by Ed Gorman
“What time does it start?” I said.
He didn’t have a chance to answer. Jamie was back.
She should have asked for a sack. Instead she gripped the three soggy-hot cardboard containers in her hands. And as she approached the front of the desk where we sat, I saw what was about to happen. She stubbed the toe of her shoe against something and lurched forward. And in lurching forward the coffee went slamming down against the desk.
“Oh, shit!” she cried as the containers exploded, spraying coffee everywhere.
Muldaur leaped from his chair, avoiding the worst of the flying coffee. I didn’t do too badly, either, just got a shot of it on my right sleeve. My desk was the main casualty, papers soaked, coffee dripping off the desk edges.
“You let her talk that way?” Muldaur intoned.
“Talk what way?” I didn’t know what he was referring to. I was too busy assessing the damage.
“I used the word “shit,” Mr. C.”
“She did it again,” he said.
“I was just saying what I said is all,” she said miserably.
“Please go get some rags and start cleaning this up, Jamie.”
“I’m sorry I used the S word,
Reverend,” Jamie said earnestly, and I felt sorry for her. She looked very sweet right now.
Too bad Muldaur couldn’t appreciate her particular form of innocence.
“You wouldn’t be using words like that if you came to my church, I can tell you that.”
She glanced at me. Scared. She was
probably thinking he was going to turn her into a serpent or something. She rushed from the room.
“Two nights from now,” Muldaur said.
“Eight o’clock. I’m sure you know where it
is, the way everybody makes fun of us.”
“Strictly speaking, you’re breaking the law, Reverend. Bringing poisonous reptiles to a public place.”
“Your law,” Muldaur reminded me. “Not God’s law.”
That’s one thing I have against organized religions of all kinds. They have all of the answers and none of the questions.
Three
I guess Kylie and I were sitting at the wrong angle. From our folding chairs in the back of the place, it sure looked as if the little girl had been bitten by the striking snake. Later on, we’d learn that she’d flung the baby rattler away from her before it could do any damage.
What we didn’t mistake was what then happened to Reverend John Muldaur. At the same time the little girl was screaming and holding her hands out for her mommy, Muldaur went into the kind of convulsions Jerry Lewis goes into for laughs.
But you could tell by the abrupt mask-like stiffening of his face, which was an expression of shock and horror, that whatever was wrong with him was for real.
His body went into spasms, an arm kicking out, a leg collapsing, the other arm flailing away from his body as if it wanted to tear free.
While one of the male members of the church collected the rattlesnake and put it back in its cage, the other members of the church formed a circle around the minister, who was now flat on his back on the platform, arching up every few seconds to allow his entire body to jerk and twist and convulse. We were part of the circle.
Prayers went up like flares; sobs
exploded. A lone woman
hurried-pushed-paddled the children out the door.
An older man in a T-shirt with a Dixie flag on it knelt next to Muldaur saying the same thing over and over, “You’re receiving the spirit of the Lord, Reverend, and you shouldn’t be afraid.”
Some spirit. Some Lord.
“Is there a phone in here?” Kylie asked.
“A phone in the house of the Lord?” a woman snapped back.
“There’s a pay phone down the road,” one of the more sensible women said.
“He’s receiving the Lord,” said the man in
the Dixie flag T-shirt, calmly.
“He’ll be fine in a minute.”
But Muldaur wouldn’t be fine in a minute.
His attempts at breathing were loud and frightening.
I’d visited my granddad, a “lunger,” on a Va ward one time. He’d never recovered from the various lung ailments he’d picked up from various poison gases in Ww I. He was like a sea creature writhing on a beach beneath a pitiless sun. My mom always cried for days after seeing him like that.
Muldaur’s death—I had no doubt he was passing over—was far noisier and gaudier.
He was bug-eyed, flailing tongue, wriggling eyebrows. He was spit, snot, urine, feces. He was crying, cursing, keening. He was dancing, heaving, pounding.
“The Lord comes to us in many strange ways,” said the Dixie T-shirt man. He was as beatific as ever.
“Marv, you’ve got a motorcycle,” the man who’d recovered the baby rattler said. “Run down and call for an ambulance.”
Marv trotted out the door.
There are significant moments that you can’t quite deal with completely—they’d explode your mind if you gave yourself to them completely—s a portion of your brain observes you observing the moment. It was like that the first time I ever had sex. I was enjoying it all so much I was afraid I’d start acting real immature and yell stuff or act unlike the sophisticated, jaded sixteen-year-old I was. So a sliver of my mind detached and took an overview of everything. While my body was completely given over to trying to last at least three minutes, my mind was congratulating my body. You’re a man now, young McCain. A worldly gadabout-philosopher stuck in a town where the new co-op grain silo is still a newsworthy event. You, McCain, are a Hemingway sort of guy.
I was hoping a portion of my mind would detach now and watch me watch Muldaur die. But it didn’t. And so all I could do was stand there and hope that there was a life afterward because if this kind of suffering had no meaning—six million Jews in the concentration camps; millions who could be snuffed out with a brief exchange of atomic bombs—then none of the words our religions spoke were anything more than ways of hiding
the meaninglessness of everything. And frankly, cosmic meaninglessness scares the shit out of me the way nothing else comes close to. I should never have taken those philosophy courses as an undergrad.
And then I realized something.
The only thing more terrifying than watching Muldaur throwing himself voodoo-crazed all over the floor of the platform was watching him lie there absolutely still.
Which is what he was doing now.
And it didn’t take me long, worldly gadabout-philosopher and Hemingway sort of guy that I am, to realize what this meant.
Muldaur was dead.
“What’d he do? Crap his pants? God, that smell is awful. I knew those damn snakes would kill somebody eventually.” We were still inside the church. Sykes’d shooed a lot of the worshipers outside.
With his usual dignity and professionalism, Cliffie Sykes, Jr., hitched up his
holstered Colt .45, hitched up the Bowie knife he carries in a belt scabbard, touched a tip of his black Western boot to the corpse, and screwed up his fat face into a parody of Porky Pig, no personal offense meant to you, Porky.
Cliffie, Jr., is the chief of police.
At one time Black River Falls was owned and operated by the Whitney family, a branch of Eastern millionaires who came out here when one of the men got involved in some kind of legal trouble involving stock swindles. They tried to create a small version of a New England town out here on the prairie. They were imperious, of course, and snobs, of course, and contemptuous of the rest of the town, of course. But they brought sound town government, good and fair law, and an eagerness to keep the town clean and modern, all the virtues of New England Yankees.
World War Ii changed all this, as it changed so many things, good and bad. Cliff Sykes, Sr., owned a small construction company at the start of the war. Then he entered into various federal contracts with the government. He built airplane runways, roads, training camps. And his brothers and sisters
practiced every kind of black-marketing there was. One of his sisters was even an Allotment Annie, a woman
so-called because she married soldiers just about to ship overseas and collected their monthly allotment checks. One New York woman was indicted for having forty-six husbands. I doubt that Helga Sykes had had that many husbands, only because there weren’t that many blind soldiers.
Anyway, the long run of the Whitney family, begun in the previous century, came to an end. The Sykes clan were not only wealthier, they were more powerful. They took over this part of the state, including our town. And thus it was that Cliffie Sykes, Jr., who had failed to pass the police entrance tests given by six other towns, started his law enforcement career as our chief of police.
“You smell that, McCain?”
“Yeah, I smell it.”
“He crapped his pants.”
“Yeah, you said that, Sykes.” I only called him Cliffie when I was so mad I didn’t care anymore.
He pointed to the snake cage. “I should go get my shotgun and kill every one of those bastards.” He pawed his stubby hands on the front of his khaki uniform, the kind Glenn Ford always wears when he’s playing a lawman.
Secretly, Cliffie thinks he’s Glenn Ford. Secretly, I think I’m Robert
Ryan. Which I am, pretty much, except for the height, the good looks, the deep voice, the masculinity, and the charm.
“Or you could always just take them to the woods and set them free,” Kylie said.
He seemed to see her for the first time. She’d be pretty hard to miss. She was the only pretty one of the three of us. Everybody else he’d run outside.
“Say, what’re you doing here?”
“I’m with McCain.”
“And what’s McCain doing here, while I’m at it?” he said.
“McCain is doing here what Muldaur asked him to do,” I said.
“And that would be what exactly?”
“Exactly, that would be trying to ascertain if somebody was trying to kill him.”
“He told you that?”
“He told me that.”
“Why’d he think somebody was trying to kill him?”
“He thought it was because of all those pamphlets he was handing out.”
“What was wrong with those pamphlets? I read a couple of ‘em and they seemed all right to me.”
“Why doesn’t that surprise me?” I said.
“And anyway, the snakes killed him.”
“I don’t think so.”
“That’s what you told me.”
“No, it wasn’t. That’s what you told yourself.
You haven’t even asked me what killed him.”
“Well, if he was doin’ all that
heebie-jeebies stuff, then what killed him?”
Kylie said, “Poison.”
“Yeah, snake poison.”
She shook her fetching head. “I don’t think so. We studied snakes in biology in college.”
“College,” Cliffie scoffed. “A training ground for commies.”
Kylie sighed. She was used to him. “Snake venom rarely produces symptoms like that.”
“Like what?”
“Like what you call the heebie-jeebies.”
“So if it wasn’t snake poison, what was it?”
“We’ll have to let the autopsy tell us,” I said.
The ambulance siren cut through our conversation as the boxy white truck swept up in front of the open doorway. You could hear the attendants hitting the ground and yanking the gurney from the back.
Cliffie, thumbs in his gunbelt, swaggered up to meet them.
“Why aren’t I surprised Cliffie liked those pamphlets? And I’m not saying that just because I’m Jewish. I’d be mad even if I
wasn’t.” Then she smiled. “And by the way, McCain, the rabbi put some more guns in the basement of your church last night.”
“I’ll alert the monsignor.”
They made swift work of Muldaur, the ambulance boys.
When they were lifting him onto the gurney, Cliffie, ever helpful, said, “Sorry about the smell, boys. He crapped his pants.”
“You calling Bci?” I said, referring to the state Bureau of Criminal Investigation. Without their help, small towns just can’t do adequate scientific crime investigations.
“For what?”
“For what? To find out who poisoned him.”
“Did it ever occur to you, McCain, that maybe one of his snakes bit him earlier and he was just having a delayed reaction. Snakebites can do that, you know.”
“Clifford Sykes, Jr.,
Herpetologist,” Kylie said.
“What’s that herpe-thing mean?”
“It means snake expert.”
“Oh.”
He’d obviously thought she’d insulted him.
Then he said, “So I call them in and it turns out to be an accidental snakebite and then I look like a fool.”
“Gee, I can’t imagine you ever looking like a fool, Chief,” Kylie said in her sweetest voice.
“Well, God knows you and that left-wing rag you work for have tried to make me sound like one every chance you get.”
Maybe it was the innumerable times he’d arrested people for crimes they hadn’t committed. Maybe it was the year he pocketed half the ticket sales to the policeman’s dance. Maybe it was the time The Clarion pointed out that it was Cliffie’s first cousin Luther who was not only selling our town its police vehicles but also charging twenty percent over the sticker price. It wasn’t real hard to make a case against Cliffie.
“We couldn’t do it without your help,” Kylie said, all sweetness again.
Cliffie was about to respond when one of the children raced into the church. Cliffie did not like this. When Cliffie tells you to stay out, he gets most unpleasant if he sees you defying him.
He lunged for the kid and shouted, “Hey, you, twerp!”
“Maybe he’ll shoot him,” Kylie said.
“Nah. Nothing worse than a
pistol-whipping, probably.”
The kid wanted to see the snakes, was the thing.
He rushed up to the cage and stood gazing in fear and amazement at the serpents that hissed and rattled at a world as alien to them as theirs was to us.
“You get away from there now,” Cliffie said.
“They wouldn’t bite me, Chief,” the boy said. He was probably eight, with a bowl-job haircut like Larry’s of the Three Stooges, something Mom probably gave him at
home. “I don’t have sin in my heart. I really don’t.”
“You heard what I said.”
Cliffie yanked him down from the platform and dragged him outside.
Something had been troubling Kylie all evening.
Something that was becoming clearer and clearer on her girlish, elegant face. Somehow, I sensed that it didn’t have anything to do with the church here, frightening as that had been.
“You give me a ride home, McCain? I guess I’ve about had it. Watching him die like that took it out of me.” She slid her arm through mine.
“Let’s go outside.”
Heat, mosquitoes, fireflies, and the smell of gasoline, cigarettes, and sweaty people awaited us. The place was already becoming a carnival. On a summer night in a small town there’s nothing front-porch folks would rather do than follow ambulances. Put up some iced tea there, honey, and we’ll see where that ambulance is goin’. Hurry, now. More dramatic than Tv, cheaper than the movies. And they were just now pulling up, forming a semi-circle around the cars of the churchgoers. They were practiced enough at all this to leave plenty of room for the official vehicles to get in and out. And they were bold enough to go right up to Muldaur’s flock and ask them questions. They were sure this just had to involve snakes, and what could be more exciting than something that involved snakes and was cheaper than going to the movies?
But it wasn’t all front-porch types, and that surprised me. Reverend Thomas C.
Courtney was there, for one, th
e first minister to look as if Esquire had dressed him. I wondered if the apostles had worn starched blue dress shirts, white ducks, and deck shoes. And driven green Mg’s. I always enjoyed driving past his church to see the titles of his forthcoming sermons. “You, John Paul Sartre, and The Crucifixion” was still my favorite. We used to parody that title. I came up with “You, Gabby Hayes, and The Heartbreak of
Hemorrhoids.” (i was reading Mad
magazine a lot in those days.) Courtney appealed to what we call, out here anyway, the gentry. He’d angered a lot of Catholics lately by preaching a piece written by Dr.
Norman Vincent Peale, the most
successful Protestant minister of our day, who claimed that Jack Kennedy was, as a Catholic, beholden to Rome and that a vote for Kennedy was thus a vote for papal rule.
Finding Sara Hall here was even more surprising. A fading country-club beauty who’d been to the Mayo Clinic several times for what was locally called “a little drinking problem,”
Sara was a friend of my employer, Judge Whitney, and a woman I liked. Her hands twitched sometimes, and she was known to have had a couple minor breakdowns in very public places a few years back. One day, seeing me on the street and having met me only once, she asked if I’d have a cup of coffee with her. I was surprised but I went. And when our coffee came and she’d had a couple of swallows, she said, “I was just afraid I might pop in somewhere and have a drink. But instead I can sit here and talk to you.
I really appreciate this.”
Muldaur’s people had gathered in front of two battered Chevrolet trucks, from one of which issued the plaintive cry of hill music in its purest form, not steel guitars but slide guitars, the kind of music first heard on these shores a couple hundred years ago when Irishers landed on the shores of the Atlantic.
The voices of the girl singers were my favorite parts, high-pitched wails relating tales of doomed lovers and the men who enslaved them. The lyrics were changing now, influencing country music and being influenced by it at the same time. This was the music of a subculture that would never become mainstream. To find life as it was lived a hundred years ago, maybe a hundred and fifty years ago, you didn’t have to travel far.
I saw it peripherally, not sure at first that I did see it, the big man who’d guarded the church door leaning over to slap a small woman, hard, across the mouth. This was in the far shadows, beyond the wall of crunched and crushed vehicles they drove. They stood between two such vehicles.
