The Snake

Three

The snake woke shortly before dawn. At once, its long tongue began to flick in and out through a rostra opening in the margin of its upper jaw that allowed it to emerge even when its mouth was shut.

The two tips of the forked tongue fitted into ducts communicating with the snake's Jacobson's organ, which lay in a depression in the roof of the mouth. The sensory epithelium of the Jacobson's organ responded to odour substances conveyed to it by the tongue, and interpreted them as a chemical computer might do, in terms of the quality of the atmosphere, of the presence of another animal, of prey.

The findings of the Jacobson's organ disquieted the snake. And so, when it slipped through the branches of the tree and down the trunk, it chose not to wander off in search of water. Instead, moving in slow ripples, it drank the dew from the grass. Then, despite its hunger, it did not go in search of food, but wound back up the tree until it found the place where it had been before.

It slept again.

At much the same moment, Arthur Bennett stumbled on a body. His first thought, when he saw it lying on the walk, was that it was some other wino sleeping it off. But when he saw its size, he decided that it was that big bastard who had beaten him up a month ago and damn near punched his eye out.

His immediate impulse was to cut out, but when he touched his eye, still scabbed in the process of healing, he got mad. Stepping forward a pace, he launched a thudding kick to the ribs. He was bringing his foot back for a second kick-although by now he had remembered that the bastard who had punched his eye was a black guy-when he saw the dark blood staining the front of the T-shirt and the linen jacket.

Bennett recoiled, then stepped forward again and looked at the body. The eyes were open and glassy. One arm was bent back underneath. The white captain's hat had fallen away and lay nearby, incongruously balanced on its rim. There was a good-looking box a little distance away. He looked dead, but to make sure, Bennett let him have a couple more kicks in the ribs.

He found the wallet, first try, sticking up from the breast pocket of the linen jacket. fie cackled with pleasure. He leafed through the wallet quickly and gasped with delight: bills a half-inch thick-twenties and fifties and even a few hundreds. He slipped the money into his pants pocket, and looked around him. Nothing in sight. He began to work feverishly, eager for what other wonders he might discover. In the jacket pockets he found a pack with half a dozen cigarettes in it, some keys, a crumpled dollar bill, two packages of matches, a disposable lighter, a packet of salted peanuts, a bloody crumpled handkerchief, some foreign coins. In the body's left-hand pants pocket he found a package of condoms, in the right a handful of U.S. coins. Everything went into his own pockets. When he had picked the body clean he put the sailor cap on his matted white hair, and giggled when it slid down over his ears. He picked up the box-the cover was busted, but it was still a fine box-and put it under his arm.

He decided to get out of the park real fast. He had entered on Fifth Avenue near the Metropolitan Museum, not too worried about walking through, because no self-respecting mugger would waste his time on an old wino bum (though some of the mean ones would hurt winos just for laughs), but now, with his loot, he felt different.

He pushed the hat to the back of his head so it wouldn't swamp him, tucked the box under his arm, and hurried along the path toward Central Park West.

The snake basked on the surface of a large black rock a short distance from the tree it had sheltered in, its eleven-foot length spread out to the sun in an extended sigmoidal flex. At 7:30 A.M. on the third day of the heat wave, the sun already burned relentlessly through the city haze.

The snake was poikilothermal-a cold-blooded animal. Its temperature was not constant, like that of most animals, but modulated with the temperature of its environment. Because cold exerts a narcotic, potentially killing effect, snakes predominate in the tropics and subtropics and thin out in number and species in the temperate regions moving toward the poles. Yet, a common viper is known to inhabit an area above the Arctic Circle and parts of Siberia.

Scarcely stirring, the snake warmed up its blood until some instinctive thermostatic reflex warned it that it had reached the optimum temperature. Then it slid away from its exposed position on the rock and into the shaded underbrush near its tree.

Matt Olssen's body was discovered a little after 8:30 in the morning by a Parks Department truck carrying grass-cutting equipment. The police were notified, and an RMP car was dispatched to the scene from the Central Park Precinct, located in the 85th Street transverse. The Medical Examiner's office sent out its death wagon to collect the remains, which were brought to the morgue on First Avenue, near Bellevue Hospital, and assigned a refrigerated drawer not too far removed from the remains of Ramon Torres.

Examination of Matt Olssen's effects, which had been stripped from him at the scene and placed in a transparent plastic bag, offered no clues to his identification. A label in the linen jacket indicated that it had been purchased in Hong Kong. The shoes were of French make. There were no labels on the T-shirt, the underpants, or the socks. The pockets were empty except for a few crumbs of food; there was not so much as a handkerchief in them. The only hint as to the victim's identity, if it could be called that, was a red and purple tattoo across one buttock, reading: BETTY.

But, later in the day, the corpse was identified by its fingerprints, which were on record as the result of a number of arrests over the past five years, all for aggravated assault. An address on the East Side was given for one Betty Parker Olssen, listed as the victim's wife.

Arthur Bennett locked himself in a booth in a washroom of the main branch of the N. Y. Public Library, and counted the money in the wallet he had taken from the dead sailor, whimpering with disbelief as he rolled off the numbers in a hoarse whisper. He stuffed the money (nine hundred and eighty-four dollars) into the pocket that held the coins, the disposable lighter, the keys, the salted peanuts, the matchbooks and the bloodstained handkerchief.

He left the library, bought and drank a pint of muscatel, and then wandered down to the Bowery, picking up eighty cents in handouts along the way.

He sold the peaked sailor hat for seventy-five cents, but couldn't dispose of the box, for which he was asking a dollar. When he became too persistent in pushing the sale of the box, someone became annoyed, grabbed it away from him, smashed it by jumping on it, and then threw the remnants into the street where, in time, passing cars splintered it further.

Near noon, two men cornered him in a doorway, beat him unconscious, and took his money.

The olive slate colour of the snake's top blended with the shadowed leaves of the tree, and the starling, lighting on a bough, did not see it.

The snake's vision was highly developed, with particular acuity to perception of movement, and, because of the placement of the eyes at the side of the head, commanding a large field of view. It had picked up the starling in flight and watched it flutter to its perch.

The bird was four feet from the snake's head and facing outward from the tree. The snake's darting tongue picked up the odour of prey. Unmoving, alert, tensed, the snake stared at the bird. Then, anchoring itself by its prehensile tail, mouth wide open, it shot forward in a blur of speed, and sank its fangs into the bird's body. The bird squawked and flew off. But before it had gone twenty feet its wings began to flutter erratically and it dropped to the ground.

The snake did not pursue. It stretched out on the tree, its head hanging downward, its eyes focused on the movements of the bird. Even when the bird struggled feebly into a patch of undergrowth and out of sight of the snake's vision, the snake did not follow. It waited patiently for perhaps five more minutes before it circled down the tree. On the ground it trailed the bird unerringly by means of the special scent left by an injected prey.

The snake's poison organ was a digestive juice in the form of a highly specialized proteiriacious saliva. Thus, the snake's venom, in addition to killing the prey, had at the same time begun the process of digesting it.

Ile starling was dead when the snake found it in the brush. The snake manoeuvred its length until the bird's head lay directly in front of its mouth. The bones supporting the snake's lower jaws moved in the skull, the elastic ligaments between the halves of the jaw stretched, and the mouth opened to an astounding width which would accommodate the swallowing of a prey far bigger than the starling, and even larger than the diameter of the snake itself.

Ile snake hooked the teeth of one side of its mouth into the bird's head.

Using this purchase as a fulcrum, it pushed the other side of the mouth forward a short distance, engaged the teeth (which were useless for chewing and hence required the snake to swallow its prey whole), then repeated the ratcheting process, opposite side after opposite side. The recurved shape of the teeth, acting as hooks, would have prevented a struggling prey from escaping once it had been engaged by the teeth.

The snake gradually ingested the starling, not so much swallowing it as drawing itself over it.

Around 4:30 in the afternoon, two policemen arrived at Betty Olssen's small apartment house to perform the uncomfortable duty of informing her that her husband had been killed. As always, in such instances, they sought the cooperation of a neighbour, on the theory that the involvement of a familiar face would somewhat cushion the shock. But of the first three people they found at home, one claimed not to know Betty Olssen, and two declined, on the basis that they didn't get along with her. One of these, the superintendent of the house, was quite emphatic in his refusal to help. The bitch was nothing but trouble, and, what's more, in the seven years she had lived in the house, had never tipped him so much as a thin dime, even at Christmas.

The policemen decided to proceed without assistance. They rang the widow's bell and, after an awkwardly oblique approach that she fathomed in the first seconds, broke the news of the discovery of her husband's body. They asked her to be so good as to accompany them to the morgue to complete the identification.

The widow, who was pretty, and wearing a revealing nightdress, took the news calmly, even with a certain grim satisfaction. "I knew the crazy sonofabitch would get himself killed sooner or later."

One of the cops was red in the face. Betty Olssen thought at first it was because of what she had said, but then realized from the way his eyes kept wandering away from her, that he was embarrassed by her near-nakedness.

"Wear a see-through, he told me," she said. "So I put on a see-through and I fell asleep in it. So it shouldn't entirely go to waste, officer, I wish you would take at least one good look at me."

Her face was stolid as she stood in the echoing room in the morgue and waited for the chilled drawer to be pulled out. Matt Olssen came out feet first, with a tag tied to his big toe. His hair was neatly combed. She looked down at his face with no emotion showing on her own, and simply said, "That's him," and then turned away.

When she asked about the contents of his pockets and was told that there were none, that he had obviously been shot in the course of a robbery, she nodded her head, as if in confirmation of some previously formed judgment.

She seemed surprised when the attendant told her that the Medical Examiner's office would perform an autopsy before releasing the remains.

"What for? He was shot, wasn't he?"

"It's required by law. Besides, we sometimes turn up clues that help the police with their investigation. For instance, what position he was in when he was shot, whether the perpetrator was left-handed, maybe what height the perpetrator was…" But the attendant saw that the widow wasn't the least bit interested. He rolled the body back into the refrigerated case.

"Okay, miss, tell me where you want the remains sent."

"Feed it to the cats."

Not because he was shocked-after twenty years on the job he had heard everything-but because he had a duty to perform, the attendant said, "You want to give him a decent Christian burial, don't you?"

"He wasn't a decent Christian, so why should he have a decent Christian burial?"

"Well, it's the usual thing…

"I'll tell you something." Her round face hardened to show some of its underlying bone structure. "The sonofabitch never gave me anything but misery, he starved me out, he spent his money on whores, and I never saw a penny of it except once in a while when he was bombed and, you know what I mean, wanted my favours. So if you think I'm going to spend any of my hard-earned money to bury him, forget it. You got potter's field, right?

That's where to bury him."

"Well, we don't call it that," the attendant said. "I can't force you to take the body, but if the city has to bury it, you'll get billed for the expense."

She shrugged.

Meaning, the attendant thought, that billing her is one thing, and collecting another. He said, "Look, he was a seaman, so there's probably a pretty good insurance policy, and union benefits too-right?"

She smiled. "It's the one good thing he ever did for me, and he couldn't help himself-the company took out the policy for him. I got that money coming to me, I deserve it, and I'm not gonna piss any of it away burying him."

"Aw, miss," the attendant said, "in the name of common decency-"

"Potter's field," Betty said. "He'll never know the difference."