Last Call for the Living

by Peter Farris

  A man took the stage. He flicked his wrists at the audience, then toward the ceiling. He clapped.

  Brother Rollins is right, down to the core!

  We all grew antlers that almost cost us our jobs!

  “But the job is here and now!”

  The faithful joined in a concussion of “amens.” An ecstasy spread down the aisles. Hands raised, some of the women opened their mouths and spoke in tongues. Without any warning or apparent plan the man at the pulpit knelt down.

  And opened the lid of the first box.

  He lifted a three-foot canebrake rattler from its depths, holding the snake high above his head. It slithered between his fingers and around his wrist and down a forearm. He reached in with his spare hand and pulled out a smaller rattlesnake.

  Seven or eight more congregants had stepped forward by now. The tambourine and guitar accompanied the procession, locking into a hypnotic rhythm. Another man reached into the box, his right hand emerging with a four-foot timber rattler. The reptile’s broad triangular head sliding between his thumb and forefinger, licking at the air with flicks of its tongue. Dark crossbands the length of the snake’s body were oily and smooth looking in the light.

  The man lowered his hand to waist length. The snake turned curiously up toward his shoulder with no obvious intentions. He spoke of being breast-fed from a dirty dog until the one true God took his lips away and set them right.

  The man ran a thumb along the brown stripe behind each eye of the snake. The rattler held itself steady as if trying to reciprocate the tenderness of the moment.

  More men and women took the stage, opening the remaining wooden crates while others started to dance in the aisle. They shuffled back and forth with peculiar hopping motions. Palms upturned. Wild-eyed, their mouths moving to the revelry. A woman pulled two copperheads from one of the serpent boxes. She dropped one and reached down to pick it up. Handed it to another woman. Like clowns from a car at a circus, the snakes were pulled continuously from the boxes. Twined and twisting. Thick as handfuls of drained pasta.

  They prayed and passed the snakes along. One of the women opened a mason jar and took a sip of the strychnine-water mixture. She passed it to a man who was cradling a canebrake rattler as you would a puppy. He took three large gulps from the jar and passed it on.…

  … Hallelujah, there is no throne like God’s throne.…

  One of the believers had lit the rag wick of a glass jar filled with kerosene.

  He passed a finger and then a fist and then a wrist over the flame in slow, measured movements.

  The room filled with the hysteria of the spirit, the Holy Ghost coming down on its supplicants in waves of tornadic power. The plank floor quaked a little underfoot like some divine tremor.

  The snakes writhed. They slipped through the fingers of the devout.

  Studying their handlers like you would the occupants of an asylum.

  Or an emergency room.

  * * *

  Hicklin and Charlie ran through the woods, barreling behind the scattered beam of the tactical light.

  They crossed the creek and climbed the limestone bank. Eventually the trees gave way to shrubs and grass. The grove appeared under a faint detail of moonlight. Charlie tried to keep up but struggled to get his wind back. He watched as Hicklin made for the hemlock that marked the old stone lodging. He disappeared from view for a moment when he reached inside the stove and pulled out the duffel bag. He took off at a dead run but soon stopped.

  Hicklin turned to look back at Charlie. The boy stood frozen in place, hands on his knees, his expression a mixture of dejection and fatigue. Hicklin favored him with a soft smile. Realizing himself what was occurring between them.

  Charlie was joining him in whatever happened next. Willingly. As if there were no choice now, no words to speak, no deliberations. But as they stood in the grove, the rain clouds having parted to allow a clear view of the night sky, Charlie realized for better or for worse he cared about his captor.

  Hicklin’s smile turned to a hardened scowl. He nodded.

  But there was meaning to be found in his eyes.

  * * *

  They backtracked, finding the Chevy step-side after two wrong turns. Hicklin intuited that the tarp had been disturbed. It troubled him, but there wasn’t time to fret. He rolled up the tarp, covered the shotgun with it behind the front seats. He stuck the key in the ignition. Gave Charlie some instructions and climbed out. Charlie slid over and tapped the brake with his left foot. Flicked the turn signals.

  Tail- and brake lights worked.

  One less reason to get pulled over.

  Hicklin tucked the pistol under his right leg and eased the pickup down the path that led to the nameless mountain road. After a fifteen-minute descent they were on pavement.

  Hicklin drove carefully down a set of switchbacks, his and Charlie’s ears unplugging at the lower altitude. A fog settled across the road, stretching out beyond the ridge to the east and hovering above the valley like some mannered, watchful relative. Hicklin rolled down the window, lit a cigarette from a pack he kept on the dash. Charlie watched him.

  The thought of getting Charlie something to eat occurred to Hicklin. A hot shower for them both.

  And when he looked over at Charlie, he was met by a consenting grin.

  The road ran adjacent to a wall of granite. A yellow sign warned of falling rock. Hicklin slowed the pickup for a hairpin turn. Another set of switchbacks followed, the headlights occasionally catching reflectors on a mailbox, the spooked face of a possum. Charlie glimpsed a single distant porch light hovering in the darkness.

  Hicklin knew they were approaching the flats, his mind already planning a side-road route across state lines when they passed Tommy Lang’s Nissan Titan, the pickup hidden in a drive obscured by rotted fence posts.

  Hicklin punched the gas, chirping the tires. A sickening jolt hit him in the gut. He checked the rearview mirror. The lights of Lang’s truck came to life.

  In pursuit.

  * * *

  Lang had parked under a bower, a little recess just off the mountain road where a series of fence posts stood slanted and age bent, as if to remind passersby of the long-dead hands that had planted them. He smoked a cigarette and was considering a beer when the lights of the Chevy appeared through the fog at the top of the ridge only to disappear again. Lang held his breath, waiting. A minute later the old pickup rumbled past him.

  Lang glimpsed the driver and a young man in the passenger seat. He watched. The road eased against an embankment. The driver tapped his brake lights once.

  Then the Chevy gunned it down the hill.

  Lang flicked the cigarette out the window, cranked the truck and pulled out onto the road. He turned on the high beams and punched it through the fog, taking a long curve bordered by half-grown pines a little too fast, his tires digging for grip. He saw the silhouette of Blood Mountain off in the distance, and the taillights of the step-side before they disappeared into a blanket of mist.

  He hit sixty before he let off the gas, rolling dangerously through a corner. The tires screeched and spun against the slick layer of chert, finally sticking before Lang could play demolition derby with a cliff. There was a hundred-foot drop past the guardrails. And another hundred feet of granite outcroppings.

  That sumbitch is flying.…

  After five minutes Lang considered them all but lost. The road narrowed, cutting back and forth between walls of pine, splitting here and there like bronchial stems. He slowed to a crawl, passing the old rickety church like some lost tourist.

  The road turned to blacktop. Lang stopped at an intersection, rolling down the windows, looking right and left before U-turning back up the mountain. He had hoped to hear something. A car horn or chirping tires. The rev of an engine. The clank of a railroad crossing. Anything.

  There was nothing but the wind passing through the trees. Humidity with an undercurrent of coolness, the sweet aroma of muscadines on the air.

&nb
sp; Unnatural. Dismaying.

  Lang returned to the church. There was a front yard but no driveway, a dozen vehicles parked at angles. He glimpsed more cars behind the church. No sign of the step-side.

  Shouting and singing met his ears when he opened the truck door, accompanied by a jangling, cultish music. Lang slid his Kimber into its holster, tucking it inside his waistband along with two spare magazines.

  He heard foot stomping. Loud, incoherent voices. But there was something else, a kind of a sub-rhythm beneath the manic worshiping. Lang cocked his head and listened.

  The collective rattling of deadly snakes.

  He had been out to this church once before, fifteen years back for a fatality. A man from North Carolina had been bitten by a cottonmouth. His hand swelled to the size of a catcher’s mitt and when he fell to the floor three more snakes bit him. Lang remembered walking inside the church, a small crowd of believers standing over the poor son of a bitch, praying and moaning. Struck Lang that he had walked into another universe, a place as alien as he could imagine. The man was vomiting when Lang arrived, the victim’s eyes looking as though they’d been sketched in with a charcoal pencil.

  A now-retired deputy named Creston had been first on the scene. Told Lang that when he entered the church there were about ten snakes slithering around, hiding under benches, searching for nooks and corners. One of the wranglers had already gone to work with a hook, snagging rattlesnakes and dropping them into a burlap sack. Old Creston turned right around and called the jail and Animal Control. It took a good hour for EMTs to find the place. Another thirty minutes for the county coroner.

  Lang recalled the crates. The persistent buzz. A distinctive noise, that rattle you never wanted to hear when out hiking or hunting. When they brought the man outside on a gurney everyone relocated to the porch and continued praying, some distraught, but most seemed disappointed more than anything else. As if the cable had gone out during the Super Bowl. The victim had failed them all, one man had remarked. Not the snakes, not God, but the bitten man.

  And all Lang could think was, How?

  * * *

  Lang tried to look through a window. Condensation was as thick as a layer of paint. A gutter, rusted over and clotted with pine needles, hung partially detached from the roofline. He peeked around the corner to the backyard. There was a brush arbor with picnic tables. Cars and trucks clustered on either side.

  He stepped off the porch and turned a corner, following a set of tire tracks to the far side of the church property. Lang’s eyes adjusted to the vague glow of a tin-shaded flood lamp. He stared down a long row of cars, using the brightness of his cell phone screen to discern one vehicle from the next.

  The Chevy step-side was parked between two station wagons.

  The service inside the church was peaking in intensity. A preacher shouted to the rhythm of stomping feet, the voices that answered elegiac and possessed. Lang tried to maintain some situational awareness, prowling, studying the entrance.

  One way in and one way out, buddy.

  He thought to call for backup. Hell, you’d have to drive three miles just to get a signal. Could just sit in his truck and wait them out?

  Or drive on home. Forget about the whole thing.

  Get drunk. Quit. His specialty. Behavior that had defined him for more than a decade.

  Walk into the woods then. Straight to hell or oblivion, whichever’s got a vacancy.

  Lang drew his sidearm and put a hand on the doorknob. Took a deep breath.

  He was smarter than this and he knew it.

  * * *

  He met with a swelling of heat and violent sound. Lang scanned the church’s one room, seeing nothing but the backs of people’s heads. All of the worshipers too caught up to notice or acknowledge him. He looked down the aisle at the pulpit, at the people on the stage, mostly men in sweat-soaked shirtsleeves. Maybe twenty of them swaying and singing.

  You’re in a goddamn nuthouse now, Tommy.

  One man had several rattlesnakes in his hand. He danced around, holding the snakes above his head as if hoisting a trophy. The serpents hung vine-like, flat heads turning as if they waited for a cue. Their eyes were bold and black. Little tongues tested the air. Lang heard the rattles even above the hand claps and possessed babbling.

  A fiery preacher bellowed from the pulpit as a canebrake rattler slithered from one hand to the other.

  “I once grew antlers and it cost me my job!”

  “Our Host!”

  “The Ghost!”

  “He bites the most!”

  Lang tried to follow the preacher, but his words descended into gibberish. The room smelled of melted wax and hair tonic, sweat and sawdust stomped from the old floorboards. Lang surveyed the room again, the Kimber casually hidden behind his right buttock.

  A young man, five pews down, turned as if hearing some phantom noise in his head. Lang studied his profile for a moment. The gaunt, dirty face. A pitiful white shirt.

  Looking like a stray dog that had survived a kennel fire.

  Charlie Colquitt.

  The music and voices were pounding Lang’s brain to jelly. He couldn’t think. Charlie turned to see Lang better, his lips forming a word of warning.

  … Don’t!

  The man standing next to Charlie had a back and shoulders broad enough to fireman’s carry an Appaloosa mule. He twitched, glancing over his shoulder like a pitcher checking a fleet-footed base runner. Then he and Lang made eye contact. Time elongated, Lang’s brain rimshotting as his body instinctively adjusted into a shooting stance.

  I’ve seen that look in a man’s eye a couple times.

  That look.

  Mean enough to kill Jesus.

  And then ask for Mary and Joseph.

  Gun!

  * * *

  The first round whistled past his ear.

  Lang instinctively returned fire.

  He squeezed two rounds and ducked to his left below a pew. A window shattered behind him. The burst of gunfire had the congregation in a frenzy of a different kind. Lang raised up, aimed and fired once, a point and shoot he wished had been quicker. Too many bodies rioting to lock in on the big, broad-shouldered gunslinger—who apparently didn’t care who he killed besides Lang.

  He showed too much of himself trying to locate the gunman and a heavy round took out his left shoulder. Lang saw red and hit the floor hard, the injured shoulder going loose and wet. He sat up, breathless from the pain, glad to see his arm still attached. Most of the panic inside the church was stampeding past him and out the front door. He had a glimpse of the preacher behind the pulpit, pointing a long finger as if directing traffic, hollering nonsensically.

  “Satan is here and now and this is the time of the satinback!

  “Grow antlers or bow to the endless tunnel!”

  Screams and more gunfire. Lang somehow reloaded, in spite of a near-useless left shoulder. Bullets blew apart the pinewood pew in front of him. People pinballed down the aisle.

  More shots rang out. Lang hunched against the pew as a salvo of hollow points chunked it to pieces. Holes opened in the front wall. Lang watched men and women fall, shot in the back.

  The gunman emptied his magazine.

  He’s reloading.

  Lang turned, checked his background and sighted on the shooter. He fired one-handed, three trigger pulls that sent unbearable pain up his arm to a shattered collarbone. A woman near the pulpit dropped from sight. The gunman disappeared down an aisle, using an old man in a checkered shirt as a human shield. The congregation continued to pile up, dead or alive, following instinct at the threshold of their church.

  Lang slumped back behind the pew, starbursts of pain clogging his vision.

  Wondering what it was like to pray and really mean it.

  * * *

  Hicklin had driven around the church to the backyard where there were more vehicles parked. Picnic tables were set up along a thicket bordered by yellow daisies. A hollow of darkness beyond. Charlie loo
ked out the window toward a morbid black sky, snapping from his daze when Hicklin got out of the truck and quietly shut the driver’s side door.

  He tucked Lipscomb’s HK into his waistband. Two clips in each pocket, the lips of the magazine facing up for an easy grasp. He pulled his sweatshirt down to cover the grip of the handgun and nodded to Charlie.

  They walked around to the front of the church. Hicklin paused before a fogged-over window, hearing some feverish proclamation followed by a round of applause. A guitar resonated through the clapboard. The structure itself seemed poised to crumble at every wallop.

  Hicklin hesitated at the door. He eyed the road in both directions, studying the cars parked where the front yard met the shoulder.

  “There’s somebody followin’ us,” he said. “We needed to get off this here road.”

  “Are you sure?” Charlie said, whispering, a lip quivering with uncertainty. “Could we keep driving? I’m scared of this place.”

  “You ever been to church?”

  Charlie nodded.

  “We’ll go in here like we belong. Ever wanna belong to a church?”

  Charlie shook his head.

  “Might even talk to some folks,” Hicklin warned him. “But not if I can help it. Don’t you make eye contact with nobody. Look straight ahead. Like you’re real interested. In a li’l while we’ll head back out. I’m gonna buy us some breakfast, get you new clothes. I promise. You believe me, right?”

  Charlie nodded again that he did.

  Hicklin opened the door.

  Naked bulbs hung from the ceiling of the church, providing a sickly yellow nimbus. A man in the corner videotaped the action with an old shoulder-mounted Beta. Another man leaning on a walker for balance turned and smiled at Hicklin and Charlie, gesturing in welcome to some available seating. Hicklin took Charlie by the wrist and led him to a pew in the middle of the room.

  Feeling beads of sweat lining his brow, Hicklin wiped his face with a sleeve and studied the commotion. On the altar platform a dozen people were handling snakes. Others held mason jars, sipping a liquid Hicklin damn sure knew wasn’t corn whiskey. The pastor ranted, his voice demanding and powerful.