The Snake

by John Godey

  Bennett recoiled, then stepped forward again and looked at the body. The eyes were open and glassy. One arm was bent back underneath. The white captain’s hat had fallen away and lay nearby, incongruously balanced on its rim. There was a good-looking box a little distance away. He looked dead, but to make sure, Bennett let him have a couple more kicks in the ribs.

  He found the wallet, first try, sticking up from the breast pocket of the linen jacket. He cackled with pleasure. He leafed through the wallet quickly and gasped with delight: bills a half-inch thick—twenties and fifties and even a few hundreds. He slipped the money into his pants pocket, and looked around him. Nothing in sight. He began to work feverishly, eager for what other wonders he might discover. In the jacket pockets he found a pack with half a dozen cigarettes in it, some keys, a crumpled dollar bill, two packages of matches, a disposable lighter, a packet of salted peanuts, a bloody crumpled handkerchief, some foreign coins. In the body’s left-hand pants pocket he found a package of condoms, in the right a handful of U.S. coins. Everything went into his own pockets. When he had picked the body clean he put the sailor cap on his matted white hair, and giggled when it slid down over his ears. He picked up the box—the cover was busted, but it was still a fine box—and put it under his arm.

  He decided to get out of the park real fast. He had entered on Fifth Avenue near the Metropolitan Museum, not too worried about walking through, because no self-respecting mugger would waste his time on an old wino bum (though some of the mean ones would hurt winos just for laughs), but now, with his loot, he felt different.

  He pushed the hat to the back of his head so it wouldn’t swamp him, tucked the box under his arm, and hurried along the path toward Central Park West.

  ***

  The snake basked on the surface of a large black rock a short distance from the tree it had sheltered in, its eleven-foot length spread out to the sun in an extended sigmoidal flex. At 7:30 A.M. on the third day of the heat wave, the sun already burned relentlessly through the city haze.

  The snake was poikilothermal—a cold-blooded animal. Its temperature was not constant, like that of most animals, but modulated with the temperature of its environment. Because cold exerts a narcotic, potentially killing effect, snakes predominate in the tropics and subtropics and thin out in number and species in the temperate regions moving toward the poles. Yet, a common viper is known to inhabit an area above the Arctic Circle and parts of Siberia.

  Scarcely stirring, the snake warmed up its blood until some instinctive thermostatic reflex warned it that it had reached the optimum temperature. Then it slid away from its exposed position on the rock and into the shaded underbrush near its tree.

  ***

  Matt Olssen’s body was discovered a little after 8:30 in the morning by a Parks Department truck carrying grass-cutting equipment. The police were notified, and an RMP car was dispatched to the scene from the Central Park Precinct, located in the 85th Street transverse. The Medical Examiner’s office sent out its death wagon to collect the remains, which were brought to the morgue on First Avenue, near Bellevue Hospital, and assigned a refrigerated drawer not too far removed from the remains of Ramon Torres.

  Examination of Matt Olssen’s effects, which had been stripped from him at the scene and placed in a transparent plastic bag, offered no clues to his identification. A label in the linen jacket indicated that it had been purchased in Hong Kong. The shoes were of French make. There were no labels on the T-shirt, the underpants, or the socks. The pockets were empty except for a few crumbs of food; there was not so much as a handkerchief in them. The only hint as to the victim’s identity, if it could be called that, was a red and purple tattoo across one buttock, reading: BETTY.

  But, later in the day, the corpse was identified by its fingerprints, which were on record as the result of a number of arrests over the past five years, all for aggravated assault. An address on the East Side was given for one Betty Parker Olssen, listed as the victim’s wife.

  ***

  Arthur Bennett locked himself in a booth in a washroom of the main branch of the N.Y. Public Library, and counted the money in the wallet he had taken from the dead sailor, whimpering with disbelief as he tolled off the numbers in a hoarse whisper. He stuffed the money (nine hundred and eighty-four dollars) into the pocket that held the coins, the disposable lighter, the keys, the salted peanuts, the matchbooks and the bloodstained handkerchief.

  He left the library, bought and drank a pint of muscatel, and then wandered down to the Bowery, picking up eighty cents in handouts along the way.

  He sold the peaked sailor hat for seventy-five cents, but couldn’t dispose of the box, for which he was asking a dollar. When he became too persistent in pushing the sale of the box, someone became annoyed, grabbed it away from him, smashed it by jumping on it, and then threw the remnants into the street where, in time, passing cars splintered it further.

  Near noon, two men cornered him in a doorway, beat him unconscious, and took his money.

  ***

  The olive-slate color of the snake’s top blended with the shadowed leaves of the tree, and the starling, lighting on a bough, did not see it.

  The snake’s vision was highly developed, with particular acuity to perception of movement, and, because of the placement of the eyes at the side of the head, commanding a large field of view. It had picked up the starling in flight and watched it flutter to its perch.

  The bird was four feet from the snake’s head and facing outward from the tree. The snake’s darting tongue picked up the odor of prey. Unmoving, alert, tensed, the snake stared at the bird. Then, anchoring itself by its prehensile tail, mouth wide open, it shot forward in a blur of speed, and sank its fangs into the bird’s body. The bird squawked and flew off. But before it had gone twenty feet its wings began to flutter erratically and it dropped to the ground.

  The snake did not pursue. It stretched out on the tree, its head hanging downward, its eyes focused on the movements of the bird. Even when the bird struggled feebly into a patch of undergrowth and out of sight of the snake’s vision, the snake did not follow. It waited patiently for perhaps five more minutes before it circled down the tree. On the ground it trailed the bird unerringly by means of the special scent left by an injected prey.

  The snake’s poison organ was a digestive juice in the form of a highly specialized proteinacious saliva. Thus, the snake’s venom, in addition to killing the prey, had at the same time begun the process of digesting it.

  The starling was dead when the snake found it in the brush. The snake maneuvered its length until the bird’s head lay directly in front of its mouth. The bones supporting the snake’s lower jaws moved in the skull, the elastic ligaments between the halves of the jaw stretched, and the mouth opened to an astounding width which would accommodate the swallowing of a prey far bigger than the starling, and even larger than the diameter of the snake itself.

  The snake hooked the teeth of one side of its mouth into the bird’s head. Using this purchase as a fulcrum, it pushed the other side of the mouth forward a short distance, engaged the teeth (which were useless for chewing and hence required the snake to swallow its prey whole), then repeated the ratcheting process, opposite side after opposite side. The recurved shape of the teeth, acting as hooks, would have prevented a struggling prey from escaping once it had been engaged by the teeth.

  The snake gradually ingested the starling, not so much swallowing it as drawing itself over it.

  ***

  Around 4:30 in the afternoon, two policemen arrived at Betty Olssen’s small apartment house to perform the uncomfortable duty of informing her that her husband had been killed. As always, in such instances, they sought the cooperation of a neighbor, on the theory that the involvement of a familiar face would somewhat cushion the shock. But of the first three people they found at home, one claimed not to know Betty Olssen, and two declined, on the basis that they didn’t get along with her. One of these, the superintendent of the house, was
quite emphatic in his refusal to help. The bitch was nothing but trouble, and, what’s more, in the seven years she had lived in the house, had never tipped him as much as a thin dime, even at Christmas.

  The policemen decided to proceed without assistance. They rang the widow’s bell and, after an awkwardly oblique approach that she fathomed in the first seconds, broke the news of the discovery of her husband’s body. They asked her to be so good as to accompany them to the morgue to complete the identification.

  The widow, who was pretty, and wearing a revealing nightdress, took the news calmly, even with a certain grim satisfaction. “I knew the crazy sonofabitch would get himself killed sooner or later.”

  One of the cops was red in the face. Betty Olssen thought at first it was because of what she had said, but then realized from the way his eyes kept wandering away from her, that he was embarrassed by her near-nakedness.

  “Wear a see-through, he told me,” she said. “So I put on a see-through and I fell asleep in it. So it shouldn’t entirely go to waste, officer, I wish you would take at least one good look at me.”

  Her face was stolid as she stood in the echoing room in the morgue and waited for the chilled drawer to be pulled out. Matt Olssen came out feet first, with a tag tied to his big toe. His hair was neatly combed. She looked down at his face with no emotion showing on her own, and simply said, “That’s him,” and then turned away.

  When she asked about the contents of his pockets and was told that there were none, that he had obviously been shot in the course of a robbery, she nodded her head, as if in confirmation of some previously formed judgment. She seemed surprised when the attendant told her that the Medical Examiner’s office would perform an autopsy before releasing the remains.

  “What for? He was shot, wasn’t he?”

  “It’s required by law. Besides, we sometimes turn up clues that help the police with their investigation. For instance, what position he was in when he was shot, whether the perpetrator was left-handed, maybe what height the perpetrator was….” But the attendant saw that the widow wasn’t the least bit interested. He rolled the body back into the refrigerated case. “Okay, miss, tell me where you want the remains sent.”

  “Feed it to the cats.”

  Not because he was shocked—after twenty years on the job he had heard everything—but because he had a duty to perform, the attendant said, “You want to give him a decent Christian burial, don’t you?”

  “He wasn’t a decent Christian, so why should he have a decent Christian burial?”

  “Well, it’s the usual thing….”

  “I’ll tell you something.” Her round face hardened to show some of its underlying bone structure. “The sonofabitch never gave me anything but misery, he starved me out, he spent his money on whores, and I never saw a penny of it except once in a while when he was bombed and, you know what I mean, wanted my favors. So if you think I’m going to spend any of my hard-earned money to bury him, forget it. You got potter’s field, right? That’s where to bury him.”

  “Well, we don’t call it that,” the attendant said. “I can’t force you to take the body, but if the city has to bury it, you’ll get billed for the expense.”

  She shrugged.

  Meaning, the attendant thought, that billing her is one thing, and collecting another. He said, “Look, he was a seaman, so there’s probably a pretty good insurance policy, and union benefits too—right?”

  She smiled. “It’s the one good thing he ever did for me, and he couldn’t help himself—the company took out the policy for him. I got that money coming to me, I deserve it, and I’m not gonna piss any of it away burying him.”

  “Aw, miss,” the attendant said, “in the name of common decency—”

  “Potter’s field,” Betty said. “He’ll never know the difference.”

  FOUR

  This evening’s performance at the Delacorte Theatre was to be Richard Brinsley Sheridan’s School for Scandal. All 2,200-odd free tickets had been distributed by seven o’clock.

  At least half the ticket-holders picnicked in the park, mainly in the areas adjacent to the Delacorte: up by the Belvedere Castle, on the banks of the small oblong Belvedere Lake, by the Shakespeare Gardens, and, in the hundreds, on the burnt-out grass of the Great Lawn. The grass was barely visible for the blankets that covered it, on which people sat or reclined or spread their picnic food and drink.

  A certain segment of the crowd, notably the older people among them, were festive and uneasy in equal parts. As New Yorkers, trained in the ways of survival in the perilous city, they held it as an article of faith that one didn’t enter the park after, or even approaching, dark. And so there was a heady, nervous pleasure in being here now, a sense of willful violation of common sense, like teasing a bull in an open field. They were aware that there was no real danger, of course, since they were part of a vast throng, and since there was a reassuringly sizable police detail on hand. Nevertheless, it was an adventure of sorts.

  When the performance began at eight o’clock, it was not quite dark. The buildings to the east lay in dusk, and their windows were already sparkling with lights; to the west, the sky was hazily luminous with the setting sun. In a few moments that light would die away, and darkness would fall. Sitting on their wooden fold-down seats in the circular theater, the crowd was dressed for the stifling heat in light summer shirts and blouses, trousers and skirts and halters, and even, here and there, bikini bathing suits and bare chests. The house lights dimmed, and the audience prepared for its pleasure, knowing that, whatever standard terrors-would surely transpire in the more remote regions of the park, here it was cozy and secure.

  ***

  The snake crept swiftly through the darkness, its slender length always in direct contact with the ground, curved into a continuous flowing S-movement, each part of its body following precisely in the path of the part preceding it.

  The snake’s movement was by horizontal undulation, a series of gentle curves, with the body forced against the substrate at each curve. This method of locomotion was made possible by the hundreds of vertebrae that constituted its backbone. The scales of its lower surface were enlarged, forming transverse overlapping plates whose free edge was directed backwards, and to each of which was attached a pair of movable ribs. When the ribs moved forward they carried the plate, or scute, with them. Since the scute was smooth, and its leading edge was protected by the one over it, it slipped comfortably over any irregularity in the surface. There was one disadvantage: when the scute was moved backward, its free rear edge snagged. Thus, to all practical purposes, the snake could move in only one direction: forward.

  Although it had no awareness of it, the snake was, in part, retracing its movements of the night before, after it had escaped from the box. It passed within a few feet of the place on the pavement where Matt Olssen had died, where it had bitten Torres. Its path took it across a segment of the Great Lawn. If the grass, burnt dry and tanned by the sun, was a familiar environment to the snake, nevertheless many of the odors its tongue carried to the Jacobson’s organ were alien to it.

  It glided over the edge of the grass, crossed a walkway, and slid toward the Belvedere Lake. It veered to the left, away from the great upward fling of light from the Delacorte Theatre, and then crawled down to the water’s edge.

  As it drank, a great shout of laughter rose from the theater. The snake didn’t hear it. It lacked an external ear, an ear drum, a tympanic cavity, and eustachian tubes. It was deaf.

  ***

  Roddy Bamberger leaned toward the girl and whispered, “Let’s duck out of here and go to my place and turn on the air conditioner and bring out the fine sherry wine and…” He brushed her cheek with his lips “…and anything else your heart desires.”

  Somebody in the row above shushed him. The girl herself didn’t answer, didn’t even seem to have heard him. She was sitting forward eagerly in her chair, seemingly transported by what was occurring on the lighted stage. Roddy groaned
inwardly. Transported, for Godssake, by a bunch of inept emoters without the foggiest notion of how to speak the witty cadences of the great Irish—what else?—master of the English comedy of manners. Some of the speech was as flat as street talk, some of it so badly imitative of flutey mid-Atlantic English that it verged on parody. He had seen college dramatic society versions that were better. And, Christ, in London he had been privileged to be present at a National Theatre performance of School for Scandal. After that, this thing was sacrilege!

  Looking at the girl, still gazing at the stage with idiot rapture, he couldn’t imagine how he had ever thought that profile interesting. What had at first seemed to be an enchanting kind of delicacy was really more aptly describable as simpering. He was an ass to have been beguiled by a profile and a set of agreeable small breasts he had permitted himself to fantasize about in various pleasingly diverting ways.

  It was all a bloody mess. He should have had more sense than to have allowed himself to be conned into coming here in the first instance. Free theater—like free anything else—was bound to be lousy theater. What you got for nothing was nothing. Nor should he have deceived himself into thinking that the profile and the quivery little tits might lead to a relationship of lasting (or protractedly temporary) value. The girl was worth exactly one dinner, a little arty talk, the air-conditioned bedroom. A one-night stand, and then goodbye forever.

  It was all a bloody mess: the play, the girl herself, the ridiculous heat, the chicken and oversweet domestic wine she had put up, and which they had eaten on the buggy Great Lawn surrounded by hundreds of others eating the same cold chicken and hot wine. He despised the crowd around him—the way it dressed, the way it talked, its manners, its uproarious laughter when Sheridan’s wit called for a quiet, appreciative smile. Not to mention its collective smell—a blending of sweat, greasy chicken, and pot.