Francine searched hopelessly for coffee. Outside, Dennis had scooped up a large snake between the tines of a rake and was dropping it over the wall that separated their lot from the Benchleys’. It looked quite like the snake the fire department had recently removed. Dennis was being helpful but she would have to dismiss him. He would simply have to retreat to his life’s ambition, which he had once told her was to run a security cactus ranch. There he would cultivate hybrids specific to sites, creating fast-growing, murderously flowering walls with giant devil’s-claw spines that could scoop an intruder’s throat out in a heartbeat.
She went outside. “Dennis,” she began.
He turned toward her, not a young man. He had deep lines in his narrow face, running from his eyes to the corners of his mouth. They were not unattractive. If a woman dared to have lines like that she would naturally be considered freakish.
“Rattlesnakes don’t have anyplace to go anymore,” Dennis said.
The snake, deposited in a flower bed maintained by the Benchleys at a cost of great aggravation, set off in the direction of a large rock Francine knew to be fraudulent. It weighed little more than an egg carton and concealed a spare house key for the maid.
“Dennis, I’m afraid we must terminate your services. We haven’t the money to pay you.”
Dennis shrugged. “Nobody’s paid me for coming on a year.”
“Freddie hasn’t been paying you?”
“Told me six months ago you didn’t have any money. I come here because you remind me of Darla. When I first saw you I said to myself, Why, she’s the spit and image of Darla, taking the years into account.”
“‘Spitting image,’” Francine said. “What on earth does that mean?”
“I’ll talk any way you want to talk. You want me to talk less formal? I’m just so happy we’re talking at last, like the more than friends we were meant to be.”
“This is of no interest to me, but who is Darla?”
“Darla was my nanny when I was eight years old. She was ten years older than me.”
Francine was shocked. A nanny! Though she did not want to believe herself a snob.
“Darla liked snakes.”
“I don’t like—”
“She had lots of stories about snakes. She told me, for instance, that the Mayans practiced frontal deplanation in newborn children so their heads would look like a rattlesnake’s head. They bound up the newborn’s soft little skull with weights. They believed snakes were sacred and that people with rattlesnake skulls would be more intelligent and creative. This had a positive, motivating psychological force on them. They became freer, more aware, bright and unusual. And I remember saying to Darla when she told me this that I wish someone had had the imagination and foresight to do that to me when I was first born because I wouldn’t mind having a deeply ridged, crenellated head. And Darla said it was too bad but knowing my parents, which of course she did very well, it would never have happened were they given the opportunity for a thousand years, they still wouldn’t have done it. They were very conservative. Not like Darla. Darla could leap up as high as her own shoulders from a standing position. Darla rocked! We lived in St. Louis, and once a year Darla and I would come out here to the desert, each spring for three years, and spend a week at a dude ranch and shoot bottles and ride mules and sleep in bunk beds. The corral is where Galore is now.”
“Is that a new town?”
“Barbeques Galore is there.”
“Oh,” Francine said. She found this quite funny but decided to say in her most gracious manner, “Change can be quite overwhelming at times.”
“That’s right, that’s right,” Dennis said. “And then we’d come back to St. Louis and Darla would go off on another week of vacation but without me, and as you might imagine I resented that other week very much because I loved Darla. And then Darla had to have an operation.”
“Wait,” Francine said. “An operation?”
Dennis nodded. “She had to go under the anesthesia. And when a person goes under the anesthesia they’re never the same when they come back up. You’ve got another person you’re dealing with then. It makes just the smallest difference, but it’s permanent. The change only happens once. That is, you might have to go under the anesthesia again for one reason or another and there’d be no change. Change don’t build on that first change.”
Why did she have to have an operation? Francine wondered.
“I was never told why she had to have an operation,” Dennis said, “so that’s not important.”
She shouldn’t have been jumping as high as her own shoulders, perhaps, Francine thought.
“We still talked about snakes and made pineapple upside-down cake and swam and rode bicycles and I was still in love with her and then she took her other week again, which I begrudged her as usual, and when she came back she died.”
“I’ll be darned!” Francine exclaimed. She really was trying to follow this unformed history. It would cost her nothing to be polite. They owed him money and he had done a good job with the citrus. Not a remarkable job, but a good one. Also, he was a human being who had suffered a loss, even if that loss had been by her estimation almost thirty years ago. The shock had clearly addled him. It must have come exactly at the wrong time. A moment either side of it and he would have been perfectly all right. She hoped they hadn’t had an open casket.
“My parents permitted me to put a piece of broken glass in the coffin because Darla and I collected pieces of broken glass. It was one of the many collections we maintained. My parents didn’t want there to be any confusion in my mind. They wanted me to realize that this time Darla was gone for good. Still, I had difficulty with the concept. It was a little beyond me.”
“An open casket can sometimes backfire,” Francine said.
“What?”
Darla sounded like a good-hearted girl, energetic, inventive, a nice kid, called too soon from life’s parade or banquet, whatever it was. She couldn’t imagine anyone being further from the idea of Darla than herself.
“I don’t know what I would have done if I hadn’t found you,” Dennis said.
“You haven’t found me!” Francine said, alarmed.
“I’m not saying you are Darla, jeesh, I’m not crazy. I’m just wondering if you wouldn’t like to go out some night and talk like we used to.”
“I was never Darla.”
“Jeesh,” Dennis said. “I’m not saying you were Darla and now you’re just not, I’m not crazy. But I was thinking we’d go out in the desert and build a little fire. Darla loved those fires so! I could bring the wood we’d need to get it started in the motorcycle’s saddlebags. In less than fifty miles we could be in the desert. Fat Boy could get us there in an hour.”
“We are in the desert.”
“You know they don’t know what this is now where we are.”
He was missing a tooth, far back, it was way back, only noticeable in the way that hardly noticeable things are.
“You’ve seen my Harley. Haven’t you just wanted to climb on Fat Boy and go? That bike gets so many compliments. If I ever wanted to sell, the ad would read consistent compliments, but I’ll never sell. Or maybe you’d want to go somewhere else. I’ll take you anywhere you want. I got another pair of jeans, newer jeans. What? My hearing’s not so good. After Darla died I stuck knives in my ears. You know how they say you shouldn’t put anything smaller than your elbow in your ear? It was in honor of Darla because I loved her voice so and never wanted to hear another’s. I probably hear better than I should but I miss some of the mumble. You were mumbling there, not making yourself clear.”