Julieta craned toward the snake.
“Don’t touch it,” my mother said quickly. “They can bite even after you cut their heads off.” By way of demonstration, she touched the severed head with the tip of the shovel blade, and the snake’s jaws jerked wide, then snapped.
Mrs. Howard was standing wide-eyed on the sidewalk, hugging herself. I wouldn’t have thought she could look any paler, but she did. I realized I’d never seen her cross the street. She motioned me over.
“Has your mama done that before?”
“Yes ma’am. She’s the Rattlesnake snake killer. She’s not afraid of anything,” I boasted, reflecting a little of my mom’s badass glory.
Mrs. Howard seemed as frozen as Luisa had been a few minutes ago. Then she took a shuddering breath and said, “Could you tell her I’d like to speak to her, please?”
I did. Mrs. Howard stood on her carport waiting until my mom had stashed the shovel and swaggered across the street. I went inside to watch TV, and when my dad got home I realized Mom was still at the Howards’.
They were on the carport, huddled in a corner. Mom was was talking intently, her voice low. Mrs. Howard was nodding but looking utterly miserable, tears standing in her eyes.
I got close enough to hear my mother say, “You have to. You have to go now. My God, the little one is his own child.”
Mrs. Howard closed her eyes, and my mother took hold of her shoulders and shook her a little bit, so that the tears ran down her face.
Then they heard my feet crunch on the dry grass. Mom turned and said, “Go tell your father to get a pizza from Maria’s. And you go with him.”
When we got back she was home. My dad raised his eyebrows; she cut her eyes at me and shook her head. At least I got pizza. They talked long after I went to bed, though they shut my door so I couldn’t hear what they said.
The next day I took a bus to swimming lessons at the Davis Islands pool, as I did a couple of days a week in the summer. The lessons consisted of a couple of teenage lifeguards throwing us all in the deep end and laughing, but the pool cooled us off.
The bus dropped me near home just in time for a classic Florida summer thunderstorm. I was drenched in a minute. I didn’t mind that — I was still damp from swimming — but I was terrified of lightning, so I started sprinting the four blocks home.
A car pulled up beside me and slowed. It was the Thunderbird. The colonel cranked down the passenger window. “Jump in.”
I felt frozen again. He swung the door open just as a thunderbolt crashed so close I could smell the ozone. I jumped.
He pulled into the empty driveway of my house, then turned to me and smiled. “This storm will pass in a minute. I can tell you don’t like that thunder. Let’s wait.”
Rain hammered the roof. He reached over the back of the seat and fished out a towel. He rubbed my hair with it briskly, then slid it over my shoulders.
In the tiny car, his face was close to mine. “So pretty,” he whispered. His hand moved over my wet shirt. I was as flat-chested as a boy, but his fingers found my nipple and pinched it, hard. His arm tightened around me and his mouth was at my ear.
“You remind me of the little girls I used to know in Saigon.” He sighed deeply. “All those sweet little girls.”
I swung the door open, twisted sideways from under his arm, and bolted into the dark house. The Thunderbird sat in the driveway for a minute or two, then slowly drove away. It didn’t stop across the street.
This time I knew I hadn’t dreamed anything, but I didn’t know what to do. That night my parents seemed distracted, sending me to watch TV and murmuring in the kitchen. When my mother came into the living room, she said, “You look tired,” and I realized I was exhausted. I went to bed without argument, figuring if I slept on it I’d know what to say tomorrow.
Voices woke me deep in the night. My parents talking in low tones, but someone else too. From the hall I could see Mrs. Howard and her girls in the kitchen. Susie was asleep on my father’s shoulder. Nancy was backed up against the counter, weeping silently and sucking a lock of her hair. Out on the carport, I could see the back end of our station wagon, piled with loose clothes and my mother’s tan suitcase.
Standing so close to her mother their noses almost touched, Brenda was shaking with anger. “I’m not going anywhere, you old bag,” she said. “I’m staying here with him.”
She turned toward the door, and fast as a cat my mother blocked her. She seized Brenda’s arm and hissed in her face, “You get in that car now, or I’ll hogtie you and throw you in the back.”
Brenda wrenched her arm loose, and I thought she would strike my mother. Instead she whirled and slapped Nancy so hard she staggered. “Come on, you fucking moron,” Brenda said.
I crept back to bed before anyone saw me. In the morning my father told me that my mom got a phone call in the middle of the night and had to go visit her aunt up the coast in Masaryktown because she was in the hospital; she’d be home soon, he added. I didn’t ask him why I hadn’t heard the phone ring.
A day later, walking home after swimming lessons, I spotted the T-bird on the carport across the street and saw the colonel standing at our front door. I cut off through the alley before he could see me and went into our house as quietly as I could through the back.
“Where are they?” the colonel was saying, not shouting but in that voice that sounded like he was giving an order. “I know you know. I know that damn wife of yours has something to do with this.”
“My damn wife is my business,” my father said, “and I’d appreciate you not talking about her that way.”
The colonel snorted. “They’re mine. You have no right. She has no right.”
“All I can tell you is they’re not here.”
From where I stood in the kitchen, the colonel couldn’t spot me, but I could see a gun in his hand. He held it loosely, pointed toward the ground, but he twitched it back and forth in a nervous way I didn’t like.
My father must have heard me. Behind his back, he flicked his hand toward me in a get-back gesture, then pointed toward the Mendoza house. I went out the back door, holding it so it wouldn’t slam, and jumped the fence into the backyard next door.
“The colonel is yelling at my dad,” I said quietly through the Mendozas’ kitchen screen door. “He has a gun.”
“The colonel has a gun?” Sergeant Mendoza was already moving, his hand swinging the holster toward him. “Call the base,” he said to Mrs. Mendoza. To me he said, “You stay here.”
As soon as she was on the phone, I snuck out and slid behind the hedge along the side of our house so I could see the front yard.
Mendoza moved even more quietly than I did, stopping a few feet behind the colonel. “Drop the gun, sir.”
The colonel grew still. He didn’t drop the gun, but he stopped twitching it. “I’m your superior officer,” he said without turning.
“Drop the gun, sir,” Mendoza said again. “Then put your hands up.”
For an instant my father’s eyes met Mendoza’s, and my father took one step back from the doorway, pivoted, and flattened himself against the wall. The colonel’s hand twitched once. Mendoza moved one foot a little forward. Once again I felt as if I couldn’t breathe.
Then we heard the siren.
The colonel never looked at Mendoza, but he put his gun down on the driveway, very slowly. Mendoza kept his weapon trained on the colonel until the MPs handcuffed him and drove him away.
After Mendoza holstered the gun, my father shook his hand. They looked at each other silently for a moment, and then my father said to me, “Come out of those damn bushes.”