Sam McCain - 04 - Save the Last Dance for Me Read Free Page B

do this!”
    They tell you snakes don’t smell. And that they’re not cold to the touch. And that they’re not slimy. In an objective sense, I knew all this to be true. But I had the sudden visceral feeling that I was in a cave of reeking, slithering, cold-bodied snakes that dripped poison even from their vile scaly bodies.
    “Please, Kathryn, help this young girl,”
    Muldaur intoned. “We’re trying to conduct a service for the Lord here. He is not kind to those who defy Him.”
    The young woman, scrawny and pigtailed as her daughter, left her folding chair and ascended to the raised platform. The girl clung to her, throwing her arms around her mother’s waist and clutching her the way people clutch life preservers.
    “If she will not hold the serpent,” Muldaur said, “that means she knows the serpent is already in her heart.”
    Kathryn bent down and talked to her daughter in a low voice.
    Muldaur addressed the congregation.
    “Pray for little sister Claudia that she might receive the divine courage she needs to do her duty for a loving God.”
    And they broke into loud, ragged prayer, mother and daughter still talking in low tones back and forth.
    Mother walked daughter a few steps closer to the snake cages and pointed to the snakes inside as if they were gentle creatures that would be fun to play with.
    Claudia was calmer now, snuffling up her tears, standing little-girl tall and little-girl brave. Her mother dabbed at one of Claudia’s tears with her finger. Then Mom nodded to Muldaur.
    “Unto the Lord will the true heart deliver us,” Muldaur said to the congregation as he opened the lid of the second cage. Once again I was startled by the way, almost without looking, he shoved his hand deep into the middle of the piled, hissing rattlesnakes and plucked one out.
    He did not pause.
    He handed it straight to the little girl.
    And that was when the timber rattler, a sort of baby version, much smaller than the previous snakes, used the occasion to lunge at her, striking her right on the cheek.
    The little girl screamed. And so, I think, did I.
     
Two
     
    “God, Mr. C, you’ll never believe
    who’s pulling up in the parking lot.”
    Someday, or so one hopes, Jamie
    Newton, seventeen, sexy, freckled, cute, will learn that “Mr. C” only works with Perry Como on his Tv show because his last name happens to begin with C. My name, using that Tv style, would be Mr. M for McCain.
    But that is only one of many things that has thus far eluded the elusive sweater girl who makes my middle-aged clients make terrible fools of themselves. They find excuses to hang around my office like it’s the beer tent on a scorching day at the state fair. It doesn’t help that Jamie always looks like all the bad girls you see on the covers of Gold Medal novels about jailbait girls who lead middle-aged men to Death Row.
    Jamie also can’t answer the phone
    (“Uh, hello?”), type (my name usually gets typed as “Mcc-ain”; or, on
    especially bad days, “Mr. C”), buy
    office supplies (“I just thought pink typing paper would kinda brighten things up”), or resist the call of romance (her boyfriend, Turk, usually calls here four times per her two-hour after-school sessions), or keep her bathroom visits brief (“I guess I’ve just got a weak liver”).
    How, you may ponder, did such an unpolished gem come to reside in my cramped little office, itself stuck in the back of a large building that keeps changing businesses?
    Small-city lawyers are like small-city bankers. We get paid in a variety of ways.
    I once got a side of beef for handling a divorce; and a used Tv, which I still watch at home, for a traffic case.
    I got Jamie from her father, Lloyd, who couldn’t afford to pay me for an insurance case I handled for him. In exchange, he said, I’d get his daughter for an unspecified time as my secretary. I’d tried to give her back many times but so far had had no luck. “Nobody deserves her more than you do, Sam,”