The Saints of Rattlesnake Mountain by Don Waters

Author:Don Waters [Waters, Don]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780874174700
Publisher: University of Nevada Press

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It snowed. Great parachutes of crystallized water dissolved like cotton candy on his tongue. That night, the night of early spring snow, James walked the set. When the clouds parted, the moon shone like klieg lights over the buildings.

Inside the church, James perched his boots on the pews, surveying his cleanup job. More and more it resembled a truer church. A proper church. The place was the only genuine-looking article in town. After a while he began aligning the pews into neat rows. He swept snow from the entrance. He wiped down the pulpit and shined its brass base.

Around his middle—he noticed; oh, he noticed—weight in his body had dropped, leaving him with a slight paunch. All those mornings of yogurt without following up with yoga. He wondered what Joy Paz, or the earlobe model, would think, seeing James Miles like this, all mountained-up. For once he did not care. He felt oddly safe here, sheriff over his own forsaken town, examples of his sweat and hard work all around him. The big dark wood cross on the ledge was the final item that needed cleaning. When he tried taking it down, the thing wouldn’t budge. It was heavy. So he shimmied its base, and suddenly it faltered, and the arm of the cross bore down. He quickly pivoted and caught it on his shoulder, which ached under the weight. “Oh, Christ,” James said.

The wood was so old and dry that it was almost held together by splinters. It definitely needed oil.

Hitched on his shoulder, James dragged the cross outside, snow flurries jumping around his face, and walked the full lane, leaving a long, crooked trail in his wake. Then he proudly set the cross, with a thump, on the barroom floor under the buffalo head. What a shoulder workout!

The creaking stairwell was like an old woman’s complaints. James returned from upstairs with a bottle of lavender massage oil. He’d brought the stuff along in the event he met someone special, but so far the only woman around these parts was Linda. The stuff smelled calming, and when he fully unscrewed the cap he was reminded again of that aromatic young nymph from The Standard Hotel on Sunset, her sole job to lay in a nightie, behind the reception desk, encased in glass like a buxom hamster, scribbling into an oversized journal, a pink feather dancing at the end of her pen. Los Angeles seemed to him now, looking down at the distressed wood cross, a distant solar system. Months of mountain air had woken up his synapses in new, unexpected ways, and his task for the night was to burnish wood.

Lent, Linda had said. That time of year. Oh, how he’d forgotten. Yet James remembered how hard he’d tried throughout his life to forget, suppressing what he was once taught, and how long it had taken him to clean his mind of sacraments and absolutions and replace them with things of greater importance.

On his knees he picked away the splinters with eyebrow tweezers.

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