He scrambled across the floor, laughing all the way. “Your ignorance of scripture is clear, friend. In the Gospel of Mark, Jesus spoke to His disciples and said, ‘And these signs shall follow them that believe; In my name shall they cast out devils; they shall speak with new tongues; they shall take up serpents; and if they drink any deadly thing, it shall not hurt them.’ This venom shall do me no harm. My life is sustained by faith.”

I let the preacher straddle me, and when he rolled me over, I aimed the pistol between his eyes and asked, “Hey, preacher, what’s Jesus say about bullets?”

The back of his head crumbled, and blood rained on the floor.

10.

A few days later, when I came home from the grocery store, Peanut’s Bronco was parked in my driveway. I pulled in next to him, and he wasn’t sitting in the driver’s seat. I grabbed my groceries from the passenger’s seat, got out of my truck, and Peanut walked out the front door of my trailer. He stood at the top of the cinder block steps, spit into a paper cup, and said, “What you know good, Mack?”

I wanted to ask him what the hell he was doing in my house, but it surprised me it’d taken him this long to come and see me. He stepped to the side when I came up the steps and held the screen door open for me. He let it slap shut behind him, and I dropped my groceries on the kitchen table. Peanut dwarfed my small living room but plopped all his weight down into Marshall’s recliner. The trailer shuddered under him, and he motioned at the couch for me to sit.

I pulled one of the chairs from under the kitchen table and took a seat in it. We sat this way until the silence grew pregnant. It would only get interrupted by the sound of Peanut’s spit hitting the bottom of his cup. He kept smiling at me with his best gator-toothed grin and rocked the La-Z-Boy with the heel of his boot. He wanted me to be the first to speak and give him control, but I was willing to wait him out. I already knew he wasn’t planning on killing me. He wouldn’t be here if he did, and I wasn’t worried about having to defend myself.

Peanut finally said, “Get anything good at the grocery store?”

“Just a few essentials.”

Peanut spit. “Katie’s planning on frying up a whole buncha chicken tomorrow night. She’s fixing up mashed taters and collard greens to go with it. If you ain’t never had her collard greens, son, you need to come over.”