The Snake

Ten

His technique was deplorable, but his stamina was prodigious, and he was sweet in a dumb kind of way. Stamina and sweetness normally ranked well down on Jane Redpath's scale of masculine virtues, so it remained an open question in her mind as to whether or not she would have gone to bed with him if he hadn't offered to go to the menagerie with her. At this point the matter was purely academic.

"This point" was 3:30 in the morning. The alarm clock was clamoring, and here he was again, looming over her, undepleted and eager, broaching her sore pussy with a miraculous erection. She opened to him, halfway between weariness and helplessness, and wondered if she couldn't catch a catnap in the few minutes until he was done. But instead she responded with enthusiasm to his thrust, and finished up squealing with pain and delight.

While she was showering, he parted the curtain and stepped in with her.

She felt him against her, and realized, incredible as it might seem, that he was prepared for another assault, so she turned on the cold water full force, and even his Phoenix-like member wasn't up to coping with such a deterrent. He dwindled, and then she had to put up only with his cavorting and hollering and pounding his chest and spitting streams of water and a few other locker-room antics. Finally she turned off the water and jumped out of the shower stall, and before he could rouse himself again, without bothering to dry herself thoroughly, put on her jeans and T-shirt. He tried to take them off again, but she fended him off and chivvied him into getting dressed. She diverted him while they drank coffee by praising him for his courage in offering to accompany her to the park. She told him that he was the balmiest man in the sense of being gutsy; she added quickly-she had ever met. His chest-and nothing else, she noted thankfully-swelled with pride.

It was probably true, she thought, as he sipped his hot coffee and made a thoroughly unconvincing disclaimer of his bravery. He was not only one of the bravest men she had ever known, but incontestably the stupidest. The stupidest girl she had ever met was Jane Redpath.

They prepared to leave. She gathered up her tripod and slung her Hasselblad over her shoulder. Jeff stuck a hefty tire iron in his belt, picked up a forked wooden stick and a burlap bag, and they were ready. She thought the tire iron was a pretty good idea, but she wasn't so sure about the forked stick and bag. They reminded her that there was a snake in the park. She had given it some thought earlier, but rationalized her fears in terms of the enormous size of the park. Still, the knowledge of the snake's presence had made her squirm, and she might very well have postponed the expedition if her paper hadn't already been badly overdue.

She warned Jeff that she didn't want him to do anything silly like going off on his own to hunt for the snake. He said the stick was just a precaution, and relax, baby, relax.

In the taxi that took them downtown through deserted streets, he groped her, naturally, and she tried to divert him by being serious and unsexy.

She went on about her photographic project, which was to constitute the thesis for her Physiology M. A., but it didn't slow him down.

"God, I love your apples," he said fervently, with his hand inside her T-shirt.

"Whenever people think of sleep problems," she said in what she hoped was a pedantic, sedative voice, "they tend to think exclusively in terms of human beings. But it's obvious that we can learn much from animals…"

He was nuzzling her neck with his handsomely broken athlete's nose. The cab driver, who drove with his left hand extended through the window, as if to cool his fingers, kept turning his head around at intervals to check the activity in the back of the car.

"Jeff," she whispered. "Stop it, everybody's looking at us."

He placed his hand between her legs. "I can't get enough. You know?"

"How could I not know?" She tried to pin his hand down, but realized that he would take it as a playful test of strength, so she stopped. "Look, in case we meet that snake… I mean, it's not too likely and all, but… I'm scared, Jeff."

It was a fresh effort to distract him, and it succeeded. He didn't remove his hand, nothing as definitive as that, but he stopped trying to poke into her.

"No sweat, baby. If we ran across it, we'll just catch it, and that’s that."

She gave him an only partly feigned shiver. "It's dangerous. I'm so scared.

How are you going to catch it?"

He had already told her how, in detail. He had spent the previous summer in the Southwest on some kind of archaeological dig, and in the evenings, in his free time, had gone out catching rattlers with his colleagues. "Great sport" was how he had described it. But he didn't mind repeating himself.

"It's simple. All you need is a forked stick. You spear them just behind the head with the stick, then you grab them there with your hand — behind the head, so they can't nip you-and just pop 'em. in a bag. Nothing to it.

I hope we run into the one in the park so I can show you.

"But it isn't a rattler. They think it might be a cobra."

"No difference. A snake is a snake. What you have to keep in mind is that snakes have a very low I.Q. When they're threatened, and can't run away, they attack. Well, they have this low intelligence rating, and all they can think of is that they have to bite something. So you give them the stick, and they bite that."

In his enthusiasm he removed his hand from her crotch to gesture, and forgot to put it back. For this relief, much thanks. "They bite the stick?"

She tried to put an enormous amount of curiosity and wonderment in her voice. "And then what?"

"Then you shake them off the stick and pin them down. It's easy."

"Easy." She strove for a tone combining scepticism and admiration.

"Anything's easy, if you really know what you're doing."

He prattled on with earnest enthusiasm as the driver entered the 97th Street transverse and headed eastward through the park. All she had to do was keep him going for another five minutes. The trip back was another matter, but maybe she would be able to think of something.

The snake glided onto the pavement, dry again since the cloudburst. It moved slowly, cautiously, as its tongue brought in the mingled odour substances of many animals.

Once or twice it lifted its head high and peered into a cage. Even when the cages were empty, the odour-substances were strong.

In one cage, two lions were asleep; their powerful smell was familiar to the snake and disturbing. One of the lions twitched uneasily in its sleep before the snake moved on.

The cab driver dropped them at Fifth Avenue and 65th Street. They entered the park through the Children's Gate, and walked toward the Arsenal, ivy-covered red brick, where the park's administrative offices were housed. It was dark, except for a modest floodlight over the steps, and a faint reflection at a downstairs window from lights somewhere in the interior of the building.

Now that they were actually here, Jane felt nervous. If Jeff had any fears or qualms, he didn't show them. Well, that was the wrong way to put it. He didn't show them because he hadn't any. He was fully tooled up for the venture: tire iron in his belt for disposing of muggers, forked stick over his shoulder to deal with snakes. And if there was a night watchman, he would undoubtedly disarm him with sheer ebullience.

They skirted the Arsenal to the left, walking softly on their sneakered feet, circled to their right, and came into the menagerie. It was still an hour or so before dawn, and the menagerie was dark and shadowy except for the thin spread of light from the spaced lampposts. Behind them, on Fifth Avenue, the buildings loomed blackly, except for an isolated light at a window here and there, where, she thought, some despairing soul waited for the dawn or the resolution needed to end his life.

"Okay," Jeff said. "Where do we start?"

He spoke in his normal voice, and in the night-time hush it echoed like a gunshot.

"Shsh. Quiet. You'll wake everything up."

He surprised her by lowering his voice to a creditable whisper. "You're gonna wake them all up anyway with your flash."

"I'm not using a flash. I'm doing a time exposure with a very fast film.

ASA 400, It should work with the light from the streetlamps."

Something was moving to her right. She turned quickly and saw two points of light. She gasped, and clung to Jeff, and then realized that an animal was watching her through the bars of its cage. It was a shadowy gray bulk, and she couldn't make out what it was.

"Jesus!" Trembling, she rested her head on his chest. "It scared the shit out of me."

"Relax, you're with Jeff, okay?" His voice was soft, he was a terrific whisperer, an ace, better than she was herself, and he was patting her ass caressingly. "I like these apples, too."

"Please, not in front of the animals." She pushed him away, took a deep breath, and decided that she had herself together again. "Let's go to work."

She moved on to the next cage. The plaque read: BARBARY SHEEP. She peered inside. At first the cage seemed to be empty, but when her eyes became accustomed to the gloom she could make out the sheep. There were two of them, lying toward the back of the cage, tan animals with strongly curved horns. Both were motionless, asleep.

"I'm going to get these. Please keep quiet."

He watched as she opened the telescoped metal legs of the tripod and fitted the Hasselblad to it. She adjusted the settings, sighted through the finder, then decided to make an adjustment. Behind her, Jeff gave a tiny cluck of impatience and breathed heavily on the back of her neck.

She sensed that he was about to pat her ass again, too.

She said, "You're making me nervous. Go take a walk, okay?" He grunted and looked surly; he didn't like being dismissed. He didn't like standing around and doing nothing, either. He needed something to do, even if it was nothing more than a brush with a mugger. "What I mean — check out the other cages, see what I can shoot next. Okay?"

"Okay."

He strode off to the south end of the line of cages. She sighted on the sheep and felt for the shutter release. Before she could press it there was a sudden outcry, shrill, panicky (or so it seemed to her), and then pandemonium. From nearby cages and from within the animal houses she could hear the roar of big cats, the chatter of monkeys, indefinable screams, whines, snarls, even the barking of the seals in their pool.

Through the finder she saw the sheep bound to their feet, bleating. He's done it, she thought, the clumsy oaf somehow startled them and woke up the whole fucking zoo. She whirled, catching up the camera and tripod, and started toward him angrily. Then she stopped dead. He was crouched, his back to her, facing a snake, the longest and lithest looking she had ever seen or even imagined. Its head was high off the ground, its mouth was agape.

She let out a cry of terror, and knew in that instant that her reaction was no different from that of the other animals. The urge to turn away and run was overwhelming, but she knew she couldn't desert Jeff. The snake horrified her, but there was something thrilling in the way Jeff faced it-in the knotted back muscles standing out against his damp T shirt, the alertness of his posture, the athlete's grace and self-confidence.

He was moving the forked stick toward the snake and whispering softly, encouragingly, laughing a little at himself: "Toro. Ho, toro, make your move."

The snake was erect, tensed, threatening, hissing hollowly. Its body seemed incredibly long and slender, the neck swelling on a vertical aids, the eyes wide and menacing. Barely aware of what she was doing, she planted the tripod and put her eye to the finder. She placed her finger on the shutter release. Peering through the finder, holding her breath, she saw Jeff extend the stick at full length. She pressed the shutter release almost by reflex, and it seemed to trigger off movement. The picture in the finder became unfrozen. The snake and the stick seemed to meet, and then Jeff dropped the stick with a clatter. He cried out. She shut her eyes, shaking with fear. Jeff's voice came from directly in front of her. "The bugger ran up the stick and bit me."

She opened her eyes. His left hand was clasped over his right forearm and he seemed flushed, but he was calm. "Oh my God!"

"It's okay," Jeff said. "It's gone. It ran away."

He lifted his left hand from his arm and she saw two small spots of oozing blood an inch below the crook of his elbow.

"Oh, Jeff, Jeff, what can we do? We have to get you to a hospital."

He slipped his belt out of his trousers, looped it around his arm just below the biceps, and pulled it very tight. "The thing of it is," he said quietly, "the thing is to keep calm, because if you get excited the heart pumps quicker and the poison circulates that much faster. So everybody concerned has to relax, okay?"

Behind her, a voice called out roughly, and she turned, her heart thumping. A figure was moving toward them hulkingly out of the shadows.

A brilliant light came on and blinded her.

For a brief time, Jane Redpath had company in the waiting room, a middle-aged black man with a deep laceration under his right eye that seeped sluggishly into his bloody handkerchief. He was naked to the waist above a pair of blue jeans and bed slippers, and he chatted amiably while he waited to be tended to. He had actually been on his way into the emergency room when they had come in-she and Jeff and the two cops-but he held no resentment at being superseded. The cops had been called by the menagerie night watchman, the man who had flashed his light at them after Jeff was bitten. At first he had been more concerned with their trespassing than with getting help, but he had moved quickly when Jane had screamed at him in a hysterical rage. Jeff had quieted her, and apologized to the watchman.

The police car had responded quickly, and driven them to East Side Hospital, where Jeff was rushed into the emergency ward at once. They had not allowed her to accompany him. He had walked in under his own power, smiling at her and telling her not to worry, and to go home and catch some sleep. He'd give her a ring later on.

The man with the injured eye told her that his wound had been inflicted by his wife, wielding a high-heeled shoe. They had quarrelled, and she had waited until he was asleep before hitting him.

"But she was real sorry, you know," the man said. "She didn't mean to hit me in no eye, but only in the head. But in the dark, she aimed bad."

Jane murmured something, sitting on the edge of a soft chair and wishing that she smoked. The nurse at the desk was busy writing up reports, and she would frown at them from time to time, as though the man's soft voice interfered with her concentration.

"She would not have hit me in the eye on purpose," the man said. "She know where her bread is buttered. 1 am a jeweller, and with this hurt eye it will be trouble putting the loupe in the eye. You understand?"

But you can use it in the left eye, Jane thought dully.

"You might say I could use the loupe in the left eye," the man said, "but I never could use the left eye for that. You understand?"

"Habit," Jane said.

"Habit," the man said with satisfaction. He examined his bloody handkerchief and then returned it to his eye. "That's what it is, Miss, just old habit."

The telephone rang. Jane watched as the nurse answered it briefly. The nurse told the man with the injured eye to go into Room E. The man nodded politely to Jane and went into the emergency ward. Jane got up and walked to the reception desk. The nurse looked up from her papers, frowning.

Jane said, "Can you find out how he is?"

"I can't disturb them now," the nurse said. "There's a whole team in there working on your…" She paused.

"Friend," Jane said. "We're awfully close friends."

"The best thing is to sit down and compose yourself. They're doing everything they can in there to help him."

Jane went back to her seat. She shut her eyes and cried inwardly, without tears. When she opened her eyes a man in a white jacket was standing over her.

"I'm Dr. Moran."

"Yes." She couldn't say any more. The doctor looked grave.

"We've administered a polyvalent serum, he seems to be responding moderately well. He's remarkably calm, and that helps."

"Then he's going to be all right?"

The doctor made an ambiguous movement of his head that was neither affirmation nor denial. "He wasn't able to describe what the snake looked like with any certainty. Did you get a good look at-"

"Oh my God!" Jane said. "I left it in the police car! My camera. I took a picture of it."

Dr. Moran was sprinting toward the emergency ward entrance.

Within ten minutes of receipt of the report from the RMP car that had brought Jeff to the hospital, the police put two Emergency Service Unit trucks and every man and vehicle the Two-two could muster into a broad area surrounding the menagerie. In the darkness, the park glittered with the rays of flashlights and the powerful searchlight beams mounted on the ESU trucks.

The police were to work into the daylight hours before their fruitless search was called off.

Fumbling for the phone in the darkness, Converse knew with certainty that it would be Eastman, and it was.

"Sorry again. We have another victim of the snake." Eastman paused, as if to allow him to say something, perhaps to echo his, Eastman's, own grimness, but he was silent, and Eastman went on. "I'm at East Side Hospital. We have a picture of the snake. It's being developed. Can you come over?"

"Right away."

He hung up, and was already on his feet, groping for his clothing, when he realized that he had not even inquired about the victim, asked whether he was alive or dead. But, then, Eastman hadn't mentioned it, either.

When the snake left the menagerie area it did not return to its tree but ranged far afield from it, questing, as it had been ever since the rain had stopped, driven once again by an age-old imperative of its species.

It ran northward, lo the more uncultivated section of the park. Its movements were swift, with a quality of urgency. It did not move in a straight line, but quartered an area, delving into wild places, squirming into heavily overgrown patches, probing with its small head.

It was already light when it came upon a burrow concealed under a fallen tree in a tangle of heavy growth. Its previous occupant was a small animal, perhaps a family of small animals, but the faintness of the doors analyzed by the Jacobson's organ indicated that the burrow had been vacant for some time.

The snake cautiously broached the entrance to the burrow with its head, careful not to disturb the brush that covered it. It slid downward a short distance to make certain it was uninhabited (if there was an animal inside, it would leave in panic at the first appearance of the head), that it was large enough to accommodate the snake's length, that it had at least one additional exit.

The burrow fulfilled the snake's requirements in every way. It slid all the way inside. It tried the second exit hole, again careful not to dislodge the brush that hid the opening but would not obstruct a quick escape if one became necessary.

The snake coiled its long body comfortably inside the burrow and went to sleep.

A few minutes after Dr. Moran had left her, one of the cops who had driven them to the hospital came running in with Jane's Hasselblad. He went straight through into the emergency ward. He came out a short while later, and stopped when he recognized her.

"Be okay, honey, be okay."

"Did you see him?"

"Just for a second."

She wanted to ask if he was in pain, but instead she said, "Did he say anything?"

"No. I mean, not that I beard. He might have been talking, but I wasn't there long enough. They just took the camera and I came out."

"Yes. Well. Thanks, officer. For everything."

"Be okay. You'll see."

He touched the bill of his cap to her and left. A moment later a heavy-set, ruddy faced man came hurrying in. He was wearing slacks and a mesh shirt, and she heard him tell the nurse that he was Captain Something-or-other before going through the emergency ward entrance.

Presently, the black man came out, wearing a T-shirt which someone must have given him. There was a neat bandage under his eye, very white against his skin. He came over to where she sat.

"See? Never hold the loupe with this thing on."

"I hope you'll be all right," Jane said.

"Be all right, all right," the man said. "But have to lay off a few weeks, because I can't use the loupe in the other eye." He grinned. "Wife hear that she gonna get mad all over again. Make her wish she done hit me in the other eye."

After he had gone, Jane tried to catch the nurse's eye, but the nurse kept plugging away at her reports. Some nurse. An accountant. Jane looked at her watch: 5:30. It was probably beginning to get light out by now, but you couldn't tell in this windowless room. Dr. Moran appeared in the doorway, smiled at her, then snapped his fingers and went back into the emergency ward.

She conjured up an image of Jeff. He was lying on his back on a table, speaking to the doctors surrounding him. "Keep calm, fellers, and we'll all pull together and get this thing whipped. Teamwork and calm right?" Her eyes filled with tears. Jeff-such a dumb shit of a jock, all muscle and cock and an empty attic. Right? Wrong! He was a goddamn angel!

She remembered how he had calmed her down, and then calmed the watchman and persuaded him to go for help. While the watchman was gone he had told her that he was going to lie down, and that she mustn't get alarmed, that lying down was best for slowing up the action of the venom. He stretched out on the pavement, holding his tourniquet tight with his left hand, and when she asked him if it hurt he said it didn't, all he felt was just a kind of pins-and-needles effect…

A young man came loping into the reception room from outside. He spoke to the nurse, who picked up her telephone. The young man waited impatiently.

He was dressed in a torn T-shirt inscribed: Coxswain, Venice Gondola Crew.

The nurse nodded to him and he charged through the emergency ward door just as Dr. Moran came out again.

Dr. Moran sat down in a facing chair. His knees made soft contact with hers. He had great dark Irish eyes, and he brought them very close to her.

It made her dizzy to look at them. He told her that Jeff was holding his own, and that if they were able to identify the snake they would then probably inject him with the specific antidotal serum…

He spoke in a soothing, warm voice, meanwhile bearing down on her with those luminous bedroom eyes. She began to sob again. Dr. Moran tilted his head solicitously and patted her shoulder. Then she felt his hand slip down and touch her breast.

"There now," Dr. Moran said, "there now." His thumb was caressing the rim of her breast. Therapy, right? "Would you like me to give you something to calm you down?"

Give yourself something, she thought, give yourself something to calm your pecker down. She stopped crying and said, "No, I don't need anything. I'm okay."

In fact, she thought, I'm better than okay. I'm quite calm, and if he doesn't take his finger away I'll break it off for him. I'm calm, she thought, because that's the way to honour Jeff, that terrific, courageous, wonderful fucking machine. You're too honest and simple to die, Jeff, she thought, and moved back in her chair, removing her breast from the gently palpating thumb of Dr. Moran, of the deep velvet eyes, the shitty eyes…

"Feeling a little better?" Dr. Moran said.

"Much better," she said calmly. Boy, she was so calm she could taste it.

"And instead of sitting here and trying to feel me up, doctor, why don't you go back in there and see if you can't help save my Jeffs life?"

The picture had been enlarged to five by nine, and it was still wet. It had been placed on a table in an empty room in the emergency ward, and Captain Eastman was studying it from a distance, with a mingled expression of revulsion and fascination. The picture was surprisingly sharp and well defined, considering the meager light it had been shot in. The anterior portion of the snake was curled upward on the stick, and its mouth was gaped wide open over Jeff's arm, whether a moment before biting or just afterwards, Eastman couldn't tell. The snake's posterior section trailed off at the bottom of the stick, long and tensile, strongly curved, as if to brace itself against the pavement for the drive up the stick.

The phone rang. The receptionist said that Converse had arrived.

"Send him right in." He went out into the corridor and beckoned to Converse when he came through the door. Converse ran toward him. "Thanks for getting here so quick." He led the way into the room.

"How is the patient?" Converse said.

"Not too bad. He's young and strong, so…

Converse had spotted the picture and brushed by him. He bent over the table and let out a low whistle.

"You recognize it?" Eastman said.

"It's a black mamba." Converse leaned over the picture for another look. He straightened up and said, almost reverently, "God, it's beautiful…Converse was on the telephone, trying to raise a night man at the Bronx Zoo.

He told Eastman that, although the black mamba was of the genus Dendroaspis, which was covered by the polyvalent antivenin, the zoo had a specific black mamba serum in the refrigerator in the reptile house; he would ask to have it rushed down to the hospital.

Eastman said, "I'll find another phone and call the precinct up in that area, I think it's the Four-eight, and ask them to shoot the stuff down in a squad car. After that, I'd like you to come out to the menagerie with me."

"Okay. But don't bet that it's hanging around there. Black mambas are very wide-ranging snakes, and they move like something shot out of a gun. It could be a couple of miles away from the menagerie by now."

Eastman went out into the corridor to look for a telephone. He paused by the open door of Room D, where the Code Blue team was working on Jeff.

"Oh, Christ."

The team of a half-dozen doctors and nurses was gone. There were only two figures beside the table. One was Dr. Shapiro, with a cigarette in his mouth. The other was a nurse. Shapiro, with his hands at his sides, was looking down at the patient. The nurse was attaching a tag to the patient's big toe.

Eastman went into the room. "What happened?" he said to Shapiro. The figure on the table was very still.

"We lost him," Shapiro said. He didn't look at Eastman. "We thought he was going to make it, and then he just went out, he simply blinked out on us."

"Damn," Eastman said.

"When he began to go out it took us by surprise. We had thought he was going to pull out of it. Somebody got the bright idea of turning him over, and we saw the hives on his back." Shapiro struck his thigh with his fist.

"If they had appeared on the front of him, as they usually do, we'd have been able to shoot some adrenalin into him."

"What did the hives mean?"

"Anaphylactic shock. Antivenin is extracted from the blood sera of horses that have been injected with dosages of snake poison. There's a class of people who are profoundly allergic to horse serum and go into anaphylactic: shock if they're given it. It can be fatal if it's not treated."

Eastman nodded. "I've heard of that. But I thought there was a way of testing it beforehand."

"There is." Shapiro's voice was weighted with fatigue, and Eastman thought, Everybody is bone tired, all the good guys are weary, and only the snake is full of energy. "But you don't stop to test for allergic reaction when somebody is dying of snakebite. You have to hurry. In other circumstances we'd have recognized the symptoms of anaphylactic shock right off the bat.

The trouble is, they're very similar to the symptoms of neurotoxic poisoning from snakebite, so we couldn't tell." Cigarette smoke was curling up around his eyes, and he blinked. "The hives were something else, but they were on his back and we didn't see them until it was too late." He turned to face Eastman fully for the first time. "I'm getting disgusted with people being killed by that snake."

Eastman said, "I thought doctors didn't smoke."

Shapiro looked at the cigarette in his hand. "I thought so myself. It's that damn snake. It has me doing things I don't do."

"Yeah," Eastman said. "Can you spare one of those?"

Shapiro gave him the cigarette. "Take this one. I don't smoke."

Eastman took a deep puff. The filter end was wet. "Has anybody told that girl out there yet?"

"I'm going right out there to tell her."

"I'll do it. I'm used to it."

"Well, if it comes to that, I'm used to it, too."

Eastman started toward the door. "I'm sorry, doc."

"Tell it to him." Shapiro inclined his head toward the figure on the table.

As Eastman left the room he saw Converse turn out into the corridor.

"I got through to the zoo," Converse said. "You got hold of the police up there?"

"Not yet."

Converse frowned. "Let's go, captain, that serum could make a big difference."

"Not really," Eastman said.