Snake Girl VS the KKK

by Peter Joseph Swanson

  Michael picked up his pants and shook them hard. “Crap!”

  Burt smiled at Michael. “We burned all their cars down.”

  When Michael put his jeans back on he caught his foot in a hole and ripped them even more. “Good! I hope they all lived in Milldam and have to walk all the way home. I hope they cry! Look!” He pointed out his jeans. “Now my ass will hang out! Cool!” He started toward the station wagon.

  Burt went to his car. “Michael, I’ve got an extra pair of jeans here in the car you can wear. You can’t wear those anymore. They went from ridiculous to porno. You can look nice for a change.” He pulled out a box of clothes and dug into it. “Here.”

  * * * * *

  As they drove down the dark highway towards Milldam, Michael watched out the window in silence and finally grew uneasy enough to say, “This happened before to me. Alex and I was driving into town and the rednecks snuck ahead of us and were waiting for us… he was killed.”

  Annie Bea turned from the front seat to say, “Shut up.”

  Joanie chimed in, “Yeah. This is not the time and place to talk about my brother.”

  Michael shrugged. “Well it’s just a feeling. Of great doom.”

  Annie Bea asked him, “Are you psychic?”

  “No I don’t think so.”

  “Good. Then shut up about it!”

  Joanie look at him in the rear view mirror. “What happened to my brother won’t happen again. How can the same thing happen all over again?”

  Annie Bea said, “Let’s talk about food. I wonder what kind of food is waiting for us all back in town? Maybe we’ll just confuse them. They’ll be waiting for us at the pass and we’ll all be laughing it up at the donut shop! Yes, let’s pause at the donut shop and confuse them!”

  Michael looked out the back window. “Well, we just passed Armory Road and I don’t see anybody scary.”

  Joanie said, “My gas tank is low. That’s scary.” At the edge of town they stopped to fill up at a Shell station. Then they were off again. One block down the road they heard a loud siren and were lit up by red twirling lights. A cop car stopped them. Joanie said, “Fuck me! Now we’re really dead.”

  The officer got out of his car and walked to them and as he asked for Joanie’s license, Annie Bea jumped out of the car in a huff. The cop said, “Get back in the car, lady.”

  Annie Bea said, “You have no right to stop us. Why? Why?”

  He looked at her as if she was garbage. “Get back in the car, lady.”

  “I work for the newspaper.”

  “Oh?”

  Annie Bea insisted, “Why are you stopping us?”

  He asked, “Why are you out right now? Where have you come from? We have reports of some trouble… some serious property damage. Cars were burned… and a trailer home. Just checking everything out.”

  Annie Bea took a deep breath. “Tonight? In this town? Now? We’re just driving around looking for some place that’s open. I need a little snack before I go to bed. I’m fucking hungry!”

  He restated, flatly, “You were just driving around. We may need to talk about this at the station.”

  Annie Bea slammed her hand on the top of the car. “Hey! Officer Ray! I know who you are! I work for the paper and I got a file on you!”

  “What? What file.”

  “A file of Halloween party pictures. I came across this hilarious file in my desk when I took it over.”

  He looked shocked. “Last Halloween? Nobody took my picture. I made sure of that.”

  She smirked. “Maybe until you got too drunk to see straight. And they were taking pictures of the gorilla suit, anyway. The file is called ‘Halloween Gorilla’ and it’s all gorilla, except for the ones that caught you in there, too. You look so cute in that little pink dress.”

  He turned red. “It was Halloween. You can’t do anything about that. Everybody dresses up crazy. I was off duty and it’s my business. As you say… it’s a free country.”

  “Bride of the Gorilla.”

  “What?”

  “That would make a cute headline, don’t you think?”

  His jaw tightened. His fingertips nervously brushed the handle of his gun. “Are you trying to blackmail me?”

  She shook her head. “Nope, just running some ideas for articles by you. Wouldn’t your friends love to see you in a pink dress? They might think that’s why you got your divorce. You know how people talk.”

  “They wouldn’t care. They would know it was just for Halloween.”

  “Oh sure. Uh huh.” She winked at him. “You looked so cute. Such long legs. For pink I’m sure I could get the picture printed in color. Have you noticed that my article usually gets the pictures printed in color? And the pictures are huge.”

  “I don’t respond well to blackmail.”

  Annie Bea acted as if she hadn’t heard him. “I tell you what the deal is. We all don’t go to the station with you since there’s no good reason to and it postpones my trip to the donut shop. You leave us alone tonight. And if no cops bother us from here on out about some property damage you say was done tonight, somewhere, because we didn’t do it, then my Bride of the Gorilla headline never sees the light of day.”

  “You all have something to hide about tonight?”

  Annie Bea became angry. “We don’t do property damage! We are donut hunting! Got it? You know that so let’s just call it a night. Let’s call it a night. And from here on out leave us all alone and you don’t get to be a bride of the gorilla.”

  He angrily stomped away, got in his car, and squealed away so recklessly he almost sideswiped the streetlight pole.

  Annie Bea turned to Michael and Joanie, victoriously. “I guess that means I don’t get to do my Bride of the Gorilla article. Alas.”

  Michael was shaken. “God, woman-on-warpath, how did you manage that?”

  “It was easier than I thought. After you’ve put up with my husband you’ll realized this was a piece of cake. A big piece of cake. Devil’s food cake. Cake donut. And don’t mess with my midnight snack! Let’s go to the donut shop, I’m soooo hungry for a nice chocolate cake donut right now. They’ll be open.”

  Chapter fifteen

  When Joanie and Michael got to her apartment building, Michael said, “I am so stuffed with donuts!”

  Joanie pushed him. “I can hardly walk. What a night. What a night for my brother. We avenged his murder, I think!”

  “His life is worth more than a bunch of cars. We should have killed them all.”

  Joan moaned. “We did what we could.”

  Before they got up the stairs, a tow truck pulled up. Chuck hopped out of it and ran to her, soaked in mud, squinting in pain. “I’ve been burned! God my face hurts so bad! I feel like my eyelids are gonna fall off!” He held his red hands out to her. “My car’s been burned, too! I need your burn plant!” He lacked eyebrows and lashes. His moustache was frazzled stubble and his mullet haircut had no bangs.

  Joanie asked, “Burn plant?”

  “The aloe!”

  Michael said in a fearsome German accent, “If you’re burned then go to hospital, dumkopft!”

  “I don’t have a doctor. I can’t afford to go to the hospital for something like this. They can’t take back a burn. Oh, fuck! My car! My perfume bottles! The alcohol just exploded like you wouldn’t believe! And I had all my flags in there. All gone! My car and all my business up in flames! I couldn’t save any of it. I tried. And evil people did it! Evil people out in the woods! They torched all our cars and trucks! Those woods are crawling with sick pervert devil worshipers with fire shooting from their fingers! Those woods should all be burned to the ground so they have nowhere to hide like that!”

  Michael asked, “What were you doing out in the woods? Trying to sell perfume to who?”

  Chuck said, “We tried to give them God’s punishment but the devil got us!”

  Joanie asked, “Were you insured for any of that?”

  “No, I couldn’t afford any of that
kind of thing! Just let me use some of your aloe leaves. I promise I won’t use the whole plant. I hurt so bad!”

  Michael said, “One leaf should do you for today. I’ll bring the healing salve. You take a shower now to wash off that mud. And I’ll say a prayer to heal you. In German. German prayers work best. Leave the door open and I bring the medicine to your shower.”

  Chuck nodded. “Yes! German is best!”

  “Go to your apartment and I will bring it to you there. Go.” Chuck went. Michael sang, “There is a Balm in Gilead,” all warbly like Mahalia Jackson did from one of his long lost records. As he looked through Joanie’s fridge he found a bottle of Tabasco sauce. He doused an aloe leaf with it. “To make the wounded whole.” He smiled to Joanie, and spoke, “Alex’s plant, Alex’s revenge.”

  She said, “I don’t think he killed Alan.”

  “He was out trying to maybe kill me.”

  “But he didn’t.”

  Michael said, “If I’m going to always be such a jerk then why not be a jerk to a far worse jerk?”

  Joanie asked, “Is that Karma?”

  “I’m not sure.”

  He went to Chuck’s apartment and found him shivering in the shower. Chuck stepped out of the shower and fumbled painfully with his towel, as he said to Michael, “Since you’re a man of God, I have to tell you about the evil in the woods! Hundreds of devil worshipers were crying out for gay butt sex! It must be the end times! I’ve never heard of such evil! I heard them crying for it in the dark! It was sooo evil! Oh god, there’s faggots out there!”

  Michael wanted to ask him why he smelled like booze, instead he asked, “What were you doing in the woods?”

  “Trying to stop the devil worshipers!”

  “With baseball bats?”

  Chuck was startled. “How did you know about that? How would you know about something like that? You weren’t there. Were you? I thought I knew who all the sheets were.” He smiled for a second. “You’re one of us!”

  Michael leaned forward. “The Holy Spirit whispered it in my ear, maybe.”

  “Oh Sure. We had to protect ourselves. You always have to have protection when you try to save such sinners as those.”

  “By breaking their skulls?”

  “And their legs! And crack their nuts so hard they never sin again! Always strike first or else they’ve got you.” He rubbed the towel at his own genitals. “The devil is fuckin’ scary! Now you must warn everybody! You have to go to all the congregations you can and warn them that the Satanists from the woods will come out after they’ve insulted all of creation with their unspeakable acts! And they’ll burn down all that the good Christian has built up. Our homes and cars and livelihoods will all be burned down! They’ll burn it all down like they did my car and business! It’s the end times and if the devil takes over like this and burns all our things then how can we be ready for God’s return? Warn everybody! It’s true! There is true evil in the woods right near our homes and we must destroy them before they destroy us! Tell them they have burned our cars, businesses and homes.”

  “Didn’t you burn their home?”

  “Yeah, we burned that den of sin! It’s okay to burn them, they’re going to burn in hell. I wish I could’ve cracked at least one of them with my bat to break some bones but they all got away, like bats.”

  Michael smiled. “Here. And may God give you what you deserve.”

  Chuck took the aloe and rubbed the hot sauce mixed with gel on his burnt hands, arms and face. Then he was stunned by new pain. Then he frantically hopped up and down gasping for breath. Then he screamed bloody murder. Then he slipped on the wet floor and fell. Michael put his hands together in prayer under his chin, then left.

  * * * * *

  The next day, Michael entered the Baptist church. There were stunned gasps all around.

  His brother stood up, looking horrified. “What is wrong with you! You’re a black woman!”

  Michael nodded to agree. “Well, if everybody here already thinks that I’m gay then they might as well just know. I’m so much more than gay. I’m super gay. I’m so gay that I’m Diana Ross!”

  He stomped up to the front of the church, swished his grand long skirt around that was made from an orange parachute, and regarded the two matching gray coffins. “And a bull did not kill these two silly white people. God did. God makes everything happen. Like God is now making this happen. So I can tell you all right here and now that you’re all not fabulous at all!”

  The preacher said, “You’re drunk!”

  “Everybody knows Miss Ross don’t drink! This sass is all natural, hun!” He puckered. He left his Jungle Red lipstick marks on the top of each coffin. “There, now. That’ll nummy you up a bit until you get to where you can push up some daisies. You never kissed me but now I sure kissed you. Oh, and Dad,” Michael patted the coffin as he spoke to it, “your nice family car burned up. You gave it to bro and in only a week’s time he’s already ruined it. You took such good care of it and now it’s just a burnt out shell.”

  His brother gasped. “How did you know that?”

  Michael winked knowingly at his brother, turned on his high heel and walked back out the door, got into the waiting Cadillac. James squealed the tires and drove away as the song “I’m Coming Out” blasted from the stereo.

  James asked, “Now you have to tell me what the hell you were doing in a church dressed like that. I’ll go crazy if you don’t explain yourself.”

  “I didn’t want them to look at me anymore and think of pork and beans spilled on the floor. I gave them a new image of me… something a bit more accurate.”

  “What?”

  “At a potluck once somebody spilled pork and beans on the floor and they all joked about how that’s what I would look like in hell. Well I’ve distracted them all a bit from that image, now, haven’t I?”

  “There’s a potluck in there now?”

  “Omigod! If there’s any potato salad back there you have to turn around!”

  James didn’t. “What were you doing back there?”

  Michael threw his arms dramatically into the air. “You fool, haven’t you heard of drag queen bingo?”

  “I have. But I don’t think that’s what you were doing in that church.”

  “Oh. Is that why I didn’t stay long?”

  “Serious. What was going on in there?”

  “I was being rude. Again. Alas. Michael being rude. It was a funeral. My parents. They were killed in a farm accident.”

  “You don’t make sense. You just went to a funeral like that?”

  “I told you. That’s why I’m here out in the middle of nowhere. To deal with all that crap. And I thought it would drive me insane. It almost did. But I’m better now.”

  “I thought doing blackface was illegal.”

  “That’s what the lady who gave me the makeup said. Who cares. Until they repeal the sodomy laws I have so much more to worry about. And how come it’s so terrible to dress up like a black person but it’s cool to dress up like an Indian? How come Cher didn’t start riots when she did that? I think I’m just going to be whoever I want to be for myself and if anybody else doesn’t like it they just go jump in a lake.”

  James rubbed his ear. “But… you said you were visiting friends and mushroom hunting. That’s what you told Burt. That’s what he told me you said.”

  “I told him what I wanted because I didn’t want him getting all worked up about it. He’d want to do a special funeral ritual just for me… a witchcraft Druid funeral thing. I decided ritual like that should only involve my friends, not my parents… so I did things in my own way.”

  “You’re crazy. You’re really crazy. Well I’m sorry about your parents.”

  “I didn’t like them very much but I didn’t want them to be dead, either. So it all really confuses me. I don’t know how to feel about them. But now I know how I feel about me!”

  When they drove to the crossroads, James slowed the car and asked, Where to?�
��

  “To Joanie’s to change and pick up my things. Then to Saint Louis.”

  “I can’t drive you all the way to Saint Louis!”

  “Why not? You said you’re taking some time off to find yourself. There is no such thing … there’s only party while you’re still young enough, to make fun memories. You can party for a while with me in the big city. I know lots of fun places and we can finally have sex and be boyfriends, too. We’ll run with that for as long as it’ll take us! Maybe it’ll take us a long way. Maybe fifty years will go by.”

  “It’s a deal.”

  While zooming down the highway they sang old summer camp songs.

  The end