“Promise you won’t touch it,” he said without explaining. I noticed then that he had tossed his sweater over something at the back wall of our dugout potter’s house when he was in the cave earlier that morning. There was a new pile of sand beyond it. We hadn’t dug there before. Snowy waddled over to it on his knees and removed the sweater carefully.
“What do you think?” he said.
In the lantern’s smoky light, at the fire pit’s edge, was a humped disk of gold about the size of a fifty-cent piece. On it was embossed a man’s face, with wild curly hair and closed eyes. Fencing the disk all around were a dozen delicate ivory spears, tapered and sharply pointed, curving inward. They were set in pairs. My hand reached toward the middle and was slapped away sharply by Snowy. “Don’t touch!” he warned me.
“Why not?” I asked.
“What do you think those things are?” he asked me.
I brought the lantern a little closer. Once again I tried to touch one, and again Snowy slapped me back.
“Hey!” I said.
“Barney, be careful.”
“Of what? These things are just swords or sabers,” I said. “Sort of. What are you scared of?”
“You know what I think they are?”
“What?”
“Get your hands back, Barney. I think it’s a trap.”
“What kind of trap?” I said. “A mousetrap?”
“Don’t laugh. Look carefully. In the middle is what looks like gold, right?”
“Right.”
“Okay. If you put your hand in there, you’re going to graze it against the tips of those spears. No way not. The face on the gold disk, the disk itself, has closed eyes. I think these are graves, Barney. I think when a man died, he was buried with a kind of death mask made of gold.”
“So let’s take a shovel and dig up the whole thing.”
“Barney, did you know the Egyptians put lethal gas in some of their burial chambers to ward off tomb robbers? Are you crazy? Supposing there’s a lump of plutonium under there? We could have a meltdown!”
I sighed. “Poisoned in the Pyramids” again. There was no arguing with Snowy. If he didn’t think of plutonium, it would be Stone Age AIDS germs. I took a piece of rice paper from my supply, and against the sole of my boot I cut a crude circle, small enough to wedge onto the gold disk. With neither of us touching the ivory daggers, Snowy held the edges of the paper down with my pocketknife while I traced the design of the face, carefully slanting the pencil through the openings in between the spears. Then I did another picture of the whole ring as it sat in the sand, a side view.
“There are more,” said Snowy when I had finished.
“More what?”
“There are three more of these things. They’re all on the rim of the fire pit. Look.” He turned and gently brushed some sand from a small mound behind him. Another gold disk. Another face with eyes closed. Another ring of ivory spears. In the same snail-like procedure I traced the disk of this one and the one that lay beyond it, careful not to touch the surrounding spears, although I thought Snowy was crazy.
“I’m waiting for you to go into one of your King Tut stories,” I said. “About how we’ll both die horrible deaths for disturbing a tomb.”
“You wouldn’t listen,” said Snowy distantly. “But you know what, Barney? Forget King Tut. You know how natives fight jungle warfare? You know what a punji stake is?”
“No, what’s a punji stake?”
“They take some kind of very hard wood, okay? Like teak. And they carve it into spikes like knives. Then they soak the spikes in curare for a week. After that they plant ’em in the ground. Hidden under piled-up brush. You step on ’em and good-bye, Charlie. You’re dead in twelve minutes. Central nervous system’s paralyzed. You suffocate.”
“Snowy, you believe everything you read,” I said. I tapped one of the spears with my pencil. “Ivory, Snowy. Ivory can’t soak up anything. My dad bought a pair of elephant tusks that used to sit right in the doorway of some Indian raja’s bedroom. They’re decoration. That’s all.”
There was a fluttering on the ceiling. The bats were making ready to go out. Ignoring Snowy’s warnings, I reached down to retrieve my last tracing from the third gold disk. The little finger of my left hand brushed against the tip of one of the ivory spears. “Harmless!” I said to Snowy. “See?” My laughter echoed hollow, like the laughter of a ghost, throughout the cave.
Chapter Fourteen
FOUR AND A HALF weeks later, when the early March wind chased a clutch of winter clouds around the sky, I opened one eye.
I was alone. The window was open. I had no idea where or who I was. I lay there without moving because moving didn’t seem to be a thing I could do. I only looked with that one eye and only out the window at the scudding clouds. A woman came into the room. That’s a nurse, I heard a slow voice in my head say. That’s a nurse in a white uniform. When she saw my open eye, she ran out of the room. More time passed, and then there were three men and another woman wearing a stethoscope hovering around me. Now I knew I was in a bed. I was in a hospital somewhere. I had no memory of anything bad or good.
“Can you hear me, Barney?” asked one of the doctors slowly and distinctly, as if I were a six-month-old baboon.
“Of course,” I said.
“He’ll be all right. Get his father” was the next thing the doctor said. I closed my eye. I slept for two days.
When I woke, my father was sitting on my bed. We did not talk. He spoon-fed me custard pudding. I fell asleep again.
I woke sometime later with both eyes open. Another March day. Snowing this time. Someone was in the room, sitting on another bed. “Dad!” I said.
“You’re awake!” he whispered.
“I’m awake.”
“It’s been a long time. It’s been touch and go.”
“It has?”
“Barney, it’s March third. I’ve been here a month. Sleeping in this room. Only leaving you when Snowy or Mr. Finney or Dr. Dorothy spells me. You have been very sick.”
“What happened? What happened to my hand? Why is it bandaged up like a watermelon?”
On the wall of my room I could see get-well cards. They were from the boys in my class.
“Do you remember anything?”
“No.”
“You were in the cave.”
“Yes. We were in the cave. Snowy and I.”
Dad heaved himself off the bed. He put on a pair of glasses. I didn’t remember that he wore glasses. Yes. He got them last year, of course. He lifted each of my eyelids and looked at my eyes. Then he felt my forehead. “Do you need the nurse?” he asked.
“No.”
“Don’t talk too much,” Dad advised me. Sitting on my bed again, he began. “You know you must promise not to go back to the cave.
“Why?”
“Barney, you almost died. You were bitten by a snake.”
“What? There wasn’t any snake!”
“Barney, you just don’t remember.”
“I don’t understand,” I said.
“You keeled over after Snowy had walked you about halfway home. He got you to the school somehow. Carried you or dragged you. Five minutes into the emergency ward you went into cardiac arrest.”
“I had a heart attack? I’m just a kid!” I said.
“Cardiac arrest can occur after a bad snakebite,” said my father. “You swelled up like a balloon. Your little finger went iridescent red, bubbled up, and then started to go black. Everyone asked Snowy what happened. Snowy told the doctors his best guess was you had pricked yourself on a curare-filled punji stake. Well, you can imagine what the doctors thought of that. I flew here fifteen hours later. As soon as they got in touch with me. The Finneys had asked Snowy what you’d gotten into, and he had told them a lot of fluff about curses on tombs. He’s fixated on punji stakes. That night he was so overwrought he said he’d go back to the cave and bring one out so that they could test it. You were about to die, you see. Well
, they weren’t about to have two boys bitten by snakes, so they told him if he ever went near the cave again, they’d throttle him and hobble his legs with chains.
“Meantime they tried everything on you. Cottonmouth moccasin antivenin, copperhead antivenin, even rattlesnake. Snowy told me that just before you two left the cave, you went to pick something up. A drawing, I think. It was dark, Barney. You couldn’t see. The snake was probably hibernating, and you disturbed it. We couldn’t even see the bite afterward because your finger looked like a Sicilian sausage. Would you like some tea? I’ve brought a thermos.”
“Yes, please.”
Dad had also brought two fine bone-china cups, probably Limoges, with gold rims. I recognized them from the Finneys’ china cabinet. Some things were coming back to my mind. I sipped, saying nothing.
“Is that tea all right? Do you want sugar?”
I nodded.
“Barney, are you ready for this?”
“Ready for what?”
“They had to take off your finger. The antivenins didn’t work.”
“Take off! What finger?”
“Fortunately it’s the little one. Fortunately it’s your left hand.”
“Am I going to be all right?” I asked.
“Perfectly all right. You’ve lost the end two joints of the finger, but other than that you’ll be fine. There is only one explanation for it.
“About ten years ago a crazy fundamentalist church group stopped near here. A traveling religion show. Snakes were part of the come-on. All kinds of foreign snakes we don’t have antivenins for. You see, you have to use the right antivenin for the right snake. You can’t use pit-viper antiserum on a coral snake bite. It won’t take. Anyway, they set up their tent in Greenfield for a while in the summertime. They did all kinds of things, healing crippled people and chanting and coiling the snakes around their necks. The snakes had their venom glands removed and were harmless apparently. The preacher didn’t tell that to the congregations, of course. So, to make a long story short, one of these snakes may have escaped pregnant. She may have been glandless, but her fifty little babies weren’t.”
“You mean they’re in the cave? Grown-up now?”
“Barney, you may never go near that cave again.”
“Never,” I said groggily. The tea was warm and syrupy. It was beginning to make me sleepy.
“It got in the papers, you know,” my father said wearily. “And naturally Mr. Silks is angry at you. The local papers carried the story. ‘Prepster from exclusive Winchester Boy’s Academy near death from copperhead bite.’ Well, several boys’ parents called the school worrying, you see. Silks figured that since you had once eaten toadstools on purpose, you had done this on purpose as well, to show off. Never mind. I think Silks thinks you’ve been neutralized for the rest of the year. But you must understand one thing. It is not safe for you to go back to the cave.”
“How about Snowy?” I asked suddenly.
“While you were in a coma, Snowy spent every spare minute of his time right here by your bed, just looking at your face like a puppy. In the last few days he hasn’t been around. We made him promise not to go near the cave. I hope he hasn’t. But he’s not my son. You are. And you’re all I’ve got, Barney.”
I fell asleep.
The next week, while my father was out to dinner, I opened my eyes, and there was Silks himself, standing at the foot of my bed looking like a funeral director. He asked me how I felt. I said, “Fine.” Immediately he said “Fine” to that. And shifting his weight from foot to foot, gruffly offered me a booklet. “You should read that, Pennimen,” he instructed me. In order not to have to talk to him anymore, I began reading right then and there. He edged out of the room muttering about getting me my textbooks and assignments.
The pamphlet was called Safety First! Published by the Department of Agriculture in 1941. It began by telling me that snakes are our friends. We must never kill them. We must never go near them. We must report them if they look strange. We must not pick them up. We must not disturb their young. It showed photographs of a 1941 boy about to put his foot in a dark hole where a snake lurked. “Don’t do this!” the pamphlet shouted. There were pictures of people doing unimaginably stupid things to and with snakes. “Don’t do this!” said the pamphlet each time. One picture had a couple of eight-year-olds prodding a dead snake with a marshmallow fork. “We must not even touch a dead snake because the venom sits there in the glands behind the teeth, still potent, for at least fifty years,” so there! When Silks was safely gone, I flipped the booklet like a Frisbee into the corner and called him an awful name.
When my dad came back that night, he began gently testing my memory of things. I was not so tired anymore. The memory test began simply, but soon it became a talk about old times. I remembered everything in the catalogues, where we’d found our best treasures, where we’d traveled.
“Am I okay?” I asked him.
“I think so, Barney. You will be, anyway, when we get you out of here. I wish you’d spend the rest of the term home. I wish I could go home with you. But if I miss a meeting next month in Stockholm, we’ll go broke for the year. I’ll call every night. Meantime I’ve arranged that you live at the Finneys’ house, not the dorm.”
“That’s okay, Dad. Dad?”
“Yup?”
“You’ve been here a month? With me in the hospital?”
“Of course!”
“Didn’t you have a convention somewhere? A buying trip in Italy?”
“Spain again. I canceled. I’ll go as soon as you’re well. You think I was going to go racing around Toledo and Barcelona with you flat on your back in a coma?”
During spring break, at the end of March, the bandage was taken off my hand. Everyone stood around waiting to see how I would react. The hand looked like a white prune. “You’re lucky it’s the left hand, and you’re lucky it’s only one finger,” said someone for the hundredth time. I was put into physical therapy. I would be allowed to go back to school when the break ended, on April 1. I had lost twenty-one pounds. Everything had come back to my mind except the snakebite itself. I was well, except for the finger, which hurt where there was no finger left.
My father had mothered me the whole time. When I was well enough, he took me out to dinner at local steak houses every night, loading me with chops, lobsters, baked potatoes, and chocolate cream pies.
One night he asked me, a little shiftily, what Snowy and I had been doing in the cave in the first place.
I answered him just as shiftily with a question: “Did the Finneys tell you anything?”
“No,” he said. “They seem to be honoring some promise to Snowy Cobb, although I can’t imagine why. But I know you. You’re not the caving type. Not unless there’s something in the cave beside stalactites. What have you found down there?”
“I can’t tell either, Dad. I made the same promise to Snowy. It’s Snowy’s cave.”
My father munched a piece of pork chop. “Like father like son,” he said, washing it down with a swig of beer. “I’m a treasure hunter, and you are too. You’ve found something. Someday, tell me.”
“It’s a deal, Dad. Someday.”
“Are you going to be able to resist going back to whatever it is that’s down there?”
I placed my little finger joint on the table between us. The skin at the end of the stump was pursed like a pouting mouth. I hoped in time this would get less ugly. “The difference between me and Snowy is that Snowy is an idiot and I’m not. The thought of fifty baby coral snakes or pit vipers or whatever they are down there, hiding in the sand ... wild horses couldn’t drag me. Are you kidding?” I attacked my spareribs.
The night before Dad left, he took an envelope out of his coat pocket and pushed it across the restaurant table to me. It was a letter of acceptance from a prep school in Geneva, Switzerland for the following year.
“But I don’t want to go to school in Switzerland,” I blurted out.
“Barney,”
he said so sadly, “do you want to go to a military academy here?”
“No!”
“Well, then.”
I played with the plastic netting that covered the candle glass between us.
The next afternoon, in the school driveway, my dad hugged me before he left for the airport. “Now, you promise? No more caving?”
“Dad, do you think I’m crazy?”
“Yes,” he said.
“Dad,” I said, “I’ve been having nightmares about snakes and snake-worshipping preachers since I woke up in the hospital.” I buried my face in his shirt front.
Dad stood with his arms around me for ten minutes, roughing up my hair with his hand. He cried quietly. Then he blew his nose, fixed his tie, and said, “The Swiss aren’t that bad, Barney.” He drove away, waving sadly.
It was Saturday. March was almost over. Sunday night the other boys would be corning back from spring break. A long day spread before me. I had missed nearly a month’s work. I had three papers due. I headed for the library.
By noon I’d finished enough note cards on Lincoln’s cabinet to get a fair paper out of it. I had to prepare sketches on Roman architecture and research the uses of uranium in industry.
In the science stacks I passed by the ancient Latin encyclopedia of natural history that Snowy and I had pored over with the little bone in hand. Lazily I fingered the gold-stamped spines. Then I picked out the S volume. S for serpentes.
There were pictures of puff adders, fer-de-lances, and pit vipers. My hands sweated at the sight of them, slithery and deadly, even on the pages of an old book.
For the heck of it I tried reading the Latin text on venom and snakebite cures. It was not as difficult as I’d thought. After all, I’d had two and a half years of Latin. I began to enjoy it. I learned that snakes were milked for their venom and that the venom was injected into horses. The horse-converted serum, which contained antibodies to the venom, was what they’d put in my IV drip. Snake venom was extremely expensive and had to be stored at zero degrees centigrade. “Toxicum post mortem serpentis indefinite permanet.”
I stared at the brightly hand-colored inset of cobras. The leading figure was the Naja naja, king of snakes, supple, risen from its coil with its little tongue peeking out of the cold lips and its hood thrown up like the mantle of a ghoul.
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