The Red Hourglass

by Gordon Grice

  This massacre reduced the number of rattlesnakes on the ranch the next year, though a few still turned up. The tailwater pit was polluted beyond use, the run-off draining into the cavernous den. For a long time, in the evenings a strange smell hung low over the cavernful of water where oily rainbows floated. The hired hands who burned the carcasses have all gone away. The rancher and his sons have died, and only an old widow remains on the family land to remember the troubles they had with rattlesnakes.

  When I was a child my father killed a rattler near our yard. He decapitated it with a hoe, and I watched it pulse for what seemed like hours. The snake, a very small one, kept twitching, even after our white leghorn hens came and started to work at it with their beaks. At dusk I came back (I was forbidden to, but I came). It was still alive enough to shrink from my touch. In the morning, it was stiff. The bubble of blood where its head had been was hard as brick.

  Folklore says a decapitated rattlesnake doesn’t die until sundown. The restless one I watched as a child was no aberration; beheaded rattlers often make this lore credible. Their movements don’t really stop with the sunset; they diminish gradually, and no moment of death can be specified. But the movements clearly outlast an injury that should, according to everything we think we know, prove instantly fatal. In fact, animal life in general doesn’t end as neatly as we expect it to, but this revelation is especially disturbing in the case of the rattlesnake, partly because of the ancestral hatred and fear that cause us to try to kill it. More important, the rattlesnake, unlike other apparently dead animals, is still dangerous.

  People and dogs have died from the reflexive bite of a decapitated rattlesnake’s head. The venom itself has proven potent even after twenty years of storage; dried, it remains potent for at least fifty. We approach the rattler with such an awareness of its deadly potential that its failure to die neatly becomes terrifying and must be explained, if only in the form of a convenient piece of lore that fixes the time of death.

  We would like to think death is a crisp fracture: living, and then not living. In fact, there is no clear division between life and death in any animal. People sit up, fart, and twitch long after they are apparently dead, and an arcane lore of medical and legal specifications has grown up to deal with the practical difficulties of this sloppy division. We debate the merits of machine-assisted life and independent life. When should a person be removed from life support—at the stopping of the heart? at the stopping of the brain?

  We ordinary people (that is, not medical professionals) generally believe in the principle of brain death. Brain death as a concept frees us from the responsibility of deciding death, because it is a completely invisible distinction. No layman has the equipment to measure brain activity. With the means of officiating out of our hands, we don’t have to decide; we bring our dying to the hospital, a kind of temple, where doctors, in their roles as secular priests, make the pronouncement. They use technology incomprehensible to most of us to make the call, and then they declare a time of death on official documents—as if death happened in an instant. As if it were a crisp fracture from living.

  Practical difficulties surround this system. How should we judge cases where the brain still lives, but consciousness and independent breathing and heartbeat are gone? How do we answer the objection that a brain-dead person whose heart still beats can live for many years, as long as someone feeds him? How about the fact that some people who need machine support to live have active minds?

  Once a body is declared dead, the difficulties continue. The body may move around. A dead woman may deliver a live baby. Occasionally a “dead” person recovers. In the nineteenth century, one writer estimated that a third of the people buried weren’t really dead. He arrived at this figure by considering the number of people who, disinterred for one reason or another, were found to have clawed at their coffin lids or otherwise struggled to escape. Edgar Allan Poe’s fictions on this subject were probably more frightening to his contemporaries, who knew of actual cases, than to us well-insulated moderns. The EEG and other advances would reduce the possibility of premature burial, if we hadn’t obviated that need by hitting on the idea of embalming our dead and making damn sure they don’t get back up. Current embalming techniques involve, among other things, mechanically sucking the juices out of a corpse and replacing them with preservatives. You can also complete a death by burning the body or signing away its organs.

  Americans, at least, have taken steps to hide the slipshod workmanship of death completely. We don’t sit up with corpses anymore. We give the dying over to hospitals and the declared dead to funeral homes. We don’t see our dead sit up anymore; we don’t smell them evacuating their bowels like living people. Embalming gives us a corpse two or three days old that looks much like the living person. But that resemblance is an illusion we grant ourselves. It is part of a larger illusion we maintain: that death is a still version of life.

  Death isn’t still. It is a continuation of what has gone before. The digestive juices in our gut lose their inhibitions and go to work on the organs that hold them: we eat ourselves from within in a last burst of appetite. The bacteria that have been part of our bodies go on living. Suddenly freed to partake of the feast they have always dwelt inside, they prosper as never before. Our tissues, if left alone, take on an array of strange forms as microscopic life converts them; one way or another, the meat we’re made of fuels the building of other lives. The blood gels, the breath quiets, the tiny strands of lightning inside the nerve tissues disappear, the form we instinctively like best gives way to other forms; the smells of death and rot are always the smells of small life-forms teeming. Death is real, but it is slow and sloppy; it proceeds in no certain order; its beginning and end are indeterminate; and its causes are not always certain. Dead, we are not stilled; we are activated, changed.

  On the highway ahead, I see the sinuous curves of a rattlesnake in motion. He moves on the hot asphalt in liquid esses. He is doomed.

  Cars and trucks rush by, some of them holding their course, their wheels straddling the snake, others swerving to miss him (perhaps these drivers know the legend of the mechanic killed by a fang embedded in a flat tire). Soon one of them will crush him, by chance or choice. He halts and buzzes on the yellow line. I pull over and wait my opportunity to chase him off the road, but the traffic is heavy. A one-ton pickup finally swerves to hit him.

  I watch his body spasm into twisting arcs, the white belly and patterned back showing by turns. It is the old dance of animal flesh: the dying, and the determination not to die.

  TARANTULA

  Llightning showed them crossing the asphalt in the first tentative cracklings of the rain. They hustled across, more than we could readily count, each brown-and-beige body slung low amid the multiple dark arches of the legs. Rain dappled the windshield. The droplets staggered down through dust and the lambent blood of fireflies. The view at that moment would let you believe you weren’t seeing right, that rain and lightning and motion and filthy glass had cooked up an illusion. But the headlights began to show them straight ahead, middle of the road, not just on the shoulders, and the wipers left arcs of clear viewing between arcs of mud, and we knew we were seeing an exodus of tarantulas. We stopped to watch, and as I stepped out of the pickup I saw two of them convulsing on the shoulder behind us, wounded by our tires.

  In Africa the wildebeest migrate, and when they come to a river the herd fords. Their great number gives the crocodiles a good chance to feed, but it also guarantees there will be too many for the crocs to take them all. That’s the brutal logic of mass movement. This spectacle was a little like that, the tarantulas going somewhere, crossing the asphalt river, and some of them dying beneath the treads of passing cars. One of the cars swerved in a slow ess, as if trying to miss one particular tarantula among the dozens. At the edge of the asphalt we could see them wrestling through the unruly grass to reach the road.

  “Males hunting for females?” I said. It was the first time I’d ev
er seen more than one on the road.

  “No, look. They’re all going the same way.” My friend bent to look at a tarantula breaching the grass at his feet. He was a burly man, but he reached with gentle precision to place a forefinger on the spider’s buck-colored carapace, the shell-like cover of the front half of its body. He pressed the spider against the pavement. His thumb and middle finger found a place to grasp in the thicket of legs. He lifted it to show me. It kept its legs bunched against its sides, still, like a cottontail rabbit that thinks you haven’t spotted it.

  The fangs lay folded. They looked like the parings of a thumbnail in shape, color, and size. The legs and belly looked soft in their dusty brown hair.

  “A female,” my friend said. “Look at that one.” Another tarantula had emerged from the grass-choked ditch. It walked taller than the one he held; its legs were longer, but its body was smaller and seemed shriveled. As it crossed the puddle of glare from our headlights I saw that its hair was darker, a brown approaching black. These, my friend said, were the characters of a male.

  In the truck we found a few empty cups that documented the fast-food places along our route, and a plastic grocery bag. Such trash would serve until we got someplace. We caught eight of them—my friend did, actually. I was afraid to touch them. When we looked at them under the light, we found only two were male, which meant this was no seasonal wandering in search of mates. Only the males wander for that purpose.

  “It must be the flood,” my friend said. It had rained too much that summer, and the fields were drenched; the place was a disaster area by the President’s say-so, the ordinary ditches beside highways supporting populations of duck instead of roadrunner, cattails instead of prairie grass. Some places people were climbing to their roofs or leaving their homes. We stood, our heads bare to the evening’s return of rain, watching the tarantulas leave their homes to cross from flooded field to equally flooded field, and then we drove on.

  Wash your hand and leave it moist. Now place it, tips only, on a tabletop. Let it feel whatever air may move in the room. Do you feel the coolness on your palm? The shiver produced by your own pulse? The tiny shocks made by any other thing moving on the table? Listen with your fingertips, and you’ll notice that the tapping of something three feet away comes to you in waves, reaching the nearest fingertip perceptibly sooner than the farthest. If you practiced, honed this kind of perception, you could navigate blind and deaf; you could sense the world by touch.

  Now you have a hint of what it’s like to be a tarantula. The big spider’s entire body is a tactile ear. Some of the hairs are specially built for vibration; rooted in sensory cells, they know the direction of their disturbance. And the tarantula tastes everything, from air to prey, with the tips of its palps and its feet and even with openings on its legs and under its knees.

  My grandmother was known as a great screamer. Her screams were startling; they had some peculiar quality of making the front of your backbone itch. She screamed at anything creeping or otherwise verminous. Living in the country, she often happened to see creatures fitting this description. One time when a mouse showed itself in the house, Grandma let loose one of her high-pitched ear-splitters. The mouse ran away at top speed and crashed headfirst into a wall. It fell dead on the spot—of a broken neck, my uncle speculated.

  My family claims the scream was responsible for the rodent’s suicide. They say the scream was so intense, or so high in pitch, or so something, that the mouse’s brain was scrambled. And, to counter my skepticism, they recount The Tarantula Incident.

  The tarantula, like the mouse, was an innocent wanderer. It happened into the kitchen where the family were assembled. Grandma spotted it and belted forth. It stopped and lifted its body higher on its legs. She screamed higher and louder; it rose higher. She seemed terrified that the spider didn’t run away; it seemed too scared to move. The battle continued to escalate—higher screams, higher spider.

  Everyone else was laughing too hard to help. When my uncle finally stopped rolling on the floor, he clapped a jar over the tarantula. This action would normally cause a flurry of legs, but the tarantula simply remained at attention. My uncle soon had the spider sitting securely in the jar on the table. It never moved again. It just stood at the full extension of its legs, and after a day or two someone tossed it out.

  Sound is, of course, nothing but vibration.

  “It’s the eyes that gross me out,” my wife said. She was explaining why she found tarantulas far more disgusting than black widow spiders. The question came up when I brought home four tarantulas, my share of the ones my friend and I had captured on the road. Tracy has always tolerated my habit of bringing home assorted vermin in jars, but the tarantulas taxed her.

  “I thought you would object to the widows, because they’re dangerous,” I said. A few dangerous tarantulas hang out in tropical rain forests, but no American tarantula’s bite is dangerous to humans. Of course, getting punctured by fangs that size doesn’t feel good.

  “I don’t love the widows, but they’re so shiny they seem hard. I know they’re not, but they look like they wouldn’t be too disgusting to touch.” The widow she had named Sweetie Face sat in a jar on the table in front of us, snacking on a cockroach. “The tarantulas have hair, like something you might pet.”

  I responded with a discourse on the texture of the widow’s hide, during which Tracy left, made something out of pasta, and returned, still nodding occasionally as if in agreement with some point I was making. When I paused she said, “But tarantulas have those two big, gross eyes. They’re so big you can look into their eyes.”

  “Actually they don’t,” I pontificated. “They have eight small eyes, which are grouped into two hairy patches.”

  “Which are right on top of its head staring at you.” At that moment the biggest of the tarantulas I’d brought home seemed to be staring at us with her two bunches of eyes, from which sprouted tufts of brown hair. Actually, a tarantula’s eyes are so weak they’re probably only good for noticing the shadows of predatory birds. I had named this big tarantula Prima, after the enormous heavyweight boxing champion Primo Camera. She stood motionless in a gallon jar. We’d put a cricket into the jar an hour earlier. The cricket had tunneled into the dirt for a while, then come up to look around. It walked under Prima, who lifted herself higher on her legs to let the cricket pass. The cricket made another circuit of the jar and came at Prima from the front, swishing its antennae against her legs.

  The tarantula twitched as if she had been shocked electrically, and her twitch raked the cricket to her mouth. She stood holding the cricket the way a dog holds a dead rat. After the first bite, the fangs moved separately, stabbing down and in repeatedly. They were slow, sensual, almost obscene, and the flash of the tips made us shudder.

  Spiders have pioneered the architectural possibilities for predation. The orb weavers spread nets to the wind. The bolas spider goes fishing with a sticky ball of glue on a string. Some orb weavers spread sheets of flypaper and then attack snared prey from below. One spider spins a net and then, camouflaged as a plant stem, sits with the net stretched between its front legs, waiting to cast it on an insect. Some orb weavers make their snares three-dimensional by pulling on the hub until the web deforms into a cone: when a flying insect hits, the spider releases the hub and the web snaps back, wrapping the insect by spring action.

  The range of snares is astounding, but the spider clan knows other fancy predatory tricks too. Some spiders have bodies crusted with nodules and projections, their graceless forms disguising them from their prey and their predators. Others wait within flowers that match their own colors, killing the eaters of pollen and nectar who fail to see them. Still others trap prey from a distance by spitting toxic glue.

  All of which points out how simple the tarantula is. While other spiders have evolved complex predatory behaviors, the tarantula still earns his meals the old-fashioned way: he hides in his hole until he senses some hapless critter passing, leaps on it li
ke a mugger, and mashes the hell out of it with a wicked set of mandibles. He is to the orb-weaving spider as the Australopithecus is to modern man. He doesn’t know any tricks involving color. He doesn’t build snares. He hasn’t even mastered the fine art of killing with a dainty, pinching bite full of venom and then sipping his victim down like a gentleman. He has venom all right, but he still chews his food like a wad of tobacco, slobbering digestive juice all over it as he goes.

  It’s not that the tarantula lacks silk. He uses the stuff to line burrows. He lays a few trip lines on the ground, radiating from his burrow starburst-style to tell him when something’s walking past. The female knits a silk knapsack for her clutch of eggs. The tarantula’s use of silk would actually be impressive if his younger cousins weren’t such geniuses with it.

  As I write, the world is crazy for dinosaurs. Especially the carnosaurs, like Tyrannosaurus rex. While paleontologists argue whether the carnosaurs actually were predators—some say T. rex must have been a scavenger—Hollywood and its affiliated toy manufacturers continue to hype them as the baddest beasties ever to walk the planet. I’m sure it’s good marketing.

  The movie people don’t mention the animals that ate carnosaurs.

  In Georgia and Alabama a paleontologist found only a few bones of a big carnosaur called Albertosaurus, which was common elsewhere in that period. The Albertosaurs seem to have been edged out of this swampy environment by crocodiles. Bones of young Albertosaurs show the hack marks of crocodile teeth. This evidence has been lying around since the time when dinosaurs “ruled the world.” The type of crocodile that ate Albertosaurs grew to about thirty feet; larger types elsewhere managed fifty feet. They were longer, and probably more massive, than the Tyrannosaurs.