Sinsemilla’s left hand was clenched. She opened it to reveal a wad of bloody Kleenex that Leilani hadn’t been able to see before. The crimson tissues dropped out of her grip; in the meaty part of her palm were two small wounds.
“Poor scared thingy bit me when the lights went out.”
Dark with clotted blood, the holes no longer oozed.
“Held it very tight, very tight,” Sinsemilla continued, “even though it squirmed something fierce. Took a lot of time to work its fangs out of me. Didn’t want to tear up my hand, but I didn’t want to hurt thingy, either.”
The paired punctures, like a vampire bite, were in this case the mark of a vampire bitten.
“Then I held poor scared thingy a long time in the dark, the two of us here on the bed, and after a while thingy stopped squirming. We communed, baby, me and thingy. Oh, baby, we bonded so totally while we waited for the lights to come on. It was the coolest thing ever.”
Leilani’s hard-pounding heart seemed to clunk as arrhythmically and as awkwardly as a panicked girl with one shackled leg might run.
Warped Masonite, cracked plastic glides, and a corroded track conspired to prevent her from sliding the closet door with ease. Grunting, she shoved and shook it out of her way.
“No venom, baby. Thingy has fangs but no poison. Don’t wet your panties, girl, we’re doing less laundry to conserve electricity.”
As in Leilani’s own closet, a tubular-steel pole, approximately two inches in diameter, spanned the seven-foot width. Only a few women’s blouses and men’s shirts hung from it.
She glanced down at her feet. No snake.
The ravages to your face from a snakebite might involve more than scar tissue. Maybe nerve damage. Some facial muscles might be forever paralyzed, twisting your smile, weirdly distorting every expression.
The pole rested in U-shaped brackets. She lifted it up and out of the fixtures. The hangers slid off the rod, taking the clothes to the closet floor.
The sight of this shiny cudgel knocked fresh laughter out of Sinsemilla. She clapped her hands, oblivious of the bite, excited by the prospect of the entertainment to come.
Leilani would have preferred a shovel. A garden hoe. But this length of tubular steel was better than bare hands, something to keep the serpent away from her face.
Gripping the pole in her right hand as if it were a shepherd’s staff, she used it to help maintain her balance as she stumped toward the foot of the bed.
Waving her hands in the air as a gospel singer waves praises to the heavens while shouting hallelujahs, Sinsemilla said, “Oh, Lani, baby, you should see yourself! You look so completely St. Patrick, in a total snake-driving mood!”
Hitching clumsily but warily alongside the bed, telling herself, Calm. Telling herself, Get a grip.
Leilani wasn’t able to act on her own good advice. Fear and anger prevented mind and body from being properly coordinated.
If the snake had struck her face, it might have bitten her eye. It might have left her half blind.
She cracked her hip against the chunky post at the corner of the footboard, fell against the bed, but at once levered herself upright, feeling stupid, feeling clumsy, feeling as though she were the Girl from Castle Frankenstein, lacking only bolts in the neck, an early experiment that hadn’t gone half as well as the creature that Karloff played.
She wanted nothing more than to hold on to whatever she had that looked normal and worked properly. This wasn’t so much to want. The twisted leg, the deformed hand, the brain too smart for her own good: She couldn’t trade those in for standard-issue parts. She hoped only to keep the strong right leg, the good right hand, the pleasing face. Pride had nothing to do with it, either. Considering all her other problems, a pleasing face wasn’t just about looking good; it was about survival.
When she rounded the end of the bed, she saw the pet-shop terror where she had left it, stacked in scaly ringlets under the window. Evil-looking head raised. Alert.
“Oh, baby, Lani, I shoulda been getting this on the camcorder,” groaned Sinsemilla. “We’d win big bucks on TV — that show, America’s Funniest Home Videos.”
Face. Eyes. So much to lose. Get out. Leave. But they’d bring her back. And where would the snake be by then? Somewhere, anywhere, everywhere, waiting. And what if her mother took it with them when they hit the road in the motor home? In that tin can on wheels, already trapped with Preston and Sinsemilla, she’d have this third snake to worry about. There’s no way to flee outside when you’re cruising at sixty miles per hour.
Holding the pole in front of herself with both hands, Leilani wondered what maximum distance a snake could travel through the air when it flung itself out of a tight coil. She thought maybe she’d read that it could shoot twice its length, in this case five to six feet, which might leave her unbitten, but if this particular specimen happened to be ambitious, if it always gave that extra ten percent, like the hero of some demented children’s book — The Little Snake that Could — then she was screwed.
Leilani didn’t have a fearsome capacity for violence, maybe not any. She never fantasized about being a whole-of-limb, hard-bodied, martial arts wunderkind. The Klonk way wasn’t the way of the Ninja. The Klonk way was to ingratiate, to amuse, to charm, but while you could expect a high degree of success with this approach when you were dealing with schoolteachers and ministers and sweetly daffy pie-baking neighbors, all you would get for trying to charm a snake was your eye on the end of a fang.
“Better go, thingy, better squiggle,” Sinsemilla advised gleefully. “Here come bad-ass Lani, and dis here girl mean bidness!”
Because any hesitation would lead to the complete collapse of Leilani’s will, she had to act while desperate with fear and fierce with anger. She surprised herself when she choked out a strangled cry, part misery and part fury, as she jabbed the lance hard at the coiled target.
She pinned the thrashing serpent to the baseboard, but only for two seconds, maybe three, and then her sinuous whipping adversary nailed loose.
“Go, thingy, go, go!”
Jabbing, jabbing, Leilani poked the villain once more, crushed it against the baseboard, bearing on it with all her strength, trying to hurt it, cut it in half, but again it writhed free, no easier to kill than a serpent of smoke, as hard to nail down as your father’s identity, as what happened to your brother, as just about anything in this screwy life, but all you could do was keep jabbing, keep trying.
As the snake slithered along the wall and under the tall chest of drawers, Sinsemilla bounced on the bed: “Oh, trouble now, trouble with a capital S-n-a-k-e. Thingy’s pissed, hidin’ under the highboy, him bruised and bitter, him havin’ a hissy fit, him broodin’ up bad snaky revenge.”
Leilani hoped to see bloodstains on the baseboard — or if a snake didn’t have exactly blood in it, then a smear of something else that said mortal wounds as clearly as a lot of good red gore would have said it. But she saw no blood, no ichor, no snake syrup of any kind.
The sawn-off circular end of the hollow tubular pole wouldn’t be as effective as a sharp knife, but it would cut even tough scales and muscled coils if driven hard enough, if a lot of insistent pressure was put behind it. Her sweaty hands had slipped on the polished steel, but surely some damage had been done to the snake.
The chest of drawers stood against the wall, on four stubby legs. More than live feet high. Four feet wide. Maybe twenty inches deep. The bottom rail cleared the floor by three inches.
Snake; under there somewhere. When Leilani held her breath, she could hear the angry hissing. The reverberant bottom of the lowest drawer amplified the sound in that confined space.
She’d better get a fix on the creature while it was stunned. She backed away, dropped awkwardly to her knees. Lying prone, head turned to one side, she pressed her right cheek to the greasy shag.