Tales from a Free-Range Childhood

by Donald Davis

  Being sixteen years old, within about fifteen minutes, I forgot all about the snake.

  About two days later, it was time for us to go for a visit to see if my grandparents were dead. On this day, Mama was going, I was going, my brother, Joe, was going. Daddy thought up something he had to do. He often did that these days.

  We headed out early in the morning. Grandmother made Rooster Pies. We visited and finally stayed on through the midday meal. About two in the afternoon, it was determined to be time to go home. We told Grandmother and Granddaddy goodbye like we would never see them again and promised to be back before a week had passed.

  Mama was driving on the way home. I was riding beside her in the front seat. Joe was in the backseat where little brothers belonged. We were about halfway home on the sixteen-mile trip when it happened. We had reached a part of the road everyone called “the Narrows,” a section of the old road that curved back and forth high above the Pigeon River. Mama was carefully driving through these curves when, all of a sudden, I saw the snake.

  On the Plymouth, the defroster came out through vents that ran all the way along the base of the windshield. Right in front of me, at the right-hand end of the defroster vents, up popped the snake. Its little head came up first, looking around, with its tongue feeling the air. There you are! I said silently to myself, wondering where the little creature had been for the past two days.

  I quietly watched as the little snake kept coming up out of the vent. It was traveling along the base of the windshield from right to left, right along the track toward my mama. I kept wondering how snakes move the way they do, almost flowing along with no legs at all. I watched, just like the snake and I had a secret between us, as the little fellow glided along the base of the windshield until its little tail popped out of the vent in front of me. This meant that its head was directly in front of Mama.

  My mother was a very nervous driver. Her vision was focused about thirty yards down the road in front of us. Between her eyes and her focal point on the road, she saw nothing. I began to fear that she was going to miss the snake. I was afraid that it would go all the way across the car and disappear down into the defroster vent on the other side and she would never get to see it. I did not want to be the one to point it out to her. . . . No, I just did not want her to miss the experience.

  At about that time, we started around the last big curve on this part of the road. Just as we were entering the curve, it started to sprinkle rain. To be sure that she was safe, Mama reached down and turned on the windshield wipers.

  Later on, I tried to figure out exactly what happened next. It occurred to me that humans have very large brains, and that, with those large brains, humans would easily realize that between the little blacksnake and the windshield wiper there was a solid tempered-glass windshield. But snakes have very small brains, and this was a very small snake. It did not know this.

  The moment the wiper went Swoorp! across the windshield, the little snake emitted an amazing Hssss! and drew back as if to strike at the offending wiper. When it drew back, the back of its head almost smacked Mama right in the mouth! She screamed, her arms went straight and stiff, still holding the steering wheel, and it did not matter where the road went because we were not going there!

  The Plymouth accelerated in a straight line right off the side of the road and stood on its nose in the ditch. By the time it had stopped, Mama had grabbed the door handle, flung open the door, and abandoned her children! She cleared the centerline in the road in the first leap and Albert McCracken’s pasture fence with the next. She was running away from the snake.

  And she had totally lost her punctuation! “Run run there’s a snake there’s a snake run get out of the car run run!”

  At about this time, my little brother, Joe, had gathered himself up out of the floorboard of the backseat and pulled himself up over the back of the front seat. He was looking at me and asking over and over again, “What’s happening? What’s happening?” I pointed, and he watched as the little snake finished its trip across the dashboard, dropped out the open door, and happily started its way back home.

  Gradually, she got herself under control and started back toward the car. I supposed that her intention was to at least try to save us. She said without pause, “Get out of the car get out now run listen to me run!”

  She was coming across the road now. When she was about an arm’s length from the car, I made a terrible mistake: I laughed at her.

  She flushed red and pulled a loaded finger on me! With her finger almost in my face, I heard not unfamiliar words: “Something is going to get you, something is going to get you!”

  When we were finally pulled out of the ditch and got safely home, I discovered that “something” had a name. It was called “my daddy.”

  The ride home had been marked by deep silence. The remainder of the afternoon at home was dominated by the same loud silence. Finally, I heard Daddy’s car come in the driveway and knew that something was surely about to happen now. When he came in the kitchen door, Mama looked straight at him and silently jerked her head toward their bedroom. His face dropped all expression as he followed.

  As soon as they were behind the closed door, there came from there sounds like wild animals scrapping. There was a high-pitched, “Blooerooeringhoo . . . ghlibberooniner . . . blob-berkingoolero . . .” It went on and on, only occasionally interrupted by a low-pitched, “Whaaeerr? Noerooww? ” With not a single understandable word, the meaning of these sounds was totally and absolutely clear: there would not be a happy ending to this day!

  Finally, Daddy emerged from the closed room. He looked at me and in a low voice said, “Let’s go into your room!”

  He led the way so quickly that I had to move fast to keep up with him. We barely made it into my bedroom and got the door closed when he fell on the floor laughing his head off! All he could do was to moan, over and over again, “I wish I had been there! I wish I had been there!”

  After he had worn himself out laughing, he looked at me and said, “There is one little problem: I am married to her. And she made me promise that I would punish you for everything that happened today and everything she imagines led up to it, whatever that was.” He went on, “But I think I might have a deal for you. Give me your new driver’s license.”

  “No!” I moaned. “Not that. I just got it. It’s still early in the summer. Please don’t take my driver’s license away while school is out for summer vacation.”

  “Don’t worry so much,” he offered. “I thought about what I was doing. Just listen. I told your mama that I would take your new driver’s license away from you one day for every inch long the snake was. But you get to tell me—how long was it?”

  Since I had traded my brain for the driver’s license to begin with, I did not have usable access to it at this moment. I thought, however, that I did. I chuckled at the idea that offered itself. “I can’t tell you how long it was. It was so little I can only tell you how short it was. That little snake was so short, it was impossible to measure. If you could measure it, it would probably have negative length. It was so little maybe it wasn’t even a snake. Maybe it was just a shadow on the windshield. It had no length. I cannot tell you how long it was!”

  Daddy got an expression on his face that was somehow a frown and a grin at the same time. “That is truly too bad,” he started. “Your mama said that I should ask you first, but if you did not know how long the snake was, she did!”

  When the day was over, I had lost my driver’s license fifty-four days over a preadolescent snake!

  The summer rolled on. I walked or begged rides everywhere. Finally, just before school started back, my license was returned, and the snake business was mostly forgotten.

  One night in September, my three best friends—David Morgan, Bill McInvaille, and Doug Robertson—were over at our house for supper. Mama had made spaghetti, and the four of us were having a good evening eating as much of it as we could. We were talking about dreams and makin
g plans about all the things we wanted to do. One idea involved an appeal to Mama. We needed to use her car to go to a new movie that was in town.

  David was the boldest one of us, so he took her on. “Mrs. Davis,” he began his plea, “there is a new movie in town that everyone we know has already been to see.”

  She jumped right on him. “David, if it is new, how has everybody already been to see it?”

  He kept on, “Because it is so good that it has been sold out ever since it got to the Strand Theatre. It has just now been here long enough so that we might have a chance to get in. Could Donald possibly use your car one night so that the four of us could all go to the movie? It really is a good one. Even some of our teachers have been talking about it.”

  “Well, David”—Mama kind of liked to play with him— “what is the name of this great movie?”

  “It is called Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho. It really is supposed to be good.”

  “Boys”—Mama was talking to all of us now—“that movie will scare you. I have heard about it. It is not fit for you to go to!”

  That made us even more determined. I took over. “It will not scare us. We are not the ones who have irrational fear. Besides, it is a ‘thought’ movie—Psycho, a thought movie. You do want us to think, don’t you?”

  Not a one of us saw the little, subtle smile on Mama’s face as she said, “Well, boys, sure you can have the car. I don’t want you to keep from thinking. I think you will all enjoy Mr. Hitchcock’s ‘thought’ movie. When do you want to go?”

  “Maybe tomorrow night,” I answered for us all without even asking the others.

  At school the next day, we got our plans together, and at about six-fifteen that evening, I started out in the car to pick up all the boys so we would not be late to get good seats for the seven o’clock show of Psycho.

  My first stop was to get Doug Robertson. Doug lived on Keller Street, off Leatherwood Street behind the Waynevilla Motor Court. The Waynevilla was a collection of little cabins once very nice but now somewhat decrepit, though still in business. If we saw a car there, we usually made a joke about someone who didn’t know any better than to stay there. Especially from the backside, there was something creepy about it.

  After Doug, I headed over to Boundary Street to get Bill Mc-Invaille. Bill and his half-sister, Sarah Ann, lived in part of the old Redmond house. It was a huge, old house where the Redmonds were seldom home. The house itself gave me the creeps. I did not even like to go up to the door to get Bill. I would break my mama’s rule and sit in the car and blow the horn for him to come out. He was used to the place.

  Last of all, I went to pick up David Morgan on Pigeon Road. David lived with various aunts and uncles and his grandmother. Whenever you got out of the car at David’s house, you could look up at the window of the house on the hill and see Grandma rocking in her rocking chair.

  Now, we were all collected. We headed into town and parked right on Main Street, got our tickets at the Strand, and headed inside for the great wonder of Psycho.

  As soon as the movie started, I knew why Mama did not want us to see it. Right there, in front of all the viewing world to see, was beautiful Janet Leigh—Marion Crane in the movie—sitting on a bed in a hotel room with her boyfriend. And she was in her underwear! The fact that it was very decent underwear and covered up more than most public bathing suits did nothing to blunt our excitement. It was, after all, technically underwear!

  This is what Mama thought was going to scare us? This was great. The four of us started giggling immediately. This really was going to be a “thought” movie!

  It got better by the second. Marion Crane, the main character, was going to run away with her boyfriend. She had even stolen the money to make this all possible. But she chickened out and turned around to go back to where she belonged. What made it a story was that she turned around too late and had to stop for the night on the way back home.

  That is when the movie got funny! She stopped at a place called the Bates Motel, and it looked almost exactly like the backside of the Waynevilla Motor Court across Leatherwood Street from Doug Robertson’s house! We started poking at one another and laughing. “Look there, Doug. Back there is your house. If you had been out there on that night, you might have seen her!” David suggested. We all punched and laughed out loud.

  All around us, people were looking at us. “Shhh! Shhh!” they whooshed at us. We heard a lady whisper, “It is not funny! If you boys can’t be serious, why don’t you go out in the lobby and leave the rest of us alone?” We tried to behave after that, but it was not easy.

  Marion Crane could not find anyone at the Bates Motel to give her a key. She had to go up to a big house on the hill above the motel. As the camera started to show the old house, it made all of us think of the old Redmond house where Bill lived on Boundary Street. We started giggling again. “Maybe we are all going to be in this movie,” Bill suggested now. “The next thing we know, David, we will be going up to your house and we’ll see Ma in her rocking chair!” We were out of control.

  Once in a room at the Bates Motel, Marion Crane totally possessed us. She proceeded to get ready to take a shower. After the underwear scene at the beginning of the movie, the shower scene made promises we could hardly entertain. After all, you have to take it all off to take a shower, we thought. She stepped into the shower and turned on the water. We waited to see what we could see!

  At that moment, the fun ended. For months after that moment, I awakened in the middle of the night crying amid nightmare images of red blood, red blood, red blood streaming down the shower curtain and wall and circling toward the drain—and it was a black-and-white movie!

  The rest of the time in the theater the four of us spent with our eyes closed and our heads down between our knees. I discovered that even fingers in your ears did not stop the incessant and repeated, Weeooo, weeooo, weeooo, of the endlessly unchanging sound track, which went on and on without any words being spoken for long minutes in the film.

  After what seemed like forever, I decided it was time to take a look to see if things had gotten any better. I picked the wrong time. Just as I opened my eyes, what was left of Grandma spun around in her rocking chair! The entire theater screamed!

  The real genius of Alfred Hitchcock was that he did not actually show you anything. No, he simply led you right up to the edge of terror and then let you do all the work in your own mind. The problem with that is singular: when the movie is over, your mind goes home with you!

  David and Bill and Doug and I left the theater along with everyone else who had survived Psycho . . . for now. We got in the car, which was parked right out in the light on Main Street, and started home.

  First off, I headed out to Keller Street to drop Doug off at his house. When we got there, I turned around in the driveway, then pulled up to the sidewalk in front of the house. Doug just sat there. After a couple of quiet minutes, I said, “Aren’t you going to go in your house?”

  The reply was quick and unstudied: “Somebody walk up to the door with me.”

  No explanation was needed. We knew he was not about to get out of the car alone. Finally, Bill got out and walked with Doug up to the dark door of the house. Everything looked fine until Doug unlocked the door and started to go inside. At that moment, Bill grabbed him by the arm and pulled him back out on the stoop. We could hear him all the way out to the car: “Don’t you leave me out here by myself.” At that point, both of them came back down the sidewalk and got back in the car.

  I tried to drive over toward Boundary Street to deliver Bill to his home at the old Redmond house. As soon as we turned up the hill and he saw the house, he said, “Can I just go home with you?”

  There was a brief attempt to take David home. But when we turned in the driveway and saw Grandma sitting up there through the window, rocking in her rocking chair, I put the car in reverse and backed out of there fast!

  We proceeded to simply go to my house, where we would all spend the nigh
t together and figure out how to get everybody back home in the morning.

  At our house, there was a large double garage that was part of the house itself. You could drive the car into the garage, get out, and go straight into the kitchen without going back outside. At the moment, this seemed like a very good idea.

  I pulled the car up to the garage, and, with the headlights shining brightly inside, we looked all around to be sure that no one was hiding in there. Then, with two of the boys keeping their eyes on the open garage door for security, I slowly turned the car around so we could back inside and be sure that no one was sneaking in behind us.

  Once in the garage, we jumped out of the car, slammed the big door down, and locked it. Then we went quickly inside the house and locked the never-locked kitchen door behind us. Without even needing to talk about it, we went all around the house and made sure that every door was securely locked. These doors had not been locked since we had moved in four years before.

  There were plenty of bedrooms and plenty of beds in that house. But on this night, four sixteen-year-old boys pulled blankets and pillows out of the hall closet, built a fire in the fireplace (it was the middle of summer), and made a community bed on the living-room floor, where we could sleep touching one another to be sure that nothing got any of us in the night.

  The next morning, we were still on the floor, finally asleep, when Mama came through the room. “Well, boys, I didn’t know you were all here. I will go in the kitchen and fix breakfast for everybody while you all go take a shower!”

  That did it. I knew that I would stay dirty and stink for the rest of my life before I got into a bathtub that had a shower curtain around it. That morning, for the first time in years, four teenage boys took turns taking tub baths in the big bathroom, each bathing while the other three guarded the door for safety.