by Mary Walker
She heard now the tiniest noise—the whisper of a scraping—and she knew what it was: the ventral scutes of a large snake pushing off against the floor.
She should at least stand up, get her face out of striking range. But the muscles of her legs were frozen brittle, her feet stuck to the floor. It was a state of terror she couldn’t have imagined.
Yet there was something familiar about it. As if she had once before, long ago, felt this same arctic terror.
Yes, I remember. I’m so scared I can’t move. It feels just like this—the frozen bone marrow, the blood chilled, thickened.
And there’s a snake, too! In the house I live in with my mother and father. It must be a nightmare. Yes, a nightmare. I’m just five years old, and I have trouble separating dreams from reality.
I dream of being awakened by loud noises, shouting. It’s hot. Very hot. My nightgown is wet, stuck to my body. I’m frightened. I get up to find my daddy. I open the door of their dark bedroom and walk in. Some light from the hall spills in. I see they aren’t there. Pasha comes in. Big warm Pasha. I feel better with him close. I love him. He whines and sniffs around the room.
A noise—that same tiny scraping—comes from under the bed. I am curious. I lean over to look. A dark head, a monster’s head with a darting tongue, appears from under the bed. Then the long body slowly emerges, undulating forward. I’m frozen, mesmerized by the sinuous movements. My feet stick to the floor. If I move I will rip the skin off the soles of my feet.
Pasha growls. He barks and jumps forward.
The snake curves its way toward me, closer and closer. Until the head with the flickering tongue almost touches my bare foot and bony shin. Now Pasha barks again. He snarls and snaps at the snake. Fast as an eye blink the snake strikes. The dog yips in pain.
I scream and scream.
Now Katherine heard the sound again. That tiny scraping. It began, then ceased, and began again. They had moved closer. She listened intently. Yes. They were moving again. This way. Both of them.
The ice that had contained her and numbed her body began to thaw. She was suddenly unprotected.
In panic, she tried to visualize the room, seeking a place to escape. She recreated it exactly: a rectangle with a low ceiling and nothing else. Except her. And the two snakes. And two pieces of used sandpaper. And the shears. Where were the shears? She had put them down to sand, but where? Did she dare feel around on the floor? Or would the vibration attract the snakes to her? What would she do with the shears if she had them when she couldn’t see? If she reached for them, the snakes might be there. They’d feel threatened and they’d … her heart was beating so hard it was rocking her body. She tried to stop it, to reduce the vibrations.
Oh, God. Please. Let someone come and unlock the door.
Vic. He was coming. But not until noon. An hour away.
Bob! Yes, Bob What’s-his-name. From birds. He was coming. But he would not know to look here. The others were gone. For hours.
She couldn’t live that long. The panic was growing and taking hold now. The intermittent scraping, the rustling of scales were coming closer. If only they could bite her without touching her; then it wouldn’t be so bad. The ice had all melted and now she felt herself a great meaty body, reeking hot blood, like an over-thawed steak, calling them with her heat. They would find her. They couldn’t miss.
The sound again—a rustle, like tissue paper being blown by a faint breeze. This time almost at her feet.
She threw her head back and remembered that other time, the nightmare she had forgotten until now. She had screamed and screamed.
The snake rears up again, bent into an S. I watch the flickering tongue. The blunt nose. The black stripe running back from the eye. The mouth opening wider. The fangs.
My screams tear at the tissue of my throat, suck at my lungs, stab into my eardrums. A dark shape fills the doorway behind me. The light comes on. My father. Yes, he’s there. He bellows in fury and despair. Kate, oh, no. He throws himself forward, lifts me up in his arms. He sweeps me from the room.
Then they all come running—the others. What are they all doing here in the night? Their faces are white masks of fear and anger, as if the worst thing in the world has happened. As if there is no going back.
That was the night her mother had dragged her out to the car. The night they had left forever.
Her raw throat felt bloody and torn. Slowly she contracted the muscles in her thighs and stood up. She took a step back, right into the wall. The wall! She would climb it. That was it! She would climb the wall. She turned and tried to dig her fingers into the plaster, clawed them into the wall trying to get a grip. She pressed her cheek against it and pulled, scrabbling her feet against it to boost herself up.
When the pain came, finally, it was in her left ankle.
Like prongs of fire. A burning so intense she gasped.
It was sharp, fiery, excruciating—and a relief. She could lie down now and it would be over. She sank slowly to the floor and curled up tight. It was so long since she’d had a good sleep. She abandoned herself to the dream.
* * *
When the lights came on, she was dreaming of a voice. It whispered in her ear, “No. Please, no. This can’t happen. Not again.” She dreamed of strong arms lifting her. “It was supposed to be me this time. I got the warning. I was ready.” A door slammed and the voice cooed on and on: “Don’t worry. We’ll get this fixed up. It’s my sin, not yours. The Stranahan business, what we did. Oh, Kate. Don’t worry. We’ll take care of this. Don’t worry.”
She heard the shrieking of an alarm and some shouting.
Then she remembered something.
That old dream—it wasn’t a dream at all. It had really happened.
20
THE blood that kept oozing from between her teeth tasted like thick rusty salt water.
Katherine sat up in bed, spat into the plastic basin, rinsed her mouth out again, still awed that those two tiny red pinholes in the back of her ankle could cause such devastation throughout the body. Why should a snake that needed to kill only rodents have venom toxic enough to kill a human being? Nature’s death force seemed charged with a power far greater than needed.
She held the basin under her chin, trying to decide if she was going to throw up again. No, she decided, her stomach was certainly empty by now; and since she planned never to eat again, that, at least, was finished.
The doctor had assured her that all her symptoms—nausea, kidney pain, extreme swelling in the limb, bleeding gums—were typical of hemotoxic envenomation. She’d like him better if he would speak plain English and say snakebite. But he seemed to know what he was doing.
She pulled the sheet away from her left leg and forced herself to look down at it. Not so bad. It was still puffy, but nothing, thank God, like the shapeless mass that had swollen up on the first day. And the color was better now. During her twenty-eight hours in the hospital, the leg had darkened from its usual tan to an angry puce, but now it had faded back to yellow-brown, like an old bruise.
The pain had also subsided. After beginning as an intense burning at the bite, it had erupted into fiery shooting pains the length of her leg. But now it had settled down into a mild, throbbing soreness. She could shift around in bed and hobble to the bathroom by leaning on a cane. The worst of it was behind her, she hoped.
Katherine sighed as she settled back onto the pillow.
“Jesus,” Sophie said, looking up from her needlepoint. “If I’d known what it was like getting bit by a snake, I would have been a lot more scared than I was. And growing up in Texas I’ve always been plenty scared, made it a point not to go anywhere a snake might be. Wise.”
Katherine loved hearing Sophie’s voice, knowing that she was sitting there at the foot of her bed. All her life Katherine had preferred being alone in times of trouble or sickness. She had deliberately isolated herself to get through whatever it was on her own: Chicken pox, her mother’s absences, failed romances, busin
ess problems—she had navigated them all alone.
Until now.
Something had shifted when she was in that dark room. She didn’t want to be alone anymore. She wanted people around her. The closer the better.
Throughout the emergency-room ordeal yesterday and the tests to see if she could tolerate the antivenin, Sophie had held one hand and Alonzo Stokes, very tenderly, had held the other. It amazed her that she wanted them there, that they were a comfort. It was as if, with the venom, she had been injected with the capacity to feel the comfort other people could provide.
And the comfort came from many sources. All yesterday afternoon people had stopped by her hospital room, and with each visit her spirits had risen. Lieutenant Sharb had come first, looking totally out of place in the cool white room with his shiny black suit and stubbled face. Vic had come, bringing perfect photographs from the night before, promising to take good care of Ra while she was in the hospital. Sam McElroy had come, assuring her the zoo insurance would cover all her expenses. Danny Gillespie had come, trying to smile and bearing a huge bouquet of fresh flowers he surely couldn’t afford. Wayne had come with the news that the bushmasters had done nothing but copulate since one of them had bitten her; they’d have to remember this aphrodisiac, he said, next time they had trouble getting snakes to breed. Iris had come hoping this wouldn’t discourage Katherine from working with herps. Cooper and Lucy Driscoll had come to present her with an immense basket of fruit.
She turned her head on the pillow to look out the window. The sky was a deep, pure blue, with luminous clouds floating through the window frame. It was Sunday afternoon and the auction was scheduled for Tuesday. She’d be lucky to be released from the hospital by then. It might have to go on without her, but maybe that wasn’t such a bad thing. After it was all over, she could go clean out the house and deliver Ra. She had a valid excuse for not having to face the day itself.
“Thank God for Alonzo Stokes’s perfectionism,” she said aloud.
“Amen,” Sophie said, reaching out to rest a hand on Katherine’s good foot.
Alonzo had repeated his story like an incantation yesterday as they waited for the ambulance and then as they rode to Brackenridge. Waiting for the lecture to begin, he had gotten worried about the splinters and the moving of the bushmasters. He’d had a bad feeling about it, he said, and since the lecture was delayed ten minutes, he had run back to check. Thank God. When he turned on the light and lifted the shade on the observation window, he had seen her curled up on the floor. The snakes were in the other corner copulating. Thank God.
She had been bitten only once, in the left ankle. It was bad, but it could have been fatal if they had continued to bite her. Apparently they had lost interest in her after one bite.
Saved by the power of sex.
In the ambulance, when the world began to come back into focus, she had looked up at Alonzo’s face. The intensity of his concern seemed to be melting the flesh right off his narrow skull. He had refused to let go of her hand, insisted on riding in back with her, the antivenin buttoned in his breast pocket.
When she remembered what he had whispered as he carried her out of the breeding room, she had reached up and pulled his head down close to hers, so no one else—the attendant on her other side, or the driver—could hear. “Alonzo, you said something about Stranahan back there. Did you know Donald Stranahan? What does he have to do with all this?”
He pulled back slightly and shook his head gravely.
“Alonzo, you said you’d been warned. Did you get a note from the pointman? Did you? I did, too. What happened to Stranahan? This is important. Please tell me.”
Again he shook his head, not as if he were saying no to the questions, but as if he could not think about it now, or ever. “I was upset,” he said. “It was just ravings.” He squeezed her hand in both of his. “Thank God I came back. That’s the important thing. This is going to work out just fine. I promise. I can tell. I’ve seen lots of snakebites and this’ll give you some pain, but you’ll be dandy. Especially once they start the antivenin.” He patted the vial in his breast pocket.
So he refused to tell her anything. Looking up at his ravaged face, she was certain that he knew the whole story. But he would never tell. Perhaps he had gotten so accustomed to keeping the secret after thirty-one years that his ability to tell the truth had atrophied. Whatever valve it was in the human spirit that allowed the free passage of honesty had been rusted shut.
She would have to reconstruct the story without his help.
If she wanted to reconstruct it.
Even without her willing it, part of the story had begun to spin itself inside her head. She thought she knew now what had happened thirty-one years ago. The ugliness of it made her cringe.
When Sharb arrived at her hospital room, just as they were bringing her up from emergency, she had asked to speak to him alone. Quickly she told him what Alonzo Stokes had murmured in her ear. Then she gave voice to some of her suspicions. She suspected Donald Stranahan had worked at the zoo, in the reptile house, when her father worked there, when Alonzo Stokes was the new head keeper there. She had a feeling it was very important. Would he please check it out? Right away?
He sure as hell would. Did she feel up to a few questions? Sharb pulled out his notebook and asked the inevitable. Had she seen the person who’d thrown the snakes in and locked the door? Who else had keys? Whom had she seen that morning? Did she have any hunches?
None of her answers gave him much help.
Finally he had left, posting a uniformed man outside the door of her room. Now that she’d had a day to think about it, she could see that that might be a problem. She’d have to get rid of him.
The nurse with the yellow smile button pinned on her belt entered on soft feet and once again wrapped the blood-pressure sleeve around Katherine’s arm, gravely watching the gauge rise and fall. She picked up Katherine’s limp wrist and felt her pulse while looking at her watch. She checked the IV bag of antivenin, held the tube up to see if it was dripping just right. All the comforting rituals they had been enacting every hour.
Katherine accepted it all with a mellow sense of well-being. The sheets felt cool and smooth to her skin, and she was comforted to see the dogged persistence of her vital functions.
When the nurse readjusted the swathed foot on its pillows, Katherine flinched.
“Still pretty tender?” the nurse asked. “Want something more for the pain?”
“Will it make me sleepy again?” Katherine asked.
“Probably. But it won’t hurt you to sleep a little more.”
“No.” Katherine said. “I need to be alert for a while and I’m really not having much pain now.”
“You need to rest. It’s the best thing for snakebite, slows down the envenomation.”
Katherine looked at the IV bag. It was almost empty. “When this is finished, is that it?” she asked.
The nurse looked at the label on the bag. “Probably. That’s the recommended dosage—five ampoules of Soro Anti-Laquetico. But Doctor says we need to keep you under observation for another twenty-four hours, at least—perhaps several days—to observe the site. With hemotoxic venoms, there can be some tissue damage. Do you need to urinate yet? We need another sample for the lab when you do.”
Katherine shook her head.
The nurse adjusted the pillows under Katherine’s head and picked up the basin, looking into it without the slightest appearance of repugnance. “Well, want to change your mind and have a little dinner? If your stomach’s still queasy we could bring Jell-O and soda crackers.”
“No, thanks,” Katherine said, her stomach heaving at the thought.
After the nurse left, Katherine felt sleep pulling her down again. Against her will. She was so tired. It wasn’t just the pain medication. She tried to recall the last time she’d had a full night’s sleep. In the five days since she got the note from the pointman she had slept precious little, and during the last forty-eight hours
, even less. Two days ago she had flown to New York to see Max Friedlander. Her father’s house had been ransacked and she and Vic had driven to the ranch in Kerrville. And escaped gunfire. And made love. And then … Her lids flickered. So much happening in such a short time. She let her eyes close. No wonder she … just a short nap.
* * *
When she woke, the window that had been filled with blue sky was a black square and Sharb was standing next to her bed, staring down at her, willing her to wake. She sat up with a start. Sophie’s chair was empty.
“I told your cousin to grab a bite,” Sharb said. “Don’t worry. She’ll be back.”
Katherine lowered her head to the pillow and looked up at the black beadlike eyes, so close together she wondered if he had any peripheral vision at all.
“You were right,” he said. “Donald Stranahan, the husband of the woman your father sent money to, did work at the Austin Zoo. For two years, up to July 18, 1958.” The black eyes glinted in the dim light. Katherine knew him well enough now to recognize the signs of excitement. “Until he was snake-bit. By a bushmaster. Same species that nailed you. But Mr. Stranahan died from his bite.”
A tiny smile on his lips, Sharb waited for her reaction.
Katherine just nodded once. She wasn’t much surprised. She’d been expecting it. It fit right into the story that was telling itself in her head. “So he was the one fatality at the Austin Zoo.”
“Yup. There have been a few other snakebites, but this is the only one that ended in death. It was before they had a specific antivenin, like that one they dripped into you. But it wouldn’t’ve made any difference anyway.”
“Why not?” Katherine asked.
“Seems he was drunk, fooling around with the snakes late at night after the zoo closed. May even have had a woman there, showing off for her. Stokes says he was a cowboy type—wild, macho womanizer, big drinker. Snake bit him square on the cheek right next to the nose.” Sharb rubbed his stubby fingers on that area on his own face.
“This much I got from Alonzo Stokes. I also looked up the old ME’s report. Stranahan died real fast. He was drunk, blood alcohol level of point twelve, and alcohol speeds the progress of the venom, they tell me. Even so, strange he never managed to push that emergency button or do anything to save himself. Alonzo Stokes says”—here Sharb tried to imitate Alonzo’s twangy drawl—“‘It’s one of those things that just happens sometimes when you let impetuous or intoxicated folks around dangerous reptiles.’” He took a piece of Kleenex from his pocket and blew his nose. “Makes you wonder, don’t it?”