by Barry Rachin
Call of the Beguiled
by
Barry Rachin
* * * * *
Published by:
Call of the Beguiled
Copyright © 2010 by Barry Rachin
This short story represents a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or locales is entirely coincidental.
* * * * *
Also by Barry Rachin:
•The Misfit Motel
•Canary in a Coal Mine
•A Waltz Yes, a Heart No
•Just like Dostoyevsky
•107 Degree Fahrenheit
Call of the Beguiled
The first time I laid eyes on Cheryl Oliphant the young girl was sitting in the feeding station of the Brandenberg Park Zoo with a South American Tree Boa nestled in her lap. While the snake’s bulky body lay relatively dormant, the four-foot, emerald green python was wriggling its tail in a repetitive, undulating motion. “Are you familiar with green tree pythons?” Cheryl asked in a matter of fact tone. I shook his head and teetered backwards toward the door. The snake she was fondling measured three inches thick at the middle. “A tree python lowers its tail and wiggles the end to attract prey.”
“That’s always nice to know.” I took another step backwards and glanced over my shoulder in the direction of the main entrance. I’ve seen a lot of nuttiness in my fourteen years on planet earth, but a girl my own age making nice-nice with a boa constrictor is just a tad bit too weird for my predilections.
The dark-haired girl stroked the python’s scaly head as though she was petting a lovable puppy. “Younger reptiles exhibit this behavior more often than adults. Captives will also use tail luring when hungry. But you don’t have to worry. She already ate breakfast half an hour ago.”
I didn’t particularly care to learn what the girl had fed the lemony green snake. My best guess would be frozen mice. The zoo director probably bought them wholesale from an exotic pet food distributor. But then what? Did they leave the icy rodents out overnight to thaw or defrost them in the microwave? And how many minutes did you have to zap a frozen mouse so the boa didn’t get heartburn? The eccentric girl reached out with a free hand. “I’m Cheryl Oliphant and my scaly friend is Nicolena.”
“I’m Teddy Rasmussen.” I took her smallish hand and gave the fingertips a gentle squeeze.
The Brandenberg Zoo was small but cleverly designed. The open enclosure that featured kangaroos near the entrance gate was home also to Charley, the donkey, a party of domestic white-tailed deer – spotted red markings in summer, diffuse, brownish-gray coat through the chilly winter months – and three mischievous wallabies. An indoor rain forest was kept well misted and heated to a sauna-like eighty degrees; the building housed a colorful array of tropical birds, fruit bats and a nocturnal marsupial from Indonesia that kept scrupulously out of sight during the daylight hours. A separate brick structure at the far end of the zoo sandwiched between the monkey house and rodent display was maintained in perpetual darkness. A collection of garish turtles, lizards, salamanders, snakes and exotic fish called this gloomy repository home.
Truth be told, Nicolena, the South American tree boa, made more of a lasting impression on me than Cheryl Oliphant. The girl – she looked to be about the same age as me – was short and dark with a compact frame that was neither fat nor particularly svelte. The hair was jet black and close-cropped, the eyes a deep chocolaty walnut that accentuated her earthy complexion. She wasn’t unattractive but the infuriatingly dour girl never smiled once in all the time she sat there stroking the god-awful reptile. And there was an oppressive sadness about her, a melancholy that seeped from her limpid eyes like dead weight.
And one other thing - she was bright as hell, a regular zoological brainiac! Not that I’m a slouch when it comes higher education. I’m a solid AB student except for the stupid subjects that no one has any practical use for like physics or chemistry or trigonometry or calculus or stuff like that. Then my grade might slip an academic notch or two. But that’s by choice, which is to say, I voluntarily choose not to perform up to my full potential. It’s never a matter of laziness or faulty IQ. Cheryl had been taking summer classes at the zoo straight through from elementary school and now was helping out as an assistant zookeeper, an adolescent docent assisting newcomers to the camp program. “Well, anyway, welcome to the Zoofari summer camp,” Cheryl added. “We’re gonna be seeing a lot of each other over the next few weeks.”
At four o’clock in the afternoon, my mother arrived. “Well, what’s the verdict?” she asked as I stowed his backpack in the rear of the Jeep Grand Cherokee.
“Yeah, it was tons of fun.”
“And how are the other kids?”
“Most of them commute from Mansfield and North Attleboro. There’s only one kid that I recognized from middle school. And there’s a helper, Cheryl.” I had almost forgotten about the stony-faced Oliphant girl.
“And what’s she like?”
“I dunno. Hard to say.” I flipped on the radio and fiddled with the knob until I finally located a country and western station blasting a Kenny Chesney tune.
Cheryl Oliphant’s father also pulled into the parking lot the same time my mother drove up in the Jeep. He was a dead ringer for the daughter – short compact torso with dark hair and fastidious features. Despite the short stature, he appeared quite handsome. The blue pinstriped suit was definitely not bought off the rack from any discount department store. The designer shoes, likewise, probably set the guy back a solid two hundred bucks. Mr. Oliphant grabbed his daughter’s hand and led her to a Jaguar convertible. Her face remained blank, expressionless. Nicolena, the South American tree python exuded more pizzazz – infinitely more joie de vivre – than her underage handler.
Later that night after supper, my mother positioned a sack of King Arthur flour on the kitchen table along with a container of sour cream, orange juice and dried apricots. “So what did you learn today?”
“The zoo staff … they talked a lot about global warming, endangered species and protecting natural habitats.”
She sifted three cups of flour into the Teflon-coated baking pan of her bread machine then added a generous dollop of sour cream. “Did you get to see the sloth bears?”
“Oh, yes!” I perked up. “They’re originally from the jungles of Sri Lanka and eat pretty much everything including ants, honey, fruit, grubs, grass, flowers, eggs and carrion.”
“I’m impressed!” My mother tossed a half cup of orange juice into the mix along with two eggs and began chopping the apricots into thin bite-size wedges.
“Here’s the funny part,” I grinned good-naturedly. “Sloth bears love termites. The bugs taste like candy to them. In the wilds, a bear digs open a termite mound with its claws, blows away the dirt particles, then pushes its snout against the hole and vacuums up the insects.”
“Ouch! Now that could be painful proposition.” The woman threw the chopped apricots into the pan along with a teaspoon of salt and several rounded tablespoon of yeast which she spread away from the salt. “Here, smell this.” She sprinkled a small dusting of herbs from a spice bottle into the palm of her hand and held it under my nose.
“Mmmmm. What is it?”
“Fiori di Sicilia flavoring.” She measured out an eighth of a teaspoon, spreading the aromatic spice around the perimeter of the pan. “Now tell me more.”
“To keep from being bitten by the angry termites, sloth bears seal their nostrils using specialized nose flaps.”
The regular zoo staff delivered the background information about the exotic beasts, which were playing in a large open-air pit speci
fically designed for the shaggy creatures. Cheryl, the unflappable docent, offered up the curious tidbit about the bear’s specialized nose flaps. While the somber-faced girl was giving her spiel, one of the creatures let out a collection of atonal roars, squeals, yelps, huffs, rattles and gurgles that carried a good two hundred feet all the way to the front gates of the zoo. The girl spoke in a dull monotone like she was regurgitating the material from a memorized script. No getting around it, when it came to the animals, she probably knew as much if not more than the regular staff. Still, the tortured soul shtick was beginning to grate on my nerves. The girls I knew from middle school – some were goofballs, weirdoes, bimbos, flirts, and ditz brains, but at least they had a life! This one looked like she was engrossed in some heavy-duty weltschmertz.
“That business about the sloth bears,… how absolutely intriguing!” my mother tittered. “It’s only the first day of camp and you already learned a ton of interesting things.” She closed the lid of the bread machine and pressed the one-and-a-half pound loaf button. After a moment the small spindle on the bottom of the machine began to whirl in intermittent half-strokes. A minute passed and the mixing arm spun continuously churning the ingredients in a loose ball of sticky dough.
“What the heck are you making?”
“A sour cream apricot loaf. I’ll bake it up tonight and place a fresh slice in your lunch bag for tomorrow’s session at the zoo.”
In the morning, I found Cheryl Oliphant over by the otter display. The zoo designed a rather ingenious habitat for the eight river otters permanently on display. A deep swimming pool emptied out to a shallower, fifty-foot long channel that fronted on the pedestrian walkway. The otters would belly-flop into the pool at the far end and race in a swirling corkscrew fashion up to the Plexiglas wall before flipping end-over-end and hurtling off to the far side only to repeat the process again and again. It was one of the most popular attractions at the zoo and the rodents never failed to hold up their end of the bargain with outrageous feats of gymnastic prowess.
“River otters are members of the weasel family, like skunks and ferrets,” Cheryl recited with clinical detachment, “and can hold their breath under water uninterrupted for eight, whole minutes.”
“All they ever seem to do is play and sleep,” I fidgeted, shifting the backpack higher on my shoulders. Cheryl was sort of pretty – not like the fashion plate, blond-hair-blue-eyed cheerleader types that sashayed around the middle school with their perky noses angled skyward. Rather, hers was a hopelessly neurotic, muted loveliness.
“Well, yes, they do that too. River otters are environmental indicators and only stay where the water is clean. Industrial pollution has driven the rodents from much of their traditional range.” She glanced up momentarily to make sure I was paying attention. “The good news is that cleanup and relocation programs are helping the animals make a comeback.”
“Swell.” I was getting weary to death of her endless zoological prattle. To be sure, the girl was bright as hell – a hundred times smarter than any of my Zoofari classmates, but after a while the drip, drip, drip of meaningless trivia wore a person down. “What are you reading?” I indicated a small paperback sticking up from a pocket in her backpack.
“Jack London. A collection of his short stories.”
“I read Call of the Wild,” I said.
“The Sea Wolf was my favorite.”
“Yeah, me too.” Cheryl seemed impressed that I had read both books. Actually that wasn’t completely accurate. I had only skimmed Call of the Wild, leapfrogging over the last hundred pages in order to write an overdue reading assignment for seventh grade English. As I remember, I squeaked by with a sixty-five and a sarcastic, cautionary warning from the teacher scrawled in red pen. I never laid eyes on The Sea Wolf and only said I did to impress the girl.
Cheryl pulled the book free of the flap. “There’s a story, To Build a Fire.” She lowered her voice even though no one else was within a hundred feet of where we were talking. “It’s about a gold prospector in the Canadian Yukon who falls through the ice as he’s traveling alone in the wilderness returning to camp. He has to light a fire in order to dry his wet clothing and keep from freezing.”
“It’s cold as hell up there.”
“At seventy-five degrees below zero spit freezes as soon as it leaves the mouth, making a crackling sound like a small caliber gunshot.”
I stared at her uncertainly. Several camp counselors passed by nodding as they headed toward the main office. “Jack London wrote two versions of the same story. The original had a happy ending, the second not so pleasant.” A blue jay nestled away in the dense foliage of a maple let out a barrage of energetic squawks before flying away. “Wouldn’t it be nice if we could write multiple endings to events in our lives? Pick the ones that suit us best.”
“Unfortunately, most people have no choice in the matter,” I muttered. “I saw your father yesterday afternoon when he picked you up after class. Your old man looks just like you.”
The girl’s features contorted in a foul expression. “That’s where the similarity ends,” she replied gruffly. “My father has affairs with women half his age and treats my mother like garbage. My parents shouldn’t really even be together, but that’s for them to work out.”
The outburst caught me unawares. I shifted uncomfortably on the balls of my feet and watched the otters make another pass in front of us before lithely doubling back to the wider end of the pool. One of the sleek brown rodents crawled out of the water long enough to devour a chunk of raw fish in the feeding trough. “I have a problem with my filter,” Cheryl muttered apologetically, almost as an afterthought. It was clear she regretted the emotional flare-up and was trying to make amends.
“I’m not sure what you’re talking about,” I replied, wishing I had gone directly to the staging area rather than pausing to commiserate with the eccentric girl. Cheryl Oliphant had seemed so engaging and sensitive when we first met. But now I was experiencing major doubts. Maybe what I mistook for an offbeat, quirky personality was a brittle façade masking morbid tendencies – a proverbial Pandora’s Box of adolescent pathology! And what was that crazy business about filters. There were oil and air filters on cars – fuel filters on the domestic oil burners my father serviced. The week before Zoofari, I went on a service call with my old man to a home where the filter on a four-hundred gallon oil tank was clogged with sludge and sediment. He replaced the cylinder and bled the air out of the gravity feed line.
“My mother says that I have this pathological tendency to say every foolish thing that crosses my mind without filtering content. I blurt things out impulsively … things that, even if true, are inappropriate.” Cheryl blinked several times and her voice cracked. “They sent me to a psychiatrist. He gave me some pills.”
“Did it help?”
She shook her head from side to side. “The medication made me feel like a zombie. After the first week, I stopped taking it.” She made a sharp snorting sound that only vaguely resembled a laugh and, without warning, reached out and poked me on the upper arm. “My parents have marital problems so they send me for counseling. Does that make any sense?” She didn’t wait for a response. Rather, Cheryl’s voice dropped several decibels, assuming a droll, self-mocking tone. “Last Tuesday I overheard them quarrelling and, for the first time, they used the ‘D’ word.”
Now I was in it up to my eyeballs! This petite brunette with a South American boa constrictor for a best friend was spilling the beans about her dysfunctional family. I knew the girl less than two days and she was having emotional dysentary! “You don’t have to talk about it.”
“No, I don’t mind,” she parried my remark.
Mr. Oliphant was having a love affair with a woman half his age, a secretary at the insurance firm he managed, and wanted out of the marriage. Cheryl broke off her commentary, running her slender fingers through her dark hair in a repetitive gesture.
“So what h
appened?”
“My father got a lawyer. He’s drawing up the paperwork. A bittersweet, convoluted smile enveloped her features. “My dad’s moving into an efficiency apartment over the weekend.”
I stood quietly now, mulling over what I had just heard. “How much time before class starts?”
“About eight minutes.” She blew all the air out of her lungs in a prolonged sigh. “We should probably head over to the main hall.”
“No, not yet.” I went and sat on a gray bench close by the monkey house. A plaque on the side of the structure explained that it had been fabricated from recyclable waste – plastic milk cartons, TV dinner plates and such. “Here, eat this.” I handed her the inch-thick slab of sour cream apricot loaf that my mother, with much fanfare and ceremony, had cut an hour earlier.
Cheryl closed her eyes and bit into the golden bread shot through with orange flecks. Then she smiled - the most beautiful, rapturous, enigmatic and mystifying display of transcendent emotion I had ever witnessed. “God, this is delicious!” A pungent, fruity sweetness wafted through the muggy, early morning air.
“My mother baked the bread last night. It has sour cream and orange juice and apricots and some crazy spice that can only be found in the remote mountain regions of Sicily but don’t quote me on the Sicily thing.”
She broke the uneaten piece in half and handed a portion to me. When the magic bread – the bread that made the singularly saddest girl in the universe smile as though it was the second coming of Christ – was gone, Cheryl reached out and placed the splayed fingers of her right hand on my chest. “You are the sweetest boy in the world.” Like a benediction, her hand floated down my body falling away at the stomach. “And now we should go to class.”
Each Saturday throughout the summer vacation straight through until Labor Day I went out with my father, a furnace repairman, on emergency calls. My mother said that, since I was clever with my hands, “mechanically inclined just like your old man” – those were her exact words – it would be as good as a first job.
