I tottered on my knees then pulled the hair back off my forehead. My eyes wet, I drew closer to his snake holes. They were like twin tears in cloth. At last I pressed my lips down onto those warm slots black with blood, then, slow, I pulled the poison out of Buck. Into myself. You might think I’m exaggerating when I say that I could taste what was poison, what was blood. The poison was bitter with a foamy peroxide kick to it. But blood seemed only salty and, by contrast to the venom, almost sweet.
“Spit it out, Esther, spit it on the towel. Get all that out of you. I cannot have you harmed, not for a sec. You’re so fine, dear. Bless your soul for this.” I did as he said. I spewed it out then, just as he told me. I was stooped here over him, him flexed out below me, star-shaped, Buck. I fought wanting to cry like some little girl would then. Crying not from horror, not even from gratitude, but more from simply knowing: This is my life I am living.
“Esther, now please hit me with ammonia. Takes acid to counteract snake acid. There. Yeeks, burns so good. Now I’m going to need some shut-eye, pet. You sure did it, though. You got it all or most, and I can tell, dear. But let me sleep, oh, twenty minutes tops. Then I’ll be fine. No more than that or I’ll get dopey. I will need to do something when I come to. Need to have you walk me around. This has happened maybe ten other times, so I know. But when I do feel stronger and can roll over, I am going to thank you, Esther. Living across from us these couple years, you’ve made our being here just so much more livelier. More civil. And now this. You be thinking if there is anything whatever I can do for you, girl.”
Then, at once, he passed out or slept. I eased onto my breezeway. Had myself a cigarette. I’d only ever smoked two before. But somebody had left half a pack in “The Segovia” and I did enjoy that one slow Lucky, pulling smoke way in, letting it find its own eventual way out. Laissez-faire. Then I realized: here, the only time a man had ever told me in advance I could expect something memorable and I was making my big mouth smell like an ashtray. I had to laugh at myself as I dodged into “The Bellagio” and swigged down half a bottle of Lavoris. By doing this, I saw I’d made most of a decision.
I only woke him because I felt scared that being out too long might give Buck brain damage. I stooped beside my davenport again. “Time,” I said. Facing downward, he just yawned then aimed his elbows out, as if nothing much had happened. So … male.
My couch had a new hibiscus print on it, maroon. Whatever blood he’d shed, it would blend in. But I wished that some might stay there, permanent. So sure, he turned over with a sleepy grin and growled up, “Hiya, lifesaver.” First Buck kissed me full on the mouth then more in the mouth. It did not prove so repulsive as it always looked when you suspected two movie actors were sneaking doing it.
Then he told me he’d forever been crazy about me after his fashion right from the start. Said how his liking me so, it had nothing to do with my first aid just now. Not simple tit for tat. “So to speak,” I said.
He told me to go pull the blinds shut, and I did. He got himself to sitting, woozy still. Then he patted the cushion right beside him. I, dutiful, feeling frail as if I had been snakebitten, settled just where he showed me.
“You won’t forever after blame me or be jealous of the others if we do this once, to celebrate my coming back to life with your great help, right?” I shook my head no. He said, “Nothing to panic anybody. No breakage, Esther. Just one thing I want to do. I am too weak for offering up everything right now. I would black out. But this I know I want.” And he slid down off the couch and, first, Buck warmed his right hand between my knees. In recent years I’ve been given to wear half-stockings and he soon rolled those fully down with all the care of the earth’s best young doctor. Next, he hooked his hands around my drawers’ elastic and pulled the pants out from under me, showing me how to lift up so he could do it easier.
He knew I could not have borne to let him see me all undressed. It was just too late for that much. Too late to do everything. But as I kept my hand on his one shoulder not swollen, Buck’s white hair, bristly as a pony’s, disappeared under my housedress. There was no false start, none of the snaky seeking I had feared. His tongue was there all at once, its own bloodhound locator system, and it could have been a hundred and sixty degrees hot. I had no idea. It, his tongue, soon seemed to be a teacher of infinite patience, then like a sizzling skillet, a little pen flashlight, now featherweight, now flapjack, then just a single birthday candle that—in time, strengthened by doing lap after lap—becoming the forest fire. I had no notion I would ever respond like this, way beyond where Language ever gets to start. In brief, certain sounds were made. Snake-farmish sounds, only it was me … I. The “I” that soon had her leg crooked around his shoulder, pushing him away, but he leaned into that so it felt like I was playing him in and out of me at exactly my own speed. He was regular as a clock and I was always knowing where he would have been as I allowed myself and just went off again and again and off again, my calves St. Vitus, my feet dancing spasms. The first time was sort of a sea-green, the second time more a bronzy blue—there came a red moment but it ended all steamed in hard-baked stone-washed sunflower-yellow.
It ended only because I was too proud to let it go on as long as it wanted to. Which would’ve been as long as both his life and mine. Finally, I said, “There, oh my …” and started to make one of my jokes, but some sudden dignity stopped me. Funny, I didn’t feel ashamed. I felt dignified. I never understood that this was possible. Having another person here, it was less shaming. It was more a way of knowing we are all alike in this. It was beautiful. It was once but it was beautiful.
“Bacon and scrambled eggs and coffee cake,” I chanted, gathering myself to stand. I knew I wouldn’t risk the ugly comedy of pulling up my half stockings or regaining my step-ins. Instead I would eat a meal with a man who had just taken my knickers off and he would know that, while we ate. I’d placed new oilcloth on my little table here in the Main Office of Los Parnassus and I felt glad the room looked nice. He stayed right on till 7:35. I asked if he wanted my help to get him back across the highway. “Hell, no, girl.” Buck smiled. “Let me picture you right here as you are. Know what? You’re a saint from heaven and one wonderful, wonderful woman. You’re so strong. I love that in you, Esther.”
“Well, thank you,” I said, not doing anything funny, not daring to ruin this. I helped refasten Buck into his blood-soaked safari top. We had eaten as he sat there in the half-light glow with his white hair tangled on his chest and the swelling already going down. He was that healthy, it was cause and effect, once I had Hoovered most of the bad stuff out. Fact is, I could still taste him or the poison or probably the mix in my mouth. A blend: walnut, allspice, penny metal, black licorice, lamb medium-well. I watched him go.
The traffic parted, like for Moses.
“Come one, come all,” I whispered through my screen door.
It was Buck’s fourth wife that took him to the cleaner’s. She was not in residence. On Independence Day, we heard she’d suddenly demanded half of everything; and here he was already sharing with his first three. Her lawsuit tipped him into bankruptcy. I hate that kind of selfishness in women. In anybody. He gave so much. Then she had to claim his cars and wallet. The sheriff served a summons mid-show. Flashing lights, sirens, horrible for Buck.
What else shut him down? Not the Health Department, though they could have. Grilled-cheese sandwiches were served to customers off a greasy G.E. appliance meant for home use only. Buck’s vats, where the gators did their shows (if you could call gators’ being gators shows), those might’ve used a weekly hosing-down with ammonia, Clorox. I had not volunteered to rush over and help. But you try and Ajax around thirty moody rattlers. All I knew, just when our neighborhood’s social life had grown so routed through the Reptile Canteen, just as I’d got, first, the taste of poison, then a taste of what other people’s physical-type lives must be like and, I guess, daily—here came the state to close him down.
There was a huge new si
gn:
Selling Truly Giant Snakes/Gators.
Under Chapter Eleven, Everything Must Move.
Buck soon sold the rattlers to researchers who believed their venom might someday cure cancer. A nature park outside Orlando sent a huge yellow Allied Van Line truck for the gators. All thirty-nine (Stumps, deceased, excepted) left here with silver duct tape wrapped clear around their heads, stacked like wriggling cordwood in the back of that dark truck. Oh, it was a black day along this overly bright stretch of U.S. 301, I can tell you. I stood there in Florida’s latex glare as the van pulled off with every creature blinkered and discounted.
In honor of the reptiles’ exit, I had worn my lilac hat and all my white patent leather and every Bakelite bangle I could find. We held on to each other, Buck, Dixie, Peggy, Tanya and me. Plus some young gents and the teenage boys the girls had flirted with just to keep them buying Cokes. Buck didn’t shed a tear. He was the only one. Said, “Well, I’ve gotten out of tight corners before, girls. But this is the End of the Age of the Snake Farm, probably. Hell, I’m a realist. All their rocket talk and hating the Russians has nixed many a laugh. Eisenhower and Mamie might’ve been customers here. But, you know, those European-type Kennedys? No roadside attractions for people that French-speaking and stuck-up. Type that changes clothes three times a day without noticing. Thing is, it’s not personal, way I see it. And that’s the problem. The Future is here and it gets hosed off way too often. And don’t you girls suspect it’s all based on Bad Science? I think nobody gives good value now, much less put on a decent doggone show. And where the fuck is the energy and fun in any of it? Excuse me, ladies.”
“No sweat,” said I.
Next morning, hired guys rolled up all Buck’s signs. Those now proved no more substantial than window shades, and yet, for almost three years, they’d got to feeling pretty monumental. During windstorms, their canvas snapped like the sails of the Mayflower. That sound and the surf’s slamming had made this seem the New World after all.
Suddenly, signs gone, the Atlantic’s raw horizon showed again. But it’d lost its charm; looked like one lethal paper-cut. Buck’s home-dug lake, gatorless, appeared about as exotic as some miniature-golf water trap. Gravel paths bound nowhere now.
I’d planned a major farewell breakfast in honor of my friends. But they left overnight in the middle of the dark. I later saw that as a kindness, really. The very next noon, a Haitian crew—carrying radios blaring French tunes—arrived to dig up all Buck’s store-bought palms. Root balls were still wrapped in burlap from their last sale. Seeing those trees go off lonely and akimbo on one flatbed truck? was like witnessing a slave auction of friends. Unnoticed, I waved. From the second-story breezeway, I was physically sick. Well, guess who felt bleak to the point of suicide, of moving back to Toledo mid-February?
Weeks after, you would see a Piggly Wiggly truck pull up, not having heard or believed, and with enough slimy salad in back to feed all terrariums on earth.
I never doubted Buck’s tale about beating Hemingway at poker and what a whiner Papa was over losing sixty bucks. I believed my friend about Papa’s being overnight with my favorite moving picture star, Ava Gardner. Buck would say no more than that, except, below his dancing eyes, he kissed all his right hand’s fingertips. He admitted just, “Ava? Ava was a gentleman.” And since Buck had once told me I was also somewhat one, that helped.
Buck had been exactly Ava’s type: the best gristle-sample of manhood ever to spring up on the wrong side of the tracks. And a man still male enough at sixty-five or -nine to keep three exes fighting for some stray lettuce-head of his tossed attention. He never bragged, except maybe to tourists he’d never see again. You might think Buck had too little to boast of; but there was, in the high times at the Reptile Canteen, in our sole evening of sucking the poison out of one another, a kind of grandeur I can only hint at. After his wives, too loyal and numerous—having heard his final pistol—powdered their noses and freshened their Cleopatra eyeliner, all of us knowing our last show was ending, once that day’s clump of tourists spent a few last wadded dollars on plastic shark-tooth key chains, Buck would come chesting in. He’d give us all a cobra smile, teeth white as my patent leather shoes and, including me, he’d say, “Que pasa, girls?”
Oh, he had it.
That is all I can say.
Buck definitely had it.
Once the Farm closed, if you dared walk over there to consider the sandy blankness and those holes where rental palms had stood, you realized most of the cages had been nothing more than double-thick chicken wire. Made you wonder why the snakes had stayed. Maybe for the reason his ex-wives (and I) did. Because this really had been a working farm. Because everybody did their chores. Even the snakes, who struck against glass, aiming for the sunburned leg of some plump passing tourist-boy, just to make him scream and force his mother, once she found no fang marks, to laugh. “It didn’t mean it, Willie. That’s just nature being nature, is all. That’s what snake farms teach us, son.”
Even now, one snaggled fact still stands there. Greenish and flaking, it is chipped like a Greek temple salt-preserved in Sicily; yes, the ticket booth’s rounded cinder-block steps arranged in a shape as close as possible to a scallop shell. And up on top there’s the little cement platform, five feet above the sand, where people stood to buy admission for their families. Two hurricanes chipped the booth away in two huge molar chunks. But those steps yet survive.
I told myself not to expect to hear from any of the wives or him once they’d slid out of sight. That proved righter than I’d hoped. Still, wherever they washed up next, you wished them well.
(After all, when these show folk found me here in ’59, my lady library officer’s drink of choice—learned at conventions—had been a sticky cherry cordial. And by the time my snake charmers left in the middle of the night in ’63, I’d worked my way straight up to straight Jack Daniel’s. Who says there is no human progress?)
Those greened steps now stand framed against only browning palmetto scrub. But here’s the funny part. On a cool afternoon, if you park down a ways then tiptoe back, if you take a peek at the little stage that platform makes, you’ll often catch three to seven dozing there. Real snakes sound asleep, wild ones. They must love the heat a day of sun leaves banked in those old blocks. Maybe snakes enjoy being dry and up out of their usual mud. But, cottonmouths, water moccasins and, once, a red-and-yellow coral snake, they all seem to be waiting. It’s as if local reptiles can yet remember Buck’s whole vivid show. Like they long, as I once did, to simply hear how he’d describe them!
Soon as the government closed Buck down, things grew silent fast around Los Parnassus Palms. I could not have simply left here with them when my friends drove off. I owned property. Besides, they never asked.
Still, I knew that, if he ever thought of me, Buck would want his good-sport Esther to be getting on with this, her latest life among the others she’d spent elsewheres on the lam. My heart had lately grown so … unsystematic.
When first I bought Parnassus, I turned off its signage indicating rooms available. But bargain-hunting oversexed salesmen kept making me explain myself. So I’d lit just those two low-watt neon letters. My “NO” warned cars away. Through monsoons and dry spells, one blue skull and crossbones—my spinster coat of arms—blazed day and night against stucco.
Five months after the Reptile Canteen closed, as I lounged around the Main Office—alone, naturally—I noticed, there beside the table where we’d eaten our aftermath bacon and eggs and his favorite coffee cake, two light switches. Decades back, these’d been marked in some stranger’s tidy pencil script the welcoming “V” and, near it, the canceling “N.” I now reached over and, inhaling, with the flair of some magician’s assistant, flipped off the “N.” Then, taking in two lungfuls of sea air, instead I just hit availability’s “V.”
I let it burn, out in plain and common view. I cannot say it didn’t partly shame me. Pink and raw and overly visible, so all by itself (in
its upright fifth-grade cursive). I retreated to our crucial maroon davenport. I settled here, now facing our highway’s every southbound headlight.
I crossed my arms and felt surprised to find myself this ready: I would wait again. For what? Something. Anything, though not quite anyone. Heck, I’d already had the best. Oh, I might need to make a few concessions next time; I knew that.
Buck used to flatter me: “Cozy how my big Show attraction stands right up across the road from your nice Shelter attraction, Esther.” “That’s easy for you to say”—I rolled my eyes to make him laugh. He never failed, and in a baritone whose color was mahogany.
Now, almost half a year after losing sight of him, I felt represented by that blinking light out there. He had taught me it pays to advertise. Come one, come all. It’s a human right, to name at least what you’d like to offer. True, I might not be any motorist’s idea of a final destination; but maybe I could pass as just another attraction along a roadside littered with such. —Because, you know what? You never know. And that’s a great thing, how they keep us guessing. That comes in second, right after Hope.
Stranger things have happened than life’s stopping twice at one convenient off-highway location. Plenty of free parking, God knows. And now, as each headlight played across the slackened front of this, of me—partly ruined yet still far from stupid—I felt I’d maybe outgrown that blue “NO.”
Once upon a time in America, a man from nowhere with nothing but shoulders and great teeth, a guy backboned with only one idea—could put up steps to anything that he might make you see as Wonderful. And without bimonthly federal inspections, without any legal charter past a friend or three he called “our Board,” that man could shake you down for exactly the number of buckaroos you’d actually part with. And he would send you off glad, with more of your own personal story than you’d had before he took your cash. And all this without exceptional Latin.
The Uncollected Stories of Allan Gurganus Page 20
