John Godey - The Snake

Nobody was talking to each other anymore. Earlier there had been a lot of fooling around and joking, but now nobody had the spirit for it. The mood had become sullen, morose, and Fleming was willing to bet that, in his thoughts, everybody was planning early retirement. How many had collapsed and been dragged off to the hospital with heat prostration or heat stroke? That stuff was dangerous, life threatening. A few times already he had contemplated faking heat prostration so he could get off the line. He was sorry he hadn't done it, though now there was no point to it. Twenty minutes or so and they'd have their lunch break, and he was pretty sure they didn't serve beer in a hospital.

There were plenty of people in the park, some of them lying in the sun (dumbheads!) or playing ball (dumbheads!) and they moved slowly out of the way of the sweep when they bothered to move at all. Earlier, some Puries had scuffled with cops and been detained, but it was too much trouble to pull them in, so they had been turned loose and told to get the hell out of the park. Phony, snotty bunch of kids they called that a religion? Now the cops weren't even bothering anymore. If somebody was laying down on the Great Lawn, let him be, it was a cinch he wasn't laying on top of the snake.

A loudspeaker blared, and the comfortable sonofabitch in the car said, "Okay, boys, we're finishing up this part of the park, and then its lunch and all the beer you can drink-if you can afford it, ha-haha…

Ha-ha-ha. Jerk. Fleming took a deep breath, put his head down, and ploughed upward into an area full of trees and thick brush. It was the kind of terrain which, earlier, they had entered with great caution and checked with the utmost thoroughness. A low-hanging branch snapped across his face, and damn near gave him a fit. He wiped irrationally at his mouth as if the snake itself had brushed across his face. Christ, if this wasn't over soon he was gonna start screaming.

The snake was lying near the top of its tree when it first saw the approaching figure. As the figure came closer, the snake lost sight of it. The figure moved toward the tree and came into the snake's view again. The snake slithered downward, silent, swift, its fresh skin blending with the background of leaves and branches. Its flicking tongue picked up odour substances.

When the figure was directly below the tree it disturbed a low-hanging branch. The snake anchored itself by its tail as the figure paused. It retracted the anterior portion of its body, mouth gaping, and tensed to strike downward.

The figure moved on.

The snake held its threatening posture, hissing softly, until the figure disappeared from sight. Then it climbed back up to the topmost branches.

The Reverend Sanctus Milanese stood motionless on his imposing doorstep, encircled by his security guard, Christ's Cohorts, uniformly tall, rangy, and fit. Despite the heat, or perhaps in defiance of it, the Reverend wore his long black cloak with its scarlet lining, and the small skullcap (scarlet with black lining) which had aroused indignation on the part of Catholics, who branded it a travesty of a cardinal's red calotte, and Jews, who claimed it was a mimicry of the yarmulke.

If the Reverend had called a press conference for any ordinary reason, he might have been ignored. But the announcement that he would issue an important policy statement defining the position of the Church of the Purification with respect to the snake in the park had intrigued the media.

A blend of the snake and the unpredictable Puries represented a mix of volatile chemical elements certain to produce a satisfying explosion or, at the least, an interesting smell.

The Reverend Sanctus Milanese was a tall man with black eyes under strongly arched black eyebrows, iron-gray hair, a whisker growth so heavy that he was reputed to be obliged to shave no less than three times daily, thin lips, and a long unsmiling face. He did not move. His eyes, tilted upward to the heavens, did not blink. Although he had maintained this posture for more than ten minutes in the stifling heat, he showed no sign of stress or impatience. He was waiting for the TV crews to complete setting up their equipment.

In her notebook, Holly Markham wrote, Made The man in his own image, question mark.

It was a vice of Holly's that she was helpless to resist writing down observations which had little or nothing to do with objective reporting, and which never-well, hardly ever-found their way into her copy. She called them "snippets," and sometimes worried that they were the stigmata of a suppressed novelist.

Holly was part of a respectable number of newspaper, TV, and radio reporters massed on the sidewalk in front of Purity House, the Fifth Avenue mansion of the Reverend Sanctus Milanese. The building, in the style of a French chfiteau, had been built for his own use some eighty years before by a highly respected robber baron. It had remained in the original family until three years ago, when it had been purchased, for cold cash raised by popular subscription of the Reverend's followers, and presented to him as a gift in celebration of his fiftieth birthday. It thus became the third notable holding in the real estate portfolio of the Church of the Purification. The others were the Tabernacle, located in the East Thirties, in the former church of a Greek Orthodox sect which had prospered and built a new church; and the former Duchess County estate of a played-out line of patroons, consisting of over a hundred acres and seven buildings, including the forty-room main house. This complex, called Eden Paradise, was used as a training center for novitiate members of the Church.

With the cameras in place and their sweating crews at the ready, the Reverend Sanctus Milanese prepared to speak. He opened by bestowing his blessings upon "my good friends of the media," and asking the Lord to forgive them for sometimes writing ignorantly or invidiously of the Church of the Purification and its leader, which he had the humble good fortune to be, unworthy as he was of the great honour.

Reminds me, Holly wrote, of the preacher who claimed that, when it came to humility, he was the uncontested world's champion.

"Speak the truth and shame the devil," the Reverend Sanctus Milanese said sonorously, and his voice won out over the noise of cars and buses rolling down Fifth Avenue. "And I shall speak the truth."

His voice was booming evangelical, which was to say, Holly thought, a hard-sell voice. All evangels were demagogues, selling promises. God loves you, loves you, and if you love Him in return, heaven is yours, in death for certain, and perhaps in life as well.

"It has not been given to the police to uproot the serpent, for their mission was not blessed of God."

A reporter reminded the Reverend that the verdict of failure was pre mature. The sweep was not yet over.

Reverend turns piercing eyes on speaker, Holly wrote. Evangelical eyes not worth a damn if they don't pierce. Cohorts turn eyes, too, not piercing but cold, bleak, inaccessible.

"Now the serpent was more crafty than any beast of the field which the Lord God had made."

Scripture-quoting voice has special vibrato, Holly noted.

"Only God, who is all-seeing, knows where the serpent lurks. Shall He impart His knowledge to those who follow temporal sway?"

Holly raised her hand and called out, "To whom will He impart it, Reverend?" and thought, If I ever get bored with newspaper work I can always find a job as a straight woman.

"To those who walk in I-Es ways."

A television reporter shouted, "Can we assume He has already passed the word on to you, Reverend?"

"He has instructed me as follows: Let your flock go into the park and their purity shall overcome the impurity of the evil serpent, and they shall find where it hides and then they shall destroy it."