Peaceable Kingdom

by Jack Ketchum

  The guard looked at him oddly.

  Perhaps it was because he was crying. The crying had gone on all night or most of it and here it was morning and he was crying once again. He felt tired and a little foolish. His breathing was bad.

  He pretended that all was well as usual and smiled at the guard and sniffed the bouquet of flowers he’d picked from his garden.

  The guard did not return the smile. He noticed that the man’s eyes were red-rimmed too and felt a moment of alarm because he seemed to sense that the eyes were not red as his were simply from too much crying. But you had to walk past the man to get inside so that was what he did.

  The guard clutched his arm with his little white sausage fingers and bit at the stringy bicep just below the sleeve of Will’s shortsleeved shirt. There was no one in the hall ahead of him by the elevators, no one to help him.

  He kicked the man in the shin and felt dead skin rip beneath his shoe and wrenched his arm away. Inside his chest he felt a kind of snapping as though someone had snapped a twig inside him.

  Heartbreak?

  He pushed the guard straight-arm just as he had pushed John Blount so long ago and although there were no stairs this time there was a fire extinguisher on the wall and the guard’s head hit it with a large clanging sound and he slid stunned down the face of the wall.

  Will walked to the elevator and punched four. He concentrated on his breathing and wondered if they would be willing to give him oxygen if he asked them for it.

  He walked into the room and stared.

  The bed was empty.

  It had never been empty. Not once in all the times he’d visited.

  It was a busy hospital.

  That the bed was empty this morning was almost confusing to him. As though he had fallen down a rabbit-hole.

  Still he knew it wasn’t wise to argue when after all this time one finally had a stroke of luck.

  He put the slightly battered flowers from his garden in a waterglass. He drew water in the bathroom sink. He undressed quietly and found an open-backed hospital gown hanging in the closet and slipped it on over his mottled shoulders and climbed into bed between clean fresh-smelling sheets. The bite did not hurt much and there was just a little blood.

  He waited for the nurse to arrive on her morning rounds.

  He thought how everything was the same, really. How nothing much had changed whether the dead were walking or not. There were those who lived inside of life and those who for whatever reason did not or could not. Dead or no dead.

  He waited for them to come and sedate him and strap him down and wished only that he had somebody to talk to—to tell the Gleason story, maybe, one last time. Gleason was a funny man in person just as he was on TV but with a foul nasty mouth on him, always cussing, and he had almost beat him.

  Snakes

  What she came to think of as her snake appeared just after the first storm.

  She was talking on the phone with her lawyer in New York. Outside the floodwaters had receded. She could see through the screen which enclosed the lanai on one side, that her yard, which an hour before had been under a foot of water, had drained off down the slope past the picket fence and into the canal beyond.

  She could let out the dog, she thought. Though she’d have to watch her. At one year old the golden retriever was still a puppy and liked to dig. Ann had learned the hard way. Weather in south Florida being what it was she’d already gone through three slipcovers for the couch due to black tarry mud carried in on Katie’s feet and belly.

  The lawyer was saying he needed money.

  “I hate to ask,” he said.

  “How much?”

  “Two thousand for starters.”

  “Christ, Ray.”

  “I know it’s tough. But you’ve got to look at it this way—he’s already into you for over thirty grand and every month the figure keeps growing. If we get him he’ll owe you my fee as well. I’ll make sure of it.”

  “If we get him.”

  “You can’t think that way, Annie. I know you’re starving out there. I know what you make for a living and I know why you moved down there in the first place—because it was the cheapest place you could think of where you could still manage to bring your kid up in any kind of decent fashion. That’s his fault. You’ve got to go after him. Just think about it for a minute. Thirty grand in back child support! Believe me, it will change your life. You can’t afford to be defeatist about this.”

  “Ray, I feel defeated. I feel like he’s beaten the shit out of me.”

  “You’re not. Not yet.”

  She sighed. She felt seventy—not forty. She could feel it in her legs. She sat down on the couch next to Katie. Pushed gently away at the cold wet nose that nuzzled her face.

  “Find the retainer, Ann.”

  “Where?”

  I’m trapped, she thought. He’s got me. I barely made taxes this year.

  “Trust me. Find the money:”

  She hung up and opened the sliding glass door to the lanai and then stood in the open screen doorway to the yard and watched while Katie sniffed through the scruffy grass and behind the hibiscus looking for a suitable place to pee. The sun was bright. The earth was steaming.

  She couldn’t even afford her dog, she thought. She loved the dog and so did Danny but the dog was a luxury, her collar, her chain. Her shots were an extravagance.

  I’m trapped.

  Outside Katie stiffened.

  Her feet splayed wide and her nose darted down low to the ground, darted up and then down again. The smooth golden hair along her backbone suddenly seemed to coarsen.

  “Katie?”

  The dog barely glanced at her, but the glance told her that whatever she saw in the grass, Katie was going play with it come hell or high water. The eyes were bright. Her haunches trembled with excitement.

  Katie’s play, she knew, could sometimes be lethal. Ann would find chewed bodies of ginkos on the lanai deposited there in front of the door like some sort of present. Once, a small rabbit. She watched amazed and shocked one sunny afternoon as the dog leapt four feet straight up into the air to pluck a sparrow from its flight. She was thinking this.

  And then she saw the snake.

  It was nose to nose with Katie, the two of them fencing back and forth not a foot apart, the snake banded black and brown, half-hidden behind the hibiscus bushes, but from where she stood, six feet away, it looked frighteningly big. Definitely big enough, she thought, whether it was poisonous or not, to do serious damage if it was the snake and not Katie who did the biting.

  She heard it hiss. Saw its mouth drop open on the hinged jaw.

  It darted, struck, and fell into the black mud at Katie’s feet. The dog had shifted stance and backed away and was still backpedaling but the snake was not letting it go at that. The snake was advancing.

  “Katie!”

  She ran out. Her eyes never left the snake for an instant. She registered its fast smooth glide, registered for the first time actual size of the thing.

  Seven feet? Eight feet? Jesus!

  She crossed the distance to the dog faster than she thought she’d ever moved in her life, grabbed her collar and flung all seventy-five pounds of golden retriever head-first past her toward the door so that it was behind her now, shit, head raised, gliding through the mud and tufts of grass coming toward her as she stumbled over the dog who’d turned in the doorway for one last look at the thing and then got past her and slammed the screen in the goddamn face of the thing just as it hit the screen once and then twice—a sound like a foot or a hammer striking—hit it hard enough to dent it inward. And finally, seeing that, she screamed.

  The dog was barking now, going for the screen on their side, enraged by the attempted intrusion. Ann hauled her away by the collar back through the lanai and slid the glass doors shut and even though she knew it was crazy, even though she knew the snake could not get through the screen, she damn well locked them.

  She sat down on her rug, her
legs giving out completely, her heart pounding, and tried to calm Katie. Or calm herself by calming Katie.

  The dog continued to bark. And then to growl. And finally just sat there looking out toward the lanai and panting.

  She wondered if that meant it was gone.

  Somehow she doubted it.

  She was glad it was President’s day weekend and that Danny was with his grandmother and grandfather at Universal over in Orlando. The trip was a present to him for good grades. She was glad he wouldn’t be coming home from school in an hour as usual. Wouldn’t come home to that.

  The dog was still trembling.

  So was she.

  It was two o’clock. She needed a drink.

  She could pinpoint the moment her fear of snakes began exactly.

  She had been eight years old.

  Her grandparents had lived in Daytona Beach, and Ann and her parents had come to visit. It was Ann’s first visit to Florida. Daytona was pretty boring so they did a little sightseeing while they were there and one of the places they went to was a place called Ross Allen’s Alligator Farm. A guide gave them a tour.

  She remembered being fascinated by the baby alligators, dozens and dozens of them all huddled in one swampy pen, but seemingly very peaceful together, and she was wondering if maybe the reason they weren’t biting one another was that they all came from one mama, if that were possible. She stood there watching pondering that question until she became aware that the tour had moved on a bit and she knew she’d better catch up with them but she still wanted an answer to her question about the alligators so when she approached the group she did what she’d been told to do when she had a question, never mind how urgent.

  She raised her hand.

  As it happened her tour guide had just asked a question of his own. Who wants to put this snake around his neck? And Ann, with her hand in the air and thinking hard about the peaceful drowse of baby alligators found herself draped by and staring into the face of a five pound boa constrictor named Marvin, everyone smiling at her, until her father said I think you’d better take it off now, I don’t know, she looks kinda pale to me, and she’d fainted dead away.

  There had been green snakes in the garden by her house and they had not bothered her in the slightest and there were garter snakes down by the brook. But nothing like a five pound boa named Marvin. So that afterwords she avoided even greens and garters. And shortly after that she had the first of what became a recurrent dream.

  She is swimming in a mountain pool.

  She is alone and she is naked.

  The water is warm, just cool enough to be refreshing, and the banks are rocky and green.

  She’s midway across the pool, swimming easily, strongly, when she has the feeling that something is . . . not right. She turns and looks behind her and there it is, a sleek black watersnake, lithe and whiplike, so close that she can see its fangs, she can see directly into the white open mouth of it, it is undulating through the water toward her at stunning speed, it’s right behind her and she swims for dear life but knows she’ll never make it, not in time, the banks loom ahead like a giant stone wall bleeding gleaming condensation and she’s terrified, crying—the crying itself slowing her down even more so that even as she swims and the water thickens she’s losing her will and losing hope, it’s useless, there’s only her startled frightened flesh driving her on and the snake is at her heels and she can almost feel it and

  She wakes.

  Sometimes she’s only sweating. Twisted into the bed-sheets as though they were knots of water.

  Sometimes she screams herself awake.

  Screams as she’s just done now.

  Goddamn snake.

  Seven feet long and big around as a man’s fist. Bigger. The snake in her dream was nothing compared to that.

  She got up and went to the kitchen and poured herself a glass of vodka, added ice and tonic. She drank it down like a glass of water and poured another. The shaking stopped a bit.

  Enough for her to wonder if the snake were still outside.

  The dog was lying on the rug, biting at a flea on her right hind leg.

  The dog didn’t look worried at all.

  Take a look, she thought.

  What can it hurt?

  She unlocked the door, opened it, and stepped out onto the lanai, then slid the door closed behind her. She didn’t want Katie involved in this. She picked up a broom she used to sweep up out there. Behind her Katie got to her feet and watched, ears perked. She scrabbled at the door.

  “No,” she said. The scrabbling stopped.

  She peered through the screens.

  Nothing by the door.

  Nothing in the yard either that she could see, either to the left, where the snake had first appeared and the hibiscus grew up against the picket fence, nor to the right, where a second, taller plant grew near the door. The only place she couldn’t see was along the base of the screened-in wall itself on either side. To do that she’d have to open the door.

  Which she wasn’t about to do.

  Or was she?

  Hell, it was ridiculous to hang around wondering. There was every chance the snake had gone back through the fence the way it had come and was rooting around for mice down at the banks of the canal even as she stood there.

  Okay, she thought. Do it. But do it carefully. Do it smart.

  She opened the dented screen door to just the width of the broom and wedged its thick bristles into the bottom of the opening. She peered out along the base of the longer wall to the left.

  No snake.

  She looked right and heard it hiss and slide along the metal base near the hibiscus and felt it hit the door all at once, jarring its metal frame.

  She slammed it shut.

  The broom fell out of her hands, clattered to the concrete floor.

  And then she was just staring at the thing, backing away to the concrete wall behind her.

  Watching as it raised its head. And then its body. Two feet, three feet. Rising. Slowly gaining height.

  Seeming to swell.

  And swaying.

  Staring back at her.

  It was nearly dusk before she got up the courage to look again.

  This time she used a shovel from the garage instead of the broom. If it came after her again with a little luck she could chop the goddamn thing’s head off.

  It was gone.

  She looked everywhere. The snake was gone.

  She took another drink by way of celebration. The idea of spending the night with the snake lying out there in her yard had unnerved her completely. She thought she deserved the drink.

  If she dreamed she did not remember.

  In the morning she checked the yard again and finding it empty, let Katie out to do her business, let her back in again and then went out the front door for the paper.

  She took one step onto the walkway and hadn’t even shut the door behind her when she saw it on the lawn, stretched to its full enormous length diagonally from her mailbox nearly all the way to the walk, three feet away. Head raised and moving toward her.

  She stepped back inside and shut the door.

  The snake stopped and waited.

  She watched it through the screen.

  The snake didn’t move. It just lay there in the bright morning sun.

  She closed the inner door and locked it.

  Jesus!

  She was trapped in her own home here!

  Who the hell did you call? The police? The Humane Society?

  She tried 911.

  An officer identified himself. He sounded young and friendly.

  “I’ve got a snake out here in my yard. A big snake. And he . . . he keeps coming right at me. I honestly can’t get out of my house!”

  It was true. The only other exit to the condo was through the kitchen door that led to the garage and the garage was right beside the front door. She wasn’t going out that way. No way. No thanks.

  “Sorry, ma’am, but it’s not police bus
iness. What you want to do is call the Animal Rescue League. They’ll send somebody over there and pick it up for you. Get rid of it. But I gotta tell you, you’re my third snake call today and I’ve already had four alligators. Yesterday was even worse. These rains bring ’em all out. So the Animal Rescue League may make you wait awhile.”