And anyway, maybe this was all a crock. What did he really know about her? She lived in Bath, but maybe she partied in Schuyler. Maybe she had a date every night. Maybe half the eligible men in town had seen her butterfly tattoo. What did it say about him that he assumed she had no social life? That supper at home with her brother on Friday nights was something she looked forward to, the high point of her week? Did the fact that she’d invited her middle-aged, depressed honky boss over to eat Jerome’s lamb chops suggest that despondency had set in? Possibly. But wasn’t it also possible that, while he was busy pitying her, she was already pitying him? If he wasn’t careful, he’d find out.
“There’s a flashlight in the glove compartment,” she said when they pulled into the empty parking lot at the Morrison Arms. Except for a single streetlight farther up the block and Gert’s, which must’ve had a backup generator, the street was pitch black. On a normal Friday night, that dive would’ve been packed, its raucous crowd spilling out onto the sidewalk, but not tonight. Further testimony, apparently, to just how much power an escaped cobra could bring to bear on the collective human imagination.
Opening the Honda’s glove box, Raymer couldn’t help smiling at the contrast between Charice’s reassuring clutter and her brother’s obsessive neatness. “Did you know Jerome actually special ordered an owner’s manual to his thirty-five-year-old car?”
Charice sighed and said, “Poor Jerome,” her voice rich with what sounded like genuine pity, though Raymer couldn’t quite gauge its extent. Did she pity her brother generally, because he was Jerome, or just today, undone as he was by the attack on his pride and joy.
“What’s wrong with him, anyway?”
“Wrong?” Suspicious now. Protective, too. He reminded himself that they were twins.
“Why would he think I’d key his car? Can you explain that to me?”
“I could try,” she said, “but the only real explanation for Jerome is Jerome. Don’t be long,” she added when he got out.
He didn’t blame her for being nervous. In broad daylight this parking lot was no place for a woman alone. Tonight, the lot empty, the two-story building encircled by police tape, a lethal serpent slithering somewhere in the vicinity, was enough to give anybody the willies. Aware that Charice was watching him, he did his best to imitate nonchalance as he ducked under the yellow tape and entered the building. In the black stairwell that led up to his second-floor apartment, he shivered despite the still-oppressive heat. Though every apartment here had been carefully searched only hours ago, the fact that they hadn’t found it didn’t mean the snake wasn’t in here somewhere. Or so it seemed just then. Sweeping the flashlight’s beam over the stairs, he nevertheless paused every few steps to listen for hissing. In the dark his other senses were magnified, including, unfortunately, his sense of smell. Who, he asked himself, would urinate in an unventilated stairwell in the middle of a heat wave?
Unlocking his apartment, he pushed the door open slowly, directing the flashlight beam along the perimeter of the floor, looking for movement, half surprised when there wasn’t any. The Arms had a serious roach problem, and despite Raymer’s repeated, aggressive spraying of his apartment’s every recess, the silverfish, centipedes and assorted creepy-crawlies that lived in them all continued to thrive and multiply. When he got up to pee in the middle of the night, the bathroom light sent them scurrying into drains and behind cracked tiles. Normally enough to make your skin crawl, this actually would’ve been welcome now, a signal that the status quo, while disgusting, was still in force. Did exotic reptiles eat cockroaches, he wondered. Had the cobra managed to accomplish in a matter of hours what his dogged spraying had not? This put him in mind of Justin’s story — almost certainly apocryphal — of the woman who came home to find a suspiciously fat boa constrictor in her baby’s crib. Would Raymer find the cobra curled up in the middle of his bed, too cockroach engorged to rear up and hood? From the bedroom doorway, he shined the flashlight first on the bed, then the floor. Both snakeless.
Entering cautiously, he paused before his dresser, the top drawer of which contained his underwear. Amazing, he thought, just how easily a man’s reason could be stampeded. Because, really, the snake had to be long gone, right? Assuming some motorist hadn’t run over it, the thing could have made it all the way to Schuyler Springs by now, though bad news seldom seemed to head in that direction. One of the few places it simply couldn’t be was in a closed sock drawer. For a snake to scale the dresser, pull open the drawer in question without benefit of an opposable thumb (or hand, for that matter), climb in and then — this was the best part — pull the drawer closed again from the inside without the aid of a handle was beyond impossible in the world Raymer knew and navigated on a daily basis. So why did it seem to him at this particular moment that it in fact had managed this feat? And why, before opening the drawer to find out, did he feel the need to rap it smartly with the flashlight and listen for stirring inside? Because he knew from personal experience that the world was rational until it wasn’t, after which all bets were off. When, without warning, the world pivoted, it became in that instant unrecognizable. There you are, cruising along, confident in your knowledge of how things work, until one afternoon you come home early and there’s your beloved wife on the stairs, her forehead seemingly stapled to the bottom step, the whole of her defying gravity. Suddenly you understand how wrong you’ve been about every last fucking thing, and that you have little choice but to adjust to this terrible new reality. What can’t be undeniably is and will be forevermore. Except here, too, you’re wrong. Because gradually, after the shock wears off, the world returns to its familiar old habits, seemingly satisfied to have thrown you for a giant loop and content to await the return of your complacence so it can slip a venomous snake into your damn sock drawer, thereby demonstrating yet again that it, not you, is in charge and always will be, you dumb fuck.
Which was why Raymer, normally calm and rational, slowly inched open the drawer that couldn’t possibly contain a snake and yet might anyway. When nothing stirred or struck, he opened it a little more and then a little more still, leaning back in order to make the cobra’s strike more geometrically challenging, until he could be certain of its contents: undershorts, socks and handkerchiefs. Not even a garter.
Disrobing quickly and kicking his sweaty uniform into the corner (wary of disturbing whatever might be in the hamper), he thought about showering in the dark, then immediately thought better of it. He pulled on a fresh pair of boxers — smiling to think that Charice had correctly intuited his preference for briefs, pleased that a woman her age had given this even a passing thought — and then clean socks, jeans and a short-sleeved, button-down shirt. To avoid having to return later tonight or tomorrow morning, he decided to pack a small bag. That involved getting down on his hands and knees and shining the flashlight under the bed where he kept his gym bag. This he pulled out and shook — for consistency’s sake, because, well, a snake that could access his sock drawer would have no problem unzipping a bag, crawling inside and rezipping it. Into the empty bag he tossed two sets of underclothes and three extra shirts, since he was already sweating through the one he’d just put on.
Passing by the window, he glanced down into the parking lot, empty except for Charice’s Civic, just as its dome light came on and she got out. She was either too hot sitting there or growing impatient with how long he was taking. Something about her posture, how anxiously she surveyed the dark building, suggested a third, albeit remote, possibility: that she was concerned for his well-being. Was it conceivable that what her batshit brother had said that afternoon was true — that Charice was devoted to him? He doubted it. Just as he didn’t believe that Becka had ever once worried about him. At the Academy, all the cadets had been warned about the emotional toll police work can take on marriages. Awakening to sirens at three in the morning, spouses would wonder if tonight was the night they’d get the call they’d been dreading. Your husband’s been shot. He’s in intensive care, stable for now, but you’d better come right away. Of course such nightmare scenarios were mostly urban, and Raymer was unlikely to get shot in Bath. On the other hand, until today the odds of his being bitten by a cobra had seemed considerably long as well. The world was a dangerous place, and Becka must’ve known that on any given day her husband might pull over the wrong car or stop at a convenience store just as some wacked-out dickhead emerged with the contents of the register in his jacket pocket, a Slurpee in one hand and a.45 in the other. Raymer had been prepared to reassure Becka that nothing like that would ever happen to him, but somewhat disappointingly the subject had never come up.