“Stinks. Like fish. I touched a boa constrictor,” he added. He’d been afraid not to; he’d been afraid that the snake man might throw it on him if he didn’t. “It was cold. Like a car seat in winter.”
“How many snakes does he have?”
“Oh, man. Snakes in fish tanks, this whole wall of them. Then a ton more of snakes just laying out free. Out in this fenced part called the Rattlesnake Ranch? There was another building out in the back with words and pictures and junk painted all over the sides.”
“What kept them from climbing out?”
“I don’t know. They weren’t moving around too much. They looked sort of sick.”
“I don’t want a sick snake.”
A strange thought struck Hely. What if Harriet’s brother hadn’t died when she was little? If he was alive, he might be like Pemberton: teasing her, messing with her stuff. She probably wouldn’t even like him much.
He pulled his yellow hair up in a ponytail with one hand, fanned the back of his neck with the other. “I’d rather have a slow snake than one of those fast ones that follow your ass,” he said cheerfully. “One time I saw on TV about Black Mambas? They’re about ten feet long? And what they do, is, they raise up on their first eight feet and chase after you about twenty miles an hour with their mouths wide open, and when they catch you,” he said, raising his voice over Harriet’s, “what they do is, they hit you right in the face.”
“Does he have one of those?”
“He has every snake in the world. Plus, I forgot to say, they’re so poisonous you die in ten seconds. Forget about the snakebite kit. You have had it.”
Harriet’s silence was overpowering. With her dark hair, and her arms around her knees, she looked like a little Chinese pirate.
“You know what we need?” she said presently. “A car.”
“Yeah!” said Hely, brightly, after a sharp, stunned pause, cursing himself for bragging to her that he knew how to drive.
He glanced at her, sideways, then leaned back stiff-armed on his palms and looked at the stars. Can’t or no was never what you wanted to have to say to Harriet. He had seen her jump off rooftops, attack kids twice her size, kick and bite the nurses during the five-in-one booster inoculations in kindergarten.
Not knowing what to say, he rubbed his eyes. He was sleepy, but unpleasantly so—hot, and prickly, and like he was going to have nightmares. He thought of the skinned rattlesnake he’d seen hanging from a fence post at the Reptile Playland: red, muscular, twined with blue veins.
“Harriet,” he said, aloud, “wouldn’t it be easier to call the cops?”
“It would be a lot easier,” she said without missing a beat, and he felt a wave of affection for her. Good old Harriet: you could snap your fingers and change the subject just like that, and there she was, she stayed right with you.
“I think that’s what we should do, then. We can call from that pay phone by City Hall and say we know who killed your brother. I know how to talk in a voice exactly like an old woman.”
Harriet looked at him like he was insane.
“Why should I let other people punish him?” she said.
The expression on her face made him uncomfortable. Hely glanced away. His eyes lit on the greasy paper towel on the steps, with the half-eaten cake lying on top of it. For the truth of the situation was that he would do whatever she asked of him, whatever it was, and they both knew it.
————
The copperhead was small, only a little over a foot long, and by far the smallest of the five that Hely and Harriet had spotted that morning within the space of an hour. It was lying very quietly, in a slack S shape, in some sparse weeds coming up through a layer of builder’s sand just off the cul-de-sac in Oak Lawn Estates, a housing development out past the Country Club.
All the houses in Oak Lawn were less than seven years old: mock Tudor, blocky ranch and contemporary, even a couple of fake antebellums of new, spanking-red brick, with ornamental columns tacked on to their facades. Though big, and fairly expensive, their newness gave them a raw, unfriendly feel. In the back of the subdivision, where Hely and Harriet had parked their bicycles, many of the houses were still under construction—barren, staked-off plots, stacked with tarpaper and lumber, sheetrock and insulation, bracketed with skeletons of new yellow pine through which the sky streamed a feverish blue.
Unlike shady old George Street, built before the turn of the century, there were few trees of any size and no sidewalks at all. Virtually every scrap of vegetation had toppled to the chainsaw and the bulldozer: water oaks, post oaks, some of which—according to an arborist from the state university who led a doomed attempt to save them—were standing when La Salle came down the Mississippi River in 1682. Most of the topsoil their roots had held in place had washed into the creek and down the river. The hard-pan had been bulldozed down into low-lying areas to make the land level, and little would grow in the poor, sour-smelling earth that was left. Grass sprouted sparsely, if at all; the trucked-in magnolias and dogwoods withered swiftly and died down to sticks, protruding from hopeful circles of mulch and decorative edging. The baked expanses of clay—red as Mars, littered with sand and sawdust—butted starkly against the very margin of the asphalt, which was so black and so new that it still looked sticky. Behind, to the south, lay a teeming marsh, which rose and flooded the development each spring.
The houses in Oak Lawn Estates were mostly owned by up-and-comers: developers and politicians and real-estate agents, ambitious young marrieds fleeing sharecropper origins in the towns of the Piney Woods or the clay hills. As if in hatred for their rural origins, they had methodically paved over every available surface and ripped out every native tree.
But Oak Lawn had taken its own revenge at being planed so brutally flat. The land was swampy, and whining with mosquitos. Holes filled with brackish water as soon as they were dug in the ground. The sewage backed up when it rained—legendary black sludge that rose in the spanking-new commodes, dripped from the faucets and the fancy multiple-spray showerheads. With all the topsoil sliced away, truckloads and truckloads of sand had to be brought in to keep the houses from washing away in the spring; and there was nothing to stop turtles and snakes from crawling as far inland from the river as they pleased.
And Oak Lawn Estates was infested with snakes—big and small, poisonous or not, snakes that liked mud, and snakes that liked water, and snakes that liked to bask on dry rocks in the sunshine. On hot days, the reek of snake rose up from the very ground, just as murky water rose to fill footprints in the bulldozed earth. Ida Rhew compared the smell of snake musk to fish guts—buffalo carp, mud or channel cat, scavenger fish that fed off garbage. Edie, when digging a hole for an azalea or a rosebush, particularly in Garden Club civic plantings near the Interstate, said she knew her spade was close to a snake’s nest if she caught a whiff of something like rotten potatoes. Harriet had smelled snake-stink herself, plenty of times (most strongly in the Reptile House at the Memphis Zoo, and from frightened snakes imprisoned in gallon jars in the science classroom) but also wafting acrid and reasty from murky creek-banks and shallow lakes, from culverts and steaming mud-flats in August and—every now and then, in very hot weather, after a rain—in her own yard.
Harriet’s jeans and her long-sleeved shirt were soaked with sweat. Since there were scarcely any trees in the subdivision or the marsh behind, she wore a straw hat to keep from getting sunstroke, but the sun beat down white and fierce like the very wrath of God. She felt faint with heat and apprehension. All morning long, she had maintained a stoic front while Hely—who was too proud to wear a hat, and had the start of a blistering sunburn—skipped about and babbled intermittently about a James Bond movie which had to do with drug rings, and fortunetellers, and deadly tropical snakes. On the bike ride out, he’d bored her to death by gabbing about the stunt rider Evel Knievel and a Saturday-morning cartoon called Wheelie and the Chopper Bunch.