A Wolverine Is Eating My Leg by Tim Cahill

diddla dit dit,” I said, introducing a pleasing variant on my basic tongues. This was well received. “Rit a little did a dit diddle dit dit.”
    Beside me, my older Christian ran through a few changeups, interspersing his standard “Yab ba da ba da ba” with nice syllables that sounded like the names of Biblical towns. “Ah Shal-la-dah, ah shal-ah-dah-dah.”
    I began to realize that whatever nonsense syllables you said were all right as long as you said them rapidly, in a loud trancelike monotone. It was best if your tongue bounced rapidly off the roof of your mouth. I tried to come up with some good Old Testament sounds, but the only nonsense that came to mind belonged in old rock and roll songs.
    “Ah Sha nana nana nana nana nah,” worked excellently. I was confident enough to vary my rhythms. My tongue was very loose. My friends and I took short, increasingly more rapid solos: dueling tongues.
    After about twenty minutes, we tapered back down to a half an hour of “praise you Jesus, thank you Jesus.” It was past midnight when we left the rat box, and the man who accompanied me to the saving block marked down three and a half hours on a sheet of paper on the outside of the door.
    We stood outside the door and finally introduced ourselves. My Christian’s name was Frank, and he wanted to know if I would like to stay at the Foundation and serve the Lord. The bus was about to leave.
    “Any guests want to go back to Los Angeles?” the driver called.
    Frank gave me to believe that my rebirth might not take if I returned to “the World” with its manifold temptations. He said I could backslide into “filth,” which he defined as dope, pornography, and possible homosexuality. Women, he said, were often agents of the Devil. I told him I would stay a few days because I was curious about what was involved in “serving the Lord.”
    Frank shook my hand, said praise the Lord and introduced me to several other Christians who greeted my decision with “praise the Lord,” uttered in the same vague tone other people say “far out.” I was given a dog-eared Bible, and the two of us moved to the far section of the church and sat in a booth. I should, I learned, read only the sections Frank recommended. “See,” he said, “if you just opened it up, you might get into some of the heavy prophets and it could blow your mind.”
    We were to read the Book aloud. Frank asked me to begin with Matthew, Chapter Nine. Before I could start, he closed his eyes and rotated his head from side to side in a painful manner, as if he had a chiropractic problem with his neck. He muttered something about “burning the words upon our hearts” and looked up crossly while I stared at him. I realized he was blessing the reading and obligingly rotated my head and muttered along. I got through the first fifty-seven verses without incident, but when I came to fifty-nine through sixty-two, Frank stopped me momentarily to say that I was coming to “heavy scripture.”
    In these verses, Jesus is preaching to the multitudes, and a man tells him he will follow him after he buries his father. “Jesus said unto him, ‘Let the dead bury the dead.’ ”
    “Thank you Jesus,” Frank said.
    I continued. “ ‘And another also said, Lord, I will follow thee; but let me first go bid them farewell which are at homeat my house. And Jesus said unto him, “No man having put his hand to the plow and looking back is fit for the Kingdom of Heaven.” ’ ”
    I asked Frank to “interpret” that last verse, and he bristled. The Alamos do not interpret the Bible, he said. They tell you what the words mean, and in this case the words were plain enough. If I took my hand from the plow, that is, if I left the Foundation and scorned the work of the Lord, I wouldn’t be fit to enter heaven. He pointed out that there were only two places to go after one dies.
    “Hell is so terrible you can’t even conceive of it,” he said, and as he spoke, I felt his