Free Whitechurch by Chris Lynch Page B

thee behind me, Satan,’ mean, actually? I mean, pretty much I got it, but—”
    “Come on, Pauly, will ya? It means the same thing all the rest of it means. Just, y’know, try to be good if you can. That’s all.”
    “Ah, you,” he says, waving me off and walking ahead a few paces. He takes things very seriously, very briefly.
    “Y’know, Oakley, you should try harder than you do. Big brain like you got and all. You could possibly make something of yourself, if you only made a little effort.”
    “Thanks,” I say.
    “And you could help me out, at the very least. Combined, we could be killer. You’d be the brains and I’d be … everything else. We’d make inventions, build cities we’d call Paulytowns, cure diseases, start our own church, basically help out all of humanity, and get ourselves stinking rich.”
    “That’s the spirit,” I say. “But, maybe tomorrow …”
    “‘Get thee behind me, Satan,’” Pauly says.
    There are three basic progressions to the Whitechurch postchurch experience. A lot of folks get the hell out. Families piling into cars to go on one drive or another, seeing leaves in the hills or grandparents in other towns or real life in the city. Then a lot more folks ease on down to King’s Diner for what they call brunch which looks suspiciously like their regular menu only they let you pick from either the lunch or the breakfast fare but not both, or over to the Chinese for dim sum brunch which is probably more legitimately a brunch except nobody in this town would be able to tell you whether it was or not.
    But by far the most popular postservice worship option is at Rosa’s Cantina. On Sundays, in the modest town of Whitechurch, a good many citizens get the feeling that they have been fortified with the goodness of the Lord, and can drop their pants, so to speak, in the comfort of Rosa’s.
    “‘Get thee behind me, Satan,’” Pauly says as we pass Rosa’s.
    We always laugh about Rosa’s, me and Pauly. Rosa’s has a stink. Hideous country music comes out of Rosa’s. The Christmas lights stay up all year in the windows. The TODAY’S SPECIAL sign has featured the famous ROSA’S RUMP ROAST for so long, there is now a little number in the corner ticking off the days like a hostage crisis. Today is 612. There is a sad and sorry sorry feeling to the place that reaches out and grabs at you like octopus tentacles as you pass it by.
    But Rosa’s Cantina is a real bar, with real liquor-license concerns that have caused it to be closed down more than once, so we do not go into Rosa’s. We mock it instead.
    “Wanna hear a poem?” Pauly asks as we pass Rosa’s big mirrored front window, with the roses etched all around the edges and mad loud noises blasting out from behind.
    “No,” I say.
    “Right,” he says. “Here goes.”
    Rosa’s #1
    What’s
    Inside the cantina
    Behind the flowers
    Inside the cantina
    While you’re looking in the mirror
    They see out at you
    But you don’t see in at them
    I’m not peeking anyway
    Just fixing my hair
    Probably there ain’t even
    nobody named Rosa in there
    And I find that, while he’s reciting his dumb little poem, we are, actually, staring into that mirror window, inching closer, trying to see through, while idiot Pauly and fool Oakley stare back out at us and god-knows-who-else stares from behind them. There is suddenly an awful lot of laughter going on inside that bar.
    “Pathetic,” I say, pushing off and heading down Main Street.
    “Well, it’s not my best work maybe, but that’s a little harsh, I think.”
    “Not the poem. The dopes in the bar.”
    “Whew,” Pauly says, as if my liking the poem was important. “So you like the poem,” he says.
    “No,” I say.
    He catches up to me, then passes me, walking faster now. “Church makes you bitchy,” he says.
    “No. White church makes me bitchy,” I say.
    His turn to be snide.
    “So leave, then.”
    This is a joke. It’s a bad joke but, anyway, a joke. There is