Randy Wayne White
Dead of Night
Reptiles are abhorrent because of their cold body, pale color, cartilaginous skeleton, filthy skin, fierce aspect, calculating eye, offensive smell, harsh voice, squalid habitation, and terrible venom; wherefore their creator has not exerted his powers to make many of them.
Thou shalt not fear the terror of night; nor the arrow that flieth by day; nor the pestilence that walketh in darkness; nor the destruction that wasteth at noonday. A thousand may fall at thy side, and ten thousand at thy right hand; but it shall not come nigh thee.
1
Serpiente
Solaris thought of her as “Snake Woman” because the first time she asked to see him, he thought she’d pointed at a crate just arrived from South Africa that contained leathery eggs and baby snakes.
He’d said, “Of course. You are the buyer, I am the seller. It is your right.”
He wasn’t the seller. Solaris was nineteen years old, lived with his family in Vinales, west of Cuba, eight people crowded into a shack near the village baseball diamond and communal fields where he’d plowed behind oxen until the Chinaman hired him as labor for his smuggling operation.
The Russian, whose name was Dasha, was blond, tall. Good teeth and skinny hips like women he’d seen in American magazines. Still aiming her finger at him, she’d smiled. “No. It’s you I want to see. We’re alone, aren’t we?”
She’d come into the barn where the Chinaman had organized the unloading of seventeen crates of African reptiles, parasites, spiders, and South American fish recently delivered in an old Soviet freight helicopter, a Kamov. It was a barn for drying tobacco. It smelled peppery and sour. Good, like the inside of a whiskey keg. Dusty light leaked through the wooden siding and roofing shingles. The interior seemed brighter when she pulled the door closed and slid the wooden bolt.
Yes. They were alone.
“My… private thing?” Was she joking?
“When you take your shirt off, your skin looks like it’s stretched tight over cables. Every muscle vertical or horizontal. So I’m curious about the whole package. Don’t be shy.” Looking up into his eyes, she reached and cupped him in her fingers. Still holding him, she backed Solaris into shadows against the wooden wall, the pepper smell stronger now, staring into his face, her expression different: He was a toy, his reactions amusing.
“Is there a zipper?”
“No. Just my belt. I didn’t expect-”
“Untie your belt. Or I could use my knife. It’s only rope. Would you like that?”
Solaris fumbled with the knot, his fingers shaking as the woman pulled his pants down over his hips, then to the floor, pausing to slowly retrace the curvature of his buttocks with the tips of her fingers.
“Step out of them.”
She moved away as he kicked off his pants. Stood there like an artist, her pale eyes inspecting, vacuuming in color, angles, texture.
“Nice. So smooth.”
Solaris was aroused, but he also felt ridiculous. Could this really be happening?
Now the woman was unbuttoning her blouse as she returned to him. He’d never seen skin so white.
He held his hands out to embrace her.
“Stop. Just stand there. Don’t do anything.”
He let his arms drop to his sides. “But if we are to make love, then you must let me-” Solaris stopped, not sure how to continue. The only woman he’d ever been with was a prostitute on the beach at Veradero, and that had lasted only a few minutes. How did a man go about making love, particularly with an older woman who was so certain of herself and aggressive?
The Russian saved him, barking, “This has nothing to do with love. I want to have fun after a shitty day. For my pleasure. Just stand there and keep your mouth closed.”
Like all Russians, she spoke Spanish as if she had a bad cold and was coughing.
“Don’t try to touch me again. Unless I give you permission.”
He nodded. Stood upright, shaking, not wanting to ruin it.
Her voice was dense and sleepy once again. “He has eyes. The way he follows my body. What does he remind you of?”
A picture came into Solaris’s mind of a man wearing a turban, sitting before a woven basket, playing a flute. A cobra followed the movement of the flute, head swaying.
Culebra.
Another reason he thought of her as the Snake Woman.
Serpiente.
The way she was holding him, fingers gripped, steering him into the shadows as if he had wheels, Solaris realized something that he would later find unsettling. He’d been born with this weakness. Maybe all men were.
A man with his built-in leash.
They’d been coming to Vinales, western Cuba, for the past sixteen months, arriving in a Volvo limo, or by small helicopter, dropping over rock towers into the valley beneath mountains where coffee grew green in summer, white when bushes bloomed.
There were two, Dasha, the blond Russian, with an older American man who had money, no mistaking it. It was an attitude, the way the man’s eyes blurred, empty as a camera lens, indifferent to breathing things that were tiny, peasants who would die in silence.
Dr. Desmond Stokes.
Rich Americans, they never had to open their mouths. As a boy, Solaris had pushed an ice cart around the docks of Marina Hemingway west of Havana. He knew.
They came every other month, sometimes more, the two of them alone, or with an associate. Usually a gigantic Russian with black hair that grew out of his ears like a wolf. Aleski was the wolf’s name.
Once, they’d brought a nervous little man with glasses who carried a microscope in a case. A biologist of some type. He’d jumped at unexpected sounds. Began to cry when they told him he had to fly in the helicopter again.
Solaris had never seen an adult man cry. Disgusting. Even so, the woman treated the little man like he was important. Spent time off alone, whispering.
Usually, though, Dasha was with Dr. Stokes. He allowed her to leave his side only when he talked privately with the Chinaman. Business. Money. Powerful chiefs cutting a deal.
Actually, the Chinaman was Vietnamese, Bat-tuy Nguyen. A fat man who wore bright scarves, gold jewelry, who’d learned the exotic animal trade from someone named Keng Wong. This was before Wong got extradited from Mexico to the U.S., and was sentenced to twenty-five years.
“The best-known rare animal dealer in the world,” Nguyen told Solaris. It was part of the sales pitch when the Chinaman recruited Solaris and his uncle, who was in charge of the village landing strip.
Same with the article about Wong in El Mundo, part of which read: “… reptiles rate third as the world’s most lucrative commodity to smuggle, after firearms and drugs. According to U.N. officials, the trade is worth about $10 billion internationally. It is further evidence that capitalism must destroy natural resources to fuel its own growth…”
The article was written months before the Bearded One died. Before world crime syndicates rushed into the political vacuum to stake out territory.
Cubans no longer cared about politics, only dollars. And survival.
“If you work hard, learn how the business works, maybe you’ll one day be as rich as the great Keng Wong!” the Chinaman told him and his uncle.
His cynical uncle had replied, “If the Chino is so great, why is he in a Yankee prison?” but they accepted jobs anyway.
Nguyen did a surprising business, using the village as his rendezvous place and warehouse. He imported strange creatures, illegal products from all over the world. Not drugs, though. Too risky. Better wealthy collectors than desperate addicts.
The clients were from the U.S., sometimes Europe or Colombia.