EXT. ███ CHURCH PARKING LOT NIGHT ©
𝚂o it was fitting, perhaps, that revival should end with him bleeding beneath the streetlight jaundice. One by one, the windows of the church had gone dark, each pane surrendering its imitation of holiness until the building stood pale & swollen against the night, all white clapboard / black glass, like the carcass of some enormous animal turned belly-up beneath the moon. The banners stirred above the doors in a tired breeze. [ COME AS YOU ARE ] Although Dallas had spent enough time among the saints to understand that they meant that very sparingly. He sat in the bed of his pickup, deposited there by the floodwaters. His boots hung over the dropped tailgate, heels knocking faintly against the metal, deliberate hollow little tonk, tonk, tonk Between two ruined knuckles, a cigarette burned down toward the filter, coal brightening in orange whenever he drew through it. It had glazed the split across his bleeding lower lip & collected in one corner of his mouth. His left eye's swollen nearly shut, flesh ripening from red to plum & the knuckles of his right hand looked skinned down to the grievance. Dallas flexed a fist & felt the hurt answer all the way up his wrist. Good. Then the footsteps came, nearly lost beneath the buzzing lamps & summer insects battering themselves witless against the glass. Footsteps crossing an empty lot's pavement toward a bloody boy who would threaten half the county at one time or another. Dallas didn't turn. He didn't need to. He'd learned those footsteps in fragments, behind the gymnasium after bible class, along the bank of Miller's Creek where they'd skipped evening study & thrown stones at the water. Dallas had driven him back & they'd shot the shit the whole way, passing a cigarette until the paper went damp. The footsteps stopped several yards behind him. “ Piss off, Whelan. Save it. ”
𝙳ally expected to hear retreating footsteps, & when he hadn't, he turned at last & let @covnant see it all, the eye swollen dark, the crimson smears across where he had wiped with the back of one hand. Under the diseased yellow light, Dallas looked like some blasphemous saint dragged down from chapel wall with a halo replaced by cigarette smoke & martyrdom rendered cheap beneath the buzzing lamps.
His mouth pulled into a scowl, reopening the split. Blood gathered there instantly, red & obscene as a secret finally spoken with smoke escaping around the words. “ What? You want a go? ” He turns back before he could read whatever expression would arrive on the other boy's face. A push of ribbons of smoke through his nose. “ Touch me & I'll knock your goddamn teeth in. ” There, a language Ryan might understand. “ Ain't you got somewhere else to be, preacher boy? ” You'd have to forgive him, truly, as he was already in the most sour mood possible. The fight he'd been in had begun over nothing, really. Almost nothing. At service, Dallas had sat on a pew at the back with one ankle resting over the opposite knee, staring at the wooden cross while the man spoke of wickedness. Afterwards, in the carpeted hallway, they'd made smart remarks to him & Dallas swung first, with three of them having jumped him. Four, if you counted the skinny little bastard who kept kicking his back & then disappearing whenever Dallas turned to catch him. Dally had held his own well enough, watching as they dragged the others off first. Dallas had given the housemaster the slip, narrowly missing whether tonight's correction ought to involve prayer, the paddle, or both. He was sick of this shit. Sick of the shitty iron-bedded boys' home & sick of the shitty, hypocritical church. Perhaps he would just run away right now. Take the truck & follow ᴿᴼᵁᵀᴱ ¹⁶ as far as it would take him until the road forget the county line. He had nineteen dollars in his wallet, another six hidden beneath the floor mat & enough gasoline to pass a respectable distance. Dallas sighs & flicks the cigarette somewhere onto the concrete.
