He nods and pats his belly.
“I’m not sure I did,” I say. The hair on my forearms has risen again. “I might go back out there and see what I can scrounge up.”
He nods again.
“Sure you don’t want anything?”
Headshakes.
“Okay, see you soon.”
I step out, and press the door closed behind me. My palms are sweaty, my mouth full of a metallic taste. All I hear beyond my racing heartbeat is the feeble roar of air conditioners behind closed doors. Where are all the other hotel guests? In their cars somewhere, out to dinner, I guess. But not here.
My feet bring me to the restaurant. I could do with another beer, a cracker, a leaf of lettuce, anything, whatever I can steal from those assholes. I want them to see it, and I want to see the consequences. I listen to the door, then crack it open. There’s just a server left there, cleaning the tables and putting chairs up. She gives me a Hey, stranger smile and I give one back. There’s still some food left, so I could get some, but since the party bros aren’t there it wouldn’t count as stealing, and stealing is what I want to do. I do grab a beer, though, and start it going down quick. That gets a genuine smile from the server. She might like me.
She’s way too young, though, so I leave the restaurant and lean against the door, drinking my beer and listening to the nothing happening all around me. Male murmurs in the distance, the sigh of the steam ticking on and ticking off, the constant hum of the pool pump. An old lady in a bathrobe shuffles down the hallway. I nod and smile at her, she nods and smiles at me. Think she’s the same one who was doing laps in the pool.
I wish I had a cigarette. But I don’t smoke anymore unless it’s at a party. This is not a party.
The question that got me was geography. I wasn’t stuck in the moment; I wouldn’t have gotten it even from the comfort of my living room. I wasn’t meant to be more than a third-place contestant on Guess It Now.
The Amazon River passes through Peru before entering Brazil.
How hard is life going to be for my son?
A roaring janitor passes me, his industrial vac advancing and retreating, advancing and retreating. He dips into the pool room, keys jangling. He comes out a few minutes later, closes the door, and flips a sign on a chain.
The vac roars back to life, then fades as the janitor passes around a corner and out of view.
My fingers flick over my phantom cigarette. Alone again.
Until I’m not. Voices approach from down the hall, voices I recognize.
I don’t hide, but I do go still.
The bros, only two of them now, orange bro and pink bro, lurch along the hallway, coming from the same direction where the janitor disappeared. Pink has his arm around orange’s shoulders, and the pressure of his heavy limb makes orange trip as much as he walks. They’re staying upright, but only just.
My fingers drop the phantom cigarette and make a fist instead.
The bros go right up to the glass door to the pool area, peer in. They totally ignore the Closed sign and push through.
Their voices fall away beneath the hum of the pool pump. I’m alone in the hall. It’s as if the bros were never here, as if they dropped into the water and were sucked away.
I stand there for a moment, resisting the urge to check my phone, just wondering about people being here, people being gone.
I step toward the pool entrance.
I’m totally silent, not from any special source of elegance, but because the carpet is so plush and so thick. I reach the door and peer in.
In soft focus through the blurring glass, the bros are doing midnight laps, laughing and splashing as they kick against either side. Their polo shirts stick to their torsos, and as they pull themselves out of the pool their shorts cling. Would my son enjoy the sight of this? The bros probably wouldn’t want to be seen by my son, and tonight that matters.
The lights are out, but the streetlight silhouettes the bros as they jostle and push, as they scamper along the edge of the pool, frantic and agile, like little boys at a sleepover.
They head toward the door, toward me. I tense, ready for a confrontation. My fist on a jaw might just be the answer I need, the thing that will clear this murky unease.
The bros turn before they’re at the exit, though, and head into the steam room. I hear the crank of the knob, the clink of the heater, the whoosh of the steam.
I walk toward the entrance to the pool area and lay my hand on the doorknob. I push it, and head into the chill, chlorine-tanged air.
The bros are mere smudges of pink and orange behind the small fogged window of the steam room. If they looked toward the window, I think they might see me, but I’m also sure that they won’t. I can hear the barks of their drunken laughter.
Darren’s waiting for me back at the room. I can almost imagine him here next to me, the stew of desire and self-consciousness he would be feeling.
I place my hand on the looping handles of the steam room’s double doors, consider opening them, enjoying the shock of the bros as I confront them, as I lay into them with my fists until they turn the tide on me.
How would I explain the blood and black eyes to Darren?
Instead I look to the pool, to its painted scenes of meadows and vases, and finally to the bug net lying along the tiled wall. I pick up the net, test its metal pole between my hands. Hollow, but strong.
The pole passes right through the handle loops, holds there at an angle, one end pitched into the wall.
Unaware that they’re trapped, the pink and orange smudges continue their jostling and laughter. Drunk as they are, the bros will probably stay too long before they try to leave. Before they find that they can’t leave.
I want to see it happen, want to see their shock at their sudden powerlessness. But I also want to get out of there, get back to Darren, watch whatever horrible show he’s found on the room’s greasy TV, lie there in quiet in our shared space.
I give the steam room door a kick.
The bros go silent, and the smudges near, resolve into shirts below red faces. Voices shout, but I can’t make out the words. I back up, in a horrible kind of awe at what I’ve done, what I’m doing.
I head to the exit, give one last look at the steam room door, at the narrow rectangle of the window. Pale arms beat at it, like wings.
THE BITE
by Colette Bancroft
Rattlesnake
These days it has some sunny upscale name focus-grouped by developers, but when I was a kid there the neighborhood was called Rattlesnake.
Back in the 1930s, some guy opened a rattlesnake canning plant in Tampa, off Westshore Boulevard near the Gandy Bridge. The suburbs hadn’t sprouted there yet; the land stretching south toward Port Tampa was a couple of miles of pine and palmetto scrub with a hem of mangroves along Tampa Bay, perfect habitat for the plant’s product. Locals caught the snakes by the bagful, pygmy rattlers and big diamondbacks, and sold them to the plant to be skinned and cooked. Around the South roadside gift shops sold the cans, labeled with an illustration of a coiled snake with its fangs bared over the slogan Tastes like chicken! It doesn’t.
By the 1960s, when my family moved to Rattlesnake, the east side of Westshore was lined with streets of neat, new little two- and three-bedroom houses with carports. We were civilians, but lots of our neighbors were military families. MacDill Air Force Base was so close that the howl of fighter jets taking off for training runs was as ordinary as birdsong.
Our next-door neighbors were the Mendozas. He was a staff sergeant in the military police on base, and she was a nurse at the base hospital. They had two little girls, Julieta and Luisa, and sometimes in the afternoon when their shifts overlapped I’d babysit the kids.
Sergeant Mendoza would come home in the evening, unstrap his holster, and set it on the kitchen counter, gun and all. He’d point at his two little daughters and whatever other kids might be around and say, “Don’t touch that,” then make a little clicking noise.
<
br /> The summer I was twelve, a new family moved into the house across the street. The tenants were a woman and three girls, the oldest about my age, the youngest a toddler. The woman seemed older than my stylish mother, who went off to her job at a downtown bank every day in a smart suit, every hair in her blond chignon in place. The new lady was so skinny and pale she looked like her own ghost, and she never wore anything but faded housedresses (a wardrobe item my mother disdained).
The carport across the street was usually empty, but once or twice a week I’d see a gorgeous 1955 Thunderbird parked there, with gleaming deep burgundy paint and a white convertible hardtop with porthole windows. My dad ran an auto paint and body business, so I knew cars, and I knew a ten-year-old car that looked that cherry was pampered like a princess.
I also knew it was a two-seater, which seemed odd for a family’s only car.
I met the oldest girl when I walked out of the Mendozas’ house one afternoon. She was standing across the street on the sidewalk in front of her house, hands on her narrow hips.
“The colonel would have a fit if he saw us near those greasers,” she said to me.
I wondered what that meant, but she went right on: “I’m Brenda Howard. That’s my sister Nancy.” She tipped her head toward the carport, where the middle sister stood. Brenda had her mother’s sandy hair and angular face, but her brash attitude was her own. Nancy was softer, rounder, blonder, and gazed off to the side of me like she couldn’t quite look at me directly.
As soon as I introduced myself, Brenda invited me in to watch TV. My parents wouldn’t be home for a bit, so I followed the sisters through their front door.
The neighborhood was made up of typical Florida suburban houses, concrete block with terrazzo floors and a picture window in the living room. Ours was cozy, with my mom’s pride-and-joy Scandinavian modern furniture in the living room and, in my bedroom, a pink-and-white chenille bedspread with the figure of a ballerina (although I was the least balletic of girls).
The Howards’ house looked like they were camping. In the living room were one big corduroy recliner, an old black-and-white TV, and three folding chairs that did double duty at the scuffed dining table. Mrs. Howard was sitting there in one of them, playing solitaire. Her eyes widened when she saw me, but she said hello warmly in a twangy voice, not quite Southern.
“That’s our mama, Mrs. Howard,” Brenda said, and led me off on a tour of the house, which didn’t take but a minute. Mrs. Howard’s room had a double bed; in the other bedroom, Brenda and Nancy and the third sister, Susie, slept on a mattress on the floor, where the toddler was currently immersed in a sweaty nap. Old sheets were tacked over the windows.
Mrs. Howard went out to hang laundry on the clothesline as we sprawled in front of the TV. Talking over the dialogue of some old Western, Brenda said she and her sister had been born near Tinker Air Force Base in Oklahoma City, where their father was posted. “Me and Nancy’s dad died and Mama got a job keeping house for the colonel.”
“Our daddy was in a car crash,” Nancy said, her eyes filling with tears.
Brenda’s eyes rolled. “He was a drunk,” she said, closing that subject. “At Tinker the colonel had a nice big house and we all moved in. So him and Mama got married.”
For just a second, I thought Nancy looked surprised. “Then Susie was born,” Brenda continued, “and then a couple months ago the colonel got posted here. He’s in temporary base housing until they have a big enough house for all of us.”
“How come he doesn’t just live here?”
“He has to be available for duty at all times,” Brenda said. “Military officers have very demanding schedules.”
That wasn’t what I’d heard eavesdropping on enlisted men while they were drinking beer at block parties, but I let it go. “Where’s your car?”
“The colonel drives the car. Mama doesn’t drive. If she has to go somewhere, he drives her. But she never goes nowhere.”
* * *
That night at dinner, I gave my parents a reconnaissance report. “She says the colonel—”
“He’s a lieutenant colonel,” my dad cut in. In our neighborhood everyone knew everyone’s rank. I wasn’t sure my dad had even laid eyes on him yet, but that didn’t matter.
“Well, she calls him the colonel.”
“Well, he’s not. But what does she say about him?”
“She says he lives on base and they’re just staying here until they get bigger base housing. He’s their stepfather. Except the baby, he’s her father.”
“Mm-hm,” my father said. “He’s got a sweet car, but how does he get all those kids in there?”
“It’s ridiculous,” my mother said crisply. I couldn’t imagine her giving up her new pearly white Mustang and waiting around for my dad to drive her places, although she did drive his Plymouth station wagon to the grocery store. “Now hush up and eat your pork chop.”
* * *
A couple of days later, Brenda came over to invite me to dinner at her house the next night. “The colonel will be here,” she said, kind of like he was the Beatles or something. She told me to come over at six sharp.
At about five, I heard the T-bird’s engine. The colonel climbed out as all three girls swarmed him on the carport, then they carried a bunch of grocery bags into the kitchen. It was the first glimpse I’d had of him. He was tall and rangy, with a tight brush cut that could have been blond or gray, and a khaki uniform so well starched it could have stood up on its own.
I reported at six. Brenda introduced me with a stream of chatter, which he interrupted. “Good to meet you,” he said. He smiled, a handsome smile, but his eyes made me feel like I was on inspection.
I could smell steak grilling deliciously in a cast-iron pan, but it turned out to be the colonel’s dinner. Mrs. Howard served her daughters and me beanie weenies on paper plates.
Susie was perched in a high chair, while the colonel, Brenda, and I occupied the three chairs at the table. Nancy sat cross-legged on the floor by the TV, and Mrs. Howard, her hands empty, started to sit in the recliner.
“Aren’t you going to have dinner, Mama?” the colonel said sharply. “Brenda can sit on the floor.”
Mrs. Howard jumped up halfway through her sit. “Oh, no, sir. I’m not hungry.”
He chewed vigorously for a moment, then smiled. “Well then, Mama, you can sing for us.”
“Oh, no,” she murmured.
“Sing for us,” he said. It sounded like an order.
She clasped her hands behind her back and closed her eyes.
Pack up all my cares and woes,
Here I go, singing low,
Bye bye, blackbird.
She had a thrillingly beautiful voice, so lovely it seemed unlikely coming from someone so washed out.
Where somebody waits for me,
Sugar’s sweet, so is he,
Bye bye, blackbird.
It’s a sad song anyway, though she sang it sadder than anyone. The colonel was happily sawing off big bites of his steak, but I couldn’t swallow, felt like I might never swallow again. Just as I began to fear I’d burst into tears, the baby did.
Mrs. Howard didn’t finish the song. She scooped up Susie and carried her off to wash the tears and bean juice off her.
“May we be excused?” Brenda asked the colonel a few minutes later.
“Yes,” he said, “for cleanup duty.”
As we stepped into the kitchen, I started to flick my paper plate at the trash can. Brenda snatched my wrist. “We don’t waste,” she said sternly. “You can use them more than once.” I watched as she carefully scrubbed the paper plates and Nancy gingerly dried them, and the colonel worked his way through the rest of that big steak.
When I left a little while later he smiled at me, warmly this time, and put his hand on my shoulder. “Thank you for coming. I hope we see you again.”
* * *
I reported the paper-plate business to my parents, of course. They just rolled their eyes in
unison. “We can’t even get this one to wash a real plate,” my dad said.
The Thunderbird was gone by morning, and I didn’t see it for a few days. One afternoon Brenda and Nancy and I walked to the nearby playground, but the sweltering Florida heat soon sent us back.
At the Howards’ house, Brenda said, “Mama, can we take a nap in your bed? You have a fan.” Almost no one had AC then, so a fan was heaven. We stretched out under its cool stream of air. I fell instantly asleep but sometime later was pulled partway from dreams by the sound of the Thunderbird’s engine.
I had started to sink back into sleep when I felt a hand. I lay on my side, my back to the door of the room, and the hand slipped between my legs from behind.
The hand slid inside my shorts and underwear like it knew where it was going. It curved where I curved. A fingertip moved as if searching for something, a side-to-side tremor like a snake scenting prey.
I rolled and jerked up against the headboard to a sitting position. No one else was in the bed. The colonel kneeled next to it, looking at me calmly, his left hand resting where my hip had been.
“I’m sorry,” he said. “I thought you were Brenda.” He smiled, rose, and walked out.
I felt frozen. I don’t know how long it took me to stand up and walk out of the room, but when I did there was no one in the house.
* * *
I didn’t see the Howard girls for a few days. I could tell they were home, but they didn’t come looking for me, and I didn’t feel like knocking on their door, even though I had just about convinced myself I’d dreamed the whole episode.
The rattlesnake canning plant that gave the neighborhood its name was long gone, but the snakes were still around. They had adapted to suburban life, staying mostly invisible but occasionally slithering through a yard or being discovered under a pile of boxes on someone’s carport.
My mother had a reputation as the neighborhood snake killer, having learned her technique from her father, who grew up on a farm in Slovakia where he sometimes dispatched adders. Armed with a shovel, my mother had coolly chopped the heads off more rattlers—and copperheads and water moccasins—than I could count.
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