Snakewoman of Little Egypt

by Robert Hellenga

  “You’re too stubborn and unreasonable,” Sunny told him when he told her about playing the harp in the service.

  “You’re the one who’s stubborn and unreasonable. This is my vocation.”

  On the second of these trips, right after Thanksgiving, Jackson put his hand around the middle of the snake, which was lying flat against Earl’s chest. The snake thrummed in his hand, like a powerful erection, a superhuman erection.

  “You feel that?” Earl asked.

  Jackson nodded.

  “That’s somethin’, ain’t it?”

  “It’s something, all right,” Jackson said, reluctant to let go.

  The snake turned its two heads to look at Jackson. The yellow eyes caught the lamplight, glittered like diamonds.

  “It’s like looking into the depths of hell,” Earl said.

  Jackson took a deep breath.

  “You want to hold him?” Earl asked.

  Jackson let go. “No, no,” he said, “that’s all right.”

  No one was quite sure how “Little Egypt” got its name. Perhaps the Mississippi River recalled the Nile in the minds of the first settlers, and the mysterious Indian mounds at Cahokia suggested the pyramids, and perhaps the ruins of this ancient native American civilization strengthened the association with Egypt. Perhaps settlers from the north who traveled in wagon trains to buy grain during bad winters or droughts recalled the ancient Israelites traveling to Egypt to buy grain. But Jackson put his money on John Bagley, a Baptist missionary who came to convert the Indians and the French settlers after the Revolutionary War. It was Bagley who first called the gently sloping highlands and fertile bottoms the “Land of Goshen,” the land the pharaoh had given to Joseph’s brothers after they came to Egypt.

  Naqada itself was beautiful, situated on a bluff overlooking the Ohio River. It wasn’t exactly prospering, but it wasn’t falling apart either. You couldn’t get a drink in a restaurant, but there was a row of taverns on the road down by the river, north of the marina.

  On these visits Jackson interviewed as many people as he could. He didn’t bother to position himself as a white male ethnographer; he didn’t set out to challenge the masculinist bias that underlay the strict codes and traditional models of interviewing; he didn’t think of himself as producing subjectivities; and he didn’t worry about the instability of knowledge claims that characterize post-structural and postmodern modes of research. He simply asked a few questions at the beginning of each interview, and then let people talk without trying to control the interview. Everyone had a sackful of stories, stories about the coal mines and the feldspar mines over in Rosiclare, stories about the river, stories about the timber companies that had decimated the hills; stories about hard times and good times; and stories about the church: healing the sick, raising the dead, handling fire, drinking strychnine, handling serpents, speaking in tongues. Many had grown up in the church and had known from early childhood that they wanted to handle. They looked forward to turning twelve—when they’d be allowed up in the front of the church with the serpents—the way other kids look forward to turning sixteen so they can get a driver’s license or twenty-one so they can drink legally. Others came to it late in life.

  What he wanted to know was not how many members were in the congregation, not how often they handled, not where they got the snakes. What he wanted to know was why. Though in a sense he already knew, had known ever since he put his hand around DX’s two-headed snake.

  At the American Anthropological Association meetings in Chicago at the end of the month, he asked everyone he knew: Why? And he got all kinds of answers: materialist, structuralist, functionalist, structural-functionalist, cultural-materialist. But none of his colleagues had washed Earl’s feet or wrapped his, or her, fingers around DX’s two-headed snake.

  He drove back to Colesville instead of staying for the banquet at the Hilton. Sunny was not at home, and he was asleep by the time she got back and crawled into bed beside him. Not really awake, he lay behind her with his hand on her hip. They hadn’t sorted through all their feelings for each other yet, hadn’t put them into words.

  In the morning he thought it was the dog licking his face, but it was Sunny. She was kneeling over him, naked despite the cold. The room was still dark. He looked at the clock. It said 4:30. The bottom of the red “3” was burned out so that it looked like a backward “F.”

  “Veux-tu me baiser en levrette?” she said, which is what she always said, whatever she wanted, because she liked to say it. But in the morning it took him a little while to loosen up his joints, and so she climbed on top of him. The dog woke up and stuck her head over the edge of the bed. Jackson stroked her head, Maya’s head, and after a couple of minutes she lay back down again.

  Don’t leave your pistol on the table and turn your back on her while you’re getting’ something outta the refrigerator.

  He looked up at Sunny. Earl had given him new eyes: Sunny was tough, frightening, dangerous. He didn’t really believe Earl’s story—that Sunny had gotten a snake out of the snake shed and was trying to get it to bite him while he was taking a nap—but he could imagine her getting a rattlesnake out of the snake shed and holding it up against Earl’s neck. Look at the way she’d kept one hand on the pistol in her lap while they were eating when Earl came up the first time. If Earl had tried to leap across the table and grab her, he’d have been dead meat in two seconds. He could imagine her not wanting to live right and “going with” Earl’s friend DX and a lot of other men. Maybe even Cramer, her bio prof, who had won teaching awards and who’d been voted the “most desirable professor” by the girls in two different sororities, and whose evolutionary explanations of everything from A to Z she seemed to have adopted.

  He reached up and pulled her down on top of him so that their mouths joined.

  Later, in the kitchen, he boiled water to poach eggs. He turned on NPR. And turned it off again after learning that in Utah eight teenagers taking part in a wilderness program for troubled youths had beaten one counselor and tied another to a tree and fled into the desert. They’d all been rounded up within days and seven of the eight had accepted plea bargains.

  He looked out the window at Sunny, who was sitting on the deck with a rifle, waiting for a deer. She’d put on some of Jackson’s long underwear this morning. He’d watched her put it on. It was too big and sagged in the back like the loose folds of a cow’s butt. Through the window he could see her sitting at the glass-top table. Warren’s homemade hunting knife was on the table, and some rope, a hide tag, and a plastic bag for the liver and heart.

  He took two plates of bacon and poached eggs out to the deck and Sunny kept the rifle, Warren’s old 30.06, on her lap. Jackson salted and peppered her eggs for her and added a few drops of Tabasco. They ate in silence. Warren’s Winchester .35 was in the kitchen. The scope was out of line. There was no scope on the 30.06, but she said she didn’t need one. They’d cleaned and oiled both rifles the night before.

  Jackson cleared the table. He rinsed the plates in the sink before putting them in the dishwasher. A bit of egg white stuck on the bottom of the saucepan. He scraped it off and then heated up milk in the pan while he made coffee in a French press pot, added hot milk and some sugar. Maya kept banging her tail against the wall, eager to go out.

  He took a pitcher of café au lait out to Sunny, being careful not to let the door slam or let Maya out, though the deer didn’t pay much attention to Maya and Maya didn’t pay much attention to the deer.

  Jackson’s feelings about deer had changed since he’d contracted Lyme disease, which probably came from a tick from a deer he’d shot himself, right after Warren died. Kill them all! Wipe them out. A menace. Two people in the county got West Nile Virus and there was a panic. West Nile. Egyptian. Foreign. Arab. But Lyme disease, which affects a hundred times as many people? That’s Lyme, Connecticut. How could anything bad come out of Lyme, Connecticut?

  He turned NPR back on as he did the dishes. The shot took
him by surprise.

  Out on the deck, he could see the deer lying on its side on the other side of the stream. Its legs were not moving.

  “Good shot,” he said.

  It was a young buck and would make good eating. And all of a sudden he thought of himself as the deer. Killed in an instant. Wiped out. He was overwhelmed. All doubts resolved. He could see everything clearly. Sunny, Earl, Cramer. It was a perfect moment to die, a Faustian moment: Du bist so schön. He would have been happy to have time stop. But it didn’t, and after a moment he no longer saw everything clearly, and he couldn’t remember what it was that he had seen so clearly. It had all happened too fast.

  They drank their café au lait and went to field-dress the deer. Dark blood was running out of the deer’s mouth, but Sunny checked for signs of chest movement. The eyes were glazed. She touched one of them with a stick. No response. “Earl had one kick him once,” she said. “Almost broke his leg.”

  “If you were a Neanderthal,” Jackson says, “you’d have had to get up close and personal to kill this poor devil, and you’d have had to use a flake knife to cut him open and scrape the hide.”

  She unloaded the rifle and put the shells in her pocket. She notched the date, antler points, and sex on the kill tag with the tip of her knife and wired the tag to the lower jaw. Then she turned to Jackson and grunted. “Ugh ugh ugh.”

  “Neanderthals couldn’t talk,” he said, “but they could communicate.”

  “Ugh ugh ugh.”

  “Hunting is one candidate for the development of human consciousness,” he said. “It requires cooperation, strategizing.”

  “You’re thinking about your pygmies,” she said, “with fifteen or twenty people holding a net.”

  “Mbuti,” he said. They rolled the deer over and he held back the paunch while she cut it open from breast bone to anus.

  She tied off the bladder so it wouldn’t spill piss all over. “He should have taken a leak earlier,” she said.

  Jackson looked away as she severed the base of the penis and testicles and pulled them out and held them up.

  “The Chinese eat penises,” he said. “Bulls’ penises. You can buy them in the market. An aphrodisiac. You have to clean out the urinary tract or it will taste like piss.”

  “You know this from experience? I mean your experience as an anthropologist?”

  “From the National Geographic.”

  “Cramer says that snakes have two penises. Hemipene.”

  “Two? Why would they need two?”

  “An extra one, just in case.”

  “Good for them.”

  She held up the penis. “You can eat this one if you want, but count me out.”

  She cut out the anus and tied off the intestine. She pinched off the bladder and slowly cut it free with one hand and pulled it out with the other.

  “Did you know that modern human beings and Neanderthals lived side by side for over forty thousand years? Two different twigs on the bush of life.”

  “Like African and Indian elephants?”

  “Not exactly. But sort of.”

  “Can Indian and African elephants interbreed?”

  “No, and neither could Neanderthals and Homo sapiens sapiens.”

  “How do you know?”

  “DNA evidence.” He paused. “Actually, the DNA evidence isn’t conclusive. A lot of people think they did. Interbreed. It’s a big controversy.”

  She cut out the heart and held it in her hands. Jackson opened up the plastic bag and she dropped it in. They rolled the buck on its side and the entrails rolled out onto the ground. Sunny cut them free from the back of the deer and then cut through the esophagus and the blood vessels near the diaphragm. When she’d cleaned out the body cavity they dragged the carcass out on a plastic toboggan, almost tipping it into the stream when they went across the bridge. They hauled it up to Sunny’s truck and then went into the house and showered, checking each others’ bodies for tiny deer ticks.

  Images of the buck filled Jackson’s imagination, like early morning light—the buck, the woods, the top of Sunny’s head, her fingers curved around the handle of the heavy balanced knife, the bare branches of the big horse chestnut where they’d field-dressed the deer. The spiky leaves of the red and white oaks were sprayed onto his retinas. He kept rubbing his eyes.

  “The Neanderthals were the first hominids to bury their dead,” Jackson said, when they had stepped out of the shower.

  “I thought they were cavemen,” Sunny said.

  “They were. They were a dead end. But they must have had some sense of … something.”

  “Maybe we’re a dead end too,” she said.

  They drank another cup of coffee and drove in to the locker plant and left the deer to be butchered.

  11

  Shopping with Claire

  I needed something to wear to the big millennium party, and when Claire proposed a shopping trip to Chicago, just before Christmas, I said yes. Exams were over, and I knew I’d done well on all of them. I’d spent the end of the term conjugating irregular verbs, reviewing biology labs, putting together my short story portfolio, reviewing Western Civ notes. I needed a break before I started working on my hot-snake certificate.

  We took the seven-o’clock train, the Illinois Zephyr, that would get us to Chicago by ten thirty. We were going to spend the night at Claire’s parents’ place on the north side. Claire was eager to trade confidences, girl talk. She was going to write a novel, she said. She didn’t know what she was going to write about. Not yet. She’d had an affair with a professor of astrophysics a couple of years earlier and she thought she might write about that. Or she might write a woman’s extreme adventure novel. In any case, she wanted to stay up in the apartment over the garage for the winter break. She’d already talked to her husband about it.

  “What about the mice?” I asked.

  “I was hoping you could help me. Maybe set some traps when we get back. You could help me with the novel too. You’ve got a lot of stories. Maybe I’ll write about someone like you.”

  “Like me?!”

  “Why not? I could start with the snakebox story.”

  What could I say?

  “It’s a great story,” Claire said. “I’m going to write two thousand words a day,” she said, “for twenty-seven days. That’s fifty-four thousand words. Two thousand words a day. I’m going to follow my own advice and write without stopping.”

  “Intentionality is the enemy,” I said.

  I let Claire’s words wash over me, along with the noise of the train. It had snowed during the night, and the fields were white as clean sheets. We didn’t get snow like this in Naqada. We settled down to read. Claire had her Wall Street Journal. I had a copy of Stanley Miller’s original paper that Cramer had photocopied for me.

  We were bound together by our interest in Jackson and by our substantial investments in ShoppingKart.com, which we’d invested in against the advice of Claire’s broker. This was another subject I didn’t want to think about, but Claire was reading the Wall Street Journal and relaying the bad news. In the four months since we’d bought the stock, ShoppingKart.com had burned through almost half a billion dollars without showing a profit. Today, Claire noted, it was down three points. The twenty thousand dollars of Uncle Warren’s money that I’d invested had been worth almost thirty thousand at the end of November, but now it was worth about fifteen thousand.

  “Don’t worry,” Claire said, “Pam says that this is what most Internet companies do at first. Besides, ShoppingKart-dot-com’s not like most Internet companies. It’s got a business plan and a path to profitability. And anyway,” she said, perhaps reading my thoughts, “you’ve got plenty of money. Spend some of it. Treat yourself. We’ll start at Marshall Field’s.”

  I bit my tongue and studied Claire as the train rocked back and forth. I didn’t know what to think about Claire. Was she a pathetic figure, or was she a brave spirit, making the best of things? She had lots of energy, plans,
lots of plans, including plans for me, and she looked smashing in a striped coat dress and a white silk blouse and knee-high boots.

  And what about me? Was I a pathetic figure or a brave spirit in my black slacks and an old blue blazer? My dressiest outfit. I bit my tongue again at the thought. No more ShoppingKart.coms, I was sure of that, but I was happy in spite of ShoppingKart.com. I was living with a man who spoke French with me at the dinner table—for the first fifteen minutes—and never made fun of me, a man who didn’t frighten me, a man who understood my body and didn’t beat it, a man who didn’t want to know where I was every minute, a man who didn’t have to win every argument. Though I couldn’t stop him from going to Naqada. He may have been a professional anthropologist, but I didn’t think he knew what he was getting into.

  The Stanley Miller article from Science magazine wasn’t even two pages long, and the general idea wasn’t that hard to understand, and the diagram of the apparatus wasn’t as clear as the one Cramer had sketched for me on a napkin in Seymour Union back in the middle of December, just before the end of the term. Professor Cramer had come to my table during the last lab of the semester. We’d been examining a flatworm (Dugesia) under the dissecting microscope, shining a bright light on it, feeding it pieces of liver and cat food, touching it with a probe, and my lab partner and I were waiting for Laura Gridley, one of the lab assistants, to check our drawings of a series of prepared slides of different planaria to make sure we’d labeled them correctly. We were watching Laura, whose flaming red curls were held back by a scarf, stroll down our row of soapstone tables and turn at the end as if she were modeling her lab coat, which (unlike the lab coats of the other assistants) was open at the top and flared at the waist, when suddenly Cramer appeared out of nowhere and started looking over our drawings. He made a correction on one of my drawings, with a pencil, and asked if he could speak to me after the lab. He’d wait for me outside. My eighteen-year-old lab partner, Molly Christiansen, was stunned.