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.
Two
“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.
Jamie also can’t answer the phone
(“Uh, hello?”), type (my name usually gets typed as “Mcc-ain”; or, on especially bad days, “Mr. C”), buy office supplies (“I just thought pink typing paper would kinda brighten things up”), or resist the call of romance (her boyfriend, Turk, usually calls here four times per her two-hour after-school sessions), or keep her bathroom visits brief (“I guess I’ve just got a weak liver”).
How, you may ponder, did such an unpolished gem come to reside in my cramped little office, itself stuck in the back of a large building that keeps changing businesses?
Small-city lawyers are like small-city bankers. We get paid in a variety of ways.
I once got a side of beef for handling a divorce; and a used Tv, which I still watch at home, for a traffic case.
I got Jamie from her father, Lloyd, who couldn’t afford to pay me for an insurance case I handled for him. In exchange, he said, I’d get his daughter for an unspecified time as my secretary. I’d tried to give her back many times but so far had had no luck. “Nobody deserves her more than you do, Sam,” Lloyd always says when I tell him I can’t possibly continue to accept his largesse. Lately, I’ve begun to wonder exactly how he means.
This was two days before my appearance at John Muldaur’s church.
Jamie said, “He’s the snake guy.
Turk’n some of his friends snuck in there one night.
Turk says he heard some of them can turn themselves into snakes, like that girl in that movie at the drive-in a couple of summers ago? Did you ever see that one?”
“I think so.”
“I just don’t know how you could shrink yourself down into a snake.”
One of the questions Aristotle no doubt asked himself many times.
“I wonder what he wants, Mr. C.”
Came a knock.
“I guess we’re about to find out.”
She looked spooked. “God, Mr. C,
I just thought of something.” Stage-whisper.
“What?”
“What if he brought a snake with him?”
“He doesn’t carry snakes around with him.”
“Well, maybe he can turn himself into a snake like that woman did in that movie.”
I sighed. “Just answer the door, please, all right?”
“I’m just trying to be helpful is all, Mr. C.”
“I appreciate it, Jamie. But please just get the door.”
My office is one room. I got all the furniture at various county condemnations, mostly businesses that couldn’t pay their taxes.
Nothing quite matches but it’s all serviceable enough, I suppose. If you can overlook various dings, scratches, scrapes, and gouges. The books on the top two shelves of the bookcase are fine, imposing volumes
