Authors: Anne C. Petty
“It’s like a caged dog … it paces away and then comes back to lunge against the fence again,” he’d told her. That was when she’d decided to have a closer look.
Between clenched teeth, she revealed what he’d already suspected. “Those marks are the sign of a barrier, put there for protection against some great wickedness.”
That was the one piece of useful information Ned gleaned from her terror. She couldn’t tell him anything about who’d put them there, but she could see the fluid malevolence held in check by their presence. It made sense. Sometimes the scale-like images faded to the point where only Ned knew they were there. When that happened, he couldn’t feel his nemesis, either.
Delphine claimed to be a rival of the famed Marie Laveau, whose backyard rituals caused many a New Orleans resident in the 1950’s to sprinkle salt over their doorsteps. According to the hand-lettered sign tacked beside the Soul Food office door, Mistress Savoie knew about protection, how to cast it and how to break it, but what she’d seen in Ned, or just behind him to be more precise, was apparently more than she felt prepared to confront.
“That’s old serpent majik,” she told him, “but somethin’ else, too.” Her voice had dropped to a whisper that Ned strained to hear, and she’d made a protective hand signal in the air in front of his nose.
“Go find yourself a Pentecostal snake-handler. I don’t want nothin’ to do with this.” He could smell her sweat, patchouli laced with something musky, making dark circles on her cotton blouse under her ample arms. And then he’d found himself curbside, watching the street lamps come on in the tepid Louisiana night and wondering what the hell to do. True to form, he’d hitched a ride out of town within the hour, heading west. It was a pattern that felt disturbingly familiar.
* * *
In the fading sunlight, Ned heard what he’d been waiting for.
“Eloi shandai, shandai, harakushka, eloi …” The tongues of angels, according to St. Paul.
The high nasal voice set the tone, and others in the congregation took up the chant.
“Jesuslord … shandai … release Your Holy Spirit, lord … harakaharaka shandai …”
Ned started walking toward the tent. Voices murmured, someone wept. A woman screamed, a baby began to cry and was shushed. Nasal Voice upped the ante and built the crowd into a frenzy.
“Behold! The power of the Holy Ghost! Fill us up, fill up these sinners—witness the power of His protection!”
Ned knew without a doubt what was going on by now. He pushed the tent flap aside and stepped into the sweltering confines of Brother Micah’s Southern Tent Revival. The stench of raw sweat and mildewed canvas filled his nose and mind. How many years ago had he been in one of these tents? The gloom was lit by a couple of hurricane lanterns hung from the tent struts, their sharp white light revealing maybe a hundred folding chairs set in rows bisected by one long aisle. A low wooden stage took up the space in front of the chairs. Onstage, Ned saw what he’d expected to see: several middle-aged men, thin to skinny, dressed in the kind of nondescript plaid shirts and shapeless pants you’d find in charity clothing centers. But the one who worked the crowd wore a cowboy-styled shirt and bolo tie. Ned pegged him for Brother Micah. A high table dominated center stage, and on it sat a couple of wooden boxes, each about two feet square with their lids closed. Except for one.
The oldest man dipped his hand in the opened box and hauled out a timber rattler. He held it high over his balding head, its buzzing tailtip brushing his eyebrows. More shrieks from the crowd and loud yelps of “Praise Jesus!” The serpent began to thrash its tail, and the man danced around with it a bit, then reached into the box again, extracting another rattler. Ned felt a wash of old fear.
“Behold! The power of the HOLY SPIRIT!” shouted the man in the bolo. Ned stood transfixed at the back of the crowd, drinking in the scene, the moaning, praying, weeping, shouting, and singing voices wrapping him up in the group trance. A gaunt, gray-haired woman who’d been standing at the back of the stage stepped forward and opened a second box. Ned felt sweat running down his ribs and mingling with the sour smell of the tent, not so much from the spectacle in front of him as from the unbearable stinging across his chest and the barest suggestion of a rasping voice inside his head. Or maybe it was the agitated buzzing of the captive serpents—he couldn’t tell.
The woman flipped her long braid over her shoulder and reached into the second box, pulling out an even longer, fatter snake. A western diamondback, by its markings. More shrieks from the crowd. Ned felt lightheaded. He wasn’t sure why Mistress Savoie had thought this was what he needed to do to get his answers, but some enlightenment had better happen soon or he would be out the tent flap and running flat out toward the dirt road behind the trees. And then he froze. There was a boy, a little younger than Ned had been when his mother had dragged him to handlings like this. The kid stood motionless at the edge of the stage. Ned didn’t need a close up of the tight mouth and pallid cheeks to know paralyzing terror when he saw it. The woman turned to the boy and thrust the diamondback toward him. “Take it!” he heard clearly over the cries of the faithful and the fearful. The boy took a step forward and reached out, grabbed the reptile clumsily from the woman, and then promptly dropped it.
The enraged rattler hit the tent floor with a resounding thwap and snake-warped its way down the aisle, amid shrieks of panic and tumbling chairs as men, women, and children fought to get out of its path, which was aimed directly toward Ned.
Without blinking, Ned reached out as he’d done on many other such nights long ago and grabbed the serpent firmly behind the head, hauling it up. Its body whipped the air for frenzied seconds and then wrapped around his arm up to the elbow. It felt dry and heavy against the meat of his forearm, hanging on for all it was worth.
“Don’t be scared, son,” said his mother. He felt her at his back, close to his shoulder. “She’s milked dry.” Ned turned fast, swinging the arm with the snake in a wide arc, scattering screaming worshippers in its wake. She wasn’t there to see, but he’d felt her. He looked back toward the stage and saw Mr. Bolo hurrying toward him. Ned shifted his attention to the snake.
She glared at him with vertical-slitted pupils, the striped ridges over her eyes giving her a cat-like expression. Her gaping mouth showed recurved fangs, fully extended. Ned’s grip was firm behind the wide triangular head, holding her as tightly as she held him. The snake was channeling all its aggression and panic into its madly buzzing rattles. Below the black and white stripes of her tail he counted nine, with a broken tenth. He knew you couldn’t precisely date a snake’s age from the number of rattles, but from her girth and length, she had the feel of a reptile that’d been around for awhile.
Ned held her face up at eye level and touched the ridge over her eyes, ran his finger over the snout, and lightly traced the curve of one perfect fang and then the other. The snake shivered all along the length of his arm, squeezing him in a death grip. Someone near him screamed and he barely heard Brother Micah’s high-pitched voice saying something about aiming for the open box at his elbow. Ned shut them out and focused entirely on the red-brown eyes of the serpent. She held his gaze, and then, unexpectedly, her pupils widened and it seemed to Ned that her head changed shape, becoming rounder, smoother, smaller, with wide-set eyes and no brow ridge. Her stripes faded to a smooth brownish olive-green with diagonal rows of darker scales forming an all-too-familiar chevron pattern down her body. Ned choked and nearly let go. Somebody had him by the shoulder. He blinked hard, coming out of the vision.
“That’s some fancy handlin’ you done there, son. Here now, I’m gonna peel ‘im offa you and you can just ease ‘im back in the box quicklike.” Brother Micah held the empty snake box just under his hand. Ned nodded and watched, still as stone, as the older man wrestled the coils loose. Ned aimed the snake’s head down into box and let go. It fell heavily into the container without offering to bite. He let his breath out.
Brother Micah handed the box to one of his subordinates and turned back to Ned. “What’s your name, son? You from around here?”
Ned shook his head, avoiding the question of his name. He rubbed his arm, getting blood flowing properly now that the snake tourniquet had been removed. To his relief, the ant-sting illusion was gone, too.
“You know, I could use a cold-nerved fella like you. You handled that snake like a pro. In fact, I’m thinking mebbe the Lord sent you here, to help us keep doing His work.”
Ned was suddenly painfully, aware that everyone was staring at him. “No, I don’t think so,” he managed. “I was just…” He frowned, unable to articulate exactly what he was just doing there. He’d found them more or less by instinct and a few lucky questions back in the last town.
Ned stumbled out of the tent, his mind a blur. He tried to orient himself toward the road, and then realized someone had fallen in step with him. A young guy, nearly as tall as himself, loped along beside him. White t-shirt with the sleeves rolled up over his biceps, well-worn jeans, scuffed cowboy boots, dark blonde hair swept back from his face in a pomaded wave, unlit cigarette clamped between his lips—the essence of cool. He vaguely reminded Ned of that popular young actor whose name escaped him. The one who’d taken himself out in a blaze of race car glory last year. It had been all over the news.
“Need a ride somewhere?” The stranger’s voice was friendly, with a hint of amusement.
“Yeah, I do. Much obliged.”
“This way, then.” He steered Ned toward the edge of the clearing where the Packard rested near a stand of blackjack oaks and sumacs. Ned climbed into the passenger seat and sank against its cracked leather. His rescuer slid into the driver’s seat.
“Name’s Earl Wayne Marshall II. You?”
“Ned…Waterston.” Ned chewed his lip. It’d been a while since he’d actually used his own name. Nearly three years now since his mother’s death, and nobody’d come looking for him. He guessed it was all right.
“Nice to meetcha,” Wayne said, digging his keys out of his jeans. “Been to my dad’s funeral in Macon. I was heading back to Frisco by way of Ft. Worth and took a wrong turn. Saw the tent revival back there and was gonna ask somebody for directions, but the show was more interesting. Especially your part.”
“That wasn’t intentional,” Ned said. “It just happened.”
“Well, you sure looked like you knew what you were doing. I thought, now there’s a cat’s got some brass ones.”
Ned sighed. He wished he’d never listened to Delphine and her idiotic suggestion. The less anyone knew about him, the better he liked it.
Wayne reached under the seat, scrabbled around for a minute, and then produced a bottle of bourbon about two-thirds empty.
“You look like you could use a drink.”
Ned eyed the bottle, remembering. “No, sorry, I don’t touch alcohol.”
“Don’t worry, I’m over twenty-one, by a day or two. Hundred percent legal,” he laughed, uncorking the bottle and taking a quick pull. “Sure?” He held out the bottle.
“No, I can’t.”
Wayne shrugged. “Suit yourself, though most cats I know would never turn down a taste of boss Kentucky gold.”
Wayne cranked the wagon and put it in gear, backing away from the crowd of people gathered in front of the revival tent. The great metal beast lumbered across the parking area, bumped over a shallow gulley in the gathering dark, and found its way out onto the dirt road that eventually aimed toward Ft. Worth.
Wayne pulled a flattened pack of Luckies from his sleeve roll and tapped one out. “Smoke?” he asked, offering the pack. Ned shook his head. “Well, you’re just a barrel of laughs, aren’t you?”
“Sorry,” Ned muttered. He watched the line of trees roll by in the Packard’s headlights.
After a few minutes of silence, Wayne asked, “So, how come you were hanging there watching all those snakes get abused? Since you weren’t looking for a job or anything.”
“A voudou priestess sent me,” Ned answered. No point in lying, since he couldn’t think of a good cover story anyway.
Wayne nodded. “I can dig it.” He steered the wagon with his knee against the wheel and lit up, inhaled deeply, and blew smoke out the window. “Did you get what you came for?”
Ned chewed his lip. “I don’t think so...I don’t know.”
“Where you headed, then?”
“West, I guess.”
“You running from the law or something? I mean, you just have that jumpy look.”
Ned turned and stared at his new companion. He didn’t seem like the kind of guy who’d rat on you, but you never knew.
Wayne stared back. “Hey, don’t have a cow, it’s okay. You got secrets, we all got secrets. It’s a long ways to San Francisco, and I wouldn’t mind having you hang with me. Keep me from falling asleep at the wheel. Can you drive?”
Ned shook his head.
“Well, hell, Ned,” Wayne laughed, “what are ya good for?”
“I can draw,” he answered.
“Artist, huh?” Wayne laughed again, “You might find San Fran is just your kinda town.”
Chapter 7
March 1965
“Want a toke?”
“Yeah, man.” Ned lifted his head and reached out as the joint came around to him. Barely inhaling, he passed it on. He held the smoke in a few seconds, and then slowly let it out in a long exhaling sigh. Phosphenes glowed in his peripheral vision. “That’s some serious shit,” he said.
“Homegrown. Mostly buds,” said the young woman to whom he’d passed the thin hand-rolled joint. “Doesn’t take much.”
“Religious experience,” said the long-haired man in whose lap she was draped. He took a final drag and stubbed out the lighted end. “Roach jar?”
Ned felt around under the cushions of a sagging couch and produced a mayonnaise jar partially filled with the butts of joints past. He tossed it to the man, who caught it clumsily against the NO NUKES logo on his T-shirt.
His other companions, a black man about Ned’s age dressed in military surplus clothing, a tousle-headed boy who might have been in his teens, and an older woman voluminous in a kaftan printed with a disturbing pattern of dark red paisley, laughed appreciatively. Ned barely knew these last two, but didn’t think they were related. They were pals of Tripper, the man with the hair, who was also the source of the premium weed.