SHAKE, RATTLE & ROLL
Wendell Shake watched the Jimmy’s oversized tires crawl through the mud ruts toward his farmhouse. He lifted the .30-06 semi-automatic rifle to his right shoulder and sighted down the four-power Tasco scope. At his feet, propped on end under the window, was a loaded eleven-and-three-quarter inch, forty-pound draw Ninja pistol crossbow with a die cast aluminum body and contoured grips. Wendell had come home to Mississippi and the Shake family farm two months before, after the fifth severed head had been found in a garbage can in the Bronx. That was the last of them, Wendell decided, one for each borough of New York City, to show the Jews, Catholics, and coloreds what he thought of their so-called civilization. Armageddon was about to commence, Wendell believed, and he was an operative of the avant-garde. It was his Great Day in the Morning, as he liked to call it, at last, after forty-eight years of silent suffering, witnessing the slaughter of the innocents. Now, however, the rest of the avenging angels were poised to strike, and the message Wendell had delivered was being read and discussed. Perhaps, Wendell thought, as he watched the Rattler brothers and Pace disembark from their vehicle, he was about to receive an acknowledgment of his effort.
“This place been abandoned for years,” Lefty Grove said to Pace, as the three boys walked up the path to the house. “Daddy and us used it lots of times when we come up to visit Mama. Been about three, four months since we been here, I guess. Right, Smoke?”
“ ’Bout that, Lef. You remember this gate bein’ wired shut like this?”
Smokey Joe placed his left hand on the post and vaulted himself up in the air.
Before Smokey Joe had cleared the top rail, a bullet smacked into the center of his forehead, knocking him backward, so that his legs looped over the front of the rail by the backs of his knees, leaving the upper half of his body dangling upside down on the opposite side.
Lefty Grove and Pace both hit the ground and covered their heads. They heard the screen door of the house open and slam shut, footsteps coming down the porch steps and then on the path toward them. Neither of the boys dared to move. The footsteps stopped at the gate.
“Charity, gentlemen,” said Wendell Shake, “ain’t got nothin’ to do with mercy. Even in a foreign land.”
Lefty Grove raised his head and saw a middle-aged man about six feet tall and two-hundred pounds, wearing a red and gray flannel shirt, red suspenders, black pants and low-cut, steel-toed, brown work shoes. His hair was almost completely gray, with dark patches at the front, worn very long, touching his shoulders. It was difficult to see the man’s face because of his heavy red beard and the way his head was pressed down close to the rifle. The man’s eye sockets seemed devoid of white.
“Suppose you say somethin’,” Wendell said to Lefty Grove, “and they ain’t the right words?”
Wendell rested the rifle barrel on Smokey Joe’s right knee, keeping the business end directed at Lefty Grove’s head.
“Could be there’d be repercussions.”
Pace looked up and saw Wendell standing at the gate. A light rain was falling.
“Both you boys stand up,” Wendell ordered, and they obeyed.
Wendell flipped Smokey Joe’s legs up with the barrel, causing the corpse’s head to hit the ground before the rest of it pretzeled over. Lefty Grove and Pace got to their feet.
“Come in, gentlemen,” said Wendell, unfastening and opening the gate to admit them.
Wendell marched the boys up the steps into the house, where he motioned with the gun to a wooden bench against a wall of the front room.
“Sit yourselves down there, gentlemen, and tell me what’s brought you this far.”
Pace sat down and Lefty Grove remained standing.
“Look, mister,” said Lefty Grove, and Wendell shot him through the heart.
The last Rattler brother collapsed on the floor next to Pace’s feet, made one slight lurch after he was down, then lay perfectly still. Pace closed his eyes.
“Didn’t exactly sit, did he?” said Wendell, looking down at Lefty Grove’s body, then up at Pace. “That’s a rhetorical question, son. You needn’t answer. Open your eyes.”
Pace looked at the man. Wendell Shake had mud puddles where his eyes ought to have been, and he was grinning, exposing gums that matched his suspenders and a dozen crowded, yellow teeth.
“We’ll wait together, son,” Wendell said. “There are terrible things soon to be revealed, and man craves company. That’s but one flaw in the design. Do you love the Lord, boy?”
Pace said nothing.
“Please answer.”
“I do, sir,” said Pace. “I surely do love the Lord.”
“Then the Lord loves you.”
Wendell pulled up a goose-neck rocker and sat down, resting his 30- 06 across his knees. He began to sing.
“I’m goin’ to take a trip in that old gospel ship, I’m goin’ far beyond the sky. I’m gonna shout and sing, till the heavens ring, when I kiss this world goodbye.”
Pace saw the pistol crossbow lying on the floor beneath a window on the other side of the room.