Page 92 of Never Flinch

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Women’s Center, indeed! Like Pastor Jim and Deacon Andy, Chris has always been amused by how the godless find sanitary terms for their evil. A women’s center, not an abortion mill. Pro-choice instead of pro-murder.

At least, he thinks as he dresses in jeans and a tee-shirt from the blue suitcase,Brenda’s Bitches had the balls to call themselves something honest. They were bitches and proud of it.

This was a year beforeDobbs v. Jackson. Chris found out later, after they got back to Wisconsin, that the Bitches got to know one another—wait for it, wait for it—at the Rawcliffe PTA, Rawcliffe being a small and prosperous city not far from Hershey. By the time the Bitches got organized, Real Christ Holy had been picketing the Women’s Center for almost five months, sometimes joined by like-minded local protestors but usually going it alone on days when it rained or snowed. As Pastor Jim liked to say, “Deal with it, brothers and sisters, and remember it’s always sunny in heaven.”

Funded by Hot Flash Electric money (Harold Stewart, Chris’s father, religious and completely naïve, had no idea that the name of his company had a certain female implication), Real Christ Holy might picka target in any part of the country, but once they picked it, they stuck with it.

There were women in the Rawcliffe PTA who approved of the protests, if not always of the signs the Real Christers carried (dismembered fetuses, bloodstained doctors’ smocks, ABORTION PROVIDERS BURN IN HELL), but there were a dozen or more who did not. These ladies met at the home of Brenda Blevins, who was particularly incensed by the sign Pastor Jim was carrying. This was after an abortion doctor, Henry Tremont, was shot and killed by a religious martyr named Taylor Verecker as Tremont was coming out of church. Pastor Jim’s sign read TAYLOR VERECKER WAS SENT TO DO GOD’S WORK.

The Blevins woman had an idea for a counter-protest, one that would generate plenty of headlines, and some of her friends, furious at the Real Christ Holy interlopers, went along with it. Also, it was funny. Chris was willing to admit it. No one ever said godless libtards lacked a sense of humor.

Blevins, partial heir to a chocolate fortune, had plenty of money—probably not as much as Chris’s father, who had donated almost his entire fortune to Real Christ Holy, but she was wealthy enough to purchase nine motor scooters and nine leather jackets, all as pink as Barbie’s Dreamhouse. On the back of the jackets: BRENDA’S BITCHES.

The nine women picked a drizzly day when Real Christ Holy only had a few local protestors helping them out. They formed up in aV-shape on Fourth Street, Blevins at the forefront. They rode their scooters at the protestors at about twenty miles an hour, singing a version of “We Shall Overcome” that rhymedovercomewithGod-bothering scum.

The Real Christers scattered before them. News photogs and TV cameras—all alerted by the resourceful Ms. Blevins—caught everything on film. The murder factory was in a strip mall at the end of Fourth. There was plenty of parking lot there for the counter-protestors to swing around in and return to the street. The Real Christ Holy protestors scattered again when they did. Signs were dropped and run over. Still singing, having a whale of a good time, the pink motor scooter drivers put-putted a couple of hundred yards up Fourth Street, circled, and returned yet again, singing and slinging such epithets as “Run, you self-righteous assholes!”

The Real Christ Holy men and women were cold, damp, and in too much disarray to be immediately angry. They were used to being shouted and jeered at, but notdrivenat. Most just looked bewildered. Chris’s mother was rubbing her arm. The rightside mirror of a scooter had clipped her on its way by. Her sign, GOD SENDS KILLER DOCS TO HELL, lay at her feet. Chris was infuriated to see his mom looking sad and damp and beaten, with her no-color hair (women in Real Christ Holy did not dye) pasted against her cheeks.

Jamie Fallowes, Andy’s son, grabbed Chris. He shouted, “I’ve got an idea! Come on!”

The two young men beat feet to the 7-Eleven at the far end of the strip mall. There they bought all the cooking oil and olive oil on the shelves. Jamie waited impatiently for Chris to pay with the Hot Flash credit card (Real Christ Holy did not believe in plastic, which was a tool of the deep state), then the two of them returned to the Women’s Center, young men who were excited and laughing their heads off. Brenda’s Bitches were back on Fourth Street, swinging around for another bombing run.

“Help us!” Jamie shouted to the other protestors. “Come on, you guys!”

Only Pastor Jim stood back (but smiling) as bottles of cooking oil were passed around, opened, and emptied across the parking lot the Bitches were using as their turnaround point.

“What are you doing?” Gwen Stewart asked her son. She had picked up her sign but refused to take a bottle of Wesson oil. “That’s dangerous!”

Women from the center, some wearing nurses’ uniforms—how grotesque was that—had come out to watch and cheer on the Bitches.

The scooters came back, Brenda in the lead, bent over her handlebars. A few of the Real Christ Holy protestors were still spreading oil, but most just stood aside with Pastor Jim and Deacon Andy. The scooters swept into the parking lot. “Bitches rule!” one shouted as she went by.

They reached the turnaround point. The asphalt was wet as well as oily, and every single one of them spun out. The singing and shouting were replaced by screams of surprise and pain. Most of the pinkscooters slid all the way to the storefronts. One jumped the curb and struck the show window of Richard Chemel’s Pawn & Loan. The glass shattered. Guitars rained down.

There was a moment of shocked silence from the little crowd gathered outside of the Women’s Center, and then they ran for the scattered, moaning Bitches. One of the women, a nurse, slipped in the oily wet and went on her ass. Jamie whooped and clapped Chris on the shoulder.

The Bitches were all wearing helmets—Brenda had insisted on that—and the news reports about the incident said that, plus their low speed of travel, saved them from serious injury. Probably true, but there was plenty of road-rash, one broken arm, and a couple of sprained shoulders. Five or six of the felled Bitches were lying on the pavement in shock; a couple of others staggered to their feet; Brenda Blevins herself was on all fours with blood gushing from her nose.

Nurses and aides—plus a couple of young women who’d come in for the procedure—began helping the downed women to their feet. One of the nurses, wearing a smock printed all over with bluebirds (something cheerful for the mommies to look at while their babies were being sucked away in pieces), approached Jamie, who was grinning. She was trembling with outrage. “How low can you go?” she screamed.“How rotten can you be to hurt a bunch of women?”

Chris stepped between them before Bluebird Nurse could punch Jamie in the nose, which she seemed ready to do. “You’re killing babies,” Chris said. “How rotten is that?”

Bluebird Nurse looked at him, cheeks burning, mouth open. Then she spread her arms wide and actually laughed. “I’ve got a pregnant rape victim in there today, but I can’t talk to you about that or anything else. Can I? You’re lost. The whole fucking bunch of you, lost. It’s the Great American Divide. At least you’ll go to jail.” She wheeled around and repeated, “The whole fucking bunch of you!”

But no one went to jail. Not Brenda’s Bitches, not the Real Christ Holy protestors. Pastor Jim had a local lawyer—one of the good ones—on call, and the lawyer pointed out it was the Bitches who had started it. The security footage from the Women’s Center cameras confirmed this. And while the cooking oil trickwassort of low, the Real Christ Holy group had been observing the buffer zone decreed by FACE,the Freedom of Access to Clinic Entrances Act. Also, several of Pastor Jim’s crew exhibited bruises from passing scooters, almost all of them created after the fact. The one authentic bruise was on Gwen Stewart’s arm, and she refused to show it to the police when they came. When Pastor Jim asked her—in his gentlest voice—why not, she only shook her head and wouldn’t meet his eyes. “I might have already had it,” she said. “I bruise easily these days.”

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Chris’s good moods (which almost always happen when heisChris) are as fragile as an overinflated balloon, and this one pops as he’s putting his suitcases into the Kia’s hatchback. It’s that memory of Mama saying,I might have already had it. I bruise easily these days. Mama who said,Our secret. Mama who stood up for her twins when their own father was ready to throw them out of the church… and possibly out of their home. Mama had been nobody’s ox that day.

Shedidn’talready have a bruise, Chris saw the scooter’s mirror clip her himself, but it was true that she bruised easily. Because, it turned out, she had leukemia. Six months after the Rawcliffe protest, she was dead. Once the initial diagnosis was made, there were no doctors and certainly no hospitals. Prayer was Pastor Jim’s prescription, and all six hundred members of Real Christ Holy prayed for Gwendolyn Stewart without ceasing. In the end, God’s will was done. When Andy Fallowes found Chrissy crying behind the house the day after the burying, wearing pedal pushers, makeup so ineptly applied it was clownish, and a wig all askew, he did not condemn her. He only said, “What could doctors have given her except one more year of suffering?”

It was cold comfort, but better than no comfort at all.

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