Even now, that sweet memory lingers

Or, How I Learned to Stop Worrying About the Bomb and Love the Pentecost

Couple in the next room was winning some kind of invisible Olympic medal for rhythmic slapping. Gold, probably. Definitely not bronze. Going at it all night long. Duncan had lost track of time, but not because it was flying. It was dripping. Through a leaky ceiling. Onto his forehead.

Plop.

He was in a motel somewhere on the East Coast. All motels look the same when you’re lying on your back, poor and sleepless, listening to two strangers enjoy the kind of intimacy usually reserved for paid professionals or randy dolphins at SeaWorld Orlando. Cheap walls. Expensive moaning. Time passed.

He could hear them clearly: gasps, creaks, murmurs — a repetitive cadence that mocked his fatigue. He shifted on the stiff bed, the polyester spread crackling beneath him. A sliver of streetlight carved a pale stripe across the ceiling.

Anyway.

Duncan was his name. Lincoln Duncan.

No relation to the president or the doughnut. He was twenty-ish, or twenty-two or twenty-five. Again, as established once and for all time by a humble patent clerk with time on his hands, time doesn’t really exist.

He (Lincoln Duncan, not the humble patent clerk) had a guitar, a shoe with a hole in the toe and the kind of jeans that gave up halfway through being pants. He also had a mother and a father once, which is how most people begin, even if they don’t end that way.

His father was a fisherman. Professionally melancholy. Smelled like salt and beer and wet rope. His mother wasn’t a fisherman but was adjacent to one — sort of a spousal barnacle. A fisherman’s friend, you might say. They lived in the Maritimes, where God stores the fog and the chowder and the Moosehead. Duncan was born into boredom.

When he reached his prime, he hitchhiked down the I-95 turnpike like a salmon in reverse — flopping awkwardly upstream toward New England, where people wore tweed and pretended to like jazz. He had no money, no prospects and a guitar with three working strings (one was actually dental floss).

He wanted to be someone but would have settled for a bite of a sandwich.

New England was not new and barely England. Mostly Dunkin’ Donuts and bad luck. Holes in his confidence, holes in the knees of his jeans that would now be considered stylish and retail for $200 at Old Navy or Bootlegger. Buy two, get second leg for half price.

Each morning, he woke in parks or parking lots with less money than the day before. Oo-ee, he was about destituted as a kid could be. He wished he wore a ring so he could hock it. He’d like to hock it.

A young girl in a parking lot was preaching to a crowd.

Standing on a milk crate, addressing seven lowlifes and a dog. She sang hymns with the confidence of someone who had never tried cocaine but would be very good at it if she did. Blonde hair. Serious eyes. Pale blue, slightly crossed, the left more than the right. The kind of girl who could summon small revolutions or enormous uprisings.

Duncan told her he was lost. She smiled like that was the correct password. “Good. God only finds what’s missing.”

Told him all about the Pentecost, which involved fire and tongues and something called the Holy Spirit. Sounded like science fiction to him, but nice science fiction. The tongues part sounded good.

Thought about it some. He seen that girl as the road to his survival.

Later that night, under a tent that smelled like wet canvas and Low-Level Spiritual Recalibration via Erotic Transfer, Duncan crept in with a flashlight. She didn’t scream or call security or point to a crucifix. She just led him to the woods and said, “Here comes something, and it feels so good.”

And just like a dog, he was befriended.

Biblically.

Oh, oh, what a night. Oh what a garden of delight.

Afterward, he lay under the stars with his guitar on his chest, strumming the usual nonsense and thanking whatever beneficent deity had invented opposable thumbs.

The next morning, she was gone. Possibly Raptured. More likely just hitchhiked west with a Methodist blues band.

Duncan still didn’t have any money. Still didn’t have a plan. But there were pine needles in his hair.

And Christ, did he have fingers.