My Soul to Keep

by Melanie Wells

  Maybe the geography was a hint from the Lord. Truth be told, I treat my sink like a sacred shrine in my home. I scrub. I polish. I disinfect. I wipe it out with a soft towel every single time I use it, buffing away every last droplet to avoid leaving even the tiniest water mark. In fact, if I’m willing to be honest with myself, I must admit that I’m possibly guilty of sink worship.

  The sad truth is, if I paid as much attention to my soul as I do my sink, I’d probably be a whole lot better off. My sink is pristine. My soul could use a can of Comet and some elbow grease.

  Whatever Peter Terry’s reason for choosing a plumbed hunk of porcelain to torment me, it was working. I stood there staring at the sink from across the room, positively exploding inside at the thought of a nasty, venomous serpent coiled up behind those cabinet doors, settled in and comfy among my cleaning products.

  I couldn’t decide whether to vomit or run. Probably I should have done both—in reverse order.

  What I did instead was both monumentally stupid and uncharacteristically optimistic. I stalked to the pantry, grabbed a broom, and marched back to the sink.

  I realize a broom might seem like an unusual weapon of choice. A shovel or, as Randy the rodent man had aptly suggested, a garden hoe would certainly have been more effective. But I have a long-held secret belief in the power of brooms. Not in the witch-transportation sense, of course. In the consecration sense. If you can sweep something, you can make it better. This is a cornerstone of my obsessive-compulsive philosophy.

  Of course, you cannot sweep up a snake. Shoo it, possibly. Poke it, perhaps. But my guess is that if a rattlesnake finds himself in a fight with the business end of a broom, the moron on the other end of the stick would have a fifty–fifty chance, at best. Nevertheless, there I was, clutching my broom, staking my claim.

  I flung the cabinet doors open, jumping backward into the kitchen and assuming a martial-arts stance I’d seen in all those female-warrior movies.

  The buzzing stopped as soon as the doors swung open. The silence was downright creepy.

  Now, anyone even passably familiar with rattlers knows that snakes are not like crickets, who become silent when threatened and wait politely for you to go away. An angry rattler is a loud rattler. The rattling, then, should have intensified when the doors flew open. Not stopped.

  I watched for movement, peering into the cabinet from a nice, safe distance, broom poised and ready.

  Nothing happened.

  As I stared into the space under the sink, it gradually began to dawn on me that there was no room under there for a snake. I’d envisioned a monster of a serpent, its coiled form roughly the size of one of my truck tires. My vision, I realize, was perhaps a teeny bit exaggerated. Even paring that down significantly, however, there was simply not enough space under my sink to accommodate a reptile of any kind. There were just too many cleaning products in there. The bottles and boxes were all still standing upright (labels forward, sorted by purpose and frequency of use). Not one of them had been disturbed.

  My heart still pounding, I tightened my grip on the broom and moved closer, squinting to see inside the cabinet, until I was squatting between the open doors, mentally dividing the territory into grids and searching systematically for scales, a rattle, fangs—anything reptilian at all. I jabbed the broom into the cabinet and knocked over a bottle of Soft Scrub with Bleach (lemon scented, of course), which started a little bowling-pin chain reaction.

  I waited. Still no movement. My confidence growing, I began pulling everything out of there, piece by piece—Brillo pads, Comet, Pine-Sol, Pledge. I poked my head inside the now-empty cabinet and looked up at the underside of the sink, then carefully inspected the piping and the corresponding holes in the wood. I’d sealed off all the openings last winter after the rat incident. There was no way anything could have gotten in and out of the cabinet without going through the cabinet doors, and those had been firmly closed. I sat back on my heels.

  There was indeed no snake under the sink.

  Maybe the sound had somehow been misdirected. Or had I imagined it? What if the whole thing was a big, fat bluff?

  Somehow, this last thought triggered more ire than relief.

  I replaced the cleaning products, first scrubbing the entire interior of the cabinet with Murphy Oil Soap and then wiping each bottle with a damp towel before I placed it carefully in the appropriate order. Then I opened the rest of the floor-level cabinets and drawers, one by one, fishing around inside each one with my broom handle, knowing even as I did it that there would be no snake there. Finally, I reached on top of the stove for my egg timer, turned the dial, then shut it inside the cabinet and listened to the tick. It was muffled and local. Definitely coming from under the sink, behind the cabinet doors. There was no way the rattling sound had somehow been projected from elsewhere.

  The timer dinged like a game-show bell.

  The rabbits had scuttled into the bedroom when they heard the rattle but had eventually hopped back into the kitchen. I sat down cross-legged on the floor, chin in my hand, eyebrows furrowed. Both bunnies hopped into my lap and snuggled in. They were clearly shaken and seemed to possess a misguided confidence that I could protect them.

  I petted the bunnies and pondered the situation. Which was worse, I wondered—a real snake or some kind of creepo spiritual manifestation? I almost preferred the real thing. At least a flesh-and-blood snake could be trapped and removed. With the Peter Terry version, I could be up against something else entirely.

  Which brought me back to the issue of Peter Terry extermination. It was time to address this problem once and for all.

  Now, I realize that to most Jesus people like me, anyway, the obvious solution to such a dilemma would be to pray. At least that’s the scuttlebutt. But the truth is, I’d done plenty of praying over the past two years about this very thing, and it had gotten me exactly nowhere. Was I praying incorrectly? Without the appropriate surge of faith? Maybe the high-church types were right. Maybe I should be kneeling on a hard floor under stained-glass saints instead of tossing up desperation passes while driving around in a ’72 Ford pickup with muffler problems. Would it help to enlist allies? Should I be taking advantage of the thoughtfully provided little golf pencils and begin submitting items on the prayer request cards at church?

  My worst fear, of course, was that God had decided that I could use the kind of spanking only a being like Peter Terry could deliver. If that were the case, I was doomed. Straightening up my life or begging for mercy wouldn’t do me a bit of good.

  I found my Bible and squinted at the concordance in the back. After checking every New Testament passage about demons—there are hardly any in the Old Testament, it turns out—I concluded that life reconstruction was not the answer for this particular predicament. Plenty of nice, decent people in the Bible were targeted by the dark side. They didn’t do anything spectacular to deserve it, any more than the ones picked for the good stuff deserved their fate. Lucky and unlucky alike were picked because they got picked, and that was that.

  I did not find this to be heartening news. I sat there for a while, staring at stubborn pages of maddeningly small print and growing more irritable by the minute, until finally I realized it was time to employ my secret weapon. The ultimate solution. It was time to go to the library.

  Like all academics, I hold a deep reverence for thick, wordy books, for charts and tables and graphs and indexes. A thorough search of the literature, a posited idea, a series of incisive, illuminating questions, and a serious effort to amalgamate the information should propel me forward—or at least help me make some real progress.

  If the answers are not at Elliott’s or in the Bible, then they are at the library. It’s a fact.

  I tucked the rabbits into their hutches, securing the screen lids over the aquarium tops to protect them from the lurking serpent—in case it did happen to be the live, rabbit-eating variety. Then I got in my truck and headed out to SMU. I stopped at Elliott’s on the way and t
alked to the man about the surefire Snake Guard Snake Trap, just to hedge my bets. I took one look at the thing and experienced a crushing wave of nausea, followed by a surge of second thoughts.

  “I didn’t know it was a glue trap,” I said.

  “Only thing for the job. They crawl right on in there and they’re caught ’fore they know it.”

  I gulped. “I had a bad experience with a glue trap once.”

  “Get yourself stuck to a rattrap or something?”

  “No, the rat did.” I tried to scrub my brain of the image.

  “That would be the point, ma’am.”

  “It’s so inhumane.”

  He raised a finger. “Ah. You don’t actually want to kill the snake. You want to spare the sucker so it can bother someone else someday.”

  “Correct.”

  “How’s your nerve?”

  “How do you mean?”

  “Well, you do have an option with a glue trap. A humane option. But most people are too scared of snakes to give it a shot.”

  “What is it?”

  “Cooking oil,” he said triumphantly.

  “Pardon?”

  “Cooking oil. I recommend corn oil. Or canola is good. Snake crawls in the trap, right? He sticks to the glue, you find him in the morning, you close up the box, right? Then you throw the whole thing in your trunk and drive on out to the Trinity River bottom and open up the box.”

  “And just leave?”

  “No, see, you take the bottle of cooking oil out there with you. You open the box, you douse the snake with cooking oil—oil loosens the glue. Few hours or so, and he’ll be good as new.”

  “You’re kidding.”

  “I never kid about varmints, ma’am.”

  “Okay. I’ll take five.”

  He raised his eyebrows.

  I aimed my best and friendliest “don’t say anything” smile at him. “And did you say something about snake repellent?”

  “Follow me.” He gestured.

  I trotted behind him to aisle nineteen. He stopped and picked up a plastic jar, whirled around, and handed it to me like it was a prize. “Snake-A-Way reptile repellent. One hundred percent effective and EPA approved. Keep ’em off your property for good.”

  “One application?”

  “It’s best to reapply every few months.”

  “And that’ll do it?”

  “Should do the trick, ma’am.”

  I pointed at the plastic container he held in his hand. It was about the size of a supersized Dr Pepper from McDonald’s. “That doesn’t seem like very much.”

  He squinted at the label. “One-point-seven pounds.”

  “Does it come in a bigger size?”

  “It just takes a sprinkle or two, ma’am. This should hold you for a year or so.”

  “But it does come in larger amounts?”

  “Up to twenty-eight pounds, ma’am.”

  “Great. I’ll take one of those.”

  “Now, that’s gonna run you a hundred nineteen dollars plus tax. Not including the price of the traps.”

  “Sold.”

  He pushed his hat back. “You got a lot of property?”

  “Nope. Just a lot of fear.”

  He walked me to the checkout stand and scanned the items, then loaded them into my truck as the checker took my credit card. Poor as I am, I smiled as I signed the receipt. Small price to pay to protect my home from serpents into perpetuity. Who knew it would be so easy?

  If only Elliott’s carried glue traps for demons. I’d happily let Peter Terry squirm and moan in that stinky brown mess of glue. No corn oil for him. Gasoline, maybe. And a match.

  I slid behind the wheel and resumed my pilgrimage to the promised land, hitting only a brief little snag as I tried to figure out which library to go to. Fondren Science seemed the obvious choice. All the good snake information would be there, certainly. But I ended up at Bridwell instead, all the way down campus in the theology school. If I was dealing with Peter Terry and his minions, I was going to need more than a scientific understanding of vipers.

  A quick scan of the literature showed reams of material—most of it addressing the usual snake lore. Garden of Eden. Satan dressing up as a serpent and leading Eve around by the nose. God showing up and grounding His kids, then cursing the snake to a lifetime on its belly for leading them astray. Jesus’s mission to stomp the snake under His heel and rescue us all.

  Then there was all the mythical stuff. Once again, the dearth of comparative religion in my theology training nearly skunked me. Four years of sod-busting in seminary had taught me exactly nothing more than what I already knew—in grander proportions, of course, and to near-microscopic levels of minutia. In the end, I got out of there with a solid hermeneutical method, an encyclopedic understanding of dispensational theology, and the ability to conjugate verbs and deconstruct participles in Greek and Hebrew—all notable skills—but without even passable knowledge of anything outside one extremely narrow strip of theological territory.

  When it was all said and done, I’d spent four years and a trainload of money to get indoctrinated, not educated. Lousy planning, if you ask me.

  I spent several hours poring over basic texts on various world religions, simply to get my bearings. When I finally dug in, I found snakes were crawling all over every single one of them. Aside from the odd snake deity, most of the ancient religions—Greek, Roman, Egyptian, Hindu, Chinese, Muslim—held snakes in extremely low esteem. In fact, just about everyone loathed the little monsters. Unfortunately, no one seemed to have any useful hints for getting rid of them.

  I was deep in the middle of the Egyptian Middle Kingdom when my phone rang and jolted me back to my library table and my stacks of books. A beam of sunshine had crawled across the table, lighting up the dust in the air and warming the pages under my fingers. I dug in my bag, avoiding the angry stare of the theology student studying next to me, and checked the caller ID. “Helene?” I whispered, shooting a fake apologetic smile at my accuser. “What’s up?”

  “Are you in the middle of something?” Her voice was tight. She sounded jumpy.

  “Sort of. Why?”

  “I just got a call from Lew Sterrett.”

  “The jail?”

  “Yes, the jail. Of course, the jail. What other Lew Sterrett is there?”

  “What did they want?”

  “Parkland had them call. He’d listed me as next of kin.”

  “What? Who?”

  “John Mulvaney. Who else do you know in Lew Sterrett?”

  I felt my skin prickle, the air around me chilling, a familiar sense of dread sneaking its way up my spine.

  “Why are they trying to get in touch with John Mulvaney’s next of kin?”

  “Because he tried to kill himself last night.”

  20

  JOHN MULVANEY HAD FINISHED his evening meal, complete with an extra helping of tapioca pudding, then taken off his jail coveralls and tied the pants around his neck, twisting them so tightly he eventually passed out naked on the concrete floor of his jail cell. As soon as he lost consciousness, of course, his grip had loosened, leaving him with a plum-colored bruise on his neck but very much alive. Why he thought he’d die rather than pass out eludes me. But, of course, that’s not the point. The point is that he wanted to check out in the first place.

  I hung up the phone and put my head in my hands. In spite of myself, I felt profoundly sad for him. A drop of water plopped onto the page I’d been reading. I looked up, thinking maybe condensation was dripping from the air-conditioning vent, then back down at the page. It took me a second to realize it was a tear. My tear. I’d reached a new low. Crying (in public, no less) over John Mulvaney. What had I become?

  I sat there awhile, watching the sunbeam move across the table, trying unsuccessfully to pull myself together so I could finish my research. But too much live-action information was squirming around in my head to allow me to concentrate on the canned kind.

  I noted the page i
n the book I’d been working on, scribbled out a quick summary of my findings, shoved my notebook in my bag, and left.

  John Mulvaney had tried to kill himself. Why? Was it relevant to the rest of this mess or just a sick coincidence? I couldn’t knit any of it together. It just didn’t fit.

  I slammed the truck door, started the engine, shuddered, and said out loud, “Will somebody please tell me what’s going on? None of it makes any sense.” I half expected my phone to ring with the answer, but of course it doesn’t work that way.

  I turned on the radio to keep myself company and got nothing but static. I twisted the knob, my temper rising with each mark on the AM dial. I finally stuck my head out the window at a traffic light and discovered that my luck was indeed holding. Someone had broken off my antenna. I cursed and clicked the radio off.

  As my truck squeaked and moaned, navigating the potholed streets of Harry Hines Boulevard, I took a mental inventory. I needed a new set of shocks, a tune-up, a can of WD-40, and now an antenna.

  So, for that matter, did my truck.

  I parked in a crummy, tight spot, smack in the hot sunshine, under a ledge populated by a half-dozen fat pigeons. They squabbled for space on the cramped ledge, then settled in and stared at me. I could just feel them eying my hood. I glared back at them for a minute, longing for my childhood BB gun. I needed to blow something away right about now. A flying rat who was preparing to poop on my truck seemed to me to be a perfect candidate.

  My shoulders began to tense up as I started the hot trek across the asphalt. We’d all spent too much time at this hospital. I submitted yet another request to the Almighty to release Christine today.

  Cold air laced with the foul industrial smells of floor wax and disinfectant blew out of the lobby doors as they slid open, pushing my hair back with a whoosh. I pressed the button for the elevator, then crowded in with the rest of the forlorn parents and friends and stared at the numbers until it was my turn to get off.