by Ed Gorman
This part, I suppose, you’re familiar with.
You go up there—y, not me—and let the good Reverend Muldaur hand you off the rattler. Then you proceed to grasp it while all the time trying to keep it from biting you. If you manage to hold it for a minute or two without being bitten, that means that your soul is pure and you’re one of the chosen. If the snake bites you, you’re a sinner whose sins must be redressed. Right after they rush you to the hospital.
Two men and a woman went up and it was about what you might expect. There was a lot of Bible-quoting and a lot of prayer-shouting and one very tiny little girl crying. The snakes scared her.
What an irrational reaction. Timber rattlers, in case you don’t know, usually have black or dark brown crossbands on a yellow or tan body. The head is yellowish and unmarked. Every once in a while you find one that’s black, misleading you into thinking you’ve got a river rattler, as they’re called hereabouts.
Makes no difference. Timber rattler or river rattler, you really shouldn’t treat them like toys.
The last adult to handle a snake—a
heavyset bald man with a milky blue left eye—took on two snakes. He slung them over his shoulders, he let one wrap about half its body around his neck, and he shook one so furiously that the thing went into snake psychosis.
Then the two men and the woman stood as a group below the lectern and let the congregation touch them, as if they were anointed figures with divine powers.
Singing all the time. Everybody was singing. I’m not sure, but I think that even the snakes were singing.
True, these people didn’t wear hats, but they did sing their collective asses off. The serpents had not bitten these three and so the trio had proved its godliness and what better way to celebrate than with a slightly off-key electric guitar and twenty-some people (and some snakes) joining in congregational song.
I wondered if the ceremony was over. In a Catholic mass everything depends on the sermon.
If the sermon’s short, you’re home free. A short sermon, you can be out of mass in twenty-five minutes flat. I once got an eighteen-minute mass, in fact, leading to my belief that the priest had the trots and needed to get back to the rectory quickly. But God help you if you get the rambling old monsignor. With him, you should pack a lunch.
I had the same feeling here. The snake stuff hadn’t taken so long—or been all that terrible, since nobody’d been bitten—s maybe Muldaur wasn’t as far gone as I’d feared.
Then the little girl went up and stood next to Muldaur.
She was skinny, pigtailed, terrified. She wore white walking shorts and a blue sleeveless blouse. She looked to be about seven.
“Satan hides even in the hearts and souls of children,” Muldaur said.
And the congregation answered him variously with “Yes, Brother” and “The Lord is the Light” and “I do not fear the darkness.”
And it all changed for me. This whole experience. Until now a part of me was thinking about how I’d tell my friends about this little adventure.
It’d be fun. There’d be a few shivers and a lot of laughs and the comforting knowledge that there really were people crazier than us, after all.
But I hadn’t counted on a child handling a snake.
That orgiastic sense only increased.
A low, steady murmur of prayer and excitement and fear; women moaning, clutching their breasts almost sexually; men’s eyes gleaming with foreboding and sinister anticipation.
“I’m going up there,” I said.
Of all the whispers and rumors these people inspired, this was the most disturbing, that they forced children to handle the rattlers. This was the particular reason why state, county, and local officials were always trying to stop them from holding these services. But nobody knew if they actually involved their children or not. Until now.
“Be careful,” Kylie whispered.
She didn’t try to stop me. She wanted me to go up there.
I started to step into the aisle when I felt something cold and metal pressing against the back of my neck. I’m not a gun guy. But I’ve read an awful lot of Richard S. Prather paperbacks and so I recognize the feel of a shotgun barrel.
“Just stay right where you are,” said the giant who’d let us in. He poked me with the barrel for emphasis.
“God, look at her,” Kylie said, loudly enough for people to hear and turn to glare at her.
“Mom!” the little girl shouted. “Please don’t make me do this!”
They tell you snakes don’t smell. And that they’re not cold to the touch. And that they’re not slimy. In an objective sense, I knew all this to be true. But I had the sudden visceral feeling that I was in a cave of reeking, slithering, cold-bodied snakes that dripped poison even from their vile scaly bodies.
“Please, Kathryn, help this young girl,”
Muldaur intoned. “We’re trying to conduct a service for the Lord here. He is not kind to those who defy Him.”
The young woman, scrawny and pigtailed as her daughter, left her folding chair and ascended to the raised platform. The girl clung to her, throwing her arms around her mother’s waist and clutching her the way people clutch life preservers.
“If she will not hold the serpent,” Muldaur said, “that means she knows the serpent is already in her heart.”
Kathryn bent down and talked to her daughter in a low voice.
Muldaur addressed the congregation.
“Pray for little sister Claudia that she might receive the divine courage she needs to do her duty for a loving God.”
And they broke into loud, ragged prayer, mother and daughter still talking in low tones back and forth.
Mother walked daughter a few steps closer to the snake cages and pointed to the snakes inside as if they were gentle creatures that would be fun to play with.
Claudia was calmer now, snuffling up her tears, standing little-girl tall and little-girl brave. Her mother dabbed at one of Claudia’s tears with her finger. Then Mom nodded to Muldaur.
“Unto the Lord will the true heart deliver us,” Muldaur said to the congregation as he opened the lid of the second cage. Once again I was startled by the way, almost without looking, he shoved his hand deep into the middle of the piled, hissing rattlesnakes and plucked one out.
He did not pause.
He handed it straight to the little girl.
And that was when the timber rattler, a sort of baby version, much smaller than the previous snakes, used the occasion to lunge at her, striking her right on the cheek.
The little girl screamed. And so, I think, did I.
Two
“God, Mr. C, you’ll never believe
who’s pulling up in the parking lot.”
Someday, or so one hopes, Jamie
Newton, seventeen, sexy, freckled, cute, will learn that “Mr. C” only works with Perry Como on his Tv show because his last name happens to begin with C. My name, using that Tv style, would be Mr. M for McCain.
But that is only one of many things that has thus far eluded the elusive sweater girl who makes my middle-aged clients make terrible fools of themselves. They find excuses to hang around my office like it’s the beer tent on a scorching day at the state fair. It doesn’t help that Jamie always looks like all the bad girls you see on the covers of Gold Medal novels about jailbait girls who lead middle-aged men to Death Row.
Jamie also can’t answer the phone
(“Uh, hello?”), type (my name usually gets typed as “Mcc-ain”; or, on
especially bad days, “Mr. C”), buy
office supplies (“I just thought pink typing paper would kinda brighten things up”), or resist the call of romance (her boyfriend, Turk, usually calls here four times per her two-hour after-school sessions), or keep her bathroom visits brief (“I guess I’ve just got a weak liver”).
How, you may ponder, did such an unpolished gem come to reside in my cramped little office, itself stuck in the back of a large building that keeps cha
nging businesses?
Small-city lawyers are like small-city bankers. We get paid in a variety of ways.
I once got a side of beef for handling a divorce; and a used Tv, which I still watch at home, for a traffic case.
I got Jamie from her father, Lloyd, who couldn’t afford to pay me for an insurance case I handled for him. In exchange, he said, I’d get his daughter for an unspecified time as my secretary. I’d tried to give her back many times but so far had had no luck. “Nobody deserves her more than you do, Sam,” Lloyd always says when I tell him I can’t possibly continue to accept his largesse. Lately, I’ve begun to wonder exactly how he means.
This was two days before my appearance at John Muldaur’s church.
Jamie said, “He’s the snake guy.
Turk’n some of his friends snuck in there one night.
Turk says he heard some of them can turn themselves into snakes, like that girl in that movie at the drive-in a couple of summers ago? Did you ever see that one?”
“I think so.”
“I just don’t know how you could shrink yourself down into a snake.”
One of the questions Aristotle no doubt asked himself many times.
“I wonder what he wants, Mr. C.”
Came a knock.
“I guess we’re about to find out.”
She looked spooked. “God, Mr. C,
I just thought of something.” Stage-whisper.
“What?”
“What if he brought a snake with him?”
“He doesn’t carry snakes around with
him.”
“Well, maybe he can turn himself into a snake like that woman did in that movie.”
I sighed. “Just answer the door, please, all right?”
“I’m just trying to be helpful is all, Mr.
C.”
“I appreciate it, Jamie. But please just get the door.”
My office is one room. I got all the furniture at various county condemnations, mostly businesses that couldn’t pay their taxes.
Nothing quite matches but it’s all serviceable enough, I suppose. If you can overlook various dings, scratches, scrapes, and gouges. The books on the top two shelves of the bookcase are fine, imposing volumes dedicated to law. The bottom two shelves, hidden somewhat by my desk, run to hardbound novels and short-story collections. They get read a lot more than the law books.
I always kind of pose when people come in. I place myself behind my desk, put on a pair of reading glasses I got for fifty-nine cents at Woolworths, and pretend to be lost in my perusal of legal documents. “Torts, torts, torts,” I’ve been known to mutter, just loudly enough for my hopefully impressed client to hear.
Jamie opened the door.
Muldaur stood there in a faded work shirt and even more faded work pants. His thick, dark hair spilled over his forehead Elvis-style and his messianic eyes reflected both anger and fear. Oh, yes, I suppose, I should mention the pistol he was holding. It was the kind of handgun my grandfather had, some kind of Colt.
“If this is a stickup,” I said, “you’ve come to the wrong place. I’ve got exactly thirty-five cents and I’m planning to blow that on a soda when I get done working.”
“Turk gave me five dollars for my
birthday,” Jamie said. “But I already spent it on a pair of shoes.”
He remained in the doorway, huge and fierce. “I brought the gun so you’d take me seriously.”
“And why wouldn’t I take you seriously?”
“Because nobody else in this town does. They all think I’m kooky.”
“Kooky,” if you’ll recall, is the word of choice for Edd Byrnes, the male beefcake on “77 Sunset Strip,” one of those
realistic Tv crime dramas in which the private eyes all drive Thunderbirds and sleep with virgins. The word is irritating enough when the untalented Edd Byrnes says it; coming from a crazed and chiseled Old Testament madman like Muldaur, it was downright comic.
“Why don’t you come in and have some coffee and give your hand a rest? That gun looks pretty heavy.”
“I can make some coffee,” Jamie said.
She had apparently forgotten the day I pulled an exceptionally long afternoon in court. Turk stopped by and they got to necking and everything—I didn’t ask her to detail “and everything” when I grilled her later on—and wouldn’t you know it, somehow she forgot to check the coffeepot and the darned thing caught fire and gutted the pot so that I had to throw it away and buy a new one. I hadn’t gotten around to replacing the coffeepot since. The thing was, the burned-up coffee probably didn’t taste a whole lot worse than Jamie’s regular fare.
“That’s all right, Jamie. Why don’t you just run over to Rexall and buy us each a cup?”
“Gee, Mr. C, I thought you only had thirty-five cents.”
“Just tell them I’ll pay them later this afternoon.”
“Wow, you have a charge account there? That’s cool.”
Bliss comes easily to Jamie.
I watched Muldaur watching her as she disappeared out the front door in her tight blue skirt and even tighter summer-weight sweater, black-and-white saddle shoes with tiny buckles in back, bobby sox with discreet hearts on their sides. Wrapped around Turk’s class ring (from reform school, presumably) there was enough angora to knit a good-size sweater. She couldn’t tell you who John Foster Dulles was or what some guy named Khrushchev did, exactly. But she was well aware of her own considerable charms.
Turk, whom I’d never had the displeasure of meeting, was a lucky kid.
“Nice,” I said.
“What?” Muldaur whipped around as if I’d poked him with a sharp stick.
“She’s a nice-looking young girl.”
“I didn’t notice.”
“I noticed that you didn’t notice.”
He shoved his craggy face forward. “If I put a serpent in your hand, would it find you innocent or guilty of lust?”
I smiled. “Guilty.”
“Well, it wouldn’t find me guilty. I have cleansed my soul of fleshly pleasures.”
What was the point of pushing further? He’d taken more than a passing interest in Jamie’s shapely backside, but why argue about it?
“How may I help you, Reverend?”
“Somebody’s trying to kill me.”
“If that’s true, you should go to the police.”
“If you mean that fool Cliffie Sykes, Jr., I told him about it and he said he didn’t blame them. I’m being followed. I can feel it, sense it. Somebody took a shot at me as I was leaving the church. Can you believe that?
He’s supposed to be a lawman.”
“Any idea who might be trying to kill you?”
“You believe me, then?”
“I believe that you believe somebody is trying to kill you. So I’d like to hear you explain things a little more.”
“I appreciate that.” Then, “I think it’s the Catholics.”
“Ah,” I said, “The Catholics. I
see.”
“And the Jews.”
“Ah,” I said. “The Jews.” Then,
“Well, speaking as a Catholic myself, Reverend Muldaur, I doubt the Catholics I know would do such a thing, despite all the really vile things you’ve said about us. And as for Jews, there’re only a few Jewish people in town, and they’re just too nice to go around killing people. Or even threatening it.”
He watched me. “You’re a dupe.”
“A dupe of whose, Reverend Muldaur?”
“The pope.”
“Ah, a papist dupe.”
“You think this is funny?”
“No, what I think this is, is pathetic. You and your people are angry because a Roman Catholic may become president. I hope he does.
I plan to vote for him.”
“And you know how he’ll get in?”
“How?”
“The Jews and their money.”
“I hate to say this but my people haven’t ever treated the Jews
very well. In fact, we’ve treated them very badly. Even murdered them. And refused to help them during Ww Ii. So why would the Jews and the Catholics be working together, exactly?”
He leaned back. For the first time, he smiled.
His smile was even scarier than his scowl. “You ever looked in the basement of your Catholic church?”
I returned his smile. “Now that’s always been one of the dumbest conspiracy theories I’ve ever heard.”
“You don’t believe it?”
“Of course I don’t believe it. I was an altar boy. I was in the church basement hundreds of times.”
“You ever hear of subbasements, Mr.
McCain?”
“Oh, the old subbasement routine, eh?”
“You find the subbasement and you’ll find the guns.”
It was an old theory often expressed on rightwing radio out here in the boonies. The international cabal of The Jews (note the capital letters) use the basements of Catholic churches to store their weapons. What weapons and for what reason? Because when the revolution comes The Jews and The Catholics, who have only been pretending to disagree at times, will then rise up and impose a One World government on all right-thinking non-Jews and non-Catholics.
I leaned forward on my elbows. “I’m afraid I can’t help you.”
“You’re just like the others, aren’t you?”
“First of all, Reverend Muldaur, I’m a lawyer. I’m not a bodyguard.”
“You’re also a private investigator.”
“True.”
“So I’d like you to come to one of my services and just look around.”
“Look around for what?”
“Somebody who doesn’t seem to belong.”
“A spy?”
“Something like that. Dupes like you may not realize this, Mr. McCain, but the pope has his own assassins.”
“I see. And the first place these assassins would think of is Black River Falls,
Iowa?”
“Catholics aren’t known for clear thinking.
All that mumbo jumbo they believe.”
I realized then that the only way I was ever going to get rid of him was to agree to help him.
Besides, the service would probably be worth seeing. Much as I feared snakes, there’d be a certain repellent majesty to watching all the snake-handlers do their work.
