“Harriet! Of course you can, Sweet Pea.…” The receiver dropped. Harriet, her eyes still unaccustomed to the light, blinked at the dining-room chair which still stood by the refrigerator. Hely’s mother’s little nicknames and endearments always caught her by surprise: sweet pea was not the kind of thing that people generally called Harriet.
Commotion: a scraped chair, Pemberton’s insinuating laughter. Hely’s irritated whine rose above it, piercingly.
A door slammed. “Hey!” His voice was gruff but excited. “Harriet?”
She caught the receiver between her ear and shoulder and turned to face the wall. “Hely, if we tried, do you think we could catch a poisonous snake?”
There was an awestruck silence, during which Harriet realized, with pleasure, he understood exactly what she was getting at.
————
“Copperheads? Cottonmouths? Which is more poisonous?”
It was several hours later and they were sitting on the back steps of Harriet’s house in the dark. Hely had gone nearly berserk waiting for the birthday excitement to die down so he could slip out and meet her. His mother—made suspicious by his vanished appetite—had leapt to the humiliating assumption that he was constipated and had hovered for ages querying him about his toilet intimacies, offering him laxatives. After she’d finally kissed him goodnight, reluctantly, and gone upstairs with his father, he’d lain open-eyed and stiff beneath the covers for half an hour or more, as zinged-up as if he’d drunk a gallon of Coca-Cola, as if he’d just seen the new James Bond movie, as if it was Christmas Eve.
Sneaking out of the house—tiptoeing down the hall, easing the squeaky back door open, an inch at a time—had zinged him up even more. After the purring, air-conditioned chill of his bedroom, the night air pressed heavy and very hot; his hair was stuck to the back of his neck and he couldn’t quite catch his breath. Harriet, on the step below, sat with her knees under her chin eating a cold chicken leg that he’d brought her from his house.
“What’s the difference between a cottonmouth and a copperhead?” she said. Her lips, in the moonlight, were slightly greasy from the chicken.
“I thought it was all just one damn snake,” said Hely. He felt delirious.
“Copperheads are different. It’s cottonmouths and water moccasins that are the same snake.”
“A water moccasin will attack you if it feels like it,” said Hely gladly, repeating, word for word, something Pemberton had said to him a couple of hours earlier when Hely had questioned him. Hely was deathly afraid of snakes and did not even like to look at pictures of snakes in the encyclopedia. “They’re real aggressive.”
“Do they stay in the water all the time?”
“A copperhead is about two feet long, real thin, real red,” said Hely, repeating something else that Pemberton had said since he didn’t know the answer to her question. “They don’t like the water.”
“Would he be easier to catch?”
“Oh yeah,” said Hely, though he had no idea. Whenever Hely came across a snake he knew—unerringly, regardless of size or color, from the point or roundness of its head—whether it was poisonous or not, but that was as far as his knowledge went. All his life, he had called all poisonous snakes moccasin, and any poisonous snake on land was, in his mind, simply a water moccasin that wasn’t in water at the moment.
Harriet threw the chicken bone off the side of the steps and, after wiping her fingers on her bare shins, opened the paper towel and began to eat the slice of birthday cake Hely had brought. Neither child spoke for some moments. Even in the daytime, a dingy, shut-up vapor of neglect hung over Harriet’s back yard, which was tarnished-looking somehow, and colder than the other yards on George Street. And at night, when the sags and tangles and rat’s nests of vegetation blackened, and massed together, it practically twitched with hidden life. Mississippi was full of snakes. All their lives Hely and Harriet had heard stories of fishermen bitten by cottonmouths twining up paddles or tumbling into canoes from low, overhanging trees; of plumbers and exterminators and furnace repairmen, bitten beneath houses; of water skiers toppling into submerged nests of moccasins, floating up blotched and glassy-eyed, swollen so tight that they bobbed in the wash of the motorboat like blow-up pool toys. They both knew not to walk in the woods in the summer without boots and long pants, never to turn over big rocks or step over big logs without looking first on the other side, to stay away from tall grass and brush piles and swampy water and culverts and crawl-spaces and suspicious holes. Hely reflected, not without discomfort, on his mother’s repeated warnings to be careful of the overgrown hedges, the dank, long-abandoned goldfish pond and the rotted lumber piles in Harriet’s yard. It’s not her fault, she said, her mother doesn’t keep the place cleaned up like she should, just don’t you let me catch you running around barefoot over there.…
“There’s a nest of snakes—little red ones like you say—under the hedge. Chester says they’re poison. Last winter when the ground froze, I found a ball of them like so—” she drew a softball-sized circle in mid-air. “With ice on them.”
“Who’s scared of dead snakes?”
“They weren’t dead. Chester said they’d come to life if they thawed out.”
“Ugh!”
“He set the whole ball of them on fire.” It was a memory that had stayed with Harriet a little too vividly. In her mind’s eye, she could still see Chester, in high boots, splashing the snakes with gasoline out in the flat, wintry yard, holding the gas can from his body at arm’s length. After he threw the match, the flame was a surreal, orange ball that cast no warmth or light upon the dull greeny-black of the hedge behind. Even at that distance, the snakes had seemed to writhe, glowing suddenly into a horrible life; one in particular had separated its head from the mass and weaved back and forth blindly, like a windshield wiper on a car. As they burned, they’d made a hideous crackling noise, one of the worst noises Harriet had ever heard. All the rest of that winter and most of the spring there’d been a small pile of greasy ash and blackened vertebrae in the spot.
Absent-mindedly, she picked up the piece of birthday cake, then put it down again. “That kind of snake,” she said, “Chester told me, you can’t really get rid of them. They might go away for a little while if you really get after them, but once they get to living in a place and liking it, they’ll come back sooner or later.”
Hely was thinking of all the times that he had taken the shortcut through that hedge. Without his shoes on. Aloud, he said: “Do you know that Reptile Playland out on the old highway? Near the Petrified Forest? It’s a gas station, too. Creepy old hare-lip guy runs it.”
Harriet turned to stare at him. “You’ve been there?”
“Yep.”
“You mean your mother stopped there?”
“Gosh no,” said Hely, slightly embarrassed. “Just Pem and me. On the way back from a ball game.” Even Pemberton, even Pem, had not really seemed all that keen on stopping at the Reptile Playland. They’d been low on gas.
“I never knew anybody who actually went there.”
“The man there is scary. He’s got tattoos of snakes all up and down his arms.” And scars, too, like he’d been bitten plenty of times, Hely had noticed while he was filling up the tank. And no teeth, and no dentures, either—which had given his grin a soft, horrible, snake-like quality. Worst of all, a boa constrictor had been twined around his neck: want to pet him, son? he’d said, leaning into the car, pinning Hely with his flat, sun-dazzled eyes.
“What’s it like? The Reptile Playland?”