The house was nothing special: white, two stories, with a slat staircase running up the side so the second floor had its own entrance. This had been built by Mr. Dial, who had blocked off the inside staircase so that what had once been a single home was now two rental units. Before Mr. Dial had bought it, and cut it into apartments, the house had belonged to an old Baptist lady named Annie Mary Alford who was a retired bookkeeper for the lumber mill. After she’d fallen one rainy Sunday in the parking lot of the church and broken her hip, kindly Mr. Dial (who, as a Christian businessman, took an interest in the ailing and elderly, especially those of means who had no family to advise them) made it a special little point to visit Miss Annie Mary daily, offering canned soups, country drives, inspirational reading matter, fruits in the season, and his impartial services as executor of her estate and power of attorney.
Because Mr. Dial dutifully handed over his gains to the bursting First Baptist bank accounts, he felt himself justified in his methods. After all, was not he bringing comfort and Christian fellowship to these barren lives? Sometimes “the ladies” (as he called them) left Mr. Dial their property outright, so comforted were they by his friendly presence: but Miss Annie Mary—who, after all, had worked as a bookkeeper for forty-five years—was suspicious by both training and nature, and after her death he was shocked to discover that she—quite deceitfully, in his view—had called in a Memphis lawyer without his knowledge and made a will which entirely negated the informal little written agreement which Mr. Dial had suggested, ever so discreetly, while patting her hand at her hospital bedside.
Possibly Mr. Dial would not have purchased Miss Annie Mary’s house after her death (for it was not especially cheap) had he not accustomed himself, during her final illness, to considering it his own. After cutting the upstairs and downstairs into two different apartments, and chopping down the pecan trees and rosebushes (for trees and shrubberies meant maintenance dollars) he rented the first floor almost immediately to a couple of Mormon missionary boys. That was nearly ten years ago, and still the Mormons had it—this despite their mission’s stark failure in all that time to convert even one citizen of Alexandria to their wife-swapping Utah Jesus.
The Mormon boys believed that everyone who wasn’t a Mormon was going to Hell (“Yall sure are going to rattle around up there!” Mr. Dial liked to chortle, whenever he went around on the first of the month to collect the rent; it was a little joke he had with them). But they were clean-cut, polite boys, and would not come right out and say the word “Hell” unless pressed. They also abstained from alcohol and all tobacco products and paid their bills on time. More problematic was the upper apartment. As Mr. Dial balked at the expense of installing a second kitchen, the place was almost impossible to get rid of short of renting to blacks. In ten years the upper story had housed a photography studio, a Girl Scout headquarters, a nursery school, a trophy showroom, and a large family of Eastern Europeans who, as soon as Mr. Dial’s back was turned, moved in all their friends and relations and nearly burnt down the whole building with a hot plate.
It was in this upper apartment that Eugene Ratliff now stood—in the front room, where the linoleum and wallpaper were still badly scorched from the incident with the hot plate. He was running a nervous hand over his hair (which he wore greased back, in the vanished hoodlum style of his teen years) and gazing out the window at his retarded baby brother, who had just left the apartment and was pestering some black-headed child out on the street. On the floor behind him were a dozen dynamite boxes filled with poisonous snakes: timber rattlers, canebrake rattlers, Eastern diamondbacks; cottonmouths and copperheads and—in a box by itself—a single king cobra, all the way from India.
Against the wall, covering a burned spot, was a hand-lettered sign which Eugene had painted himself, and which his landlord Mr. Dial had made him take out of the front yard:
