Ed Gorman: Save The Last Dance For Me

“You hear them, McCain?”

“Oh, I hear them all right.”

And I did. How could you not hear them?

“So you know what they are?” she said.

“You bet I do,” I said.

“And you’re not scared?”

“Who said I wasn’t scared?”

“You did. On the way over.”

“Oh.”

“So you are scared?” she said.

“A little, I guess.”

“I’m scared. But then I’m a girl. I’m not a big brave five-foot-four he-man like you.”

“Five-five.”

“Yeah, in motorcycle boots maybe.”

“In motorcycle boots I’d be five-six. If I owned a pair.”

“Have I ever told you I’m five-foot-seven?”

“Not more than 4eagcb times,” I said.

“Almost five-eight, actually.”

“All right, I’m scared. Does that make you feel better?”

She gave me her best kid-sister grin and squeezed my hand. It was a kid-sister squeeze, too. Nothing romantic.

“Actually, that does make me feel better, McCain. So let’s go in, all right?”

Just as we walked away from my ‘ea red Ford ragtop, she stopped me and said. “Actually, maybe we’re imagining it.”

“Imagining what?”

“You know. Hearing the rattlesnakes. I don’t think you can hear rattlesnakes this far away.”

“You want to get out a tape measure?”

The grin again. It always made me want to kiss her. But she was married and we were both reasonably honorable people. So I knew better than to try and she knew better than to let me should I be foolish enough to try.

I guess I should do a little scene-setting here.

The date is August 19, 1960.

The town is Black River Falls, Iowa, pop. 20eacjj. The pretty, red-haired young woman I’m with is Kylie Burke, ace reporter for The Black River Falls

Clarion. Only reporter, actually. She isn’t writing the story-her boss is doing that-but she thought it’d look good on her resume (in case the New York Times calls someday) to say she did background on a group of Ozark folks who moved here after getting kicked out of every state contiguous to ours. Seems these folk incorporate rattlesnakes in their services and that is a violation of the law. And after all the rain we had this past spring, there are plenty of timber rattlers to be had in the woods.

Kylie’s a bit uneasy about visiting these folks, as am I, so we’re here together.

My name is Sam McCain. I’m the youngest and poorest attorney in town. I’m also an investigator for Judge Esme Anne

Whitney, the handsome, middle-aged woman who presides over district court. At the age of twenty-four, I earn more from Judge Whitney than I do from my law practice. I’m here tonight because I was summoned by Reverend John Muldaur, the hill-country man who procures the rattlers and oversees the services.

The place we’re about to enter is a deserted four-bay service garage that was once part of a Chevrolet dealership on the north edge of town.

It’s closed up tight except two of the front windows have been smashed and are now filled only with cardboard, so you can hear everything going on. A tornado came through here in ‘ed and killed eight of us, including a two-month-old, and wiped out everything in this area, including the gleaming new Chevrolet showroom, except the garage. The dealer decided to rebuild on the opposite end of town, apparently figuring his luck might be better come the next tornado.

The cars and panel trucks and pickup trucks parked in the melancholy twilight looked as if they’d been driven across a time warp from the Dust Bowl. Hadn’t been washed in years.

Had smashed windshields. Cracked headlights.

Missing taillights. Tires that held varying amounts of air, some of them nearly flat. were rusted out so badly the rust had turned into holes in places. And were covered with stickers of all sizes and all lurid colors exhorting pagans to hand themselves over to God and be damned quick about it before it was too late.

The service was just now starting. An Old Testament voice said into a screeching microphone, “Let us now praise the Lord in song.”

And that’s when we knew that we really had been hearing rattlesnakes. Because as a lone, lame electric guitar began to play “I Know The Bible’s Right-Somebody’s Wrong” the faint rattling sound disappeared.

The man appeared from inside the small door in the face of the whitewashed concrete-block building. He was big and wide in his greasy gray work clothes. The dour line of his mouth exploded into a smile as he said, “The Lord welcomes you.” But the close, hard way he looked at us made me wonder about his words.

Kylie and I glanced at each other and nodded, and he widened the doorway by standing aside for us.

Right inside the door we saw the snakes.

A small, wood-framed cage of them sat on a table with a large crude painting of Christ that was as spooky as the snakes. He had the demonic visage normally associated with Satan. On the left side of the table was a stack of pamphlets with a headline reading: The Jews Behind John F. Kennedy. You could pretty much guess what that one was all about. The pamphlets were well printed on a semi-glossy stock. I wondered where Muldaur had gotten the money for them.

There were no pews, just wobbly folding chairs; no decorations but an elevated platform holding a lectern, and four more folding chairs, pushed back against the wall. You could still smell gasoline and car oil all these years later, though all the hydraulic lifts had been taken out and the work pits filled in with concrete.

“Say hello to some new friends!” John Muldaur shouted into the microphone. He’d been singing in a sturdy baritone. He kept grabbing a bottle of Pepsi, gripping it hard as if it was slipping, and guzzling it down between lyrics.

When they turned around and looked at us, the twenty or so people filling the folding chairs, I saw faces that were almost cartoons of joy and grief and fear and hope as they sang out, immigrant faces scrubbed clean for churchgoing, unlovely faces for the most part, mountain people of the deep South who’d trekked up to the Midwest several generations ago but had never fundamentally changed, a problem for cops, social workers, doctors, clerics, and neighbors. Some of these people still clung to the precepts of “granny medicine,” where you cure lockjaw by crushing a cockroach in a cup of boiling water and drinking it down, and staunch the bleeding of a wound by rubbing chewing tobacco on it.

You can’t estimate the effects of poverty on generation after generation of people, that sadness and despair and madness that so quietly but irrevocably shapes their thoughts and taints their souls.

The Muldaurs lived off by themselves, a good half-mile from the others, who lived in trailers and shacks in an area called The Corners and mostly worked for large tenant farms. Ten, twelve families that crossbred with alarming regularity. The women mostly wore faded housedresses, their hair beribboned for church.

The men mostly wore threadbare white shirts with the sleeves rolled up. A couple of them bore dark neckties. There were six or seven very young children who wore shorts and shirts because of the eighty-degree heat. There was a certain apprehension in the eyes of the young ones. They had not yet been fortified with the certainty of their elders-that those who did not practice the ways of their faith would perish in hell, and that all strangers meant you harm. Especially, according to the pamphlets Muldaur had been circulating in town, the Jews and Catholics all huddled behind Jack Kennedy in this fall’s election. And of course it was the diabolical Jews stirring up all the trouble down South with the “coloreds.”