“True.”
“So I’d like you to come to one of my services and just look around.”
“Look around for what?”
“Somebody who doesn’t seem to belong.”
“A spy?”
“Something like that. Dupes like you may not realize this, Mr. McCain, but the pope has his own assassins.”
“I see. And the first place these assassins would think of is Black River Falls,
Iowa?”
“Catholics aren’t known for clear thinking.
All that mumbo jumbo they believe.”
I realized then that the only way I was ever going to get rid of him was to agree to help him.
Besides, the service would probably be worth seeing. Much as I feared snakes, there’d be a certain repellent majesty to watching all the snake-handlers do their work.
“What time does it start?” I said.
He didn’t have a chance to answer. Jamie was back.
She should have asked for a sack. Instead she gripped the three soggy-hot cardboard containers in her hands. And as she approached the front of the desk where we sat, I saw what was about to happen. She stubbed the toe of her shoe against something and lurched forward. And in lurching forward the coffee went slamming down against the desk.
“Oh, shit!” she cried as the containers exploded, spraying coffee everywhere.
Muldaur leaped from his chair, avoiding the worst of the flying coffee. I didn’t do too badly, either, just got a shot of it on my right sleeve. My desk was the main casualty, papers soaked, coffee dripping off the desk edges.
“You let her talk that way?” Muldaur intoned.
“Talk what way?” I didn’t know what he was referring to. I was too busy assessing the damage.
“I used the word “shit,” Mr. C.”
“She did it again,” he said.
“I was just saying what I said is all,” she said miserably.
“Please go get some rags and start cleaning this up, Jamie.”
“I’m sorry I used the S word,
Reverend,” Jamie said earnestly, and I felt sorry for her. She looked very sweet right now.
Too bad Muldaur couldn’t appreciate her particular form of innocence.
“You wouldn’t be using words like that if you came to my church, I can tell you that.”
She glanced at me. Scared. She was probably thinking he was going to turn her into a serpent or something. She rushed from the room.
“Two nights from now,” Muldaur said.
“Eight o’clock. I’m sure you know where it is, the way everybody makes fun of us.”
“Strictly speaking, you’re breaking the law, Reverend. Bringing poisonous reptiles to a public place.”
“Your law,” Muldaur reminded me. “Not God’s law.”
That’s one thing I have against organized religions of all kinds. They have all of the answers and none of the questions.
Three
I guess Kylie and I were sitting at the wrong angle. From our folding chairs in the back of the place, it sure looked as if the little girl had been bitten by the striking snake. Later on, we’d learn that she’d flung the baby rattler away from her before it could do any damage.
What we didn’t mistake was what then happened to Reverend John Muldaur. At the same time the little girl was screaming and holding her hands out for her mommy, Muldaur went into the kind of convulsions Jerry Lewis goes into for laughs.
But you could tell by the abrupt mask-like stiffening of his face, which was an expression of shock and horror, that whatever was wrong with him was for real.
His body went into spasms, an arm kicking out, a leg collapsing, the other arm flailing away from his body as if it wanted to tear free.
While one of the male members of the church collected the rattlesnake and put it back in its cage, the other members of the church formed a circle around the minister, who was now flat on his back on the platform, arching up every few seconds to allow his entire body to jerk and twist and convulse. We were part of the circle.
Prayers went up like flares; sobs exploded. A lone woman hurried-pushed-paddled the children out the door.
An older man in a T-shirt with a Dixie flag on it knelt next to Muldaur saying the same thing over and over, “You’re receiving the spirit of the Lord, Reverend, and you shouldn’t be afraid.”
Some spirit. Some Lord.
“Is there a phone in here?” Kylie asked.
“A phone in the house of the Lord?” a woman snapped back.
“There’s a pay phone down the road,” one of the more sensible women said.
“He’s receiving the Lord,” said the man in the Dixie flag T-shirt, calmly.
“He’ll be fine in a minute.”
But Muldaur wouldn’t be fine in a minute.
His attempts at breathing were loud and frightening.
I’d visited my granddad, a “lunger,” on a Va ward one time. He’d never recovered from the various lung ailments he’d picked up from various poison gases in Ww I. He was like a sea creature writhing on a beach beneath a pitiless sun. My mom always cried for days after seeing him like that.
Muldaur’s death-I had no doubt he was passing over-was far noisier and gaudier.
He was bug-eyed, flailing tongue, wriggling eyebrows. He was spit, snot, urine, feces. He was crying, cursing, keening. He was dancing, heaving, pounding.
“The Lord comes to us in many strange ways,” said the Dixie T-shirt man. He was as beatific as ever.
“Marv, you’ve got a motorcycle,” the man who’d recovered the baby rattler said. “Run down and call for an ambulance.”
Marv trotted out the door.
There are significant moments that you can’t quite deal with completely-they’d explode your mind if you gave yourself to them completely-s a portion of your brain observes you observing the moment. It was like that the first time I ever had sex. I was enjoying it all so much I was afraid I’d start acting real immature and yell stuff or act unlike the sophisticated, jaded sixteen-year-old I was. So a sliver of my mind detached and took an overview of everything. While my body was completely given over to trying to last at least three minutes, my mind was congratulating my body. You’re a man now, young McCain. A worldly gadabout-philosopher stuck in a town where the new co-op grain silo is still a newsworthy event. You, McCain, are a Hemingway sort of guy.
I was hoping a portion of my mind would detach now and watch me watch Muldaur die. But it didn’t. And so all I could do was stand there and hope that there was a life afterward because if this kind of suffering had no meaning-six million Jews in the concentration camps; millions who could be snuffed out with a brief exchange of atomic bombs-then none of the words our religions spoke were anything more than ways of hiding the meaninglessness of everything. And frankly, cosmic meaninglessness scares the shit out of me the way nothing else comes close to. I should never have taken those philosophy courses as an undergrad.
And then I realized something.
The only thing more terrifying than watching Muldaur throwing himself voodoo-crazed all over the floor of the platform was watching him lie there absolutely still.
Which is what he was doing now.
