I Am Sorry to Think I Have Raised a Timid Son (15 page)

Tim was crouching behind the Mojave, talking to me, when she turned and struck at his thigh. “Got only denim,” he assured us.

Dan went to get everybody more drinks. Tim decided to take out the pregnant diamondback and practice with a new set of snake grippers ordered specially from Georgia. When he unlatched the box, the snake flowed straight up and out, a genie from its lamp. She was
ornery.
On the linoleum, she seemed almost overwhelmed by the forest of legs to snatch at. Tim tried one of the bigger grippers, speared her behind the head, but the diamondback wormed easily out from under it. She writhed
and lunged about like a downed but sentient power line. Using a smaller gauge, Tim pegged her, picked her up, and held her out to us spectators. She yawned, her pink gullet bracketed by fangs winking drops of venom. Everyone in that room was, deep down, a misanthrope who had never quite lost his adolescent fascination with the death act, snake on rat, who maybe still gazed upon it with a sort of jealousy.

Dan returned with an armload of Steel Reserves and another woman. “I asked you if there was gonna be pussy,” he said to Tim. “All I found … was this.” Her name was Megan. She was a slim woman with a bulb nose and inky hair kept bundled in a red kerchief. Lacy with tattoos, she exuded a pheromonal benevolence. She was Corey’s fiancée, and the night janitor at Oshkosh Truck. But before that, when she was jobless and adrift, Tim had loaned her money, provided her with a place to stay, and put her in charge of his rats. His wife once briefly kicked him out after finding Megan’s colors mixed in with his in the wash.

During quiet moments the night before, Tim had brought Megan up. “Do I want to see her and hug her and kiss her?” he’d asked at the Applebee’s, apropos of a text message from her. “Of course I do! Do I want her to hold my hand and support me? Yes!” But he waved it all away, explaining that love had been the downfall of his immunizer heroes. His mentor “fell off and got foggy” because of a woman. Bill Haast burned through two wives before he found one who accepted her role in his ecosystem. “Megan knows that tremendously well,” Tim had said. “As far as what I need or don’t need.” What he didn’t need was a woman worrying about him, about the risks he accepted voluntarily, begging him to stop. That it might be her who was consigned to the anguish he’d inoculated against had not crossed Tim’s mind. “I’m not some vulnerable idiot,” he went on. “I know what I’m doing. Meg is horribly special. But I guess what
it comes down to is I have to cut a few people out of my life to save a million.”

He slid open the water cobra tank. He withdrew both snakes without incident. They entwined his right hand in a Gordian knot, and he said to Dan, “There are always girls here.” He propped his smartphone on the windowsill to record a video of the bite. One cobra, having recently shed, looked as though she was mailed in green glass. Tim put her back. He wanted a heavily venomous bite, and snakes are more temperamental when they’re shedding.

The other one was skin-shabby. Tim gripped it by its neck and rubbed it around his left arm, trying to encourage a bite. It remained flaccid and pliant as he brushed it first down and then back up, muttering, “Come on,” apologizing that “it’s not usually like this, I swear.” This was practice for his trip to Sudan, where he’d have to stand and deliver in front of strangers. He pushed the rope of the snake for two more minutes before dropping it to his side and sighing. “Performance anxiety.”

It would have to be the black mamba, then. We took a beery recess while Tim mentally prepped. The black mamba is
the
snake, according to him. The fastest on the planet. Terrifically aggressive. Unwelcome in zoos. Well over ten feet long, and the gray green of guns, B-52s, all your finer life-taking instruments. The “black” comes from its mouth, which it opens when threatening, and which isn’t pink but obsidian. Without antivenom, the mortality rate of a “wet” black bite is absolute. Two drops is all it takes.

“Let’s, ah, let’s just see,” Tim said, badly missing the garbage can with his tossed empty. He watched as I started, then stopped, taking this down in my spiral ledger. I looked at him expectantly. “Brotherman, there’s no black mamba on earth with venom enough to kill me.” He made an expansive gesture with a new beer in hand. He embraced my spotlight. “I control them,” he said. “I control death.”

A freight train trundled across the far bank of windows. The sun didn’t set so much as slowly back away. Tim drank his beer to foam and said, “We go.” He slipped his hands inside welding gloves. He opened the tank and hooked the mamba. He threw down one and then the other glove as though starting a hockey fight. He took the snake behind her head. She vined herself up his other arm, tonguing his ardor. She unhinged her abysmal mouth. “She’s opened up!” somebody went. I thought I could hear a faint but continuous B-flat.

Tim held his palm away from his hip as though reaching for another’s hand. The mamba’s eyes shined with an intense bigotry of purpose. Her exhalations seemed to jelly the air. Tim pursed his lips, tensed, and lowered the open mouth to his forearm. Then the snake nipped him. She nipped him twice, actually, in quick succession, fangs through skin making the same small popping noises as airholes forked in TV dinners. Tim’s arm immediately petrified.

“That might’ve been the worst one ever,” he said, carefully unwinding the mamba and dropping her into her tank. He noted the bites on a
Sports Illustrated
bikini calendar and had me take a picture of them. People cleared out of the lab. He watched Megan go feed the rats through the shed’s window. “I’ll never be that lucky,” he said to Corey.

“Man, shut the fuck up,” Corey responded. He talked thickly, as though there were a hand around his throat. “You ain’t even divorced yet.”

Six inches away from Tim, at eye level, a monocled cobra hammered the door of its tank, again and again, wishing to interject. “What I’m going to do is go for married chicks,” he said, rotating his forearm, which was now a bloody delta.

“Oh, at Oshkosh Truck, it’s mad easy,” Corey said. “I’ve already had a couple.”

Tim leaned forward and jabbed at Corey with his bitten arm. “Ay,” he said, fixing his eyes. His smile unfastened his face,
and for just one instant he looked ancient. “When you getting married, dog?”

They both forced laughter. “If it was gonna happen with you, it would’ve happened a long time ago,” Corey said.

Tim’s false laugh pushed Corey’s out of the room. Dan came back in, unknowingly defusing the situation. He was exponentially drunker, with a giant lizard held to one shoulder. He petted it and said in mommy talk, “He’s just a big baaayyy-bee,” whereupon the wee dinosaur lifted its tail and sprayed a rich fecal foam across the laboratory floor.

“How about that Mojave?” I enticed. Tim was by then checking his Facebook messages on his phone. “Hey, should I bring the wife over?” he wanted to know. From downstairs Megan shouted, “Noooooo! She fuckin’ hates me!” She ran up into the lab, a tottering smile on her face, and she reminded Tim to take a picture of the swelling that was pushing past his elbow.

“Nah,” Tim said, eyes on his phone. “The wife isn’t coming over, because she says she’s baking. Bitch’s baking? Bitch, you don’t
bake.
”

Megan sidled up to review the photo, her birdy hand alighting on his shoulder blade. She stepped on Tim’s foot not accidentally but as though flooring him.

“Nine-by-nine-inch swelling,” Tim said. “Now I just need a penis bite. A solid nine all around.” He did not betray the awful pain he was feeling, his nerves vised tighter and tighter by his own expanding self.

A little later, good and drunk and sitting Indian-style, we watched the uncaged Mojave thread itself into a spring of stored energy, the position of last resort. Tim did some sleight of hand and collared it. “No dinner and a movie necessary with this one,” he
said, and plugged the Mojave into his forearm. It rattled excitedly as it drained itself. Tim’s face gaped into an ecstatic rictus.

When he pulled the snake off, tartarous venom mizzled onto me. “There’s the money shot,” Dan went. This was Tim’s fourth deadly snakebite in twenty-four hours’ time. I scrawled, “To sin is to cheat with order.” Tim saw me writing and said through a grimace, “All right, hold on now, we still got the diamondback tomorrow.”

After that, things got convivial, if hazy. Beers were drunk at a ferocious pace. A gun was brought out? Tim and Megan went off in the dark somewhere. With the winking meekness of a moonlight vigilante, Dan explained how he forwent his usual rules and restrictions when selling cobras to undesirables. I poured up large-bore whiskey shots and rather hoped for pandemonium. When the couple returned, it was agreed that the after-party would move to Tim’s place.

I stopped at a gas station to get us some Millers and Tombstone frozen pizzas. When I finally blundered into Tim’s farmland shanty, I found him supine on his mattress with his inflated arms in the air. His wrists broke at right angles, and his hands hung plump. He looked as though he’d been long planted with his own wilted grave posies. Only Corey and Megan remained; they stood against the wall, looking down at him.

“Who else is impressed by this swell?” Tim asked, a lit cigarette balancing on his lower lip. His face barely chinned above his engorged neck. He was not able to turn to anyone. The holes in him had been squeezed shut.

“This is the sickest I’ve ever seen him,” Megan said.

“That’s what she said,” Tim quipped in response to his own question. Megan asked him to take off his shirts before he distended too much. I put a pizza in the oven. Corey’s face contracted
into a pitying squinch. What was he going to do, call 911 and tell the Fond du Lac paramedics to bring three kinds of foreign antivenom?

“Shit’s too soft,” Tim said when I brought a slice to his mouth. After swallowing, he went, “There’s room enough for you on here, sailor,” and pointed to the other side of the mattress with his eyes. My face went blank. “I suppose you’re too good for the floor, too?” he asked.

Corey excused himself, saying that, after all, he’s got three kids and a Packers game tomorrow. Megan threw a blanket over Tim, who looked to me. The swelling was creeping still further, and the blue in his wet eyes seemed unnaturally bright. I slipped into my coat.

You can love a snake, but the snake’s got no way of showing it loves you back. Selective pressures have made it so; the creature lacks the faculties. It probably never had them to begin with. Lucky thing, its existence was never a problem it had to solve—whereas a man like Tim was born a freak of nature, being within it yet transcending it. He was tasked with finding principles of action and decision-making to replace the principles of instincts. He had to develop a frame of orientation that granted him both a consistent picture of the universe and a basis for consistent living. Thus did he choose to build himself up: his Creation is one that does not care and will never cease. Seen this way, self-immunization doesn’t just make sense. It’s the only logical response to his world.

“I am gloved in fire,” he said.

Last one out, I flicked off the light and took the beers with me.

The next day came and went. I sent Tim a couple of texts from my hotel room while four inches of snow fell. I wanted to see a fifth bite. When he didn’t respond, I began to consider the legal
ramifications. It’d all been his idea, I argued, freely chosen. I was just there, observing.

Late in the evening, I stopped by. I found Tim huddled over a portable electric heater, only the one light on. Inflamed under his same clothes, he appeared soft but also rigid, like something that had been stuffed and mounted. He’d been lying in bed since I left. “Just staring at the ceiling,” he said. “I came close to crying, and there were a couple uncool moments when my eyes started closing on their own.”

“Do you think you could still pull it off?” I asked.

“If I didn’t have to work tomorrow. Or if you thought you could throw some money my way.”

I patted myself down, shrugged, and said that that was against the rules. Tim’s right arm had been cocked Napoleonically, but now he absentmindedly pumped it with his other hand, loosening his elbow joint. “What you have to understand,” he said, “is you have to become the snake. The snake—they call it a ‘recessive’ step when you lose something through evolution. But the snake
improved
itself by getting rid of legs, extra lungs, everything.”

He asked me to pass him the fifth of Jack Daniel’s hidden among the bottles of generic painkillers on his countertop. He unscrewed the cap using only his palm. “Had you ever even
seen
a venomous snake before this?”

I had. One Christmas morning, in my overgrown backyard. I was stalking trash, shooting it with the compressed-air rifle I’d just unwrapped. I stepped softly through rusted bike frames and skirted the Braille of hamster graves. I was about to set sights on a bleach bottle when my body froze. That’s a cliche, but it’s absolutely true: I was arrested by the cold and tingling sensation of the familiar gone strange. I suddenly knew I was in the presence of a ghost.

Amid the litter at my feet was the candy tilde of a coral
snake. How long had it been there? Was it offering to bite
me
? I considered what that might be like, getting digested from the inside out by a creature that could never comprehend in me a full human being. I felt the urge to trust my life to it, to see just what the outcome would be. I bent to the snake in the grass.

I had no doubt that Tim would take a fifth bite if I coaxed him. But there’d be time enough for that. After all, Tim had been doing this here, alone, for quite a while, and he would be doing it for a long time to come. “To sound arrogant—and I hate to say it—but I don’t think anyone’ll ever be able to go through what I go through,” he said. “Or want to. Not in a million years.”

I looked down and ruffled through the ink-bloated pages of my pocket ledger. It was just shy of full. A self that is its own antidote—there’s something to be hellaciously proud of. The cheap paper hissed with crinkly sibilance as I flipped to its cardboard backing. With that, I was gone.