Peaceable Kingdom

by Jack Ketchum

  Floodwater poured rushing into the garage, the thick muscular body of the snake turning over and across her in its tide, caressing the flesh of her stomach and sliding all along her back as she struggled to free herself of the blouse and twist it around its darting head. She stumbled to her feet and ran for the washing machine, found the keys and gripped them tight and ran for the door.

  The snake was free. The blouse drifted.

  Ann was standing in two feet of water and she couldn’t see the snake.

  She fumbled the key into the lock and twisted it and flung open the door.

  The snake rose up out of the water and hit the lip of the single stair just as she crossed the threshold and then it began to move inside.

  “No.” she was screaming. “I don’t let you in I didn’t invite you in. Goddammit! You bastard!” Screaming in fear but fury too, slamming the wooden door over and over again against the body of the snake while the head of the thing searched her out behind the door and she was aware of Katie barking beside her, the snake aware too, its head turning in that direction now and its black tongue tasting dogscent, womanscent, turning, until she saw the vacuum cleaner standing by the refrigerator still plugged in from this morning and flipped the switch and opened the door wide and hurled it toward the body of the black thing in the water.

  The machine burst into a shower of sparks that raced blue and yellow through the garage like a blast of St. Elmo’s Fire. The snake thrashed and suddenly seemed to swell. Smoke curled puffing off its body. Its mouth snapped open and shut and opened wide again, impossibly wide. She smelled burning flesh and sour electric fire. The cord crackled and burst in its wallsocket. Katie howled, ran ears back and tail low into the living room and cowered by the sofa.

  She grabbed a hot pad off the stove and pulled the plug.

  She looked down at the smoking body.

  “I got you,” she said. “You didn’t get me. You didn’t expect that, did you.”

  When she had hauled the carcass outside and closed the garage door and then fed Katie and finally indulged in a wonderful, long, hot bath, she put on a favorite soft cotton robe and then went to the phone.

  The lawyer was surprised to hear from her again so soon.

  “I’m having a little garage sale,” she said.

  And she almost laughed. Her little garage sale would no doubt relieve her of everything she was looking at, of practically everything she owned. It didn’t matter a damn bit. It was worth it.

  “I want you to go after him,” she said. “You hear me? I want you to get the sonofabitch.”

  And then she did laugh.

  Rikki-Tikki-Tavi, she thought.

  Snakes.

  Firedance

  Frisco Hans shifted the Remington over-and-under to his scarred white-knuckled left hand and nervously adjusted his hat. A night as cold as this, they all wore hats. A night like this you could feel the body-heat rise off your head like steam out of a sewerpipe. For eight and a half years Hans had worked as a merchant seaman. Then one morning he jumped off a lifeboat made fast high over the leeward rail onto the deck of the Curlew, hit the deck too hard and lost his sense of taste. Couldn’t tell salmon from a plate of liver and onions. It never came back. When he realized it was not going to come back he quit the merchant marine before he lost some other of his senses and took a job as a security guard in a frozen-fish factory way up here in Maine. Hans knew about loss. He kept his hat on.

  The little guy beside him, Homer Devins, considered that he knew about it too. But that was because Devins’ wife had run away with the Chinese dry-cleaner last winter while Devins was out hunting rabbits. He bagged one rabbit and Chin Feng Chi made off with his wife of thirty years. Devins was still a little uncomfortable with the deal.

  Hans shook his head. “What I still want to know is, how the hell does this kind of thing just happen? Did I just wake up one morning and all the rules’re changed?”

  Devins pulled hard on his Camel Light, a tiny glow in the dark. “Damned if I know. You come up with the answer to that, you tell me.”

  Devins glanced down the line of bare scrubby trees that encircled the field. Other cigarettes glowed. A kitchen-match flared. Half the town was out, standing around the perimeter, watching. He threw his Camel Light into the snow.

  “Damn! Animals are s’pposed to be afraid of fire.”

  Hans nodded. He’d been hearing the same puzzled wisdom for over two days now, ever since Ray Fogarty and Dot Hardcuff rushed into the Bar None Grill Wednesday night just after one in the morning all red-faced and out of breath and babbling about animals in the clearing up by Zeigler’s Notch. To which he and most of the sixteen or eighteen gathered there responded bullshit. And what the hell were the two of them doing up there in the first place? kidding them, knowing full well what they were doing, but knowing also that Ray’s wife would skin him alive if she knew and so would Dot’s husband.

  Not one of them believed them. Not for a second. But it was Wednesday night and nobody in the joint had much to go home to—damn few even had work to go to in the morning given what was happening with the economy. So they piled into half a dozen trucks and made the run up the mountain to the Notch, their tire chains grinding up the dirt beneath the snow like one long open wound.

  They pulled over where the road stopped dead and even from the base of the trail through the thicket you could see the glow up ahead over the hill so that they knew the part about the fire was true enough. But the rest? Bullshit. Ray and Dot were having a little fun with them was all.

  It was only at the rim of the clearing that the cigarettes started falling out of incredulous wide-open mouths and beer bottles started dropping down into the snow—because what they were looking at wasn’t possible. Wasn’t natural. Wasn’t right. It flew in the face of everything.

  You didn’t have to be a genius—you didn’t even have to have finished high school for godsakes—to know that it was not just brainmatter and the almighty opposable thumb that set people apart from the animals, certainly set them apart from the animals in nature, in the wild, you were not talking about some fat old yellow hound or bone-lazy housecat lying all curled up and comfy on the sofa, you were talking about wild things, and it was not just brain and thumb that made humans different. It was fire.

  An animal saw a fire in the hearth, it stayed the hell outside. Saw fire in a cave, it hung well clear in the dark. Saw fire in the woods, it panicked. It ran like the beejeezuz.

  What kept us warm and comforable was for animals a source of terror yet here they were, seven of them, basking in its warm red glow.

  And not even all the same species.

  Yet another impossibility.

  You had mice, two of them.

  You had snakes, big ones, impossible to tell exactly what kind from this distance but a pair of those too.

  You had a big red cardinal, a goddamn bird no less.

  You had a wolf. You had a lynx. Both of them rare as hens’ teeth around here.

  But basically, you had a bunch of natural enemies. Wolf. Lynx. Bird. Snakes. Mice. Nobody eating nobody. Lying instead by a good hot fire enclosed by a fieldstone circle maybe three and a half feet in diameter. Easy as you please, staring into the fire, listening to its crack and sizzle.

  The first thing Hans realized was that it would not be a good idea to fuck with them. Other than the occasional half-empty beer bottle they were all unarmed out there. A wolf could get nasty. A lynx was practically bound to get nasty.

  So the patrons of the Bar None Grill stood in the cold perimeter and at first it was as though they were standing in the presence of something as miraculous and awe-inspiring as the Second Coming, as Lourdes for chrissake, they could have been watching little green men stepping wide-eyed out of a saucer, they could have been watching Nessie poke her head from beneath the waters of a Scottish lake.

  Then one man stepped back, and then another. In the crackle of the flames and the silence which surrounded them they seemed to have h
eard something ominous, felt the dark chill of a moonless Maine winter night move from outside to in.

  Later, many would admit to having pretty much the same thought.

  It was as though the natural way of things had reversed itself.

  Humans in the shadows, wild things in the light.

  “Not right,” someone said. “No-fucking-way right!” and suddenly they bolted, pounding down the mountain, running like kids from the bogeyman, half of them ignoring the trail entirely and battling their way through the thicket as though the woods itself had all of a sudden turned on them and was barking, snapping at their heels, racing after them like cobras, diving from the skies like hunting birds.

  The drinking lasted till dawn.

  By noon that day the whole town knew.

  Something was happening with the animals.

  It was Gert McChesney talking. Who, because she was old and lived alone in an ancient ramshackle house on top of Cedar Hill and walked with a rolling limp, refusing the indignity of hospital gown and bedpan the hip replacement would have called for, the local kids dubbed the Witch. But who in reality was Dead River’s one and only Rhodes Scholar—Yale University, Class of ’31—and only marginally a drunk.

  They were sitting at the Bar at the Tip Top Lounge and Gert was on her second Heineken and Musiel and Schilling and Frisco Hans were each on their third. It was only one o’clock—a cold, grim grey day that seeped across the floor of the bar and over their feet even with the door closed tight behind them.

  “You think about what fire is,” she was saying, “and what do you come up with? Fire’s a breaking down of things. You start with a hardwood log, you end up with a pile of ash. You get the fire hot enough, same goes for flesh and bone. See, the form’s gone. All you’re left with’s minerals and gasses and the temporary release of energy. That’s what scares the animals. The destruction, the breaking down of all those old familiar forms. Trees, grass, nests—and whatever’s unlucky enough to be trapped in ’em. Animals got enough sense to run like hell when things are falling apart around them. Us on the other hand, we love it. We love the smell of a fire, the look and sound of it, the nice warm glow. To us fire’s a comfort. We’re the only animal on earth who takes comfort in the breaking down of things.”

  She sipped from her beerglass, a little foam clinging to the long steel-grey hairs of her upper lip.

  “Maybe that’s changed now.”

  “Now how the hell could that be, Gert? The fire ain’t changed any.” Frisco Hans slapped his bottle down and pointed at it and Teddy Panik swept it away and uncapped him another and set it on the bar. He didn’t ask if anybody else was ready. He never did have much to say.

  She shrugged. “I dunno.”

  Hans looked at her, frowning. He’d been following her pretty well he thought. Now he’d run head-first, tires screeching into a mental brick wall. Maybe that’s changed now? He thought Gert had more sense than the whole town council combined on the very best day of their lives but what the hell did that mean? Musiel and Schilling were looking at her like they were puzzled too.

  Hans was a man of action though. Given the roadblock he’d skirt around it.

  “Okay,” he said. “So what do we do about it?”

  She smiled. More often than not Gert’s teeth had a lipstick stain on the uppers. Today was no exception.

  “Call up the evening news? Get somebody in from the University? I suppose you could. If it was me, I’d just leave well enough alone. See what happens. Long as they don’t burn the woods down, what’s the difference?”

  Hans thought on that. Maybe there was a difference and then again maybe there wasn’t. Leave that for awhile too, he thought.

  “Okay, then explain to us how come we got snakes not eating mice, we got cats not eating birds, we got cats, lynxes for godsakes and wolves not tearing the living shit out of each other. Explain that.”

  She smiled again. “Peaceable Kingdom,” she said.

  “Huh?”

  “Old testament passage, a kind of prophecy, it might be Isaiah. A lot of nineteenth-century naif painters favored the subject. Edward Hicks, Henri Rousseau. There’s this bucolic scene, a lion sniffing at the muzzle of an ox, a wolf lying down with a lamb, leopards lying next to a goat, that sort of thing. I only remember one line from it. ‘And a child shall lead them.’ There were usually some kids in the paintings too. Peaceable Kingdom. Interesting.”

  Hans wondered what naif was and what bucolic meant. It sounded to Hans like a disease.

  He wished he could taste his Heineken.

  That was yesterday. Nighttime fell and they’d gone up the mountain, little after midnight, and instead of half a dozen trucks parked where the road left off and the trail began there were cars and trucks all over the place and he and Homer Devins had to walk about a quarter of a mile from where they left the Dodge.

  This time some of them, the original crowd from the Bar None Grill and a handful of others, were armed with shotguns, rifles. Despite their embarrassment and efforts to conceal what they’d done word had got around about their headlong flight down the mountain. Even Hans had his over-and-under.

  His neighbors and friends were already standing two-deep in the shadows along the perimeter by the time they arrived. Women and children too this time. He and Homer moved in close beside Gert and Dot Hardcuff and Jack Musiel where they could see. The hush was the same as the night before. The inexplicable made flesh. Nobody could believe their eyes.

  There were a lot more animals this time. A big wild black-and-white dog. Another wolf, smaller, a female, maybe the mate of the first one. Two more cardinals and a half dozen sparrows. A pair of bullfrogs. A bluejay. An owl and a rooster. A pair of water moccasins from down by the river. A hawk.

  And they weren’t just basking by the fire either. They were moving in a slow irregular circle in either direction around it. Frisco Hans watched the lynx brush shoulders with the she-wolf and a mouse crawl right on up over the back of a water moccasin sliding in the opposite direction. The moccasin didn’t even turn its head, didn’t blink an eye.

  “What in the Lord’s name are they doing ?” whispered Dot. Hans noticed that her husband wasn’t there. But then again neither was Fogarty. He wondered if they’d up and shot one another. By now half the town knew it was Dot and Ray Fogarty who’d barrelled down the mountain last night, bursting in with the news to the Bar None Grill.

  “They’re moving,” said Gert, as if to say, how in the hell do you expect me know what they’re doing, you damn fool? which with a few more beers in her she might have. You could almost hear the click in Gert’s head sometimes when she’d been drinking and then she wasn’t so polite anymore.

  It didn’t matter much what they were doing though because whatever it was, they stopped. It was as though some prearranged signal had passed between them. They stopped on a goddamn dime and they did it all at once.

  And that was truly scary. You could hear safeties click and bolts thrown on rifles all along the periphery. Everybody thinking, you gotta bet they know we’re out here. Everybody nervous as a virgin in a whorehouse, wondering if the animals wouldn’t turn and move against them. Even tame animals reverted. These were wild.

  But what they did was, they sat down.

  Just like the night before. As though the people in the shadows didn’t matter one damn bit. As though they weren’t even there. They just curled up in front of the fire. A wing fluttered. The she-wolf sighed. You could hear the soft raspy coil of a blacksnake.

  And it was strange then, Hans thought, even he was aware of it, as the fear passed off them there was something maybe about the way these creatures who were supposed to be frightened of men with guns were ignoring them instead, or maybe it was just them all being out here in the first place, to what end nobody could say, scaring them, scaring humans, but a feeling passed through the crowd that felt like a kind of collective shame or guilt or something, as though the animals had made them smaller somehow, humbled, a damn s
ight less significant. You were aware of a dull resentment of that. It moved across the crowd like a pale moon rising.

  And there was a moment when he knew, just knew it was going to get ugly. In all his experience with people of every nation on the face of the earth there was a link between pride and humiliation and an aftermath of bloody violence. He’d seen it in Singapore bars and Polish whorehouses, on docks and freighters, over and over, everywhere. You could almost feel the bodies tensing, fingers tightening on triggers.

  “Guess the show’s over for the night,” said Gert—loud, so everybody could hear. “You can’t help but wonder what in the world they got for us tomorrow, though.”

  People laughed here and there. The tension eased.