Pastor Dale’s instructions had been for me and Tim to meet at the abandoned Citgo on Highway 65 at dawn. I was on time and had the place entirely to myself, not counting the vermin scouring the weedy lot for their daily bread. With no sign of Tim, I circled the old-timey pumps and parked facing east, figuring I could squeeze in a little solo sunrise service if he was running a few minutes behind. The sun hadn’t broken through but the horizon was already aglow, a thin line running along the bottom of the darkness like God had left the closet light on.
Praying out loud made me feel like a little kid, but I usually did a daily prayer checklist in my head: thank you for momma, please let me get that mowing contract with the county, go Cowboys, keep me on the straight and narrow, so on and so forth. I said the amen part out loud, though, like kissing your powerball ticket right before the news lady read off the day’s numbers.
Sometimes I’d say amen even if I hadn’t meant to be praying, if I’d just been noticing something that made me feel like a small part of something big. This morning, seeing Tim’s headlights come down the highway, remembering Pastor Dale’s big hand, heavy on my shoulder in the doorway after church on Sunday, like a healing. The sun beginning to color the rest of the sky. Amen.
Tim and his wife pulled up next to me in their beat-to-death Blazer. Tim got out of the passenger side, his big body solid and stiff, like it held more stuff in it than everybody else’s. An unlit cigarette dangled from his chapped lips. He patted to make sure he had something in one of the inside pockets of his jacket, then nodded his head at what looked like a large glass aquarium in the back. He lit the cigarette, hand cupped against the nip of the morning breeze as I wrestled the bulk of the glass box and tried to get its edge up and over the lip of my truck bed. I secured it into place with the bungee cords Pastor Dale had told me to bring and walked around to the Blazer’s driver-side window to say hello to Tim’s wife.
“Morning, Ms. Tina.”
“Morning.”
“Thanks for letting me borrow your husband, today.”
“Borrow him? I thought you were taking him off my hands permanently.” Her lips pressed together in a tight smile.
“Let’s go,” Tim said, his hand already on my passenger door handle.
I nodded to Tina, climbed in the truck, and cranked the windows down. She yelled goodbye over the dueling whines of our engines and the roar of a passing chicken truck. I don’t know if Tim couldn’t hear her or if he chose not to. Either way he didn’t so much as glance in her direction as she pulled out of the lot in the direction they’d came. I made it a rule not to pry: best not to intervene in what Pastor Dale calls “the great mystery of holy matrimony.” I figured I’d trust Pastor Dale on that point, considering the three times he’d engaged with that great mystery himself.
“Go right,” Tim said, lighting a new cigarette from the tip of his last one, which he flicked from the open window. That seemed about all the instruction I was going to get for the moment, so I went right.
We headed east in silence, the hillier country flattening into planted fields that stretched to the horizon. I had an urge to swerve off into the openness of the fields, to bounce my truck across the irrigated ditches. I wanted to feel the sideways pull of the back end, tires losing grip and spinning mud, the truck like a whip in my hand I could perfectly crack. But I kept it mostly between the white lines, and later, as we crossed the churning brown water of the Mississippi into Tennessee, I kept it below the speed limit, too. Seeing as how I wasn’t really supposed to be crossing state lines and all.
I’d been honored when Pastor Dale pulled me aside after Sunday evening worship, how he’d looked me in the eyes and said he had noticed a strengthening of my spirit. The warm light of recognition shone through me and seemed to melt something hard inside my chest.
I’d first met him on a work detail when I was still inside, the two of us among a group assigned to a concrete factory that had discovered the profits made possible when you hired inmates and paid them nothing. He was just Dale then, but some of his pastor traits were already poking through. He was loud and asserted himself as Unofficial Crew Leader almost immediately. I admired his ability to get through an entire shift without doing any actual work. He spent his time solving problems he’d made himself and talking good-natured shit with guards and foremen alike.
At the unit, I began to notice Dale everywhere, like when you get a new car and start noticing the same make and model all over town. I never saw him without a Bible, always flanked by a group of two or three muscled-up disciples, one of whom I’d later learn was named Tim.
On work detail one day, Pastor Dale came up to me and promised me not only protection, which I didn’t really need as I’d mostly spent my time inside reading books and keeping my head down, but also help getting back on my feet once I was out. I was so lonely he wouldn’t have had to promise me a thing.
What he wanted in exchange was for me to accept the Lord as my savior and, seemingly even more importantly, to accept his church as my own. He had a plan to start up a congregation when we got out. “Orange brick, white doors,” he’d said, “Little marquee sign out front where I put funny little sayings to draw in street traffic.”
I wasn’t necessarily the religious type up to that point, but in my recovery meetings there was a fair amount of God stuff and I’d been tolerating it pretty well. It might not be bad to try and believe in something different for a while. Two days later, there was a beautiful leather Bible on my bunk and fifty more dollars in my commissary.
Pastor Dale’s dream had only partly come true. There were no orange bricks or marquee signs, but he did find a pre-fab building on the edge of town, and eventually folks started showing up that I hadn’t seen before, hollow eyed and skinny, nodding along with Pastor Dale’s every word. There was no air conditioning, only one industrial-sized fan, rusted and roaring loud. Pastor Dale’s sermons and our off-key hymns fought against its hum, an organ that only knew one note.
Come summer, the heat lent a new edge to Pastor Dale’s preaching. He chose verses that had a little more of a fire and brimstone bent to them. I’d often zone out, mesmerized by the sweat flinging from Pastor Dale’s head as he really revved up, illuminated by fluorescent lights hanging high above. We were all searching for something those Wednesday nights and Sunday mornings, but I wasn’t sure if it was the same thing. I’d close my eyes during these impassioned sermons, swaying in my chair as if I had been overcome by the holy spirit. Fake it til’ you make it, my sponsor sometimes said.
Eventually we moved into the old Premiere Video in an empty strip mall further toward the center of town, where they’d forgotten to shut off the power when the store closed. After a summer in the hot box that was our previous location, the sound of the air conditioning kicking on was near holy. When they passed a couple of beat-up offering plates around the small congregation, I put in my tithe and instinctively looked up to Pastor Dale for affirmation. But he was looking in Tim’s direction, lips pressed into a satisfied smile. I couldn’t blame him: Tim’s offering envelope had been thicker each week, and my ten percent of not much didn’t much move the needle.
“I’ve got an exciting development for the church,” Pastor Dale had said to me that Sunday afternoon. “A cousin in Tennessee that is going to help us get ourselves a little closer to God, give us something that will really set us apart.” I waited for him to elaborate but he just looked at me, as if he had been perfectly clear. “I could use your help,” he finally said, placing his hand on my shoulder, “and your discretion.” I suspected it wasn’t really the strengthening of my spirit that Pastor Dale had noticed, but my functioning truck. He didn’t give me any other details, other than when to show up and meet Tim. I changed my oil that night.
The weather turned once we hit I-40 in Tennessee. I knew it was bad before we hit it based on the frantic wipers of the cars driving toward us.
“Your wipers don’t work for shit,” Tim said. His first words to me in a hundred miles. He popped the cigarette lighter out of the dash and lit two cigarettes, passing me one. “And I gotta take a leak.”
We smoked in silence until the next exit and pulled into a busy truck stop, big rigs huddled under the big gas station’s canopy like cattle under an oak tree trying to avoid the rain. Tim handed me money for gas, so I went inside to pay, pee, and grab a coffee. A line had formed outside of the bathrooms, dirty water tracked in from outside leading past the drink dispensers to a poorly lit hallway.
Before I even saw the handoff, my junkie intuition told me this was not a place I should be. A potbellied man with a large, untamed beard palmed a small baggie of assorted pills into the hand of a much thinner man. The thin one gave me a side-eyed glance from behind thick, dirty glasses. It was 9:30 in the morning. I fingered the outline of the gas money in my front pocket, tongue gone dry in my mouth.
Tim came out of the bathroom without acknowledging me at all, and when the two dealmakers made no move toward the bathroom, I moved around them, keeping close to the wall like I was shimmying along a cliff’s edge. I washed my hands for the time it took me to say the serenity prayer three times, thinking the entire time about warm numbness spreading through my limbs, a jolt of electricity to my brain. I splashed cold water on my face and stared into the mirror, killing as much time as possible without drawing Tim’s ire. When I came out of the bathroom, the hallway was empty. Amen.
Back on the road, I asked Tim if he had seen the two men in the hallway by the bathroom. He was silent for a while, then without turning from the window, grunted in a vaguely affirmative way. “Pretty sloppy,” he added, a beat later. I focused mostly on not gripping the wheel too hard and scanning the radio for something that would occupy my mind. I let it stay on scan, snippets of old country songs and commercials for car dealerships washing over me until Tim reached up and shut it off. After some time, he pointed at a rapidly upcoming exit. I merged through the blinding spray of an 18-wheeler and we left the interstate for a two-lane highway. I was grateful for the focus required by the slick road winding sharply through the hills. Less opportunity to dwell on damp gas station hallways and other dark corners of the mind.
An hour plus of driving into the increasingly hilly middle of Tennessee and the rain was getting plague-like. I was relieved to hear Tim tell me to keep my eye out for a dive called The Handlebar. A few miles later it appeared around a curve, a small metal-roofed structure covered in a variety of large-print beer advertisements. The parking lot was empty but for one short bed pickup, so pitiful that I questioned whether it had been driven there or the bar built up right next to it. Tim felt for the bulge in his chest pocket and told me to wait in the car.
“I gotta take another leak,” I said.
“Then do it,” he said, as if he hadn’t just ordered me to stay in the car.
Entering the neon dimness inside, I scanned for the bathroom and crossed the room, which somehow seemed smoky despite the lack of anyone smoking. Tim, with the unexplained confidence of a man who had been to this random bar several times before, nodded at the bartender and placed a fat envelope on the counter. I hovered for a second before Tim pointed at the bathroom on the other side of the bar behind a shabby pair of pool tables.
When I got out of the bathroom they were gone. After a cursory look around the bar, which took about four seconds to scan in its entirety, I stuck my head out of the front door and peered into the driving rain. My truck was still there, but the other truck in the lot was gone. It did drive, I guessed.
Thirty minutes passed. No other customers came in, which I supposed was why the bartender was happy to leave the bar unattended in the middle of the day. I didn’t want a drink, really, but I’d been feeling like a kite in a hurricane since the close call at the gas station and I needed to do something to either better tether myself to the world or cut the cord and drift all the way out. I’d never been much of a middle ground guy.
It was mostly true to say I’d been sober since being locked up. They got me for possession with intent to distribute, and I was always a little embarrassed because the truth was all the drugs had been for me and me alone. I’d just been buying in bulk to save a little money. On occasion, nowadays, I’d buy a six-pack for the mower on larger jobs, or a twelve-pack for the back porch when the weather was nice. Always light beer, always only beer. I knew it sounded like gibberish, which is why I never mentioned it to my sponsor, but something about dipping a toe back into the waters of drunkenness firmed up my convictions against the harder stuff.
I strolled behind the bar, grabbed a mug, and poured myself a beer from the tap. I gulped it down immediately, barely tasting it on the way down. Another, then another, standing at the tap refilling like an unwatched child at a coke dispenser.
When Tim came back through the front door, beckoning to me without explanation like his absence made complete sense, he didn’t see me wobble as I rose from the bar stool, and he didn’t see me trip over a taped down electrical cord, and he didn’t see or didn’t care that it took me three or four tries to get the key into the ignition.
We turned off the two-lane highway onto an unmarked gravel road, plowing through the growing moat of a puddle. Varying flavors of Keep Out signs were plastered to trees along the sides of the road. DUE TO INFLATION WE WILL NO LONGER WASTE AMMO ON WARNING SHOTS. A hundred feet later: MAKE PRIVATE PROPERTY GREAT AGAIN.
The gravel made it easier to hide that I was having trouble getting the truck to move in a straight line. It felt like the road was steering the car and we were just along for the ride, ruts in the gravel reminding me of a slot-car track I’d had as a kid. There was something so calming to me back then about the moment where you found just the right speed, fast but not too fast, your car zipping along the curves like it was magnetized. Like it would never lose control and tumble across the brown carpet.
The road ended abruptly in the front yard of a weather-worn mobile home. The lawn was dotted with old cars in various states of disrepair, and the groundskeeper in me couldn’t help but run through its various problems and their fixes.
“Wait here,” Tim said, continuing his frustrating lack of anything resembling an explanation, and lumbered through the rain up to the front porch. He knocked twice and took in the surrounding woods before the door opened and he went quickly inside. I leaned the seat back, just the right amount of drunk where little things like the click and release of the seat’s lever gave me immense pleasure, simple design and simple execution.
Nearly horizontal, I found myself staring at a duffel bag in the back seat I was pretty sure I hadn’t put there. It was zipped tight and laying heavy on the floorboard. I began to feel as if I were orbiting around it, though I hadn’t moved a muscle. I stared at it for what felt like a long time, until at some point I closed my eyes and drifted off into dreamless sleep.
I woke who knows how much later to a fist on the window, the rain still pouring down. I popped the seat up too fast, waking up drunker than I was when I went to sleep. Tim was pounding on the window, yelling something I couldn’t hear over the rain hitting the truck and the fogginess in my head. I cracked the window and among other choice words he instructed me to grab the tank from the truck bed and bring it around back to the greenhouse.
The tank was unwieldy and I nearly dropped it a few times while navigating the overgrown yard, made worse by standing water. Tim and a tall, pale man I had never seen before were waiting in front of the open door of a greenhouse that was missing several roof panels. Inside, small waterfalls were cascading down from the edges of the gaps in the roof, creating a kind of hillbilly Eden. The right side of the long structure, where the roof was intact and several heat lamps were set up, was dedicated to a couple rows of scraggly-looking marijuana plants. I badly needed to use the bathroom and shuffled back and forth, still holding the bulky tank.
Tim was talking to the man on the far side of the greenhouse, looking at something I couldn’t make out. Setting the tank down on the wet ground, I moved closer to the weed, shivering despite the warmth and overwhelming humidity of the greenhouse. Weed had never been my drug of choice, but there had certainly been times I wasn’t doing a lot of choosing as to which drugs I could get my hands on. I put my face close to the leaves of the nearest plant and inhaled deeply, eyes closed, hands clasped behind my back like they’d been cuffed there by somebody who knew better what’s good for me.
I glanced over at Tim. He seemed to be negotiating, holding a stack of cash close to his chest with a smirk as Pale Man gesticulated wildly. I wasn’t too far from them, but the pounding rain made it hard to hear.
I walked a bit closer and nobody told me to stop, so I joined in on their discussion as if I knew exactly what it was about.
“I’m giving you a fair price,” Pale Man said, “it’s not like this is easy to come by merchandise.”
“I understand,” Tim said. “But it’s not quite fair enough yet.”
Tim was the type of guy who’s effortlessly menacing. His bulk was the kind that didn’t seem to come from a gym, but instead from good eating, angry genes, and the constant effort of his fists to stop themselves from beating the shit out of you. Eventually the man relented and lowered his price. Tim handed him a portion of the cash and walked a few steps further toward the corner of the greenhouse. I followed, still unsure of what we had bought.
Then I saw it: a medium-sized, cloudy tank with, by my count, four snakes inside. Three were coiled tightly, all close to the same brownish-gold color, similar black patterns in stripes down their still bodies. The fourth was the others in reverse, faded black with tan markings and a dirty copper line running down the center of its body. The outlier snake was unfurled, its three feet or so of body spread like a dark river between the bodies of its cellmates.
As I got closer, the black snake lifted its head slightly and a quiet hiss left its mouth, like I’d opened up the valve on a propane tank. Its rattler began vibrating and the other snakes awoke to our presence, the sound of rattling raising goosebumps on my arms and neck as I backed a step or two away. Even muffled by their enclosure, the sound filled my ears.
“Which two you want?” Pale Man asked, breaking our reverie. Tim studied them for a minute or two like he was some kind of snake expert, though I’d never heard him mention a snake before in the years I’d known him. “The black one and this one here” he said, pointing to what looked to be the plumper of the three tan snakes.
I brought the tank over, put it on the ground without its lid, and moved to what felt like a safe distance, though I had no idea how much ground snakes could cover or how quickly. I unrolled the sleeves of my work shirt down over the exposed skin of my forearms. Pale Man plucked a snake with some sort of claw-on-a-stick and it writhed in midair, suspended in the grey light and rattling with displeasure. He deposited the snake in the tank and I crouched from a slight remove, paralyzed by a mix of fear and curiosity.
Back on the gravel road, I didn’t feel like I was sobering up like I should have been. Maybe it was the adrenaline from the snakes, or from the duffel on the back floorboard, or maybe I’d had more beers than I thought at the bar. We bounced along, and I asked Tim what the snakes were for. I thought it was a fair question, but he looked at me like he’d never seen a snake before in his life.
“What do you mean?”
“I don’t understand why we just bought two snakes.”
“You don’t understand why we just bought two snakes,” he repeated, sneering a little. “You heard of snake handling? Signs following?”
I didn’t answer, turning the truck back onto the paved highway.
“Dale thinks it will be a big hit with the congregation, strengthen our numbers, make us legit,” Tim continued. “You don’t see it often as west as we are, may draw folks from all around. He’s gonna throw a revival and everything.”
“Who’s gonna do the actual handling?”
Another pause as we went around back-to-back curves on the rain-slick road.
“Dale. Or I guess anyone else dumb enough to think they can. Which I’m sure includes you.” The digs at me were an upgrade over the silent treatment, but not by much.
I imagined standing in the old video store, a black snake hanging from my left hand, my right hand lifted toward the fluorescent lightning and drop ceiling. In the image, my eyes were closed. I was smiling, transported. The snake’s head and searching tongue inches from my forearm, but my face was calm and my hand steady. The congregation watching in awe, hushed in anticipation.
I snapped out of my daydream and checked the snakes in the rearview mirror. I’d bungeed them snug against the left side of the truck bed but had been somewhat hasty on account of the rain and my desire to get my hands away from their general proximity as quickly as possible. The tank seemed secure enough, but I couldn’t see inside to see how the snakes were reacting to their change in circumstances. As I strained to see, a police car came around the bend about two hundred feet behind us. How long had it been there?
The road began to curve gently to the right, but I wasn’t watching the road and we began to drift into oncoming traffic. Tim yelled at me and I corrected it quickly, but I knew the cop had seen it. I was still wet from the rain, but now it mixed with flop sweat.
“There’s a cop behind us,” I said.
Tim checked the side mirror. “Keep steady. Just drive normal.”
I nodded, hands tight at ten and two. The cop was closer now, I had slowed down to below the speed limit, hoping he’d pass. He didn’t, following close behind for several unnerving minutes.
“What if he pulls us over?” I asked.
“Let’s just hope he doesn’t,” Tim said. But like we’d conjured it I heard the siren flip on and blue and red lights filled the rear view.
“I’m not supposed to be outside of Arkansas.”
“No shit. We’re also not supposed to have unregistered snakes and we’re really not supposed to have a big bag of fucking drugs.”
I stole a glance at the bag behind the passenger seat. The silver lining of junkiedom was that the overwhelming blaze of your desire for a high could temporarily burn clean all the rest of your shitty life. For a second, I didn’t think at all about the fact that we were two parole jumpers in a car full of contraband in the process of getting pulled over. I just wanted to know what kind of drugs were in the bag.
“Just pull over and let me do most of the talking. We’re a couple of white guys in a beat up truck in the middle of nowhere. He may just give us a warning without running your license.”
There wasn’t a good place to immediately pull over so I put on my hazards and continued to drive slowly until I could see a gravel shoulder for a stretch up ahead. Prison had not been as bad for me as it could have been, but I wasn’t eager to go back. I slowed the truck to a stop and the trooper pulled in behind me. I reached for my license and registration, but Tim stopped me.
“Shit,” he said. In the mirror I saw a broad-shouldered, black policeman exit his car with a flashlight in one hand and his hand on his sidearm. He walked slowly toward the car, casting the shine of his flashlight over various parts of the truck.
“What if he already ran the plate in his car?” I asked.
“Shit,” he said again. Tim reached under his seat and pulled out a paper bag, a glint of black catching my eye from inside. I hadn’t noticed him stash anything.
The trooper walked toward the truck. When he was about five feet from the passenger-side window I noticed my hand reaching toward the gear shift, then felt my boot press hard on the accelerator. Muscle memory for a crime I hadn’t yet committed. Tim didn’t say a word, just turned and looked behind us with what I swear was a smile on his face, hand resting inside the paper bag.
I drove recklessly, beautifully. I whipped around turns as the back end fishtailed on the wet asphalt. If I put enough distance between us and the cop, I figured we could try to hide out at the Handlebar or some other turnoff, truck stashed in the cover of the surrounding woods.
Going into a hairpin up ahead, I drifted down across the double yellow lines to get lower on the banked turn like I’d seen watching dirt track. Tim gripped the door handle with one hand, leaning to redistribute his bulk. Oncoming headlights from around the turn. I jerked the wheel to the right to avoid the car and then back to the left to try and keep from careening into the woods bordering the highway. It didn’t work.
Time didn’t slow down. We weren’t suspended in air. The truck was not corkscrewing gracefully through the dusk light like a gymnast. It came loud and fast, all screeching steel and broken glass as the truck flipped and we skidded toward the tree line.
When I came to I was dangling upside down, the seat belt pressed deep into my chest and lap. I tried to breathe. It was harder to do than it should have been. I glanced to my right. Tim was out of his seatbelt, or hadn’t been wearing it, unmoving and folded awkwardly into a pocket of crushed truck. I called out to him but got no response. I tried to push the seat belt release but it wouldn’t budge. My head was light and fuzzy—blood was either rushing to my head or too much of it was leaving my body. I found a piece of glass and began sawing away at the belt, eyeing the tree line and wondering what kind of shape my legs were in.
About the time I cut myself loose and thumped down to the roof of the truck, I heard the trooper’s boots crushing glass in approach. A flashlight shone in through where a window had been. “Don’t move,” he said, without much urgency. I couldn’t tell if it was a you’re-hurt-real-bad “don’t move” or a cop-giving-orders “don’t move.”
“Paramedics are on their way but it may take a minute. Please don’t do anything dumb.”
To my right, miraculously, was the duffel bag, torn open with small Ziploc baggies of pills leaking out through the gap. I lay still, doing several kinds of unpleasant math at once. Number of years for the drugs, for the probation hopping, for the fleeing. Number of milligrams per pill, number of pills I might need to not worry about the number of years I might get.
Then: a rattling coming from beyond the duffel and a hint of movement, a darker black moving within the larger black night. I lost sight of it but heard the rattle getting louder. A flash of red and blue reflected off the black scales and my eyes adjusted. The snake was moving slowly, its body draped over the edge of the duffel.
I felt like I was hovering over my own body. I watched my arm extend, scraped raw with road rash. I heard the cop tell me to freeze. I watched my hand reach toward the duffel, fingers lingering on a small pile of its spilled contents. The cop screamed again but I wasn’t listening. I watched my hand turn over, opened to the waiting snake, willing it toward me.
The snake glided toward my outstretched fingers. I closed my eyes, scales cold against my skin. The siren-filled night dropped away, the loud aches of my body suddenly quiet. I wrapped my fingers firmly around its body and felt a pulsing that could have belonged to either of us, or both. Synced. I waited, patient and unafraid, the snake’s weight belonging in my grip. I waited for what seemed like hours but was probably seconds, the time passing pleasant and unhurried like the sun dipping below the tree line. A better wisdom coursed through the pathways of my brain, old and divine. I waited for the snap of a fang or the sting of the rattle or a bullet in the back. “Amen,” I whispered, the snake’s body a heart beating in my fist.
