The Lower River

by Paul Theroux

Only then had Hock realized that his voice had risen almost to a scream. In this same shrill pitch he said, “The snake is measuring her. It’s getting ready to eat her!”

  He knew snakes. Jerry’s story of the woman made him miss Africa—not the continent, which was vast and unfinished and unfathomable, but his hut in Malabo, on the Lower River in Malawi.

  After he hung up, he called Jerry back and said, “Where is she? That woman’s in trouble.”

  The house was a wood-frame three-decker on a side street in Somerville, from the outside like every other house on the block, from the inside a tangle of drapes and silken gold-fringed banners, highly colored, smelling of a sickly fragrance, perhaps incense, or from the candles flickering like vigil lights, their fumes the pulpy flavor of fruit, the plush bite of spices. The place was shadowy, as though furnished for some sort of ritual, a séance or spiritual exercise. A small cluttered bulb-lit shrine was fixed to one wall—a dark idol, a dish of grapes and plums before it. The rooms were warm with the aroma of sweet cake crumbs on this raw day.

  A white-faced woman opened the door, holding it ajar just a few inches, looking afraid, until she recognized Jerry, and then she smiled and let them in. Her dark hair was uncombed and looked clawed and nagged at.

  “Where is it?” Hock asked.

  “Is this your friend?” the woman said, peering with her flat smile.

  “Teya—this is Ellis,” Jerry said.

  She spelled her name and said, “American Indian. I wish I would have known you were coming.”

  Hock said, “The snake—did you secure it?”

  “Mind taking your shoes off?” the woman said.

  She herself was wearing sandals, with silver rings on her toes, and over her shoulders a robe that Hock knew to be polyester and not silk. She was older and slightly plumper than he expected. “Spaced out” and “hippie” had made him imagine someone girlish, but the woman was perhaps fifty. Her left wrist (upright, she was clutching a hank of her hair) was tattooed with a pattern of small dots.

  When Hock put his mesh box down, she said, “Like I need another pet.” But she was pleased and smiled at the small sniffing guinea pig.

  Stepping inside, barefoot, his foot-sole cushioned by carpets, he could not see much in the candlelit room. Yet through the furry fruitiness of incense and hot wax he could smell the snake—a distinct tang of flaking scales, the sourness of urine and smashed eggshells, a rank odor of earth and warmth.

  “I’ve been doing a ton of washing,” the woman said. “Just back from Vermont.”

  “The snake’s in a cage, right?”

  “Witch Camp,” the woman said. She bent down and put her face against the mesh of the box and clucked loudly at the guinea pig.

  “Witch Camp. What did I tell you?” Jerry said, pleased with himself.

  “Am I wasting my time?” Hock said. “Where is this bad boy?”

  “I was just going to say, the Mud Ritual,” the woman said. “It was insane.”

  She had turned and was shuffling in her sandals across the room, to an adjoining room, where parasols hung upside down from the ceiling, the walls draped with scarves and gilt-edged banners and more votive lights.

  “In here,” she said.

  He saw a glass-sided fish tank against a wall, some sawdust and wood shavings heaped against one end, and a snake inside that he immediately recognized as a rock python. A heavy board served as the lid of the tank. And because this room was not as warm as the first one, the snake lay coiled like a rope on the deck of a ship, its head tucked under its thickest coil.

  “Nsato—Python sebae,” Hock said.

  Jerry said to the woman, “What did I tell you?”

  “Jerry told me about him being dangerous. I put him in here just before I went to Vermont.”

  “You didn’t leave him any food?”

  “He wasn’t interested.” She had taken possession of the mesh box, and now she lifted it and smiled at the guinea pig. “But this little guy looks hungry.”

  Hock unhooked the small door of the box and reached in. He held the squirming guinea pig, which was kicking its short legs. In one motion he lifted the lid of the fish tank and dropped in the guinea pig. The small creature scampered to a corner, darting against the glass, skidding in the thickness of wood shavings, awkwardly tugging its body as though too fat and top-heavy for its short legs.

  The snake did not move—that is, it remained coiled. But then its pear-shaped head tilted, its yellow eyes flickered and widened, and it seemed almost imperceptibly to swell, like an inner tube inflated by a hand pump, fattening, tightening, filling its scaly thickness, as though it was visibly thinking.

  “I had him drinking milk,” the woman said, looking closer at the panicky guinea pig, the enlarging snake.

  “They like their food a little more animated than that,” Hock said.

  She was peering in, blinking, her nose almost touching the glass. “Maybe they’ll be friends.”

  “How long have you had him?”

  “Couple of months.”

  “They can go months without eating.”

  “After the milk, he wasn’t interested. He let me hold him. He’s bigger than he looks.”

  “They can grow to twenty-four feet.”

  “He just—like Jerry told you—flattened himself next to me.”

  “Because he was planning to eat you,” Hock said. “Seeing if you’d fit.”

  “Me?” The woman laughed, moving her body heavily, as if to show her plumpness, to emphasize the absurdity of what Hock had just said.

  “You’d be surprised at what a snake like that can fit into its mouth.”

  The woman was smiling anxiously at the twitching guinea pig, the staring snake. She said, “You actually think they’re going to get along together in that cage?”

  Hock frowned and said, “Let’s leave them to make friends. Okay?”

  “Want some herbal tea?”

  “Tell us about Witch Camp,” Jerry said.

  She led them through the room with the incense and the drapes and the shrine to a small kitchen, and they sat at a table while she heated a kettle of water and made tea, crumbling some tiny black twigs into the pot.

  “This is very cleansing. It sort of scours the toxins out of your system and heals your linings.”

  And as she went on describing the purifying powers of the tea, Hock reflected on the untidiness of the room, the pots and dishes in the sink, the crumbs on the table, the dull gleam of the sticky toaster imprinted with a film of grease. And the woman herself, dark hair, pale skin, her heavily made-up eyes—blue eye shadow—squinting from her puffy face. She smiled wearily and shook her head.

  “The Mud Ritual, like I was saying—insane. People were copulating. I got mud in my hair and my clothes were filthy. I’ve been doing laundry for two days.”

  “Copulating?” Jerry was beaming at her.

  “In the mud,” she said. “Big turn-on. But not for me. Some of these people just take advantage. The things they put in their bodies! One of them tosses a beer can onto the ground and I goes, ‘This is the earth. It’s your mother!’”

  “Maybe a little chilly up in Vermont for getting tagged in the mud?” Jerry said, and he nodded at Hock.

  “We’d just done a sweat,” she said. “Sweat lodge?”

  “That’s some crazy stuff.”

  “A few got wacky-vaced.”

  Jerry said, “Excuse me?”

  “Like medevaced. But they were toasted, I think on mushrooms.”

  Hock was thinking of the snake, the poor thing captive in her apartment, just another artifact, part of the scene. Yet it was a great coiled cable of muscle, glittering, black and yellowish on its dorsum, with a glossy iridescent bluey sheen all over its upper scales, the pupil of its eye vertically elliptical. It simply did not belong here in a suburb of Boston.

  The woman was telling Jerry about the Mud Ritual—Jerry giggling. Hock said, “I want to have another look.”

  �
��At Naga?”

  “That what you call him?”

  “It’s Hindu. Naga the snake.”

  “Naga’s the cobra,” Hock said. “This is nsato. That’s what he’s called in the Lower River.”

  “Your friend’s kind of interesting,” the woman was saying, as Hock left the kitchen and walked through the shrine room to the back room where the snake lay coiled in the fish tank. Now the python was only partly coiled. Its sculpted head was upraised, its neck looped in a tight and thickened S.

  In a whisper behind him, the woman said, “How’s my baby?”

  Hock lifted his hand to quiet her. He knew that the snake’s posture, the drawn-back S, meant it was preparing to strike. The small guinea pig had flattened itself into a corner, where it was twitching miserably.

  “Are you sure you want to see this?” Hock said in a low voice.

  Before the woman could reply, the snake flung its head forward, jaws agape, and crushed the guinea pig against the glass wall of the tank. The jaws closed, but only slightly, and a pale froth brimmed at the edges of its mouth.

  The woman was whimpering, Jerry behind her, softly cursing in awe.

  “Can you get him out?”

  “It’s caught, like a fish on a hook—the teeth are recurved, slanted back. The more the thing struggles, the more he’s pinned. Shall we give them a little privacy?”

  “I didn’t need to see that,” the woman said.

  “That was awesome,” Jerry said. “Snake was hungry.”

  “Do you mind if I come back sometime?” Hock asked.

  “Give me your cell-phone number. I might be doing my puja. Like praying.”

  “No cell phone,” Jerry said.

  The woman said, “That’s nice. That’s righteous.”

  Back at the store, Hock thought only of the snake, especially its uncoiling and lengthening across the fish tank to strike at the guinea pig—the woman’s gasp, Jerry’s curses.

  He called her a few days later. When he visited again he brought a mouse in a small box, which he kept in his pocket. The rooms were tidier, even neat in places, more candles had been lit. Teya—he remembered the name—was dressed in a dark smock-like dress, her hair drawn back, fixed with an ornate comb, gold hoops on her ears, bangles on her wrists.

  Hock wanted to see the snake, but she insisted on serving him tea first. She was more relaxed, kinder-seeming, and yet was watching him closely.

  “Hock—like the store?”

  “You know the place?”

  “I used to get the bus from there,” she said. “My father wore clothes like that. Overcoats with velvet collars.”

  “Chesterfield.”

  “Yeah. And always a hat. He’d wear a cravat sometimes. I mean, lace-curtain Irish, but he knew how to dress. He was a comptroller over at Raytheon, terrific with figures. He’s retired but he still does consulting. Maybe you could use him.”

  Hock said, “I’m selling the business.”

  “Bummer.”

  “It’s served its purpose. It’s over now. It’s dated, like chesterfields and cravats.” When the woman said nothing, he went on, “Things change, things end, things die. Even love.”

  “What are you going to do with all that money?”

  “Ask my ex-wife.”

  “Money is trouble,” she said. “Are you dating?”

  The word had always made him smile. “My ex-wife and I go out now and then.”

  “You should consider massages, maybe detoxing.”

  “I might take a trip,” Hock said, but until he spoke the words, the whole thought had never entered his head. He was giving voice to the shred of a feeling he had, a buried sense that he should go away. “You notice the snake’s been sleeping more?”

  “Definitely. No funny business.”

  “Digesting,” Hock said. “You like it here?”

  “Comme çi, comme ça. All the colleges in the area. Kids everywhere—Tufts, Harvard, MIT, kids, grad students, foreigners.”

  “It makes for variety.”

  “Know what? I really don’t think so.”

  Hock gestured, turning his hands, encouraging her to explain.

  “Whenever you’re near a college, there’s always this smell of pizza. It’s the students. And coffee shops with kids and their laptops. And their bad skin. And the way they walk. There’s a typical student walk, because their parents give them money to let them go on being kids and having bad posture. I should move. Maybe move to Medford.”

  Hock visited more frequently, and the woman who seemed at first so easy to mock, so easy to dismiss for her robe and her rings and her New Age jargon, became a whole person. It turned out that she had an ex-husband, and a daughter of twenty-something. “She doesn’t want to be my friend,” Teya said, smiling sadly.

  “I’ve got one of those,” Hock said.

  “I was giving her money and she used it to self-medicate. For drugs.”

  Teya worked part-time as a massage therapist—she gently corrected Hock when he used the term “masseuse”—and she was a volunteer at a hospice near Davis Square, doing physiotherapy, “to remind them that they’re alive.”

  Hock, alert for decades to the way people dressed, sizing up customers who wandered into the store, guessing at what they might buy—always attentive to details of clothing—noticed that Teya was making an effort for him. And it was odd, because he couldn’t tell her that he was visiting not to see her and listen to her stories of her daughter, or the hospice, or her plans to travel, but only because he wanted to see the rock python.

  He always brought something the python might eat, a pale pop-eyed mouse, a wobbly frog, a pair of baby guinea pigs—hairless, pink, mottled skin. Sometimes the snake pounced, its jaws wide open, but one mouse survived in the glass tank for a week or more, burrowing in the wood shavings, believing it was hidden.

  Teya cooked meals for Hock, always vegetarian, dishes of lentils, curried cauliflower, a stir-fry, and she used these meals as an occasion to tell stories, speaking softly in a monotone, deaf to any interruption, oblivious to his reaction or any comment. Hock would have found her maddening, except the stories were unusual.

  In one she’d broken her toe (“I hit it on the stone lingam in the puja room”) and was prescribed Vicodin as a painkiller. She found that her daughter was secretly stealing her pills—so many that Teya still had pain but no medicine, and the added pain of her daughter’s betrayal. Hock mentioned his daughter again, but Teya spoke over him, not hearing, changing the subject to folk dancing—Thai dancing—saying she had learned to bend her fingers back, Siamese-style. And there was an African student down the street who wore a skullcap and blue shawl and was stalking her. He was from Sudan, with teeth missing and ornamental scars on his face, and one day he left a pair of red shoes for her at her doorway upstairs—how had he gotten in? The police didn’t take it seriously, though the African was tall and very scary. She grew herbs, she grew marijuana plants, and explained that some weed was male and some female.

  Hock was grateful; her stories were a helpful distraction to him in the last weeks of his business, which would close after Christmas. He even mentioned that. She didn’t listen. Jerry didn’t listen either. But Teya wanted to see him; she smiled gratefully when he showed up. She needed him as a listener. Customers at the store needed him as a listener. All you had to do to be a friend was show up and listen. He found that Teya could go on and on, and the more he listened and said nothing, the more she depended on him. She said he was a good conversationalist and that she liked talking with him, and he said nothing.

  Her stories could be alarming. The Sudanese boy who brought her the red shoes was eventually arrested and charged with harassment. “I took out a restraining order on him.” But all her sadness was apparent in the stories, and since Hock remained silent, just nodded and encouraged her to continue, he seemed powerful to her, and supportive, not sad at all. He was touched by her telling him how she gave money to charities that worked with orphans in Afri
ca.

  Now and then he excused himself and went to the ripe-smelling back room that held the tank with the python. He sat before it in silence, waiting for its eye to open, its tongue to flick, admiring the gleam on its body, its complex coloring, the patterns straggling down its dorsum. And he reflected again on how the poor creature was trapped in a small space—this six-foot python that could move with such sinuous grace across stony ground could not stretch to even half its length in the tank, but lay coiled, half asleep in the wood shavings.

  One Saturday morning Hock brought a kitten with him. He had not intended to feed it to the python, though seeing it, Teya said, “Oh, God, no,” and snatched the kitten from him and cuddled it, pressing it to her cheek. “Please don’t.”

  He had guessed what her reaction might be, as he watched her nuzzling the small mewling creature.

  He said, “I think our friend needs a new home.”

  Holding the kitten, Teya watched as he shifted the heavy lid of the tank, and he lifted the long tangled snake, one hand pressed behind its head. Then he shook its thick coils into a burlap bag that he’d brought.

  That same day he took the python to the Stoneham Zoo, on the far side of Spot Pond from Medford, where he had often gone as a child to see the caged bear and the mountain goat and the coatimundi. He had called in advance to say that he had a python, and he was told that one of the resident pythons had recently died, so this one was welcome.

  “Regular meals, a nice clean cage, plenty of water and light,” the zookeeper said. “It’s why their life span is so short in captivity.”

  “Python sebae,” Hock said.

  “You’re a herpetologist?”

  “I know a little. I’m in the clothing business, but before that I was in Africa.”

  “That’s where this guy belongs. Out of his element here.”

  From that day, instead of visiting Teya, Hock visited the zoo. Teya called the store a few times, and reminded him that she was a licensed massage therapist. But by then the sale of it was final, the new buyer a computer chain. When the Christmas blowout was over, the unsold clothing and all the fixtures were warehoused, the phone disconnected. Now no one could find him, not even Deena.