The Halleluiah Chicken

By Tom Cater

Chapter One

I was 41 years old and in the middle of an irresolvable identity crisis when I fell in love for the first time. The object of my affection was a country and western singer who wormed her way into the apple of my heart with belly-to-belly slow dancing and cheatin’ type songs that promised moments of passion and rapture-filled joy.
I might not have fallen so hard for those false back-alley promises if things had been different at home; if Loretta, my wife of 20 years, hadn’t grown so incredibly fat and complained so often about my sexual performance. She took great delight in comparing our seasonal liaisons to the mating rituals of horseshoe crabs and jellyfish.
I might not have fallen so madly in love with the voice of a total stranger if my children had shown a little more respect and appreciation for my life-long dedication to their needs.
I might not have drifted so far away from my family and friends if my grandfather hadn’t fallen from a Hungarian circus wagon and been trampled into Polish sausage by Lippizaner stallions and rogue elephants.
I might not have abandoned my career as a plumber’s apprentice if my grandmother hadn’t lost her mind years later trying to figure out all the ‘whys and wherefores,’ and then passed her madness on to her succeeding generations like a priceless heirloom.
I might still be home sitting in front of the television waiting for my arteries to harden if the 80’s recession hadn’t bankrupted the plumbing supply company I worked for and left me with nothing but a feeble grip on reality and a dirty ring around the hot tub of my discontent.
The chanteuse responsible for my fall from mediocrity was none other than Crystal Quayle, a name nearly synonymous with all that is holy and sacred to man’s passionate search for meaning and purpose ... and one selected for its obvious similarity to another more successful country and western singer called Crystal Gayle. It would be a terrible mistake to confuse the two in any other way, a statement that impending circumstances will eventually clarify and confirm.
I left my wife and four children for the dubious pleasure of following my little songbird and her small entourage of musicians and faithful fans across this great nation of ours. I was always hopeful that somewhere along the way we would miraculously be thrown together and, inspired by my love and devotion, she would fall as madly in lust with me as I was with her.
But that was not to be, at least not in the traditionally acknowledged sense of the word. After three months on the road and a dozen states later, traveling from one honky-tonk to another, I finally ran out of cash, checks and hard luck stories. My Mr. Goodwrench auto service warranty was canceled and my gasoline credit card was maliciously confiscated and savaged in a service station outside Arlington, Texas, but not before I had a chance to top off the tank in my 1979 VW Van.
While hiding out from the police in a small suburban shopping center, I met the owner/operator of a small mobile snake show. He was lolling on a bench outside of Victoria’s Secret. As we sat and ogled the scantily clad mannequins, we talked about how tough it was to make a decent living on the road, to strike up meaningful conversations with young and attractive single women, and the ever escalating price of beaver skins, or fashionable silk underwear from Fredrick’s of Hollywood; the less material, the higher the cost.
Eventually we got around to talking about trading cars: his mobile road show, which consisted of 24 snakes, for my VW van and a two-year old vested wool suit I had recently purchased from the Salvation Army and outfitted with museum quality mother-of-pearl buttons. It was a good suit, worth maybe three or four pit vipers.
I never buy new clothing; my present life style provides few opportunities to gild the lily. I view the purchase of recycled attire these days as a socioeconomic necessity. When I comb through second hand swap shops for previously owned trousers, I am filled with doubt. They may fit well when I try them on but not in a way that counts. They are not really mine. It takes time to rehabilitate a pair of abandoned polyester pants that once covered another man’s bum.
As the new tenant, I am bound by an ancient tradition to purge the material of all lingering flatus. I am also required to indoctrinate the seasoned and distressed threads with my own ebullient substance. I itch, twist and scratch until the discarded trousers are sufficiently amenable to my permanent occupation.
After two or three weeks, the britches begin to adapt to my physiology. The trousers may have once belonged to someone else, but now they’re mine by default: squatter’s rights.
If all goes well, they will assume my charisma, my fragrance, and fragments of my other irksome characteristics. They will eventually possess me physically in much the same way I occupy them psychically. My secondhand selections serve me well, which is more than I can say for my state and federal tax dollars.
My VW was also worth considerably more than his ratty old Chevy pickup truck with the homemade camper in the bed and the rusting aluminum trailer he dragged around behind it.
A big sun-blistered sign wired to the side of the dingy white box-like container portrayed brightly colored smiling cartoons of snakes coiled in positions of letters that spelled out:
‘The Largest Traveling Snake Show on Earth!’
Which could have been true, since I knew of no other. There were also words to the effect that the show distinguished itself by exhibiting the largest anaconda in captivity at 23’7”, and the largest boa constrictor in captivity at 19’6 ¼”, though I couldn’t figure out how he got the snakes to lie still and straight long enough to measure them so accurately. There were other unsubstantiated claims mentioned on the sign, but with less impressive statistics. ‘Bushmasters, Mambas, Copperheads, Fer-De-Lances, and even a. Spitting Python
“This exhibition is worth thousands,” The snake man affirmed with a slithery twist of his head.
I noticed that the whites of his eyes had all but vanished. His hairline was receding and a scaly form of psoriasis was creeping over his scalp. If that wasn’t sufficient cause for concern, a smooth, hairless brow protruded over both his dark pitted eyes.
“Then why are you so eager to trade?” I asked.
He shrugged his thin shoulders and an apparently bifurcated tongue flicked nimbly in and out of his mouth. “I been on the road too long,” he complained. “I got a wife and two kids in Cincinnati who think I’m gone for good. This ain’t no life for a family man.”
His head and shoulders revolved like a dish antenna tracking an incoming ICBM.
“Why don’t you take a few weeks off,” I suggested. “Go home, spend some quality time with the family, take a vacation.”
His head recoiled from the suggestion and nearly vanished between his beveled shoulder blades. He gave his somewhat flattened brow a decisive shake.
“No. I want out. Goin’ to see if I can find a job that pays regular wages. Do you want to trade or not?”
He claimed the snakes were easy to care for and only ate once or twice every three or four weeks, if that often. I figured that with just a little luck and some honest effort, I could make a few dollars, stay mobile and follow in the musical wake of the woman I loved, Crystal Quayle.
“What do you feed them?” I asked.
“I try to get by on road kill,” he said, “but it has to be fresh. Possum, coon, rabbit, armadillo, dog, cat, turkle, anything that wanders on to the highway is fair game. If the pickin’s are thin, the big ones will stay fat and sassy if you feed ‘em a chicken now and then. You can buy live ones from farmers for about a dollar each. Just wring their necks and throw ‘em in. Junkyard rats, porky pines and skonks are inclined to be a little too feisty for the snakes and might fight back, unless you gut ’em first. You don’t want your inventory damaged. The smaller ones will eat newborn kittens, white mice, peeps and hamsters. You can buy ‘em in dime stores for about one or two dollars each. These snakes ain’t been fed in quite a while, so they’re probably startin’ to get a little hungry,” the snake man said nervously. “If you wait too long between meals, they’ll start eatin’ each other. If I was you, I’d see if I could find some chickens real quick.”
We traded pink slips and car keys, and at the last minute, he threw in a new pair of red silk panties and I opened up the store. By day’s end I’d cleared nearly thirty dollars and met two skanky little wild-eyed teenage girls who said they were candidates for doctoral degrees in anthropology and animal husbandry at the local junior college. They offered to pay ten dollars each just to hang out in the snake trailer with the big boas and study their mating habits. They said they also wanted to see if snakes could be taught to smoke cigarettes and blow smoke through their nostrils, and what it would feel like to have one wrap it’s entire length around their soft voluptuous bodies and squeeze until the cows came home.
It looked like the end of hard times and a roller coaster ride down the freeway to fame and fortune for me. I couldn’t figure out why the previous owner was so happy and anxious to sell. I think the snakes knew something, but they didn’t seem to care one way or the other.
When the two little teenyboppers returned later that evening to observe and cavort with the snakes, they were wearing studded leather shorts, fishnet stockings and high-heeled shoes three or four sizes too big for their feet. Their faces were also painted with bright glow-in-the-dark orange and green makeup. They looked like circus clowns or punk rock singers. In addition to their black lipstick, which spilled over onto their front teeth, they’d colored their hair purple and yellow with Easter-egg dye. They also had the most peculiar look in their eyes I’d ever seen, until I realized they’d drawn pictures of eyes on the tops of their eyelids.
I asked what the costumes had to do with their studies. They said it was part of a long-lost local tradition for ophites to dress appropriately before participating in ‘con-genital’ rituals and merriment. I suspected they meant congenial or maybe conjugal.
I thought about backing out of the deal for the sake of the snakes, but I hadn’t missed one of my little turtledove’s performances in months, and I could see she was beginning to notice me. Besides, a deal was a deal, and the girls said they only wanted to “frolic like temple virgins” in the trailer for about 30 minutes. I figured the snakes could hold their own that long.
“No peekin’ now,” the skinny one in the short leather britches and the fishnet stockings warned.
“No, I won’t peek,” I said, “but I would like to know what you’re planning? You’re not going to harm or upset the snakes, are you?”
They muffled giggles with their pudgy little hands and their wild eyes glowed bright enough to light up the grand opening of a California used car sales lot.
“Ain’t you ever met an ‘ophite’ before?” The one with the gaping space between her legs and two front teeth asked.
“An o’fight?” I repeated. It was a condition alien to my previous orientation. I’d never met or seen ‘an o’fight’. I wasn’t even sure I knew what one was, nor did I, with any degree of certainty, know why an o’fight felt obliged to recreate with snakes.
“Sure” she said, “don’t cha’ know? Eve was an ophite. That’s why she got throwed out of the Garden of Eden ... for ophitin’ with a snake.”
The implications were abundantly clear. Considering that she’d spoken with some albeit dubious authority on the subject, I was not able to dispute her words. It was clear that she had received instructions or information from one source or another supporting her position. The source would undoubtedly remain her secret.
I told her that I didn’t know snakes possessed the essential accouterments necessary to perform ‘ophi-adultery’.
“Hmm?” She said, with growing distraction.
“I didn’t know snakes had it in them, or wherever, to get it on with an ophite,” I repeated peevishly.
“They got the fanciest things you ever seen in your life,” she said with exuberance. “Real pretty! Especially the big ones, the boas and the anacondas, the old world slinkies. They got things that look like spears!”
There were apparently cultural gaps left in my education that previous employment as a plumber’s helper and apprentice and later as a sump-pump salesman had neglected to bridge.
“How can you tell them apart?” I asked “The males from the females. They all look alike to me. Where do they store their hardware?”
“That’s easy,” she said. “They keep them folded up inside their bodies like antennas on foreign cars. Whenever an ophite comes around, they just seem to turn on. Before you know it, those slippery little slinkies are just slithering around everywhere lookin’ for some place to call home. If you were a snake, well, you ain’t, so I guess it don’t matter.”
I could remember roasting a few common garden variety snakes over an open bonfire during my somewhat abeyant and misguided youth. I began to recall from early biological experiments with toads and various other amphibians that snakes were equipped with hemi-penes or two telescoping penises. It was a condition that literally filled my youthful soul with transmogrifying terror, but not without just cause. The reason for that deeply rooted penile phobia will eventually require further elaboration, and that too will come in time, but not now.
I can vaguely recall an incident during one snake-roasting occasion in my youth when I’d mistaken the long antenna-like appendage dangling from the midsection of the tormented creature for its intestine.
I found the pseudo-sacrilegious predilection of those two puerile pubescent teens for puttering around with reptiles somewhat repugnant, but I couldn’t help delving a little deeper into their squirming serpentine psyches.
“What is it about serpents that make them so appealing to ophites?” I asked.
Before the words were out of my mouth, my brain was conjuring up mythical images of Medusa, Hecate, the three Graiae sisters, Gorgons, Harpies and Sirens, all phallic monsters yet reputedly unspoiled virgin goddesses, except Medusa, of course, who was spoiled by Poseidon and beheaded later by Perseus.
The truly meaningful answer, I suspected, would be rooted deeply in myths too old for human recollection or elaboration and probably dated back to that first deluded sensual encounter between that arboreal primate man, and that similarly constructed creature he chose to domesticate and mistook for a soul-mate, woman, Eve, or was her real name Athena, or Anathema, or Anna Conda? The Old Testament fear of unnatural trespass prevented me from continuing my inquiry.
“If you was a snake, honey, you wouldn’t even have to ask,” the tall lanky bowlegged one said. “You’re so cute you’d have to fight the ophites off with a sharp stick.”
They paid their ten dollars and said they wanted to ophite privately, which I interpreted to mean without an audience. I unlocked the trailer door and they minced in carefully so as not to step on any fat tails. They got overly excited just stroking and staring at the snakes. They started jumping up and down and bouncing against each other in a way that led me to believe their interests in serpents were not really culturally oriented or religiously motivated.
There was a lingering odor in the trailer reminiscent of Egyptian tombs, old church hymnals, Minoan temples, and girl’s locker rooms. They waited for me to leave so they could start re-creating the ancient ritual, the first pact woman ever made with her sovereign spiritual mentor and slithery savior.
I closed the door, but I could still quietly and unobtrusively observe through a narrow crack and keyhole. Even though I’d promised not to peek, I couldn’t see how one little backward glimpse was going to make a difference in the scheme of things. After all, it wasn’t every day one was fortunate enough to witness the renewal of an ancient pact, a timeless ritual that involved the surrender of femininity to the creature that symbolized all that was unholy in the natural order of things. I scrunched up close to the crack in the door and focused my left eye, which was considerably keener and easier to focus than my right.
They were squirming out of their leather shorts and camouflage panties and kicking off their high-heeled shoes by the time I got into position. They played little tickly games with each other and the snakes, touching and teasing them until those slinkies were sliding around and over each other as smoothly and swiftly as if they were gliding on well-oiled ball bearings.
The snakes seemed to possess some epigenetic knowledge of human biology because their tails began to discover and explore those warm wide vacuous spaces between the girls’ legs, while the two teens seemed to become more spiritually enraptured by their touch. It was such an extraordinary sight that it set the nerves in my medulla oblongata tingling so deliciously that I couldn’t tear myself away from the door.
The last time I’d experienced anything half as compelling was during a folk festival in Elkins, West Virginia. I’d accidentally stumbled into an Afro-American snake-handling ceremony and watched a black man turn white and female after singing a Negro spiritual with a timber rattler draped around his neck.
The snakes were gearing up and starting to glide over the teenyboppers with greater ease and speed than I’d ever seen one move before. I’d never seen a boa constrictor caress or tenderly attach itself to a living, breathing, pulsating, palpitating thing, but that night I did. They gave a new meaning to the word cuddle. I saw things going on in that trailer I couldn’t dare believe were possible, not even if I’d read about it in Time, or Ripley’s Believe it or Not!
I once saw a Cambodian topless dancer amuse tourists by allowing a thin green snake to crawl up her nose and exit her mouth. But I could never have imagined the incredible diversity, variations and configurations a youthful female torso could so easily perform and perfunctorily assume before I got into the snake show and country and western groupie business.
After only a few minutes, nearly 10 to be precise, I couldn’t in good faith or conscience watch any more. My senses were numb and I felt as if I’d overdosed on a pound of chocolate opium cookies. The snakes were also giving off an embarrassingly musky odor that was bordering on the hypnotic.
I’d seen and heard of some curious and peculiar diversions before, but those two little flightless dodo birds were destined to fill space in a lot of supermarket tabloids.
“You girls be careful in there, you here?” I shouted with a hint of menace in my voice.
I heard them laughing and giggling, so I thought I’d take one last quick peek in the event they had discovered a new configuration. One of the larger snakes was actually embracing one of the young ladies and using his body much the same way a man might use his arms. Its awesome length was coiled around her legs, waist and hips, and the tip of its tail …
“My God!” I screamed, much to my regret.
The snake turned a baleful eye in my direction as if to infer, ‘We know now who calls on whom when the going gets tough.’
Damn, I muttered beneath my breath and backed away from the door. “I’m going,” I shouted, more for the snake’s benefit than anyone else’s. “The keys are hanging by the door. Make sure you lock up when you leave.”
“Okay,” they replied and laughed giddily.
I thought about sneaking another peek but chickened out. The snake had blood in its eyes when it looked in my direction. I knew that if I was ever going to live in a state of peaceful coexistence with them, I would have to make a few concessions over the next few weeks, months, maybe even years.