Harriet caught the back of his sweat-soaked shirt. “Hang on,” she managed to say.
They sat astraddle their bicycles to rest—Hely’s Sting-Ray with the goat horn handlebars and the banana seat, Harriet’s Western Flyer, which had been Robin’s—both breathing hard and not talking. After the banging of their hearts had slowed, and they each had swallowed a grim little drink of lukewarm, plastic-tasting water from Hely’s canteen, they set out into the field again, this time armed with Hely’s BB rifle.
Hely’s stunned silence had given way to theatrics. Loudly, with dramatic gestures, he bragged about how he was going to catch the water moccasin and what he was going to do to it when he caught it: shoot it in the face, swing it in the air, snap it like a whip, chop it in two, ride over the pieces with his bicycle. His face was scarlet, his breath fast and shallow; every now and then, he fired a shot into the weeds and had to stop and pump ferociously on the air rifle—huff huff huff—to work his pressure up again.
They had shunned the ditch and were heading toward the houses under construction, where it was easier to clamber up onto the road if they were menaced. Harriet’s head ached and her hands felt cold and sticky. Hely—the BB gun swinging from the strap across his shoulder—paced back and forth, jabbering, punching at the air, oblivious to the quiet part in the thin grass not three feet from his sneaker where lay (unobtrusively, in a nearly straight line) what Reptiles and Amphibians of the Southeast United States would call a “juvenile” copperhead.
“So this briefcase that shoots teargas when you open it? Well it’s got bullets too, and a knife that pops out the side—”
Harriet’s head felt swimmy. She wished that she had a dollar for every time she’d heard Hely talk about the briefcase in From Russia with Love that shot bullets and teargas.
She closed her eyes and said: “Listen, you grabbed that other snake too low. He would have bit you.”
“Shut up!” cried Hely, after a moment’s angry pause. “It’s your fault. I had him! If you hadn’t—”
“Watch out. Behind you.”
“Moccasin?” He crouched and swung the gun round. “Where? Show me the son of a bitch.”
“There,” said Harriet—and then, stepping forward in exasperation to point, again, “there.” Blindly the pointed head wove up—exposing the pale underside of its muscled jaw—then settled again with a sort of sifting movement.
“Jeez, that’s just a little one,” said Hely, disappointed, leaning forward to peer at it.
“It doesn’t matter how—Hey,” she said, skipping awkwardly to the side as the copperhead struck out at her ankle in a red streak.
A shower of boiled peanuts flew past, and then the whole plastic bag of them sailed over her shoulder and plopped to the ground. Harriet was staggering, off balance and hopping on one foot, and then the copperhead (whose whereabouts she’d momentarily lost track of) popped out at her again.
A BB pinged harmlessly against her sneaker; another stung her calf and she yelped and jumped back as they cracked in the dust around her feet. But the snake was excited now, vigorously pressing its attack even under fire; repeatedly, it struck at her feet, lashing out again and again with stringent aim.
Dizzy, half-delirious, she scrambled to the asphalt. She smeared her forearm across her face (transparent blobs pulsing merrily across her sun-dazed vision, bumping and merging, like magnified amoebas in a drop of pond water) and as her sight cleared, she became aware that the little copperhead had lifted his head and was regarding her without surprise or emotion from a distance of about four feet.
Hely, in his frenzy, had jammed the BB gun. Shouting nonsense, he dropped it and ran to get the stick.
“Wait a minute.” With a tug of effort, she pulled free from the snake’s icy gaze, clear as churchbells; what’s wrong with me? she thought, weakly, stumbling back into the shimmering center of the road, heatstroke?
“Oh, jeez.” Hely’s voice, coming from she didn’t know where. “Harriet?”
“Wait.” Hardly aware what she was doing (her knees were loose and clumsy, like they belonged to a marionette she didn’t know how to work) she stepped back again, and then sat down hard on the hot asphalt.
“You okay, dude?”
“Leave me alone,” Harriet heard herself say.
The sun sizzled red through her closed eyelids. An afterburn of the snake’s eyes glowed against them, in malevolent negative: black for the iris, acid-yellow for the slashed pupil. She was breathing through her mouth, and the odor of her sewage-soaked trousers was so strong in the heat that she could taste it; suddenly she realized that she wasn’t safe on the ground; she tried to scramble to her feet but the ground slid away—
“Harriet!” Hely’s voice, a long way off. “What’s the matter? You’re freaking me out.”
She blinked; the white light stung, like lemon juice squirted in her eyes, and it was horrible to be so hot, and so blind, and so confused in her arms and legs.…
The next thing she knew, she was lying on her back. The sky blazed a cloudless, heartless blue. Time seemed to have skipped a half-beat, as if she’d dozed and awakened with a snap of her head in the same instant. A heavy presence darkened her vision. Panic-stricken, she threw both arms over her face, but the hovering darkness only shifted, and pressed in, more insistently, from the other side.
“Come on, Harriet. It’s just water.” She heard the words, in the back of her mind, and yet did not hear them. Then—quite unexpectedly—something cold touched the corner of her mouth; and Harriet floundered away from it, screaming as loudly as she could.
————
“You two are nuts,” Pemberton said. “Riding your bikes out to this shit subdivision? It must be a hundred degrees.”
Harriet, flat on her back in the rear seat of Pem’s Cadillac, watched the sky rush past overhead through a cool lace-work of tree branches. The trees meant that they had turned out of shadeless Oak Lawn back onto good old County Line Road.
She shut her eyes. Loud rock music blared from the stereo speakers; patches of shade—sporadic, fluttering—drove and flickered against the red of her closed eyelids.
“The courts are deserted,” said Pem above the wind and the music. “Nobody in the pool, even. Everybody’s in the clubhouse watching One Life to Live.”
The dime for the phone call had come in handy after all. Hely—very heroically, because he was nearly as panicked and sun-sick as Harriet—had hopped on his bicycle and despite his faintness and the cramps in his legs had pedalled nearly half a mile to the pay phone in the parking lot of Jiffy Qwik-Mart. But Harriet, who’d had a hellish wait of it, roasting on the asphalt at the end of the snake-infested cul-de-sac all by herself for forty minutes, was too hot and woozy to feel very grateful for this.
She sat up a little, enough to see Pemberton’s hair—crinkly and frizzed from the pool chemicals—blown back and snapping like a scrappy yellow banner. Even from the back seat, she could smell his acrid and distinctly adult smelclass="underline" sweat, sharp and masculine under the coconut suntan lotion, mingled with cigarettes and something like incense.
“Why were you all the way out at Oak Lawn? Do you know somebody there?”
“Naw,” said Hely, in the jaded monotone he adopted around his brother.
“What were yall doing, then?”
“Hunting for snakes to—Quit,” he snapped, his hand flying up, as Harriet yanked a handful of his hair.
“Well, if you feel like catching a snake, that’s the place to do it,” said Pemberton lazily. “Wayne that does maintenance at the Country Club told me that when they were landscaping a pool for some lady out there, the crew killed five dozen snakes. In one yard.”