The Snake

by John Godey

  But the sailor turned away and went straight on. Ahead, on the right, was the Delacorte Theatre, and on the left the Great Lawn, with the baseball backstops sticking up and the patterned dirt infields, stretching north for about four city blocks. The sailor moved on past the big round theater without even looking at it.

  Because the path was straight here, Torres hung well back. Above him, nailed to a tree, was one of those green signs: THIS PARK CLOSES AT MIDNIGHT. What’s a matter, sailor, Torres said to himself, you can’t read? You breaking the law, amigo, you committing a crime, so I don’t feel sorry for you, what’s gonna happen, you fucking criminal. He smiled to himself in the darkness, and closed up the gap a bit as the sailor lurched past the little Belvedere Lake, they called it, with the castle on the other side, sitting on a rocky bed, looming up against the sky like something from olden times.

  After a while, as the sailor wandered deeper into the park, something occurred to Torres that made him worried. What if there was another mugger someplace, and he picked off the sailor while Torres was laying back? And suppose, from the way he was heading, suppose he stumbled into the Ramble, where all the fags hung out? Some of those maricons were rough people, and could rob the dumb bastard, besides cornhole him, too. Cristo, Torres thought, I better pull the job before he gets hijacked.

  He started to quicken his pace, and just then the sailor turned around. Torres dove for the pavement. Sonofabitch had seen him! No, he was looking up, maybe checking out the buildings on Central Park West to see which way he was going. Just ahead was one of those arches, like a little tunnel. Go ahead in the tunnel, Torres said to himself. But instead, the sailor veered off to his left.

  Good enough, Torres thought. He got up, drew his piece out of his belt, cocked it, and took off after the sailor at a light run. He had closed in to within a dozen feet when the sailor heard him and turned around. Torres edged toward him a little.

  “Aw ri’, man” he said. “This wha’ they call a mugging, okay?”

  The sailor’s eyes were blinking in surprise. He didn’t look scared. Torres raised the piece so the guy could see it.

  “You be a smart guy and you don’t get hurt. Ri’?” He waved the pistol. “Else you get blowed away. Okay? I wan’ you lay down on your face. Okay? Lay down, man.”

  The sailor laughed.

  “You hear me, man? Lay down.” When the sailor kept laughing, Torres began to feel uncertain. Sonofabitch was like an apartment house. But then the sailor laughing at him made him mad. He pushed the gun out at arm’s length toward the sailor and yelled, “You lay down, motherfucker!”

  “Okay, greaseball, I lay down.”

  The sailor shifted the box from under his arm and threw it at Torres, shoving it out from his chest with both hands, like a basketball pass. Torres saw the box coming at him, tumbling in the air, and, behind it, the sailor moving toward him fast. An edge of the box caught him on the shoulder, and then it went sailing past him and he heard something crack as it hit the pavement. The sailor was right on top of him when he pulled the trigger. He shot three times, the last two with the muzzle of the gun right against the sailor’s chest, and then the sailor’s weight was bearing him backward.

  They hit the ground hard, with the sailor on top, and Torres heard his own breath whoosh out of him. He struggled wildly, threshing with his legs, chopping at the back of the sailor’s neck with the barrel of the gun. He braced his feet against the pavement, arched his back, and heaved upward, and the sailor rolled off him. He scrambled to his feet and trained the gun downward at the sailor’s head. But the sailor wasn’t moving. His eyes were open and staring up at the sky. His shirt was bloody, and Torres realized that all three bullets had gone into his chest and that the sailor was already dead when he fell on top of him.

  “Sonofabitch,” Torres said. He felt awed. It was the first time he had ever wasted anybody. Then he felt a surge of pride. Big like an apartment house and he had wasted him! Okay, beautiful, but think about it later on. Three shots, and if there was cops cruising through the park they maybe heard it. Hurry up and make the score and split.

  The sailor was lying a couple of feet in front of the box. The wood had split when the box hit and the cover was broken. Torres started toward the sailor, and his eye was caught by something moving in the box. He saw two points of gleaming light and a dark shape moving slowly from side to side. The dark shape moved upward on a long column, and Torres, staring, realized that it was the head and neck of a snake. As he watched, frozen, the snake started to slide out of the box. It slithered over the rim, pouring out in a continuous motion. It kept coming, slow and smooth, no end to it, and Torres thought he must have been dreaming.

  “Madre de Dios!”

  He looked on in fascination as the snake poured out of the box, drawing itself into a loose coil until finally a thin tail flipped out. Then the snake raised its head up high on its stiffened neck and stared at Torres. Its head was small and flattened and its eyes were bright and shining in the darkness. Some of the coils were practically touching the sailor’s body. The snake was flicking its long tongue in and out, and its head swayed over the sailor’s body, like, Torres thought wildly, it was guarding it.

  Torres couldn’t believe his eyes. He had seen some big snakes before in Puerto Rico, in the interior, but never one like this sonofabitch. It scared him. He wanted to turn and run away, but he wasn’t gonna split without getting the money. He thought of trying to shoot the snake, but he knew it would have to be a very lucky hit, and if he missed it might get the snake mad.

  The snake kept looking at him with its gleaming eyes, and the tongue kept sliding in and out. It was like they were both hypnotized, Torres thought, staring at each other across the sailor’s body. But Jesus, man, Torres said to himself, you can’t stay here all night. The cops might be trying to locate where the shots had come from. He had to make a move. The snake had started to hiss at him, and it had its mouth wide open. Suddenly, remembering a movie about India, Torres had an idea. He held the gun out in front of him and moved it to the right, and the snake’s head swayed to follow it. He moved the gun back to his left, and again the snake’s head moved with it.

  “Stupid snake,” Torres said, and, to himself, Hey, man, you got it made. He edged forward to within three feet of the sailor’s body. Cautiously, he moved the revolver left and right a few times, and always the snake’s head followed it.

  “Okay, man,” Torres said, “now we make the score.”

  He extended the revolver as far out to his right as his arm would reach, and when the snake’s head turned to stare at it, hissing, he quickly crouched, and with his free hand reached inside the breast pocket of the sailor’s bloody coat. His fingertips had just touched the wallet when the snake’s head shot forward, so fast that it was a blur, and he felt a sharp stinging pain in his thigh. Before Torres could move, the snake struck again, launching itself over the sailor’s body, and he felt it hit in almost the same place.

  Torres shouted hoarsely and jumped back. The snake was erect again, hissing, its mouth gaped open. Torres retreated half a dozen paces and looked at his thigh. His beige pants were slightly reddened by a few tiny spots of blood. It didn’t hurt there, just a feeling like pins and needles. When he looked up again the snake’s body was in motion, curling forward over the sailor’s body, moving toward him.

  “Cristo, save me,” Torres screamed. “Cristo, please save me from this fucking snake!”

  He turned away and began to run at top speed.

  ***

  The snake crawled off the walkway into the grass. It held its head high, and its black forked tongue darted in and out. It disappeared into the darkness.

  TWO

  Five minutes after the start of his panicky flight, Torres stopped running long enough to rub the surface of his revolver with his shirt, and drop it into a trash basket. Then he began to run again.

  He had been running headlong, as fast and hard as he could, from the moment the snake had
crawled across the sailor’s body toward him. For a while, he kept turning his head to see if it was chasing him, though he knew that no snake could possibly travel at that speed. From time to time he reached down to touch the place on his thigh where he had been bitten. It wasn’t swollen and it didn’t hurt—just the little pins-and-needles feeling—and he took comfort from that. Maybe the goddamn mile-long whore of a snake wasn’t even poisonous.

  But he began to feel lightheaded, like he had been drinking too much wine, and he was having some trouble breathing. Also, it was taking him too long to get out of the park. He had stayed on the winding footpaths except for once, when he tried to take a shortcut through an uphill bushy area, and he had lost his bearings and almost gotten hysterical until he found his way back to the paths. He always thought he knew the park as well as he knew his own asshole, but now he couldn’t seem to find the way out.

  After he found the paths again he felt played out and had to take a rest. So he just sat down on the pavement, facing in the direction he thought he had come from, so he could see the snake coming if it was still following him. Estupido! He had lost it a long time ago. But the fucking animal had scared him shitless, and he couldn’t free his mind of the way it kept sliding out of that box, and the way it bit him so fast that he couldn’t hardly see it move.

  Sitting down and resting didn’t seem to do much good. If anything, his breathing was getting worse, and his mouth was filling up with some sticky kind of crap. He couldn’t spit the stuff out and had to try getting rid of it with his fingers. He got scared all over again, and he knew he better get to a hospital fast, but he had a hard time standing up. His legs felt weak, and he was starting to feel sleepy. But he finally pulled himself up and took off again, though he was staggering more than running, and he couldn’t breathe good, and the gummy stuff in his mouth was dribbling down his chin now.

  He began to sob, and tried to beg some saints to help him, but he couldn’t think of any of their names. He was sucking for air, and his arms and hands felt so heavy that he could hardly move them. At last he remembered his name saint, but when he tried calling out to him he couldn’t talk, only make sounds like a frog.

  He couldn’t feel his legs at all now, just saw them going up and down like in slow motion. The pins and needles were spreading upward in his body, and his head kept falling down until his chin bobbed against his chest. After a while it got too hard to try lifting his head, so he just let it hang down. He didn’t feel like running no more, either. All he wanted was to lay down and go to sleep. But he kept going, and a little bit later he saw an exit out of the park onto Fifth Avenue. It puzzled him that he was way down near 64th Street, when he should have come out in the high Seventies.

  He stumbled through the exit, but couldn’t stop himself at the curb. His momentum carried him into the middle of the street, where he collapsed.

  Through his closed eyelids he saw the brightness of headlights coming toward him, but he didn’t try to move. He knew his legs wouldn’t work, no part of his body would work. He heard the bad noises he was making when he tried to breathe, and he knew he was gonna die, right there, laying down in the middle of Fifth Avenue.

  ***

  Patrolman John Nebbia, driving sector car Boy-3, saw the figure stagger out of the park and into the street, where it collapsed.

  “See that?” he said to his partner, Patrolman Frank Finnerty.

  Finnerty nodded. “Look at the cars. They go right around him, like dodging a pothole. Nobody stops.”

  “Who stops and gets out of his car at three-thirty in the morning? I’m not crazy about it myself.”

  Nebbia sped up a bit until he reached the figure sprawled in the street. There he made a short U-turn that brought the car around in front of the figure, setting up a barrier to protect it from the oncoming southbound traffic. Finnerty was out the door before the emergency brakes were set. Nebbia turned on his revolving roof light before he got out.

  Finnerty was down on one knee, leaning over the man. “What’s the matter, feller?”

  Nebbia watched the man’s brown eyes open and stare upward. He was having trouble breathing, and a heavy gluey mucous discharge glistened on his lips and chin.

  “OD’d” Nebbia said. “One more Hispanic OD. I’ll call for an ambulance.”

  “He can hardly breathe,” Finnerty said. “See how blue his face is? Probably a heart attack.”

  “Me, I diagnose it overdose,” Nebbia said. “He’s too young for a heart attack. I’ll call an ambulance.” He straightened up, but instead of going back to the car, yelled at a driver who had stopped alongside them, with his window turned down, to watch the scene. “Move along, move along, chrisesake. You got no home to go to?”

  “He looks like he might go out any second, John,” Finnerty said. “Let’s put him in the car and take him ourself.”

  “I don’t know,” Nebbia said.

  “What don’t you know? He could go any second.”

  “That’s what I don’t know,” Nebbia said. “You know as well as me that if he dies on us we have to hang around and wait for the M.E., and Christ alone knows how long it takes the wagon to get here, and then we have to inventory his possessions….” He paused, and assessed the tightening of Finnerty’s spare Irish face, and shrugged. “Okay, okay, we’ll take him ourself.”

  They carried him to the car. Finnerty got into the back seat with him.

  Nebbia spoke into his microphone. “Nineteenth Precinct sector car Eighteen-twenty to Central. K.”

  In the back seat, looking down at the slumped figure beside him, Finnerty heard Nebbia inform Central that they were transporting a serious OD to East Side Hospital. After Central acknowledged, Nebbia turned his siren on.

  Not OD, Finnerty said to himself, not OD but a heart attack. He tried to remember the emergency procedure he was trained to follow. The only thing he could think of right now was mouth-to-mouth resuscitation, and he wasn’t sure he could bring himself to do it with all that crap that was clogging the victim’s mouth and oozing down over his chin.

  “Move it,” he said to Nebbia. “Will you move it?”

  ***

  As the snake headed into heavy brush, a squirrel fled before its approach. The snake was hungry, and it might have taken the squirrel, but its primal impulse was to seek a place of safety. It crawled deeper into the brush, constantly probing with its deeply forked black tongue. It paused at the base of a tree, erected its head on the taut anterior portion of its body, and looked upward. Then it began to crawl up the trunk of the tree, winding around it swiftly and smoothly, using its prehensile tail for leverage.

  It stopped two-thirds of the way up the tree in an area of heavy foliage, and draped itself over the branches in a seemingly patternless arrangement of loose random loops that were designed to distribute its weight evenly.

  The snake was eleven feet, two inches long, and slender. Its head was coffin-sided and comparatively small for the length of its body. Its eyes, dark brown and round, were wide open. It was unable to shut its eyes because it had neither eyelids nor nictitating membrane.

  The snake was asleep.

  ***

  With the exception of weekend nights, when the traffic was heavy and continuous until dawn, the emergency ward of East Side Hospital was normally at its busiest between 4 P.M. and midnight. Those were the hours when most of the patients flocked to emergency for nonemergency treatment they would normally have sought in the clinic, which closed at four o’clock.

  Now, at 3:45 A.M., the reception room was empty except for a sleeping wino with a stiffly bandaged forefinger. He had been treated more than an hour ago, but showed no disposition to leave. Probably, Nurse Rosamund Johnson thought, glancing at him from behind the reception desk, because of the air conditioning. Well, he was peaceful enough, poor old bum, so let him hang around.

  She was working on a sheaf of Blue Cross claim sheets when two cops came in with a patient. His feet were dragging, his head lolling, and he see
med to be semi-comatose.

  “Found this on Fifth Avenue,” one of the cops said. “He’s got the blue face.”

  Nurse Johnson punched a key on her intercom and said, “Billy, bring out a stretcher, stat,” then punched another key and, after a moment, said, “Dr. Papaleo, we have a patient in a cyanosed condition who’s having trouble breathing. Come immediately, please.” She listened for a moment and then said sharply, “Look, doctor, you better come immediately. Stat.”

  “Overdose,” one of the cops said. “I seen hundreds of them.”

  The nurse, grimacing at the intercom, said, “How’s he ever gonna be a doctor if he don’t learn how to wake up?”

  “He can’t breathe,” the other cop said. “My opinion, it’s heart attack.”

  An attendant came through an inner door rolling a stretcher.

  “Put the patient in Room D, Billy,” Nurse Johnson said. “Dr. Papaleo is on his way.”

  The two cops strained, helping the attendant lift their burden onto the stretcher. “Dead weight,” one of them said, arching an eyebrow. “If you know what I mean.”

  Nurse Johnson said, “Can you fellows hang around a few minutes in case the doctor wants to ask some questions? There’s a coffee machine around the corner.”

  One of the cops nodded, and the other one said, “I’ll call it in.”

  ***

  Dr. Charles Papaleo disliked the emergency ward almost as much as he disliked the surgery, which, in turn, he disliked more than obstetrics and less than medicine. He recognized that in terms of gross experience emergency ward service was invaluable for a first-year intern, but that didn’t change his view of it. His problem was that he was abnormally shy, and had trouble in his dealings with people. Left to himself, he would have chosen another profession, something reclusive, no doubt, but his father and brother, both of whom were physicians, wouldn’t hear of it, and they were overwhelming. Nevertheless, he had prevailed in making his own choice of a specialty—radiology. As a radiologist he would rarely have to face a patient from one year to the next, just his shadow imprinted on a sheet of film negative.