I was playing darts when I saw this little fella walk up to the bar and order a whiskey sour. He had a horseshoe of red hair and a thick mustache that curled over his lip. His head barely peaked over the counter, but he folded his hands and leaned his forearms on the edge, like he was praying or something. I thought that was just about the funniest thing I’d ever seen, so I walked over and asked if he needed a boost. He looked at me all side-eyed and told me to buzz off.
“Big words for a little guy,” I said.
“I can hold my own,” he said and lifted his jacket a few inches to reveal a snub nosed revolver holstered at his side.
That’s when I knew I liked him. I found out he went by Ginge, I suppose because of the hair. After a couple of hours we were both drunk and laughing, getting looks from the bartender like it's probably time we continue elsewhere. I told him about a grocery store nearby where we could grab some more beer. We walked on the side of the road, stumbling across the shoulder line and pulling each other back as cars swerved and blasted their horns. After we got the beer, we sat in the parking lot and I told him how I found my way into my current line of work.
My first gig, though I didn’t know that’s what it was at the time, was with a woman I met at a party in Saginaw. I bummed a cigarette, and we stood outside while a beat pulsed from the house behind us. We were both a little blitzed. She traced the outline of the moon with her cigarette and asked me if I was the spiritual type. I got real quiet for a spell, took a deep breath, and started spinning some bullshit about exorcising a demon from one of my buddies in Afghanistan.
She leaned in close and stared at me like diamonds were dripping out of the corners of my mouth. When the party wound down she grabbed my hand and told me I could help her with something. We walked back to her place, and I sat on her couch while she tore through her closet. She came back with a joint and a little red box. We smoked the joint while she told me about the contents of the box, a locket she inherited from her grandma.
A real piece of work, this grandma. One of those fire and brimstone Calvinists. Used to whip the kids and leave webs of pink welts all over their backs and legs. She told me one day grandma found a Prince CD and a Walkman hidden under her mattress. Next morning she woke up to an umbrella handle crashing down on her over and over, grandma standing over her and calling her a whore and a Satan worshipper and everything else you could imagine. The CD and the Walkman were in pieces on the floor.
I told her, honestly this time, that I knew what that was like. Not the moral rigidness necessarily, but the part about waking up to the back of a hand or a leather belt, or being dragged out of bed and kicked through your comforter. We compared scars, arm to arm, back to knee, stomach to shoulder.
Turns out she did exactly what I did. She ran away when she was sixteen. Didn’t hear anything about her grandma for years. Then one day she got a letter. Grandma had died and left her a few personal items, a gold locket with a picture of her grandparents and a worn King James Bible full of annotations on Post-It notes.
“I threw the Bible away,” she said, “but whenever I try to get rid of the locket, I just can’t. I hear her voice, and I can’t.”
I took the locket and twirled it around my fingers. Pinched it and blew smoke over it. Tried to look like I was thinking real hard.
“Yup,” I said, “I’ve seen this before.” I set down the locket and handed her the joint. “You got any sage?”
“No.”
“How about myrrh?” I said, “You got any myrrh?”
“No.” She looked at me all puzzled and said, “just the pot.”
“Okay, we’ll make it work,” I said.
I put my hands on her shoulders and started humming. We swayed back and forth a little. I placed the locket in her hands and squeezed them together, enclosing them in mine. We kept humming and swaying while I inched toward a window, and slid it open with my elbow.
I counted to three and we tossed the locket out the window.
“Holy shit,” she said.
“Well,” I said, “what do you think? Did it work?”
She looked around for a second, ran her fingers through her hair and grabbed a clump in each hand, pressing her fists against her scalp as if she was holding herself from floating away.
“Yeah,” she said, “yeah, I think it did.”
That might have been the beginning and end of the whole thing, except the next morning I told her my real name and the place I usually stay when I’m around. Sure enough, some guy came knocking at my door a few days later and told me he had a problem. Said he thought his cat might be possessed. I shut the door and told him to forget my name, but he said he had some money and was willing to pay.
“Upfront?” I asked.
“Yeah, sure.”
“Okay,” I told him, “give me a few minutes.”
I was in business.
By the time I met Ginge I was doing a couple of jobs a month. Each time I got a little better, learned a little more about the clientele, how to read desperation and how to relieve it. Where is the demon? In your sister? Your husband? In the couch? Is it in your fingers or in the keyboard? Is it a nameless thing in the floorboards? Or does it look like your mother and peer down from behind a painting? The trick was, there wasn’t a trick. Just a bunch of folks with the same anxieties and loneliness as anyone else, looking for ways to exorcise them. The whole bit boiled down to a little affirmation and a listening ear. And to be honest, I never once felt guilty about taking their money. The way I saw it, I was providing a legitimate service, even if it wasn’t the service advertised.
And I was right about Ginge, he caught on quick. After a couple of jobs I could see something click. One day he showed up with a ratty old copy of Exorcisms and Related Supplications that he’d bought off a guy in Ann Arbor. But his biggest contribution was finding leads, and boy did Ginge have a nose for that. Like the time he found us that group of born-again punks in Alpena.
We were at a bowling alley and Ginge got to talking to this pale little wisp of a guy with sunken eyes, ear gauges, and black skinny jeans. He told Ginge that the group of them, the band playing at the little stage in the back for a bunch of fans, travel around the state to do shows like these to proselytize. Christian emo, he said. They jump around and scream at the top of their lungs, about salvation apparently, but I had to take their word for it. After the shows, they all head back to this warehouse they’d converted to a church, where every week one of them or another feels the spirit and falls into fits of Holy laughter or tongues.
Then this guy told us about a friend of theirs, named Charlie, who used to come to every concert and dance wildly. Said everyone loved Charlie and his faith was rock solid, but a week ago he just disappeared. They found him in a hotel nearby, holed up all alone.
“He looked awful,” the guy said, “all pale and sweaty. I tried to sit down with him and pray, but when I touched his hand he pulled it away and told me to leave. And I swear to you that the voice that came out of his mouth was not his.”
“Does he partake in any spiritual, um, enhancers?” I asked.
The kid looked at me dumbfounded.
“Drugs,” I said. “Is he an addict?”
“No,” the kid said. He lifted his chin and pulled back his shoulders. “We’re straight edge. We belong to the day, let us be sober, having put on the breastplate of faith and love, and for a helmet the hope of salvation. If anyone messes with that stuff, they’re out. For good.”
“Is that right?” I said.
A week later, the skinny guy and a couple of fellas from the band drove us to a rundown motel on the edge of town. It was a familiar kind of place, the kind of place I’d grown up in, or just one example of the many. It was a motel like this where I took a last look at my father passed out on the floor next to some stranger and decided to leave for good.
One of the guys went up and knocked on the door to Charlie’s room on the second floor. No answer.
“Why don’t you guys go grab us some lunch,” I told them. “I need to pray a bit. Get myself prepared.”
Ginge took the guys back into town, and I started knocking. Felt a little déja vu as I went down the row of doors one-by-one asking for help. Like I was a boy again, looking for some food or a place to sleep after getting locked out. A woman with a toddler on her hip answered the room just below Charlie’s. I told her I’m the kid’s uncle and he’s an addict and we’re concerned about him. She said he’d walked in a couple of days ago with two bags full of groceries and hadn’t left since. Nobody’d come to the room either, as far as she knew, and he’d been real quiet. I asked her if she could get the manager to let me in, and she said she could.
Sure enough, Charlie was naked, sleeping face down on one of the two twin beds. There was a gallon milk jug filled with water on the nightstand next to him and a garbage can on the floor near his head. I looked through his grocery bags. Cereal, Pedialyte, coffee, Tylenol, and magazines. Nothing else in the room except for a Bible and a bucket of ice. The kid, I realized, wasn’t there on a bender, he was there to get clean.
I slipped into the bathroom and filled the bathtub with cold water. I dumped a couple of buckets of ice into the water before Ginge and the boys pulled back up to the motel. I slipped out of the room and met them in the parking lot.
“Listen,” I told them, a little out of breath, “I convinced him to let me in. You were right son, textbook possession.”
The fellas all froze in place.
“He’s passed out on the bed. Ginge, grab the holy water and the relic. You guys know the Nicene Creed?”
They nodded.
“Good, you keep repeating that. And follow any directions I give you. Understand?”
They nodded again.
“Alright. Let’s go.”
Ginge handed me a vial of water and a small glass jewelry box with a shard of pig bone — one of his innovations. I put my hand on his shoulder like we were praying and I whispered some instructions. We walked up to the room and I peeked in the window to make sure Charlie was still on the bed. I gave Ginge a quick count down and then kicked open the door. Charlie rolled over, and Ginge and I grabbed him before he could get up. He started screaming. I put my hand over his mouth, and we lifted him and took him to the bathtub.
“What the fuck what the fuck what the fuck!”
I tried my best to yell over him. “In the name of the Father! The Son! The Holy Spirit!” I gave Ginge a wink and we plunged Charlie into the icy water.
“Jesus Christ!” he screamed.
“Yes!” I said, shaking the pig bone dramatically. “Yes! He commands you to leave this boy’s body!”
“Who the fuck are…” he began, but Ginge and I pushed him back down under the water. I gave the skinny guy the vial. His hand was shaking.
“When I say go, you pour this into the tub,” I said.
I pulled Charlie out of the water by his hair and turned his face to mine. “Son, look at me.” He took a couple of sharp breaths and blinked to get the water out of his eyes. “We’re here to help you, son. Your friends are here.” I turned his face to the fellas standing behind us. “They figured out that you were overcome by a demonic force.” I turned his face back to mine. “You understand, Charlie? We’re here to get the demon out of you.”
Charlie looked at me, then at the fellas, then back at me.
“Yeah,” he said. “Yeah, I understand.”
“Are you ready to expel this Satanic power?”
“Yes.”
“Do you accept Jesus Christ as your Lord?”
“Yes.”
“Now!” I yelled and dunked Charlie back under the water.
The skinny guy poured the vial into the tub, and I led us all in a quick prayer. Then I pulled Charlie out of the water and shook him like a ragdoll.
“Thank you,” sputtered Charlie, coughing up water. “Thank you, thank you, thank you.”
Next thing we knew, we were doing regular work. Real honest regular work. Started billing people for mileage and expenses. Ginge had business cards printed up. We rented a whole house for ourselves in Schwartz Creek, and for the first time I bought a car that I wasn’t worried would break down in the middle of the highway. We spent a whole summer that way. Ginge would grill us up burgers on our porch while I plotted the best routes to a job in Ypsilanti or Toledo. It was probably the longest stretch I’d laid my head on the same pillow every night.
Near the end of summer we got the call. Quiet, nervous sounding fella on the line. Took him a while to get to the point. He was cryptic and seemed to be second guessing himself while he spoke. Finally I told him I had souls to save and didn’t have time to be on the phone all day. He gave me his address and said we should come by at eight the next day. Said we should call him Jim. Wouldn’t give me a full name or any other details.
“I need to know what kind of problem we’re looking at, Jim,” I told him. “I can’t help you if I’m not prepared.”
“Disobedience,” he said. “I got a couple of kids infected with an unholy disobedience.” He chewed on the word unholy as he said it, like a revival preacher, or some two-bit actor hamming it up.
Kids were a new one for us, but I told him yes and wrote down directions and said we’d see him soon. When we arrived, we saw him watching us from behind a curtain, like he’d been waiting since we hung up. He opened the front door before we could knock and hurried us inside. The house was tidy and simple. Smelled like coffee and kitchen cleaner. Jim looked a lot older than I pictured him, a lot bigger too. His hair was short, white, freshly cut, and slicked with pomade. He had on a plain green polo shirt tucked into his trousers, loose around his shoulders but tight across his gut.
“Well,” he said, “you finally made it. Sit down, please.”
Ginge and I sat next to each other on a little white loveseat. Jim brought us two mugs of coffee and sat down on a wooden rocker. He smiled and rocked back and forth a few times, then asked us if we had a pleasant drive.
“Sure,” I said, “but we’re on a pretty tight schedule, so if…”
“I’ll bet,” he cut me off. “I’ll bet you guys are busy. So much evil in the world.” He took a sip of his coffee and rocked a few more times. “A lotta evil.”
“Sure, sure,” I said. “Our policy is to receive payment upfront. After that…”
“Thank the Lord there’s folks like you,” he interrupted me again. “Satan walks among us and nobody seems to care anymore. Churches are all liberalizing. Culture’s a mess. Kids’ minds all rotted out from the computers.”
“That’s right, my friend,” I said, trying to hurry things along, “but the righteous shall flourish.”
Jim gave me a big old grin and slapped his belly. “They shall bring forth fruit in old age,” he said, “and be fat and flourishing.” He rocked back and laughed at his joke, baring two rows of straight and immaculately white teeth. “Alright boys. You want your money first, that’s fine.” He pulled himself out of the rocker and walked to another room.
“Hey,” Ginge said, “something seem off to you?”
“What?” I said.
“Does it look like kids live here?”
Jim came back and handed me an envelope, which I passed to Ginge.
“Alright,” he said, “follow me.”
We walked into the kitchen and he opened a door to a basement.
“Careful,” he said, “stairs are pretty narrow.”
He went down first and turned on a single lightbulb above us. At the bottom of the stairs he turned on a second lightbulb and I saw the entire basement for the first time. The room was unfinished, and clumps of earth seemed to seep through the cinder block walls. There were no windows. The only light came from the two lightbulbs that flickered occasionally. Against one wall was an old washing machine and dryer. Opposite them were two homemade chain link cages. In the middle of each cage was a child wearing a pair of handcuffs bolted to the ground.
I stopped before reaching the last step and tried to make sense of what I saw. Ginge ran into me from behind and we both stumbled down the last few steps.
Jim laughed. “Watch yourselves, boys. I told you they were narrow.”
The kids couldn’t have been older than 15. A boy on the left and a girl on the right, both their faces bruised, and their hair greasy and matted. Neither of them reacted to our presence. Just sort of looked up blankly.
“Well,” Jim said, as easily as if we were shooting the shit over some beers in his backyard, “here they are.”
“They look like they’re in pretty bad shape,” I said. Then, trying to figure out how to get us all out of there, I suggested we take them upstairs to clean them up first.
“Yeah,” Ginge said, “I’m not sure about…”
“No, no.” Jim jumped in. “They stay down here until they’re cleansed.”
“Jim,” I said, “maybe you can fill us in a bit, so we have a sense of what we’re dealing with here. How long have they been, um, afflicted?”
“Well, about since the day I picked them up,” he said.
“What do you mean picked them up?” Ginge said. “These aren’t your kids?”
“They’re my kids alright. Not the fruit of my loins if that’s what you mean, but they’re mine.”
Ginge started looking carefully around the room.
“How’s that?” I said.
“Well these two little fornicators were hitchhiking up I-75. When I drove past them a voice told me, Jim, you are my shepherd and you must rescue these lost sheep.”
One of the kids started whimpering. Jim turned and bellowed: “Quiet!” Then, calm and cheerful again, he continued, “I brought them here, and I’ve tried to teach them. But they’re ungrateful little Sodomites. I’ve never needed help before, but maybe I’m getting old. I don’t know.”
“Before?” I said.
“Oh yes. I’m just one man, one old man. But the Lord renews my strength. I don’t have to tell you this. You’re like me. Holy warriors.”
“Yes. Yes,” I said. A bolt cutter, I remembered, there was a bolt cutter in the trunk. “For this particular case though, I think we’re going to need some materials from the car. Ginge, could you?”
“No,” Jim said, moving between us and the staircase. “No more delays. You have your money. Let’s begin.”
“I really just need to consult my notes,” I said as I tried to step around him.
He pushed me away from the staircase. Then he placed his hands on my shoulders and started walking me backward. “Don’t be nervous,” he said softly, “we are mighty.”
Next thing I knew I heard a loud crack and my ears rang so loudly I forgot where I was. I wondered whether the house was falling down, or whether I’d stepped on a landmine. Jim’s hands were still on my shoulders, but he started wobbling. A red spot opened on his forehead and grew slightly, before dripping down the bridge of his nose. He fell on my chest and slid onto the floor, leaving a bloodstained trail down my shirt.
I turned and saw Ginge standing behind me, eyes wide, breathing heavy, smoke still trickling out the barrel of his revolver.
“I never shot it before,” he said. “I wasn’t even sure it would work.”
The kids were too weak to climb the stairs, so we carried them and set them down in the living room. Ginge pulled the car into the backyard while I got them some water and all the food I could find in the kitchen. Ginge came in and said it looked clear, so we carried Jim’s body upstairs, wrapped him in a sheet, and slipped him through a bedroom window into the back yard. Ginge kept watch while I rolled him into the trunk of the car.
We walked back into the house and the kids were sitting there on the couch eating sandwiches. I called 911 and left the phone off the hook. As we walked out the door, Ginge turned around and handed the envelope of Jim’s money to the girl.
“Don’t tell the cops about that,” he said. “That’s yours.”
After we left, we drove all the way up to Rush Lake and pulled off before the public entrance. Ginge and I hadn’t said a word to each other in the car. I killed the engine, and we waited for a while to make sure nobody was around. It was dark, which made it near impossible to walk through the woods dragging a limp body. Eventually we made it to the water’s edge and slid him in.
His body floated in the shallows. The moon was only a sliver, but somehow the white sheet around him glowed like a beacon. Ginge helped me find a bunch of rocks, and I waded into the water and tied the rocks into the sheet. I walked his body out until the water was up to my armpits, then gently cast him off.
The sheet got darker and disappeared. A few bubbles rose to the surface as it slowly settled, and my reflection, all dark and distorted, appeared. The bloodstain on my shirt began to run, and I rubbed the fabric to loosen the stain.
Holy shit, I thought, this is it, the real thing.
That was the last I saw of Ginge for months. We thought it best to split up and head to different states. And for a while that worked just fine. But a year later I got stuck with a disorderly charge, which snowballed into a long stay at the Department of Corrections due to some outstanding warrants. On the first day I walked into the cafeteria and saw none other than Ginge himself rationing out mashed potatoes with an ice cream scoop.
I walked up to him and asked for a double portion, and he started swearing under his breath before he looked up and saw my face. I don’t know that I was expecting a kiss, but he just stared back at me blankly for a few seconds, then slammed a ball of potato onto my tray and motioned for the next in line.
That’s all it took. In that brief moment, I saw it. Just a flicker, but I saw it.
“It’s okay. I’m here now, Ginge.”
The men in line behind me grew impatient and started yelling. A guard waved me along, but I stood where I was.
“Tell me where the demon is, Ginge. Tell me what it looks like.”
