After they’d drunk most of the whiskey, Truck and Trailer said the young man told them a story about Judas from a gospel they’d never heard of. In this gospel, Judas didn’t betray Jesus at all. In this story, Judas is the only disciple who understands Jesus’s true teachings and his own role in turning things inside out. In this story, Judas is the hero because he brings about Jesus’s suffering, frees him from the terrible clothing of his body. The young man said that this was the fiercest love of all.
Truck told Hollis he felt the hair on the back of his neck rise. He said he didn’t say anything for a minute or so because his head was buzzing with the whiskey, his heart thudding too fast. He could hear the creek rushing clear and cool over the rocks below them. Then he saw that the young man had an erection.
Trailer told Hollis he knew all along that the man was a missionary.
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THE VIDEO OF the ice cream shop is a glimpse into another world. A canvas painted by a master, rolled up and spirited away, then rediscovered by chance in somebody’s attic. The woman, Theresa Mooney, lives in Houston. She’d forgotten where the video was taken, she told Rosa Heller on the phone. She’d visited her sister in Austin that December to help her move after the sister and her husband had separated. So she’d held an impromptu sixth birthday for her son with his cousins in an ice cream shop not far from where her sister lived. She’d forgotten the name. Her sister’s trouble back then had colored everything. She wouldn’t have remembered anything if it wasn’t for the photo of one of the girls in the article Rosa had written on the fifth anniversary of the murders. Elizabeth, her name tag says in the video. Elizabeth had helped with the birthday party, made balloon animals, even shot some video of the birthday boy and his cousins. She appears at the 1 minute 51 second mark on the DVD, which Theresa Mooney recently found in some boxes, its case mislabeled as X-MAS PARTY. In the video, the focus is off. Theresa Mooney is still learning to use the camera. Zoom or not zoom. Elizabeth is hamming it up a bit, making balloon crowns and swords. Zoom and you see small scars on her hands as they twist and twist, this way, the other. A Lyle Lovett song is playing in the background somewhere.
Theresa Mooney’s son Dean’s striped shirt already has a smudge of chocolate ice cream down the front. He sticks out his tongue. Theresa tells Rosa about the little scar under his chin where he fell four feet off the porch when he was two because she was distracted. Down he went, she says, a moment still frozen in her mind.
On the tape, in a wider shot, you can see that it’s dark out, likely still early evening by the crowd. The windows and double doors at the front of the shop reflect back the interior. If you enlarge the DVD image, as Rosa has, you can see several things: at the counter, the other two girls are working. Meredith’s head is down, counting out change but thinking about boys, Rosa imagines. Or maybe her horse. A misplaced bridle or brush. Zadie with her ponytail at the drive-through window. The oldest and dreamiest of the girls. If you enlarge the image more, you can see Zadie moving her hips, swaying to a tinny song that’s playing on a car stereo in the drive-through line. It’s hard to tell what song it is at first, but if you replay it several times, like Rosa, you can tell it’s a cover of “Sea of Love.” Do you remember when we met?, a line that plays in Rosa’s head for weeks after. The reflection of Zadie leans out in the drive-through window, laughs with her hand to her mouth as if she’s been caught being herself.
Here, you might suddenly remember, as Rosa did, that these reflections aren’t like photo negatives, not images of us flipped left to right; they’re images of us reversed front to back, as if looking at a mask turned inside out.
You can see other things in the window’s reflection at the 2:46 mark: near the front counter, behind the table where a woman and a bearded man are spooning ice cream to their mouths, are two men, one in a long overcoat. The man in the overcoat is sipping from his shake. There’s glare on the window where their faces should be.
In the foreground of the video, at the 3:11 mark, one of the big balloons slips out of Elizabeth’s hands, makes a farting sound, then curlicues in the air. The birthday partiers giggle. When she goes to retrieve it, the camera follows her and the two men rise from the table but turn away. One of them, the one in the overcoat, his back to the camera, presents the deflated balloon to Elizabeth with a chivalrous bow, as if returning a lost glove.
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