Dusssie

by Nancy Springer

  “Medical excuse?” The old man leaned closer over the deli table, giving me such a kind look that I’m sure he thought I had leukemia. I mean, he thought I had lost all my hair from chemo and that was why I wore a big hat all the time. “I’m sorry,” he told me, real nice, nothing sloppy about it. “By the way, my name is Cyril Ford. Call me Cy. Rhymes with Hi.” He extended his knobby old hand toward me, and I shook it. His hand felt light and dry, like driftwood. “And you are?” he asked.

  “Dusie,” I told him. “Dusie Gorgon.”

  “Dusie,” he said, his pale eyes going thoughtful, like he was focusing on the name. “Dusie, and you are a doozy, aren’t you? Nice to meet you, Dusie.” He shook my hand again, then picked up his soup spoon. “May I treat you to some small token of friendship? A slice of apple pie?”

  “Um, no thanks. I gotta go order paella for Mom and me.” But I felt myself smiling at him as I got up to leave.

  Sitting cross-legged on my bed so I wouldn’t have to hold the big dictionary, I looked up some words. Gracile meant “slender and graceful.” Cloaca was the vent in the posterior end of a snake through which musk and feces were emitted. Ophiophagous meant “eating snakes.”

  King snakes. Ophiophagous.

  King snakes ate other snakes.

  I grabbed The Encyclopedia of Snakes and looked up king snake just to be sure. Yeppers. King snakes even ate rattlesnakes.

  Wow. Gotta respect king snakes.

  Then I started to get an idea.

  See … if I didn’t cut the snakes off my head myself, like, if they just sort of fell victim to natural predation, maybe they wouldn’t grow back twice as big, right? Maybe they wouldn’t grow back at all.

  Of course, if I’d really thought about it, I would have realized that then I’d be left with four king snakes, or at least with one top-dog, gladiator, all-victorious, totally egotistic king snake. And when you’ve got snakes growing out of your head, just cutting down on numbers is not really an improvement. With snakes for hair, one snake is as bad as twenty-seven.

  But I didn’t get a chance to really think about it, because the snakes snagged the idea right out of my mind, and all the garter snakes and ribbon snakes and corn snakes and stuff started to thrash and whimper.

  I’m ssscared, whined one of them, might have been the yellow-bellied racer.

  Somebody else cried, Danger! Danger in the head.

  Ssslither! Flee!

  Russstle tailsss!

  No tailsss!

  can’t flee!

  Panic, panic, dark brown musky-smelling panic, and at the same time the bigger snakes, like, the racers, whipped into a different sort of hissy fit. The indigo snake darted her body right down in front of my face. I saw all her underside scales like treads on a bulldozer for an instant before she bent like a pretzel and glared into my eyes. She startled me so bad, nose to nose with me, that I didn’t even put up a hand to bat her away.

  She hissed, Shame on you! as she swelled and flattened her neck like a cobra imitation, then struck.

  It was like a tiny fist had hit the tip of my nose, except this fist had teeth and it bit me.

  I yelled, “Ow!” staring cross-eyed down my own schnoz. There she hung, thrashing like a pit bull with the fleshy part of my nose in her mouth, hissing through her flattened nostrils, while at the same time twenty-some voices clamored inside my head.

  Go Indigo! (black racer.)

  you show her! No nonsssenssse! (pine woods snake?)

  We’re all on thisss head together! Yesss! We didn’t asssk to be on her ssstupid head! It’sss not like we want to be here! All sssqueezed, no freedom—Can’t even ssslide in the grass—never a tasste of a grub—No matesss—And now she wants the king sssnakesss to eat usss? Bite her! Let’sss all bite her! (Impossible to identify; too many all at once.)

  Also, I heard my mother’s voice calling from the living room, “Dusie? Are you okay?”

  And amid all the ruckus I heard the regal, bored query of the scarlet king snake: What’sss in it for me?

  “White mice from the pet shop,” I replied, surprised to find myself hoping savagely that they would stick in her gut and kill her.

  I heard that! Her red, black, and yellow head flashed down and struck my cheek.

  I screamed, lunged off the bed, ran to the kitchen, and yanked open the freezer compartment of the refrigerator. I stuck my head in there.

  Hey! complained twenty-seven snakes.

  My mother exclaimed, “Dusie, what in the world?” I heard her drop her magazine and follow me into the kitchen, but I kept my head in the freezer.

  I told my snakes grimly, “Listen up, all of you creeps, or I will freeze you into Popsicles.” I knew they couldn’t hear me, I knew they just picked up the thoughts from my mind, but I couldn’t seem to help talking aloud to them. Especially now. Between my teeth I told them, “First of all, none of you are to bite me. Ever. Never again.”

  The milk snake said, Let go of her, Indigo. Already they sounded more sluggish. And the indigo snake did let go of me, coiling in on herself, still hissing.

  “You promise me that,” I continued, “and I promise I will drop the idea of siccing the king snakes on you.”

  We promissse! said various voices, mostly garter snakes.

  I said, “I want the biters to promise.”

  Behind me, Mom was saying, “Dusie, you’re dripping blood on the Healthy Choice dinners!”

  I ignored her except to stick my head deeper into the freezer. The scarlet king snake said frostily, I ssspeak for all of usss. We promissse.

  Good enough. I got my head out of there and reached for a paper towel to swab my nose. Mom had gone out of the room. I heard her rummaging in the bathroom, looking for Band-Aids, probably.

  I stood there with the paper towel soaking up quite a lot of blood from my nose, and I felt coldly furious. “I am going to get rid of you,” I told my snakes. I had promised not to set the king snakes against the others, and I wouldn’t. It wasn’t a good idea anyhow. But there had to be another way.

  Go ahead, said the scarlet king snake, and all the others gave a hissy titter, sss-sss-sss. They didn’t act like I was scaring them. Not at all. They seemed completely sure I couldn’t do it.

  Or maybe they knew something I didn’t.

  SIX

  Tuesday morning I watched from the apartment window as Mom waited for her bus—she was going to a Humane Society committee meeting, I think. Anyway, the minute the bus drove away with her in it, I pulled on my blue crushed-velvet hat, ignoring a number of hissy complaints from my head, and headed out. I had some money, thanks to a guilt gift from Aunt Stheno because she hadn’t sent me the hats, so I treated myself to a taxi. I told the driver, “NYU Medical Center.”

  I still thought maybe I could do something …

  “Troy Lindquist,” I told the woman at the visitor’s information desk.

  Troy Lindquissst. The scarlet king snake mimicked me.

  “He is not allowed any visitors,” said the receptionist.

  I had figured it would be like that. I mean, everybody on the TV news was still speculating hysterically about mutant viruses and bioterrorism and whether there was going to be an epidemic of partial petrifications. I’d seen some people on the street wearing surgical masks to cover their mouths and noses.

  I just nodded at the woman behind the desk. “I have a delivery for him.” I’d bought roses, the sweetest-smelling kind I could find, from one of the vendors outside.

  “Flowers? Take them up to the nurses’ station on the fifth floor, west wing.”

  So I headed up there. But I didn’t stop at the nurses’ station. I strode past, into the west wing, trying to look like I worked there or something, like I did this every day of my life and I was busy and nobody better bother me.

  It wasn’t hard to find Troy. I just followed the crowd of white coats. No visitors? Ha. Maybe they weren’t letting in kids Troy knew from school, but it looked like doctors had come from all ove
r the country to have a look at the stone boy.

  They were mostly men, taller than I am, talking medical stuff to each other right over the top of my head. They didn’t notice me. I slipped between them and peeked in at the door first, to be sure it was Troy’s room, and saw his stone Nikes and blue-jeans—well, white stone jeans now—at the bottom of the bed.

  Forget having a few moments alone with him. It was standing room only in there. White coats everywhere.

  But I had to try to help him.

  There had to be something I could do …

  Sssilly girl, grumbled the indigo snake. I don’t underssstand. Why not jussst leave him?

  Dusssie’s half-human, said a corn snake kindly. She’sss concerned—

  Ssso? That’sss her problem. We were jussst doing our job—

  Sssh! whimpered the yellow-bellied racer. I’m ssscared.

  So was I. But I took a deep breath, let it out slowly, then started to edge through the whispering crowd in Troy’s room, working my way to his bedside.

  I caught glimpses between the white coats, seeing Troy in bits and pieces. Wires punched into the stone of his arms and body, right through his stone clothing, wires leading to, like, TV screens. And tubes in him leading to machines with plastic bags that put liquids into him—the part that was still alive, I mean, under the stone—or took liquids out of him, whatever. And his poor stone hands, up in the air rigid as if he thought somebody was going to hit him. I saw a stone Band-Aid on the web of his left thumb, like he’d cut himself slicing a bagel. And when I saw his face …

  For a moment I felt weak. I had to stand still and swallow hard.

  It didn’t matter that his eyes were no longer the color of tarnished silver, that they stared at the ceiling stony blind and white. He was still Troy, yet more than Troy. I saw all the Prince Charmings of the world in that marble face no human hand had carved, perfect stone softness of brow and cheekbones and jaw and chin, perfect white marble blemish on one side of his nose, his stone lips parted slightly in—terror. He looked so scared.

  I got myself moving again and wormed my way between two nurses to lay the roses on the bed by his head. Maybe he could smell them, I hoped. “Troy,” I told him softly, “it’s me, Dusie.”

  Of course he couldn’t say anything, or move, or even blink. There was no way for me to tell whether he could hear me, and if he did, whether he hated me. Whether he would want to put me in jail—

  This was no time to start worrying about myself.

  I bent close to his ear. “Troy,” I whispered, “I don’t know how, but I’m going to try to help—”

  “Hey!” a man’s voice boomed out behind me. “What’s that girl doing in here?”

  Somebody else ordered, “Get her out of here!”

  I felt a nurse grab my arms.

  “Wait!” yelled another man’s voice. “Look at the heart monitor!”

  A babble of voices broke out as I yanked myself free of the hands trying to pull me away from Troy.

  “His heart’s going like a racehorse!”

  “His pulse is up to—”

  “What’s he reacting to?”

  “The girl! What did—”

  Quickly, before they could pull me away again, I bent and kissed Troy on his slightly parted lips, thinking Troy, Troy, wake up … I could feel a warm breath gasping in his mouth, but his lips felt so hard, so cold. Stone.

  And they stayed that way. All that happened was that the doctors kept yelling. “His body temperature just spiked!”

  “His respiration’s way up!”

  “All his vital signs—”

  I didn’t care. Kissing him like he was Sleeping Beauty hadn’t worked, so what now? Tell him I loved him and I would marry him, like in Beauty and the Beast? But no, I had it backwards, he was Beauty and I was the Beast, so he should tell me.

  I couldn’t think what to do. There was too much yelling.

  “How could he feel that?”

  “He didn’t. She said something to him—”

  “He heard her?”

  “Young lady!” I felt a heavy hand on my arm. “What did you—”

  I hate it when anybody lays a hand on me; it just flips me out. As Troy had discovered, poor guy. I snatched my arm away, and my snakes started to coil. Under its blue velvet hat, my head started to hiss. Voices inside my skull started to chorus worse than the voices in Troy’s hospital room.

  Predator!

  Roussse! Roussse! Deploy necksss!

  Deploy fangsss!

  Prepare to ssstrike!

  No! Ssslither away!

  Essscape!

  Good idea. Doctors and nurses grabbed at me from all directions.

  Dusssie, essscape! urged the scarlet king snake.

  I wrestled myself free and ran.

  There was nothing else I could do.

  Hanging onto my hat brim with both hands, I put my head down and scuttled between their legs like a—like a salamander or something. Sometimes being smaller has advantages. I scooted, I darted, I wormed and squirmed, I snaked right through the crowd in Troy’s room and sprinted down the hallway. I jumped in front of some poor lady with a cart full of food trays and grabbed her elevator. The service elevator. I hit the close door button and the ground floor button and stood panting, trying to catch my breath, as the elevator lumbered down, down. It dumped me in the kitchen, and I took one look and ran for daylight. Out back of the hospital someplace, I dashed up a street, saw a bus pulling into a stop, and hopped on.

  The bus rolled. I’d gotten away.

  I slumped in a backseat for a long time, trying to think, wondering whether Troy … had his heartbeat gone up because he liked me as a girl, the way those doctors seemed to think?

  Or because he was terrified of me?

  Did he know I was trying to help him?

  Did he know I … I had no idea how to do it?

  I guess my snakes knew I didn’t want to talk, because they kept silent. They weren’t so bad really, sometimes.

  They stayed out of my hair, so to speak, while I got off the bus, caught another, and went home.

  It was still morning.

  Already I had failed.

  I ate lunch—leftover paella, leftover London broil, leftover General Tso’s chicken, scrambled eggs, a can of tuna. I felt bummed, depressed, fat, fit to splat, yet I couldn’t stop eating till I felt like I’d swallowed a pig.

  Then I waddled to the sofa, where I collapsed and turned on the TV. I wanted to forget about my weird, messed-up life by watching cartoons or something, but the indigo snake commanded, Sssnake show!

  And they all started yammering.

  Sssnake man!

  Python!

  Boomssslang!

  Sssidewinder!

  “Oh, for God’s sake,” I complained. We’d caught a couple of segments of the animal channel the night before, that was my mistake. I was in no mood to watch any insane biologist dancing with reptiles. I whammed the power button to kill the TV, jumped up, yanked on my coat and an ugly head scarf, and slammed out.

  I started walking with no idea where I was going. Thinking about Troy had me so bummed that even going nowhere felt better than sitting still. There was nothing much to see except chichi restaurants, big snooty art galleries, and expensive stores. And skyscrapers in the distance, dark against a smoggy gray sky.

  My mood was pretty dark and pretty gray, too. The air smelled of exhaust fumes and something rotting, maybe the Hudson River. I wished I’d thought to bring along my iPod so I could listen to music and not think. I wondered what Troy was thinking about me inside his stone skull. I wondered whether Troy’s parents cried about him a lot. I wondered whether they visited him every day. I wondered whether they would keep him in the hospital or take him home and stand him in a corner. My snakes stopped hissing about the TV and went quiet, maybe rocked by the rhythm of my walking, maybe listening to my thoughts.

  Sssome thingsss you can control, sssome thingsss you can’t, said a gentl
e dandelion-yellow voice, a corn snake. No ussse worrying.

  Like I said, sometimes they weren’t so bad. “Corny,” I grumbled, but I did feel better. Walking seemed to be a good idea.

  Dusssie, said one of the little garter snakes, tell usss a ssstory.

  “Huh?” What was this?

  A ssstory! said several voices at once. Ribbon snakes, queen snakes, milk snakes.

  The garter snake elaborated, A ssstory about what it’sss like to have legsss.

  No! Tell usss about intessstinal parasssitesss, demanded a king snake.

  Whoa. Who did they think I was, their mother? I was just a girl—well, I used to be just a girl—not a storyteller. “You tell me a story,” I said, just to argue.

  For once they all shut up; there was a silence in my mind. I walked aimlessly, watching the wind scuttle scraps of paper along the gutters like white rats, feeling so clueless that I guess my snakes sensed it. In a moment, a voice said, Very well. I will tell usss all a ssstory.

  It was the smooth green snake, which was a surprise, to me at least. She hardly ever said anything.

  She continued, I will tell usss the ssstory of the Ssserpent Mother and the Jewel of Wisssdom.

  And she did. But I can’t even begin to tell it the way she did, because I don’t remember any words at all, just—just story, with colors that had fragrance and smells that sang and flickering tastes brighter than any dream:

  A sun snake-ray flew to Mother Serpent and told her to go into the dark place. Back then snakes could fly, because they lived in the sky, rain snakes and wind snakes and the white-fire serpent of lightning and many others. But Mother Serpent was the first to crawl on the earth. She could fly without wings and run without legs, but now she had to venture into the dark. Why? she asked, and the sun snake told her: to find wisdom for the world.

  She did not understand, but she obeyed. She burrowed down through sharp rocks that battered her bright scales. She burrowed through groping willow roots that tried to grab her. She became weak with hunger, for there was nothing to eat. She burrowed through masses of attack worms. Then when she got to the center of the earth she found a Wyrm, which was worse, a kind of giant worm dragon, coiled in the mouth of the World Tree.