Stolen World

by Jennie Erin Smith

  In the morning, Alfred arrived at the hotel eager to hunt snakes in the town of Baní. Coincidentally, little rural Baní was famous for its beautiful women, like something out of Ovid, and was in the middle of a carnival. Baní crawled with women, in skirts, wearing cat masks, on the backs of mopeds, swishing their hips, drinking rum. But Alfred drove straight through. There were snakes to catch.

  All day, they hunted muddy flats, finding nothing but shed snake skins and a toad. In the evening, when the group had migrated to a wet patch of woods that looked more promising, the frog calls were interrupted by a loud whooshing sound: the doctor’s son was throwing rocks high into a tree, trying to dislodge a vine snake. The doctor and his son threw rocks at animals all the time, it turned out. Recently, to Crutchfield’s lingering disgust, the doctor had thrown one at a female bobcat in the Everglades, trying to separate her from the kittens she was nursing, so he could grab one. Crutchfield threatened to let the cat shred him if he didn’t stop.

  The vine snake dropped to the ground. Its tail, they saw when they examined it, had been chewed by a rat.

  The day’s total haul was that single rat-chewed vine snake, wriggling in a bag on the dashboard of Alfred’s jeep. He drove through Baní, where the carnival was winding down, and stopped on the road for a snack of pork rinds. A woman roasted them next to a tiny shack with a circle of chairs in the dirt, and on the porch of the house next door, two couples danced merengue under a bare lightbulb. Just then a young pregnant woman, in a chair near Crutchfield, suddenly fell backward and hit the dirt. “Uh, I think she’s having a seizure,” he said. The dancing couples stopped dancing and helped lift the limp woman into the house.

  The doctor was back at the hotel—he seldom woke up before one or two p.m., and so had missed the trip—and though the doctor’s son was studying to be a chiropractor, he was at a genuine loss to help the woman. His phone calls to his father’s hotel room went unanswered. Screams came from within the house, and he finally entered. The woman’s pulse was nearly two hundred, he reported. She needed to get to a hospital.

  Her family refused. Recently a friend of hers died, they said, a young man in the village. What that was supposed to explain was unclear. Hysteria? Spirit possession? But they were adamant. “Country people,” said Alfred.

  The episode elicited a string of factoids from Crutchfield. “In Haiti, the asogwe is mounted by the loa,” he explained on the drive back toward the capital. Alfred passed around his rum.

  Then, a burst of light came from behind; it was a speeding car. Alfred hit the gas and swerved skillfully to miss it. It happened so fast that it barely registered, a flash of white headlights in the mirror. About a minute later, the speeding car, a souped-up Accord, had crashed into a Jeep and a Toyota; a small mob was pulling bodies from the smoking cars. The driver of the Accord was alive, a boy of about twenty; his companions were dead or dying, and the Toyota passengers weren’t faring much better. Alfred yelled at Crutchfield to clear all the gear from the back—he would be transporting a victim. But that victim, another boy in his twenties, was seconds from being dead. His brains were falling out of his head and onto Alfred as he gripped Alfred hard and struggled to stand. A mob on the road grew and grew—young girls, old women, a fat man naked except for a towel. The crowd got increasingly nasty as young men loaded the victims into pickup trucks, while others stole their wallets and jewelry. Someone was waving a gun. “Fuck it, let’s go,” Alfred said. The boy he was tending to had died.

  The smell of liquor permeated the truck on the way back, as though the bottle of rum had spilled. But it was the blood of the dead boy, reeking of alcohol. “I have brains on my pants,” Alfred said, and all his cash was missing from his pocket. Just then, nearly an hour after the accident, a lone ambulance crossed in the opposite direction.

  At the hotel, the doctor was AWOL. Neither Crutchfield nor the doctor’s son had any idea where he might have gone. He had left some sort of vile mess of vomit and possibly feces in the tub before disappearing, and though his son was busy trying to clean it, Crutchfield couldn’t bear to watch, and returned to the hotel lobby. “This trip is going south fast,” he said, pausing for a good long while to absorb how far south it had gone. “You know who would have appreciated this day?” said Crutchfield, finally. “Hank.”

  He was right—it had been a Hank Molt day, a day when things go so wrong that failure itself is transfigured, with a little distance and the right telling, into a twisted sort of glory.

  BY MORNING, the doctor had returned, but neither he nor his son could be roused, and so Crutchfield spent the first half of the day sitting by a cloudy stream in Santo Domingo’s botanical gardens, watching Haitian slider turtles, with yellow faces, float up and dive. “You see, I actually enjoy this, just being here and seeing these turtles,” Crutchfield said. The doctor, he continued, “would be out there in the water, mud all over his pants. He has an unstoppable compulsion to accumulate wildlife. He becomes possessed.”

  A butterfly native to Florida fluttered by, causing Crutchfield to marvel. He liked to be among the hummingbirds, the butterflies, a pond full of papyrus. Thirty years ago, he said, he was a lot like the doctor and his son—all about the snake. He might even have thrown rocks at a snake, he said. But now, that kind of behavior embarrassed him.

  When Crutchfield returned to the hotel, Alfred was waiting, in clean clothes and surprisingly good spirits, though he retained a macabre bruise on his upper arm where the dying boy had grabbed him. He’d heard there were red boas in the town of San Francisco, two hours away. That got the doctor and his son out of bed. The doctor had not been hospitalized or in jail the night before, as Crutchfield had feared, but was out winning $3,000 at a casino. The doctor’s fresh cash would be spread around the village of San Francisco, where eager children would scout red boas. They should write a piece for Reptiles magazine, Crutchfield suggested: “The Hunt for the Red Boa!” Crutchfield was smiling, excited. “We’re gonna make some kids skip school!” he said. The issue of the export permits was far from resolved, but Alfred had accepted thousands of dollars of the doctor’s money and assured everyone he’d take care of it later.

  The next morning, as San Francisco’s village square came to life, filling fast with sandwich vendors and shoe shiners and begging Haitian children, the doctor emerged from the hotel smoking a cigarette, interviewing random people in his excellent Spanish. Anyone around here hunt snakes? Red snakes? he asked a shoe shiner. Crutchfield joined the doctor, lighting a cigarette. He tried to follow the conversation, gave up, then looked the shoe shiner straight in the eye with a very intent expression.

  “Cu-le-bras ro-jas,” he said slowly.

  “Rojas,” the man confirmed. Actually, yes, he did have a friend—a taxidermist—who caught red snakes. In an hour, this taxidermist friend, too, found his way to the square. He was a slender, gentle, impoverished-looking fellow, carrying a plastic grocery bag full of shoes and belts he had fashioned from Haitian boas. One of the belts was a distinct reddish orange. He extracted from his pocket a very worn photograph, protected by layers of yellowing plastic, of himself holding a live, enormous, unmistakably red Haitian boa around his neck. Alfred’s tip had been right—San Francisco was red boa country! Crutchfield borrowed the man’s photo and ran into the hotel to show Alfred.

  The taxidermist told the doctor he wanted thirty dollars per red boa. Outrageous, countered the doctor, who offered ten. The issue of payment remained unsettled as the entire team, now including the taxidermist, squeezed into Alfred’s truck. The taxidermist said he knew a cave full of red boas. That perked everyone up. Then Alfred remembered that the word for “cave” can be the same, in Spanish, as the word for “hollow of a tree.” Was it a cave or a tree? A tree, said the taxidermist. “Shit,” said Crutchfield. On the way they picked up another snake hunter, a friend of the taxidermist, who carried a machete and clung to the side of the jeep. The trees on the road were charred underneath from where the hunters had burned t
hem, trying to smoke snakes out of the hollows. The sky was gray and it began to thunder.

  The tree that was said to be full of red boas stood in the middle of a deteriorating old ranch. Cow pies and tangles of barbed wire were everywhere; guinea fowl and chickens ran hysterically in circles. None of the ranch hands, who were sheltering themselves from the impending rain, minded a gang of men with machetes removing snakes from the property. They were all for it.

  Extracting a snake from the hollow of a tree is more art than science, and the Hank Molt adage “You can’t do shit without natives” came to mind as the taxidermist climbed the tree, barefoot. His friend with the machete followed. They worked fast, chopping down branches to expose the tree’s cavities. The taxidermist’s long feet curled around the branches as he poked sticks into holes, looking for anything soft and alive. Crutchfield and Alfred did the same to a nearby tree, then retrieved a gas can and a narrow hose to blow gas fumes into it, fumes that would irritate a snake enough to force it out into fresh air. When that produced nothing, they started a fire, with twigs and leaves and gas, lighting it in the lowest hole of the tree, letting the smoke do the work. “This is like a needle in a haystack,” said Crutchfield. “This is how snakes have survived millennia of abuse.”

  No one doubted there were snakes around here; the trouble was, this ranch had been pretty thoroughly hunted of them already, for shoes and belts. Most of its trees bore sooty stains from old fires. The smoking and gassing and hacking took hours, as thunder roared over the fields.

  The weather was causing the cattle to cry out and the fowl to screech, but a shirtless doctor wandered alone and indifferent, looking for snakes in the ether. For a moment, it appeared as though he would be gored by a bull, which was exactly the type of thing Crutchfield expected would happen to him. “Buuuuuullll!” Crutchfield shouted in the doctor’s direction. “Dad! Buuuuuuulll!” the doctor’s son followed, but there was no response; the rain and wind had muted their pleas. The doctor, not one to be hurried, returned intact in his own time.

  Crutchfield and Alfred had a strong fire going in one tree’s core; they squatted and fanned it, looking up to see smoke emerge from its higher orifices. A sudden stench caused them to step back. “Smell that?” Alfred asked. “I sure do,” said Crutchfield. Snake musk: proof positive that something was in there, ready to come out. But the taxidermist and his friend, from their vantage in the tree, had spotted something on the ground. They descended, and the taxidermist lifted with a machete the rotting carcass of a large, still visibly red Haitian boa, limp and bony as it dangled from the blade. That was what smelled. They put out Crutchfield’s fire with mud.

  22

  The Blue-Rattled Rattler

  When Hank Molt failed to show up for the reptile expo in 2006, the rumor was that Peter Nguyen had put out a hit on him. Nguyen had announced on the reptile Web sites that Molt had cheated him out of twenty thousand dollars’ worth of snakes, and his language was threatening in an oblique sort of way. It was a good rumor, but Nguyen was not nearly that crazy, and Molt had never let fear of creditors stop him before—his visits to the expo were marked by his cocksure defiance of people angry enough to want to kill him.

  Days before the expo, Molt wrote to say that “a sudden and extremely serious medical emergency” was keeping him from getting to Florida. He alluded to a brother-in-law. Later, he acknowledged that this was not the case—he was broke and depressed, and facing some emerging debacle in South Carolina.

  The cause of Molt’s depression, generally speaking, was Bitis parviocula. It had been five months since the ignoble death of the last parviocula in a Münster basement. Molt, however, continued to offer the snakes under the “international inventory” section of his fabulist online price list: “Bitis parviocula. Captive born ’05 the best 2 holdbacks of the litter—very rare—6000 Euros.” Unless he meant frozen ones, the parviocula were now very rare indeed, but in Molt’s experience failures were often precursors to success, and Molt could not bring himself to abandon hope that there were more parviocula in his future. “With the Boelen’s pythons and ringed pythons we did it so many times before it worked,” he said.

  Molt had been quick to seek distractions after the parviocula debacle, and new people to spend his time with. In South Carolina, he’d met a thirty-two-year-old Mormon named Adam Stewart, who owned a pet shop in a neighboring town. Molt and Stewart drove around to reptile shows and went snake hunting in the Blue Ridge Mountains. It did not take long before their relationship bore some trappings of a business partnership. Molt consigned snakes to Stewart’s pet store, and they split the earnings. Molt encouraged Stewart to obtain a live-animal shipping permit from Delta Airlines.

  A couple months before the expo that he missed, Molt called Stewart with some news: Two men in Alabama, a father and a son, had asked Molt to buy out their valuable, partly illegal collection of venomous snakes and lizards. The collection included Gila monsters and rare rattlesnakes that the pair had caught in the Arizona deserts, and had flown home in their luggage. The son was getting married and his fiancée was not keen on this hard-gotten collection. The father wasn’t willing to risk caring for it in his own house, since Alabama law barred the keeping of venomous snakes.

  Molt was not the most loved or trusted reptile dealer in the country, but he remained a useful contact for people in a pinch.

  Molt wanted the rattlesnakes and Gila monsters, but had no money with which to buy them. Adam Stewart had a credit card that allowed for cash advances. Molt agreed to take two of the rarer rattlesnakes as his finder’s fee if Stewart took over the deal. Stewart negotiated a price of $5,200 for the collection, which was worth easily twice that. Molt drove with Stewart in Molt’s Jeep to Guntersville, Alabama.

  It would have been a cut-and-dried affair, except that on the way to Guntersville, Stewart’s $5,200, a stack of notes in a bank envelope, disappeared. Stewart seemed not to have noticed until he reached the sellers’ doorstep. It made for an awkward afternoon. Molt and Stewart managed to examine the collection anyway, then retraced their path and searched gas stations, fruitlessly. They returned to South Carolina with neither snakes nor money.

  Stewart extracted more money—at this point he would have to buy and resell the collection merely to break even—and picked up his snakes, alone. Later Molt stopped by Stewart’s pet shop for a look at the collection, which, they both agreed, was fantastic. You should see one specimen, Stewart told Molt. It was a rare twin-spotted rattlesnake, Crotalus pricei, but with a blue rattle.

  “Adam was saying, ‘Isn’t this neat?’ He thought it was a natural thing,” said Molt. “I knew right away it was a field-marked specimen.” Biologists routinely paint specimens with some sort of enamel, often nail polish, to identify them. This snake had a two-toned marking of turquoise and cobalt. “I told him, ‘You gotta get some nail polish remover,’ ” Molt said. But it was too late—Stewart had already listed the animal for sale in the classifieds section of Kingsnake.com, with a color photo. Customers were already calling.

  The first “customer” to arrive was Special Agent Tom Chisdock of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service in Asheville.

  EDDIE CELEBUCKI had expected Molt to make it to the reptile expo, since Molt had, crises and calamities notwithstanding, made it to ten years’ worth of expos in a row. Celebucki in no way believed that a medical emergency prevented Molt from coming to Florida, and he seemed a little lost without his friend.

  Celebucki arrived the Thursday before the expo wearing a dragon shirt, unbuttoned to the belly, and a lizard earring. Celebucki owned a whole wardrobe of rayon shirts printed with oriental motifs—dragons, phoenixes, Chinese characters. He stood on the patio deck of the big hotel, dragon shirt rippling, surveying the crashing sea. He would use this weekend, he announced, as a test to see if he could break his addiction to reptiles. Celebucki, who had opened another karate school but never replaced his snake collection after his swingers’ club was raided, had money in his pocket and no
reptiles, always a volatile scenario, and wanted to see if he could resist the temptation to buy them. He thought maybe he had become addicted to reptiles in the first place because “I was a lonely five-year-old, and this unusual thing distinguished me.” His swinging days were over, too, he added. He was single now, a state that did not agree with him.

  The movie Snakes on a Plane opened that night, and Celebucki raised a posse of friends to go see it. They came back wild-eyed and happy, though they could not help cataloging the scientific errors. Twelve hours later, Celebucki was wandering around with a turtle he’d just bought. That evening, Celebucki was musing aloud about returning to Papua New Guinea, figuring that all the people old enough to remember him there would be dead.

  In Molt’s absence, his friends felt free to talk behind his back, and Celebucki, by far the most tolerant and understanding of them all, was no exception this time. Molt hadn’t bothered to come around to Cleveland once since the swingers’ club closed, he complained, and hadn’t called much either since Celebucki refused to put up $2,000 in the doomed parviocula deal, a decision that, to Celebucki, was a no-brainer. “Two thousand dollars in a Hank Molt deal—no fucking way,” he said. Celebucki wasn’t surprised by what had happened to Peter Nguyen, and he had a feeling about what had happened to Adam Stewart. When Molt ran into a certain type of young man, Celebucki said, someone just a little too enthusiastic for his own good, he used to point him out to Celebucki and say: “I think he’s ripe for our program.” Nguyen had been ripe for the program. Stewart was ripe for the program. “Hank is a herpetologist’s version of a pedophile,” Celebucki said.