Unit2SubmissionKristineAltaro.docx
Kristine Altaro
Intro to Creative Writing
Professor Harrell
March 19, 2018
Unit Two
Sacred Heart Jesus
We’d been on the road for nearly two weeks when I began to notice tiny fissures in our fool- proof plan to leave everyone and everything behind in search of ourselves. The reality of our decision was beginning to weigh upon me, no less eased by the unwelcomed moments of clarity brought on by the increasingly more frequent moments of sobriety. We were running low on pot and decided to ration what was left until we could secure our way. We needed to save what money we had left at least until we made it to Las Vegas where we would continue to test luck and fate. That was until our problem was ultimately remedied days later when we happened upon nearly a half pound some regretful soul left beside a Gideon’s bible in the top dresser drawer of a Santa Fe motel room. Staring out the window of the white Chevrolet station wagon with my dirty shoeless feet pressed against the dashboard, I found myself questioning not only if this was the right decision but if we’d actually end up surviving this whole ordeal when all was said and done. I thought back to that Friday afternoon a few weeks prior when I stood in the foyer of my mother’s house screaming up the staircase that I hated her, that she didn’t understand me and that she was trying to ruin my life. I wished now that I could figure out the last thing she tried to say to me that day as she struggled to articulate through her tears and broken voice. I wondered if she feared she’d never see me again and if she was attempting to bestow some maternal wisdom intended to one day save me. But maybe the Gods of Fate conspired with the Gods of Hard Lessons that day. Perhaps not being able to discern what she tried to say was the way it was intended. Either day we’ll never know. I never asked her and it was now so long ago I’m sure she doesn’t remember.
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As we passed the last gas station for the next 100 miles (as foretold on the blood red hand-painted sign along the side of the road), I stuck my arm outside the open passenger-side window and made rhythmic diving motions as the dusty wind caught my hand. The decapitated Sacred Heart Jesus I had taken from the cabinet in my stepmother’s living room sat in the cup holder beside me next to a half-smoked pack of Marlboro cigarettes.
I had always been drawn to this statue as a child and would study it for hours; fascinated with both my stepmother’s devotion and the ritualism of her Catholic faith. As I scrambled to sneak out of the house without waking anyone that night, I noticed the light as still on in the maple red curio in the living room. It was shining directly on the Jesus statue, his hand over his benevolent heart. I’m sure there are many reasons why, but I took him with me along with a collection of porcelain clowns, my notebooks, and other things that proved to be oddly necessary. Jesus was to serve as the mascot for our journey; this omniscient and benevolent protector. However, the tongue-in-cheek appropriation of our parents’ preferred deity was offset by the unfortunate veering off a Texas road like the ones in the movies where good things never happen The night before, our intact Sacred Heart Jesus flew between the seats to the back of the car as we careened into a ditch, thankfully shaken but relatively unscathed.
It wasn’t the first time we’d faced peril. There was the night in West Virginia when we ran out of gas in a rain storm and hitched a ride to a nearby campsite with a long-haul trucker. Or the night we got pulled over for swerving while driving through Nashville. The cop who pulled us over left to chase a guy who held up a convenience store before he could check our ID’s. It would have been but one of two other times we would have had to explain ourselves to law enforcement, Perhaps they should not have let us go. that last time. He was dangerous and reckless, cruel, and possessive but I knew with my gypsy heart that I could mend him and teach him how to be free. I asked him if he felt bad knowing that our families must be worried. He said he didn’t feel bad at all. He said that they forced us to run away. He said, “Somewhere in the back of their minds they were proud of us for taking a chance.” As he extended his arm across the top of the seat to draw me in, he lost control of the car and veered off the road.
Later, after we were fully convinced that the timing of his statement and the unexpected loss of control were both poetic and a coincidence, we pulled into a rest stop for the night, When I opened the hatch of the station wagon to retrieve a blanket and pillow, Jesus’ head rolled onto my foot and into the parking lot. “Oh, fuck!” I gasped, pressing the palms of my hands to the sides of my head. “We killed Jesus.”
“No we didn’t,” he snarked, not at all questioning. “The Romans did.” He popped the hood of the car pretending he might be able to discern the source of the ticking sound that started before we’d driven into the ditch, but had grown louder and more steady since.
“But his head came off. We did this. When we drove off the road…we did this.” I wanted this moment to be less fortuitous than it was.
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My boyfriend was chain smoking with one hand and fiddling the radio with the other; fruitlessly trying to get Santana’s Black Magic Woman to come in through the static. The New Mexico dessert is a weird and magical place with landscape one could easily imagine belonging to another planet. Millions of layers of time revealed themselves to us in the form of giant rock formations that seemed to have been placed there by something other. As the sun dipped behind the clouds, in the near distance, painted in white on the face of a rock at the top of a large hill were the words “Shrine to the Virgin Mary.”
The station wagon resisted, but he pressed the gas pedal harder and drove up the steep hill to see what humans had left behind in reverence to the mother of their creator. The hill was covered in dozens of relics - statues, crosses, candles, and hand-written prayers inside dusty glass bottles strewn among the blue and yellow flowers. At the edge of the hill, over-looking the endlessness below was a white wooden reliquary containing statues and images of the Catholic saints. Mary was present in all her forms… Mother Mary, Our Lady of Guadalupe, the Holy Virgin of Virgins. Mother of Mercy. I opened the cracked glass door and placed our mascot beside one of his mother’s many depictions, his head balanced delicately upon his shoulders. This was where the decapitated Sacred Heart Jesus belonged, safe with his own merciful mother and not in the reckless hands of two lost teenage souls. I imagine still that if you come upon this shrine on Route 40 in the middle of the New Mexico dessert, you’ll find a graveyard of Christian idols replete with a headless Sacred Heart Jesus.
Dee Crosss
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