by Tamar Myers
Of course, no one even thinks about locking their car doors. Why should they? I trotted down Cheryl’s walk with zero concern for my safety. Instead, I congratulated myself for having gotten the last word. When I plopped my pitiful patooty down on the driver’s seat of my car, it was with a sigh of relief. But a nanosecond later I screamed so loudly that I put Bob Neubrander’s cows off milking, and he lives two counties over.
Something beneath my bony bottom was moving. I was wearing a heavy gabardine skirt, and a cotton broadcloth slip, plus my sturdy Christian underwear, mind you, and I could still feel movement – vigorous movement, in fact – under my derriere. One might be surprised as to what goes on in the mind of one Magdalena Portulacca Yoder Rosen at a time like that. Or maybe not.
My third grade Sunday school teacher, Miss Esch, related the time she awoke to the sound of breathing under her bed. Somehow, she knew that it was the Devil. Well, Miss Esch was a spiritual warrior. After a fervent prayer, she reached under the bed, grabbed old Lucifer, and flung him across the room. She told our terrified class of mini-believers that the Devil had felt for all the world like a rubber mat.
‘What sort of rubber mat?’ I’d asked. The question earned me a whack with Miss Esch’s yardstick, but it was worth knowing the answer.
‘The kind of rubber mat one puts in the bottom of the bathtub so as not to slip. Exactly like that.’
‘He even had suction cups?’ Billy Wharton asked. That earned Billy two whacks, the second of which broke the yardstick. There was only a month to go until the end of the term, and so Miss Esch didn’t bother to replace the broken stick.
Anyway, you can bet your bippy that the Devil was the first explanation I thought of for my undulating underparts. After all, I was raised to believe what I was taught, and to take the Bible literally, like every good Christian should. Never mind the many apparent contradictions in it, for they will be explained to us when we get to Heaven. Miss Esch’s encounter with the Devil made an enormous impression on my young psyche, one which I never really outgrew. The reason is that for me, and many conservative Christians like me, the Devil is a real, and sometimes physical, presence is this world.
‘Get behind me, Satan!’ I cried.
Of course that didn’t do any good. Satan wasn’t behind me; Satan was squirming beneath my bony bottom.
‘Get from beneath me, Satan!’ I screamed.
It felt like the Devil was not in the least bit affected by my fervent prayer. Perhaps I was meant to reach beneath my buttocks, grab Satan by the horns, so to speak, and fling him into the rear seat. The problem with that scenario is that I am not the spiritual warrior that dear Miss Esch was – may she rest in peace. Instead, as casually as I could, I opened the car door, jumped out and hightailed it three houses down the street to my best friend Agnes’s house.
Now, Agnes may not be a Conservative Mennonite, but she is a good Christian, and even she believes that the Devil can be a shape-shifter (as Gabe calls him in jest). I didn’t even knock; I just burst into her house and headed straight for her kitchen where there was a ninety-nine percent chance of finding her while she was awake at home.
Sure enough, my bestie was sitting at her dinette table, eating a bowl of cereal and watching a popular talk show on TV. I recognized the program immediately as the one on which four, or maybe five, ladies interrupt each other for an hour. Sometimes they discuss topics that are so filthy, that I’m tempted to hop on a bus to New York and wash their mouths out with soap.
‘Agnes! The Prince of Darkness hath assailed me,’ I wailed.
‘That’s nice,’ she said, without glancing away from her boob tube. ‘You can tell me about that book when this is over.’
‘It’s not a book,’ I wailed. ‘It’s Lucifer – the fallen angel.’
‘Shh, Mags, please! Darn, now you made me miss the name of the woman who claims to have slept with the vice pres—’
‘I sat on Satan!’ I shrieked. ‘Satan, I tell.’
‘What in the blue blazes?’
‘The Devil, Agnes, and I’m not making this up. I got into my car and plopped my patooty right on top of the Devil himself.’
‘No way!’
‘Way! Of course, first I prayed for Satan to go away, but he didn’t. Agnes, remember Miss Esch back in third grade Sunday school? Well, I wasn’t brave enough to yank the Devil out from beneath my buttocks, so I ran like a coward. That’s why I’m here. Oh, Agnes, I’m not a spiritual warrior – I’m just a coward and a failure.’
I don’t have a single drop of British blood running through my veins. The only stiff upper lip I’ve ever had was the result of a bee sting. That said, I turned my back to my friend so that she couldn’t see the tear that I felt rolling down my left cheek. I am not one given to hyperbole, but it is only a slight exaggeration to say that when I again beheld Agnes’s face, each of her eyes was as large, and round, as a child’s backyard wading pool.
‘M-m-mags,’ she stuttered. ‘You didn’t sit on Satan.’
‘Are you calling me a liar? You’re supposed to be my best friend, for heaven’s sake! I did so sit on Satan, and I can still feel him twitching about my hind parts.’
‘N-no,’ Agnes protested, ‘I’m not calling you a liar. Now, just keep calm.’
‘And what? Carry on?’
From the way Agnes giggled, I could tell she was extremely nervous. ‘Good one, Mags, but you’re far too restrained to ever pass for British.’
‘Sarcasm does not become you, dear. What in a buttercream-filled, triple-layered Genoese sponge cake is going on? I demand to know immediately!’
‘OK, I’ll tell you,’ my best friend said, ‘but first you have to promise – on a stack of genuine English muffins – to not freak out. If you break your promise, I’m going to tell your Reverend Diffledorf that you said his sermons were so dull that, if you could get away with it, you would pay someone to poke you with something sharp to keep you from falling asleep.’
‘Why, I never!’ I said indignantly.
‘Now you are lying,’ Agnes said.
‘OK,’ I said. ‘I promise not to freak out.’
‘You sat on a garter snake,’ Agnes said.
‘I what?’
‘Relax,’ she said. ‘They’re harmless garden variety snakes. We’re both country gals. We’ve run into them oodles of times while weeding our vegetable gardens. Besides, this is just a little fellow.’
How was I supposed to relax? Didn’t Satan appear to Adam and Eve in the guise of a serpent in the Garden of Eden? Also, the Bible didn’t specify which species of snake, so Satan could have been a garter snake. But then an even more important question occurred to me.
‘Agnes! How do you know I sat on a snake?’
By then Agnes was up on her undersized feet and had grabbed my massive mitts in her pudgy little hands. She is deceptively strong. If I was a betting woman, I’d wager that she could milk a steel cow.
‘This is when the keeping calm part is really important,’ she whispered. ‘At the count of three, I’m going to tell you something very upsetting, and then I’m going to give you a solution to the problem. Do you understand? Nod slowly if you do.’
I nodded.
‘Good. Mags, the reason I know that you sat on a little garter snake is that it is still clinging to the back of your skirt. Apparently you sat down so fast that you didn’t see it, and the snake didn’t have time to properly strike. Its fangs appear to be embedded in that wide elastic waistband of your denim skirt. That’s what you feel whipping around your thighs, not Satan.’
My knees felt like wet noodles – well, I can only imagine that they did, having never actually had pasta for legs. The only thing that kept me erect was the thought that if I fainted, or sank to my knees, the snake would be closer to my head and face. Who cared if it was supposedly just a garden snake? Anyway that was just Agnes’s assessment. She once mistook her neighbour’s stallion for a mare, and trust me, even a city girl can tell the difference betwe
en those two animals. In any case, how in tarnation was I supposed to rid myself of the reptile? I certainly wasn’t going to reach behind me and grab it. Perhaps my bestie would.
‘If it’s only a harmless garter snake,’ I said weakly, ‘then be a doll and remove the poor thing.’
‘First I’m calling Toy,’ Agnes said, and clutching her cell phone scampered from the room on her elfin feet. It is plum amazing how fast a woman her shape can move when properly motivated. Given my excessive height, I would be flat on my back from wind resistance if I attempted to accelerate like that.
Frankly, I was surprised when she returned just a minute or two later. ‘It’s going to sound preposterous, but Toy said it could work, so we have to trust him. OK?’
‘OK, what?’ I demanded. ‘I don’t know what it is?’
‘You’ll see soon enough. Just try to stand absolutely still in the meantime.’
‘Do I have to? I was thinking of going into Bedford to do a little shopping. You know, buy a snakeskin purse, and a pair of snakeskin shoes, to go with my snakeskin tail.’
But Agnes hadn’t heard a word of my brave banter. She was too busy tossing frozen food items from her freezer into a humongous ice chest. It both astounded and surprised me to see that almost everything that my friend was tossing into her cooler was a single portion frozen dinner. Truly, there, but for the grace of God went I. Agnes had a much more pleasing personality than I did, and when it came to dancing the headboard-hora, what man wouldn’t prefer the well-upholstered woman to a bag of bones? Finally, after several weeks’ worth of single portion frozen meals (of the weight conscious sort), had been dumped into her giant ice chest, Agnes called to me.
‘Now, walk here slowly,’ she said.
I did as she directed.
‘Now sit in the ice chest. And do it quickly.’
‘What?’
‘Toy said that the cold will inactivate your cute little buddie. To quote Toy, “By the time I get there that fella will be right sluggish.” So now sit.’
‘I don’t want to sit on your frozen dinners,’ I wailed. ‘Can’t I just pass gas instead? That’s been known to clear a room.’
Without further ado, Agnes punched me in the solar plexus, and when I was hunched over, gasping for air, she pushed me down into her wallopalooza of an ice chest. Although I landed hard, the snake not only survived me falling on top of it, but it started squirming immediately.
‘How long does it take for this thing to settle down?’ I whispered hoarsely. If there was any chance that my ‘cute little buddie’, as Toy put it, was going to nod off in a cold-induced slumberland, I wasn’t about to disturb him.
Agnes shrugged. ‘How should I know? I’m not a herpetologist. But while we’re waiting for Police Chief Toy to show up, why don’t we two girlfriends make idle chit-chat. Let’s talk about stuff that has nothing to do with today and the weeks leading up to it. I’ll go first, if you want.’
‘Sure,’ I said, ‘but keep your voice down.’
Agnes giggled. ‘Well, you’re never going to believe this, but I joined an internet dating site for singles called Bodaciously Buxom Broads with Curves.’
‘You didn’t!’
‘Now you go,’ she said beaming happily.
‘Mine is horrible news – but then again, aren’t all my news flashes awful?’
My dear, loyal friend shook her head. ‘In May you drove all the way down here to show me the new toenail that was growing back in after you dropped a log on your foot last winter.’
‘Well, how about that! I can be a basket of cheer, after all.’
So my bestie and I gabbed. Rather, I pumped her for details on the men who’d responded to her profile on that ridiculous dating website. I thought the idea of an innocent Mennonite woman like Agnes labelling herself a ‘bodaciously buxom broad’ was incredibly foolish. The poor dear had all the worldly acumen of a poached egg. Even a man in a medically induced coma could take advantage of my gal pal.
At least all my stewing over my friend’s innocence and vulnerability took my mind off the reptile beneath me. Or could it possibly be that, true to Toy’s prediction, the snake had been rendered inactive by Agnes’s frozen dinners? Had lemon grass chicken really done the trick? After all, snakes were cold-blooded creatures, and their body temperatures reflect their environments.
Agnes read my mind. ‘It’s stopped squirming, hasn’t it?’
‘Yes,’ I said. ‘At least I’m pretty sure that it has. On the other hand, my bottom is frozen. Be a dear and reach under me; see if you can feel any movement.’
Agnes recoiled like a snake preparing to strike. ‘Are you nuts?’
Just then Toy burst through the side kitchen door. ‘Hey, ladies. How’re you doing, Magdalena?’
‘I’m fine as frog’s hair,’ I replied, using one of Toy’s Southernisms. ‘However, I think that my backside might have gone into hibernation.’
‘Good,’ Toy said. ‘That means our little fellow has as well.’
‘Agnes, where do you keep your oven mitts?’
After he’d donned a pair of red-and-white checked oven mitts, and propped open the kitchen door, Toy exhaled deeply. Then he turned to me.
‘OK, at the count of three, I’m going to hoist you out of there by your armpits. Then I’m going to yank that critter off your skirt and toss him out the door. Agnes, your job is to slam the door shut after him. You both got that?’
‘Aw, that’s so cute,’ I said. ‘You called that snake a “him” and not an “it” like we did.’
‘I’m all kinds of polite,’ Toy said. ‘Now, here we go. One. Two. Three.’
It was that fast. He had me on my feet, snake free, and the critter out the door, all in the same amount of time that it takes Toy to pronounce his own three letter name.
Agnes clapped. ‘That was awesome!’
‘Oh, Toy,’ I said. ‘Thank you, thank you! But if it was just a harmless little garter snake, weren’t you a bit rough on him?’
Toy and Agnes exchanged glances. ‘Do you want to tell her, or should I?’ Toy said.
‘Mags,’ Agnes said, ‘it wasn’t a harmless little garter snake. It was a medium size Eastern Diamond-Back Rattlesnake. It’s a good thing that you were wearing your thick denim skirt. When I saw the rattles—’
But I didn’t hear the rest of her sentence just then because I fainted dead away into Toy’s strong, young arms.
EIGHTEEN
I came to my senses in Toy’s strong young arms just seconds later, but of course I didn’t let on right away. I’m only half as stupid as I look, if I do say so myself. Toy was born to be a hero and raised to be a gentleman. He scooped me off my feet and carried me into Agnes’s living room (I made sure that my head was resting against his shoulder), where he laid me gently on her sofa. Then he patted me ever softly on my cheeks with hands that were both manly, and well-manicured.
‘Magdalena,’ he practically cooed, ‘Magdalena, are you in there?’
‘Of course she’s in there,’ Agnes said. ‘Maybe she really did faint, but she’s faking it now. You can always tell by her breath.’
‘Her breath?’
‘Yeah. When she pretends to be asleep, or unconscious – which happens more than you think – her breath smells like rotten pumpkins.’
‘It does not,’ I said, and sat up so quickly that I bumped heads with poor Chief Toy.
‘You see,’ Agnes chortled. ‘I told you she was faking.’
‘I was not.’
Toy’s blue eyes twinkled as he rubbed his forehead. ‘Actually, I can detect the faint odour of last year’s jack-o-lantern.’
‘Very funny. But seriously, am I remembering correctly – before I fainted dead away – that the snake was a rattler?’
‘That’s right,’ Toy said. ‘A rather large one at that. Nice and fat. Agnes here is quite a brave little trooper, a real hero in my book. She needs to be given some sort of award. I don’t know of any other woman who would have remained
as calm and collected under those circumstances as she did. Why, when she called me—’
‘What about me?’ I said.
‘You fainted,’ Agnes said. ‘Dead away. And you were so terrified from just hearing the word “rattlesnake” that you remained passed out until after Toy carried you in from the kitchen.’
‘Well, the snake was attached to my waistband. I ought to get some credit for that.’
‘Ladies,’ Toy said gently, ‘I do believe that we have lost sight of what’s most important here.’
‘That I saved her life?’ Agnes said.
‘That I ruined her TV dinners?’ I said, and then slapped my mouth. ‘Oops, that just slipped out. I’m sorry, Agnes.’
Agnes smiled. ‘Did the Devil make you say that?’
I smiled back. ‘No, those particular thoughts I’m keeping to myself.’
Toy cleared his throat loudly. ‘Ahem. We’ve lost sight of the fact that even the most intelligent rattlesnake is incapable of opening and closing a car door. Therefore, one can safely surmise that the snake in question was placed in Magdalena’s car by someone who wished to do her harm.
‘Also, I think that it’s possible there could be a link to the snake and the three previous acts of vandalism within the last twelve hours. It’s pretty clear to me that someone, or some party of persons, was not happy with Hernia’s Fourth Annual Billy Goat Gruff Festival.’
‘What about the bodies found in my cousin Sam’s dumpster?’ I said. ‘Do you think that there’s a connection there?’
Toy cocked his head. ‘Maybe. But why start off by playing your highest trump card first?’
‘What?’ I said.
‘Card games, at least the ones in which the cards have faces, are against her faith,’ Agnes said.
I felt my cheeks colour. ‘He already knows that, dear.’
‘Yes, of course. What I meant was that if someone simply wanted to ruin this festival, all they had to do was start off with the release of the sewage into Main Street. Killing two tourists was totally unnecessary. The only person affected by it, and then indirectly, was you.’
