Snakewoman of Little Egypt

by Robert Hellenga

  He could have made an issue out of it, but he let it go.

  The crates looked like rows of computer monitors lined up on their new shelves.

  The next day we would start checking the snakes for mites and parasites. Ideally the snakes should be quarantined for at least a month, but we were going to turn them loose in two weeks if we could get the transmitters implanted, and if the weather cooperated.

  In the parking lot outside Buehl Hall we were reluctant to say good-bye. It had been an adventure, and we’d bonded, though in a funny way. Funny like the Shakespeare play where everybody gets mixed up. Frank wanted Laura to go for a drink; Laura didn’t want to leave me behind with Cramer. But Frank was impatient to leave and dragged Laura off with him in his VW. I was glad that they’d both bagged several snakes despite Frank’s obvious fear.

  There was a tiny bit of whiskey left in the flask, and standing by the TF truck, Cramer and I finished it. It was a good feeling, warm and dangerous. I wasn’t surprised when Cramer put an arm around me. I thought he was going to bend over and kiss me, and he did. I almost exploded. He smelled of snake—musky and meaty. I knew I’d crossed a line, but it was a line I’d crossed before, and I was a little bit sad rather than worried. I thought I could draw another line around this kiss and keep it separate from the rest of my life.

  That night Jackson and I drank beer while I cooked two small steaks on the French stove—Steak au poivre—and then we drank a little red wine with the steaks. I drank just enough to maintain my high. After we finished the dishes I went upstairs and put on my French outfit. I wanted to discover whose version of myself I was going to be. I hadn’t washed it, and it was wrinkled and still had the red wine stains down the front. I doubted if they’d ever come out. My small breasts looked nice and firm in the spaghetti-strap camisole. I admired myself in the mirror over Jackson’s big chestnut dresser. I don’t think I’ve ever been so aroused. The dress was like the magic girdle I read about in Western Civ. Not a girdle girdle but some kind of a belt that you fastened under your breasts. More like a bra than a belt. Hera, the queen of the gods, borrows it from Aphrodite, the goddess of love, when she wants to seduce her husband. All you have to do is put it on and you are irresistible. That’s the way I felt. Irresistible to myself too, even though I hadn’t taken a shower, and when I put my hands up to my nose I could smell snake and gasoline and whiskey (and maybe Cramer too). My body was trembling, just the way it had when I’d confronted the big snake. My mind was spinning, my heart pounding, my feet and hands tingling, my stomach churning.

  “Jackson,” I called. “Come up here. I want to show you something.”

  He took his time, made me wait.

  Then on the stairs. I felt each step like a smart sassy slap on the ass.

  At the top of the stairs we confronted each other in a rush of fear and of pleasure. I could hear my own bones singing, like a rattlesnake’s rattle. I could feel my stomach coiling, and below my stomach, something ready to strike.

  “I wondered what happened to that outfit,” Jackson said, looking me up and down. “But I was afraid to ask.”

  “You look ten times better than you did when I got here,” I said. “You look like you’re full of life.” I could already feel his hands on me. I unfastened the cache-coeur and the little putty-colored skirt and then pulled the cami over my head, like a snake shedding its skin. I could feel my blood thickening. I was turning into DX’s two-headed snake, into a powerful erection that would pulse under this man’s touch. I was Snakewoman, I was the python in the San cave in the Tsodilo Hills, and when we embraced we turned into the ancient Mesopotamian tree of life. His kisses were like blood and salt.

  But afterwards, when he turned to me and asked, “What just happened?” I didn’t say anything about the snakes.

  “What just happened?” I had to think. “My heart started beating faster,” I said, “and my breathing got faster too, and I tightened all my muscles, and my nipples got hard, and my clit swelled up and my pelvic area got engorged with blood, and I had about fifteen muscle contractions, and then my body got rigid, and then it relaxed. Why? What do you think happened?”

  “You took me inside you,” he said, “and devoured my seed when I was most vulnerable, and you were most triumphant. I explored your dark continent at my own risk. You lured me on. But because I survived the encounter, you will now share your great riches and power with me, because you love me.”

  It wasn’t really funny, but I started to laugh. “Is that what really happened?”

  “That’s what really happened,” he said.

  I thought maybe he was right.

  There were no more Cramer kisses, no brushings up against each other, no secret glances—just the kind of intimacy that comes from working closely together in a crowded lab. Four of us working together, collecting blood and fecal samples, and tissue samples that would have to be stained, sectioned, and sequenced in order to determine genetic variability.

  Cramer did the first surgical implants himself. I had to admire him. He hadn’t done it before, but he didn’t flinch. During the first one he was on a speakerphone with a woman from the University of Florida.

  “Maneuver the snake head-first into the plastic tube,” the voice said. “Head first. Just hold the body and slide it up into the tube.” The voice was talking to me. The snake felt like a pulsing penis in my hand. It twisted and turned till the anesthetic flowing through the tube took effect.

  Cramer made an incision towards the lower third of the snake and placed the transmitter itself under the ribcage and tied it to a rib, and then he slid the flexible antenna between the skin and the pink flesh along the ribcage and stitched the snake up.

  Forty minutes. We were all sweating.

  I took the snake out of the tube and put it in its Neodesha cage and triple-locked the door. C.h.h.1. Crotalus horridus horridus 1. All the vital signs seemed to be okay.

  We thought of giving the snakes names: Slinky, Creepy, Crawly. But then we ran out of names, and Cramer vetoed a plan to name them after biology professors.

  We did two more implants that afternoon and then called it a day.

  It took a week to insert all the transmitters and to weigh and measure the snakes and check them thoroughly for mites. Cramer taught Laura and Frank and me how to insert the transmitters.

  Before releasing them in a new denning area we had to wait for the weather to warm up again after a cold snap. We wanted to get them to their new home before they started to shed. Once they’re shedding, you can’t handle them without damaging the skin.

  17

  Fleecing the Lord

  Jackson managed to convince himself that Sunny was doing the right thing and did his best to support and encourage her —locating material on Baja California and La Paz, where the conference was going to be held, and ordering a book about snakes in Baja. He looked at his mother’s slides again, several times, letting the slides transport him back into that world where he could be eleven years old again. He’d visit his old school, have dinner with Suzanne and her husband and children, he’d walk along the Seine, eat at the Café de Flore. His clothes were packed. His tickets were in his briefcase with his passport. He was going to fly from Peoria to O’Hare instead of driving.

  But the moment Sunny left—Cramer picked her up in a TF car on Tuesday morning at three o’clock for the drive up to O’Hare—he went to pieces. His joints swelled up, and by first light he couldn’t recognize his own truck in the drive when he looked out the bedroom window, he couldn’t sleep, he could hardly get out of bed, he couldn’t tell right from left, couldn’t tell the front door from the back door, couldn’t tie his shoes. And all the time he felt that someone was right behind him, a presence, but he couldn’t be bothered to turn his head. So, he thought, this is what love is really like. He took two big sky-blue capsules of doxycycline, which he had trouble swallowing. He stayed in bed on Tuesday, and Wednesday too, getting up only to take more doxycycline and to feed Maya and
let her out. On Thursday morning—his flight was not until one o’clock—he felt better. He threw some clothes and his Guide Bleu into a suitcase, gathered up his tickets and passport, and dropped Maya off at Claire’s. Claire took one look at him and told him he wasn’t going anywhere. We’ll get you to a doctor and then you’ll stay right here. But he wouldn’t listen to her. Her voice seemed to come to him from a long way away, and while she was explaining things to her husband, in his study, he got in the car and headed for the airport in Peoria, but instead of taking the airport exit, he kept going, heading south on 155, picking up I55 at Lincoln. Six hours later he was in Naqada, parked in front of the Naqada Inn. He was in bad shape.

  Gladys Rose, who ran the hotel, gave him his regular room, the Winterthur Room on the second floor, overlooking the river.

  “You don’t look good,” she said.

  “Just tired,” he said. “It’s a long drive.”

  He closed the heavy velvet drapes and sat down on the edge of the big double bed and watched the dust motes suspended in the beam of light that sliced through the narrow opening where the drapes failed to come together. He sat down at the desk and started to write a letter to Sunny, tried to explain, again, the difference between looking at the beam of light and looking along it, but his head wasn’t clear and he didn’t think he was getting it right, so he tried to explain his feelings. Jealousy, of course. Which he wanted to conceal or at least soften. It was a matter of principle. But what principle? What did he want to say? He was writing with a blue ball-point pen on a piece of glossy motel stationery with the name of the hotel —The Naqada Inn—at the top. The main thing: He wanted to leave the door open. Maybe he was jumping to conclusions. About Sunny and Cramer. He didn’t realize he was writing in French until he couldn’t remember the word for drape.

  He pushed the chair back and stood up to walk to the bed. His knees were swollen. He grabbed the back of the chair and used it as a walker. He was disoriented, worse than on his first night in the Forest with Claude, his first night of the real fieldwork—for which he’d been preparing himself ever since Anthropology 101 at the University of Chicago—and he was unnerved by every stimulus. What am I doing here? He could see the folly of anthropology, the folly of seeing “through” everything. It was like having X-ray vision. If you could see through everything, you wouldn’t be able to see anything. He thought he could smell kerosene, though it was summer, hot outside, and the room was air-conditioned.

  When he woke up, Earl was sitting on the edge of the bed. “I brought you some sassafras tea,” Earl said. “Mrs. Rose called me.”

  Jackson swallowed some tea. It tasted like root beer.

  “Isn’t sassafras illegal?” Jackson asked. “A carcinogen?”

  “This here is homemade,” Earl said. He’d already asked DX to round up some of the women from the church to come and pray over Jackson. Jackson didn’t have the strength to object. Didn’t want to object.

  Later the women from the church came to his room. Their warmth and kindness took him back to his childhood. This was what they knew how to do. These were the women you could count on for help, the women who knew what to do when someone died, or when there was an accident at the mill or the grain elevator. Women he could picture at a church supper in the Methodist church in Kendallville, where his grandparents worshipped.

  The women told stories about healing.

  “If the Lord can handle snakebite,” Jackson asked, “why not a broken collarbone?”

  There was quite a bit of controversy over this matter. The women offered examples and counter examples. They knew their Bibles —Saint Paul getting serpent bit in Malta, Jesus healing the sick, raising the dead too. Lazarus, and the little girl … And they had examples from their own experience.

  “But was the person really dead?” Jackson asked.

  “Absolutely.”

  Earl came back in the evening, bringing Mawmaw Tucker. They did a lot of praying, touching, laying on of hands. Earl and DX too. It was unnerving to see grown men on their knees.

  The visit by Mawmaw Tucker was regarded as quite an honor. She placed her hands on his head, over his face, and he could feel the swelling in his knees going down. Her drooping lower lip was moist and reflected the light.

  “You was in the Garden,” she said.

  Ordinary reality seemed to recede. Jackson seemed to be looking down on himself, and on Earl and DX and Mawmaw Tucker and the other women, as if he were floating above them. They began to talk, not to each other, but individually. Babblings. Ejaculations. Murmurings. But measured, pulsating phrases of equal length, every pulse beginning with a heavy stress that faded away in a kind of trochaic rhythm. As an anthropologist Jackson thought immediately of shamanistic spirit possession—in the Zar cult of Ethiopia, or among the Lapps and the Yakut, or among the Ke’let, when the spirit enters the shaman’s body, or the Semang, who chant to invoke the cenoi, who then speak to the shamans and through them.

  But Jackson was also inside the experience, and from the inside—looking along the beam of light instead of at it—the talking became a kind of music, a kind of chanting. He seemed to see things as if he were a child seeing them for the first time, as if he were looking out the window at the river, waiting, or as if he were waiting with his grandparents for a glimpse of the Twin Cities 400, the bright yellow train that ran from Chicago to Minneapolis. They’d driven up—he and his grandparents—to Muskegon and taken the ferry to Milwaukee and they were waiting in a park for the train to appear. He tried to put the experience into words, but he was like a child who hasn’t learned to talk, who could only cry out. And then the words came, in a strange language. He could explain everything. But only for a moment, or a few moments. Then Mawmaw Tucker took her hands off his head, just as the train was streaming by below them, and his daughter was waving from the last window of the last car.

  “I was there too,” she said. Taking him by surprise. “It’s hard to explain.” Her eyes were moist. “Them mountains was just like you said. And the rivers too.”

  He didn’t have to tell her that he wanted her to put her hands back on his head. She already knew what he wanted. He closed his eyes and focused on her touch.

  “When you were dead?” he asked.

  “Ummm.”

  When he opened his eyes and looked up into her face, he saw a young woman looking down on him.

  “How old were you?”

  “I was only twenty-four.”

  “That was a long time ago.”

  “During the war,” she said. “My husband was killed in the Philippines. I keeled right over when they come with the news. His plane went down. They never found it.”

  “I’m sorry,” he said.

  “It’s all right. My sisters come from across the river and took care of me.”

  Jackson had more questions, but there was a knocking on the door and the door opened. It was Mrs. Rose. “The doctor’s here,” she said. “You’re going to have to leave. This is a hotel, not a church.”

  Mawmaw Tucker rose up. She was a large heavy-set woman in a wide gray dress the color of winter sky. “Is that Dr. Arnold?” she asked.

  The doctor stepped into the room, a middle-aged man with a thick mustache that covered his upper lip.

  Mawmaw Tucker approached the doctor. “Dr. Arnold,” she said “this man needs to be prayed over more than he needs whatever you’re sellin’.”

  “Mrs. Tucker,” the doctor said, “I know you and I don’t see eye to eye, but if you put your mind to it you might remember wanting to see me when you had that appendicitis, and if I put my mind to it, I think I might remember three or four other visits …”

  “You take care of your business here as quick as you can and then kindly leave us be.”

  The doctor asked Jackson a few questions and got him back on his doxycycline. He held one of the big blue and white pills up for everyone to admire. Jackson swallowed it with the remains of his sassafras tea.

  “Give him som
ething to eat,” Mawmaw Tucker said when the doctor had gone. “He’s hungry. Tell Mrs. Rose to bring him some soup.”

  And he was hungry. And Mrs. Rose did bring him some soup.

  The next day he was feeling better. He was tired, and his joints ached. But not so bad. Earl picked him up at the hotel and they drove down several hairpin turns to the marina in Naqada, where Earl kept his boat.

  The air was warm, heavy with fish stink. “The river’s rising,” Earl said, smacking a mosquito on his forehead, leaving a spot of blood. “This is good if it don’t get too high. It gets too high, them fish hide off in the swamps where you can’t find ’em.”

  Jackson didn’t care. He liked fishing with Earl and DX in Earl’s flat-bottomed johnboat with its square prow and a big Evinrude motor on the stern and four outriggers, two on each side. Jackson’s grandfather had had a rowboat, which he kept over at Little Long Lake, where they fished for bluegills and crappie. And he’d fished in the Seine once with his father, with rented tackle, but they hadn’t caught any fish.

  As they rounded a bend in the river, south of Naqada, Earl told DX to get out the bait. “I sometimes wonder if Jesus was a fisherman,” he said, looking at Jackson. “He picked fishermen for his disciples, but the Bible don’t say anything about Jesus himself fishing. You ever think about that?”

  “Fishers of men,” Jackson said. “I will make you fishers of men.”

  “That’s me too. I’m a fisher of men.”

  “And I’m a fish?”

  “That’s the idea. When you’re sick like this, you got to ask God to heal you. Look at how much better you are already. When you got here you couldn’t hardly move. Now look at you. Walking around. Just with the women asking God to heal you … You’re feeling better, right?”

  Jackson nodded.

  “You can see it plain as day. But you still ain’t right with the Lord, and you know what I’m talking about.”

  Jackson didn’t say anything.

  “Now she’s done you like she done me. Ain’t that what you told me last night, or don’t you remember? That’s what’s making you sick.”