, to a building that looked as if it had once been a warehouse, or maybe a factory. The parking lot was already full of cars, and the front doors of the place were wide open, lighting up a crowd of people standing outside. "Looks like the non-believers are out again tonight," Hank said.
    "Atheists?" I asked, looking at the crowd. They held signs in their hands and were shouting at everyone that went inside.
    "Oh no, they're Christians," he said.
    "I thought you were the Christians."
    "We are," he said.
    "I don't understand," I told him.
    "They're just jealous," Helen said from the front seat. "The Lord doesn't touch them like he touches us."
    "I'm not so sure about this," I told them, but I got out of the car and followed them to the building