Sam McCain - 04 - Save the Last Dance for Me (2 page)

Kylie and I glanced at each other and nodded, and he widened the doorway by standing aside for us.

Right inside the door we saw the snakes.

A small, wood-framed cage of them sat on a table with a large crude painting of Christ that was as spooky as the snakes. He had the demonic visage normally associated with Satan. On the left side of the table was a stack of pamphlets with a headline reading: The Jews Behind John F. Kennedy. You could pretty much guess what that one was all about. The pamphlets were well printed on a

semi-glossy stock. I wondered where Muldaur had gotten the money for them.

There were no pews, just wobbly folding chairs; no decorations but an elevated platform holding a lectern, and four more folding chairs, pushed back against the wall. You could still smell gasoline and car oil all these years later, though all the hydraulic lifts had been taken out and the work pits filled in with concrete.

“Say hello to some new friends!” John Muldaur shouted into the microphone. He’d been singing in a sturdy baritone. He kept grabbing a bottle of Pepsi, gripping it hard as if it was slipping, and guzzling it down between lyrics.

When they turned around and looked at us, the twenty or so people filling the folding chairs, I saw faces that were almost cartoons of joy and grief and fear and hope as they sang out, immigrant faces scrubbed clean for

churchgoing, unlovely faces for the most part, mountain people of the deep South who’d trekked up to the Midwest several generations ago but had never fundamentally changed, a problem for cops, social workers, doctors, clerics, and neighbors. Some of these people still clung to the precepts of “granny medicine,” where you cure lockjaw by crushing a cockroach in a cup of boiling water and drinking it down, and staunch the bleeding of a wound by rubbing chewing tobacco on it.

You can’t estimate the effects of poverty on generation after generation of people, that sadness and despair and madness that so quietly but irrevocably shapes their thoughts and taints their souls.

The Muldaurs lived off by themselves, a good half-mile from the others, who lived in trailers and shacks in an area called The Corners and mostly worked for large tenant farms. Ten, twelve families that crossbred with alarming regularity. The women mostly wore faded housedresses, their hair beribboned for church.

The men mostly wore threadbare white shirts with the sleeves rolled up. A couple of them bore dark neckties. There were six or seven very young children who wore shorts and shirts because of the eighty-degree heat. There was a certain apprehension in the eyes of the young ones. They had not yet been fortified with the certainty of their elders-that those who did not practice the ways of their faith would perish in hell, and that all strangers meant you harm. Especially, according to the pamphlets Muldaur had been circulating in town, the Jews and Catholics all huddled behind Jack Kennedy in this fall’s election. And of course it was the diabolical Jews stirring up all the trouble down South with the “coloreds.”

Naturally, I had mixed feelings about these people.

About the only good thing I could say for their religion was that they didn’t wear hats of any kind. I’ve often wondered if God wears a fedora. I mean, have you ever noticed that about religions, their thing for hats? But the rattlesnakes kind of balanced things back in the other direction. The priests and monsignors I grew up with all wore various liturgical hats, caps, and beanies, but one thing you could say in their favor was that they never brought any rattlesnakes to mass, God love ‘em. If they had any rattlesnakes, they kept them in the privacy of the rectory and didn’t tell

us about it.

But then there was the sadness of these people. Not even Steinbeck had gotten to it. The Okies were just displaced farmers who wanted to work and prosper. I never read anything about Okies and rattlers.

Dreiser kinda got to these people, I guess. That opening scene of An American Tragedy where the family is there on that twilight street corner. I could see these people on that same corner, snakes and all. They were the lost ones and didn’t even know it. Few of them would have indoor plumbing; some of them wouldn’t even have electricity. A good number of them would die young because they didn’t see doctors. And they would spend too much of their time fearing a Jesus who was a parody of the man or god who lived not quite 2eajjj years ago. In their version, He despised them and they were appreciative of that fact. It gave some explanation, I suppose, for their smashed and shabby lives.

The singing continued even though John Muldaur set down his microphone and suddenly walked down the aisle between the folding chairs. By this time, his entire upper body glistened with sweat and he was muttering some kind of prayer to himself in the sort of hypnotic fashion people speaking in tongues get into.

No doubt about where he was going, what he was doing.

He swooped up the two cages of snakes and transported them back to the makeshift altar.

The air changed. Not just because of the hissing and the rattling. Because of the excitement. I’d never been to an orgy before but I was sure at one now.

Kylie nudged me. Whispered, “This is scary.”

I knew what she meant. There was a sense of violence in the orgiastic response to the snakes. Women moaned in sexual ways; men stared as if transfixed. The children looked confused but excited and afraid, their tiny faces darting up to survey the faces of their parents, wanting some sort of verbal explanation.

Muldaur reached out his hands. His wife, Viola, took his left one; his teenage daughter, Ella, his right. Both were buxom, frizzy-haired, and aggrieved-looking. They looked as troubled and angry as the rattlesnakes. All three Muldaurs

raised their locked hands and said a brief

prayer. “That I am pure of soul, I have no doubt, my Lord. Bless me in my purity, Father.

Bless me.”

Muldaur dropped the women’s hands and turned to the snakes once again. A collective emotional upheaval rumbled through the church. The big moment was approaching. The electric guitar played quick, exotic, crazed, off-key rifts.

Moans; shouts; cries. The snakes were coming.

Orgasm.

My body spasmed when he reached into the cage and brought forth snake number one. Now slow down and think about this: You have a small cage containing four or five poisonous snakes, all right?

So what do you do? You just plunge your hand in the open lid up top and grab one of the buggers?

Aren’t you risking being attacked by one if not more of the snakes in the cage?

But if he was afraid—or even hesitant-he sure didn’t show it.

“God has sent us the serpent to reveal our true nature,” Muldaur said. Or intoned, I guess. The rattler had brought out his intoning side. “Who wants his soul judged by the serpent?”

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.

“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.