“Poisonous snakes?”
“Who cares? I wouldn’t live out in that hell hole for a million dollars,” said Pemberton, with a contemptuous, princely toss of his head. “This same guy Wayne said that the exterminator found three hundred of them living under one of those shitty houses. One house. Soon as there’s a flood too big for the Corps of Engineers to sandbag you’re going to have every car-pool mommy out there bit to pieces.”
“I caught a moccasin,” said Hely primly.
“Yeah, right. What’d you do with him?”
“I went on and let him go.”
“I’ll bet you did.” Pemberton glanced at him sideways. “He come after you?”
“Naw.” Hely eased down a little in his seat.
“Well, I don’t care what anybody says about the snake being more scared of you than you are of it. Water moccasins are vicious. They’ll chase your ass. One time a big bull moccasin attacked me and Tink Pittmon in Oktobeha Lake, and I mean, we weren’t anywhere near him, he swam after us clear across the lake.” Pem made a sinuous, swishing movement with his hand. “All you could see on the water was that white mouth open. Then bam bam with his head, like a battering ram, up against the aluminum side of the canoe. People were standing on the pier watching it.”
“What’d you do?” said Harriet, who was sitting up now and leaning over the front seat.
“Well, there you are, Tiger. I thought we were going to have to carry you to the doctor.” Pem’s face, in the rear-view mirror, caught her by surprise: chalk-white lips and white sun cream down his nose, a deep sunburn that reminded her of the frost-bitten faces of Scott’s polar party.
“So you like to hunt snakes?” he said, to Harriet’s reflection.
“No,” said Harriet, at once defiant of and confused by his bemused manner. She retreated into the back seat.
“Nothing to be ashamed of.”
“Who said I was ashamed?”
Pem laughed. “You’re tough, Harriet,” he said. “You’re all right. I’ll tell you, though, you guys are nuts with that forked-stick business. What you want to do is get yourself a length of aluminum pipe and run a loop of clothesline through it. All you have to do is slip the loop over his head and pull the ends tight. Then you’ve got him. You can take him in a jar to the Science Fair and really impress everybody” (swiftly, he shot out his right arm and thumped Hely on the head) “right?”
“Shut up!” screamed Hely, rubbing angrily at his ear. Pem would never let Hely forget the butterfly cocoon he’d brought to school for his Science Fair project. He’d spent six weeks nursing it, reading books, taking notes, keeping it at the right temperature and doing everything he was supposed to; but when he finally brought the unhatched chrysalis to school on the day of the Science Fair—nestled tenderly in a jewelry box on a square of cotton—it turned out not to be a cocoon at all but a petrified cat turd.
“Maybe you just thought you caught a water moccasin,” said Pemberton, laughing, raising his voice above the hot stream of insults that Hely pelted at him. “Maybe it wasn’t a snake at all. A big fresh dog turd curled up in the grass can sure look a whole lot like—”
“—Like you,” shouted Hely, raining blows on his brother’s shoulder.
————
“I said, drop the subject, all right?” said Hely for what seemed like the tenth time.
He and Harriet were in the deep end of the pool, holding on to the side. The afternoon shadows were growing long. Five or six little kids—ignoring a fat, distracted mother who paced by the side, pleading with them to get out—yelled and splashed in the shallow end. On the side near the bar, a group of high-school girls in bikinis were stretched out on lounge chairs with towels over their shoulders, giggling and talking. Pemberton was off duty. Hely almost never swam while Pem was lifeguarding because Pem picked on him, shouting insults and unfair commands from his chair on high (like “No running by the pool!” when Hely wasn’t running, only walking fast), so he was very careful about checking Pemberton’s weekly schedule, taped to the refrigerator, before going down to the pool. And this was a pain because in the summer he wanted to swim every day.
“Stupid,” he muttered, thinking of Pem. He was still fuming about Pem mentioning the cat turd at the Science Fair.
Harriet looked at him with a blank and rather fishy expression. Her hair was plastered flat and slick against her skull; her face was criss-crossed with wavering streams of light that made her look small-eyed and ugly. Hely had been irritated with her all afternoon; without his noticing it, his embarrassment and discomfort had turned into resentment and, now, he felt a surge of anger. Harriet had laughed about the cat turd too, along with the teachers and the judges and everybody else at the science fair, and it made him boiling mad all over again just to remember it.
She was still looking at him. He made bug eyes at her. “What are you looking at?” he said.
Harriet kicked off from the side of the pool and—rather ostentatiously—did a backwards somersault. Big deal, thought Hely. Next thing you knew, she’d be wanting to have contests where they held their breath underwater, a game Hely couldn’t stand because she was good at it and he wasn’t.
When she came up again he pretended not to notice that she was annoyed. Nonchalantly, he squirted a jet of water at her—a well-aimed spurt that hit her right in the eye.
“I’m looking over my dead dog Rover,” he sang, in a sugary voice that he knew she hated:
That I overlooked before
One leg is missing
One leg is gone—
“Don’t come with me tomorrow, then. I’d rather go by myself.”
“One leg is scattered all over the lawn …” sang Hely, right over her, gazing up into the air with a rapt goody-two-shoes expression.
“I don’t care if you come or not.”
“At least I don’t fall down on the ground screaming like a big fat baby.” He fluttered his eyelashes. “ ‘Oh, Hely! Save me, save me!’ ” he cried in a high-pitched voice that made the high-school girls on the other side of the pool start laughing.
A sheet of water hit him in the face.
He squirted her with his fist, expertly, and ducked her answering squirt. “Harriet. Hey, Harriet,” he said, in a babyish voice. He felt unaccountably pleased with himself for having stirred her up. “Let’s play horsie, okay? I’ll be the front end, and you be yourself.”
Triumphantly, he kicked off—evading retaliation—and swam out to the middle of the pool, fast, with much noisy splashing. He had a blistering sunburn, and the pool chemicals burned his face like acid, but he’d drunk five Coca-Colas that afternoon (three when he got home, parched and exhausted; two more, with crushed ice and peppermint-striped straws, from the concession stand at the swimming pool) and his ears roared and the sugar trilled high and quick through his pulse. He felt exhilarated. Often, before, Harriet’s recklessness had shamed him. But though the snake hunt had stricken him, temporarily, rambling and crack-brained with terror, something in him still rejoiced over her fainting fit.
He burst exuberantly to the surface, spitting and treading water. When he blinked the sting from his eyes he realized that Harriet was no longer in the pool. Then he saw her, far away, walking rapidly towards the ladies’ locker room with her head down and a zig-zag of wet footprints on the concrete behind her.