Reckless: Shades of a Vampire (3 page)

He had lost the family’s money, they said.

He had lost his way in his walk, they said.

He had struck his wife, on more than one occasion, they said.

And, he had denied any wrongdoing at all, they said.

Not one speck of repentance from Uncle Billy.

He had it coming, they said.

“Just a few dollars and a little whiskey,” he had said. “A little fun never hurt nobody.”

God knew better, they said.

Apparently, they were right.

Uncle Billy handled a serpent in a service one Sunday night, taken from the hands of his brother, the preacher. Uncle Billy was bitten in an instant.

Strike!

Billy died on the sanctuary floor an hour later with his wife kneeling beside him, begging for his survival while trying to atone for his sins for him.

“He was a good man, God!” she cried out. “He painted these walls with his own hands.”

But Uncle Billy drew his last breath without muttering a word after the serpent struck him.

God rest his soul, her father said still, whenever Billy’s name came up.

Emma didn’t think her odds were better than Billy’s, or others who had handled snakes without repentance for sin.

She knew her heart. She knew her mind. And she knew both at the moment were at the same place they had been all week.

That’s why Emma had paused when her turn had come to reach out for the rattler. She had feared the inevitable. But once committed to the act, parishioners are admonished for backing off, a sure sign of weakness in guilt, something just as bad, if not worse, as being bitten.

The parishioner might avoid the bite but they can’t survive the scorn. And her very own father, who would have nothing of her rejection of the serpent, was holding the snake.

Turning back was not an option.

Emma had gritted her teeth and pushed her toes hard into the sanctuary’s plank floor. She had reached toward her father, who was holding the gyrating, three-foot rattler in his right hand, and the Bible in his left hand.

“Praise God!” her father had shouted, hoisting the Bible above his head. Though her mouth was too dry to gather saliva, she had swallowed, hard, and opened her palm to take the serpent. 

Emma’s father had looked her in the eyes, and smiled dimly with his lips closed. The rattlesnake had coiled as Emma’s hand approached, opening its flexible jaws wide enough that it flashed the underside of its milky-white fangs.

Strike
!

With a piercing that felt like the sting of 13 bees at once, the snake’s fangs had dug into Emma’s skin on the right side of her neck, just above her collarbone. She had moaned.

Her father, still holding the recoiled snake midway up its torso, had gasped.

Emma had blinked her eyes. She had pulled back her hand and clutched the wound on her neck. Her head was sent spinning like when she twirled in circles in the yard as a child.

Emma saw bursts of flashing light.

Her knees had buckled. She had fallen to the floor.

Emma had missed Sunday night snake handling the week before, after she had approached her father at the lectern in the moment between when he called for the snakes and the Deacons arrived with them. She had whispered to her father that she did not feel well and needed to leave for home. Emma had told her father she would walk the half-mile home to the parsonage and go to bed early.

But Emma had felt fine that night, nearly perfect even. Maybe better than she had ever felt before, anticipating what lie ahead. She had known the handling of the serpents took an hour-and-a-half or more as charged parishioners hummed about with free-flowing adrenaline long after the last rattler was returned to the wooden box.

She had planned that night to meet Michael in the barn at the Denton farm, which ran parallel to the parsonage across the narrow two-lane blacktop county road. Emma had known the only time she could meet Michael without her parents knowing about it was during the snake handling.

So the plan was made days before, and she had eagerly counted them down.

Michael had recently graduated from Ider High School. He had started working as a hand on the Denton farm doing odd jobs the week before. Emma had seen him a few times over the years, at the market in Ider, and she had noticed him looking at her.

She, too, had looked at him. But they had never spoken beyond the language of a long gaze.

Emma was not allowed by her father to date or see boys at all until she turned 18, and even then, only with his approval. She was 18 now, but any meetings were to be approved by her father and held in the family home under his watchful eyes.

“God will tell me who your husband should be,” her father said. “He knows the path you should walk.”

Since the first Monday Michael went to work at the Denton farm, he and Emma had stared at one another across the roadway like stargazers looking into the universe for a new planet. In her bed at night, she looked deep into his eyes, imagining he was still there. She knew he was thinking of her, too.

"Michael," Emma whispered as her fingers circled her crotch.

By day, they could not look away, afraid they might miss something that might carry them through the next night.  

Emma knew without it being said that her father would never allow Michael to call upon her at the house since Michael’s family did not go to church -- any church.  The Mooney’s, including Michael, his mother, his father, and his three younger sisters, were viewed by her father as black sheep of the Sand Mountain community, a tolerable aberration allowed to graze among the good and local since they caused no obvious trouble.

When John and Sara Mooney moved to the area from the state of New York more than a decade before most locals simply referred to them as hippies. And most still did.

The Mooney’s, the hippies, had arrived in the area in a Volkswagen van. They had paid cash for a house and 40 acres that came with a mule, and a plow for the mule to pull. Before they had fully unloaded the van they had plowed a field, planted a garden, and started calling themselves residents, and writers. Most everybody liked them all right, as much as they knew them. They just didn’t understand who the Mooney’s were or what they were beyond the broad assessment – hippies.

Michael’s mother wore long hair she kept tied in a ponytail that landed halfway down her back, and dresses once colored bright that had long since faded that landed halfway down her thighs. Rumor among the women was that Sara didn’t shave under her armpit.

But nobody really seemed to that know for sure. Sara Mooney volunteered three days a week in the public library restocking books, and she tutored students who needed help in reading and writing at her children’s school.

Michael’s father wore sandals that strapped around his ankles and had facial hair that looked like he trimmed it with a well-used butter knife. Michael’s father was known to walk the land of the region far and wide, the hills in particular, recording data about trees, wildflowers and wildlife encountered.

Rumor among the men was that John Mooney, eight years older than has wife, was married before, but nobody seemed to know for sure. Mooney led a Boy Scout troop in the area that was started with a few, but had dwindled to just one by the time Michael earned his Eagle Scout badge.

Michael’s sisters were honor roll students who thrived in art classes. They had shoulder-length, sandy brown hair they pulled back into a ponytail, bluish-green eyes, and long, slender noses that tapered at the end to meet broad, bright smiles. The girls ran together as if they were best friends from the same grade in school, and they were, and they did not like talking about Michael’s planned departure for college.

Michael was heading to New York University in the fall. He was just the second student in the history of Ider High School to notch a 36, a perfect score, on the American College Test, and the third to earn a National Merit Semi-Finalist distinction. Academic scholarship offers came from colleges and universities all over the country, and most offered a paid-in-full experience, including housing and books. 

But Michael felt NYU would best prepare him for law school. His plan was to work at the Denton farm in the summer, earning enough money to manage the difference between scholarship money and spending money needs at the more expensive school for the first year.

Michael was known as a hard worker in high school, and he had never dated in other than obligatory arrangements for prom and junior senior banquet, and those had not gone so well.

Still, Michael was voted “Cutest” and “Most Likely to Succeed” in the senior class, and the girls giggled when he walked by, noting his olive skin, bluish-green eyes, and wavy brown hair as OMG-worthy.

Standing six-feet tall, he wore Wrangler jeans that snuggled tight to muscular buttocks in the back and made a bold outline of his package in the front and matched well with an assortment of pale, well-worn t-shirts regardless of the season. In winter, he just tossed a jacket on top for good measure.

But the girls did not know what to make of Michael, or so they said to one another in whispers as he passed quietly by, because he did not talk much to them.

They said he was shy, if not socially awkward.

Michael’s excuse to his mother was that he had nothing to say to girls.

“I can’t relate,” he had said.

“That’s okay honey,” she said. “You’ll meet someone your type in college.”

Emma, of course, had never been on a date – any date, of any kind.

Holding hands with grown men during congregational prayers sessions was her closest encounter with the opposite sex. She had pictured herself on a date with Michael when she daydreamed about going to prom, but she did not know him at all beyond the fuzzy image she recalled from a few chance meetings in town that had ended without words.

They had never spoken, and all she really knew about he or his family is what her father said – that they were heathens and hippies, two things her father loathed incidentally. 

After Michael had arrived for work that first day at the Denton Farm, which anchored the opposite side of the blacktop highway from the parsonage, he and Emma had the perfect alignments for gazing at one another, considering the parsonage grounds were directly across from the farm’s barn and tool shed where Michael spent most of his time.

While Emma worked in the garden and flowerbeds and hung laundry daily on outside lines, Michael had an old farm to get back into shape as part of his I’ll-do-the-work-and-we’ll-share-any-profits setup he made with Mrs. Denton, a widow.

Nobody had worked at the farm in years since Mr. Denton died. The entire farm was less than 200 acres -- not big enough for a commercial farmer to fool with but enough to squeeze some income from. Hay and garden produce would deliver the most return, Michael figured, since the farm and its assets were in need of repair.

The big water well behind the barn was tainted, the tractor was aged, and started with more than a few huffs and puffs, and the plow was rusting. But the soil was fertile and Michael figured all it needed was some sweat equity. Anyway, he needed a summer job an was able to talk Mrs. Denton into letting him plant some fields and cut and bail some hay, splitting the profits with her in turn for her letting him use the land and tools to get it all done.

His first few days on the job, Michael and Emma pretended like they weren’t gazing at each other at all. If she looked up at him, and he was looking at her, she pretended her glance was accidental, continuing to move her eyes moving to another point away from him.

But when Michael looked at her Emma tingled head-to-toe like she had just stepped into a fresh-drawn warm bath with lavender bubbles. And when she thought of him at night, her thing it barely lasted at all. 

Emma imagined Michael kissing her and she couldn't help moments later but to thrust her hips up from the bed toward what she imagined was his body as orgasm rippled throughout her body.

By day, at first, at least, he too looked away if Emma’s eyes caught his staring at her. But by the fourth day, their look-away game had worn off, and Emma and Michael had come to a meeting of the eyes, a sort of understanding through the dilated, distant language that they both wanted to stare and have the other do so in return and do so without apology.

So they did, passing glances that grew deeper and longer with every passing moment of the day. Emma watched Michael, and Michael watched Emma. They grew so close she thought she could smell his musk, and he thought he could smell her honeysuckle breath.

She watched him pitch hay from a wagon to the ground, and from the ground to a shelf within the barn. He watched her bend over to fill a bucket from the water well, and pour the bucket of water over flowerbeds.

She watched him wipe sweat from his brow, and she wanted to reach out her tongue to taste it.

He watched her lift the hem of her dress just above her knees to walk through tall grass, and he wanted to reach out his lips to touch her legs, licking his way up to her crotch.

She breathed heavily when he rode by shirtless upon the saddle of the green John Deere tractor that purred along the roadside like an old cat.

He breathed heavily when she curled her left arm just below her chest and filled it with produce picked from the garden.

By the end of his first week on the job, when Michael could no longer take watching Emma glide across the parsonage grounds in her cotton pastels without approach, he had started walking toward the blacktop road that separated them, in a direct line toward her, as she stood on the parsonage grounds measuring his progress.

Emma watched his each and every step without glancing away, not even for one blink.

She saw Michael hop the barbed-wire fence that buffered the Denton farm from the road. She watched him cross the road. She watching him walking to her with his eyes fixated firmly upon her.

Eventually, he was standing before her.

“You are blushing,” Michael said to Emma, standing at her side.