The Surf Guru (27 page)

 

 

The Argus monitor has a forked tongue and a vomeronasal organ in the roof of its mouth, which is why one should not speak ill of it. And also on account of it pays so well.

 

 

Its underside is cream-colored and surprisingly soft.

Last night, S.——, a thirtyish man, dreamed that he was sitting on the couch with his wife—not his real wife, but a dark-haired dream-understudy whose face he was never able to see clearly. They were watching a show called
Hot Herps
on the Circle Of Life Channel, which was following up a feature on “Lizards That Eat Their Young” with a profile of a species of viper called the daboia (whose name comes from Hindi for “lurker”). In one clip, an Indonesian field-worker presented with a daboia bite on his hand. The wound was blistering, the arm swollen to more than twice its normal size. A real-time computer simulation reenacted the bite, showing a daboia being held—much as that infamous boomslang was—with fingers carefully arranged around the head, pinning the jaw. Then: a flash of movement, a whip-flick of brown and black, and suddenly snake and hand were attached by a pair of long, curved fangs.
Normally, bites like this are due to careless handling or inattentiveness
, the narrator said,
but not in this case
. The simulation ran again, in super-slow motion, revealing the snake's secret: unable to break the man's grip, it had struck the only way it could. It had
bitten through its own lower jaw
to get at the man's hand. S.——backed up the DVR, and he and his dream-wife watched the simulated strike over and over, rapt, alive with this glimpse of the pure, concentrated menace of the natural world. He put his hand on her neck and felt her skin warming.

Perhaps they should not have watched any further; perhaps S.——ought to have tried some lucid-dreaming stratagem to take control of the narrative and cause his dream-self to pick up his dream-wife and carry her to bed, where they would whip themselves about, dangerous and sharp, driven by the intense, atavistic passion so rarely unleashed from its tight coils inside their reptilian brains. But S.——'s real-self didn't have that kind of power. Instead, his dream-self sat with his dream-wife and watched as a lab-coated Austrian discussed the physiological effects of the daboia's extremely potent venom and noted that a dilute form of it is often used in an in vitro diagnostic test for autoimmune disorders.

At this, S.——'s dream-wife ripped herself away from him, curled herself up at the far end of the couch, hid her face in her hands, and convulsed with sobs. He—dream-self and real-self both—tried to tell her,
We can try again, we can try again
, but the words wouldn't come out clearly. He knew she wouldn't have heard them anyway; everything was drowned out by those jagged, bloody, apocalyptic sobs. And he felt afraid to go to her, afraid to touch her, so he curled up on his side of the couch and covered his ears and told himself he'd wake up before too long. He tried to comfort himself, by imagining the face of the dream-baby that had been taken from them, but he couldn't do it. The baby seemed to belong to another dream altogether, and everyone knows that the membranes that divide our dreams, while they may appear thin and translucent, are in the end impermeable.

Lately, every time you finish a story, the gharial that lives under your writing desk darts out and bites off one of your toes, then scutters back into the shadows. To ask how it knows you've finished is pointless; it just does. Anyway: it's sad, how little work you finish, but it's understandable. A person needs to walk, after all.

When you limp into your psychiatrist's office, he asks what's the matter.

“I have a gharial problem,” you say. You wanted to bring a photo to show him, but every shot you've taken has come out as a murky, blurred nada. The creature is surprisingly quick. Why, if it weren't for your lost toes and the dark-red spatters and swirls on the hardwood floor of your office, you would doubt its existence yourself.

He admits he knows next to nothing about this species of reptile, apart from the fact that gharials have narrow jaws and long snouts that are ideally suited to their piscivorous feeding habits.

“They're native to the Indian subcontinent,” you offer, because you've looked it up. “Although apparently they can thrive indoors in central Texas, too.”

“Yes,” he agrees. “And also: they rarely if ever attack humans. But if one were to, it makes a degree of sense that it would choose a writer.”

You ponder this. “Is it because they can sense the dread in our blood?”

“Precisely,” he says. “Studies have shown that dread is sweet and umami-rich.”

He gives you a referral to a specialist, an old college roommate of his who runs a semi-licensed snake farm on a ranch road outside Wimberley. You ask if your insurance will cover your consultation with the herpeculturalist, explaining how, on account of, you know, money and your utter lack of it, and also how these days the things you get paid for—stories—require body parts from you (even if they are minor ones), etc. “Almost certainly not,” he says, but he hands you a sackful of benzodiazepines, which you interpret as an expression of empathy.

 

 

You arrive at the snake farm late in the afternoon under a seasonal-affective-gray sky and find the man sitting in a recliner on a spacious screened porch. Around him are chunky metal filing cabinets, the drawers all open and spilling out loose papers. “Come on in,” he says, having heard your uneven footsteps as you scuffed your way up the gravel drive. At the door you peer through the screen and sense motion everywhere, dark shapes creeping and pulsing and darting along. Snakes writhe around on the floor, slither-twist over and around the man's boots and his faded-denim thighs and his faded-tatt arms, wrap themselves around the brim of his ten-gallon hat, curl in and out of the file drawers. You catch glimpses of bushmasters and taipans and banded kraits. Armored lizards jostle and grunt and snap as they raid a trough full of meat that smells like steak fajitas. A snapping turtle lies in wait inside a Scooby-Doo kiddie pool, sizing up a fat feeder frog. Caimans and crocs prowl the inner perimeter and regard you in ways you do not like; the screen looks too thin to hold back a thousand pounds of reptile on the attack. Your phantom toes start to itch inside your new steel-toed boots, your latest attempt to up-armor.

“Come on in,” he says again. “Don't be a stranger.”

“I'll stay out here,” you say. “I just need to know if you can help me with my gharial problem.”

“Depends,” he says. “Do I get to keep the critter, or are you looking to eat it?”

“Eat it?” Something about the idea appeals to you. Vengeance, perhaps. Or irony. But the itching flares up, hotter now, maddening, and you tell him you don't care what happens to it, you just want the damned thing gone.

“Gharial grills up nice,” he says, and it sounds like he's smiling, but you have trouble seeing his face because of the steady traffic of snakes traveling across it. He says he'll need cash in advance, and you pay eagerly. You figure you'll make the money back with, two, maybe three new stories. Driving back to the city as the last daylight leaks out of the miserable sky, you take off your boots, set the cruise control, and scratch scratch scratch all the way home.

 

 

Two days later, he rings your doorbell. Wings of white hair poke out from under his hat. Without snakes obscuring his face, you can see he's handsome in that leathery, half-a-century-of-Texas-sun kind of way, as long as you overlook the scarred-over puncture wounds that cover his cheeks like a bumpy purple beard. He has left his truck idling in your driveway, and you admire that kind of confidence, wish it were contagious. He drops his cigarette and grinds it out with the toe of his boot on your welcome mat. “So,” he says, “where's the little reptile?”

You lead him to your office and point under the desk. “It lives down there,” you say, “although I can't be more specific than that.”

He shines a flashlight on the floor, around the wall moldings, behind the desk, inside the drawers, over the tangled wires that snake out from your CPU. “Ain't no gharial here,” he says.

“It's here,” you tell him. “It comes out when I hit Control+S. When I'm saving the final version of a story. It bites off my toes.”

“Welp,” he says, “then I guess we need to lure her out. You'd best get down to it. My time ain't cheap.”

“You mean write? Finish? Hit Control+S?”

“Hell yeah, if that's what makes her hungry.”

You settle into your desk chair, crack your knuckles, wiggle your remaining toes. You turn on the computer. You open a new document. You get ready to write. You listen to his truck's engine grumbling in the driveway. You wonder how much gas it has in the tank.

The man puts his flashlight between his teeth, adjusts the coil of rope on his hip, pulls a mesh net from a deep pocket, and crouches down to begin his vigil over the dark beneath your desk. His hands hold the net perfectly still—they don't tremble, they don't twitch—and you know that when (if?) the time comes, those hands will strike with precision and purpose and cold-blooded quickness.

You could pretend you have hands like that. Maybe that's all you need to do, is pretend.

J
o floats naked on the inflatable chair. The tennis ball, blackened with dirt and dog spit, bobs in the water next to her. The dog sits at the edge of the pool, fixing her with smoky eyes and waiting for her to throw. She is tired and a little drunk and she just wants to close her eyes, but she gives in. She has only a few more days with Shane, a sleek black lab from a long line of movie dogs. She wishes he were her own. It takes so little to make him happy.

“Last one, baby,” she says, picking up the ball. She throws it as hard as she can, spilling her beer on herself and nearly capsizing the chair. Shane spins and bounds into the yard, hurls himself skyward to snatch the ball at the apex of a bounce, then takes a celebratory tumble through the dry grass and dirt. He trots back to the pool, tags jingling, and drops the ball in the water next to her.

“No more,” she says. “The girl needs to rest.” The dog cocks his head and eyes her curiously. Jo avoids his gaze and instead looks at her pink hi-top Chucks at the far end of the redwood deck. One of them has her car keys tucked inside. It's not too late to drive out to Stockton to see Wayne, like she promised him. It's really not. She could still get there in time for dinner.

Shane barks—a staccato, scolding burst—and she closes her eyes, forces herself to count off the reasons she can't go, shouldn't go:

One. It's over. He needs to understand this.

Two. She's had four or five or maybe six beers.

Three. Her car can't make the trip. The transmission is screwed up. She lost fourth gear yesterday.

Four. She invited Spencer to come over and hang out after his shift. She could change her mind and he wouldn't complain, but still.

Five. She has the test tomorrow morning all the way down in Gilroy. It's her last chance at getting certified. She should get a good night's sleep, show up fresh.

No, the best thing she can do is forget Wayne, forget the test, forget it all for now. Concentrate on the warm sun on skin, the cool tickle of sweat, the sweet haze of alcohol and early summer. The beer in her hand is warm now, but she shakes the last sip into her mouth anyway, swallows, shifts her weight in the chair, relaxes her shoulders.

Shane gives a squeaky yawn and pads off to lie in the shade under the bougainvillea that overhangs the deck. Jo lets the can roll from her fingers into the water, where it floats with the other empties, glittering silver flotsam. Within minutes she is asleep.