by Lydia Peelle
Last seen in 1942, long before worry about endangered species
Probably extinct
As the city of Las Vegas grew
groundwater pumped out,
springs capped
hope for Rana fisheri was filled in with cement
Discovery of a remnant population
would be a herpetological event
Deficiency
The herpetologist needs my help. I wouldn’t ask, he says on the phone, except that no one else is here. A snake has just been brought in, a confiscated reticulated python that someone has been keeping as a pet. When I arrive, the herpetologist is standing in front of its tank, dwarfed by it. I’m afraid it must be destroyed, he tells me sadly. It has an irreversible and degenerative vitamin deficiency, resulting from an inadequate diet. Nothing can be done. I watch it slowly map the terrain of its tank, staggered with disbelief that someone would keep such a massive, commanding thing in the house and not take pains to see that it has everything it needs. Ready to shed, too, the herpetologist says, pointing to its milk-white eyes. Dull all over. Would be brilliant in a week or two. I’ve seen them tie themselves in knots in an effort to shed the old skin. What a shame, I say, and feel a shiver of grief as the loss suddenly multiplies—the snake, and the newness the snake won’t have the chance to inhabit. People, the herpetologist sighs. I help him hold the snake as he makes the injection, and in my hands I feel a change in the taut muscles, the exact moment that life leaves them. We hold vigil over the enormous body. The herpetologist looks stricken, drawn and old. I don’t know, he says over and over. I just don’t know. I shove my hands in my pockets, wishing I could give him something. We stand there together for a long time, bewildered as two night travelers with a map they can’t make out in the dark.
Bloom
All night, I lie awake in the light of the bedside lamp, studying my hands. What was it, exactly, that I felt pass out of the snake? The one thing I know for certain: I’ve witnessed a slight parting of the curtain that hangs over the unknown. By morning I feel a bloom of gratitude for this, which I wear, a bright badge, pinned to my chest for days.
Heralds of Spring
I leave my apartment at five to help the herpetologist with his morning feedings. So this is what it feels like, I think, to be out at dawn, meeting the world head on. Salt trucks are rumbling by, preparing the icy streets for the coming day. The sky is a color I’ve never seen before. It is as if a corner of the city’s gray overcoat has blown back to reveal an orange satin lining. We drink Postum out of Styrofoam cups. He apologizes that there is no real coffee. I tell him I don’t drink it anymore, a last attempt to reclaim sleep. Good girl, he says, good girl. He pulls a record off the bookshelf and puts it on the turntable. Through the scratchiness I hear a high-pitched, insistent whistle, like crickets, only the notes are rounder, wetter, like water dropping from a leaf into a pond. The dawn song of the peeper, he says, the herald of spring. He beams. I don’t think spring is ever coming, I say. Nonsense, he says. And in a week or so, the students will come back. I must say, as much as I enjoy the quiet, it does get lonely around here when they’re gone. The students! The fact of them has never occurred to me. Now I see their bright, eager faces, I see them shaking snow off their boots and talking excitedly, listening raptly to the herpetologist in a lecture room, notebooks open, carrying him away in a wave down the hall. The record switches to the call of a bullfrog, mournful. I have the sudden urge to reach behind me and lock the door.
Secret
I want you to see something, the herpetologist says. A secret. He leads me to a door at the back of the lab that I haven’t noticed before. He selects a large key from his ring and unlocks it. We step into a tiny antechamber, and when he closes the door behind us, we stand together for a moment in the utter darkness. Then I hear the click of a key in another lock, and we step through to another room, even darker than the first. He switches on a dim red light. As my eyes adjust I see a chest-high tank of water in the center of the room. We step to its edge. In the red light I can just make out something swimming around in the water, tiny ghost creatures with red ruffs of gills. The Georgia blind salamander, he whispers. It exists only in the deep wells and subterranean waters of one particular farm in southeast Georgia. You’re maybe the tenth person in the world to see one alive. The salamanders seem to give off a light of their own, dark eye buds showing through the clear skin of their faces, their red gills waving like feathers as they weave through the water. For a heartbeat I forget myself completely. Then I catch my breath and say, They don’t even know we’re here. The herpetologist moves closer. I slip my hand in his. I think I love you, I say. He shakes his head firmly, as if it’s the wrong answer to a question. No, you don’t.
A Herpetological Event
I stay late at work, in no state to face my dark apartment, overcome by a new sort of loneliness, one that seems as if it will outlive me. By the time I get on the bus, late in the evening, it is hushed and mostly empty, and I collapse into a seat near the back. As we rattle down the street I close my eyes and think of the blind salamanders, down there in their well in Georgia, far from the city, far from me. When I open my eyes I have long since missed my stop. I sit up in a panic, recognizing nothing outside. But then, as the bus voyages through unfamiliar streets, the salamanders come back like a dream. The darkness deep in the earth where they’ve been all along. Arcing, looping, somersaulting through the water, somehow finding one another in the dark. Without any thought, care, or need for me. And for a instant, just before the bus turns on its loop, I catch a glimpse of the infinite. There I am inside of it, for one suspended moment—tiny, inconsequential, and utterly free.
Dawn Song
Late in the night a storm settles on the city, throwing snow against the windows and rattling them in their frames. My husband calls to tell me his power has gone out and asks if he can come over. Just this one night, he says. I don’t have anywhere else to go. I sit at the kitchen table waiting for him, listening to the silence of the streets, the weather too bad for even the plows to be out. Things are so still that I am startled to look down and see the collar of my robe is quivering steadily with my pulse. He comes in with a red wind-burned face and cold clinging to his clothes. We sit side by side at the table, no words left for one another. Soon my power goes out as well and there is nothing for us to do but get into bed and huddle beneath the blankets, press tight together to conserve warmth. We make love, a matter of survival, our bodies desperate to generate heat. My heart pounds against his chest with the insistence of self-preservation, tenacious and bright. It is still beating hard, determined, by the time he has fallen asleep. I sit up and try to make out his sleeping face in the dark, left with the unshakable feeling that there is a stranger in my bed. Sometime before dawn I get up in the cold room to look out the window. The snow is slackening, but down the block, all the street lights are still off. In the darkness, the shine of the deep, white drifts is the only thing I can make out. It seems to conceal a great mystery, the snow. I stand there watching, struck by the possibility of what might be hidden beneath. I watch for as long as I can stand the cold, knowing that by morning the trucks will have come to clear it all away.
This Is Not a Love Story
It is a reckless venture, motherhood. I know you can’t hang on to them forever, but it’s downright crazy when you think about it: you take such good care of them—you trim their tiny fingernails so carefully when they are babies, you make sure they drink their milk and eat their vegetables and look both ways before crossing, you minister to every scrape and bruise, and then they turn eighteen—that’s it—you just turn them out into the wilderness.
My daughter left home for college last week. I am still peering in the doorway of her room when I go by, thinking I will see her, cross-legged on the bed. The dog waits for her on the front porch all afternoon. An unnatural silence hangs over the house in the evening. Last night at dinner, my husband looked up at me and said, “So what
do you plan to do with yourself, now that you have all this time?”
Time. When I was young, I thought I had all the time in the world. Time to waste. Time to make mistakes. It never crossed my mind that I might wake up one morning and it would be gone, just like that.
When she was packing, my daughter found a box of black-and-white photographs down in the basement. I hadn’t seen them since before she was born. When she brought the box upstairs and spread them out on the kitchen table—my God—it was like she had dredged up a body, a missing life. Case long since closed.
What could I do? I told her the story. There it was, after all, laid out on the table: my one spectacularly wrong turn.
At the age of twenty-two, I somehow got it in my head that I would be a photographer. The next Stieglitz or Evans or Arbus. I do not have a creative bone in my body, but it was the artist’s life I was drawn to, or what I thought an artist’s life was about—beauty, spontaneity, freedom—everything my parents’ life lacked. I came up with a plan to move to the South, where I had never been and which seemed so mysterious: raw and dangerous and full of relics of a long-gone era. This mystery, I truly believed, would more than make up for my lack of talent, because any photograph I took could not help but capture it.
If only someone had given it to me straight. If only someone had been kind enough to discourage me. My parents just threw up their hands and vowed not to give me a penny. But who needed money? I had higher pursuits. I packed up my car and drove until I got to Georgia, to a little town where, in 1984, they still had dirt roads and a crossroads jailhouse and a general store where old men sat around a checkerboard on a whiskey barrel, and down a dark hallway there were two bathrooms still marked with the faint, chilling outline of the words WHITE and COLORED.
I should have known right away that I was in over my head—should have got back in the car and driven straight home to Connecticut. Instead I rented a place, made a darkroom out of the closet, and got a job waiting tables at a dingy restaurant by a lake. The lake was one of those fake lakes they’ve got down there, where sometime in the 1940s the government built a dam on a river and flooded a whole town. You would never know it, to look at it. I assumed the lake was just like the lakes we have here in the north, formed perfectly naturally by the slow scrape of glaciers. But nothing was what it seemed to be, in Georgia. Nothing was what it seemed, nothing was permanent, and so much was concealed—a town under water, a rattlesnake den under a boulder—hazards that a girl like me wouldn’t even know to look for.
Tommy came in to the restaurant all the time, but at first I did not notice him. He was twice my age, with a beard and a beer paunch, a leathery tan and mirrored sunglasses, just like all the other customers who came in for catfish and hush puppies or chicken-fried steak, all those dreadful things they served at that place, after a day of fishing on the lake. But Tommy wasn’t a fisherman—he hated to see an animal suffer, any animal—and one day, I went to clear his table and found the tip he had left me: five one-dollar bills, folded to look like a tiny bouquet of roses. I was charmed.
Tommy, I would learn soon enough, was famous for tricks like that. Useless tricks, party tricks. He could strike a match on his front teeth and get the cap off a beer bottle in half a dozen different ways. He could speak Pig Latin and fold a napkin to look like a dancing chicken and eat fire if he was drunk enough. He could play a guitar behind his back. The kind of skills some men spend their twenties perfecting, but promptly lose to lack of practice when they get real jobs and families. Not Tommy. Tommy hadn’t held down a real job in decades, and as for a family, though he’d been married once, briefly, when he was young, he had not had anyone steady in his life since. This should have been enough of a warning. Forty-five and still living life like he was eighteen.
He was staying on a houseboat docked at the marina—that should have been the next red light. The boat wasn’t even his—it belonged to a friend who let Tommy crash out there when he was low on money, and he’d been there for over a year. There was Astroturf on the deck, and below there was a galley kitchen, a tiny cave of a bedroom, mold along the edges of the carpet, and beach chairs for furniture. A leaky fuel line made the living quarters dizzying with fumes. But the first night I went out there and we motored out to the middle of the lake to watch the moon rise, in silence save for the lapping of the water, the crickets on the far shore, and the ice popping and melting in our drinks, I looked up at the stars and curled my toes in my sandals and thought, My God, why would anyone want to live on land? I thought I had found it, the life I was looking for.
I remember the parties best. Oh, my, those were some parties. You would wake up in the morning and figure the earth had to have shifted on its axis. It is a wonder no one ever drowned, or burned their hands off—the fireworks! Every night like the Fourth of July. Roman candles lined up along the rail. When they sailed off hissing into the water, Tommy would smile contentedly and watch them like they held messages to be delivered to another world.
It was a real cast of characters at those parties—grizzled old bikers, Southern belles with big hair who drank like fish and cussed like sailors, a revolving pack of skinny teenage boys whose tan bodies are forever imprinted on my mind at the moment they would dive off the back, one after another, like a chorus line. How did Tommy assemble such a crew? Some of them were old friends or, like the bikers, had worked with Tommy on an odd job somewhere, but many he would have just met a day or two before: the sons and daughters of vacationing families from Atlanta whom he befriended at the gas station or the general store. And then there was me. I must have looked to all of them exactly like what I was: a wide-eyed Yankee college girl, clutching a camera to her chest, too shocked and shy to take pictures. You have got to be bolder, you know, to be behind a camera than to be in front of one.
And Tommy—Tommy would be in the middle of it all, holding court in an open Hawaiian shirt and train engineer’s cap, a beer in each hand, putting them down only to light another firework or slide another tape in the stereo. You name it, he played it, and played it loud: that music must have carried over the water all the way down to Florida.
Then right in the middle of a song—he had the attention span of a four-year-old—all of a sudden he would snap off the stereo and pick up his fiddle. He could play any instrument that was handed to him, and play it beautifully—make you want to weep it was so beautiful, especially after what you’d been listening to all night. Old hymns, folk songs that he learned from his grandfather, who was, he’d never let you forget, the grandson of a Confederate captain. Even the titles made me teary. “There Will Be Peace in the Valley.” “Come All Ye Fair and Tender Ladies.” There was one—“Drunken Hiccups”—I must have heard him play that one a hundred times, but I never did know how it ended. He would pluck the fiddle strings to make it hiccup, and exaggerate his drawl. Everyone would sing along:
If the river was whiskey and I was a duck
I’d dive to the bottom and drink my way up
But the river ain’t whiskey and I ain’t a duck—
They never got to the last line, because one of his buddies would stop there and shout, “It ain’t a river, Tommy! It’s a goddamn lake!” And another would jab a beer can in the air and yell back gleefully, “And it ain’t whiskey! It’s beer! It’s cheap-ass beer!” And one of the boys would do a double gainer off the back, and Tommy would lean back in his lawn chair, pull me close with the bow, laugh, and kiss me. Oh, he was a charmer, that Tommy. And I fell for every last bit of it.
When people talk about the South being haunted, it’s true. But it’s not the places that are haunted, it’s the people. They are trapped by all the stories of the past, wandering a long hallway lined with locked doors, knocking and knocking, with no one ever answering. No one ever will. That’s the thing about the past. The closest you can get to it is stories, and stories don’t even come close.
Everyone talked about the town at the bottom of the lake as if it was only yesterday they had been
doing their grocery shopping there. Tommy could stand there all night, drinking beer and reminiscing. He was only a little boy when they built the dam, but he seemed to remember everything: the oak tree with a cannon ball from a Civil War skirmish still wedged in its trunk, the houses, the library, the hardware store. I would squint at the water and try to picture it—I never could.
The truth was that town was dead, all those old trees were dead, and the people were dead or had moved to Valdosta forty years before. All that was left was that big fake lake, with its choppy shoreline and muddy stink, the water skiers and mosquitoes big as hummingbirds, and the restaurant where I made terrible tips and the marina with numbered slips for thirty-five boats, and Tommy and me wrapped in each other’s arms in slip number thirty-three, once the party had finally folded and everyone else had gone home.
Tommy gave me a dog that summer, a little black-and-white mutt he found abandoned in the marina parking lot and befriended with hot dogs and tuna fish. He really did want me to have it, but that dog was never mine. Never even gave me the time of day, but I didn’t mind. It was something else, to watch that dog with Tommy. It was absolutely devoted to him, just glued to his hip. He taught it to shake and speak and dive with him off the side of the boat. They would both scramble up on deck, dripping wet and panting, great big grins on their faces, while I sat in the lawn chair and applauded. At night, the dog slept under the bed, as close to Tommy as we would allow. To use an expression of Tommy’s, that dog thought he had hung the moon.
But every once in a while, something would come over that dog. Something would come over it, and it would not let Tommy near. It would be lying there, perfectly at peace, sound asleep in the sun on the top deck, and then Tommy would come up the ladder and it would leap to its feet, hack-les raised, baring its teeth and growling like a hell-hound. Send him crawling right back down the ladder. Poor Tommy. That just tore him up. He couldn’t understand. “That dog’s just crazy,” I would tell him, trying my best to comfort him. “Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. Don’t pay any attention to it.”