Peaceable Kingdom

by Jack Ketchum

“God!”

  He laughed. “My brother-in-law’s a gardener. You know what he says about Florida? ‘Everything bites down here. Even the trees bite at you.’ ”

  He gave her the number and she dialed. The woman at Animal Rescue took Ann’s name, address and phone number and then asked her to describe the animal, its appearance and behavior.

  “Sounds like what you’ve got is a Florida Banded,” she said. “Though I’ve never heard of one that big before.”

  “A what?”

  “A Florida Banded watersnake. You say it’s seven, eight feet? That’s big. That means you’ve got maybe thirty pounds of snake there.”

  “Is it poisonous?”

  “Nah. Give you a darn good nasty bite, though. The banded’s aggressive. He’ll hit you two three four times if he hits you once. But again, I never heard of one goin’ after you the way you’re saying. Normally they’ll just defend their own territory. You sure you didn’t go after him in some way?”

  “Absolutely not. My dog, maybe, at first. But I pulled her away as soon as I saw the thing. Since then he’s come at me twice. With no provocation whatsoever.”

  “Well, don’t start provokin’ him now. Snake gets agitated, he’ll strike at anything. We’ll be out just as soon as we can. You have yourself a good day now.”

  She waited. Watched talk shows and ate lunch. Stayed purposely away from both the front door and the lanai.

  They arrived about three.

  Two burly men in slacks and short-sleeved shirts stepping out of the van carrying two long wooden poles. One pole had a kind of wire shepherd’s crook at the end and the other pole a v-shaped wedge. She stood in the doorway with Katie and watched them. The men just nodded to her and went to work.

  Infuriatingly enough, the snake now lay passive on the grass while the crook slipped over its head just beneath the jawbone and the v-shaped wedge pinned it halfway down the length of its body. The man with the crook then lifted the head and grabbed it under the jaw first with one hand and then the other, dropping his pole to the grass. Its mouth opened wide and the snake writhed, hissing—but did not really seem to resist. They counted three and hefted him.

  “Big guy, ain’t he.”

  “Biggest banded I’ve seen.”

  They walked him across the street to the vacant lot opposite into a wide thick patch of scrub.

  Then they just dropped him, crossed the street, got the pole off the lawn and walked back to the van.

  She stood there. She couldn’t believe it.

  “Excuse me? Could you hold on a moment, please?”

  She walked outside. The bald one was climbing into the driver’s seat.

  “I don’t understand. Aren’t you . . . moving him? Aren’t you taking him somewhere?”

  The man smiled. “He’s took.”

  “That’s supposed to keep that thing away from here? That street?”

  “Not the street, ma’am. See, a snake’s territorial. That means wherever he sets down, if there’s enough food ’round to feed on, that’s where he’s gonna stay. Now, he’s gonna find lizards, mice, rabbits and whatever over there in that lot. And see, it leads back to a stream. When he’s finished with this patch he’ll just go downstream. You’ll never see that guy again. Believe me.”

  “What if you’re wrong?”

  “ ’Scuse me?”

  She was angry and frustrated and she guessed it showed.

  “I said what if you’re wrong! What if the damned thing is back here in half an hour?”

  The men exchanged glances.

  Women. Don’t know shit, do they.

  “Then I guess you’ll want to call us up again, ma’am. Won’t happen though.”

  She wanted to smash furniture.

  She talked to Danny in Orlando that night and told him about the snake. She must have made it sound like quite an adventure because Danny expressed more than a little pique at missing it. By the time she finished talking to him she almost thought it was an adventure.

  Then she remembered the hissing, racing through the grass. Rising up to stare at her.

  As though it knew her.

  She fell asleep early and missed the evening news and weather report. It turned out that was the worst thing that happened to her all day.

  The following morning she cleaned house from top to bottom, easier to do with Danny gone, and by noon had worked herself up into a pretty good mood despite thinking occasionally of her lawyer and the money. She had considered how she might raise the cash for his retainer but had come to no conclusion. Her ex-husband had seen to it that her credit was shot so that a loan was out of the question. Her car was basically already a junker. And her parents barely had enough to get by on. Sell the condo? No. Everything in it? Dear God.

  Once in a while she’d go out and check the yard. And maybe those guys were right, she thought. Maybe they knew their business after all. Because the big banded watersnake had not appeared again.

  She showered and dressed. She had a lunch date for Suzie over at the Outback set for one-thirty.

  Suzie, too, had missed the weather the night before and when they came out of the restaurant around three—aware that it was raining but not for how long nor nearly how hard—the parking lot was ankle-deep in floodwater. Hurricane Andrew be damned. Here they are, standing in the midst of the worst damn rainstorm of the year.

  “You want to wait it out?”

  “I was cleaning. I left the second story windows open. I can’t believe it.”

  “Okay. But be careful driving, huh?”

  Ann nodded. Suzie lived nearby, while her house was over a mile away. Visibility was not good. Not even there within the parking lot. Sheets of rain driven by steady winds gave the grey sky a kind of thickness and a warm humid weight.

  They hugged and took off their shoes and ran for their respective cars. By the time Ann unlocked hers and slid inside her skirt and blouse were see-through and her hair was streaming water. She could taste her hair. She could see almost nothing.

  The windshield wipers helped. She started the car slowly forward, following Suzie out through the exit to the street where they parted in different directions.

  Happily there was almost no one on the usually congested four-lane street and cars were moving carefully and nobody was passing. The lane-lines had disappeared under water. She was moving through at least a foot and a half of it.

  Then midway home she had to pull over. The windshield wipers couldn’t begin to cope. The rain was pounding now—big drops sounding like hailstones. The wind gusted and rocked her car.

  She sat staring into the fogged-over rearview mirror hoping that some damn fool wouldn’t come up behind her and rear-end her. It was dangerous to pull over but she hadn’t had a choice.

  She looked down at herself wished she’d worn a bra. It was not just the nipples, not just the shape and outline of her breasts—you could see every mole and freckle. The same was true of the pale yellow skirt gone transparent across her thighs. She might as well be naked.

  So what? she thought. Who’s going to see you anyway? In this.

  The rain slowed down enough so that her wipers could at least begin to do their job. She moved on.

  The water in the street was moving fast, pouring toward some downhill destination.

  Curbs were gone, flooded over.

  Lawns were gone. Parking lots. Sidewalks.

  The openings to sewers formed miniature whirlpools in which garbage floated, in which paper shopping bags swirled and branches and bits of wood.

  In one of them she saw something that chilled her completely.

  A broken cardboard box was turning slowly over the grate. The box was striped with black and brown and the stripes were moving.

  Snakes. Seeking higher ground and respite from swimming.

  She had heard about this happening during storms in Florida but she’d never actually seen it. Everything bites, said the man.

  This goddamn state.

  She turned
the corner onto her street.

  And she might have guessed if she’d thought about it, might have expected it. She knew the street she’d turned off was slightly elevated over her own. She’d noted it dozens of times.

  But not now. Not this time. She was too intent on simply getting there, on getting through the storm. So that her car plunged into three and a half feet of water at the turnoff.

  She damn near panicked then. It took her totally by surprise and scared her so badly that she almost stopped. Which would no doubt have been a disaster. She knew she’d never have gotten it started again. Not in this much water. She kept going, hands clutching at the wheel, wishing she’d never dreamt of having lunch with Suzie.

  The water was halfway up the grille ahead of her, halfway up the door. The car actually felt lighter, as though the tires had much less purchase than before.

  Almost crawling, expecting the car to sputter and die any moment, she urged it on. Talking to the car. Begging to the car. Come on, honey. Her condo with the open second-story windows was only four blocks away.

  You can do it, honey. Sure you can.

  One block.

  Going slowly, the car actually rocking side to side in the current like a boat, her foot pressing gently on the accelerator.

  Two blocks.

  And her home just ahead of her now, she could see its white stucco facade turned dull grey in the rain, seeing the wide-open window to Danny’s bedroom like a dark accusing eye staring out at her, the front lawn drowned and flooded with water.

  And as she passed the third block, going by the overpass to the canal, she could see the roiling.

  At first it wasn’t clear just what it was. Something large and black moving in the water ahead like some sort of matter in another whirlpool over another sewer grate only bigger.

  Then she came closer and she almost stopped again because now she saw what it was clearly dead ahead but she didn’t stop, my God, she couldn’t stop, she inched along with her foot barely touching the accelerator, letting the idle do the work of moving the car forward like a faintly beating heart somewhere inside while she desperately tried to think how to avoid the writhing mass of bodies and what the hell to do.

  There must have been dozens of them. All sizes.

  All lengths.

  The water was thick with them.

  They moved over and through one another in some arcane inborn pattern, formed a mass that was roughly circular in shape and maybe six or seven feet in diameter, thickest at the center, lightest at the edges, but all in constant motion, some of them shooting like sparks off a sparkler or a catherine wheel and then swimming back into the circle again that formed their roiling gleaming nucleus.

  Driving through them was unimaginable. She had to go around them but it was impossible to see where the street ended and lawn began and like every street in the development the curbs were shallow—she would feel very little going over them.

  But she had to try.

  And in fact felt nothing as she passed to the right onto her neighbor’s lawn and into her neighbor’s mud and she tried not to see them out the driver’s side window as the car lurched once and shuddered and stopped while her wheels spun uselessly on.

  Her first response was to gun the thing but that was no good, all it did was dig her deeper into the mud on the passenger side.

  Well. Not exactly all.

  It also stirred them, seemed to annoy them all to hell. She heard them hit the front and back doors on her side. Bump. Bump. Bumpbumpbumpbumpbump. She dared to glance out her window and saw that the circle had become and oblong figure stretching the entire length of the car—as though something protoplasmic were trying to engulf her.

  She put the car in park and let it idle. Fighting a growing panic. Trying to consider her options.

  She could sit there. She could wait for help. She could wait for them to disperse.

  But there wouldn’t be any help. There was practically nobody on the main road let alone this one, no one but her dumb enough to be out on side streets in a storm like this.

  And they wouldn’t be dispersing either.

  That much was obvious. Now that the car was quiet the circle formed again. Almost exactly as before.

  Except for these two. Crawling up over the hood.

  A black snake. And something banded yellow and brown. Crawling toward the windshield. Looking for higher ground.

  And she could feel them with her inside the car. She could hear them on the seat in back. Crawling up to her seat. Crawling up to her neck and over her neck and down across her breasts and thighs.

  She had to get out of there. That or go crazy. There was one option she simply could not tolerate and that was just to sit there listening to them slither across the roof and over the hood. She could imagine them, see them, thick as flies, blocking her view through the windshield, crawling, staring in at her. Wanting in.

  She had to get out.

  She could run. She could run through the water. It wasn’t that deep. Go out the passenger side. Maybe it was free of them.

  She shifted seats.

  It wasn’t. Not completely. But there weren’t many. Just sparks on the catherine wheel. Darting back and forth beneath the car.

  The black snake was at the windshield. Another yellow and brown appeared just over the headlight, moving up across the hood.

  How long before the car was buried in them?

  Her heart was pounding. There was a taste in her mouth like dry old leaves.

  You can do this, she thought. You haven’t any choice. The only other choice is giving up and giving in and that will make you crazy. When you have no choice you do what you’ve got to do.

  Don’t wait. Waiting will make it worse. Go. Go now.

  She took a deep breath and wrenched at the door handle and pushed hard with her shoulder. Warm floodwater poured in over her feet and ankles. The door opened a few inches and jammed into the mud. The spinning tires had angled the passenger side down.

  She pushed again. The door gave another inch. She tried desperately to get through.

  It wasn’t enough.

  She threw herself across the seat onto her back, grabbed the steering wheel above with both hands for leverage and kicked at the door with all her might, kicked it twice and then got up and rammed her body into the gap. Buttons popped on her blouse. She screamed and kicked as a brown snake glided over her leg above the ankle and into the car and she pushed again and then suddenly she was through.

  Mud sucked at her feet. The water was up to mid-thigh. Her skirt was floating. She slogged a few steps and almost fell. A green snake twisted by a few feet to the left—and what may have been a coral snake, small and banded black, yellow and red swam back toward the car beside her: She lurched away. Corals carried poison. She turned to make sure it had gone back to the swirling hell it came from and that was when she saw him.

  Her snake.

  Perched atop the roof of the car. Coiled there.

  Looking at her.

  And now, beginning to move.

  The dream, she thought, it’s the dream all over again as she saw the snake glide off the roof and into the water and she hauled herself through the water, making for what she knew was the concrete drive in front of her house, its firmer footing, but now she was still on the lawn next door, her feet slapping down deep into the soft slimy mud, legs splashing through the water so that she was mud from head to toe in no time and not turning back, not needing to—the snake gaining on her as real in her mind’s eye as it had been in her dream.

  When she fell she fell flat out straight ahead and her left hand came down on concrete, the right sunk deep into mud. She gulped water spit it out. Scrambled up. The torn silk blouse had come open completely and hung off one shoulder like a filthy sodden rag.

  She risked a glance and there it was, taking its time, gliding, sinuous and a graceful and awful with hurt for her just a few feet away.

  A black snake skittered out ahead but she didn’t car
e, her feet hit the concrete and suddenly she was splashing toward the garage because its door was kept unlocked for Danny after school, there were keys to the house hidden by the washing machine, there were rakes and tools inside.

  She hit the door at a run and turned and saw the snake raise its head out of the water ready to strike and she bent down and reached into the warm deep muddy water, her head going under for a terrible moment blind as she clawed at the center of the door searching for the handle and found it and pulled up as the massive head of the thing struck at her, barely missing her naked breast as she lurched back and fell and it tangled itself, writhing furiously, in her torn nylon blouse.