I ran faster. Glancing back, I saw that it was still coming, and it was closing on me, and I didn’t have one doubt in the world that it was pursuing me and perhaps wanted to bite me in the ass on general principles. When I saw the rent house was in sight, I began to yell for my mother.
I was a short ways from the house when my mother came out on the porch and saw me running. I don’t think she saw the snake right away, but as I came up on the porch she did. Grabbing at me, she pulled me inside and shut the door.
My dog had stirred by now, though he wasn’t supposed to be inside the house, as in those days that was thought of as bad housekeeping. But, my parents loved that dog as much as I did, and that’s where he stayed. We looked out one of the porch windows, me, Mom, and Blackie. That snake was on the porch, and it raised its head and looked in the window at us, swaying from side to side. I jumped back and I think I started screaming, because I had no doubt in my mind that it was me it wanted. Blackie, due to my screaming, began to run around me in circles, barking.
My mother said, “You stay here,” and went out the back door. After a moment she appeared on the front porch with a hoe in her hand. The hoe flashed out, missed the snake, and the snake turned away from the window and went along the porch away from my mother, but she chased after it. I positioned myself to see out the window, and the last thing I saw of the snake was its tail whipping off the porch and out of sight, and then my mother chasing after it, the hoe raised above her head like a cartoon character.
I don’t know how long my mom was gone, but finally I saw her through the window. She came up on the porch and put the hoe against the wall, and came inside. She was always dramatic, and she leaned against the door frame as if she had just been in a great battle that she had only marginally survived.
“I killed it,” she said. “I chopped its head off.”
Late afternoon, suppertime, my father came home.
Mother related our snake adventure, and how she had killed it, and protected us, because that snake wanted in, and when she was through telling her story that snake could have been an army of snakes.
My dad went outside to look at the snake. I went out with him. Even though it was dead, I wouldn’t get near it. I could see that its head had been chopped off, but I had heard even a headless snake didn’t die until sundown. I had heard a lot of mythical stories about snakes, including the one about the hoop snake which grabbed its tail in its mouth and rolled down hill like a tire. There was also the snake that was said to slip under cows, attaching itself to one of their udders, and sucking out the milk, which was a reason some farmers said a milk cow went dry. I had known plenty of grown-ups to tell those stories for the truth, as absurd as they were.
My dad looked at the snake, then looked at me.
“Come here, son,” he said.
I eased closer, but still a goodly distance away from the dead snake.
He said, “See the way it looks. It don’t have a triangle head. It ain’t poisonous. It’s not a copperhead, rattler, or water moccasin, and it sure ain’t no corral snake. It gets cornered, it’ll beat its tail so it sounds like a rattlesnake, but it’s not even close. It’s a coach whip. They’ll chase you sometimes, but they ain’t gonna hurt you. Had you stopped running, it would have stopped, and had you ran toward it, it would have run in the other direction. Get it cornered, it’ll bite, but ain’t no poison in it, but you get anything cornered, it’ll fight back. Thing is, boy, not everything that looks scary is. You got to know something well enough before you decide on it as being one way or another.”
I wasn’t convinced, but that was all he had to say. He went inside, and I went inside after him. For a few days when I woke up at night and turned toward the bedroom window, I imagined I saw that snake rising up in the moonlight to look in at me. I didn’t care if all it wanted was to play chase. I didn’t care that it didn’t have a triangular head or that it wasn’t poison. The idea of it terrified me.
Much to my pleasure, we didn’t stay in Arizona long. None of us liked it and the jobs weren’t that good. We drove up into Colorado, and my dad found work there, and then we drove back through New Mexico and West Texas, Central Texas, Dad and Mom finding field work along the way, and then finally we were back in East Texas, back in Marvel Creek where I had been born, and the air seemed right and the sky seemed right and the woods were dark and green and it rained a lot. I was home.
Some years later, when I was a teenager, I was out walking in the woods behind our house, down near the creek, and I saw the grass rustle. My skin crawled. I stopped and looked. I started walking away, fast, and whatever it was started moving toward me through the grass, and pretty soon I was overcome with what I had felt as a child. I started running like a gazelle.
At some point I remembered what Dad had said, and I found the courage to stop and turn and run back toward where the grass was moving, expecting the snake to run. It didn’t. The grass was still moving, and finally the grass parted, and the snake squirmed onto the sandy trial. It wasn’t a coach whip. It was a short, stubby water moccasin, one of the poisonous snakes that are partial to East Texas. I have had many people tell me since they won’t do that, chase you, I mean, but that one did; it not having read the recent literature. I think a snake in the wild is not a snake in captivity. Maybe snakes make decisions that are not only based on instinct. Maybe now and then they just like messing with you, because that one was certainly chasing me, and I was running as fast as I could go, and it was making easy time toward me.
I glanced back again, and all of a sudden the snake slithered off the trail and into the grass on the other side, and away through it.
That snake had fooled me. I got a lesson out of it, though I don’t think I really understood it until years later. Sometimes you can think something is going to hurt you and it isn’t, but you can also think something isn’t, and it will. I don’t know the snake was dead set on catching up with me, because if it had wanted to, it would have. Maybe it was merely waiting to reach its turnoff. But still, I had convinced myself this time that I was being silly and the snake wasn’t poisonous, was a coach whip, but it wasn’t. Had I chased into the grass after it, and stepped on it, it might have bitten me.
That may have been what Dad was trying to tell me. It’s the same way with people. You might see them coming from a long distance off, but you don’t know what kind of snake they are just by sight, and they don’t have a triangular head to judge by.
12.
The Bottom of the World
“My father damn sure had his moments, like telling me about that snake, but telling me something else in the process, teaching me a lesson. He could be contradictory, and there’s no doubt he was racist. He hated blacks as a race but tended to like them as individuals. I think he couldn’t quite understand if a black person could do better than him, because that didn’t seem right. He had grown up with nothing, and the idea that there were people making fantastic amounts of money always seemed like a lie to him, or if it was true, he felt it was undeserved. I guess you grow up with nothing, ignorant and uneducated, it’s hard to wrap your head around that. It didn’t seem right to him that anybody ought to make the kind of money they did in sports, for example. Especially black athletes. On the other hand, he had a way of telling me things that mattered through moments like the one with that snake. Now and again he did it through stories.”
“I think I’d have liked your dad, me being black or not,” Leonard said.
“I don’t think he would have liked you,” I said. “But, you two are actually a lot alike. In the tough and straightforward department.”
“I’m charming,” Leonard said. “He’d have come around.”
“You’re not only black, but gay, so, I don’t know.”
“What kind of stories did he tell you?” Chance asked.
“All kinds. Sometimes things that happened to him. Sometimes even a ghost story now and again.”
“Oh, I like scary stories,” Chance said
. “Can you tell me one of his ghost stories?” I glanced at Brett.
Brett smiled. “She’s a grown woman, Hap. She can take a ghost story. If not, she and Buffy can cuddle on the couch afterwards.”
“See,” Chance said, “I’m all grown up.” She smiled her dazzling smile. She did that, it was near impossible to deny her anything.
“Alright,” I said.
The little electric heater buzzed like a bee and its grillwork glowed cherry red. Hap Collins, ten years old, sat on the floor with his arms clutching his knees, which he had pulled up close to his chest to create warmth. The house was dark except for the heater light. Outside, rain pecked at the glass and the wind howled as if it were a wolf in misery.
There was a scratching sound, and Hap nearly jumped to his feet. But then he remembered what it was. It was the branch of a magnolia tree near the window and when the wind blew hard, the branch moved and touched the window, making that sound. It reminded him of a cat scratching in gravel. Still, familiar as it had become in the last couple of months, it never failed to startle him.
Hap was glad he had his own bedroom though. He had hoped for one. They had been living in tourist courts for the last few months, traveling across Arizona and West Texas so his parents could work the fields and orchards. They picked fruit, cotton, dug potatoes, whatever job was available, until they ended up back in East Texas. But now his dad had a job at a propane company as a trouble shooter, a mechanic. That’s what his dad loved doing, fixing cars, and he was good at it. Hap would be in a new school in a few days, in January after the Christmas holidays, and it would be 1960. He thought, new year, new house, and he liked both changes. It was nice to have a house of their own, even if it was cold and a little scary and he was behind in school for having been out for a while until they got settled. Another thing was he didn’t know any of the kids in the neighborhood. Yet, it was all exciting to think about.
The bedroom door cracked, and a large man-shaped shadow fell through it, the hall light at its back.
“Son?” said the shadow. “You okay?”
“Yeah,” Hap said. “Daddy. Would you tell me a story?”
“A story? Do you know what time it is?”
“No.”
“It’s . . . Well, it’s late.”
“You’re up, Daddy.”
“Came to check on you.”
The shadow came into the room wearing boxer shorts and sat down on the floor near him. The heater spread its light on the shadow, and the shape was a shadow no longer. The light glowed on a stocky man with thinning hair with forearms as big as baseball bats. His chest was thick. His hands were thick and the fingers were short and blunt at the tips. One time his dad had torn a phone book in half to win a bet with his brother-in-law. It wasn’t a very big phone book, actually, but the brother-in-law couldn’t do it. He couldn’t lift up the back of a car long enough to pull a flat tire off the rim either, but Hap knew his dad could. He’d seen him do it. He didn’t know it was a big thing until he started hearing about it from others who had seen it with him. When they spoke of his dad’s physical strength they spoke of it in awe.
“Can you tell me a story? A scary one?”
“You look like you might be a little scared now, let alone me tell you some kind of story like that. You ain’t got a thing to worry on, Baby Man. The wind is just the wind and the rain is just the rain, and that ole tree is just a tree. In the summer you’ll be able to play under it, though that magnolia tree will bring in the bees. You got to watch for them bees.”
Hap remembered his mom saying the only thing in the world his dad was afraid of were wasps and bees. A sting from one of them could lay him low for days. He could take a punch thrown by a man twice his size and give him one back three times harder, and he might even be able to out wrestle an alligator and feed it to a bear and make him like it, but a bee or wasp made him nervous.
“I like scary stories,” Hap said.
“Yeah. I know. I seen all them comic books you read.”
“Tell me, please?”
“Alright. Well, you know we live not far from the river bottoms. All that rich bottom land and the river rolling down through them trees, them trees thick, and it all dark down there. There’s all kinds of stories go with it. But they’re just stories. And you want to stay away from that river. I was a boy, about your age, my friend Ronnie, me and him went swimming down there, and a whirlpool got him. It almost got me.”
“Really?”
“Yeah. We lived not far from where we are now. Whirlpool sucked Ronnie right under, and I was near pulled in too, but I was a stronger swimmer, and I come out of it, but that water felt like it was pulling at my legs, trying to drag me under with him. I guess I kicked free of the thing down there.”
“What kind of thing?”
“They say there was this woman lived down there on the banks of the Sabine, and she was young and pretty, and she had a lot of men wanted to marry her. But she didn’t never let that happen. She was looking for the right one, and wasn’t none of them suited her, you see.
“Well now, one day she sees a man near her cabin, and he’s fishing with a cane pole, waiting patiently for a fish, sitting under an old willow tree. Now the woman, near girl really, she looks out and sees this man, and she thinks he’s the best-looking fellow she’s ever seen, including some in the Sears and Roebuck catalogue.”
“Like them that just got on underwear and stuff?”
“Like any of them. So she looks out and sees him, and she thinks, he’s the man I want, and she is bold, and goes down there to meet him. He likes her too, right away, and they become . . . friends. Close friends. So the days go by, and finally this young man decides that another young woman he saw in town might be better suited to him, ’cause not only is she pretty, but she has some money too. But the thing is, the river woman, she don’t want to let him go, ’cause they done gone and got married, and she ain’t gonna let him get shed of her. Arguing goes on for a while, but he can’t get her to agree to a divorce, and all this sets heavy on him.
“Then one summer night he does a foolish thing. Wearing nothing but his undershorts, he takes her down to the river, drags her down there by her hair, and her wearing nothing but a flimsy old night gown. He throws her in and goes in after her, pushes her out to the middle of the river. It’s not fast moving there, but it’s deep, and though she’s done spent most of her life on that river all by herself, she never has learned to swim good, and it don’t help this fellow is holding her by the hair, and is pushing her under, and it don’t take long before she’s drowned.
“Now he’s got a problem. He’s done gone and killed her and now he’s got a body. He leaves her in the river she’s just gonna float, and though he could say she drowned out there swimming, or slipped on the bank fishing and ended up in the water, he knows ain’t no one going to believe that, because she never did swim, and everyone knew she was right afraid of water, and everyone knew too she didn’t like to do no fishing, and in fact, she didn’t like to eat fish.
“This fellow he figures thing for him to do is get an old tow sack and put it over her head, and in another sack put an old anvil, tie it to her feet, and drop her out there in the middle of the river where it’s deep, where there’s a hole there so far down some say it ain’t got no bottom. He took her out there in a row boat and dumped her over the side in that bottomless hole in the river. He put her in first with that bag over her head, and he was about to toss the anvil and the chain it was linked up to over the side, when the woman started moving in the water. She wasn’t dead. He thought she was dead, but she wasn’t.
“He took the boat paddle and went to hitting on her head in that bag. He beat it with everything he had and finally it wasn’t moving. Just floating there, her feet was lifted up out of the water on the chain that was fixed onto the anvil in the boat, so she hasn’t gone nowhere yet. When he figures he’s finally got her settled, he throws that anvil into the water, nearly turning the boat over al
ong with it. Well, that anvil hits the water and it jerks that woman straight down, way down there in that bottomless hole, and this fellow, he’s got some relief now, ’cause he figures he’s good and quit of her.
“That night he goes back to the house, thinking on how he’ll say she run off with another man, and how after a time he’ll get a divorce, saying she’s run off from him.”
“What’s a divorce, Daddy?”
“It’s a thing some people do when they can’t get along, or are just too damn selfish to try and make a thing work. Anyway, this fellow, he’s thinking in a while he’ll get with that good-looking woman in town that he’s been sneaking around and seeing, and with her will come all her money. But back in the house, the wife drowned now, he starts feeling lonely. He starts thinking on her, seeing strands of her hair in her brush on the dresser, a photograph or two around the house with him and her in it. Time he goes to bed, he’s upset with himself some, tossing and turning, seeing in his head her tumbling down and down and down in that dark, old, night water, just a twisting around in circles, her hair swaying in the river, her body swirling in that watery hole that ain’t got no bottom.
Finally he goes to sleep, and then he wakes ’cause he hears something. Like someone calling his name, and he knows that voice, or thinks he does, but it don’t sound just right. You see, it’s got this gurgle about it, like someone is trying to talk with a mouthful of water.
“He thinks, now that can’t be her. She’s in that river in that bottomless hole, going down, down, down, that anvil tugging at her toes. But then he hears something that makes his blood grow cold. There’s a rattling noise, like the way a plow chain will shake when you’re hooking up a mule to plow, and then there’s another sound, a dragging sound, like maybe that chain is hooked up to something heavy, and someone has hold of that chain and is dragging that something heavy.”
Hap and Leonard: Blood and Lemonade Page 14