Something Rich and Strange: Selected Stories Page 36

  That snake was the first of a dozen garter and green snakes I would catch in our back and side yards that summer. Despite my mother’s pleas, my father refused to kill them. Instead, he punched holes in the jar lids and encouraged me to keep them a couple of days before turning them loose again. My father tried to assure my mother, lectured her on the value of snakes, how most were nonpoisonous, were friends of mankind who helped control mice and rats. He had even brought a book on reptiles home from the college library to support his views. But my mother had her own book to refer to—the bible, and in its first chapters found enough evidence to convince her that snakes had been, since the Garden of Eden, mankind’s worst enemy. Now, with the aid of her husband, her son was making “pets” out of them, further proof to her of man’s fallen nature.

  My mother had hoped that my fascination with reptiles was, like the hula hoop, a passing fad that would be forgotten once the snakes went underground for the winter. This might have happened except for my father.

  Up to this point in my life, my father and I had been rather distant. Part of the problem was that, possessing an artistic temperament, he was distant towards everyone, his mind fixed on some personal vision of truth and beauty. But even the times he had tried to establish some kind of rapport had been unsuccessful, since these attempts consisted of Saturday morning trips to the basement of the college’s fine arts building. Once there my father sat me on a stool and placed a football-sized lump of clay in front of me, assuming that a five- or six-year-old boy would find a morning spent making pottery as enjoyable as he did.

  He was wrong, of course. I quickly became bored and wished I were home watching cartoons. I watched the clock hands crawl towards lunchtime, daydreaming of fathers such as Mr. Splawn, who had taught Donnie how to throw a curveball and took him bass fishing at Washburn’s pond.

  It was the snakes that brought us together. To my amazement my father shared my interest in reptiles and even spoke of having caught snakes when he was a child. And it was he who, during that long, snakeless winter of my seventh year, kindled my interest with books checked out of the college’s library.

  By March I rivaled Dr. Brown, the college’s biology teacher, as Cliffside’s leading herpetologist. With my father’s assistance, I had read every book on reptiles in Cliffside Junior College Library. I also owned a book on snakes better than any found there, a massive tome big as our family bible, a Christmas present from my father titled Snakes of the World.

  It was this book, more than anything else, that turned my hobby into an obsession. Unlike most of the books from the college’s library which had small, black-and-white photographs, Snakes of the World had 14 x 18 inch color plates. Opening the dull reddish-brown cover of that book was the visual equivalent of biting into one of Badeye’s snowcones, for though my mother could never have comprehended it, I found these creatures indescribably beautiful. Not all of them, of course. Some, like the water moccasins or timber rattlesnakes, had thick, bloated bodies and flattened heads and were colored black or dull brown. There were others, however, that were stunning in their beauty: the bright-green tree boa, for instance, found in the Amazon; or the gaboon viper, an Asian snake, its dark-blue color prettier than the stained glass windows of our church.

  The most beautiful one of all, however, the coral snake, was found not in Australia, or Asia, or Africa, but in the American South. A picture of a coral snake appeared on page 137 of my book, and in the right-hand corner of that page was a paragraph that I quickly memorized:

  Because of its alternating bands of black, red, and yellow, the North American Coral Snake (Micrirus fulvius) is one of the most brilliantly colored snakes in the World. A secretive, nocturnal creature found in the Southern United States, it is rarely encountered by humans. The North American Coral Snake is a member of the cobra family, and thus, despite its small size (rarely exceeding three feet in length), is the most venomous reptile in the Northern Hemisphere.

  I celebrated my eighth birthday in late March. As the fried chicken cooled and the candles started to droop on top of the cake, my mother and I assumed my father was in the basement of the fine arts building throwing pots, having forgotten it was his only child’s birthday. But we were wrong. Just as we started to go ahead and eat, my father came in the back door, grinning, a wire mesh cage in his right hand. He placed it on the dining room table between the green beans and my cake.

  “Happy Birthday, son,” he said.

  It took me a few seconds to identify the creature coiled in the bottom of the cage as a hog-nosed snake, but it only took my mother about half a second to drop her fork, shove back her chair, and make a frantic exit into the kitchen. After taking a moment to compose herself, she appeared at the doorway separating the kitchen from the dining room.

  “I will not have a live snake inside my house, James,” she said. “Either me or that snake is leaving right now.”

  It was clear my mother was not bluffing, so my father carried the cage out to the carport, moving some stacks of old art magazines to clear a space in the corner farther from the door. When I asked where the snake had come from, he told me he had driven to Charlotte that afternoon and had visited three pet shops before finally finding what he wanted.

  As March turned into April, the temperatures began to rise. The dogwood tree in our side yard blossomed, and snakes began to crawl out of their burrows. Because my father had absolutely no interest in keeping up his property, our back and side yards were a kudzu-filled jungle, a reptile heaven. It was here that I spent most of my spring afternoons. My reading had made me a much more successful snake hunter than I had been the previous summer. Instead of wandering around hoping to get lucky and spot a sunning snake, my method became much more sophisticated. I covered the back and side yards with large pieces of tin and wood as well as anything else that might provide a snake shelter. Each piece was placed carefully so that a snake could crawl under it with little difficulty. My efforts paid almost immediate dividends, for I now not only caught green snakes and garter snakes but also other species, including several small king snakes, and in late May, a five-foot-long black snake.

  My father had borrowed a dozen wire cages from Dr. Brown, so I was able to keep the snakes I caught for several weeks at a time, longer if they ate well in captivity. I cleared out more space on the carport as I filled cage after cage. When school let out the first week of June, my snake-hunting range extended beyond my own yard. I caught thick-bodied water snakes in Sandy Run Creek, red-tongued green snakes in the vacant lot next to my grandmother’s mill house in Shelby, orange and white corn snakes in my Uncle Earl’s barn, tiny ring-necked snakes in the dense woods behind Laura Bryant’s house. My father borrowed more cages from the junior college.

  By this time the hot weather had brought out Badeye as well, and for a while my mother fought a renewed battle against both, using similar tactics. Having grown up in the rural South, she had a rich repository of snake stories to draw on, so every night before I went to sleep, my mother would pull a chair beside my bed and try to frighten me out of my hobby. She told of timber rattlesnakes dropping out of trees, strangling children by wrapping around their necks, of copperheads lying camouflaged in leafpiles, waiting for someone to step close enough so they could inject their always-fatal poison, of blue racers, almost as poisonous as copperheads, so swift they could chase down the fastest man, and hoop snakes, capable of rolling up in a hoop, their tails poison-filled stingers.

  My mother’s bedtime stories were graphic, and there is little doubt they would have cured most children of not only snake collecting but sleep as well. But I found them humorous, even less convincing than her snowcone horror stories because I knew her tales had absolutely no basis in fact. Timber rattlesnakes did not climb trees, and they were vipers, not constrictors. Blue racers were nonpoisonous, incapable of speeds greater than five miles an hour, even in short bursts. Hoop snakes were nonpoisonous also, and unable to roll into a hoop, though as made clear, “Reports to the
contrary continue to persist in primitive, superstitious regions of the United States.”

  My mother bought baseball cards and a half-dozen Indianhead pennies, trying to get me interested in collecting something besides snakes. She purchased a chemistry set, believing the possibility of my blowing myself up a lesser danger than my snake collecting. Her efforts were futile. I traded the baseball cards to Jimbo Miller for a half-dozen rat snake eggs he found in a sawdust pile and bought bubblegum with the pennies. The chemistry set gathered dust in the basement.

  By this time my mother was having nightmares about snakes several times a week. Dark circles began to appear under her eyes. For the first time in my life, I watched her refuse to defer to my father, the biblical view of serpents in Genesis evidently balancing out the command that wives should obey their husbands, the danger to her son tipping the scales. Every evening at supper she would lecture my father on the catastrophe that was about to occur.

  Sometimes she even succeeded in breaking through the trancelike state he spent most of his waking hours in. At these times my father related the information gleaned from the books he had read to me the past winter. He tried to convince my mother that her fears were groundless, that the truly dangerous snakes—water moccasins, rattlesnakes, and coral snakes—were at least two counties away. He assured my mother that she didn’t have to worry about the copperheads because I had promised him that if I did come across one I would not try and catch it, would keep my distance.

  My mother’s sense of impending doom was not assuaged. Her fear of snakes was more than cultural and religious; it was instinctual as well, too deeply embedded in her psyche to be dealt with on a rational level. Facts and statistics were useless. She threatened to get rid of the snakes, gather up the cages and take them away herself, but I knew she wouldn’t do it, couldn’t do it. Her fear of snakes was so great she had not even set foot in the carport since the arrival of the hog-nosed snake in March.

  By the dog days of August I had thirty cages in the carport, and every one had a snake in it. The feeding of the snakes and the cleaning of the cages left me little time for snake-collecting field trips, but by this time the snakes were coming to me.

  Not by themselves, of course, slithering by the hundreds toward our house. That occurred only in my mother’s dreams. In late July Frank Moore, who owned, published, and wrote the Cleveland County Messenger, had done an article about me and my hobby, making me a county-wide celebrity and bringing a steady stream of visitors to our carport. Most came emptyhanded, just wanting to see my collection, but others brought milk pails and wash buckets, mason jars and once even a cookie tin. Inside were snakes, some alive, some dead. The live ones I put into cages; the dead ones that were not too badly mangled by hoe, buckshot, or tire I placed, depending on their size, in quart or gallon jars filled with alcohol. Though months earlier my mother had told my father and me that she would not allow a “live” snake in her house, she had said nothing about dead ones, so I kept these snakes in my room where, almost every night, they crawled out of their jars and into my mother’s dreams.

  Badeye came too. One night after completing his rounds, he drove back by the house and, seeing me alone in the carport, parked his truck across the street. The carport lightbulb was burned out, the only light coming from the streetlamp across the road, so I took each snake out of its cage so Badeye could see them better. Unlike the other people who visited the carport that summer, Badeye did not keep his distance from the snakes once I took them into my hands. He moved closer, his blue eye only inches away as he studied each one intently.

  When I had put the last snake back in its cage, Badeye rolled up one of the sleeves of his soiled, white t-shirt.

  “Look here,” he said, pointing to a king cobra, hood flared, tattooed on his upper arm. I moved closer and saw, incredibly, the cobra uncoil slightly, its great head sway back and forth. Badeye grinned as I stepped back, stumbled over a stack of newspapers.

  “I’ve got to go,” he said. “I’ve got a long drive downstate to make tonight.” I watched him slowly walk back to the truck, slide behind the steering wheel, then disappear into the darkness. As I walked back to the carport, I saw my mother watching from the living room window. Tears flowed down her cheeks.

  I did not sleep much that night. Part of the reason was the heat. The temperature had been over ninety-five every day for three weeks. Rain was only a memory. The night brought no cool breezes, only more hot, stagnant air. But it was more than the heat. It was the cobra on Badeye’s arm and my mother’s tears. I sweated through the night as if I had a fever, listening to the window fan beat futilely against the darkness.

  The following evening Badeye gave Donnie and Robbie their snowcones first, even though I had beaten them to his truck. After they left, Badeye jumped out of the truckbed and opened the door on the passenger side.

  “I’ve got something for you,” he said. “Saw it on the road last night when I was driving back from Laurinburg.”

  Badeye held an uncapped quart whiskey bottle up to my face.

  “It’s the prettiest snake I ever saw,” he said.

  And so it was, for a small coral snake lay in the bottom of the bottle.

  “Is it alive?” I asked, hoping for a second miracle. Badeye shook the bottle. The snake pushed its black head against the glass, tried to climb upward before collapsing on itself.

  “Here,” he said, placing the bottle in my hand, though still gripping it with his own. “It’s yours if you will do one thing for me.”

  “Anything,” I said, meaning it.

  “You know Bub Ely, don’t you, and where he lives, that white house next to Marshall Hamrick’s?”

  I nodded. It was only a half mile away.

  “Well, I need to get something to him, but I can’t take it by right now.” Badeye grinned. “His wife don’t approve of me. Tonight, say about eleven, after everyone goes to sleep, could you take it over to his house? Just put it in the garage. Bub will find it in the morning.”

  I said I would. Badeye ungripped the whiskey bottle, opened the glove compartment.

  “Here,” he said, handing me a mason jar filled with a clear liquid that looked like water.

  “You know what it is?” Badeye asked.

  I nodded.

  “Good,” he said, sliding behind the steering wheel. “You’ll know to be careful with it.” Badeye’s voice suddenly sounded menacing. “Don’t get careless and drop it.”

  After checking to make sure my parents were not watching out the window, I carried the moonshine and placed it in the high grass beside the dogwood tree in the side yard. Then I carried the whiskey bottle into the carport. I opened a cage with a king snake in it, let it crawl out and disappear into the nearby stacks of books and newspapers. I tipped the bottle, watched the coral snake slither out of the bottle’s neck into the cage. I carried the cage to the edge of the carport so that more of the glow from the streetlight would fall on the snake.

  The coral snake was everything I had dreamed it would be, and much, much more. As beautiful as it had appeared in the photographs. I saw now how the camera had failed. The black, red, and yellow bands were a denser hue than any camera could capture. The small, delicate body gave the snake a grace of movement lacking in larger, bulkier snakes.

  I lost all track of time and did not hear my father open and close the carport door. I was unaware of his presence until he crouched beside me and peered into the cage.

  “That looks like a coral snake,” he said in an alarmed voice as he picked up the cage for a better look.

  “It’s a scarlet king snake,” I quickly lied.

  “Are you sure?” my father said, still looking intently at the snake.

  “I’m sure, Dad. Positive.”

  “But the bands are black, red, and yellow. I thought only coral snakes had those.”

  “Look,” I said, trying to sound as convincing as possible, “scarlet king snakes have the same colors. Besides, coral snakes don’t live
this far west. You know that.”

  “That’s true,” my father said, putting the cage down. “Come on in,” he said, standing up. “It’s already past your bedtime.”

  I followed my father inside and waited in my darkened room three hours until my parents finally went to sleep. Then I sneaked into the kitchen, took the flashlight from the cupboard, and eased out the back door. I found the moonshine and walked up the street towards Bub Ely’s. It was 11:30 according to my Mickey Mouse watch.

  The lights were off at the Ely house, but there was enough of a moon that I did not need the flashlight to make my way to the garage. Once there, however, I did not lay the jar down in the corner. Instead, I unscrewed it. Everything that Badeye had put in my hands before had been magical. I wanted to know what magic the jar held. I pressed it to my lips, poured a mouthful. I held it there for a moment, and despite the kerosene taste, made a split-second decision to swallow instead of spit it out. When I did, I gagged, almost dropped the jar. My eyes teared. My throat and stomach burned. When the burning finally stopped, I placed the jar in a corner, walked slowly home.

  I will never know for sure if what I did next would have happened had I not sampled Badeye’s moonshine, but I did not go inside when I got home. Instead, I went to the carport to look at the coral snake, placing the flashlight against the cage for a better view. Finally, just looking wasn’t good enough. I opened the cage and gently placed my right thumb and index finger behind the snake’s head, but my hold was too far behind the head. The coral snake’s mouth gripped my index finger.

  I snatched my hand out of the cage, slung the snake from my finger, and screamed loud enough to be heard over the window fan in my parent’s room. I knew the small, barely bleeding mark would not cause the agonizing swelling of a copperhead or rattlesnake bite. The coral snake’s poison affected the nervous system, the heart. I also knew that several people recently bitten by coral snakes in the Southeast had died. It was this knowledge that paralyzed me, made me unable to move, for my books had assured me the chances of a child’s dying from a coral snake’s bite were even greater.