The Snake

by John Godey

“I don’t think anybody hates you that much, Mr. Mayor.”

  The mayor laughed bitterly. “We won’t go into that. Let’s get to the point. The snake. It’s driving this city crazy. It’s making national and even international news. The hotels and restaurants and theaters and airlines are driving me crazy. Even the overseas airlines. Hundreds of cancellations. We need those tourists, Francis. Destroy that snake before it destroys us.”

  SIXTEEN

  The Lord is my shepherd.

  Graham Black stood on the flat rock and stared down into the tangled thickets of the hollow. It was deeply shadowed with the dark of evening and the overhanging miasma of evil. The Lord is my shepherd, and He has led me. Down there lurked the beast, the messenger of Satan, upon whom the beloved Reverend Sanctus Milanese had declared holy war. And under his inspired generalship I, Graham Black, humble soldier in the army of the Church of the Purification, have been directed to the lair of the enemy. Thank you, Lord.

  If Graham Black had been capable of detachment, he might have recognized that his afflatus was familiar, that he experienced it anew each day, each time he explored another possible hiding place; and that the litany of faith had never altered or wavered in all the days he had spent scouring his assigned sector of the park. But Graham Black did not question himself. He knew only certainty. Why else was he returning to a place he had already searched thoroughly once before? Was that not a Sign in itself?

  The Lord is my shepherd.

  The revelation had come earlier in the day, and, dizzy with joy, he had wanted to rush to the evil place, but God had blessed him with caution as well as wisdom. There were many police in the area, and they would have beset him and hindered him in doing the Lord’s work. So he had waited until the approach of darkness, when the police had given up and gone away. And then he had come straight to this place.

  As he started off the rock and down into the shadows, he felt himself trembling. Not in fear but in expectation. God is my buckler and my shield, He will allow no harm to befall me. I feel His presence all about me, an invisible cordon of security and love.

  He ducked his head and swept aside the low-hanging branches of a tree, and entered into the fetid place of the messenger of Satan.

  ***

  Now, responding to another of the imperatives that directed its behavior, the snake had defined the perimeters of its territory and would defend them jealously and aggressively. It would be more than usually watchful of encroachment, more than usually alert to threat, more than usually irritable and willing to bite. So that, when it felt the impact of the footsteps on the substrate, it did not withdraw into its burrow, but instead began to hiss harshly, its head inclined forward, its mouth gaped wide, its body tensed to strike.

  ***

  Gazing at Evil, its mouth open to an astonishing width, swaying, hissing, Graham Black felt a shiver of fear. But God was his shield, and he felt comforted, and his fear was vanquished and he felt a great suffusion of strength flow through him. Joyful of his new courage, he wondered if he might not advance upon the beast, seize its terrible head in his hands and throttle it. But the Reverend Sanctus had forbidden such a course of action. “Do not attempt to deal with the serpent yourself. Only note where it hides, and then justice will be done. Anything else is vanity.”

  Perhaps it was as well. The serpent was truly horrifying, and, looking into its terrible staring eyes, he felt fear again, and was shamed by it. But would it not be vanity, also, not to feel fear for this powerful agent of evil, this monstrous embodiment of the Antichrist?

  His mission was accomplished, with God’s help he had found out the serpent. But the snake’s wide stare was compelling, hypnotic, and he lingered. Then, just as he turned to leave, the snake began to move toward him, gliding over the leaves and brushy debris, and its speed was terrifying. But he remembered being told that a snake only rarely pursued a man and that, in the event that it did, a man could easily outdistance it.

  He put his back to the advancing snake and, lifting his feet high to clear the underbrush, began to run. The play of his muscles and his surefootedness exhilarated him. When he began to climb upward from the hollow toward the rock, he turned for a look over his shoulder, certain that the serpent would be far behind him, if it had not abandoned the chase altogether. But it was still pursuing, and it had closed the gap between them, its head high on a forward slant, the long slender body curving behind.

  Graham Black did not look behind him again, straining as he pushed upward toward the rock, and he had almost reached it when he felt a blow against the calf of his right leg.

  ***

  Captain Eastman arrived at East Side Hospital in a dead heat with the television crews. A reporter wearing a backpack pushed a microphone in his face. He brushed it aside and went into the reception room. It was heavy with smoke and crowded with reporters. His I.D. got him past the security man guarding the entrance to the emergency ward, but no farther. The guard posted at the door of the room where the Code Blue team was working on the victim wouldn’t budge.

  Eastman lost his temper and tried to force his way past the guard and got into an undignified shouting and pushing match with him. The door opened and Dr. Shapiro came out, looking angry.

  “What the hell is going on out here?” He stared at Eastman. “What are you trying to do, captain?”

  “I’m sorry.” Eastman made a gesture of apology to the guard. “How is he, doc?”

  “You ought to know better, captain.” Shapiro frowned and hesitated and then said, “He’s responding to the antivenin. We think he’s going to make it. Thank God.”

  “Thank God,” Eastman said. “He can tell us where the snake is. Can I go in and talk to him?”

  Shapiro shook his head. “No. Anyway, he won’t talk to you.”

  “He’s able to talk?”

  “Yes. But he won’t even talk to us. He flatly refuses to say a word to anybody but the Reverend Sanctus Milanese.”

  ***

  The Reverend Milanese’s gleaming black Rolls-Royce (custom built at a cost of $125,000) turned into the Emergency Ward driveway, and was surrounded by reporters before it had come to a full stop. The press of bodies made it impossible for the doors to be opened. Cameras focused through the windows on the back seat of the car, where the Reverend’s Milanese’s saturnine face, shrouded in the stiff collar of his cloak, could barely be discerned.

  The stalemate was ended when a second car, a more modest Mercedes-Benz, pulled in behind the limousine. Four Christ’s Cohorts got out, formed a wedge, and opened a path to the Rolls-Royce, roughly displacing the reporters. The rear door opened, and the Reverend Milanese emerged with a flash of scarlet cape lining. Another three Christ’s Cohorts got out, and, with the four from the Mercedes, formed another wedge. With the Reverend Milanese in their center, using their shoulders and elbows, they pushed through the crowd to the entrance. Inside, they swept on into the emergency ward, carrying the protesting security guard with them.

  Presently, those in the reception room heard shouts and the sound of scuffling through the door. Later, the guard posted in front of the room where Graham Black was being treated told the reporters that the Puries had forced their way into the room and roughed him up in the process. He exhibited a welt on his right cheekbone, and said that he would bring suit against the Church of the Purification for aggravated assault.

  ***

  In the hospital cafeteria, Captain Eastman drank his coffee, grimacing, as though it was medicine. Which, in a way, it was—an antisleep potion. Yet more than once, in the past week, it had occurred to him that he couldn’t have made less headway in the search for the snake if he had just allowed himself to drift off to sleep. He looked at the phone sitting at the cashier’s elbow. Dr. Shapiro had promised to call him as soon as the Reverend arrived, the estimable, fucking, phony Reverend Sanctus Milanese.

  He had no patience for the Puries or their religion, with its arrogant insistence that God was their God. But didn’t his own
religion make the same claim of being specially chosen? And the Jews and the Moslems and what-all-not? One God, but everybody had an exclusive on Him. He thought of the Purie lying upstairs in the emergency room. He was glad he was going to recover, but it was inevitable, the way the Puries had been roaming through the park, that one of them would get killed.

  And now what? If they had been a pain in the ass before, what would they be like now? There was a real fanaticism about those clean-necked young people, and wheresoever their Reverend led they would follow. What idiocy would the Reverend dream up to harass an already overworked police force? Manpower was being stretched to the limits as it was, especially in problem areas like Harlem and Bed-Stuy and the South Bronx, where people were exacerbated by the heat and demanding blood in arguments which, in cooler weather, would have ended with just a blow or even a few angry words.

  When the telephone rang he reached across the counter and took it out from under the cashier’s hand. The Reverend Milanese had just left the emergency room….

  Eastman yelled, “Left?” and slammed the phone down furiously. He ran up the stairs to the reception room. The Reverend, surrounded by his bodyguard, stood in the center of a clot of newsmen, his face turned upward, his eyes shut, his sallow lips moving. The reporters were shouting questions at him: “Did you speak to him?” “What did he tell you?” “Do you know where the snake is?”

  The Reverend lowered his head. He held his hand out, palm up, for silence. “I have seen Graham Black and I have prayed with him.”

  Eastman had to restrain himself from joining the chorus of questions. Inwardly, he framed one of his own: “You mean you wasted your time praying when you could have asked him where it happened?”

  “Is that all? Didn’t he say anything about the snake?”

  The Reverend faced the speaker. “Graham Black beseeched me to carry on the task that God has imposed upon us, namely, to exterminate the messenger of Satan and so purify the tainted city. Needless to say, I rededicated myself to the effort in the name of the Lord God, and pledged new initiatives to destroy the wicked serpent.”

  A voice, louder than the other, caught the Reverend’s attention. “Did he tell you where to look?”

  The Reverend’s black eyes glittered. “What I said to him, and he to me, was the private conversation of priest and communicant. Would you wish me to violate that confidentiality?”

  A few voices shouted, “Yes, yes,” and the Reverend’s lip curled. There was a volley of questions: “You spoke of new initiatives. What are they? Be specific, Reverend.” “Will you tell the police what you were told by Graham Black?” “Are you going to defy the Police Commissioner’s warning about vigilante actions?”

  “‘The Lord went before them by day in a pillar of cloud, to lead them the way; and by night in a pillar of fire.’ We shall do God’s bidding in the way that He prescribes. We obey His laws, not the Police Commissioner’s.”

  The Reverend nodded to his guards, who began to push against the crowd toward the exit. The reporters followed, still shouting questions. A TV newsman reached in with his microphone. “Reverend, tell us how soon we can expect this new initiative of yours to start.”

  The Reverend, after a moment’s hesitation, said, “Armageddon is tomorrow. Tomorrow, the emissary of the devil will be extirpated.”

  The Reverend’s guard swept through the door into the courtyard, and the reporters piled out after them. Eastman crossed the almost empty reception room and went into the emergency ward. Shapiro was in the corridor, sitting on a stretcher, his legs dangling.

  “You promised to call me when he got here,” Eastman said. Shapiro looked up with a bitter smile. “They manhandled us. Those goddamn goons charged in and shoved us all to one corner of the room, so they could talk to each other without being overheard. I had no way of calling you, I was under restraint.”

  “Was he asking questions? Did it look as if he was interrogating the patient?”

  Shapiro nodded. “At one point he showed the kid a sheet of paper, cardboard, maybe a map, and the kid looked at it and pointed at it, touched it.”

  “You couldn’t make out anything they were saying?”

  “Not a word. They were whispering, and we were off in the corner with those fascist bastards glowering at us. I swear, you could smell the violence in them. In a hospital. In a hospital. I’ll tell you something—if I could have gotten my hands on a scalpel I would have killed one of them.”

  “You can press charges against them if you’d like.”

  “I was ready for murder,” Shapiro said. “I was ready to cause death. Me, a healer.”

  “Will you let me talk to him now?”

  Shapiro shrugged. “Why not? I’ll give you two minutes. But you won’t get anything out of it. He won’t talk to you.”

  For all of the time Eastman was in the room bending over the table, Graham Black looked up at the ceiling and moved his lips in prayer. He gave no indication that he knew Eastman was speaking to him, or even that he was there in the room.

  Shapiro told Eastman his time was up, and escorted him from the room. “I’m sorry,” Shapiro said, “but I told you.”

  “Yeah,” Eastman said. “Tell me, doc, you got some medicine for being middle-aged?”

  “If I did, I’d take it myself.” He anticipated Eastman’s question. “I’m thirty-one. It hits some people early.”

  SEVENTEEN

  If a day that started out badly kept on getting worse, it could turn out to be memorable. When Holly still hadn’t shown up by 7:45 for a 7:00 date, Converse knew that the day—which had begun with the helicopter, and gone on with his being fired by the DI and having his neck squeezed, and had continued with his waking up sour and out of sorts from an afternoon nap—was going to be one of those red-starred calamities that one could look back on in the future with awe and a sort of inverse pride.

  For a while, he was sure he was going to turn the day around. He had phoned Holly at her newspaper, where three people, speaking brusquely against a background of clacking typewriters, had asked him to hold on. When he heard her voice he said, “This is Mark Converse. Can I see you tonight?”

  “Yes, of course.”

  “I don’t think you could classify it as a case of actual need. I just want to see you.”

  “I want to see you, too.”

  She had named the time and the place. The place was a five-minute walk from his apartment on Charles Street, and was called, for no reason of decor, or anything else that he could fathom, the Blue Griffin. Earlier, before she was forty-five minutes late, he had sat at the bar and amused himself by trying to think of more appropriate names. The one that seemed most successful was The First Person Singular. It fit the clientele a lot better than the Blue Griffin.

  The clientele were, as she had told him—warned him—writers who lived in the Village, plus an occasional uptown editor paying a visit to a resident author. Converse had heard of the Blue Griffin, but had always passed it by. Writers didn’t interest him; not before Holly, at any rate. Now, based on his forty-five minutes at the bar, he had concluded that writers were a misnomer. Talkers—that was the right word.

  At 7:30 he decided to leave. Half an hour late was already too much leeway, it bespoke indifference, at the very least. But he ordered another drink, to delay broaching the heat outside for another little while, and also to see if two writers who were upstaging each other’s books might eventually come to blows. He doubted it, even though they shouted fiercely, but in this weather you couldn’t tell.

  He became aware that someone was calling out his name. He responded, and was told there was a phone call for him. He took his drink with him and edged between the two writers, who had by now abandoned scalpel wit and taken up bludgeons: “You’re a prick.” “Look, you mother-fucker….” He found the phone booth in the deeper recesses of the room. It was Holly.

  “…trying to get you, but the damn phone there was busy. They talk a lot. Had you noticed? I looked fo
r you at the hospital…. What did you say?”

  He had groaned.

  She said, “You don’t know? Didn’t Captain Eastman call you?”

  “Dead?”

  “He’s going to recover. He’s a Purie. Why didn’t they tell you?”

  “I got fired this morning. Was he able to talk?”

  “Fired?” The syllable was sharp, brittle. “What’s that all about?”

  “Where are you, Holly?”

  “At the office. I’m finishing up my story. I’ll leave in five minutes and take a cab down.” She spoke hurriedly, as though to get the nonessentials out of the way. “What do you mean you were fired? How did it happen?”

  “Finish your story,” he said, “and come down here and I’ll tell you.”

  “Tell me now. It belongs in the story.”

  “No.”

  “Why not?”

  Because it’s unimportant, he thought, because the only thing that matters is your getting here as soon as possible. He said nothing.

  “If you won’t tell me yourself I’ll have to phone Captain Eastman and ask him about it.”

  “What do you mean have to?”

  “And then it’ll take longer, and I won’t be able to leave in five minutes. But if you tell me now—”

  “It’s a question of priorities, right?” He was deliberately sloshing his drink around, taking some sort of odd pleasure in its running over and wetting his fingers. She was silent. “Is that right?”

  “Don’t be unreasonable.”

  “Unreasonable. Unreasonable is what it’s all about, isn’t it?” He waited. “Well, isn’t it?” The line hummed between them. “You’re a dumb bitch.”

  He hung up.

  ***

  Converse stood at the bedroom window of his floor-through apartment, which faced the backs of the buildings on Perry Street and their postage-stamp-size backyards. Directly across the way, a handsome, nearly naked couple was broiling meat on a hibachi.

  It was stifling in the room. He had turned off the air conditioner, partially to restore a little animation to the python, partially to punish himself, to make his body feel as miserable as his spirits. The bad day had gotten worse, but he was about to put a limit to it. He would take a leaf from his boyhood when, on disaster-filled days, his mother would pop him into bed early. She had understood that the only cure was to retire from the day by imposing an end upon it. That was what he could do. Declare the day finished, by edict, by going to sleep at 8:30.