The visitor—Loyal Reese—was the baby of the family, the baby Eugene had heard tell of in the prison laundry, laid to rest as a newborn amongst the rattlers. He had been handling serpents since he was twelve years old; he looked as innocent as a calf, with his big country ears and his slicked-back hair, beatitude shining glassily from his brown eyes. As far as Eugene knew, none of Dolphus’s family (apart from Dolphus) had ever been in trouble with the law for any reason other than their peculiar religious practices. But Eugene was convinced that his own sniggering and malicious brothers (involved in narcotics, both of them) had some ulterior motive in arranging this visit of Dolphus’s youngest sibling—some motive, that is, apart from Eugene’s inconvenience and distress. His brothers were lazy, and as much as they loved to annoy Eugene, calling young Reese down here with all his reptiles was too much effort for a practical joke. As for young Reese himself, with his big ears and his bad skin, he seemed wholly unsuspicious: lighted violently by hope, and his calling, and only slightly puzzled by the cautious welcome Eugene had offered him.
From the window, Eugene watched his baby brother Curtis galumphing off down the street. He had not asked for the visitor, and felt confused about how to deal with the reptiles caged and hissing around the Mission. He’d envisioned them locked in a car trunk or a barn somewhere, not residing as guests in his own quarters. Eugene had stood dumbfounded as box after tarp-draped box was dragged laboriously up the stairs.
“How come you didn’t tell me these things didn’t have the poison took out of them?” he said abruptly.
Dolphus’s little brother seemed astonished. “That’s not in accordiance with the Scripture,” he said. His hill-country twang was as sharp as Dolphus’s, but without the wryness, the gamesome cordiality. “Working with the Signs, we work with the serpent as God made him.”
Eugene said, curtly: “I could have got bit.”
“Not if you had the anointment of God, my brother!”
He turned from the window, full-face, and Eugene flinched slightly at the bright impact of his gaze.
“Read the Acts of the Prophets, my Brother! The Gospel according to Mark! It’s coming a victory against the Devil here in the last days, just like it was told in the Bible times. … And these signs shall follow them that believe: they shall take up serpents, and if they drink any deadly thang—”
“These animals are dangerous.”
“His hand hath made the serpent, Brother, just as it made the little lamb.”
Eugene did not reply. He had invited trustful Curtis to wait with him at the apartment for young Reese’s arrival. Because Curtis was such a valorous puppy—stricken, bumbling uselessly to the defense when he believed his loved ones hurt or in danger—Eugene had thought to scare him by pretending to be bitten.
But the joke had been on Eugene. Now he felt ashamed of the trick he had tried to pull, especially since Curtis had reacted with great sympathy to Eugene’s shriek of terror when the rattlesnake coiled and struck the screen, spraying poison all over Eugene’s hand: stroking Eugene’s arm; inquiring, solicitously, “Bite? Bite?”
“The mark upon your face, my brother?”
“What about it?” Eugene was well aware of the gruesome red burn scar running down his face, and felt no need for strangers to call it to his attention.
“Is it not from being took in the Signs?”
“Accident,” Eugene said curtly. The injury had resulted from a concoction of lye and Crisco shortening known, in prison parlance, as Angola cold cream. A vicious little trick-bag named Weems—from Cascilla, Mississippi, in for aggravated assault—had thrown it in Eugene’s face in a dispute over a pack of cigarettes. It was while Eugene was recovering from this burn that the Lord had appeared to Eugene in the dark of the night and informed him of his mission in the world; and Eugene had come out of the infirmary with his sight restored and all set to forgive his persecutor; but Weems was dead. Another disgruntled prisoner had cut Weems’s throat with a razor blade melted into the end of a toothbrush—an act which only strengthened Eugene’s new faith in the mighty turbines of Providence.
“We all of us who love Him,” said Loyal, “bear His mark.” And he held out his hands, pocked and hatched with scar tissue. One finger—spotted with black—was horribly bulbed at the tip and another cut short to a nub.
“Here’s the thing,” Loyal said. “We got to be willing to die for Him like He was willing to die for us. And when we take up the deadly serpent and handle it in His name, we show our love for Him just as He shown it for you and me.”
Eugene was touched. Obviously the boy was sincere—no sideshow performer, but a man who lived his beliefs, who offered up his life to Christ like the martyrs of old. But just then they were disturbed very suddenly by a knock at the door, a series of quick, jaunty little raps: tap tap tap tap.
Eugene tossed his chin at the visitor; their gazes parted. For several moments, all was stillness except their breath and the dry, whispery rattle from the dynamite crates—a hideous noise, so delicate that Eugene had not been aware of it before.
Tap tap tap tap tap. Again came the knock, prissy and self-important—Roy Dial, had to be. Eugene was paid up on the rent but Dial—a born landlord, drawn irresistibly to meddle—often came snooping around on one pretext or another.
Young Reese laid a hand on Eugene’s arm. “They’s a sheriff in Franklin County got a warrant on me,” he said in Eugene’s ear. His breath smelled like hay. “My daddy and five others was arrested down there night before last for Breach of the Peace.”
Eugene held up a palm to reassure him but then Mr. Dial gave the doorknob a ferocious rattle. “Hello? Anybody home?” Tap tap tap tap tap. A moment of silence and then, to his horror, Eugene heard a stealthy key turning in the lock.
He bolted to the back room, just in time to see the chain-lock catch the door in the act of easing open.
“Eugene?” The doorknob rattled. “Is somebody in there?”
“Um, I’m sorry Mr. Dial but now aint a very good time,” Eugene called, in the chatty, polite voice he used with bill collectors and law-enforcement officials.
“Eugene! Hello there, bud! Listen, I understand what you’re saying but I’d appreciate it if we could have a word.” The nose of a black wing-tip shoe slid into the door crack. “Okey-doke? Half a second.”
Eugene crept up, stood with one ear inclined to the door. “Uh, what can I do for you?”
“Eugene.” The doorknob rattled again. “Half a second and I’ll be out of your hair!”
He ort to been a preacher himself, thought Eugene sourly. He wiped his mouth with the back of his hands and said aloud, in the most glib and sociable voice he could muster: “Um, I sure do hate to do you this away but you done caught me at a bad time, Mr. Dial! I’m directly in the middle of my Bible Study!”
A brief silence before Mr. Dial’s voice came back: “All right. But Eugene—you ought not to be setting all this garbage out in front of the curb before five o’clock p.m. If I receive a summons you’re going to be responsible.”
“Mr. Dial,” said Eugene, staring fixedly at the Little Igloo cooler on his kitchen floor, “I sure do hate to tell you this but I kindly think that trash out there belongs to the Mormon boys.”
“It’s not my problem whose it is. The Sanitation Department doesn’t want it out here before five.”
Eugene glanced at his wristwatch. Five minutes to five, you Baptist devil. “All right. Er, I surely will keep my eye on it.”