The Snake Oil Wars

by Parke Godwin

  Time passed, Lance shivered in his blanket, jerking in revulsion when a transient rat nuzzled at his leg, John the Baptist did not have to put up with rats. Lance fastidiously deleted rodents from his picturesque suffering but left the water-drip for atmosphere.

  The bolt withdrew from the door with a hollow clang; the portal groaned open on rusty hinges. A smallish man in a dun monk’s robe entered, nodding pleasantly to Lance.

  “I am Wyclif, sir. To look after you. How are you getting on?”

  Lance regarded him out of a sea of suffering, “Are you a Christian?”

  “I am, sir. They presumed you would want one. But this place...” Wyclif took in the verminous cell. “Excessively of my era. You might at least have imagined the Tower.”

  “Are you born again?”

  “Once was enough in my time.” Wyclif’s smile was gentle but wry. “I translated the first English Bible. To Rome, that was a sufficing Protestantism.”

  Lance’s historical perspective was landlocked by Technicolor movies, “The King James Bible?”

  “Oh, goodfellow, centuries before that. Edward and the Church barely forgave me. But there is news: be of good cheer. Even now, well in advance of trial, puissant counsel flies to your defense. One Peter Helm by name.”

  Puissant sounded suspiciously foreign to Lance.

  “Strong,” the mild little cleric clarified, “Formidable: an excellent term for Master Helm. Not warm, not a merry man, sooth, but impressive. He will come anon”

  Lance was not very reassured, “The Devil will find someone just as strong for his side.”

  Not yet, Wyclif warranted. Many had volunteered for defense before Master Helm was chosen, whereas not one tattergowned haunter of shire courts could be found to prosecute. “Meanwhile there has come a visitor for you. A woman.”

  Lance brightened. He got up quickly, hoping. “My wife?”

  Wyclif looked dubious, “If your wife wears trews like unto the skin of a leopard and hair of a shade to beggar description, well she may be.” He withdrew, leaving the door open. “I will admit her.”

  He did. Lance stared openmouthed at his visitor, The electric pink hair riveted him; he had seen her before and not long ago. Revelations was more forgettable.

  “Hey, Lance,” she confided breathily. “Activism turns me on,”

  The prisoner was an innocent. “Are you a tempter?”

  “Me? No way.” She peeked carefully around the cell door. “Unless you want some good shit.”

  “Uh...?”

  “Grass. Great stuff, no stems or seeds.”

  “No, thank you. I don’t smoke.”

  “Hey, neither do I. Cigarettes are carcinogenic.”

  “Uh-who are you?”

  “Scheherazade Ginsberg – this month anyway My horoscope and biorhythms always tell me when to change. You’re the most relevant activist I’ve met since the Weathermen. Kee-fucking-rist.” The T-shirted wraith hugged her thin frame, shivering, “It’s cold in here. Can I sit down?”

  Scheherazade curled up on the cot, sneakered feet tucked under her. Her manner was intense and darting, like a streetwise squirrel or some small nocturnal forager ready to jump at sudden danger, but otherwise intent on the business of survival. She jittered with the cold. Lance draped his blanket around her bony shoulders; she appreciated the courtesy more than the malodorous blanket.

  “Hey, man – can I call you Lance? – why do you have to stay in this dump? I’ve hit some crummy crash pads, but this is the definite pits.”

  “This is the mirror of my spirit,” Lance muttered hollowly, “The way I feel.”

  “It’s a downer, This is the tenth door of the Hilton Hereafter, full of Christians and saints and people like that,” she protested with an unbelieving survey of the walls, “but the other pads got it all over this.”

  “A martyr’s suffering is internal.”

  “Oh, that is so true, Lance. Your principles really turn me on. What’s your sign? What day were you born”

  “November ninth”

  “I knew it!” she yipped. “Scorpio! Me too. Scorpio men are the sexual most. Especially now when I’m into my hetero phase. What a rush. You don’t mind if I feel a little horny along with respecting your principles?”

  Long sojourner in a sexual wasteland, Lance didn’t mind at all, though her language brought an involuntary blush. Scheherazade’s moot charms trebled with the added spice of availability, but... there were proprieties. “Look, Miss —”

  “Ginsberg, And it’s Ms. Miss is sexist.”

  “What I wanted to say, I’m married.”

  Scheherazade was unfazed. “Honor is a trip in men of our sign.”

  “Sign,” With a dawning sense of sexual rescue came recollection, “You were there when they took me in. You hit somebody with a sign.”

  The pink hair bobbed in vigorous affirmation, “I’m an activist.”

  “They arrested you too.”

  “Nah, that kind of bust is Kleenex. I got a grcat lawyer used to be with ACLU. He got scragged by the Klan in ’68, same time as me.”

  In all his limited experience with women, Lance had never confronted anyone like her; certainly not in Neosho Falls. “The Klan killed you?”

  “No, just I died that same year. Which was a very heavy year for protest, lemme tell you,” And she did. She held vigils, got blisters and then calluses carrying signs, busted three times for possession and once for obstructing a public sidewalk, but these were only prelude to greatness. When a nuclear reactor was built and the tapering towers almost finished, Scheherazade was called to glory.

  “You gotta see it.” She bounded of the cot, blanket flapping around her, “I mean if you want to be significant, if you want to count, you gotta do something, right?”

  “Right,” said Lance, losing himself in her charisma.

  “Like you did for the President, I climbed up on that scaffolding at four in the morning, like in the real dark night of the soul, and was it ever’ Splinters, you wouldn’t believe. And when the sun came up, and those mothers came to finish the reactor, there I was —”

  Her glory built with symphonic excitement. Lance couldn’t tear his eyes from her.

  “— with TEN COTTONPICKING STICKS OF TNT WRAPPED AROUND ME!”

  “Ohmigod! Where’d you get —?”

  “Guerrillas network.” She slighted the question with professional cool. “We get. You need an Uzi? Anyway, there I am, ready to sacrifice myself for a safe America.”

  “Scheherazade —”

  “Call me Sherry.”

  “What you were doing, that’s against the law.”

  “Not the people’s law, man. There I am in a dynamite bra, giving the finger to the pigs down below who can’t get to me because I sawed off the scaffold, and they’re bullhorning up at me: COME DOWN AT ONCE. LEAVE THE DEVICE ON THE STEPS AND COME DOWN! And me, I didn’t say a word, just —”

  Her thin arms opened beyond the cell to the unlimited vistas of freedom. The blanket fell from her nobby frame like frail mortality surrendering the spirit of Joan at Rouen, “Just opened my arms and let the leaflets float on the wind. Beautiful meaningful poems of peace and protest, snowflakes of significance falling and falling on the shit of corruption. Man – terminal joy.”

  Lance had to rise, had to go to her with the blanket to cover again her brave shoulders. “You died for what you believed in. You died for a cause.”

  “No.” Scheherazade confessed in the small voice of a disappointed mouse. “A downer. Like making it all night and not being able to come”

  As stated, Lance was a blusher, “Well,.. what happened?”

  “I forgot the matches. Not one fucking light. Lance, can you relate to how I felt?”

  Lance searched for some consolation. “I always say it’s the thought that counts.”

  The pigs hassled her for that, she explained, but she looked fabulous on TV for a couple of days and even greater when her lawyer got her out on a technicality
and she went back to New York to link up with the Weathermen.

  “The who?”

  Scheherazade couldn’t believe he didn’t know. “You are so historically deprived. You don’t remember the Weathermen in 1968?”

  “I was eight,” he defended himself. “I didn’t even go to the movies by myself in 1968.”

  The Weathermen, Scheherazade informed him in institutional tones, were the activists of that turbulent time, “But they needed a good hand with explosives because now and then they blew themselves up.”

  Lance was aghast. “Oh, Sherry. Is that –? You didn’t deserve to die like that”

  “I didn’t,” she denied with a note of annoyance, “It isn’t relevant how I died.”

  Lance found her hand and held on tight. “It is to me. You were a friend to come and see me. Will you tell a friend?”

  “Well... I never told a single soul about this. I got this pad in the East Village. Not much better than this place, You really oughta think something better like soon – and next day I’m to meet with a Weather connection on First Avenue. A real fox, I heard, and I was just in the right phase for her, so I decided to dye my hair symbolically,” She lowered her eyes in embarrassment.

  “This is a real bummer, Promise me you won’t laugh.”

  “I wouldn’t. I swear.”

  “So I’m in the bathtub with the radio on the edge, just a little spaced, grooving on the Stones. And the radio fell in the water.”

  The implication sank in; Lance winced. “You mean —”

  “My biorhythms are very sensitive to electricity.”

  A heavy iron key turned in the rusty lock, Wyclif peered around the door. “Time, good lady. Master Candor’s counsel will be here soon.”

  “No, please,” Lance protested, “She’s the only visitor I’ve had.”

  “Alas. A few minutes more then.” Wyclif obligingly withdrew.

  Scheherazade mewed in sympathy, “You mean your own wife hasn’t been to see you?”

  “She’s been very busy with my appeals and... and things like that.” Though Lance knew with some bitterness that these efforts would be mostly spent at Letti’s makeup table. She would not look tacky making an appeal. Quickly Scheherazade moved close to comfort the forlorn prisoner.

  “Don’t lose hope, baby. Being a hero is fraught with danger. You blow up a god, you have to expect a few bad vibes.”

  “Hope. I did what I had to. But why is it all so lonely?”

  “You’re not alone,” Scheherazade urged. “You’re meaningful.”

  But what if his case was lost, what of the disgrace? Not one of his ancestors had ever been Below Stairs, not even to visit. Letti wouldn’t feel right going there to see him even for a day. The Condors were respected among the Blessed Elect of Kansas, except for one great-uncle who strayed and became a Christian Scientist. “I stood for my principles as much as any Christian, but no one’s come to see me. Just you.”

  “Baby, baby,” Scheherazade crooned into his cheek. “You’re not alone. You’ve got me now. You’ll never walk alone.”

  Lance knuckled at his moist eyes and tried to smile bravely. “You’re a real person.”

  “I always turn to the classics for comfort.”

  “Like the Bible.”

  “And Shakespeare and music; heavy stuff like that. Listen.”

  As she began to recite, the mellow sound of a harp and soft strings warmed the gloom of Lance’s cell, and then sweet feminine voices. The melody and words were indeed a recognized classic.

  “As you walk through a storm, hold your head up high, and don’t be afraid of the dark.”

  “Yes,” he whispered, inspired in the very depths of despair, “So deep, so true.”

  “At the end of the storm is a golden sky and the sweet silver song of a lark.”

  Lance’s heart swelled with the music and reborn strength. “I’m so glad you know Shakespeare.”

  “Walk on through the wind —”

  “Yes, Sherry. Yes, I will!”

  “Walk on through the rain —”

  The orchestra billowed in a forte under her recitation and with it the chorus of clear young girls’ voices. Lance felt apotheosis had not after all been denied him.

  “— though your dreams be tossed and blown. Walk on, walk on, with hope in your heart —”

  “And you’ll never walk alone.” Lance’s hope soared with the dulcet chorus, “You’ll never walk alone.”

  “The wisdom of the ages, Lance.”

  “Oh, Sherry.” He hugged her close to him, ratty blanket and all. “Letti would never understand anything so deep or tender or real.”

  They clung together in a sweet miasma of strings and French horns. Lance’s eyes closed tight to shut out the trial and Letti, all but the moment and this truth in his arms as the gorgeous music faded.

  “Sherry?”

  “Mm,?”

  “What’s a hetero phase?”

  “Never mind, Lance,” she whispered, content. “It’s now.”

  6

  Light Speed

  Scheherazade had seriously argued with Lance to redecorate his idea of a cell before she came again because even the Jesus freaks next floor up had swinging pads. Nevertheless he clung out of principle to the medieval ambience, modifying only the excessive damp.

  Wyclif said his lawyer would come anon, which Lance learned meant later on. He was glad he’d eased up on the damp. As promised, Peter Helm came anon, bringing his own cold with him. He did not offer his hand. Lance felt the man avoided human contact, He sensed an intimidating power of will in Helm’s small frame, like a V-8 engine in a Volkswagen. A more precise observer would note that the ascetic cast of features did not quite go with the modern gray suit and vest. Helm’s was not a face or expression one found in this century. He glanced in passing at his client before surveying the stone cell with open disapproval.

  “Forget this. Distracting and unnecessary.”

  With no deference to the prisoner, Helm altered the space to half-timbered plaster walls with an open mullioned window. A dark wood table appeared with two severe chairs. The result was tidier, but Lance had often felt the same coldness and apprehension in a dentist’s waiting room.

  “Sit down, Candor”

  “I guess you’re my lawyer. Did Letti pick you out?”

  Helm paused in donning a pair of steel-rimmed spectacles austere as the rest of him. “Who is Letti?”

  “My wife.”

  “Indeed? No,” said Helm in a tone tinged with reproof. “I was retained by those with your best interests at heart. I requested this case – which we will now consider and win for the greater glory of God.” Spoken not for encouragement but as fact cold and objective as the delicate little barrister himself. “That woman who came, that was your wife?”

  “No, she’s a friend. A revolutionary, she said.”

  “Let her revolve elsewhere,” Helm decreed. “You will not admit her again.”

  As with his every utterance, Helm’s instructions did not invite argument. For all that, Scheherazade had touched and left Lance with some reckless germ of defiance. He didn’t even apologize to God for the uncharacteristic profanity. The hell I won’t. Just who are you anyway...?

  A good question. The man currently known as Peter Helm believed in the Elect of God more deeply than his client could ever hope to. Better educated even in his own century, the liberation from Rome only unleashed the northern darkness of his soul. Without the buffer of an orthodox clergy, God impacted on Helm’s passionate soul like a heavy stone in soft clay. The direct spiritual descendant of the Manicheans, he saw God as iron, the world filth, men weak vessels and their evil part and parcel with the good. The damned were legion, the Elect few and already numbered. Only an absolute theocracy was acceptable to the God of Peter Helm; only absolutes in every smallest moment of life, awake or asleep, were safeguards for men.

  Lance might have seen that thin scholar’s face in any comprehensive encyclopedia. The
surviving likeness in pen and ink catches him with eyes downcast to one side as if communing with some tender poetic thought. The Protestant equivalent of the inquisition, the first to commandeer the right to search into the undusted corners of private lives, proclaiming no man free from God’s scrutiny as it Barred in those ironically sensitive eyes. The irony was deeper than Lance would ever grasp. No sower ever planted a bitterer or more tenacious seed in Europe or early America – but then even Nazis thought their causes noble. Another bookish little pedant, Heinrich Himmler, said during a visit to a concentration camp: “To be able to kill like this and remain decent, undeterred from the pure end...”

  None would have understood or agreed so quickly as the man called Helm.

  The vast emptiness of the Void crushed the frail individuality of post-We humans. They crossed it only out of necessity. Few paused to admire the view. Only two men remained there by choice, though from dichotomous motives. Peter Helm and Joshua Speed.

  When Peter Helm tore loose from mortality, he expected no less than the City of God to which he had devoted the faith and efforts of a stringent lifetime. He found only Topside and Barion, mundane as the existence left behind. He remained just long enough to obliterate his name from Barion’s records. Helm was shaken. Where was the ordered cosmos in which he had invested his life? He had expected outer darkness as well as the Citadel of Faith. He found only Below Stairs, entered by stealth and left abruptly In the hell of his rock-ribbed faith, Helm had expected to find Martin Luther and a full compliment of Romish popes roasting together in eternal flame. He found a nebulous state more garish than Topside but as ordinary, with suffering only for those who briefly insisted on it, and an enormous amount of raucous enjoyment.

  Helm refused to believe in the reality of either establishment, They were devilish illusions, final tests of the spirit devised by God without Whom not even Satan could lift a finger. Helm departed again across the Void – rapidly at first, then more slowly as his mind cleared of confusion. The Void terrified him, so he must battle with his own fear. Like a desert, the emptiness could kill men unfit for it. He challenged the Void. Nothingness pressed in on him until his spirit felt constricted and crushed small as a pebble, or threatened to pluck him apart piece by piece. Helm fought both.