Snake Girl VS the KKK

by Peter Joseph Swanson

  “Most men my age are already potbellied and bald. I have defied age… so far.”

  Alex argued, “You’re not quite thirty yet. Shut up. How can you attract nice gay men that are socially appropriate? Why can’t you ever be socially appropriate? Maybe if you can start by cutting your hippie hair to look kind of now and maybe if you got a nice tan and wore tight shiny spandex…”

  Michael gasped in snobbery. “Spandex? And show everybody my gorgeous dimensions?” He pushed on the crotch of his jeans.

  “You do anyway. But this way it would be legal.”

  “Legal?”

  Alex asked, “Don’t you ever want to do something legal?”

  “The last time I was legal I was Snake Girl. I had to stop being human to get legal.”

  “And also, wear nice shirts—polo ones with a little alligator on it.” He laughed at that.

  “It looks so suburban that way!” Michael dramatically gasped.

  Alex said, “At least the mall rats aren’t out to kill us. The rednecks actually want to kill us.”

  “They want us dead in the suburbs too. Don’t delude yourself. I’ll leave suburbia where it is—far away. And we better keep our eye out for the rednecks.” Michael looked around. “If they caught us like this out here they’d kill us and toss us in the Mississippi and not think a bad thing of it.”

  Alex got up. “We shouldn’t be here, then.”

  “Sit back down.” Michael pointed at the driftwood. “Lucky for us a picnic at the sculpture park is too arty for them. And too gourmet.” He thumped the cheese cracker box. “Gourmet and highfalutin!”

  * * * * *

  Still slightly shaken from his reluctant stunts on the train and feeling guilty for such recklessness, Tony followed Lizzi. His father had once said, “It’s a wonder I survived childhood with all limbs intact.” Tony now knew what Dad had meant.

  “Shhh!” Lizzi alerted him. “Do you hear that? Wild dogs are near. I know it. I hope we aren’t ripped to pieces! I hope we don’t get rabies!” She grabbed his arm.

  He pulled away. “I don’t hear a thing. Don’t be dumb. It was probably just a dumb dog. People have dogs.”

  “They run away or are abandoned,” Lizzi warned mysteriously as if telling a ghost story. “Then they all pack up together and they aren’t afraid of nothing because they’ve once been pets… and they’ll tear you to shit.”

  “Whatever.” He watched her eye the bluffs behind them in a way that had him hoping she wouldn’t decide to climb one of them. “You know,” he warned, “those bluffs are filled with big black snakes.”

  “I know. Some of their dens are millions of years old.”

  “Millions?”

  “Yep.” She pointed the other way to a few tall tombstones popping up from a far hill. “There it is. How rad. I thought we’d never get here.”

  The tall fence wasn’t fit for keeping marauding zombies in or grave robbers out. The two teens easily walked through one of the many gaps along where the spikes had come loose and nobody had fixed them. After they crested a few hills of boring, modern, low gravesites, they saw their first cluster of angels on tall pedestals near a few ornate mausoleums.

  “I don’t hear any lawnmower,” Tony commented. “It’s all ours. Wait. What’s that sound?” The cemetery was as still as a tomb except for a few odd honks.

  “Look!” Lizzi pointed into the shade of the many colossal oak trees, pausing. “In the grass. Look! That’s all geese.”

  “There must be hundreds of them.”

  She insisted there were many many more.

  The large birds slept cautiously in groups, heads picking up here and there to take notice of the irritating humans.

  “Let’s stay away,” Tony suggested. “They need to rest. We need them to not attack us and tear us to shreds. There’s enough here to kill a pack of wild dogs.”

  “And look at the ground!” Lizzi moaned, gingerly stepping. “Oh, no, it’s all bird poop! We’re walking on bird poop. Oooh!”

  “Let’s get out of here. Let’s see if the sandbag wall is still there at the river. Let’s see if somebody’s taken all that away yet. Let’s let the birds sleep. They’re way pooped.”

  She agreed and pulled on his shirt to steer him in a new direction.

  Tony looked north. “They’re probably from as far away as Canada.”

  “Oh, farther, I’m sure. Way far farther than that!”

  Tony laughed. “The only thing farther than Canada is, like, Santa Claus.”

  “Oh, that’s far. I wish I’d brought some breadcrumbs for them. I bet they’re hungry.”

  “How many hundreds of bags of bread would you need? Anyway, they’d probably kill each other climbing all over themselves for it.”

  Lizzi pulled on his shirt again. He pulled away from her. They shuffled down a grave-checkered hill, hopped a knee-high wall that supposedly kept the graves from floating downstream in spring floods, hit the water’s edge, then walked around driftwood, around a bend.

  Lizzi stopped. She flashed her sinister little teeth in a creepy china-doll smile. “Look! People!”

  “Who? Where?” Then Tony spotted them sitting on the sandbags. He was so shocked he just stiffened and pretended he didn’t see anything anywhere.

  “Over there,” Lizzi indiscreetly pointed. She started to wave at them. She clamped onto his arm to pull him along. He stumbled. She walked up to the castle, talking. “Hi! Have you heard about this is where the witches meet at night—at this very spot!”

  Alex and Michael both smiled in genuine surprise. “How nice to see you here,” Michael said. Tony avoided Michael’s smug gaze. Michael patted a sandbag. “Hop on up and join us. Here, there’s a few cheese crackers left. Finish them off. Gourmet. House brand. But then it’s a gourmet day… the whole day. Don’t you think?”

  Tony mumbled, “Hi, Michael.”

  Lizzi climbed up onto the wall and looked back and forth between the two of them in disbelief, seeing Tony blushing badly. “My! We all seem way acquainted.”

  Tony looked at the sand beneath his boots and wished he could be swallowed by all of it. He finally took the orange colored cracker box.

  He handed it to Lizzi but she put her nose up. “As if!”

  So he ate what was left.

  Lizzi noticed the weird tension. She extended her hand to Michael, “Hi, I’m Lizzi, Tony’s very best friend. How do you do? You look like a rock star! You a rock star?”

  “Lizzi?” Michael asked. “As in Borden?”

  “As in Lizard.”

  “Ah, of course… a’chante’.”

  Lizzi looked confused.

  “Chaaarmed,” Michael rephrased in his best swarthy southern accent. “And what brings you out?” Michael pointed at the driftwood. “What brings you to the Mississippi sculpture park?”

  “How do you all know each other?” Lizzi asked. “How rad!”

  “I’ve never met anybody before,” Alex said.

  Michael explained in Tony’s defense, “We merely bumped into each other at the grocery. I dropped my Oscar Meyer. He picked it up for me. I always have been touched by simple displays of good manners in the grocery store isles... by the kindness of strangers. I’m very pleased to meet you. Let me introduce to you my best friend, Alex. He is mentally retarded but if he doesn’t say anything you may not notice.”

  Alex said to Michael. “Putting others down does not give you a personality.” He said to Lizzi, “I cut hair.”

  She said to him, “I cut my own.”

  Alex glared. “I noticed. I’m sure Cyndi Lauper is jealous. How festive.”

  Lizzi smiled big. “That’s what I always say!”

  Michael regally gestured for Tony to come closer. Tony tried to act aloof about it as he sat and rubbed his hands on the sides of his jeans. Lizzi got up and moved over to plop herself between them. “It’s a bitch of a day. Awesome, huh? We’d have gone through Riverwood because it’s usually so nice and dead but it’s all birds a
nd bird shit.”

  Alex nodded sadly. “That happened to us, too.”

  Michael added, trying to wipe the wicked smirk off his face. “So it’s a little more than fate that brought us together.”

  Alex asked Tony, “How old are you?”

  Lizzi answered for him, “Eighteen, because he’s slow. His dad started him in school way late—babied him in Montessori.”

  Tony grinned, embarrassed. “Dad said it would make me succeed better in school and give me confidence if I was always the oldest one in class. He said I was too shy. I don’t know about that. I do know I’m now late in everything in life.”

  Michael elbowed Alex.

  Lizzi looked at Michael, confused, then turned to Alex. She said, “Um, I hope we didn’t interrupt anything. I hope you don’t think we’re dorks. He is but I’m not.” She pointed to Tony. Lizzi asked the two older men who were looking at Tony more than her, “Like, hello, what are you two doing out here?”

  Alex didn’t know what to say, gesturing to the empty cracker box, so Michael blurted, “Oh, we were just playing a little game.”

  “Game?” Lizzi asked. There were no cards or game pieces about. “Spin the bottle? Between you two? Here?” She didn’t see a bottle, even.

  “No, not that.” Michael smiled mischievously. “There’s lots of games to be played at the cemetery, cemetery games for doomed souls… and Tony has arrived just in time to pick it up at round two.”

  Alex looked at Michael. “We did what?”

  “Okay?” Tony looked confused.

  “Sure, dork,” Lizzi said to Tony. “He obviously knows you well enough to know as well as I that if we don’t volunteer for you then you’ll never volunteer. You’re shy.”

  “Fine.” Michael rubbed his hands together in thought.

  For a brief moment their gazes locked and Tony felt something inside his head melt. He tried to blink it away. Tony asked, “Okay. So what’s this game?”

  “First, I want you to tell me where you want to be in life right now… as of this very minute of the day.”

  Tony shook his head. “Huh?”

  Michael repeated himself more slowly. “Where do you want to be in life as of today?”

  “That’s a game? A cemetery game?”

  Michael grinned. “That’s the cemetery game for today. We don’t sacrifice virgins in the fall. That’s for springtime, of course. Anyway, there are many flavors of cemetery games.”

  “But that’s just not a game.” Tony turned away towards the river and pretended to be interested in the tiny distant fishermen quietly chugging along the other shore.

  “Go on, dude!” Lizzi prompted him so it would soon be her turn.

  Tony turned back to Michael. “Do you mean, what do I want to be when I grow up?”

  “No, no, no.” Michael shook his head. “Right now!”

  “Um…”

  Lizzi kicked him. “Don’t look at me for answers.”

  Tony fiddled with the torn canvas and sand to avoid looking at Michael again. He blushed anyway at the possibility. “Well, um, I wish I didn’t sleep so much so that I could get more things done.”

  Lizzi complained, “That’s not the game!”

  “Yes, it is,” Michael corrected her.

  She indignantly kicked her heels into the sandbags.

  “So, Tony, what would you do if you didn’t sleep so much?”

  “I’d be a famous actor by now.”

  Lizzi blasted out a laugh.

  Tony clapped his hand over her mouth.

  “Okay, okay, okay,” Michael proceeded, smoothing the end of a strand of his long hair over his chest. “Now I want you to put a new thought into your head.”

  The three stared at Tony in anticipation.

  Michael asked, “What don’t you like about your present life?”

  Tony asked, “Where’d you find this game?”

  “I bought it at a garage sale. I hope all the game pieces came with the box. Now go on.”

  “What don’t I like about my life? The thing shitting next to me, I mean, the shitty thing sitting that used to think she was Nastassja Kinski.”

  Lizzi squealed. “Oh! You creep!” She pushed him over and sat on him. Tony fought his way back up with sand in his hair. She slapped at his head until it was gone.

  “Answer the question!”

  “I don’t really like my dad.” Tony squinted up at the sky. “We’ve nothing to say to each other… ever. Once he taped a cartoon from the paper on the fridge and laughed and laughed at it all day. I could die. I hate chess and Dad thinks I like to play it with him. And I hate school because of the few assholes there who ruin it for everybody. And I hate my house because it’s ugly. I’m constantly surrounded by assholes and ugliness.”

  “Except for me.” Lizzi smiled prettily. “I’m not ugly. I’ve been told I look like a movie star…”

  Tony quipped, “Like an extra in The Dark Crystal.”

  “Good, good,” Michael encouraged Tony, completely ignoring her. “You hate assholes and ugliness. Anything else?”

  “Am I telling my life’s story to a complete stranger?”

  Michael frowned. “I’m not a complete stranger.”

  Alex interjected, “No, you’re just completely strange.”

  Michael glared at Alex then turned back to Tony. “Well, now for the next part of the game.”

  “What could that possibly be?”

  “I want you to close your eyes and think of both your first and second thoughts together at the very same time.”

  Tony looked at him, then the others, twisting up his face. “Impossible.”

  “Naaah,” Michael assured him. “Smash the two thoughts together; it can be done. Contrast them.”

  “I’ll stroke out if I try.”

  Lizzi clapped. “We’ll stick a gold foil star on your forehead if you do. You’ll get an award!”

  “Close your eyes!” Michael commanded, impatiently.

  Tony closed his eyes.

  Lizzi watched as if a miracle were about to occur. Finally, she couldn’t help herself from asking how it went.

  Tony opened his eyes and looked at them all as if he hated them. Finally he muttered, “Okay.”

  “Ta da!” Michael sang. “You’re a new man.”

  “That’s it?” Lizzi asked, disappointed. “Dork me!”

  Tony found himself staring at a tiny silver ankh that dangled from Michael’s ankle bracelet, thinking it was so cool.

  “Did you think anything?” Alex asked, still wondering what was going on.

  Tony shrugged. “Only that I want to be someplace else where everything is way different.”

  Michael cautioned him, “Be careful what you pray for or you just might get it.”

  “That’s not a game!” Lizzi complained, finding it all intolerably pretentious. So she went on to try and impress them all with how very cool she was by making up tales of witches that ate wild dogs at the river at night.

  Chapter four

  At home that evening at the kitchen table, Tony heard Michael’s voice in his head saying, “Be careful what you pray for or you just might get it.” He got up and put on his shoes.

  Dad stepped into the kitchen. “Where you going? Off to Lizzi’s?”

  “Sure,” Tony answered without looking at him as he walked to the door.

  “We can play chess tomorrow then. I don’t want you to think I’m inflexible. I’m not a robot. I’m not a thermostat.”

  Tony laughed at Dad but pretended he was laughing at the joke. “I would never call you a thermostat.”

  His dad warned him about the time.

  Tony walked solemnly around the dark chilly downtown park. He thought it had the same demon-possessed quality as when Lizzi first dragged him to the bar. He paced several circles around the block wanting to go home and wanting to go in the bar, both. After he finally realized he was being absurd either way he decided to go home but instead went under the jutting crumbling garlan
d cornice and into the door of the bar. He was surprised at how empty it was, surely making him all the more conspicuous. In panic, he wanted to about-face and bolt but then he knew that would make him look even more ridiculous. He sucked in a deep breath, told himself not to be shy, and put one foot in front of the other until he had walked all the way up to the bartender.

  The bartender asked “Whatcha need?”

  “Oh, um, just a Pepsi.”

  “Gotcha.” As if there were an impatient line behind him he quickly snatched a glass, scooped ice, and squirted Pepsi in one continuous motion. It seemed to annoy him that it took so long to dispense.

  Tony looked around nervously as he waited. One older man had been watching him but quickly looked away.

  “A dollar.” He set the glass down on a napkin.

  Tony handed him quarters and tried not to look as uncomfortable as he felt. He couldn’t help but be irritated by the disco which seemed to him a big fake polyester heartbeat. As he sat and listened, trying to find variation, he decided the bland banal arctic drone was a mockery of the heart and its vessels and the rhythm of breath and the circles of the moon and sun and day and night and the entire orbit of the entire cosmos flipping around itself blindly again and again and again and...

  “The meaning of life is just a disco beat,” a voice to his side offered.

  “What?” Tony jolted.

  A man sat down next to him who had bleach-blond hair cut off at his shoulders. He wore three candy-colored watches.

  The man noticed Tony regarding his watches and smiled proudly. “Swatches. The more the merrier. You were thinking something and it almost fell out.”

  “Oh, okay. I was thinking?” Tony asked.

  “Mmm-hmm.” The man grinned accusingly. “You were thinking about the music.”

  “Well it is kinda loud.”

  “I once heard that rhythm was both a song’s manacle and its demonic charge.”

  Tony felt very uncomfortable. “Well, okay. I don’t like this kind of music.”

  “Why?”