by Donna Tartt
The houses in Oak Lawn Estates were mostly owned by up-and-comers: developers and politicians and real-estate agents, ambitious young marrieds fleeing sharecropper origins in the towns of the Piney Woods or the clay hills. As if in hatred for their rural origins, they had methodically paved over every available surface and ripped out every native tree.
But Oak Lawn had taken its own revenge at being planed so brutally flat. The land was swampy, and whining with mosquitos. Holes filled with brackish water as soon as they were dug in the ground. The sewage backed up when it rained—legendary black sludge that rose in the spanking-new commodes, dripped from the faucets and the fancy multiple-spray showerheads. With all the topsoil sliced away, truckloads and truckloads of sand had to be brought in to keep the houses from washing away in the spring; and there was nothing to stop turtles and snakes from crawling as far inland from the river as they pleased.
And Oak Lawn Estates was infested with snakes—big and small, poisonous or not, snakes that liked mud, and snakes that liked water, and snakes that liked to bask on dry rocks in the sunshine. On hot days, the reek of snake rose up from the very ground, just as murky water rose to fill footprints in the bulldozed earth. Ida Rhew compared the smell of snake musk to fish guts—buffalo carp, mud or channel cat, scavenger fish that fed off garbage. Edie, when digging a hole for an azalea or a rosebush, particularly in Garden Club civic plantings near the Interstate, said she knew her spade was close to a snake’s nest if she caught a whiff of something like rotten potatoes. Harriet had smelled snake-stink herself, plenty of times (most strongly in the Reptile House at the Memphis Zoo, and from frightened snakes imprisoned in gallon jars in the science classroom) but also wafting acrid and reasty from murky creek-banks and shallow lakes, from culverts and steaming mud-flats in August and—every now and then, in very hot weather, after a rain—in her own yard.
Harriet’s jeans and her long-sleeved shirt were soaked with sweat. Since there were scarcely any trees in the subdivision or the marsh behind, she wore a straw hat to keep from getting sunstroke, but the sun beat down white and fierce like the very wrath of God. She felt faint with heat and apprehension. All morning long, she had maintained a stoic front while Hely—who was too proud to wear a hat, and had the start of a blistering sunburn—skipped about and babbled intermittently about a James Bond movie which had to do with drug rings, and fortunetellers, and deadly tropical snakes. On the bike ride out, he’d bored her to death by gabbing about the stunt rider Evel Knievel and a Saturday-morning cartoon called Wheelie and the Chopper Bunch.
“You should have seen it,” he was saying now, raking back with agitated repetitiveness the dripping strings of hair that fell in his face, “oh man, James Bond, he burned that snake right up. He’s got a can of deodorant or something? So when he sees the snake in the mirror, he spins around like this, and holds his cigar up to the spray can, and pow, that fire shoots out across the room like this, whoosh—”
He staggered backward—trilling his lips—while Harriet considered the dozing copperhead and tried hard to think how they should proceed. They had set off hunting equipped with Hely’s BB gun, two whittled, forked sticks, a field guide to Reptiles and Amphibians of the Southeastern United States, Chester’s garden gloves, a tourniquet, a pocket knife and change for a phone call in case either of them was bitten, and an old tin lunchbox of Allison’s (Campus Queen, painted with pony-tailed cheerleaders and pert beauty contestants in tiaras) into the lid of which Harriet, with difficulty, had poked a few air holes with a screwdriver. The plan was to sneak up on the snake—preferably, after it struck, before it recollected itself—and pin it behind the head with the forked stick. They would then grab it close behind the head (very close, so it couldn’t snap around and bite) and throw it in the lunchbox and buckle it shut.
But all this was easier said than done. The first snakes they’d spotted—three young copperheads, rust-red and glistening, roasting themselves all together on a concrete slab—they’d been too scared to approach. Hely tossed a chunk of brick in their midst. Two darted off, in opposite directions; the remaining one was infuriated and began to strike, low and repeatedly, at the brick, at the air, at anything that caught its attention.
Both children were horrified. Circling, cagily, forked sticks at arm’s length, they darted quickly towards it and just as quickly back when the thing whipped around to strike—first on one side, then the other, fighting them off in all directions. Harriet was so frightened that she felt she might black out. Hely jabbed at it, and missed; the snake whipped back and lashed at him its full length and Harriet, with a stifled cry, pinned the back of its head with the forked stick. Immediately, with shocking violence, it began to thrash the remaining two feet of its length as if possessed by the Devil. Harriet, flabbergasted with revulsion, leapt back to keep its tail from slapping her legs; with a wriggle, the thing muscled free—toward Hely, who danced back and shrieked like he’d been impaled with an iron spike—and shot into the parched weeds.
One thing about Oak Lawn Estates: if a child—or anyone—had screamed long and high and hard like that on George Street, Mrs. Fountain, Mrs. Godfrey, Ida Rhew, and half a dozen housekeepers would have flown outside in a heartbeat (“Children! Leave that snake alone! Scat!”). And they would mean business, and not stand for any back talk, and stand watch at their kitchen windows after they went back inside just to make sure. But things were different at Oak Lawn Estates. The houses had a frightening sealed-off quality, like bunkers or mausoleums. People didn’t know each other. Out here at Oak Lawn you could scream your head off, some convict could be strangling you with a piece of barbed wire, and nobody would come outside to see what was going on. In the intense, heat-vibrant silence, manic laughter from a TV game show wafted eerily from the nearest house: a shuttered hacienda, hunched defensively in a raw plot just beyond the pine skeletons. Dark windows. A gleaming new Buick was parked in the sand-strewn car-port.
“Ann Kendall? Come on down!” Wild audience applause.
Who was in that house? thought Harriet, dazed, shading her eyes with one hand. A drunk dad who hadn’t gone to his job? Some sluggish Junior League mother, like the sloppy young mothers that Allison sometimes babysat for out here, lying in a darkened room with the TV on and the laundry undone?
“I can’t stand The Price Is Right,” said Hely, stumbling backwards with a little moan, and looking on the ground with an agitated, jerky movement as he did so. “They have money and cars on Tattletales.”
“I like Jeopardy.”
Hely wasn’t listening. Energetically, he thrashed about in the weeds with his forked stick. “From Russia with love …” he crooned; and then, again, because he couldn’t remember the words: “From Russia with LOVE.…”
They had not long to look before finding a fourth snake, a moccasin: waxy, liver-yellow, no longer in its body than the copperheads but thicker than Harriet’s arm. Hely—who, despite his apprehension, insisted upon leading the way—nearly stepped on it. Like a spring, it popped up and struck, just missing his calf; Hely, his reflexes electrified by the previous encounter, lunged back and pinned it in one stab. “Hah!” he shouted.
Harriet laughed aloud; with trembling hands, she fumbled with the catch of the Campus Queen lunchbox. This snake was slower and less nimble. Testily, it swept its thick body—an awful, corrupt yellow—back and forth across the ground. But it was much larger than the copperheads; would it fit into Campus Queen? Hely, so terrified that he was laughing too, high and hysterical, spread his fingers and bent to grab it—
“The head!” cried Harriet, dropping the lunchbox with a clatter.
Hely jumped back. The stick fell from his hand. The moccasin lay still. Then, very smoothly, it pulled its head up and regarded them with its slitted pupils for a long ice-cold moment before it opened its mouth (eerie white inside) and went for them.
They turned and ran, knocking into each other—afraid of stumbling in a ditch, and yet too afraid to look at the ground—with the u
ndergrowth crashing beneath their sneakers and the smell of trampled bitterweed eddying up pungent all around them in the heat like the smell of fear itself.
A ditch, filled with brackish water that squiggled with tadpoles, cut them off from the asphalt. The concrete sides were slick and mossy, too wide to clear with a single leap. They skidded down (the smell they churned up, sewage and fishy rot, catapulted them both into an ecstasy of coughing), fell forward on their hands, scrambled up to the other side. When they heaved themselves up, and turned—tears streaming down their faces—to look back at the way they’d just come, they saw only the path they’d beaten through the yellow-flowered scraggle of bitterweed, and the melancholy pastels of the dropped lunchbox, farther back.
Panting, beet-red, exhausted, they swayed like drunks. Though they both felt as if they might pass out, the ground was neither comfortable nor safe and there was no place else to sit. A tadpole large enough to have legs had splashed out of the ditch and was stranded, twitching, on the road, and its flip-flops, its slimy skin rasping against the asphalt, bumped Harriet into a fresh fit of gagging.
Mindless of their usual grammar-school etiquette—which kept them rigidly two feet apart, except to shove or punch—they clung to each other for balance: Harriet without thought of looking a coward, Hely without thought of trying to kiss her or scare her. Their jeans—clustered with burrs, sticky with beggar’s lice—were unpleasantly heavy, soaked and stinking with the ditch water. Hely, bent double, was making noises like he might vomit.
“Are you okay?” said Harriet—and retched when she saw on his sleeve a yellow-green clot of tadpole guts.
Hely—gagging, repetitively, like a cat trying to bring up a hairball—shrugged away and started back to retrieve the dropped stick and the lunch box.
Harriet caught the back of his sweat-soaked shirt. “Hang on,” she managed to say.
They sat astraddle their bicycles to rest—Hely’s Sting-Ray with the goat horn handlebars and the banana seat, Harriet’s Western Flyer, which had been Robin’s—both breathing hard and not talking. After the banging of their hearts had slowed, and they each had swallowed a grim little drink of lukewarm, plastic-tasting water from Hely’s canteen, they set out into the field again, this time armed with Hely’s BB rifle.
Hely’s stunned silence had given way to theatrics. Loudly, with dramatic gestures, he bragged about how he was going to catch the water moccasin and what he was going to do to it when he caught it: shoot it in the face, swing it in the air, snap it like a whip, chop it in two, ride over the pieces with his bicycle. His face was scarlet, his breath fast and shallow; every now and then, he fired a shot into the weeds and had to stop and pump ferociously on the air rifle—huff huff huff—to work his pressure up again.
They had shunned the ditch and were heading toward the houses under construction, where it was easier to clamber up onto the road if they were menaced. Harriet’s head ached and her hands felt cold and sticky. Hely—the BB gun swinging from the strap across his shoulder—paced back and forth, jabbering, punching at the air, oblivious to the quiet part in the thin grass not three feet from his sneaker where lay (unobtrusively, in a nearly straight line) what Reptiles and Amphibians of the Southeast United States would call a “juvenile” copperhead.
“So this briefcase that shoots teargas when you open it? Well it’s got bullets too, and a knife that pops out the side—”
Harriet’s head felt swimmy. She wished that she had a dollar for every time she’d heard Hely talk about the briefcase in From Russia with Love that shot bullets and teargas.
She closed her eyes and said: “Listen, you grabbed that other snake too low. He would have bit you.”
“Shut up!” cried Hely, after a moment’s angry pause. “It’s your fault. I had him! If you hadn’t—”
“Watch out. Behind you.”
“Moccasin?” He crouched and swung the gun round. “Where? Show me the son of a bitch.”
“There,” said Harriet—and then, stepping forward in exasperation to point, again, “there.” Blindly the pointed head wove up—exposing the pale underside of its muscled jaw—then settled again with a sort of sifting movement.
“Jeez, that’s just a little one,” said Hely, disappointed, leaning forward to peer at it.
“It doesn’t matter how—Hey,” she said, skipping awkwardly to the side as the copperhead struck out at her ankle in a red streak.
A shower of boiled peanuts flew past, and then the whole plastic bag of them sailed over her shoulder and plopped to the ground. Harriet was staggering, off balance and hopping on one foot, and then the copperhead (whose whereabouts she’d momentarily lost track of) popped out at her again.
A BB pinged harmlessly against her sneaker; another stung her calf and she yelped and jumped back as they cracked in the dust around her feet. But the snake was excited now, vigorously pressing its attack even under fire; repeatedly, it struck at her feet, lashing out again and again with stringent aim.
Dizzy, half-delirious, she scrambled to the asphalt. She smeared her forearm across her face (transparent blobs pulsing merrily across her sun-dazed vision, bumping and merging, like magnified amoebas in a drop of pond water) and as her sight cleared, she became aware that the little copperhead had lifted his head and was regarding her without surprise or emotion from a distance of about four feet.
Hely, in his frenzy, had jammed the BB gun. Shouting nonsense, he dropped it and ran to get the stick.
“Wait a minute.” With a tug of effort, she pulled free from the snake’s icy gaze, clear as churchbells; what’s wrong with me? she thought, weakly, stumbling back into the shimmering center of the road, heatstroke?
“Oh, jeez.” Hely’s voice, coming from she didn’t know where. “Harriet?”
“Wait.” Hardly aware what she was doing (her knees were loose and clumsy, like they belonged to a marionette she didn’t know how to work) she stepped back again, and then sat down hard on the hot asphalt.
“You okay, dude?”
“Leave me alone,” Harriet heard herself say.
The sun sizzled red through her closed eyelids. An afterburn of the snake’s eyes glowed against them, in malevolent negative: black for the iris, acid-yellow for the slashed pupil. She was breathing through her mouth, and the odor of her sewage-soaked trousers was so strong in the heat that she could taste it; suddenly she realized that she wasn’t safe on the ground; she tried to scramble to her feet but the ground slid away—
“Harriet!” Hely’s voice, a long way off. “What’s the matter? You’re freaking me out.”
She blinked; the white light stung, like lemon juice squirted in her eyes, and it was horrible to be so hot, and so blind, and so confused in her arms and legs.…
The next thing she knew, she was lying on her back. The sky blazed a cloudless, heartless blue. Time seemed to have skipped a half-beat, as if she’d dozed and awakened with a snap of her head in the same instant. A heavy presence darkened her vision. Panic-stricken, she threw both arms over her face, but the hovering darkness only shifted, and pressed in, more insistently, from the other side.
“Come on, Harriet. It’s just water.” She heard the words, in the back of her mind, and yet did not hear them. Then—quite unexpectedly—something cold touched the corner of her mouth; and Harriet floundered away from it, screaming as loudly as she could.
————
“You two are nuts,” Pemberton said. “Riding your bikes out to this shit subdivision? It must be a hundred degrees.”
Harriet, flat on her back in the rear seat of Pem’s Cadillac, watched the sky rush past overhead through a cool lace-work of tree branches. The trees meant that they had turned out of shadeless Oak Lawn back onto good old County Line Road.
She shut her eyes. Loud rock music blared from the stereo speakers; patches of shade—sporadic, fluttering—drove and flickered against the red of her closed eyelids.
“The courts are deserted,” said Pem above the wind and the mus
ic. “Nobody in the pool, even. Everybody’s in the clubhouse watching One Life to Live.”
The dime for the phone call had come in handy after all. Hely—very heroically, because he was nearly as panicked and sun-sick as Harriet—had hopped on his bicycle and despite his faintness and the cramps in his legs had pedalled nearly half a mile to the pay phone in the parking lot of Jiffy Qwik-Mart. But Harriet, who’d had a hellish wait of it, roasting on the asphalt at the end of the snake-infested cul-de-sac all by herself for forty minutes, was too hot and woozy to feel very grateful for this.
She sat up a little, enough to see Pemberton’s hair—crinkly and frizzed from the pool chemicals—blown back and snapping like a scrappy yellow banner. Even from the back seat, she could smell his acrid and distinctly adult smell: sweat, sharp and masculine under the coconut suntan lotion, mingled with cigarettes and something like incense.
“Why were you all the way out at Oak Lawn? Do you know somebody there?”
“Naw,” said Hely, in the jaded monotone he adopted around his brother.
“What were yall doing, then?”
