One Door Away From Heaven

Chapter 21

JAWS CRACKED WIDE as if unhinged, backward-hooked fangs exposed to their full wicked arc, split tongue fluttering, the serpent swam through the air with the wriggle of an eel through water, but faster than any eel, as bottle-rocket fast as a fireworks snake, launched straight at Leilani's face.

Although she juked, the viper must also have misaimed, because her reaction alone wouldn't have been quick enough to spare her from a bite. She might have imagined the thin hiss as the thwarted snake sailed past her left ear, but the lash of smooth dry scales across her cheek was real. This caressing flick, cold or not, sent chills chasing chills along her spine, with such palpable shivers that she could almost believe the hateful serpent had slipped under the collar of her T-shirt and along the small of her back.

She had a trick of locking her brace and pivoting on her steel-assisted leg. Even as she heard the hiss or dreamed it, she twisted around in time to see the "treasure out of Eden" as it raveled in a long arc to the floor, the brighter fraction of its scales glinting like sequins in the red light.

The snake wasn't huge, between two and three feet long, about as thick as a man's index finger, but when it struck the floor and tumbled, lashing angrily, as though mistaking its own whipping coils for those of a predator, it couldn't have been scarier if it had been a massive python or a full-grown rattlesnake. After that brief moment of frenzy, the viper slithered loose of its own tangles and flowed swiftly across the squashed-shag carpet, as if it were a quickness of water following the course of a rillet. Encountering the baseboard under the window, it reeled itself into a coiled pile once more and raised its head to assess the situation, ready to strike again.

Leading with her good leg, dragging her left, long-practiced grace abandoned, hard-won dignity lost, Leilani clumped in a panicked stagger toward the hallway. Though off-balance with every step, she managed to remain upright, lurching all the way to the door, where she clutched at the knob for support.

She had to escape from the snake. Get to her bedroom. Try to barricade that door against her mother's intrusion.

Sinsemilla was highly amused. Words whooped from her on peals of laughter. "It's not poisonous, you ninny! It's a pet-shop snake. You should've seen the look on your face!"

Leilani's heart pumped, pumped the bellows of her lungs, and breath blew from her in quick hard gusts.

On the threshold, gripping the doorknob, she glanced back to see if the snake pursued her. It remained coiled under the window.

Kneeling on the mattress, her mother bounced like a schoolgirl, making the springs sing and the bedrails rattle, laughing, shiny-eyed with delight over a prank well played. "Don't be such a goof! It's just a little slippery thingy, not a monster!"

Here's the deal: If she fled to her room and barricaded the door, she still wouldn't be safe, because sooner or later she'd have to come out. To get food. To use the bathroom. They were going to be here a few more days, and if the creature was loose in the house, it could be anywhere, and once she came out of her room to go to the toilet or to get something to eat, then it could slip in her room, too, through the one-inch gap under the poorly hung door, or because Sinsemilla let it into her room and then it could be waiting under Leilani's bed, in her bed. She'll have no sanctuary, no peace. Every place will belong to the snake; no place will belong to Leilani, no smallest place. Usually she had only a corner, a nook, a precious retreat; though Sinsemilla might invade any room without warning, Leilani could at least pretend her nook was a private place. But the snake won't allow even a pretense of privacy. She'll have no respite from torment, no relief from the expectation of attack, not even when Sinsemilla is asleep, because the snake is essentially sleepless. This wasn't a way Leilani could live, not a situation she could endure, this was too much, too much, intolerable.

Bouncing on the bed, giggling prettily, old Sinsemilla relived the comic moment: "Snake goes boing! straight in the air, and Leilani goes yikes! just about straight in the air herself, and then she's makin' for the door like two drunk kangaroos in a three-legged sack race!"

Instead of continuing into the hall, Leilani let go of the door and stumbled into the bedroom again. Fear kept her from regaining her usual ease of movement, but also anger; she remained unbalanced by a sense of injustice that quaked through her with 1906 San Francisco intensity, rocking her from good leg to bad, rolling through her in nauseating waves.

"Cute little slippery thingy won't kill you, Leilani. Little thingy just wants what we all want, baby. Little thingy just wants love," Sinsemilla said, drawing out love until it was longer than a twelve-syllable word, and she laughed with strange delight.

Poisonous or not, the snake had struck at Leilani's face, her face, which was the best thing she had going for her, the best thing she might ever have going for her, because in truth she'd probably never develop great bouncing bosoms, regardless of what she had told Micky. When she was sitting in a restaurant or somewhere, with her clatter-clank leg under a table, with her poster-child hand tucked out of sight in her lap, people looked at her face and often smiled, treated her like any other kid, with no sorrow in their eyes, no pity, because nothing in her face said cripple. The snake had struck at her face, and she didn't give a rat's ass whether it was poisonous or not, because it could have changed her life if it had gotten those fangs in her cheek or her nose. Then people would never think of her as sassy, but would always think, What a sad little crippled girl she is, with her little twisted leg and her little gnarled hand and her snake-gnawed face and her snake-chomped nose.

So much to lose.

She must deal with this, and fast; but nothing on the bed would be of help to her in a snake chase, snake fight. The chest of drawers contained but a few articles of clothing, nothing else, because they were living out of suitcases for the short time they were here. In fact, suitcases were open on a bench at the foot of the bed and on a straight-backed chair; neither the luggage nor the furniture suggested a strategy for this battle.

The snake still coiled near the baseboard, under the window. Luminous eyes. Head weaving as if to the music of a charmer's flute.

"Hoing! Yikes!" Sinsemilla had compressed the anecdote into two words. She rollicked even to this abridged version, abusing the bed more than might have any gaggle of giddy girls at a pajama party.

Forgetting to use the brace's mechanical knee joint, swinging her caged leg from the hip, Leilani hitched and clumped toward the closet, which regrettably put the bed between her and the snake. She was convinced that the moment the slippery little reptile was out of her sight, it slithered toward her, coming at her from under the bed.

"Baby, baby," Sinsemilla said, "look at this, look, look. Baby, look, see, look." She extended her hand, offering something. "Baby, it's okay, see, baby, look."

Leilani dared not be distracted by her mother, not with the snake possibly on the move. But Sinsemilla couldn't be ignored any more than you could ignore an asteroid the size of Texas hurtling at Earth with impact predicted for noon Friday.

Sinsemilla's left hand was clenched. She opened it to reveal a wad of bloody Kleenex that Leilani hadn't been able to see before. The crimson tissues dropped out of her grip; in the meaty part of her palm were two small wounds.

"Poor scared thingy bit me when the lights went out."

Dark with clotted blood, the holes no longer oozed.

"Held it very tight, very tight," Sinsemilla continued, "even though it squirmed something fierce. Took a lot of time to work its fangs out of me. Didn't want to tear up my hand, but I didn't want to hurt thingy, either."

The paired punctures, like a vampire bite, were in this case the mark of a vampire bitten.

"Then I held poor scared thingy a long time in the dark, the two of us here on the bed, and after a while thingy stopped squirming. We communed, baby, me and thingy. Oh, baby, we bonded so totally while we waited for the lights to come on. It was the coolest thing ever."

Leilani’s hard-pounding heart seemed to clunk as arrhythmically and as awkwardly as a panicked girl with one shackled leg might run.

Warped Masonite, cracked plastic glides, and a corroded track conspired to prevent her from sliding the closet door with ease. Grunting, she shoved and shook it out of her way.

"No venom, baby. Thingy has fangs but no poison. Don't wet your panties, girl, we're doing less laundry to conserve electricity."

As in Leilani's own closet, a tubular-steel pole, approximately two inches in diameter, spanned the seven-foot width. Only a few women's blouses and men's shirts hung from it.

She glanced down at her feet. No snake.

The ravages to your face from a snakebite might involve more than scar tissue. Maybe nerve damage. Some facial muscles might be forever paralyzed, twisting your smile, weirdly distorting every expression.

The pole rested in U-shaped brackets. She lifted it up and out of the fixtures. The hangers slid off the rod, taking the clothes to the closet floor.

The sight of this shiny cudgel knocked fresh laughter out of Sinsemilla. She clapped her hands, oblivious of the bite, excited by the prospect of the entertainment to come.

Leilani would have preferred a shovel. A garden hoe. But this length of tubular steel was better than bare hands, something to keep the serpent away from her face.

Gripping the pole in her right hand as if it were a shepherd's staff, she used it to help maintain her balance as she stumped toward the foot of the bed.

Waving her hands in the air as a gospel singer waves praises to the heavens while shouting hallelujahs, Sinsemilla said, "Oh, Lani, baby, you should see yourself! You look so completely St. Patrick, in a total snake-driving mood!"

Hitching clumsily but warily alongside the bed, telling herself, Calm. Telling herself, Get a grip.

Leilani wasn't able to act on her own good advice. Fear and anger prevented mind and body from being properly coordinated.

If the snake had struck her face, it might have bitten her eye. It might have left her half blind.

She cracked her hip against the chunky post at the corner of the footboard, fell against the bed, but at once levered herself upright, feeling stupid, feeling clumsy, feeling as though she were the Girl from Castle Frankenstein, lacking only bolts in the neck, an early experiment that hadn't gone half as well as the creature that Karloff played.

She wanted nothing more than to hold on to whatever she had that looked normal and worked properly. This wasn't so much to want. The twisted leg, the deformed hand, the brain too smart for her own good: She couldn't trade those in for standard-issue parts. She hoped only to keep the strong right leg, the good right hand, the pleasing face. Pride had nothing to do with it, either. Considering all her other problems, a pleasing face wasn't just about looking good; it was about survival.

When she rounded the end of the bed, she saw the pet-shop terror where she had left it, stacked in scaly ringlets under the window. Evil-looking head raised. Alert.

"Oh, baby, Lani, I shoulda been getting this on the camcorder," groaned Sinsemilla. "We'd win big bucks on TV — that show, America's Funniest Home Videos.''

Face. Eyes. So much to lose. Get out. Leave. But they'd bring her back. And where would the snake be by then? Somewhere, anywhere, everywhere, waiting. And what if her mother took it with them when they hit the road in the motor home? In that tin can on wheels, already trapped with Preston and Sinsemilla, she'd have this third snake to worry about. There's no way to flee outside when you're cruising at sixty miles per hour.

Holding the pole in front of herself with both hands, Leilani wondered what maximum distance a snake could travel through the air when it flung itself out of a tight coil. She thought maybe she'd read that it could shoot twice its length, in this case five to six feet, which might leave her unbitten, but if this particular specimen happened to be ambitious, if it always gave that extra ten percent, like the hero of some demented children's book — The Little Snake that Could — then she was screwed.

Leilani didn't have a fearsome capacity for violence, maybe not any. She never fantasized about being a whole-of-limb, hard-bodied, martial arts wunderkind. The Klonk way wasn't the way of the Ninja. The Klonk way was to ingratiate, to amuse, to charm, but while you could expect a high degree of success with this approach when you were dealing with schoolteachers and ministers and sweetly daffy pie-baking neighbors, all you would get for trying to charm a snake was your eye on the end of a fang.

"Better go, thingy, better squiggle," Sinsemilla advised gleefully. "Here come bad-ass Lani, and dis here girl mean bidness!"

Because any hesitation would lead to the complete collapse of Leilani's will, she had to act while desperate with fear and fierce with anger. She surprised herself when she choked out a strangled cry, part misery and part fury, as she jabbed the lance hard at the coiled target.

She pinned the thrashing serpent to the baseboard, but only for two seconds, maybe three, and then her sinuous whipping adversary nailed loose.

"Go, thingy, go, go!"

Jabbing, jabbing, Leilani poked the villain once more, crushed it against the baseboard, bearing on it with all her strength, trying to hurt it, cut it in half, but again it writhed free, no easier to kill than a serpent of smoke, as hard to nail down as your father's identity, as what happened to your brother, as just about anything in this screwy life, but all you could do was keep jabbing, keep trying.

As the snake slithered along the wall and under the tall chest of drawers, Sinsemilla bounced on the bed: "Oh, trouble now, trouble with a capital S-n-a-k-e. Thingy's pissed, hidin' under the highboy, him bruised and bitter, him havin' a hissy fit, him broodin' up bad snaky revenge."

Leilani hoped to see bloodstains on the baseboard — or if a snake didn't have exactly blood in it, then a smear of something else that said mortal wounds as clearly as a lot of good red gore would have said it. But she saw no blood, no ichor, no snake syrup of any kind.

The sawn-off circular end of the hollow tubular pole wouldn't be as effective as a sharp knife, but it would cut even tough scales and muscled coils if driven hard enough, if a lot of insistent pressure was put behind it. Her sweaty hands had slipped on the polished steel, but surely some damage had been done to the snake.

The chest of drawers stood against the wall, on four stubby legs. More than live feet high. Four feet wide. Maybe twenty inches deep. The bottom rail cleared the floor by three inches.

Snake; under there somewhere. When Leilani held her breath, she could hear the angry hissing. The reverberant bottom of the lowest drawer amplified the sound in that confined space.

She'd better get a fix on the creature while it was stunned. She backed away, dropped awkwardly to her knees. Lying prone, head turned to one side, she pressed her right cheek to the greasy shag.

If Death had pockets in his robe, they smelled like this filthy carpet. Nauseating waves of righteous anger still churned Leilani, and the rotten-sour sludge of scent that pooled on the wall-to-wall gave her another reason to worry about losing her apple pie.

"Oh, listen to that snaky brain a-hummin', listen to old thingy schemin' up a scheme, like when he wants to kill him a tasty mouse."

The silk-textured light, as red as Sinsemilla's favorite party blouse, barely brightened the nest of shadows under the chest of drawers.

Leilani was gasping, not from exhaustion — she hadn't exerted herself that much — but because she was worried, scared, in a state. As she lay squinting for a glimpse of the beast, her face only six or seven feet from the reptile's crawlspace, she breathed rapidly, noisily, through her mouth, and her tongue translated the stink of the carpet into a taste that made her gag.

Under the chest of drawers, shadows appeared to throb and turn as shadows always do when you stare hard enough at them, but the lipstick light kissed only one form among all the shifting phantom shapes. Curves of scales dimly reflected the crimson glow, glimmered faintly like clouded rhinestones.

"Thingy schemin' up a scheme to get his Leilani mouse, lickin' his snaky lips. Thingy, him be dreamin' what Lani girl gonna taste like."

The serpent huddled all the way back against the wall, and about as far from one side of the chest of drawers as from the other.

Leilani rose to her knees again. She seized the pole with both hands and rammed it hard under the furniture, dead-on for the snake. She struck again, again, again, furiously, burning her knuckles from friction with the shag, and she could hear the critter thrashing, its body slapping loudly against the bottom of the lowest drawer.

On the bed, Sinsemilla romped, cheering one of the combatants, cursing the other, and though Leilani wasn't any longer able to make sense of her mother's words, she figured the woman's sympathies were with the thingy.

She couldn't clearly hear Sinsemilla's ranting because of the snake lashing a crazy drumbeat on the underside of the chest, because of the pole punching into the snarled coils and knocking on the baseboard and rattling against the legs of the furniture — but also because she herself was grunting like a wild beast. Her throat felt scorched. Her raw voice didn't sound like her own: wordless, thick, hideous with a primitive need that she didn't dare contemplate.

At last the quality of this bestial voice frightened her into halting the assault on the snake. It was dead, anyway. She had killed it some time ago. Under the tall chest of drawers, nothing flopped, nothing hissed.

Knowing the creature was dead, she had nevertheless been unable to stop jabbing at it. Out of control. And who did those three words bring to mind? Out of control. Like mother, like daughter. Leilani's accelerator had been pressed to the floorboard by fear, rather than by drugs, also by anger, but this distinction didn't matter as much to her as did the discovery that she, like Sinsemilla, could lose control of herself under the right circumstances.

Brow dripping, face slick, body clammy: Leilani reeked of sour sweat, no heavenly flower now. On her knees, shoulders hunched, head cocked, wild damp hair hanging in tangles over her face, hands still clenched with such rage that she couldn't release the pole, she made her bid for being Quasimodo reborn, only nine and a return to Notre Dame still years away.

She felt diminished, humiliated, shaken — no less afraid than she'd been a moment ago, but now for different reasons. Some serpents were more frightening than others: the specimens that didn't come in ventilated pet-shop boxes, that never slithered through any field or forest, serpents invisible that inhabited the deeper regions of your mind. Until now, she hadn't been aware that she herself provided a nest for such potent snakes of fear and anger, or that her heart could be inflamed and set racing by their sudden bite, so quickly reducing her to these spasms, these half-mad headlong frenzies, out of control.

Like a gargoyle above, Sinsemilla leaned over the footboard of the bed, her face shadowed but her head haloed by red lamplight, glittery-eyed with excitement. "Thingy, him a hard-ass stubborn little crawly boy."

Leilani didn't actually make sense of those words, and she was saved only because she met her mother's eyes and saw where they were focused. Not on her daughter. On the nearest end of the makeshift cudgel, just behind Leilani's two-hand grip.

The tubular-steel rod was hollow, two inches in diameter. The snake, not dead after all, seeking refuge when the battering stopped, had squirmed inside the pole. By this pipeline, it traveled unseen from beneath the chest of drawers to Leilani's exposed back, where now it slowly extruded on the floor behind her like the finished product of a snake-making machine.

Whether the serpent moved slowly because it was hurt or because it was being cautious to deceive, Leilani didn't know, didn't care. Just as the full length of it oozed from the hollow cudgel, she seized it by the tail. She knew that snakehandlers always gripped immediately under the head to immobilize the jaws, but fear for her one good hand caused her to choose the nether end.

Slick it was, wet-slick and therefore injured, but still lively enough to wriggle fiercely in a quest for freedom.

Before the snake could wind back on itself and bite her hand, Leilani shot to her feet faster than her braced leg had ever before allowed, playing cowgirl-with-lariat as she rose from the floor. Swung like a rope, stretched long by centrifugal force that thwarted its inward-coiling efforts, the reptile parted the air with a swoosh louder than its hiss. She swung it twice as she stumbled two steps toward the chest of drawers, the bared fangs missing her mother's face by inches on the first revolution, and then during the third swing, the serpent met the furniture with a crack of skull that took all the wriggle out of it forever.

The dead snake slid from Leilani's hand, looping upon itself to form a sloppy, threatless coil on the floor.

Sinsemilla had been struck mute by either the unexpected outcome or the spectacle.

Although she could let go of the broken serpent and use the pivoting trick with her braced leg to turn her back on the scaly mess, Leilani couldn't turn away as easily from the mental image of herself in a fit of grunting, gasping, snake-killing rage and terror. Like a foxtail bramble, this hateful picture would work its way deep into the flesh of her memory, beyond the hope of excision, and prickle as long as she lived.

Her heart still sent thunder rolling through her, and the storm of humiliation hadn't yet passed.

She refused to cry. Not here. Not now. Neither fear nor anger, nor even this unwanted new knowledge of herself, could wring tears from her in front of her mother. The world didn't have enough misery in it to force her to reveal her vulnerability before Sinsemilla.

Her usual ease of movement still eluded Leilani; however, when she thought through the movement of each step before taking it, like a patient learning to walk again after spinal injury, she was able to proceed to the open bedroom door with a measure of dignity.

In the hall, a violent fit of the shakes overcame her, rattling teeth to teeth, knocking elbows against ribs, but she willed steel into her good knee and kept moving.

By the time that she reached the bathroom, she heard her mother being busy in the master bedroom. She looked back just as a pulse of icy light filled that open doorway. The flash from a camera. The snake wasn't road kill, but apparently the artist in Sinsemilla had been inspired by the grisly grace of the serpentine carcass resting on a grave cloth of orange shag.

Another pulse.

Leilani went into the bathroom, switched on the light and the fan. She closed the door and locked her mother out.

She turned on the shower, as well, but she didn't undress. Instead, she lowered the lid on the toilet and sat there.

With the hum of the fan and the noise of the running water as cover, she did what she had never done in front of her mother or Preston Maddoc. Here. Now. She wept.