7

My life could be divided pretty neatly into two parts: there was the time before the snake bit me and everything that came after. The world itself seemed to shift when I was seventeen years old and my father handed me the cottonmouth while I stood in front of the church. I had been hoping to feel something powerful, something supernatural and holy, but instead, I felt desperation and impotence. The snake, dead-eyed and alien, struck me in the side of the face. The scar is still there, but mostly hidden by the scruff of my increasingly graying beard. After the cottonmouth, I could no longer accept the beliefs of my father. I could no longer accept there was a plan, secret or otherwise, that I was simply too foolish or unenlightened to understand.

I stopped believing the bullshit about everything having a purpose, everything working out for the greater good.

Even the people I knew and loved looked different when viewed from opposite sides of this bellwether event. My father went from a man I had to please to a mystery I wanted to solve. My mother went from being the good wife I admired for all the reasons Daddy did—patience, meekness, and a kind of soft ignorance that I had once believed all women should possess—to a woman I had to struggle to think about kindly after realizing how fully she’d swallowed my father’s duplicitous act.

Then there was Rufus. My impression of him pre-cottonmouth was not good. Even before I’d pulled fully away from the church, the seeds of bitterness were already there. He and his mother sat in the front row, taking in Daddy’s words every Sunday without fail. Rufus was often the first person my father passed the serpents to when the time to handle them came. While in front of the church, Rufus’s face showed nothing but an assuredness in every action, every moment. In short, he was sold out—not so much for the Lord, but for my father and his own twisted version of faith.

The next time I encountered him—nearly thirty years later—Rufus had changed as much—maybe more—more than I had. His journey had mirrored mine in many ways, though the specifics of his were vague to me. All I knew was that he’d been inspired by my departure, and shortly thereafter he’d left our little community by choice. He spent some indeterminate number of years wandering the area, living hand to mouth, trying to figure out what there was in life that was worth believing in. Somewhere along the way, he lost his eyesight but gained a moral clarity second to none. Rufus had never explained how he went blind, and I’d never asked.

Now, Rufus had become nearly the exact opposite of everything my father stood for. He was an avowed atheist who spent his time thinking about the big questions in life and trying to help the less fortunate. The irony being that Rufus, in his atheism, had actually become a better example of a Christian than my father ever was. Lately, his passion had been organizing a group to resist Jeb Walsh’s influence in the area.

But the bite had changed me in other ways too, ways that worried me, that kept me open to the possibility of the divine in this life despite the deluge of anecdotal evidence that suggested the world was ruled less by providence than passion, less by absolutes than absurdities.

My dreams changed after the snakebite. There was a clarity to some of them, a vivid, movielike quality that allowed me to replay them scene by stuttering scene upon waking. The only saving grace was that the dreams were increasingly farther and fewer between. But when I did have one—and I always knew when it was a special dream compared to a normal one—it never failed to put me on edge, and it always made me remember the snakebite and all the many ways I’d never outlive my father’s legacy.

Which was why I found myself nearly shaking whenever I visited Rufus’s house. Okay, house wasn’t really accurate. Rufus lived in the remains of an old church. And not just any old church. Rufus lived in our old church, my father’s old church, the Holy Flame.

Not only that, Rufus’s closest neighbor was none other than Ronnie Thrash, who had been squatting in the old moonshiner’s shack across the creek from the church for the last couple of years. A year ago, the two had been at odds, but from what Rufus had told me lately, Ronnie had been keeping to himself most of the time, which was a welcome relief from the days when Ronnie and his buddies had spent their evenings in their pickup trucks, kicking up mud and grass and making a general nuisance of themselves.

Add it all up, and I had very little reason to visit Rufus, yet most days, I found myself heading over to his place anyway. Today was no exception. I told myself I was doing him a favor, checking in, making sure he hadn’t fallen in the night, but truthfully, the chances were greater that I’d fall and hurt myself during the night than Rufus would. No, the truth of why I visited him was that he understood me in a way few others did.

As I pulled up to the old church, I checked the shack across the creek and saw Ronnie’s truck parked outside. I figured he was still sleeping, and for that I was glad. There were two reasons I dreaded visiting Rufus at the church: first, I would probably never feel comfortable coming back to the place where I’d been bitten by the cottonmouth, and second I wanted to avoid Rufus’s disdain when he realized Ronnie and I had become … what was the word exactly?

Friends? God, there had to be something else. Acquaintances. That was a term I could live with. Maybe. But either way, Rufus would not approve.

Rufus stood beside his fire pit, tossing trash into it with uncanny accuracy. When I stopped the truck, he turned to face me, almost as if he could see.

I walked over and helped him clean up. We worked in companionable silence until the fire had consumed all the trash. Then he offered me some whiskey, and I told him that sounded about right.

A few minutes later, he returned with an unopened bottle of Wild Turkey and sat beside me in one of the four cast iron chairs he kept near the fire pit. “Figured we could dispense with the glasses,” he said. He nearly always said this when we drank. Oh yeah, that was the other reason Rufus and I got on so well. We both shared an abiding love for whiskey, and the outdoors. In fact, we tried to combine the two as much as possible. Nothing could be nicer than whiskey by the fire on an early fall day.

“Jeb Walsh,” he grunted.

I nodded and took a sip. “Yeah. What the hell are we going to do about him?”

He frowned. “I been thinking on it some and came up with something. A way to at least make sure I’m heard at his book signing.” He reached into one of his overall pockets and pulled out what looked like a tiny microphone. He held it out, and I took it.

“Where’d you get this?”

“I was walking up on the eastern ridge the other day, around those caves you and Mary are always trying to explore, and I felt something underneath my boot that wasn’t grass or a rock. When I first picked it up, I couldn’t figure out what it was, but then Nedra told me it was a mic.” Nedra was Rufus’s friend. It was unclear to Mary and me exactly how to define “friend” in this case. We suspected there might be a physical relationship, but the truth was, we really had no idea.

“You’ll need an amplifier,” I said.

“Got it already,” Rufus said. “It’s in my pocket. Hand it back, and I’ll demonstrate.”

I put the mic back in his hand, and he clipped it to his shirt, under one of the lapels of his blazer. He reached into his pocket and flipped a switch.

“Reckon this will be loud enough to get his attention?” he said, his voice booming.

I covered my ears. “Uh, yeah, that’ll be loud enough.”

There was a click as he turned the amplifier off.

“So you just carry this around in your overalls?”

He shrugged. “I like to talk to the asshole across the creek sometimes.” He clicked the amplifier back on and held the mic up to his mouth. I covered my ears.

“Hey, asshole,” he said, his voice booming out even louder than the first time. “Wake up. Day’s a-wasting.”

I looked over at Ronnie’s place. It was silent, but I could just imagine him sprawled out on his couch, holding up two middle fingers before rolling back over and going to sleep.

“So, you’re going to use this at his book talk?”

“Damn right, I am.”

“They’re gonna carry your ass out, you know.”

“Maybe,” he said, and reached back in his pocket to kill the mic. “But at least they’ll be able to hear me when they do.”

I drank some whiskey and thought about the look on Walsh’s face when Rufus interrupted him and he couldn’t just talk over him. I decided that alone would be worth whatever trouble Rufus’s plan brought us.

“What are the chances?” Rufus said.

“Excuse me?”

“I’ve just been thinking. What are the chances that this area finally gets rid of one cult of personality, one demagogue, and then almost a year later, another one emerges that—hell, I’ll just say it—seems even more dangerous than the first?”

He was talking about my father and now, Jeb Walsh. I didn’t have an answer. Not a good one anyway.

“Maybe there was a vacuum? Had to be filled?” I offered.

He shook his head. “No, it’s just a crazy coincidence. Like being struck by lightning. It just doesn’t happen, except…”—he hesitated and opened his hands—“when it does, but even then, it doesn’t feel right. It feels like the person was just a fool or maybe God was angry or something.”

I cleared my throat. I had been struck by lightning.

“Shit,” Rufus said. “I forgot about that. But you don’t count. You’ve been bit by a snake in the face too. You break the mold, Earl.”

“Thanks,” I said.

He laughed. “But you follow what I’m saying, right?”

I thought it over. “Maybe. It’s almost like the whole area is cursed or something.”

“Could be,” he said. “Which is why you and me can’t ever get too complacent.”

“You mean like we are today, sitting around and getting drunk?”

“That ain’t what I’d call it.”

“Well, what would call it?”

“I’d call it making a pact.”

“A pact? What kind of pact?”

“The kind that says we don’t let that asshole win.”

“I’ll drink to that,” I said.