When she slept she dreamed that Shep and the snake were one in the same. That when Shep stood naked in front of her, the snake was where his penis was supposed to be. The snake hissed and curled around her like a boa constrictor, wrapping her from head to toe in its embrace, squeezing so tightly that she felt bones crushing, the breath being squashed in her lungs. Shep smiled his best smile and asked if there was anything she wanted. She tried to ask for help, to tell him that she was dying, but the words that came out were in a language she did not understand.
When she awoke it was daylight. She realized Shep had not come.
Sandra showered, washed her hair, but did not set it or even blow it dry. She left it tangled and clumped to do as it pleased. It seemed futile. She packed her suitcase, the new clothes now dull and drab. She knew she would never wear them again. She thought about the long drive back to her house, which struck her more like a tomb than a home. She did not think she could bear to go back. Then she remembered the gun in her handbag. She got it out, held it, studied it. She thought how painless it would be—like the bump on her head really. Had she felt that when she hit the floor? No. It was only afterward when she woke up that the pain set in. This would be just like that, except there would be no after.
She knew not to take too long, that too much thought would destroy that part of her that was acting on instinct, on impulse. She knew the best way was to simply put the gun in her mouth, like a child sucking its thumb, and pull the trigger. Pointing it at the side of the head was clumsy—often people did not die right away like that if they died at all. She had seen a report on Hard Copy where a teenager had survived a gunshot wound to his temple with the bullet still lodged smack in the center of his brain. They had interviewed him. He had trouble coordinating his eyes and his speech was slightly slurred, but he still functioned well enough to show the camera an X-ray. He then pointed to his head, and said, “In there,” like the bullet was a key to a door he had forgotten how to open. No, she reckoned putting the gun to the side of the head was used only for dramatic effect in the movies. Putting it anywhere else except inside the mouth where the shot would lift her brain up through the top of her skull might only result in injury, disfigurement, or disability.
So, that was decided. In the mouth. Quick. One. Two. Three. And then it would be over.
There was a knock at the door. Sandra thought the maids were probably coming to clean the room. She smiled to herself. Just give me a minute and then you’ll really have something to clean up.
Two more knocks. Then a voice. “Mrs. Maxwell, are you still there?”
She knew that voice. It was as familiar to her as her own heartbeat. It was Shep. Sandra laid the gun gently on top of the dresser and unlocked the door.
There, he stood. Shep Waters. Her Shep.
“Mrs. Maxwell?”
“Yes, I prefer Sandra.” She squinted her eyes against the morning sun. She moved so he blocked the light from her, so that she stood in his shadow. As her eyes readjusted, his silhouette loomed over her, framed against the bright open sky.
“I went to check on you at the infirmary last night after the service,” he said. “I wanted to make sure you were all right. But they told me you had left.”
“I wanted to get home. I was expecting someone,” she said.
“How are you feeling now?” She noticed he wasn’t wearing his blue slacks and white shirt and necktie. Instead, he had on a pair of old jeans and a pullover shirt that fit him too tight across the chest and around his arms. She could smell a mixture of aftershave and deodorant soap. It was the way Carson would smell when he had just showered and was ready to go to town.
“My head hurts some. Would you like to come in?”
“The Lord must have given you a powerful whack,” he said. “I was afraid you might have a concussion.” She closed the door behind him and slipped the security bolt into place. “I prayed for you last night when I couldn’t find you, and then this morning when I was packing up, I found the note you left me.” He pulled the envelope from his back pocket and held it out toward her. The note was creased where it had been folded over and casually stuffed into his pocket. The note she had so carefully crafted, delicately perfumed, sealed with a kiss. She imagined her scent mingled with his just as Mary Magdalene’s did with Jesus’ when she washed the Lord’s grimy feet with her tears, dried them with her hair.
Sandra studied him. Now that he was up close, away from the auditorium, Shep didn’t put off any light like before. He seemed oddly human. She wondered if he had brought the snake with him. She thought of her dream and how Shep and the snake were one. She imagined he could have it hidden, wrapped around his waist, or maybe bunched up in his crotch, ready to spring out at her like a Jack in the box.
“I won’t keep you,” he said. “I just wanted to see if you were okay. And in the note . . .”
“Yes,” said Sandra, trying to recall what she had said in it.
“You wrote that you wanted to make a donation.”
“A donation,” Sandra repeated.
“You said you had written a check.”
“The note also said one night only. Did you read that part?”
“God’s work knows no season, no time,” he said. “And the Lord has put it on your heart to help us. That is what we are here to do, isn’t it? Serve the Lord and help each other out? You said you wanted to talk to me about some personal things. What can I do for you, Sister Sandra? What is on your heart? What is it you need?”
Sandra thought of all she longed to tell him. How lonely she had been when Carson had died, how Shep had saved her life, had given her purpose. How she wanted him to take her in his arms, to lay her across the bed, to shower her body with his kisses, to melt into her. Then she remembered the snake. How the snake had been attached to Shep. That instead of caressing her, stroking her, Shep only wanted to feed her to the snake. She picked up the gun from the dresser and pointed it at Shep.
“I know why you’ve come here,” she said. “God showed me the snake. Showed me how you planned to use it against me. To hurt me.”
“I am not here to hurt you,” he said. She could see that he was lying. She could see the snake twist and turn down his pants leg.
“I need you to take off your pants,” she said.
His face flushed with color. “Sister,” he said, “we shouldn’t even joke like that.”
“I’m pointing a gun at you,” she replied. “And I’m not joking. Take off your pants. I want you to show me.”
“I am a married man,” he said. “I have a wife at home in Sumter—we are going to have a baby in four months.”
His voice had lost its confidence, its edge. He sounded like a schoolboy. She was struck how young he had become in the daytime. Shep. With his beautiful wife and bouncing baby on the way. “You should have thought about that before,” she said. “Take your pants off—now.”
“No, ma’am,” he said. “I won’t do that. You can keep your money if you want. I am going to leave here. I got the shield of God protecting me. You can’t hurt me.” With that, he turned toward the door.
The first bullet blew a chunk off his shoulder and spun him around hard like a puppet on a string. The second bullet hit him just above his left eye and his whole face seemed to crumble behind it, as if it were chasing the bullet to a secret, faraway place. Standing over him as he lay on the floor, Sandra held the gun tightly, hand shaking as she undid his trousers, ready to kill the serpent. But it was not there. She searched frantically for it on her hands and knees throughout the room, but it was no use. The snake had eluded her, escaped.
Sandra picked up the note from where it had fallen and tucked it into her suitcase along with the gun. A thick, gloomy stain spread across the plush pile carpet. She understood if Shep had waited only a few minutes it would have been her blood instead of his. God’s hand, however, had intervened, saved her. But for what? If she was ordained to kill the snake, she had failed. The snake was still loose.
> Stepping over Shep like she would a pile of soiled, rumpled laundry, Sandra placed the DO NOT DISTURB sign on the outside knob of the motel room door. No one had even come outside to see what the noise was, probably thought the gunshot only the backfiring of a redneck’s car. She walked calmly down the steps—a single woman with a suitcase, nothing more—then got into her car and drove away.
3
What was next? She had to plan carefully. Without a plan the only other option seemed uncontrollable, unending screaming. She had killed Shep Waters, shot him, left him lying on the floor of the Ramada Inn in a pool of his own blood. People would not understand that she was acting as God’s instrument. They would hold her responsible. In a movie this is where she would start to run, take it on the lam. She imagined herself like Janet Leigh in Psycho, after she had taken the $40,000, tainted in her black slip, a shady lady. Wary. Watchful.
So she began to drive and drive and drive. On the way out of Greensboro, she stopped at a bank and withdrew most of the cash from her savings account. She told them her husband had suffered a stroke (she even had Carson’s ring to show them as evidence). She told them he did not believe in using credit cards. That much was true. Carson had ingrained in her the merits of cash-only transactions, which is how she had paid the Ramada Inn. No credit card to trace her. Just her last name and an initial on the registration slip. Her address was a rural box number. And as usual, she had not remembered her license plate number so she had left that space blank. She wondered briefly if it all had not been a foreshadowing. God works in mysterious ways His wonders to perform. They let her withdraw the money with no questions. The teller had even patted her on the arm and said she would pray for her.
As she drove, she imagined herself poised high above the car watching as it zigzagged a cobweb of highways and back roads. When she stopped to sleep, she ignored the major chain motor inns along the highway and stayed only in the second best motels—lost, lonely places on the outskirts of town. In those places they did not request ID, and cash in advance was always appreciated by the weary desk clerk who she was sure pocketed the money and tore up the registration. Even so, she was careful not to give herself away and concocted exotic aliases for herself, names like Marion or Delores or Yvonne. None seemed to suit her fancy, though. Each day she felt Sandra fade away just a tiny bit more.
Time moved like sunlight through water. She was aware of it only when she would catch the glimpse of a clock tower on a bank or when the news would announce three o’clock or six o’clock. Music distracted her and she would turn the radio on only for brief intervals when she thought about it, wondering if there was some news of Shep. It was on the third or fourth day when she finally heard the report that a popular television evangelist had been found shot to death in a motel room. They gave no details. They did not mention her name.
That night, when she had stopped driving, she listened to the TV news at 6:00 and at 10:00 and again at 11:00. Each time the report was roughly the same. A bleached-out video showed the Ramada Inn now festooned with yellow police tape across the parking lot, then an interview with the manager, pictures of Shep preaching, a wedding photo of him with the wife. Police were not sure why he was at the motel. He had left Brother Toby that morning and said nothing about going there. Brother Toby thought Shep had headed back straightaway to his wife in Sumter. No, he did not think sex or drugs were involved. Shep Waters was a good man, he loved the Lord. He loved his wife. Whoever had done this was a crazy person. Maybe a Satanist trying to stop the work of God that could never be stopped. Hallelujah!
She thought about Shep as he lay on the floor of the motel room, how he must have looked when they found him, his handsome face now pulp. She took out the note she had written to him, the note he had brought with him to the motel. Speckles of dark red flecked the pink paper like dried, crumbled rose petals. Clasping it like a sacred relic, she held it to her nose where she could still smell his aftershave impregnating the paper that she had scented with her own fragrance. The two smells intertwined—Old Spice meets L’Air du Temps.
That night she dreamed of Shep again. In the dream, he was hosting a show on the Home Shopping Network wearing a tight, shiny snakeskin suit; but when she looked a second time as he stepped through the TV screen, she couldn’t tell if it was truly a suit or simply his flesh. She only managed to view him with a quick backward glance, over her shoulder as she ran away from him. Then in front of her loomed a mountain, tall and craggy, dense with vegetation. She was trying to climb it wearing only her undergarments and high heels, and she could hear the stones chip beneath her shoes with loud cracks like limbs of trees breaking off. She would slip and scrape her skin against the boulders as she tried to scurry up over them, inching her way toward the top. When she looked down to check her wounds she was amazed to see she wasn’t bleeding. Instead, the rocks had merely loosened large translucent pieces of her flesh that lay scattered behind her like tissue paper.
What was at the top of the mountain she did not know. But she was desperate to get there, to reach it. She was acutely aware that the snake could hide in the small spaces between the rocks, ready to spring out at her at any time. And she knew she was making too much noise. It would only alert him to her—and there was no place to hide a weapon, dressed as she was. She felt absolutely vulnerable. She knew if she encountered the snake she would have to wrestle it, hold it in her hands and strangle it. Or it would kill her. Then as she pulled herself up over the top of one of the rocks, she saw it tangled and knotted with dozens, hundreds of other snakes, a kingdom of vipers. His kingdom. The snakes twisted and writhed, interlocked in a slow, solemn dance. She knew that they were mating, except as they copulated, the smaller snakes somehow merged, melded with the king. She watched helplessly as one by one they disappeared, as he grew larger and more hideous. Finally, when all the other snakes had been consumed, he rose up from the rock, towering over her, and struck.
When she woke, the room was deep with shadows. Sandra ripped open drawers, dumped her suitcase into the middle of the room, searching desperately for the snake, to make sure it wasn’t there. When she could not find it, she read in her Bible, she prostrated herself on the carpet in prayer, she pulled at her hair in hope for relief. But there was none. What was the dream trying to tell her? She was afraid to go back to sleep—afraid that the snake might return. She kept a vigilant watch all night.
Then in the morning, before she left to begin driving, she saw another TV news report about Shep. They showed everything she had already seen, but this time they highlighted parts of the state with stars showing where Shep had been born, where he had been killed. They interviewed a male cousin who looked remotely like Shep and who still lived there in Shep’s home town, Pison River Gap. High in the mountains where Shep had learned to love the Lord. Where Shep had told of old Brother Hiram who kept the snakes and brought them to church. Looking at the TV screen as the name blazed yellow on the emerald green map, Sandra knew that God was calling her there—to Pison River Gap.
It was early when she arrived. The morning sun had just cleared the crest of the highest ridge when she passed the Pison River Gap Chamber of Commerce welcome sign. A black wreath hung from the top of the sign.
Pison River Gap reminded Sandra of her own hometown, and the similarity saddened her. In her mind it seemed every town on her journey had become a composite, each main street virtually interchangeable with the next—a homogenized blend. Wal-Mart, Kentucky Fried Chicken, Hardee’s hamburgers, one, two, or three banks depending on the size and wealth of the population, the same rule governing both the number and denomination of churches. Though she had been driving for what felt like forever, where she had arrived seemed almost exactly like where she had left.
She stopped at the Huddle House for breakfast. She was too early for the regular coffee crowd, and the few construction workers who allowed themselves the luxury of a full breakfast instead of a drive-through sausage biscuit were just clearing out. She had the place a
lmost to herself. Sandra chose a booth in the rear and rummaged for a paper to see if there was any more news. The local paper, a weekly, had run a special edition that was little more than a memorial to Shep. The Asheville Citizen Times, however, featured the story on the bottom half of the front page. The details were still vague, but the investigators said they were following a strong lead. They were not revealing anything till they could be more definite, but they felt they would certainly solve the case and bring the murderer to justice. Sandra’s stomach tightened at the word. Murderer. Did that mean they thought it was a man? Wouldn’t they have said murderess if they were looking for a woman? Or was murderer just generic enough to make her relax until the net had dropped over her and she was caught in its snare.
“It breaks my heart.” Sandra looked up to the waitress, Darlene: small framed, pink polyester, tight gray perm. Run-of-the-mill hash house. Sandra took her to be well past fifty. She wondered what sad story had brought this woman to this point in her life. She was too old to be slinging pancakes and eggs, how her feet must ache at the end of each day while her derelict husband drank up all the tips at home sitting on his redneck ass.
“Yes, it’s tragic. I’ll have the Number Three, eggs over hard, bacon crisp, white toast, and coffee.” She did not want to engage this Darlene in conversation.
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