“That’s my herpetology collection,” Jezzie says, before Dancy has a chance to ask, and then the girl picks up a yellow and pink waffle-weave dishrag and wipes the sweat off her face.
Dancy looks up at her. “Your what?” she asks.
“It’s the study of reptiles and amphibians. Herpetology.”
“You keep dead things in jars?”
“So I can study them. I caught them myself, and I used rubbing alcohol to preserve them. It ain’t so good as formalin, but where am I gonna get that?”
Dancy rubs at her eyes, which feel at least as dry as her throat.
“You want something to drink?” Jezzie asks, like maybe the girl can read her mind. “I got water, and I got water. But it’s good sweet water, right from our well.”
“Yes, please,” Dancy replies, and Jezzie opens the plastic jug and fills a jelly glass halfway full.
“Now, don’t drink it too fast,” she says. “You’ll get cramps. You might throw up, if you drink it too fast.”
You think I don’t know not to gulp water when I’m this hot and thirsty? she wants to say. You think I don’t know no better? But she keeps the thoughts to herself and sips the water in the jelly glass.
“I like to think one day I’m gonna go away to college,” Jezzie tells her. “I won’t, cause we don’t have the money, and my grades ain’t good enough for no scholarship. But I like to think it, anyway. I have my granddad’s books – like you’ve got your great granddad’s knapsack – and I teach myself everything I can. I don’t have to be ignorant, just cause my family can’t afford college. I might just wind up working at the Wal-Mart or my auntie’s BBQ place, but I don’t have to be ignorant.”
“Keeping snakes in jars, you think that makes you smart?” Dancy asks, and she leans a little nearer the jar with the king snake. Its dead eyes are a milky white. She sets her glass down, picks up one of the books, and she reads the cover aloud – Prehistoric Life by Percy E. Raymond, Third Printing, Harvard University Press.
See? Dancy thinks. I ain’t ignorant, neither. I can read.
“That’s one of my favorites, that one is,” Jezzie tells her. “It’s kinda outta date, cause it was published in 1950, and we know lots more now. I mean, scientists know lots more. But it’s still one of my favorites. It taught me about evolution and geologic time. My teacher wouldn’t teach that, skipped over that part of the textbook so parents wouldn’t complain about –”
“Evolution?” Dancy asks, flipping through the yellowing pages. There are photographs of fossils and dinosaurs and skeletons. “You believe in that, in evolution?”
Jezzie is silent a moment. She sits down on the floor by the table.
“Yeah,” she says. “Yeah, I do. It’s science. It’s how everything alive –”
“It’s against the Bible,” Dancy interrupts, setting the book back down. “The Book of Genesis tells how the world was made.”
“In six days,” Jezzie says.
“Yes, in six days. And if that book says any different it’s against God and Jesus, and it’s blasphemous.”
Jezzie is frowning and looking at her hands. “You sound like my Daddy and Mama and the parson down at First Testament Baptist. You ever read a book like that? You ever read about Charles Darwin and natural selection? You know about Mendel and genetics?”
Dancy puts the book down and picks up her glass again. She takes another swallow, wishing the water were at least a little bit cooler.
“No. I don’t read books that go against God.”
“What you’ve got is a closed mind, Dancy Flammarion. You think you know what’s what, and so you won’t let nothin’ else in.”
“I know I didn’t come from no dirty ol’ monkey,” Dancy mutters.
“Oh, but it don’t bother you to think you came from a fistful of mud?”
Outside, the cicadas have begun singing, and it sounds to Dancy like the trees are in pain, the bugs giving voice to the aching of bark and loblolly pine needles.
Jezzie says, “And you probably think the whole wide world is only ten thousand years old. I bet that’s what you think.”
“No, I don’t know how old the world is, Jezebel” – and Dancy says her name like it’s an accusation – “but I know how long it took to make it.”
Jezzie sighs and shakes her head. “That’s just a sad thing, someone with a mind that ain’t got no room for anythin’ but what some preacher says.”
“This water ain’t sweet,” Dancy says, after she’s emptied the glass. “It’s warm, and it tastes like that plastic jug.”
Jezzie reaches over and takes the glass from Dancy. “Closed minded and ungrateful,” she sighs. “You don’t look like someone in a position to be picky about the water she’s drinking.”
“I ain’t ungrateful. But you said –”
“You want more, or is my water not good enough for a close-mind, Biblethumpin’, holy-roller hobo?”
“I’m fine, thank you,” Dancy says, though she isn’t. She could easily drink another half glass of the water. But the girl’s right. It was ungrateful, saying what she did, and she’s too ashamed to ask for more.
I shouldn’t even be here. I should be out there on the road. I don’t run. I don’t get to run.
“That thing in the sky, you seen that before?” Dancy asks.
Jezzie nods and pours more water into the glass, even though Dancy hasn’t asked for it. She sets the glass down on the rug, take it or leave it, and then she looks up at the ceiling of the packing crate.
“Yeah,” Jezzie answers, “I’ve seen it lots. People around here been seein’ it on and off since I was little. They call it a thunderbird, and a demon, but that ain’t what it is.”
“It’s a dragon,” Dancy says.
Jezzie laughs and shakes her head again. “It ain’t no damn dragon, girl. There’s no such thing as dragons.”
Dancy feels her face flush, and she wants to get up and walk out, leave this heathen girl alone with her dead snakes and Godless books. Instead, she picks up the glass and takes another sip. Instead, she asks, “Then what is it, if it ain’t no dragon? You’re so smart, Jezebel, you tell me what I saw out there.”
“Long time ago,” Jezzie says, finally taking her eyes off the ceiling of the crate. “Back about seventy million years ago –”
“The world ain’t nearly that old,” Dancy says.
“– all these parts round here were covered over by a shallow tropical ocean, like the sea down around the Florida Keys. And there were strange animals in the ocean back then, animals that went extinct, and if we were to see them today, we’d call them sea monsters – the mosasaurs, plesiosaurs, giant turtles. And in the sky –”
“But,” Dancy interrupts, “when the Flood came, Noah’s Flood, everything was under water, the whole world, for forty days and forty nights.”
“Dancy, you want to hear my answer, or you want to talk?” Jezzie asks and crosses her arms. “You asked me a question, and now I’m tryin’ to answer it.”
Dancy just shrugs and takes another sip of water. After a moment or two, Jezzie continues.
“That was during what’s called the Cretaceous Period,” she says, “because of how these shallow seas laid down layers of chalk. In Latin, chalk is creta.”