Norman Partridge - The Ten-Ounce Siesta

It was a volatile situation. Daddy was sure that Barry McGuire’s “Eve of Destruction” had arrived at last. The pot was boiling. The end was near. And in a bomb-proof cement and lead sanctuary on a small scab of Mojave Desert called Hell’s Half Acre, a new beginning was at hand.

But nothing seemed to happen for the longest time, no matter what George Will said on This Week with David Brinkley. Still, the conservative commentator kept Daddy’s hope alive.

Daddy was nothing if not a patient man. “Sometimes the wheels of progress turn mighty slow,” he’d say. He lay awake many a night imagining some cash-hungry Soviet general selling an atom bomb to a bunch of rug-headed Middle Eastern terrorists or a swarthy Panamanian drug lord, but that kind of stuff only seemed to happen in Tom Clancy novels. In real life the bombs never seemed to make it out of Russia. All they did was rust.

Daddy’s faith kind of rusted right along with those bombs. He had always been a man of strong conviction, but that summer he was troubled. Because if there wasn’t going to be a nuclear war, then the new beginning he’d prophetized so many years ago wasn’t going to happen, either.

And Daddy had seen that prophecy so clearly.

He’d told Eden the story many times. The story about the night he’d met Mama on the Las Vegas Strip back in 1966. A go-go dancer and a preacher sharing a mescaline and neon high. Both of them walking the streets in 1966, but one of them seeing the future.

In his vision, the preacher saw himself as an old man. His go-go girl bride became an old woman. They stood together, in the desert, with their children.

A blinding blast in the distance. A rushing tsunami of nuclear destruction. Atomic thunder and sharp slivers of neon rain. The Las Vegas Strip, cracked and scalded, a fused mosaic of broken glass. Gamblers bursting into flame as they yanked slot machine handles for the last time, keno girls exploding like ripe sausages in the wild apocalyptic heat, lounge singers radiated to a crisp as they wailed the closing notes of “Volare.”

The true believers would be spared. Daddy and Mama and their children, the lone survivors of nuclear Armageddon. They would stand together and listen for the sound of hoofbeats on that fused glass highway.

They would watch Him claim the earth for His children.

The Lord from below. His Satanic Majesty, Lucifer.

Daddy had served the dark one for many years, preaching His unholy gospel, converting those who had walked too long in the light. And though his faith had been shaken many times, he still believed in Satan, even if he could no longer believe in the prophecy.

The prophecy had come a cropper. Daddy could see that. All that glasnost and perestroika, and then Reagan with his Star Wars, and before you knew it Ronald McDonald was hawking Big Macs on Red Square.

Daddy had to rethink things. Night after night he meditated in the little chapel he had built to honor Satan. Night after night he stared down the old mine shaft behind the altar, the shaft that ran straight to hell.

Night after night he waited for a sign.

Some nights he’d make a sacrifice-a jackrabbit, a prairie dog, a hitchhiker, a coyote. . something like that. Other nights he’d channel demons through his rattlesnakes. And every now and then he’d get his mind right with a shot of strychnine. Daddy believed in taking a good shot of strychnine now and then. Do that, he said, and you could almost feel Satan nipping at your behind.

Of course. Daddy’s people back in Appalachia had been handling snakes and drinking poison since forever, only they were Christians. They claimed to channel the Holy Spirit, but Daddy always said his people were a little mixed up on that point.

Satan, after all, was a serpent. And a serpent in the house of God was still a serpent. Once you turned one loose, there was no looking back. It was like trying to close Pandora’s fabled box or trap the snake that tempted Eve in Eden.

Eden. That was the name her father had given her. And it was Eden who provided her father with a new vision of the future.

On a hot August night he stepped forth from his little chapel and told Eden that Satan wanted her to find a serpent, because an Eden without a serpent was an Eden unspoiled.

The time had come for his daughters to leave home and honor the dark provider through their carnal appetites. Daddy sent them into the desert with only the clothes on their backs. He told them not to return until they had become as worldly as the whore who gave them birth.

Tura and Lorelei were delighted with the news. They longed to leave home. They dreamed of Las Vegas-the neon kingdom that lay to the east. But Eden was frightened by the idea of leaving Hell’s Half Acre. She read books and magazines and watched television, but there was much she didn’t know about the ways of men.

The three sisters walked through the desert, following those forty miles of bad dirt road that led to the highway. Tura and Lorelei looked like a couple of innocent flower children from Daddy’s day-their complexions a dark nutty brown, the soles of their bare feet toughened from years of desert living.

But Eden was not so tough. She had always clung to the safety of the bunker. Her skin was the whitest shade of pale.

And she could not travel the desert unshod. On her feet she wore a pair of Mama’s old white go-go boots. It was, in fact, the same pair Mama had worn on the night she met Daddy back in 1966.

Soon Tura and Lorelei left Eden behind. She stumbled along, all alone, feet kicking up feeble dust devils that were no stronger than a dying man’s cough. The sun burned down, and her skin turned red, and the wind stuttered through the dry leaves of the yucca trees with a sound like wild castanets.

The first night had nearly passed by the time Eden found the highway. Sunburned and thirsty, her white go-go boots dusted with white Mojave earth, she put out her thumb.

A trucker stopped almost immediately. Eden said she was headed for Las Vegas. The trucker smiled genially and told her to climb aboard.

Eden did. She felt comfortable around truckers. She’d helped her sisters hijack enough big rigs to know what they were like.

This one liked to sing. Cowboy songs, the ones from TV shows. He knew all the words. “Bonanza,” “The Ballad of Paladin,” “Rawhide”-he sang them all as the big truck headed east.

The trucker drove toward Vegas and through it. He didn’t so much as pull over until he reached an empty valley of towering red sandstone. He parked near a trailer. To Eden it seemed incredibly fragile and somehow tragic, nothing like the concrete-and-lead pillbox in which she’d spent her life.

The trucker dragged Eden inside by her black hair. He didn’t even give her a glass of water. He stripped her of everything save her go-go boots and beat her. Eden didn’t know why he did that. He didn’t have to hit her to hurt her. Her sunburned skin was so raw that the slightest touch was agony.

He took her virginity with his fingers, promising that he would do far worse, and do it very soon.

Eden could not bear the sight of him. Mama had told her about the serpents men carried between their legs and the pleasures that they could give a woman, pleasures as gratifying as a rattlesnake bite. But this man was not like the men Mama had described. The serpent between his legs was weak. Eden soon realized that she had not a thing to fear from it. The trucker’s snake cared not a whit for his threats or promises. It did not strike; nor did it bite, no matter how much he coaxed it, no matter how hard he cried.

The trucker tied Eden to a bed that stank of loneliness and despair. He coaxed his serpent through the long night, but it only nestled small and defeated in his big hand.