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he’d dragged a line through the whole word with the toe of his pointed shoe, lurching along on the other foot, but still it was legible or could be guessed at anyhow, since no other word looked like that one.
    The day he was forty-three, he accepted Jesus Christ as his Lord and Personal Saviour. It was quite a shock to his system.
    A few weeks before, he had been driving through downtown Tacoma on a sticky afternoon much like any other. Traffic was slow as molasses and he found himself staring at a bus shelter with a poster on it that said in large pink letters, JESUS IS THE WAY.
    He might well have seen it before, on other days when he’d been preoccupied with what to make for dinner or whether Margaret had remembered to call the IRS from the office about those tax forms, but the fact was that only on that particular day was there a chink open in his mind as he glanced at that bus shelter, a crack wide enough for those words to drop in. And for a moment he forgot a lifetime’s worth of wisecracks about the Born Agains; for a moment he thought,
What if it was true? What if just maybe?
    Wouldn’t that explain a lot of things, like what a mess this country had gotten itself into? Wouldn’t that make some sense of how his life had turned out after all the promising things his report cards had said, after all his dumb dreams of changing the world?
    Not that he was complaining. He’d been to Corsica and Bali and Scotland and the Everglades; he had a home with a view of Puget Sound and a good job and a great collection of German steins and a lot of laughs. Above all, he had Margaret, who was twice what he deserved. But it struck him sometimes that in a couple more decades he would be dead without ever having figured things out. And think of it: All these years he’d been using the word
Jesus
as a colourful form of ouch – if he dropped a wrench on his foot, say – when for all he knew the Born Agains were right, and Jesus just might be the way.
    He was still half joking, or at least he thought he was.
    Waiting for the lights to change, he tried it out loud. ‘Jesus?’ so it sounded like he was calling softly over the car door to someone in the street he thought he remembered from high school who probably wouldn’t know him any more.
    But all at once he was sick to his stomach, felt so bad in fact that when the light changed he pulled right instead of left and parked in front of a fire hydrant. He laid his wet forehead on his hands where they gripped the steering wheel and said, maybe out loud or maybe in his head, he didn’t know, ‘I’m nothing, I’m scum, Jesus, Jesus, Jesus.’
    When he finally got home he watched some drag racing and waited for it to wear off, like a hangover, or heartburn. Margaret came home with antipasti from the deli; she felt his back where his T-shirt was stuck to it. He blamed the heat.
    But by the weekend he still felt the same way. So come Sunday morning he walked down the road till he came to the first building with the word
Jesus
on it.
    It was the Church of Jesus Our Lord. He thought he’d bolt at the end of the service, but strangers gathered round to welcome him. It turned out it wasn’t them who’d paid for the sign at the bus shelter downtown, that was the Church of Christ Crucified, but still, ‘No objections,’ said the pastor. ‘It was Our Lord who led your feet to our door.’
    He still felt sick, standing there. These people weren’t his sort of people, or so he would have said a week before. Their phrases were foreign to him; there was talk of missions and calls and walks with God. When they used words like
voice,
or
light,
he was never sure if they were to be taken literally. Their clothes were funny and the pastor stood too close to him. He knew he might turn these people into a big joke at the next office party. He felt like James Dean and wished he hadn’t worn his leather jacket. He felt like a sinner. And when an old lady who’d introduced herself as Mrs