Between the Bridge and the River Read online

  He talked of his marriage, of how he had never loved his wife and suspected she wasn’t desperately keen on him either but they had married because it seemed to be the path of least resistance. They had gotten engaged after his father died and squeezed the wedding in before his mother went. He thought they just got married to make his mother feel he’d be okay and that she could relax and expire. They had talked about getting a divorce when Nancy was little but neither one of them could bear the thought of spending time away from her. They hadn’t had sex in nearly two years.

  Claudette pursed her lips at this.

  He talked of his teenage daughter, Nancy.

  That was when Claudette first saw pain in his eyes. He didn’t know what to do about Nancy, he loved her, genuinely and with all his heart. He knew that she would be okay financially and that her mother would take care of her but he hadn’t said good-bye and he felt guilty as hell.

  “That’s because you are guilty. Being guilty tends to engender feelings of guilt,” she pointed out helpfully.

  George squirmed a little in his wood-and-plastic chair. “We’ve been kind of estranged recently. She’ll hardly notice I’m gone. She’s a teenager.”

  “You are her father. It is not her responsibility to maintain contact when she is this age, it is yours.”

  “Cut me some slack here, I’m dying.”

  “Ah yes, the victim excuse. Victim is where evil is born.”

  “Oh, for Christ’s sake. I’m not evil.”

  “I know. You are beautiful but you are afraid. You are in danger of committing little acts of evil.”

  “Bloody hell,” sighed George. He was beginning to wonder if he could handle this kind of scrutiny. He was just beginning to wonder if he should get away from Claudette—then she leaned over and kissed him on the lips.

  It was the best kiss of his life.

  Her lips were soft and warm and slightly parted. She put her hand at the back of his head and grabbed his hair, pushing his face deeper into hers. Her tongue touched his and she gave a little moan. Not only was it the best kiss of George’s life (so far), it was in the top ten best kisses of anyone’s life.

  When they came up for air, she kept her face very close to his. She looked deep into his eyes, and he could feel blood rushing in his ears, actually for real hear his heart pounding. If he hadn’t been sitting he would have had to.

  She spoke very softly. “Evil does not question itself. Only Hope questions itself.”

  He suddenly felt a huge metal anchor of sadness dragging him down. “I have no hope. I’m dying.”

  “Nothing is written,” she lied, and kissed him again, this time because she had noticed that actually it was the best kiss of her life.

  “I’ve only known you for a few hours,” he said, looking at her, genuinely mystified as to why anyone this beautiful would have anything but disdain for him.

  “Courtship is bourgeois. It implies a lack of faith in yourself.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “It means, when you know, you know.”

  And she was right.

  Love at first sight is not rare, in fact it is extremely common, it happens to some people a few times a year. The feeling of “what if” when meeting the eyes of a stranger can be love unrecognized.

  Social and safety concerns impose rules on human behavior that restrict people from listening to their instincts but George and Claudette lived very close to death and they heard themselves more acutely than the civilized and the safe. They heard nature the way an antelope does in the presence of a lion.

  Also, the chemical and genetic structure imprinted on George and Claudette was so compatible that the Universe threw them at each other with all its might. Offspring of such a match would be extremely useful.

  Love at first sight for George and Claudette was not romantic and whimsical. It was inevitable. The Universe wanted it.

  And the Universe always gets what it wants.

  It is, after all, very, very big.

  THE ROAD TO GOD: THREE

  POTTER TEMPLETON HAD NEVER been the sharpest tool in the shed but grief had cracked him so hard that he could barely function. It took him half an hour to brush his teeth, and putting his pants on could take all morning. He had lived in the woods for nearly twelve years before he met Leon and Saul.

  He had moved into the little shack next to the church after Barbara (Babs, he called her), his wife, was killed just before their sixth wedding anniversary. He had been inconsolable, although no one really tried that hard to console him after a couple of weeks. It was too depressing; at least when smart people experienced grief you can distract them for a while, get them into another train of thought for a second or two, but Potter was too dumb to let his big slow-moving freighters interfere with his feelings. All he could do was cry and tell you how bad he felt. No matter what anyone said or did, no matter what cookies or platitudes were offered him, he just wept and complained, so people gave up, even though they sympathized. After a few years he stopped weeping but you still didn’t want to get into too long a conversation with him; after the weather and sports he went straight to his dead family.

  Potter and Babs had grown up in Crawford’s Creek and had been best friends in kindergarten, through grade school, and had become high-school sweethearts. Babs was his intellectual equal. They had made sure they went to summer camps together and they always sat next to each other in Bible studies. Once they held hands and cried together at an Easter service when Babs was pregnant with their only child, an adorable little snaggletooth they had named Jamima.

  Barbara had wept because she had been so deeply affected by the thought of Jesus’ mom seeing him cruelly abused by the Roman soldiers who had beaten and crucified him. It was always a mystery to Babs as to why Mary hadn’t done more to stop it. It wasn’t like she wasn’t connected. But Babs was a simple soul and the pregnancy hormones made her weepy. Potter couldn’t stand to see her cry, so he had joined in. He had wished he could go back in time and kick the ass of everyone who had been mean to Jesus. He still did.

  Babs had been driving Jamima back from choir practice when their station wagon was broadsided by an eighteen-wheeler big rig that ran a stop sign. It had been carrying frozen poultry north to Kentucky. The refrigeration unit on the truck had broken and the driver, Colin Sanders—his buddies called him Col—a twenty-year veteran of the road-haulage business, had been speeding, trying to reach his destination before his cargo spoiled. Col was also a good God-fearing man, and only two months after he killed Babs and Jamie in the truck accident, he put his handgun in his mouth and pulled the trigger. He didn’t die but he became completely immobile, the brain damage so extensive that he couldn’t move or speak or even hear. He was blind too. The only part of his brain that was left intact was that little piece that reminded him constantly that his impatience and greed had made him responsible for the deaths of a beautiful woman and her sweet daughter. That was all he remembered. He had even forgotten that one day he would die and be released.

  It turns out that speeding irresponsibly in a large truck, placing personal wealth ahead of the welfare of others, is one of the greatest sins in the Universe, and Col Sanders’ punishment was very severe. The kind of thing arms dealers and tobacconists can expect later.

  Of course, Potter wasn’t aware of any of this. He just knew his heart was broken and he was in hell.

  Barbara’s and Jamima’s bodies were buried in the little churchyard next to the Confederate soldiers and Potter gave up his job selling industrial machine parts and slept in the shack to be near them.

  Through time, the other parishioners grew to accept this and brought him food and blankets and whatever he needed. Potter kept busy by doing little odd jobs around the church, keeping the church and graveyard neat and tidy, and finding and capturing the occasional snake for services, although most of the local snakes were completely harmless, so were of no significant ceremonial use. The poisonous ones came from a specialty pet s
tore in Tampa that the Reverend Pinkerton would occasionally visit. He had to get his snakes under the counter, you can’t just buy a deadly snake in America, someone could get hurt. Anyway, if you really need something dangerous, get a gun. It’s easy, it’s cheap, and it’s the American way.

  By the time Saul and Leon came stumbling out of the forest, Potter was as much a fixture of the church as the snakes themselves; in fact, he was the Keeper of the Snakes. He kept them in an aquarium next to his bed. At night, alone, listening to the sounds of the trees bending and the crickets calling, he would watch the snakes move slowly under the dull red glow of the heat lamp.

  Once a week he fed them a large live rat.

  Potter was working on the church roof, plugging leaks, when he looked down and saw a fat, sweaty kid and a shifty-looking beanpole walking toward him.

  The fat one spoke. “Pardon us, sir. We’re lost.”

  “I was lost and now I’m found,” replied Potter.

  Leon, still a little spacey and weird, just sang out, “Was blind but now I see.”

  Potter had never heard such a beautiful voice in all his life. He looked at Leon, amazed.

  Leon felt embarrassed, so he sang the song from the beginning, by way of an explanation.

  “Amazing Grace/How sweet the sound/That saved a wretch like me.”

  Leon’s unspeakably brilliant, clear voice filled the forest like the smell of fresh pine after the rain. What chance did Potter have? Even the snakes were charmed. Potter took the boys into his little shack. They sat on the upturned Bulgakov’s Apricots boxes that Potter had converted into chairs (by upturning them—no fancy Catholic carpentry) and sipped the tepid, bitter sludge that Potter called coffee.

  Leon, still “off world,” was fascinated by the snakes. He couldn’t take his eyes off them, they were so weird. So alien. Saul didn’t like snakes. He made sure he sat furthest away from them. Potter fed the boys some grits he had made earlier, which they ate greedily. He listened to their tale, Saul doing all the talking, of how they had escaped the clutches of an atheistic orphanage where reading the Bible was forbidden.

  “We were persecuted for loving the Lord,” Saul told him.

  “This country is turning to Satan. It’s all a man can do to stand against the tide of the forces of evil,” growled Potter.

  “Amen,” said Saul enthusiastically.

  Potter eyed him for signs of irony, but finding none in the fat kid’s clear-eyed expression, he mumbled an amen himself.

  “Ma wife died. I miss her. Ma little girl too. Died for chicken parts.”

  Saul and Leon glanced at each other, confused. Saul took the reins.

  “I’m sorry for your pain. They’re with Jesus now.”

  Potter nodded. “You boys have been abused, like ’em poor Catholic kids—all those faggot priests. Evil, plain and simple. The Reverend Pinkerton will be happy I saved you.”

  And indeed he was.

  The Reverend Alexander Pinkerton had been worried for some time. It was hard to be the minister of a snake-handling cult, after all. Other religions promised community and togetherness and the solace of communal worship, just like the snake handlers but without the rather unpleasant devotional duty of handling icky creatures that might well inject you with a highly toxic venom. He was beginning to feel that it was a tough sell; in his most secret of thoughts, he considered the idea of proposing that they handle other creatures from time to time, more people-friendly critters—puppies, a young goat, kittens—something that the kids could hold and enjoy. Maybe a cow—although that might be blasphemous because of the Hindu connection, you can’t be too careful when it comes to Mighty Jehovah. (Coincidentally, Mighty Jehovah and the Hindu Connection is the name of a punk/jazz fusion band from Athens, Georgia. The drummer, Ricky, is a distant relative of Tootsiepop Ted, the notorious serial killer. Ricky has never killed anyone but he sometimes has an overwhelming urge to stab large mounds of cheese. To date he has never followed through with this. He’ll be twenty-six in January and likes sincere girls, movies with robots, and walks on the beach.)

  The Reverend Alexander Pinkerton wanted something that would bring people in. Crawford’s Creek was a small town and had three churches, so the competition was fierce. He needed something that would allow his church to reach out to the community, plus he was getting bored with snakes. They don’t do much, they just kind of exist. They’re depressing animals, really. God made so many cheery, chirpy things, great and small—why must they specialize in the unpleasant, nasty ones? He never voiced these opinions, of course, he knew they were blasphemous, and he prayed that God remove his weak-minded liberalism.

  He felt he was in a rut. Preaching about sin, handling snakes, preaching about hell, handling more snakes. Truth is, he was getting restless, and was goading the snakes to bite him just to break the routine. He got bitten a lot by snakes but it never seemed to have the slightest effect on him. He was a third-generation member of the Church; his parents and grandparents had been bitten hundreds of times before he was born.

  Reverend Pinkerton’s mother, Darlene, had been bitten by a black mamba, the world’s deadliest snake, when she was pregnant with him. The snake had been brought to the church by Cletus Fairfield, an outlaw zookeeper from Tennessee, who had stolen the expensive African specimen from the Memphis Wildlife Park and was making a killing, often literally, touring the beast through the extreme serpentine cults of the South. People would pay a pretty penny to prove the strength of their faith by handling this deadly beauty.

  Alexander Pinkerton’s grandfather Abraham was a mad drunk who had emigrated to the South from Scotland when he was a boy. He paid five dollars for his pregnant daughter to hold the evil-looking killer. She knew better than to protest. Better to take your chances with the world’s deadliest snake than a Scotsman drunk on moonshine and religion. Cletus didn’t feel too good about it either but he could see a steely psychotic purpose in the old man’s eyes and also witnessed the fearful acquiescence of the other parishioners. He took the snake from the basket using the little stick and lasso he used to protect himself from it.

  Darlene stretched out her plump hand, ready to die if it be the wish of Jesus and her daddy, and the bored snake took a halfhearted stab at her wrist, more out of a sense of duty than any real snakiness. (He’d been biting his way around the Southern states and had figured out that biting was a way to avoid being prodded—rather like a Hollywood film star who finds out that bad behavior is rewarded in show business.)

  Darlene didn’t faint or feel any the worse for the bite, and her father proclaimed a miracle. It is true that the bite should have killed her and her unborn child within a few minutes but nothing happened, nothing visible anyway.

  In reality, only the tiniest amount of venom reached Darlene’s central nervous system. The poor snake was almost out—it was over-milked. The effect of the meager dose of poison was that it acted like a vaccination, rendering Darlene and her unborn clergyman completely immune to all snake venom.

  This, of course, is impossible but it happened. Just like when a bumblebee flies or when Fraser’s invitation was delivered on a Sunday.

  Still, even this story did not help the Reverend Pinkerton in converting many new souls to his church, so when Potter presented him with Saul and Leon, two lost white boys who obviously needed to be shown the Way, he was indeed delighted.

  He was appalled at the story of two young men being persecuted by heathens for their love of Christ, and he insisted that the boys come and live with him and his wife, where they would be safe from satanic governmental indoctrination.

  He would regret that.

  Reverend and Mrs. Alexander Pinkerton lived in a large white wooden house on the outskirts of Crawford’s Creek. The house had been in the Pinkerton family for generations; in fact, it had been built by the Reverend’s mad Scottish grandfather.

  It was a beautiful big American house with a wraparound porch complete with rocking chairs, whitewashed fencing in the yard
, and a covered well. It looked more New England than Old South. A Colonial masterpiece. Anyone would want to live there.

  It was the main reason Sarah Pinkerton (née Muller) had married her husband. Sarah came from a family of Baptists, the tenth of thirteen children, and was hardly noticed by anyone until she hit puberty, when for some strange reason, her gawky bucktooth appearance was transformed. She filled out across the hips and lips and tits and became a pure corn-fed farmer’s daughter fantasy girl. Had she not lived in such an out-of-the-way area, fashion vultures and show business hyenas would have swooped, snatching her for cash and prizes, mauling and pawing at her until they had drained her of all possibilities.

  Her father noticed her beauty and sought to protect her by marrying her young to a good family. In Sarah Muller’s father’s bleak German eyes, a snake-handling family was mystic royalty. The off-spring of snake handlers was as the Dalai Lama. Almost Jesus. A rock star. A great big celebrity worthy of his genetic treasure. Almost as good as a Baptist minister but he couldn’t find one of those who wasn’t obviously gay.

  Alexander and Sarah’s marriage was arranged by their parents. Neither one of them thought to protest, they had been in a vise since birth, they didn’t really know that protest was an option.