The cars and panel trucks and pickup trucks parked in the melancholy twilight looked as if they’d been driven across a time warp from the Dust Bowl. Hadn’t been washed in years.

Had smashed windshields. Cracked headlights.

Missing taillights. Tires that held varying amounts of air, some of them nearly flat. were rusted out so badly the rust had turned into holes in places. And were covered with stickers of all sizes and all lurid colors exhorting pagans to hand themselves over to God and be damned quick about it before it was too late.

The service was just now starting. An Old Testament voice said into a screeching microphone, “Let us now praise the Lord in song.”

And that’s when we knew that we really had been hearing rattlesnakes. Because as a lone, lame electric guitar began to play “I Know The Bible’s Right-Somebody’s Wrong” the faint rattling sound disappeared.

The man appeared from inside the small door in the face of the whitewashed concrete-block building. He was big and wide in his greasy gray work clothes. The dour line of his mouth exploded into a smile as he said, “The Lord welcomes you.” But the close, hard way he looked at us made me wonder about his words.

Kylie and I glanced at each other and nodded, and he widened the doorway by standing aside for us.

Right inside the door we saw the snakes.

A small, wood-framed cage of them sat on a table with a large crude painting of Christ that was as spooky as the snakes. He had the demonic visage normally associated with Satan. On the left side of the table was a stack of pamphlets with a headline reading: The Jews Behind John F. Kennedy. You could pretty much guess what that one was all about. The pamphlets were well printed on a semi-glossy stock. I wondered where Muldaur had gotten the money for them.