It glided forward inch by nightmarish inch, its movements so silken it was as if its belly were lined with ball bearings. To Minerva, it was not unlike watching a train of inconceivable size steam out of a tunnel. Its scales had the shimmer of hammered copper gone green in the rain. It made its way toward them with a sickening but somehow dreamy speed, the grass whispering against its dry body.
Minerva grabbed Cort’s arm, jerking him up. He uttered a yelp of pain and confusion. The grove spilled down to the water; their only escape route was blocked by the advancing snake. Minny had half a mind to hurdle the thing. Jesus, it was thick, as stout around as a quarter horse’s leg—but she had jumped over bigger logs. But logs didn’t move the way the snake did, with those lazy yet threatening undulations. And she didn’t think the water was any way out: she was pretty sure the snake was as nimble in water, or nimbler, than on land. They would be at a disadvantage if it followed them into the reservoir.
So they had to go up. They would have to climb a tree.
Cort had seen the snake by then, too. He actually adjusted his spectacles, as if under the assumption they were deceiving him.
“That’s a biiiig one,” he said, his voice set at a high-pitch whinny.
“Go,” said Minny, shoving him toward the nearest hackberry tree.
The snake… sweet Christ, that snake. It was fourteen, sixteen, eighteen feet long. It did not have an end.
Minny did not know then that the serpent was a green anaconda, the largest of its kind. She did not know—in fact, would never know—that it had hatched in the Orinoco basin in Venezuela and was netted by an indigenous tribesman while it was still an adolescent. The tribesman sold it to an exotic animal merchant. It twice escaped containment and ate that merchant’s more valued specimens, a scarlet macaw and a spider monkey. The merchant then sold the snake to a Mr. Edwin P. Popplewell, operator of the Popplewell Traveling Menagerie. For some years, the snake had circuited the southwestern states, gawped at by rubes in Bullhead City and Las Cruces. One night, while the menagerie was camped on the banks of the Yuba, the snake escaped. When Popplewell noticed that its cage was empty, he did not search for it or report it missing. The snake was a menace, having consumed both his gnu and a tiger cub, offering nothing in return save its sullen lethargy. Let it be someone else’s problem, Popplewell figured.
Minny and Cort were halfway up the tree when Cort’s footing slipped. His heel slid on a branch with a frictionless sound, as if the bark had been oiled. Next, he was falling. He uttered a fearful squawk, but that was all. It happened quickly—so quick that Minny didn’t know he’d fallen at first. There was just this terrible absence below her, as if the ghostly outline of her brother were still there.
Cort fell fifteen yards straight down. He landed on his feet, the way cats always do. The lower bones of his left leg snapped with the sound of lake ice cracking in a spring thaw. He fell over then and struck his head on an exposed rock and began to jitter as if in a terrible seizure.
The snake rushed at him. Minerva’s lungs unlocked and she screamed.
“Daddy! Daddy, come quick!”
They were within shouting distance of their shack. Their father was almost always home by this time. A punctual man, was Charles Atwater.
“Daddy, please hurry, a snake’s got Cort!”
A snake’s got Cort. It sounded so silly. Something you might cry out in a dream. But this was happening. Terribly, it was happening.
The snake could have climbed up the tree. Minerva and Cort were no safer there than on the ground, as Minerva would later realize. But that was not necessary now, seeing as its meal had fallen right in front of it. It wrapped the boy in the greasy rope of its body, which flexed and thinned as the huge muscles worked beneath its skin.
“Oh no!” was all Minerva could say, watching the snake coil lovingly around her baby brother—for she still thought of him that way sometimes, as a baby, despite the fact that he could talk and count his fingers and toes. His little feet stuck out one end of the snake’s coils, one boot off, his baby toe poking out of his sock. His head on the other end, his spectacles askew with the right lens shattered, the pressure purpling his face. Blood squeezed through the pores of his cheeks and ran from the edges of his eyes. There came a series of shuddery snaps as his ribs broke.
Minerva couldn’t stop screaming. She wasn’t screaming for her father—it was too late for that. Not for God or some divine intercession. She just screamed at the horror of it all, at the dark, sucking hole that had opened so suddenly in her life.
The snake unwound itself. Cort’s body tumbled limply from its embrace. The snake’s jaw unhinged and it began to consume the boy, starting at his skull. He might still have been breathing.
Minerva screamed until she went temporarily blind with the effort. She screamed over the hot hum of the cicadas. This did not startle the red-tailed hawk circling the sky above. From that bird’s vantage, what was happening below was simply nature taking its course in the way nature sometimes did. Something splintered deep inside Minny’s head. Perhaps she went just a little insane on that hazy sunlit afternoon. Who could blame her?
Time passed. The snake slithered back into the feather grass. Its belly was swollen with the outline of Cort’s body, stretched so that its scales separated to show the silky silverskin beneath, so sheer you could almost make out the boy’s features.
Where was her father? Why hadn’t he come with an axe, a butcher knife, with only his two hands and the fatherly madness that must come when he sees his youngest in such peril? But he never came. He’d turned his back on her and Cort.
It was night by the time Minerva’s legs unlocked and she could move again. She shimmied down the tree—her body had detached from her mind, which was totally blank. Cort’s spectacles lay on the ground. The moon glossed the one unbroken lens.
She slipped across the night-lit field to their shack. She found her father sitting dead in a chair with a bullet hole in his forehead.
Minerva was too shocked to believe it possible. It wasn’t a hole at all. No, it was just a blot of raspberry jam on his forehead. Or a flash burn he’d gotten at the mine. Never mind that his eyes were wide open and his last thoughts were splattered over the wall behind him.
She touched her finger to the hole. She would wipe away the jam, was what she’d do, then tell her father what had happened to Cort. Then they would get the axe and the cudgel and find and kill that horrible snake.
Her finger slipped into the hole. Into her father’s skull. It was cold in there.
12
“MY FATHER WAS SHOT by a black man with an English accent. A hired killer.”
Minerva trembled as she spoke. She had begun to shake, though that could be the blood loss. Her eyes remained hard on Micah throughout. “My father owed debts. To a bookie, mainly. Thelonious Skell was the bookie’s name.”
“Thel… Skell?”
She nodded. “It was Skell who hired the Englishman to claim the debt. My father—” She gritted her teeth as a wave of pain flooded through her. “My father owed him five thousand dollars. I don’t entirely blame Skell. My father owed him. But what did Cort owe? Debts should not carry forward that way.” She paused, spat a sac of blood. “It was the Englishman who did it. He stole Cort’s life by stealing my father’s… He would have saved us. If he was still alive, my father… he would have. But the Englishman killed him, and wrecked my life in the bargain. And that is the which of why I aim to kill him.”