Snake Girl VS the KKK

by Peter Joseph Swanson

  Lizzi looked at him funny.

  Michael explained as he opened the car door, “If you don’t know how to finish a sentence you’ve already started just start talking about blue pills. It works every time for me… I think.” He walked in a pall thinking how he used to be so filthy. The farm was manure drenched. Summer baths were quick swims in the big pond, then he’d end up smelling like ripe pond mud.

  Near the barn he heard mirth and chatter spilling from open doors. Michael groaned audibly. Lizzi quickly took his cold hand. As they entered the barnyard, he added, “Oh, and one thing… no swearing. We were all so filthy, but not like that.”

  Lizzi elbowed him. “What do you think I am? A blankity dork? Oh look at all these people. I wonder how many of them are in the KKK?”

  “Shhh!”

  “Look! It’s Mikey!” an excited voice called out.

  They walked into the aisle-way of the barn that usually held a row of tractors and the machinery they pulled. Kith and kin sat at folding tables in folding chairs that had JERUSALEM BAPTIST CHURCH stenciled across their backs.

  “Hi, Mike!”

  “Look at Mike!”

  “Where ya been Mikey?”

  “Come on in!”

  Mom jumped up, clasping her hands to her mouth in excitement, hurrying to him in a big display of joy. “Oh, praise the Lord God! I prayed you’d make it this year!” Her short gray hair was tightly permed. She wiped her hands on her bright apron, which Michael instantly decided was ugly.

  “Hi, Mom,” he awkwardly greeted, trying to read her brown eyes behind her silver wire glasses but wasn’t sure what to make of her expression. “This is Lizzi.”

  Lizzi waved. “Hi, Mrs. Barely.”

  “Barley.”

  “Ooops, what a dork,” Lizzi apologized. Mom badly hid her suspicion, smiling a bit too vacantly, causing Michael to suddenly feel thirteen years old and very ridiculous.

  “Nice day for a party!” Michael blurted.

  Mom said to her son, “Your father and I are so happy that you didn’t stay away.”

  Mr. Barley approached with a sunburned neck and nose, peering at Michael with steely eyes. “Son.”

  “Hi, Dad, this is Lizzi.” Dad shook his hand so tight Michael winced, almost having forgotten the male dominance ritual of hand crushing. He suddenly thought about how air kisses were far more civilized and fun. His brother half-grunted a hello from his seat, not bothering to get up.

  Mom turned to Lizzi. “Has he been eating?”

  “Oh, yeah, like, lots of raw meat. Way lots.”

  “Oh?” She turned back to her son and gave his long ponytail a dirty look. “We’re just old fashioned country people. We like things tried and true. Where does he get his ideas?”

  “Let’s eat, Lizzi, I’m starved,” Michael lied. What he really wanted was a quick beer, coke, heroin, a Valium injection, and a rocket ship to a violently spinning black hole. He steered her away. They gathered their food from side tables then sat next to Aunt Jennifer where there were brief introductions and lots of chatter between her and Lizzi. Michael soon spaced it all away and looked up in bitter nostalgia to the haylofts on each side of the aisle-way. On sweltering humid summer days when he used to help unload bales into it, it was an unbearable dusty oven. Now, the two haylofts were filled to the rafters with timothy, alfalfa, a share of thistles and surely a few unlucky black field snakes. Michael remembered all the work that it took to put it all up there so high.

  Aunt Jennifer said, “My, Mike, you sure are quiet today.”

  “Just thinking.”

  She asked Lizzi, “Why don’t you try the ham?”

  “I don’t eat that.”

  “What? You Jewish?”

  “I don’t eat meat,” Lizzi proudly announced for all to hear as if they would deeply care and become instant converts to her vegetarian way of thinking. A few just looked at her as if she was a brat.

  “Not at all?” Aunt Jennifer asked.

  “It’s beyond gross!” Lizzi stabbed a garden fresh green bean which was nothing in consistency like a canned green bean. “Did you know that pigs are the animals closest to humans?”

  Aunt Jennifer asked, “What are you talking about?”

  “It’s like eating a cousin.”

  “It’s just a pig!”

  “I’m a humanitarian,” Michael blurted.

  “What?”

  “I eat humans!”

  “Oh, please.” Aunt Jennifer scowled.

  Michael curled back into himself and watched the rest of the meal detached from it as if it was on TV, to music from The Waltons. He was so glad Lizzi was here to help distract everyone away from him—since she was a ham.

  After the feasting, Michael ceremoniously dropped two watermelons for the children onto the front lawn. Wet pink crystals splashed across the thick green grass. Then he took Lizzi’s arm. “Let’s show you the un-peopled part of the farm. It’s a bit better.”

  “A tour?”

  “Yep.”

  “A sightsee?”

  “Sure.”

  “Cool! Maybe we’ll see a wild pheasant or a raccoon. Or a witchcraft ritual in the woods and our hearts will get cut out.”

  “I don’t know about that. We won’t go into the woods. And there isn’t much of a variety of critters left in these parts anyway… and certainly no raccoons by the light of day.”

  After he asked his dad what field the bull was presently in, to be sure to keep out of that one, they went to the bottom of a hill behind the barn, pushed open a lanky wood gate and entered a vast amber field. “I’m so glad to be away from those people.”

  “They seem nice enough. Dorks, but nice.”

  “Yep, nice! Like napalm on children.”

  Lizzi tickled his ribs until he smiled. “Forget them, then. It sure doesn’t look very green around here. Did they drop the bomb?”

  “Oh shut up that’s my line. Sometimes I think you’re my evil twin.” They hopped across the stones of the creek and went up a steep hill. At the top, Michael decided it would be too uncool to admit that this was once an Austrian mountain and he was a twirling singing nun here. He’d even put a scarecrow of a shoddy nun there once, until his dismayed Mom reminded him what scarecrows were really for and where they went. “There used to be goats in this pasture.”

  Lizzi marveled. “You can see so far. Not like in the city with everything always in the way. Look at how far away those trees are.” She pointed to a row of them that skirted the far side of the next field.

  “When the wind blows hard in the summer and when it’s really dry the wind sucks the topsoil right up into the air high into the stratosphere. This will all be desert someday from the erosion, but it makes the most incredible sunsets. The sun catches it blowing around up there and it looks just like a great MGM backdrop. Technicolor! I used to lie on my back near that pond, looking across the field at all those sunsets and hating them.”

  “How can you hate a pretty sunset?”

  Michael looked to the west. “Easy. Sunsets are so far away. You can’t do anything with them. Then within minutes they change and go away leaving you in the dark. A dreadful stupid dark. A dark that leaves you tripping over rocks and into wet cow pies. I wanted to be able to put that beauty in Mason Jars to take home and relish… like fireflies. You can’t touch a sunset. It’s just out there, lofty and high and mighty, doing its own thing… not caring whether you live or die, not feeling anything. I thought that was the ultimate.” Michael sang a part of the song from The Wiz, “Is this what feeeeling gets…a hope for haaaappy endings.”

  “What was that?”

  “How Diana Ross sings songs with high notes. Like she’s being strangled. It’s brilliant. It sounds so emotional. It sounds like she’s done for but then she keeps going on and on anyway. So inspiring. Always go on and on anyway…”

  A breeze picked up and Lizzi turned away to looked out towards the glossy ripples on a pond to see that it now reflected a splendid brigh
t cotton-ball cloud.

  * * * * *

  The next morning they followed Mom into the narthex hall just inside the church’s front door.

  Lizzi frowned and quietly asked Michael. “Are you sure this is a church?”

  “Of course it is. Why do you ask?”

  She looked beyond the narthex, up the isle, and at the altar. “It’s all so… so plain!”

  “It’s Protestant.”

  Lizzi asked, “What’s that mean?”

  “Don’t show emotion. Don’t show beauty. Just show up or you burn in hell.”

  Lizzi wrinkled up her nose. “I want statues everywhere. And things! Fancy things! Anything!”

  “That would get you burned at the stake!”

  She smirked. “Shhh!”

  He nodded toward the altar. “I see two candles up there. Count your blessings.”

  Mom beamed with intense pride as she paraded her family into the plain wood pews. Michael felt a sudden irrational agoraphobia and realized that if he was going to survive this he’d have to pretend to be somebody else. Although he’d soon be sitting as still as Snake Girl, she didn’t have a personality. He decided he had to be Diana Ross if he was to survive the hour. He smiled to himself, feeling great orange satin billows unfolding behind him in a long dress train, six wigs sewn together shooting off his head, a few tall explosions of sparks flanking the stage, and a million fans screaming at him, puffing him up. “Then I’ll be fine.”

  “Are you okay?” Lizzi asked. “You look stoned.”

  The service started with dirgy prayers and songs accompanied by a torpid organ that didn’t grandly blast but only sounded small and hollow. Michael didn’t sing, forgetting that he was a singer. He couldn’t find his breath and began to feel lightheaded and faint. When the congregation was allowed to sit for the sermon that was about “honoring your father and mother” he thought he’d be relieved but the pew felt too hard. He tried to settle in but started to feel the sensation of a heart attack. “When will this be over?” he whispered to Lizzi.

  “Shhh!”

  “If that organ groans out one more verse of that song I’m going to cry.”

  “Shhh!”

  “Pull out the stops! Play the damn thing!”

  She giggled.

  After the badly sung benediction, the congregation seemed worn down and in bad need of lunch. The service dismissed with blessings of good faith until next week’s spiritual recharge. Michael hurried to the narthex and waited for the clan so he could say his good-byes for himself and Lizzi.

  “But, Michael,” Mom complained sadly. “Aren’t you staying for lunch?” Her eyes began to tear manipulatively. “I just won’t feel like Mom unless I’ve had all my family together for lunch.”

  Michael wanted to say, “Having lunch is not having a personality” like Alex might have said. He grew sad.

  “I’m kind of way beyond starved,” Lizzi confessed.

  Michael gave her his dirtiest of looks. “We have to get back for an important band practice. We’re performing live soon.”

  “Yeah,” Lizzi agreed. “I’m screaming like they do in Chinese opera. It’s sooo way cool!”

  “We’ve got deer in the fridge,” Mom said.

  “Beer?” Michael perked up.

  “Deer!”

  “Oh. No thanks.”

  “Read your Bible,” Mom added sadly. “It says to honor your father and mother.”

  “I do. I did. That’s how I know when I’m depressed. I fixate on Ecclesiastes. I sit in ashes and listen to Siouxsie and the Banshees.”

  Mom looked puzzled. “What are you talking about?”

  “Gotta go!” He grabbed Lizzi’s arm.

  Mom frowned. Dad looked puzzled, also. He said, “I hope you can learn to be nicer to your mother.”

  Mom said to Lizzi, “And please get him to cut his hair. Somebody is going to mistake him for a woman and that will be terrible. I didn’t know hair could get that long on a man. Naturally it’s supposed to just stop at the shoulders, like on Jesus.”

  His brother chimed in. “Yeah, you look like Cher.”

  Michael tried his hardest not to make any expression at all. Ever since Cher posed with a black cat she was supposed to represent Satan worship.

  Mom said to Michael, “I probably won’t see you again until Christmas.” She repeated, “Honor your father and mother.”

  Michael and Lizzi jumped into the pale blue station wagon. With an embarrassing ka-chunk and rattle they drove down the gravel driveway off to the highway. “We sure left there in a hurry!” Lizzi admonished him. “It looked rude.” She looked back at the family. “That was rude to leave so soon like that. You could at least wait until they gave me jars of green beans. Those were good! Garden fresh is good! I can see where you get your looks, now, though. Your mom and dad are so pretty but they ruin it with such dorky hair and glasses. I don’t know why they’d want to look like that.”

  “And wasn’t the house a nightmare? Wasn’t it awful to be sleeping in that house all night? The dogs barking all night drove me insane. I needed wine. Being so sober in that house all night long left me feeling twelve years old.”

  She shrugged. “I slept.” She stopped watching out the back window. “Boy did they seem crabby somehow. Some people can make themselves smile nice and still look crabby. Does the Bible really say to honor your father and mother?”

  “Not like they advertise. They say it in a way so we kiss their rotten asses no matter what asses they’ve been to us.”

  “How else can it be interpreted?”

  He answered, “For a nomadic tribe, the commandment means ‘don’t leave your sick and old behind on the camel trail’. If you don’t abandon your elders when it’s their time to be too old or sick to keep up then your tribe won’t leave you behind when your time comes that you get too old. That’s where the promise comes in at the end. It’s the only commandment with a promise. ‘So you may live long on the earth’. If you take it the way they interpret it, it’s a promise always broken.”

  “Oh. How did you know that? What makes you so Bible smart?”

  “A book or two from the public library. Then one church can’t control your thoughts. Pastors tend to get stuck in what things can mean for their congregations nowadays while the better theologians seem more interested in what it probably meant for the people that lived way back then.”

  Lizzi said, “Funny. Lots of church people try to act so old fashioned.”

  Michael grimaced. “They just go back to the witch trials.”

  Chapter seven

  That Sunday night Lizzi sat in a booth under flashing carnival light bulbs at the roller rink and waited for Chuck to show up. “I’m insane.” She wondered if he’d take her to his car saying it was to show her all his fancy perfume but it was really to kidnap her and take her away to some Amish type farm where she’d join his eight other wives and six mothers. “Girls just wanna have fun. No fun there.”

  Chuck walked up to her booth. “Who you talking to?”

  “Myself.”

  “It makes you look crazier than you already look.”

  “As if I care how I look.”

  “Of course you do. Ready?”

  She looked him up and down as sardonically as she could. “As if.”

  “No. Really.”

  “For what?”

  He looked to the rink.

  “Is that, like, how you ask a girl to skate?”

  “That’s why you came, right? I said to come and you did. And what else is there to do here but skate? Unless you want me to buy you a snow cone or something first. Unless you want to come to my car and make out? That would be nice.”

  “And kidnap me and take me to some Amish farm?”

  “What the hell are you talking about? Are you a lesbian?”

  “No.”

  “Don’t you like to make out?”

  “Your moustache is gross.”

  “Have you ever kissed a man with a moustache?
”

  “No.”

  “Just boys, huh?”

  She looked away.

  “We won’t drive away to anywhere. We’ll just kiss in the parking lot where you can still feel safe. If the night air is cold for you I can wrap you up in one of my flags. I always keep all of my shop in my car.”

  “I don’t want to be wrapped up in a swastika, ever.”

  “I’d love to see you wrapped up in the American flag. You would look so wonderful that way.”

  Lizzi looked down at herself. “What’s wrong with the used clothing store look?”

  “It’s a bit eccentric. Sure. But I love flags. I sell them after all. It’d be a real turn on for me to make out with a girl wrapped up in the American flag. And we can kiss and then you can tell me what you think a moustache feels like on your skin.”

  “Get your eyeballs out of my lap.”

  He grinned. “A kiss on your face, of course. A nice American kiss on the lips. Not too much tongue. Nothing weird. Just kissing and kissing. And do me a favor. Wipe off that lipstick. I don’t want all that rubbing off on me so I end up looking like a drag queen.” He put his hand out as if he’d help her up out of the booth.

  “I didn’t say I’d go make out with you. Don’t be grodie.”

  He sat in the booth in the chair opposite her. “You’re a tough nut to crack.”

  “I’m to be cracked open?”

  “It’s an expression. Do you want to skate or kiss or what? We can talk if that’s what you want. We can stay here and talk. Sure.”

  Lizzi gave a nod. “Tell me. Why are you so old and not married? What’s wrong with you? Besides being a jerk… but most people are jerks. But I try not to be a jerk. So I don’t think we’d really get along. I think you need to find a woman who is more like you… a mean girl who likes to put other people down so she can feel better.”

  He shrugged. “Okay. So maybe we’ll never get married. I think you have me misunderstood. That doesn’t mean we still can’t kiss in my car. Have you even ever made out with a guy before? I bet you haven’t.”