One-Hundred-Knuckled Fist

by Dustin M. Hoffman

  We know what’s coming. We keep our heads down. Bending and plucking. Our Hefty bags bulge, but we keep jamming. No time for no more Baby Trudy drop-offs now. Still so many glints around us. Our fingers not fast enough. A damn shame Wilfred’s so dumb. Dropout, spray-can huffer, lanky brain-dead motherfucker. A thirty-bag night fades into a fifteen-bagger.

  But we try, rush for what’s left. Linus splits his finger on a Mello Yello. Bleeding so much he’s dropping cans. We keep going, wait for the bellows of barrel chests, the failed linebackers who now wear navy blue and scurry across the field. They’re reliving that last day of glory, that quarterback sack when they made a shinbone snap. They blitz our way, fingering mace and zappers.

  Worthless Wilfred already hightailed it back to his daddy’s truck. We count down, watch their glowing legs slicing through the bleacher struts. Past the forty, the thirty, twenty-five. Five yards a can, we figure. Maybe ten for Linus and his dripping finger, spouting more now that the blood’s pumping. Past the end zone, and that means they’ll hunt the bleacher shadows, means quitting time for our seam-splitting Hefties.

  We make for the truck. Fast but smooth so we don’t jostle our paychecks too much. One hole and we got an aluminum leak. Linus can’t keep up, so we sling his bags over our shoulders. To the gates, out the fence, and Murray’s got the engine hot in the parking lot. We peel out, and those security boys’ll be left with full mace cans and adrenaline. If only they looked at their feet, saw what we see. We wonder if the cleaners will save those cans or toss them, not worth the time to sort it out. That time of theirs that’s hardly worth nothing. We wonder if everyone forgot that promise Michigan made to us: our trash always worth a dime.

  In Murray’s bed, we grip the rails with one hand, hug our Hefty bags with the other so they won’t fall out. Inside the cab, Murray swats Wilfred backside the head, yelling something. Wilfred takes off his shirt and gets to wiping away that paint. Linus finds Baby Trudy faceup, arms and legs spread securely over our bags. She’s watching the streetlights whip past like falling stars. He’d stroke her dirty, blonde hair, but one hand’s bleeding and the other holds the bags tight.

  Everything a Snake Needs

  We weren’t supposed to touch the snakes at Rizzo’s Reptile Emporium, but I knew Drew was doing it. That was how he earned so many Realm of the Reptiles Bonuses, how he scored Iguana of the Month his first three months in a row. It had nothing to do with his college degree. I’d only graduated high school, but I was smarter. And it wasn’t that Drew was a foot taller than me and half my age. Looks and vitality fade. Customers see through that. Reptile expertise was the key to success at Rizzo’s, and I had ten years’ experience, knew every detail about each product we carried, from the Mojave tank murals to the Ultra-Health Heat Rocks. When he’d started here, I’d thought Drew would be my protégé, someone to take under my wing and mold. I wanted to share everything I had, pass my knowledge like bloodlines. But Drew took the easy way.

  I was talking heat lamps with this fourth-grade teacher, telling her how ceramic was the way to go, would outlast glass, distribute tropical temperatures evenly for her classroom’s pet turtle. She wanted only the best, and that’s what I did. I went to retrieve a lamp from storage, giving a nod to the big sign proclaiming Rizzo’s number one rule: DON’T TOUCH THE SNAKES. Rizzo left us this sign in his absence, gone for a week at the International Repti-Mania Conference, leaving me in charge. Me and the sign.

  When I returned to the showroom, the teacher was gone. I scanned the aisles from the front of the store. The evening sun bled orange through the massive wall of windows, casting my elongated shadow over the golden shimmer of shrink-wrapped boxes and tempered-glass tanks. It was late, and we’d had a slow day, the teacher being only my fifth customer. Once that evening sun struck me, I felt sluggish, ready to slink home, microwave a salisbury steak, and then curl up for a nap.

  I finally found the teacher giggling with Drew behind the turtle-care aisle. I ducked behind a stack of turtle food. I wanted to catch Drew in the act, find out what he was doing to steal my customers and get all those bonuses. Hidden behind bottles of Vitamin C–Enriched Turt-lets, I watched Drew dance in a little circle, swaying his hips, waving his arms, and slapping the leather elbow pads on the blazers he always wore to make himself look smarter than me, professorial. He halted, swung his arms out in a ta-da gesture. The teacher smiled with dimples and wide eyes. From Drew’s right shirtsleeve, one of our adolescent boas poked its head, then slithered around his forearm, flicking its forked pink tongue at his palm.

  I could’ve busted him right there, barged into his show, maybe used one of Rizzo’s snake-handling poles to hook him by the nostril. But I wanted more than just grounds for a write-up. I wanted him gone, so he could make way for new blood.

  The teacher dug through her purse for the five-dollar admittance to go to the basement, where we housed the Realm of the Reptiles exhibit. I hurried ahead of them, down the steps behind the sales counter, where I could hide among the reptiles—the perfect place to strike.

  It wasn’t much of an exhibit. A ramshackle version of the reptile house at the zoo. Ten- and twenty-gallon tanks cluttered the walls, crammed the hallway so that my arms brushed the glass, felt the skittering vibrations of lizards darting away to hide in their plastic shrubbery. I pushed through the hallway. The smell of frying cockroaches and regurgitated mouse scalp hung thick in the basement. I hated being down there, the darkness only broken by the massive fifty-tanker at the end of the hallway, glowing in the main room of the exhibit.

  A secret I revealed to no one: I was terrified of the snakes.

  I was an expert on all manner of reptilian products, but that didn’t mean I wanted to drape a constrictor around my shoulders. Salmonella gathered for orgies on snake skin. Imminent sickness. Slow death. One touch and your skin would be infested.

  Drew’s boots clomped down the wooden stairs behind me, the teacher’s giggles echoing over the hum of the UV lights. I squeezed into the glowing main room. In the main tank, Bertha, our mature black-tailed python, glared at me, her beady eyes sinister under the dark V on her brow. Ten feet of glossy, spotted skin uncoiled slowly. She made me shiver, my muscles contract, convulse. Like waking from a nightmare, where you don’t remember why you’re afraid but you feel it, the cold sweat, the rattling heart. That’s caveman kind of fear, instinctual, evolutionary, necessary. I sucked in my gut, tightened my arms against my sides, and slid into the one good hiding place in the main room, right next to Bertha’s tank.

  Bertha was riled up, having sensed me. She wanted dinner, mice, rats, something exotic, like when Rizzo found baby raccoons in the attic and tossed the screeching infants in the tank. She engulfed those innocent babies, one after the other until they became bulges in Bertha’s skin.

  I felt Bertha’s head smack her side of the glass, striking at the fake panorama of field grass pasted there. I winced each time she struck. My shirt had ridden up in my squirming, and the glass warmed my skin. I imagined her teeth digging into my soft flesh, her speared nose driving into my navel, glossy scales wrapping my intestines.

  When Drew entered Bertha’s room, he started dancing again, humming a slow, high-noted tune. He moved toward Bertha’s tank. I heard the metal scratch of the latch lifted. From my vantage, I couldn’t see what Drew was doing, but I guessed, swallowed dryly. And in a few seconds, Drew waltzed into the center of the dimly lit room with Bertha vining his shoulders. He offered his hand to the teacher. She took it, and the two of them danced with Bertha. Rizzo would have his head. We could go back to the old days when customers were won with expertise instead of good looks and flashy acts.

  Drew leaned toward the teacher. Their lips touched, torsos pressed. The teacher hooked her leg around the back of Drew’s knee. Bertha slithered off his shoulders, plunked onto the stained carpet. She’d done her part and wanted to hunt, seek out the escaped mice that often roamed the basement exhibit. Her tail swished the carpet.

  B
ertha must have smelled my sweat. She twisted toward me, her tongue snatching molecules of hot fear like a child catching snowflakes. I should have jumped out then, put Drew in a half nelson, muscled him to the floor, but I didn’t. Bertha’s eyes hypnotized me. Snake charming in reverse. I stared until her head disappeared into the shadow at my feet, then her body, then the tapping of her nose against the pleat of my slacks.

  The teacher slammed Drew against a wall of chameleon cages, sucked his lower lip. Drew’s fingers slipped beneath her shirt, climbed her belly, and fumbled with a breast. I felt myself growing. I didn’t intend to watch—I was no pervert voyeur—but I needed to keep my mind off Bertha, all ten feet of her, which now wrapped around my leg, up my thigh, and was twisting higher. When I flexed my leg, her body squeezed. I tried to relax. She’d be to my midsection soon, squeeze tighter, strangling liver, then lungs. I wondered if she could fit my body inside her mouth if she really tried. I’d seen her jaws stretch, like when Rizzo finally found and trapped the raccoon mother. He’d tossed her in Bertha’s cage just to see. And Bertha proved how much she could swallow—the burly mother raccoon was no match, just another lump under her skin. Surely I’d be more of a challenge. The weight I’d put on over the years, up to 250 pounds now, was for once a good thing, a defense.

  Drew was lean, tall and skinny. The teacher had to reach her arms high over her head to wrestle the T-shirt off his body. He was hairy. All mammal. My chest and stomach only grew sparse sprigs of hair. I was mostly smooth, naturally so, sleekly so. If only I could talk to Bertha, I could convince her how much better of a meal Drew would make: easier to stretch into her jaws, better meat, worth the hairballs. I couldn’t talk sense into Bertha, though. She was twisting through my legs, flexing over my erection. It had been so long since a woman had touched me. Bertha pulsed, pangs of serpentine pleasure I tried to ignore. Before us, the teacher grinded against Drew, the young college graduate, the handler of snakes, the tall and lean and desirable.

  I couldn’t take it, our paralleling embraces. I stomped onto Bertha’s body. She tightened around my legs, strangling my erection until I thought it would pop. I ground my heel. We both strained, reacting to one another’s struggle, fighting for our lives of lonely comfort, warm light and small cages.

  The teacher went to pull up her shirt, but Drew stopped her. He led her away, probably out to his car or into Rizzo’s office. Their footsteps scurried up the staircase. I grunted, leaned into my heel. Bertha slackened. I burst from the shadows, grabbed her head, and threw it to the floor. She zigzagged, banging into the walls, trying to scale them. I had to touch her, despite Rizzo’s rule, a damn good one. I heaved her over my shoulders, struggling to drop her back into the tank. Under the bright lights, her body slumped, oozed blood from my footprint. There was no helping her, not that I wanted to.

  Bertha had cursed me into having something in common with Drew. We’d both touched the snakes.

  I headed upstairs and found Drew counting the till. He wasn’t with the teacher, who had disappeared. I scanned for any last customers, locked the front doors.

  “Did you see that chick?” Drew said.

  “Where’d she go?”

  “Bought three of our best heat lamps, a crate of turtle chow, and went on her way.” He licked his fingers, shuffled through the bills. “She’s a teacher. What a looker, too. Wish we had about a hundred more customers like her.”

  “Did you give her a Realm of the Reptiles tour?” I pulled the counted till from Drew’s hands, started recounting. It was my job.

  “You know it.” Drew punched my shoulder. I didn’t return the smile spreading stupidly across his face. “In fact, she’s bringing her whole class on Monday. Thirty kids.”

  “How the hell you gonna fit that many people downstairs at once?” I lost count of the till, the green bills blurring. I started over.

  “That’s where you come in. You can tour them around up here, teach them about reptiles and shit, while I give small group tours.”

  “You mean, while you screw around with their teacher?”

  “What?”

  I dropped the till, let it flutter in a messy pile on the counter. “While you touch the snakes?”

  “I don’t touch snakes.” Drew looked up to the ceiling, scratched his chin. “I know Rizzo’s rule.”

  “You don’t know rules. You don’t know reptiles. Just because you touch these snakes, you think you’re king shit.”

  “Look, man,” Drew put his hand on my shoulder, “I don’t touch the snakes.”

  “Bullshit.” I grabbed Drew by his blazer lapels, shook him.

  “Wait. Wait.” Drew squirmed, pushed his palms in my face. I released him, saw the frightened child in his eyes. He was just a kid playing games, didn’t know any better.

  He stumbled away from me. From each pocket of his blazer, he pulled a snake, another from his jeans. He held up his finger for me to wait while he dropped them into an empty tank. He had them everywhere, fearless of their coiling bodies.

  “So, yeah, I touch the snakes. I touch them like you can’t.”

  I wanted to correct him, lecture him about their bacteria-ridden skin. But I didn’t get a chance. Drew cracked his knuckles, crouched into a wrestling stance, circled me. It was something like the dance I’d seen him do for the teacher, his shoulders bobbing, hips swaying. Rhythmic and natural.

  “If violence is all you understand,” Drew said, “so be it.”

  Drew pounced.

  Our fight didn’t last long. Drew was quick, swatted my ears, but I smothered him quickly, put him in a sleeper until he knelt on the tile floor. I didn’t let go until he stopped squirming, until I lay on top of him, my body engulfing his. For a moment, I thought my sleeper hold had actually made him fall asleep. But he spoke.

  “I’ll give you one hundred. Two-thirds split from the teacher’s class.”

  “What about Rizzo’s cut?” I released Drew from the hold but remained on top of him.

  “Rizzo will never know.” He lay still under my belly, acquiesced to my weight. I was finally in control, like Drew with the snakes. “Fuck Rizzo’s cut.”

  “Stop touching the snakes and we have a deal.”

  Drew didn’t say anything. I didn’t release him. Not yet. Not until I was sure he couldn’t steal any more of my customers.

  “I have to touch the snakes for the kids,” Drew said to the floor. “Just this one last time, and then I’ll never touch them again.”

  I leaned into Drew, felt his back tense, resisting my advantage, and then give in. I had him where I wanted him. This was better than catching Drew in the act, reporting him to Rizzo. His fingers would tremble when he passed the snakes in the weeks to come, but he couldn’t touch them. He made a promise.

  Work went smoothly the rest of the weekend. I raked in the sales, and Drew was helpless without his snakes. Every time a pretty girl or a group of kids walked in, he’d dig into his blazer pockets, then hang his head and slump back to the stockroom, where I hoped he was taking long, hard looks at Rizzo’s sign. No one went downstairs, and Rizzo’s was my domain once again, the showroom filled with shiny boxes, where expertise was king, instead of dark hallways cluttered with mystery, the touch of scaly skin and broken rules. That lasted until closing on Sunday, when Drew went to clean and feed the snakes downstairs.

  “Something’s wrong with Bertha.” Drew’s face had turned pale, his forehead creased.

  We both made our way down, and I tried to look surprised when I saw Bertha’s wound, the size of my footprint. It had blackened, and pus seeped from cracks in her skin, which had begun to prematurely shed. I didn’t feel guilt. It was Drew’s fault. He’d touched the snakes.

  “The kids are coming tomorrow, man.” Drew plucked at his leather elbow patches. “They can’t see her like this.”

  “Did you touch Bertha?”

  Drew’s head drooped. He took a deep breath, tried to say something, but only let out a few choked sighs. When he lifted his head
, I saw tears. He was playing the scared kid again. I didn’t trust the tears. Last time, that scared kid pounced.

  “Shit, man. You gotta help me.” Drew put his hands on my shoulders. I could see, with his arms raised, the gaps in his fancy elbow patches. They were frayed, coming loose at the seams, like Bertha’s flaking skin. I could have torn them off with one quick pull.

  “Should we take her to the vet? You’re the expert, man. What do we do?”

  I was the expert, and Drew finally acknowledged that. But I didn’t know anything about reptile emergencies. I knew how to thump a dead snake in the dumpster, and I knew how to feed and care for a live snake, but I didn’t know the in-between, the near death. And I didn’t want to save Bertha or Drew. It was time for me to think about myself, focus on my own survival. So I made a choice. We wouldn’t touch Bertha. We’d wait until morning and see what happened.

  Before we left that night, I smashed and sprinkled some vitamin-enriched snake pellets over a mouse and dropped it in Bertha’s cage. I convinced Drew it would help. He looked hopeful when Bertha budged from her coil, her head following the mouse, tongue flicking. That was enough to get him through the night.

  The next morning, Bertha was dead.

  Drew came to work looking extra sophisticated, not just a blazer and jeans but a baby-blue button-up shirt, a striped satin tie, pleated slacks, and a new blazer. With how professional he looked, I thought he’d take Bertha’s death in stride, philosophize coolly—just another dead snake in a world where so many snakes have passed before, where many more will be born—but he broke down. Not just tears. He whimpered, ran up the stairs, locked himself in the bathroom.

  The teacher was coming in two hours, and she’d see what a fool Drew was, how he was all phony tricks, no expert of anything. That was the real reason he cried. It wasn’t sympathy for Bertha; it was fear of his shed skin, of someone seeing the truth, the naked animal.