Julio's Ark

A short story
by Errid Farland

Noah wasn’t the only one with an ark, you know. Julio built one, too, out in the Mohave Desert, per the command of God. Fortunately, he worked in construction, road construction, which took him all over the place, or he’d never have come up with the building materials. He didn’t have one hundred and twenty years, like Noah had. Life spans were considerably shorter than they were six thousand years ago, so he couldn’t lollygag.

Also of fortune was the fact that he could supplement his cache of gopher wood (he thought of California Live Oaks as gopher wood, and they were a protected flora, so he could only collect already dead pieces he’d run across here and there) with—well, with anything. God hadn’t insisted upon a specific building material, so Julio just gathered anything that seemed fine for an ark.

“What the hell is that?” people would say when they’d see his ark a-building.

“An ark,” he’d say. “To save such as will be saved, for the benefit of all mankind, now and forever, amen.”

Julio didn’t have many friends.

He spent his spare hours twisting and adhering and nailing and screwing and bolting whatever pieces he might find while working on highways. Car parts were pretty plentiful, particularly bumpers and mufflers. Also pieces of tires. He used everything, let nothing go to waste. When he worked driving a steam roller, he’d keep one eye on the hot tar, and another on the side of the road, making mental notes of stuff—building materials from God. If he found it, he considered it a divine happenstance, and he’d think, all the way home, of where each item should be placed, for he was convinced that God had an exact location for each thing. He’d labor over some pieces for hours upon hours, so convinced was he of God’s intended placement, even if he had to somehow meld a stuffed bunny (torn ear notwithstanding) to a bicycle wheel with three broken spokes.

“How do you know where to put things?” Esmeralda asked. Esmeralda lived there on his property, in his spare room, and she kept the gate locked while he was at work, and she brought him things like ice water and hot dogs while he labored.

“I get a vision,” he explained. “I see it up here.” He tapped his temple with an almost black finger (he didn’t have much time to devote to hygiene).

Sometimes Esmeralda had to feed him, he was that devoted to his ark. She’d stick the hot dog in his mouth, and he’d bite it in a distracted sort of way, never breaking focus from whatever particular task consumed him.

“It looks like a bat udder,” Esmeralda said when he attached an exploded douche bag to the outstretched arms of the remains of a blowout from a sixteen wheeler.

“That’s a blasphemy,” Julio told her, eyeing her though hard tensed eyelids, his jaw tight, and sweat drawing visible lines through the filmy coating on his face.

“I’m sorry,” she said.

“Don’t tell it to me,” Julio said. “Get on your knees and tell it to God.”

Esmeralda did.

Julio said, “I can only hope I finish before it’s too late.”

He worried about that as he started coughing, a nagging cough that wouldn’t go away. He shouldn’t have, though. God wouldn’t have called him to a task he couldn’t complete, but it sometimes seemed so immense he just didn’t know how he’d get it done. He obsessed about counting cubits. Each day after finishing his work, like a ritual, he’d walk the length of his ark, laying elbow to fingertip, elbow to fingertip, elbow to fingertip, three hundred times, then he’d stand and look back to see how much more length was required. He’d do the same with the fifty-cubit width, but he’d just estimate the height.

People called him crazy, but they did the same with Noah; that didn’t mean anything. It wasn’t like he saw pterodactyls roosting in the craggy hills overlooking his property or anything.

“That thing won’t float,” they’d tell him, as if logic ever played a part in God’s miracles. Julio just hmphed at them.

One night, he and Esmeralda slept out in the ark on a clear and moonless night, where the stars shone yellow and white and red against that deep black sea.

“It’s not meant to float,” he told Esmeralda.

“What’s it for?” she asked.

“I don’t know, but not for floating. Not for fire, either.” It took him several minutes to make the whispered declaration, “I’m not going to be the one to finish it.”

Might Esmeralda have heard a faltering, doubtful tone in his voice? Had the diagnosis of lung cancer rocked his faith, or had God really given him the assurance that he’d begun a work, an important work, a work of a redemptive machine that someone else would finish and carry into eternity?

“It’s your life’s work, you’ll finish,” Esmeralda said. “Remember, God wouldn’t call you to a task if He didn’t intend to see it though.”

“Shut up,” Julio said, angered by her clichéd encouragement, her canned response. Toward the end, when he could no longer work, he passed his days in the bowels of his creation. He laid back, black tar etching his bloody lungs, pain accenting his perpetual cough, his breath shallow and phlegmy. When tears welled in his chest, it wasn’t from the pain of the cancer.

The futility of it hurt nearly as much as the cancer did. “Why?” he asked those vast and distant heavens, “How could I have been wrong?” he pleaded. “I was so sure,” he said, but he said it silently, within his heart, for doubt like his should never be voiced, especially not the biggest one, “Are you real?”

To the biggest one, he received a reply. “Of course I’m real.”

Esmeralda, always by his side, seeing the agony of his soul as clearly as she saw the agony of his body, said, on a particularly dark night, “What does it show, Julio? Your ark. What does it show?”

He didn’t answer, for he didn’t know.

Esmeralda had learned patience in dealing with Julio. She waited, then she said, “I’ve thought a great deal about it. The first one showed salvation. That didn’t need to be shown again.”

“Not redemption?” he said.

She shrugged her shoulders. “Vanity,” she ventured, fearing such a word might fracture him.

But it didn’t fracture him. “It was a redemptive machine,” he said. “Of that I was certain.”

Esmeralda laced her fingers in his. “Isn’t understanding a redemption? Who wouldn’t look at this and understand?”

Then he apprehended the concept; he saw what Esmeralda saw. The stars beamed down; the night twinkled at his enlightenment. “Vanity,” he repeated. “Yes.”

His eyes traveled along the thousands of details of his life’s work, his life’s mission, his life’s passion, there surrounding him. He remembered the toil, the hours and hours he spent on it—the sacred placement of each sacred object. He remembered how it consumed him. Oh, what a picture! The flotsam and jetsam of his highways, they were all once new, purposeful, useful, wanted things. All those lives, all those hopes, all those endeavors, expressed in all those multitudinous tangible objects; and here they stood at their futile end, affixed to his ark—to his futile work in this futile world—a vessel that might transport those whose eyes could see beyond the here and now, into the forever.

The pain eased in his heart, if not his chest. “It was a good work,” he said.

“A good work,” Esmeralda agreed.

Copyright © 2008 by Errid Farland