Something Rich and Strange: Selected Stories (46 page)

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.

And I very well might have died, if my father had not been able to act in a focused manner. He ran out into the carport in his underwear, took my trembling hands and asked what had happened. I pointed to the snake coiled on the concrete floor.

“It’s a coral,” I whimpered, and showed him the bite mark.

My mother was at the doorway in her nightgown, asking my father in a frantic voice what was the matter, though a part of her already knew.

“He’s been bitten,” my father said, walking rapidly towards my mother.

“I’ve got to call the hospital, tell them they need to get antivenom rushed here from Charlotte.”

My father was now on the carport steps. He turned to my mother.

“Get him to the hospital. Quick. I’ll get over there fast as I can.”

My father brushed by my mother, who had not moved, only stood there looking at me. He brought her the car keys. “Go,” he shouted, urging her out the door.

My mother saw the coral snake coiled on the concrete between us, but she did not hesitate. She stepped right over it and caught me as I collapsed in her arms.

The sound of rain pelting the windows woke me. I opened my eyes to whiteness, the unadorned walls of Cleveland County Hospital. My father and mother were sitting in metal chairs placed beside my bed. Their heads were bowed, and at first I thought they were asleep, but when I stirred they looked up, offered weary smiles.

Three days later I was released, and in a week I was feeling healthy enough to help my father fill my Uncle Earl’s pickup truck with my snake collection. We first drove down to Broad River, taking the bumpy dirt road that followed the river until we were several miles from the nearest house. We opened the cages, watched the contents slither away.

Then we drove back towards home, stopping a mile from Cliffside at the town dump. My father backed the truck up to the edge of the landfill and we lowered the tailgate. We threw the snake-and-alcohol-filled jars out of the truck, watched them shatter against the ground, and knew they would soon be buried forever under tons of other things people no longer wanted.

As for Badeye, I ignored his offers of free snowcones. My parents ignored his apologies. After several attempts at reconciliation failed, Badeye stopped slowing down as he approached our house, even sped up a little as his truck glided past into the twilight.

That October Badeye left Cliffside. When he pulled into Heddon’s Gulf station, his possessions piled into the back of his truck, and Charlie Heddon asked him where he was moving to Badeye only shrugged his shoulders and muttered, “Somewhere different.” No one ever saw him again.

I remember my mother staring out the kitchen window that autumn as the dogwood tree began to shed its leaves. It would not be until years later that I would understand how wonderful those falling leaves made her feel, for they signaled summer’s end and the coming of cold weather, the first frost that would banish snakes (including the coral snake that we never found), as well as Badeye and his snowcones. But I also remember the first bite of my first snowcone that June evening when Badeye suddenly appeared on our street. Nothing else has ever tasted so good.

D
arlene walks through the open sliding door dragging two trees’ worth of divorce papers. Lord, she is beautiful, even as she harps on me about keeping the door open while the air conditioner is running in the other room. Darlene and her lawyer are setting me up where I won’t have an extra dime for the next five hundred years, and she’s telling me I need to watch my power bill. I follow her into the den, wishing I had a pair of blinders like they put on mules. Seeing her again after two months is killing me. It’s like trying to give up smoking and someone putting a lighted cigarette in your hand.

I look out the window and see Carl Blowmeyer in his backyard, barbecuing what looks like a large dog and staring this way. Blowmeyer is one of many northern retirees who have moved down here to live cheaper and to educate southerners about how to drive on snow. The one or two times each year the white stuff falls, Blowmeyer stands on main street with a Mr. Microphone and tells drivers what they’re doing wrong.

Spring and summer mornings he’s out in the yard with his lawn-mower, Weed Eater, and electric hedge clippers.

Blowmeyer’s grass is cut shorter than most golf course greens. He crawls around his yard on hands and knees to find wild onions and crabgrass. Now Blowmeyer is stretching his neck to see over the hedge, wanting to watch every minute of the soap opera next door. His shorter, grub-white wife stands on a lawn chair. They love my pain.

Darlene pushes empty Dos Equis bottles to the edge of the coffee table so she can spread out the divorce papers. She looks at the bottles and shakes her head. Darlene’s never had a drink in her life, and she used to punish me for my weakness by buying the cheapest beer she could find.

“That beer is six dollars a six pack,” she says.

“I bought it to help out the Mexicans,” I say. “They’re in bad shape down there.”

“Read and sign,” she says. “Stanley’s expecting me back at nine.”

I read. She will get the house, the car, and most of the five thousand in the bank. As far as I can tell, I get the pickup and all the food in the refrigerator.

I finish reading but I don’t look up. I’m thinking about the day we got married and how she looked right into my eyes and swore all that stuff about for better or for worse and for richer or for poorer. And now all those words, all those promises, have come to this.

“I loved you,” I say. “I think I might still. I didn’t mean to kill the monkey. I’d swear on a bible I didn’t.” Once I start talking I can’t stop. I sound like the worst drunk you ever sat next to in a bar.

I am a little drunk. If I’d been sober as a cow I’d have said the same thing—except I wouldn’t have said it.

“I wanted a child,” Darlene says. “You wouldn’t give me a child. You gave me a monkey and then you killed it.”

“Couldn’t,” I say. “Couldn’t. The doctors said it happens sometimes. It’s nothing a man can help.”

“Stanley says you could help it. He says you didn’t want a child, so your mind told your body to kill all those sperm. It’s psychological, something you wouldn’t understand. And then you killed Little Napoleon. Stanley says Little Napoleon was our symbolic child, and you killed him because you hated him. Stanley knows what he’s talking about. His minor at Auburn was psychology.”

I pick up the pen and begin to sign. I’m too much of a Baptist not to believe I’m guilty, even when I’m not exactly sure what I’m guilty of. Darlene is at least partly right. I had hated the monkey. Buying it had been a big mistake, but things had gotten so tense by then I felt I had nothing to lose. She had said she needed something else to love, something more than me. I couldn’t give her a child, so I drove to Asheville. A spider monkey was the closest thing I could find.

She had loved the monkey, and at first even loved me again. It was the Indian summer of our marriage. We were like a family. Every Friday after supper we would go to Greene’s Cafe and eat banana splits, then drive over to Shelby and play putt-putt, just like any other family. I tried my best. I even went with Darlene and Little Napoleon to Stanley’s office for his shots and checkups. But the monkey hated me from the very beginning. At night if I got up to go to the bathroom, it would wait till I started making water, then come flying out of the darkness, grab a calf, and draw blood. It got so bad I just stayed in bed and held it. Now I have chronic bladder problems.

Yes, I hated the little bastard, but I didn’t kill it on purpose. How could I know it had crawled into the washing machine when I went to the pantry to get the Tide. It was probably hiding in the bottom, waiting for me to stick my hand in so it could bite me again.

The marriage was as good as over by the rinse cycle. Darlene took the corpse to Stanley’s office. He is part owner of the pet cemetery, so he arranged the funeral service and the burial. I wasn’t allowed to attend. Then Darlene started what she called “grief therapy” with Stanley, the only veterinarian/psychologist in western North Carolina. After the first week Darlene became a vegetarian. “Animals have souls,” she had said. “To eat one is a barbaric act.”