Snakewoman of Little Egypt

by Robert Hellenga

  “One more step, Earl, and that’s it.”

  “Besides, you don’t want to go back to prison, do you? You shoot me again, they’ll put you away for a long time this time. Rest of your life, and you won’t have Uncle Warren to get you transferred out of Little Muddy. The rest of your life. It’s a long time. Not as long as eternity, and when you’re dead, you’ll be wishin’ you was back in Little Muddy. You hear about that doctor in Paducah was bringing a man back from the dead? The man come back screaming, knew he’d been in Hell. Wasn’t any doubt about it. The doctor knew it too. He was a convicted atheist, but not no more.”

  I heard a noise. I was afraid someone was coming up behind me, but it was Earl, tapping on the wall to distract me.

  I thought of Meursault shooting the Arab that we’d read about in French 102. There was no reason to shoot the Arab, there was no reason for anything. Maybe the intensity of the sun. Nothing more. I was losing focus.

  I backed up as far as I could, all the way into the bedroom. Earl took another step and tried to slap the pistol out of my hand, the way he’d slapped the phone out of my hand earlier. I shot him. I didn’t aim at his heart, I didn’t aim at anything. I just closed my eyes and pulled the trigger. But that’s where the bullet hit him. In the heart. He collapsed on the floor. People in the kitchen started to scream.

  Earl was lying on the bedroom floor, his mouth open, a black hole in his chest. DX was standing beside me. I sat down on the bed next to Jackson. His arm as big around as his thigh. Black. Hand the size of a baseball glove. A coma, that’s what happens right at the end.

  “You’ve got to call the hospital,” I said to DX. But DX looked like he was going to faint.

  “You can’t touch him,” he croaked. “This is a crime scene.”

  “You’ve been watchin’ too much television,” I said. I waved the pistol at him.

  I picked up the phone and called 911. “There’s a man’s been serpent bit,” I said, “and another’s been shot.”

  People were crowding into the trailer, plugging up the narrow hallway, wanting to know what had happened.

  “Earl’s dead,” DX kept saying. “Earl’s dead.”

  “Out,” I yelled. “Everybody get out.” I kept yelling till people backed out of the hallway and went outside.

  I waited for the ambulance at the kitchen table. A woman I’d never seen before kept trying to tell me a long story about sitting up all night with someone who’d been serpent bit and was dead but they didn’t know it. I could hear voices outside, people praying, trying to pray Earl back to life. Mawmaw Tucker was there. I could hear her voice, rising above the others and then falling below them. I hadn’t wanted to kill Earl; I’d just wanted to stop him, and I was hoping that Mawmaw Tucker would call him back, like she called her sister back, like she got called back herself, like Jesus calling Jairus’ daughter back. And wondering would Earl be hungry like that little girl: “Give her something to eat,” someone says. Jesus himself. A woman came into the kitchen and I thought maybe she was going to get something for Earl to eat, but she wanted some anointing oil. I showed her where Earl kept it in a cupboard over the sink. They were still praying—just getting started—when the ambulance came, two ambulances. The paramedics from the first ambulance had trouble getting through the crowd to get Jackson on a stretcher. The paramedics from the second ambulance were still arguing with DX and Mawmaw Tucker about taking Earl when we left. I followed the first ambulance to the little hospital in Rosiclare.

  They wheeled Jackson into the emergency room at the little hospital in Rosiclare. I had the antivenin from Colesville in a cooler, but it was pretty late in the game, and the doctor who looked like he was about twenty was reading up on snakebite.

  Jackson received ten vials of crotalidae polyvalent immune fab (ovine) antivenin and then five more vials.

  “He’s going to need a fasciotomy,” the doctor said, putting his book face down on a counter. “Someone’s going to have to cut open his arm to relieve the pressure. We’re going to have to get him to Carbondale. He may make it as long as he’s not allergic to the horse proteins in the antivenin.”

  I rode with Jackson in the ambulance to the American Legion baseball field, where the helicopter landed, and then in the helicopter. It wasn’t till I was in the hospital in Carbondale that the Naqada County sheriff’s officers caught up with me.

  I was in the room with Jackson and the doctor who was going to do the fasciotomy. Jackson would be lucky to keep the arm. The duty nurse came in. Someone wanted to see me. It was the police. I was under arrest.

  “I can’t leave now,” I said to the sheriff’s officers. But of course I didn’t have a choice.

  I was driven back to the jail in Naqada in the back of a police car with metal bars protecting the two officers in the front seat. I didn’t know either of the officers, but I knew their parents. They were curious about the snakes, about the church.

  “I could be in Paris,” I said. “I could have gone to Paris with my boyfriend.”

  In my own mind I was completely justified in shooting Earl and had nothing to worry about, legally, but I knew enough not to answer any questions. I’d been in the Naqada County jail before. I could look out the window and see the row of two-story brick buildings that lined Main Street, down to the Baptist church on the corner of Main and Forest. I tried to hold myself together and not panic, but I knew I couldn’t face prison again. That part of my life was over. I had a chunk of Uncle Warren’s money left, in spite of the collapse of ShoppingKart.com, but not enough to get the kind of lawyer I was going to need to get me off. And Uncle Warren was dead and Jackson was the closest thing to being dead. If I hadn’t lost my faith, I’d have started praying and singing hymns, like Paul and Silas in jail in Rome. Only I was pretty sure an angel wasn’t going to come and knock down the walls. Instead I started going over my rattlesnake taxonomy. I didn’t have a pencil or pen so I couldn’t write it down. But I had a notebook in my head, and I wrote it down on that, the way I used to do on a piece of paper. Kingdom: Animalia, Phylum: Chordata, and so on.

  A snake is a snake, not an avatar of the devil. The two-headed snake had simply done what rattlesnakes do by their nature. It wasn’t a punishment or a judgment. Well, maybe a judgment on Jackson’s lack of common sense.

  It was Tuesday night, almost midnight.

  In the morning I thought of calling Cramer, but I called Claire instead.

  21

  Carmina Burana

  I didn’t need the high-priced lawyer Claire had hired—a partner in her father’s law firm—to explain that homicide is the most life-altering criminal charge you can face. In Illinois, the minimum sentence is twenty years. If you use a firearm, it’s forty-five years—mandatory. Forty-five years.

  “What’s going to happen?” That’s what I wanted to know. I tried to remember what had happened the first time I shot Earl, but it was all a blur.

  “If the state goes to the grand jury,” Ms. Potaczek—Stella—said, “the prosecution doesn’t have to present exculpatory evidence; we won’t be able to cross-examine witnesses; you won’t get a warning about self-incrimination; and I won’t be able to advise you in the courtroom.” She paused to let this sink in. “But my guess is that the state will hold a preliminary hearing before a judge.”

  We were sitting in an office in the John Hancock building in Chicago, with a view of Lake Michigan. Stella and Claire and I sat in mismatched chairs at a little round table. Jackson was still in Memorial Hospital in Carbondale. Stella, according to Claire’s father, was a top-notch criminal attorney who’d been passed over for several judicial appointments.

  Stella would need to know, she said, everything that had happened. Every word Earl had said. Every word I had said; everything about my relationship with Earl; everything about the first trial. She was especially interested in the first trial, in fact, and made a note to herself to get the records, transcripts. She would need to know about the divorce proceedings.


  We were drinking tea rather than coffee, which Stella poured out of an old-fashioned brown teapot. On a big desk, behind Stella, sat a bowl of fruit. I wanted an apple, but I didn’t want to ask. It was a desk that two people would sit at, facing each other. There was a set of drawers on each side, and I imagined sitting across from Jackson at this desk.

  “Claire’s father told me to ask you about a necessity defense.”

  Stella laughed. “He’s not a criminal lawyer, but he’s always keen on a necessity defense. Did he tell you the story about the soldiers and the natives in the jungle?”

  I nodded.

  Claire and I had spent the night with Claire’s parents on Bellevue Place. Claire’s parents went to quite a bit of trouble to make me feel at home, but I could see they were uncomfortable. Claire’s father spent most of his time cooking a coho salmon on a big outdoor gas grill. He’d caught it himself, in Lake Michigan, which was stocked every year with coho and lake trout. He preferred the coho. It was a huge fish, and Claire’s mother busied herself in the kitchen, making a delicious sauce with butter and lemon, but I didn’t have much of an appetite. No one said a word about the shooting or about the upcoming trial except Claire’s father, in his study after dinner.

  The story he told went like this: “You’re in the jungle in South America and you come to a clearing where a group of soldiers are about to execute ten innocent natives. The captain of the soldiers offers his pistol to you and says, here, you kill one of these men and I’ll let the other nine go free. You figure it’s better for nine of the ten to go free than for all of them to be killed, so you shoot one of them. The nine natives disappear into the jungle in one direction; the captain and his men disappear into the jungle in the other. Suddenly a helicopter lands in the clearing. Argentinean police pour out and put you under arrest. How do you plead?”

  “She had to kill one man to save nine others, right?” Claire said. “She didn’t have a choice.”

  “Let Sunny answer,” Stella said.

  “Right,” I said. “But you know what I would have done, now that I think of it?”

  “What?”

  “I’d have shot the captain.”

  “Good choice,” Stella said.

  By the end of the June I’d been arraigned before a judge in Allensboro, and then bound over for trial. Peter Franklin, Stella’s “local council,” had come to the first appearance and arranged bail—and he knew the judge. The trial would be held in October in Allensboro.

  The judge figured I’d never make bail, which was set at $500,000, but Claire came up with fifty thousand dollars without batting an eye, and the two of us went back to Carbondale and stayed at the Holiday Inn till Jackson was released from Memorial Hospital in the middle of July. He’d had his arm closed up with a skin graft from his leg. He’d had a fasciotomy and four surgeries to clean out the dead tissue from his arm, then the skin graft. He would need several months of physical therapy before he could use his hand normally. We drove back home in Claire’s BMW. Claire hired the cousin of someone who worked at the Holiday Inn to drive my truck back to Colesville and then take a bus home. The weather continued very hot and humid, the way it was, according to Jackson, in the Ituri Forest.

  Claire never wavered in her support. “You did the right thing. The man was trying to kill Jackson and he was attacking you. You didn’t have any choice.” And Jackson too. Jackson let me take care of him without fussing too much about it, though I could see it made him uneasy. He was eager to help with my expenses, but I told him we’d think about that later, that Claire was helping me and that I still had quite a bit of Warren’s money left.

  “You saved my life,” he said the night we got back to the woods, after Claire had left. “I can never repay you.”

  “Does that bother you?” I asked.

  “A little.”

  I was putting clean sheets on the bed. Jackson was sitting in an old armchair with broken springs, his feet up on a small table.

  “It shouldn’t,” I said.

  “When something bad like this happens in the Forest,” he said, “they call out the molimo. Maybe that’s what we should do.” And he told me about the molimo, which is a trumpet made out of a beautifully carved wooden tube—or it can be a plastic drainpipe—and the young men run around with it making a lot of noise and scaring everybody in the camp. The women all stay in their huts and pretend not to know what’s going on. It can sound like a leopard growling or an elephant trumpeting, or an owl hooting. Sometimes it just makes loud farting noises. He tried to make some molimo noises, but he was too tired. “They want to wake up the Forest because the Forest looks after them, takes care of all their needs. If there’s trouble, they need to remind the Forest to do its job.”

  I smoothed the sheets, put on clean pillowcases, and helped Jackson back into bed. Something stopped me from saying “I love you,” though I did love him. Maybe it was that something was gnawing away inside me, like a tapeworm, and not the kind of tapeworm that could be drawn out of you by Mawmaw Tucker’s pumpkinseed tea. I tried to tell Jackson what it was like—not guilt, not remorse, not anger, not panic, not fear, not dread. It was all these things, but it was something more too. But I couldn’t get whatever it was into words. And there were a lot of other things to think on. Like staying out of jail.

  I sat with Jackson for a few minutes till he went to sleep, and then I kissed him good-night.

  Three things kept me going: the trips to Chicago to meet with Stella so she could figure out how to keep me out of jail; looking after Jackson —taking care of all the things he couldn’t do with one arm, like brushing the dog’s teeth with the poultry-flavored tooth paste that I’d used for a whole week when I first moved in with him; and monitoring the rattlesnakes that we’d released back in April. There’s nothing like hunting rattlesnakes to concentrate your attention. The sun was hot and we all followed Laura’s example and wore straw hats. The antennas we carried could pick up signals at a distance of five hundred meters, so you could get within a few feet of the snakes. You hold your antenna and walk in the direction of increasingly loud beeps, but sometimes the transmitters failed, or were set wrong, and sometimes the signal would bounce around on a rock formation, and it could still be hard to spot a snake even when you were right on top of it. We tried to locate each snake once a day, and then use a GPS system to record its location. We’d usually finish before noon.

  It took my mind off the trial. At least when I was closing in on a snake. Frank and Laura never mentioned the shooting, but they made an extra effort to be nice to me, sympathetic, as if I was sick with some terrible disease and maybe wasn’t going to get better. But Cramer came right out and asked me what had happened, and I told him. We were in the lab, just the two of us, entering the day’s data into a computer that had been set up on one of the lab tables. He was standing behind me, reading the slips, and I was doing the typing. He said I’d done the right thing and asked did I need anything, and I told him that Jackson and Claire were helping with expenses and that I still had some money left from my uncle Warren. I tried to tell him about the tapeworm, gnawing away inside me.

  “Tapeworms,” he said, “always require an intermediate herbivore host before they reach their final carnivore host. If we knew when hominids first became their final hosts, we’d know when our ancestors started eating animal flesh as their regular diet.”

  “Cramer,” I said, “I know you like to understand everything in evolutionary terms, but how does this information apply in my case? What’s the evolutionary lesson here? Where do these feelings come from? What purpose do they serve?”

  “Sorry,” he said. He put his hands on my shoulders. It was the first time he’d touched me since the ASIH conference. “Have you thought about counseling? Like a police officer after killing someone, even when it was what they called a ‘good’ shoot.”

  “I don’t think there is any such thing as a ‘good’ shoot,” I said.

  “You’re a good friend,” he said
. “I don’t have to watch what I say around you. And I hope you don’t have to watch what you say around me.”

  “Thanks,” I said. He was right. But neither one of us had anything more to say that day.

  Afternoons it was too hot to do anything except take our clothes off and lie next to each other on the sofa bed in the living room, under the ceiling fan. Jackson kept a flannel sheet on the bed to absorb the sweat, and sometimes he’d put another flannel sheet over me and rub my back with his good hand.

  But I was still afraid. I was dragging a weight around. I was putting off living till after the trial. It was hard to focus. I couldn’t see things up close.

  There was no rain. The stream dried up.

  On Saturday nights we listened to A Prairie Home Companion.

  Jackson rented a TV and a VCR and in the evenings we watched movies. We watched English-language movies and Jackson would fall asleep. We seldom got to the end of a film.

  One morning Jackson’s petrified finger—the one that had been bitten—which he wrapped with a towel when we made love, came off in the towel. We went to the hospital. The doctor in the emergency room gave him some antibiotic ointment to keep on the stump, or whatever you’d call the place where a finger comes off, and we buried the finger on the other side of the stream, way in the back, by the Indian burial mound. I dug the grave myself because Jackson couldn’t handle a shovel with only one arm, though his left arm was getting better with the help of stretching exercises. He’d barely been able to move his fingers when we came back from Carbondale, but by the end of the summer he’d regained most of his strength. He was always squeezing a rubber ball.

  After I’d buried the finger, I took the shovel and stuck it into the base of the Indian burial mound. Jackson tried to stop me, but I kept digging. “I was right,” I said. “It’s nothing but an old woodpile that’s collapsed in on itself.”

  I’d been on the edge of panic most of the summer, but I didn’t really fall over the edge till classes began at the end of August. I’d already declared a biology major and Cramer had signed me up for Biology 210 (a methods course), General Chemistry II, French Conversation, and another Great Books class to complete my Humanities requirement. But I didn’t bother to register. I was sinking fast, drawing back into myself the way I’d learned to do when Earl went on a tear. I couldn’t face the world, couldn’t face the crowds of young, healthy, innocent boys and girls charging around the campus in backpacks. The train pulled out of the station without me. I was left standing on the platform, like someone in one of Jackson’s old blues songs.