Snake Girl VS the KKK

by Peter Joseph Swanson

  “Nervous?” she whispered.

  “Not anymore than I should be.”

  “I’m so excited! Have you seen the program? We go on in the second act after bozo-rama sings ‘Every Breath You Take’ as if he’s out of breath and range.” She chuckled.

  He nodded.

  She walked away on her toes so the spikes of her pumps wouldn’t tap on the wooden floor. “Just don’t mess up!” she grumbled under her breath.

  Tony ignored her.

  * * * * *

  The next night as Michael walked home from the high school variety show, he yelled out into the night, “Alex! I suck! Tony is a very good actor and I’m just a nobody in a drunk dress!”

  He looked up at a billboard that read, “Where’s the Beef?”

  He yelled at it, “Anybody can drink and wear a dress and walk around on stage while Annie Lennox is blasting!”

  He wondered if he could sustain the energy to cut it in real theatre. Did he have what it takes to dance in a real chorus line eight times a week or could he ever remember and deliver all of the lines of a full play? Could he even pull off a bit part without just looking like a silly fag? He felt like a complete charlatan.

  “Alex, Tony is such a star! What am I? To be or not to be a drag queen, that is the question!” He turned. Alex wasn’t there, of course. He wished Alex was with him now to talk about all this. Alex would probably remind him that wanting to be a great actor was not a personality. Michael started to cry. He walked on. He turned again. He thought he could feel that Alex was just over his shoulder. He always had that feeling now—that the ghost of Alex was always just out of the corner of his eyes. “Alex?”

  He continued talking to himself, “Remember when you brought over that porn magazine? You just knew my pants would be off in a minute. You were such a prude about it and you were the one with the magazine in the first place. Now what am I going to do without you to hold me back a little. Not that I ever let you hold me back before, but still. Now I don’t have a chance. I don’t have you calling me on the phone…”

  Michael thought he felt a light kiss on the back of his neck. He rubbed the spot, feeling all of his body hair bristle. He thought he heard a warning and feared an ambush again so he hurried through an empty parking lot. He spotted a big black pickup truck that was parked on the street. It wasn’t the one that followed them into town but was Willy’s, Annie Bea’s husband, who’d already been questioned by the police at Michael’s insistence. Nothing came of it. He wondered what it was doing here.

  He looked around and saw that all of the streets and the nearby houses were quiet and dark. He smiled to himself. He stepped out onto the street and took careful notice that no cars were parked near the truck and that the nearest house was set back on the opposite side of the street. He pulled the gray bandanna out of his ponytail and untied its knot. As he approached the truck he looked carefully up and down the street again. No one was out and about so he took it as a smile from the Lavender Gods. “Thank you, honey,” he prayed.

  He quickly unscrewed the gas cap with the bandanna to avoid fingerprints and chucked it into the parking lot. With his adrenalin rising to an opera pitch, hearing loud singing in his ears, he rolled the cloth into a wick and slid it towards the gas-line. It slipped in easily. He lit a match, shaking, and the night breeze blew it out. He quickly lit another one. He sheltered his next match and patiently held it until the cardboard was thoroughly ablaze, then he held it under the bandanna until it caught fire. He stared at it a moment in disbelief. It was burning! He ran away so fast that the heel sprung loose from his boot. After he’d dashed a half a block he wondered if the breeze had blown out the fire again. He turned just in time to see a blast of oily orange fire rip across the bottom of the truck. Feeling deathly afraid he ran to the adjacent side street then walked calmly home not wanting to attract any attention. When he got to his street he heard distant sirens.

  * * * * *

  Lizzi had a new performance that felt like a secret mission. Not being able to decide how one dresses for a farm she decided not to and instead chose a black mini-dress covered by an oversized jacket slathered in neon Picassoesque paintings. She flashed her sinister little teeth in a victorious smile. “I’m so New Wave! I’m so way cool!” She slouched across the cracked station wagon seat with her long bare legs sprawled slovenly before her against the dashboard. “You see, I’m a most groovy musician from a big city and we are a duo. Everybody will believe that when they see how cool we look.”

  “Right,” Michael agreed, nervously hunched over his steering wheel, sober, tense, and sans all make-up. He had borrowed the pale blue station wagon from Joanie, Alex’s sister.

  Lizzi watched a tendril of his loose hair blow across the open window, thinking it looked alive. “And you see, dude, musicians always have long hair so don’t worry about that. They’ll never suspect that you are really the true Snake Girl.”

  Michael put a finger up at her. “That’s one thing you’re forbidden to mention. They have no idea I was Snake Girl. And they don’t want to know. They only want to hear what they want to hear.”

  “How could you do that, be Snake Girl? How could you have just sat there like that with your head poking up for hours on end? I would have gone bananas having to hold still for so long.”

  “I’d learned how to sit very still. Dad would whip me with a belt when we got home from church if I didn’t sit perfectly still in the pew.”

  “You didn’t get to scratch your nose?”

  “I got used to not touching my face. Mom always had told me that’s how people got pink eye. There really was a lot of pink eye with the cows so it was something to worry about on the farm, for real. If I touched my face she’d slap my hand down. I was raised to be the perfect Snake Girl.”

  “Oh my god.”

  “Don’t mention carnivals at all, while on the farm, since they think I worked with the guns at the target shoot and that’s bad enough since I shouldn’t have run away at all. It upset them, of course. It embarrassed them at their church so bad. Dad couldn’t be an elder of the church anymore.”

  Lizzi asked why.

  “You have to have control over your family to get to be that at the church. So don’t mention anything about anybody ever running away. Dad likes to always get his way. I got in the way of his being a star at his church. Woops for him. We don’t talk about things. Not since I came back and the pastor played therapist for us all. He did a reconciliation. We decided not to bring up the past. And I didn’t mention being gay, anyway. They think gay people should be dragged out back and shot in the head, after the dog pees on them. Seriously. So don’t mention anything about anybody being gay. That’s forbidden. If we’re to get along as a family then they must know absolutely nothing about me. You and I are just musicians and don’t mention anything else. How can anybody argue with musicians?”

  Lizzi said, “They’ll like it a lot if we’re gospel musicians so why don’t we tell them that?”

  “No. Then they’ll want us to play for them. We’ll tell them I just sing about Edgar Allen Poe while you scream like Chinese opera and then they’ll avoid us. They hate art.”

  Lizzi folded her hands under her chin and looked up to where somebody had autographed the ceiling of the car. “We’ll tell them that we just moved to St. Louis where we have our own band called…called…” She rubbed her lip in thought. “We’ll be called the Leapin’ Lizards! Because my name is Lizzy.” She opened her lipstick that she kept handy in her pocket and smeared on a generous fresh coat. She pulled down the visor. “Your mirror’s hazy.”

  Michael laughed. “You’re worse than me.”

  She pulled out a smudged compact from her pocket and admired her sparkling lips. “Yes, we’ll be called Blue Lizzi and the Frozen Lizards. How way way cool.” She puckered and smacked her lips. Lizzi looked off into the winsome tableau of a spectacular autumn. The station wagon coughed as it charged up an incline that dug deep into a steep hill of sedi
mentary rock. Lizzi found it easy to see the changes from one colorful bed to the next. She leaned against the door and let the wind blow in her face as she began to hum.

  “I’m not going home,” Michael said. “I’m going to hell!”

  “You’re too nervous. Don’t be a total dork.”

  “Can you tell?”

  She laughed at him. “I’ve never seen such a death-grip before.”

  “Oh!” Michael realized that he was indeed strangling the steering wheel so he loosened up, putting one hand on his leg. “I’ve every reason to be nervous. Distract me. Tell me about how fucked up you are. Tell me about your mom. Was she always a mess?”

  Lizzi shrugged. “I haven’t the slightest. She’s such a big baby. Mother says she did the news on TV way back when and did a story about crazy babbling homeless men dying of exposure during the winter. She said lots of them were shell-shocked war veterans nobody was dealing with. Her boss said nobody wants to see stuff on the news that makes our country look bad so he gave her a story about birthday magicians. She got so mad she rebelled and did a story about birthday clowns instead but her boss didn’t even notice her switchero. Now she cries a lot about that when she gets hammered and when the news comes on she sings, ‘Send in the Clowns’. She’s such a fucking idiot! Who wants to see a bunch of dead crazy frozen homeless people on TV? Yuck! But that’s just the tip of the conspiracy iceberg about the homeless vets. The vets gave her an idea for another news story about the KKK. She said that some of them said they knew the KKK. It was in Milldam but mostly in Merrek County.”

  “Oh crap. That’s where we are now. That’s what we just drove into. We just drove into KKK County!”

  She looked out into the fields as if she might see one. “Oh how creepy. Well, anyway. Mom said she was going to investigate the claims. One of the veterans said he taught them gun safety and how to run around like there was a war on. The KKK was obsessed with a race war.”

  “And the fag war.”

  “Any war. The KKK like them all, I suppose. And it wasn’t just because they were bored. It was urgent. They were supposed to wipe out all the evil stuff before the evil stuff wiped out them, for the end times. That kind of thing. But she never got to finish her news story. The TV people told her it would scare everybody too much to report that kind of thing… makes the country look scary and nuts.”

  Michael cringed. “I bet the president of the news station was in the KKK. And the chief of police. And the high school principle! Damn I’m glad I didn’t go to high school!”

  “I don’t know. She told me she couldn’t find any names of anybody for sure, of anybody who was anybody big. It was mostly people in the small trailer parks and farms and way out subdivisions. Just nobodies. And people in Milldam, too. She wanted to find somebody big. But she scared everybody on TV with birthday clowns instead. I wonder how many of the clowns are in the KKK? Mom covered spring fashion once—now that is important news!”

  “Yes. Spring fashion is import. Especially when it involves pastel fun fur!”

  Lizzi said, “When I was a kid there were always stories of witches doing devil worship rituals in the woods at the river. They said if they caught us they’d rip our hearts out while we were still alive and sacrifice us to the devil so we’d burn in hell because they could make us curse Jesus as we died. A spell did that… or something.”

  “I wonder if those stories were spread by the KKK to keep us kids from snooping in on their ceremonies. I was sure always scared of the woods!”

  “Or it’s real that there’s witches out there! But Mom insists it’s really the KKK, not witches. She’s no fun. Unless the KKK fly around on brooms they’re no fun. Mom just tells the same stories every time she starts to chug-a-lug… just crazy stuff about birthday clowns, the KKK, and any other story she did or wanted to do for the news.”

  Michael grinned. “Alcoholism brings out the dumb in people, believe me. I know all about dumb!”

  “I feel dumb.” Lizzi slipped off her hoop earrings and dropped them into her bag, then leaned against the door and closed her eyes. Michael glanced over to see that it was properly shut and locked so she wouldn’t fly out onto the road. It seemed to be. A vast valley dropped to their left and the luminous yellow and orange leaves poured out into a dappled image perfect for a postcard. He remembered a simpler life of climbing trees to eat plums, eating watermelon in the field, and drinking fresh apple cider at the orchard. Sweet potato pie picnics were a slice of heaven. Those were simpler time. He was ten.

  The station wagon wandered over onto the edge of the shoulder with a grating roar. Gravel spattered under the car snapping Michael immediately back to present tense from his sentimental journey. He gently steered the car back on track. “Ooops!”

  “What was that?” Lizzi’s eyes popped open. “Are we there yet?”

  “Almost.”

  “All these cute farms along the way are so… cute. Oh, look at that barn over there!”

  “And that tree’s ready to fall over,” Michael noted, squinted out his windshield. “It wasn’t like that before.”

  “It’s so big!”

  “I remember when it was alive. That whole field was green and alive. They must have let hogs in there.”

  “Pigs do that?”

  He nodded. “We once had one that uprooted an entire area behind the barn all by itself.”

  “Oh shit, what did you do?”

  “Bacon.”

  Lizzi made a disapproving gross-out face. “You ate it?”

  “Don’t get righteous on me. We aren’t vegetarians.”

  “Barbarians!” Lizzi sniveled. “Backward, savage barbarians.”

  Michael laughed as he took his foot off the gas pedal, causing the car to strangely rattle. “Whoa! Don’t blow up on us now!”

  “Why are we slowing?”

  “See that hill-top cemetery?”

  Lizzi joked, “Is that where the party is? Cool!”

  “No, ditz. There’s a gravel road just past it and that can be considered the beginning of a very long driveway to the stinky mouth of hell, the gnashing of teeth, and all that.”

  “Cool cemetery.”

  “Yep, it’s very American Gothic, no? Entire families lay buried there from cholera. It was a big deal back then.”

  She saw a pile of tombstones heaped under a tree. “What’s going on there? Body snatchers?”

  “They’ve been like that for as long as I can remember. I think part of one of those fields was once the cemetery and they just removed the headstones and plowed.”

  Lizzi gasped. “They’re going to rise from their graves to bite all of your heads off!”

  “There’s probably nothing left down there to rise. Ashes to ashes, muck to muck. And we hope they’re gone, gone into the light. I’d hate to think that after you die you just lay there waiting for somebody to mess with your grave so that you get to pop up and say, ‘Boo! I hate you!’ What a bore.” Michael slowed onto the shoulder and gingerly turned onto the gravel road.

  “I don’t see a farm.”

  “Patience, it’s just over that hill way over yonder. And don’t mention anything about high school, either. They hate that I ran away and didn’t go.”

  “But, like, that’s all I am! When you’re a high school kid what else are you?”

  Michael gave her a dirty look. “I never went. I left home before then and that’s a sore spot with them too. They think school is important. Just pretend you already graduated and you forgot about it. Pretend you’re older than you are. Tell them you’re 21 if they ask. How can they know any different.”

  “How young were you when you ran away?”

  “Not as young as you’d think. I flunked 3rd grade. All I could think about was that I was Judy Garland. So I didn’t listen to anybody. I did the grade twice and still have no idea what it was about. But I grew up. I’m now Diana Ross when I’m not Cher and I don’t listen to anybody. See? I didn’t learn.”

  “That’s
okay, nobody remembers 3rd grade. How old were you when you ran away?”

  “I don’t remember my age. I wasn’t thinking about that.”

  “Everybody remembers their age.”

  “I was weird.” He crested the incline and spotted the tight cluster of buildings at the bottom of the valley.

  When Lizzi spotted the farm she leaned forward in her seat. “Wow! That’s bigger than I’d expected. So many buildings!”

  Michael moaned. “Yep, it’s a damn farm.”

  The main barn was double-peaked, joining two huge red barns into one. The other buildings radiated from it: Behind it were more cowsheds, granaries, silos, and various other weathered outbuildings. In front of this picturesque bucolic spread was the two-story wood-frame farmhouse with fake black plastic shutters. An unsightly but practical Plexiglas wall now enclosed the front porch to provide passive solar heating in the winter.

  Lizzi squealed. “It’s so cute!”

  “We’re still too far away to really see it. Up close you see the rot and cow shit.” Michael moaned again. “Be it ever so humble.”

  “Oh, it looks so picture perfect… like a calendar! It’s way cute!”

  “From here, a funeral home calendar,” he clarified. “Yeah, gorgeous.”

  “You’re terrible.”

  “Yep!” Michael steered the car around a hay-field of stubble—glad to have been absent when it was baled. Its edge was now a parking lot for relatives. “Look at all those nice cars to make Joanie’s ugly one look ugly. How dare they! Look at all that! Fucking bastards!”

  Lizzi scolded, “Be nice.”

  “I’m going to run away. I don’t do fetes! God, I’m hemorrhaging!” Michael started to pretend to convulse.

  “Stop it, you dork! Is that how you dance?”

  He stopped acting out and carefully pulled alongside the other cars. “I just feel… Blue pills! Blue pills! Everybody gets blue pills!”