by John Godey
The demonstrators who did appear—the police estimate of their number was 150—were highly vociferous and reasonably energetic in waving their home-made banners and placards. There were a few clashes between bodies representing diametrically opposed viewpoints, a rough division between those who wanted the park closed (mainly white and middle class) and those who wanted it to remain open (predominantly black and Hispanic). No blood was drawn. Among the sectarian splinter groups present were the Schweitzerites, animal lovers who felt that the snake, as one of God’s creatures, should not be hunted down but given free run of the park; a group of environmentalists petitioning for the razing of outlying slum areas for the purpose of creating a green belt; and a faction of welfare recipients demanding an immediate increase in their monthly payments.
The mayor, who had been known to venture out onto the steps of City Hall to address other assemblages on other occasions, did not make an appearance. Instead, he sent forth one of his young assistants, a man with a curly black beard and, although he was a graduate of an Ivy League college, a demotic New York accent that disarmed all but the most intransigent of crowds. Speaking with impeccable timing in the troughs between waves of boos and catcalls, he told the demonstrators that Hizzonner was unable to talk to them, much as he wished to, because he was on the phone to the president to ask for increased federal assistance to the city; he had made his connection and was on hold. The bearded man reminded the complainants that the police were at this very moment sweeping the park in force, under the stern instructions of the mayor to “find the snake, or I’ll know the reason why.” He shouted to them to “have faith,” and then ran up the steps and into the building. People began drifting away. Others surrounded three pushcart vendors selling soft drinks and ice cream. A hard core, obviously the creatures of the opposition candidate, continued to call for the appearance of the mayor, but their ranks kept thinning. The demonstration was, to all intents and purposes, finished.
At 10:30 the police removed the barriers.
***
If I wanted to die of thirst, Police Officer Fleming told himself, I would’ve joined the French Foreign Legion.
The only thing that was keeping him going was the promise of a lunch break once they had finished sweeping the area between the 79th and 85th Street transverses. He had been pouring sweat ever since the start. His uniform was soaked, his eyes smarted, his tongue felt like a slab of wood. So much sweat had run down into his shoes that he squished at every step. Still, he seemed to be holding up a lot better than most of the overweight cops. Funny, you’d think the fat ones had more schmaltz to burn, but it was the wiry types like himself who were doing the best.
He trudged on, thankful for small things, like not having to circumscribe the Belvedere Lake, like a lot of the others did, because of their position in the line. By now, Fleming was just more or less going through the paces. He kept his eyes on the ground, but mostly because it was too much trouble to keep his head up. As for looking up into trees, he had quit doing that when he had heard a Parks Department gardener say that there were over 100,000 trees in the park. Even with 500 cops that figured out to better than 200 trees per man!
By now, Fleming didn’t give a shit whether they caught the snake or not. In fact, he was positive it was hopeless. He had stopped having that crawly feeling that started somewhere down in his sweating toes and worked itself up to the scrotum. Not that he was any less queasy about snakes but that he was just plain numb.
Nobody was talking to each other anymore. Earlier there had been a lot of fooling around and joking, but now nobody had the spirit for it. The mood had become sullen, morose, and Fleming was willing to bet that, in his thoughts, everybody was planning early retirement. How many had collapsed and been dragged off to the hospital with heat prostration or heat stroke? That stuff was dangerous, life-threatening. A few times already he had contemplated faking heat prostration so he could get off the line. He was sorry he hadn’t done it, though now there was no point to it. Twenty minutes or so and they’d have their lunch break, and he was pretty sure they didn’t serve beer in a hospital.
There were plenty of people in the park, some of them lying in the sun (dumbheads!) or playing ball (dumbheads!) and they moved slowly out of the way of the sweep when they bothered to move at all. Earlier, some Puries had scuffled with cops and been detained, but it was too much trouble to pull them in, so they had been turned loose and told to get the hell out of the park. Phony, snotty bunch of kids—they called that a religion? Now the cops weren’t even bothering anymore. If somebody was laying down on the Great Lawn, let him be, it was a cinch he wasn’t laying on top of the snake.
A loudspeaker blared, and the comfortable sonofabitch in the car said, “Okay, boys, we’re finishing up this part of the park, and then it’s lunch and all the beer you can drink—if you can afford it, ha-ha-ha….”
Ha-ha-ha. Jerk. Fleming took a deep breath, put his head down, and plowed upward into an area full of trees and thick brush. It was the kind of terrain which, earlier, they had entered with great caution and checked with the utmost thoroughness. A low-hanging branch snapped across his face, and damn near give him a fit. He wiped irrationally at his mouth as if the snake itself had brushed across his face. Christ, if this wasn’t over soon he was gonna start screaming.
***
The snake was lying near the top of its tree when it first saw the approaching figure. As the figure came closer, the snake lost sight of it. The figure moved toward the tree and came into the snake’s view again. The snake slithered downward, silent, swift, its fresh skin blending with the background of leaves and branches. Its flicking tongue picked up odor substances.
When the figure was directly below the tree it disturbed a low-handing branch. The snake anchored itself by its tail as the figure paused. It retracted the anterior portion of its body, mouth gaping, and tensed to strike downward.
The figure moved on.
The snake held its threatening posture, hissing softly, until the figure disappeared from sight. Then it climbed back up to the topmost branches.
***
The Reverend Sanctus Milanese stood motionless on his imposing doorstep, encircled by his security guard, Christ’s Cohorts, uniformly tall, rangy, and fit. Despite the heat, or perhaps in defiance of it, the Reverend wore his long black cloak with its scarlet lining, and the small skullcap (scarlet with black lining) which had aroused indignation on the part of Catholics, who branded it a travesty of a cardinal’s red calotte, and Jews, who claimed it was a mimicry of the yarmulke.
If the Reverend had called a press conference for any ordinary reason, he might have been ignored. But the announcement that he would issue an important policy statement defining the position of the Church of the Purification with respect to the snake in the park had intrigued the media. A blend of the snake and the unpredictable Puries represented a mix of volatile chemical elements certain to produce a satisfying explosion or, at the least, an interesting smell.
The Reverend Sanctus Milanese was a tall man with black eyes under strongly arched black eyebrows, iron-gray hair, a whisker growth so heavy that he was reputed to be obliged to shave no less than three times daily, thin lips, and a long unsmiling face. He did not move. His eyes, tilted upward to the heavens, did not blink. Although he had maintained this posture for more than ten minutes in the stifling heat, he showed no sign of stress or impatience. He was waiting for the TV crews to complete setting up their equipment.
In her notebook, Holly Markham wrote, Made He man in his own image, question mark.
It was a vice of Holly’s that she was helpless to resist writing down observations which had little or nothing to do with objective reporting, and which never—well, hardly ever—found their way into her copy. She called them “snippets,” and sometimes worried that they were the stigmata of a suppressed novelist.
Holly was part of a respectable number of newspaper, TV, and radio reporters massed on the sidewalk in front of Purity Ho
use, the Fifth Avenue mansion of the Reverend Sanctus Milanese. The building, in the style of a French château, had been built for his own use some eighty years before by a highly respected robber baron. It had remained in the original family until three years ago, when it had been purchased, for cold cash raised by popular subscription of the Reverend’s followers, and presented to him as a gift in celebration of his fiftieth birthday. It thus became the third notable holding in the real estate portfolio of the Church of the Purification. The others were the Tabernacle, located in the East Thirties, in the former church of a Greek Orthodox sect which had prospered and built a new church; and the former Dutchess County estate of a played-out line of patroons, consisting of over a hundred acres and seven buildings, including the forty-room main house. This complex, called Eden Paradise, was used as a training center for novitiate members of the Church.
With the cameras in place and their sweating crews at the ready, the Reverend Sanctus Milanese prepared to speak. He opened by bestowing his blessings upon “my good friends of the media,” and asking the Lord to forgive them for sometimes writing ignorantly or invidiously of the Church of the Purification and its leader, which he had the humble good fortune to be, unworthy as he was of the great honor.
Reminds me, Holly wrote, of the preacher who claimed that, when it came to humility, he was the uncontested world’s champion.
“Speak the truth and shame the devil,” the Reverend Sanctus Milanese said sonorously, and his voice won out over the noise of cars and buses rolling down Fifth Avenue. “And I shall speak the truth.”
His voice was booming-evangelical, which was to say, Holly thought, a hard-sell voice. All evangels were demagogues, selling promises. God loves you, loves you, and if you love Him in return, heaven is yours, in death for certain, and perhaps in life as well.
“It has not been given to the police to uproot the serpent, for their mission was not blessed of God.”
A reporter reminded the Reverend that the verdict of failure was premature. The sweep was not yet over.
Reverend turns piercing eyes on speaker, Holly wrote. Evangelical eyes not worth a damn if they don’t pierce. Cohorts turn eyes, too, not piercing but cold, bleak, inaccessible.
“Now the serpent was more crafty than any beast of the field which the Lord God had made.”
Scripture-quoting voice has special vibrato, Holly noted.
“Only God, who is all-seeing, knows where the serpent lurks. Shall He impart His knowledge to those who follow temporal sway?”
Holly raised her hand and called out, “To whom will He impart it, Reverend?” and thought, If I ever get bored with newspaper work I can always find a job as a straight woman.
“To those who walk in His ways.”
A television reporter shouted, “Can we assume He has already passed the word on to you, Reverend?”
“He has instructed me as follows: Let your flock go into the park and their purity shall overcome the impurity of the evil serpent, and they shall find where it hides and then they shall destroy it.”
That’s it, Holly thought, that’s the kernel of news in the shell of bombast. He’s giving the police advance notice that he will defy them.
A reporter said, “City officials have warned the public not to search for the snake. Will you disregard this warning?”
The Reverend gave the speaker a pitying smile.
“Follow-up to an earlier question, Reverend. Will God tell you exactly where the snake is hiding?”
The Reverend Sanctus Milanese appeared pained by the crudity of the question. “Even disbelievers must understand that He moves in mysterious ways. He will not say, Here, go to this or that place. Instead, He will take the hand of one of us and lead us there.”
“When will He do this—before or after somebody else is bitten?”
Cohorts give speaker death-ray looks.
“When, in His infinite wisdom, He sees fit.”
“Your people will be taking chances. Suppose one of them gets bitten?”
“Then it is the Lord’s will.”
The Reverend Sanctus Milanese turned abruptly, with a theatrical swirl of his cape that displayed its scarlet lining, and strode on a direct collision course toward the massive, ornately carved door of his house. At the last moment the door opened from the inside, and he passed through it.
He makes a classy exit, Holly wrote, and shut her notebook.
***
Sweating copiously, Converse passed the afternoon in fitful catnaps and short, angry dreams. He had shut the air conditioner off on behalf of the python, and let it out of its cage so that it could crawl into the living room and bask in the patches of sunshine that came in through the south windows.
His dreams consisted of a series of tenuously connected situations in which he tongue-lashed the redhead cruelly, bringing her to the point of tears. The underlying theme was her duplicity; she had breached an honorable agreement by leaving a note behind her which contained her phone number and the message “Call me. Clare.” Clare. He hadn’t even known her name until he read it on the note.
He had picked her up at the Brentano’s on University Place. Her husband was abroad on a business trip, and she had what she called an end-of-summer itch for a fugitive affair with an attractive partner. Strictly a one-night stand, and then goodbye. She happened to love her husband, or, at least, like him an awful lot. Besides, she could never be serious about an affair with a pickup, especially a man who went in for T-shirts with comic inscriptions. Her attitude had suited Converse perfectly, and they had made a compact which, besides being congenial to both of them, added a little erotic spice to the adventure: Like ships that passed in the night they would never see each other again, and, in fact, wouldn’t even exchange names.
Her note had wantonly ruined a foolproof arrangement in which the danger of involvement would be taken out of his hands. It was his nature to be insanely susceptible to falling in love with the women he met. It was partially in an effort to cure himself of his affliction that he had quit his job at the zoo, which he liked very much, and signed on to hunt snakes in Australia. The Outback would offer few temptations. But the expedition had been delayed by a series of bureaucratic snags, and he had been left with almost two months with nothing to do. He had recognized his idleness as fallow ground for the forming of a liaison, and so, in self-defense, had imposed an iron celibacy upon himself. The nonidentification pact with Clare had seemed ideal, and then she had gone ahead and spoiled it, damn her.
He slept again, and a new and alarming component invaded his dreams. Clare’s body wore Holly Markham’s head. Waking, he mocked his dream. Holly, the girl with the calm, unassertively confident face? No sweat. Not his type. Nothing there to tempt him. Then why had he looked for her in the crowd of reporters before he left the park? No sweat. Just a reflex; he turned toward good-looking women like a flower turning toward the sun. Just a meaningless tropism. Pretty? Not really, except when her face opened up in its transforming smile.
As for Clare, forget it, he had torn up her note, hadn’t he? Well, actually, he had just crumpled it and tossed it into the wastebasket. Should have ripped it up and flushed it down the toilet. That’s what he would do, next time he got out of bed.
He fell asleep again and dreamed that Holly was kissing him. He forced himself to wake up. He thought of Captain Eastman. Why had he been tactless and made Eastman sore at him? Had he wanted to alienate him so he could go out and catch the snake himself, for reasons of vanity (succeed singlehandedly where an army of cops had failed) or reasons of humaneness (save an innocent snake’s life)?
The cat was spitting. Converse raised himself on an elbow and saw the python twining up the lamp standard, where the cat was perching, back humped. The cat wasn’t showing any disposition to escape by jumping down to the floor. It looked determined to settle the python’s hash once and for all. Converse got out of bed, picked up the python behind the head, and tossed it wriggling into its cage.
He turned on the air conditioning, made himself a drink, and switched on the television set in time for the evening news. Almost immediately, Eastman’s face appeared, like a bad conscience. He was admitting to a smoothly persistent reporter that the sweep had failed and that he didn’t know—“at this time”—what the next move would be. His face was eroded by fatigue and frustration, and he looked a great deal older than he had in the morning.
Converse got up from his chair and dug in the wastebasket until he found Clare’s note. He smoothed out the sheet of paper and reread the note, then tore it up and flushed it down the toilet. When he came back, the herpetologist from the Museum of Natural History was on camera. Converse didn’t hear what he was saying. He was listening to his own inner voice: If I hurry, I can run downstairs, open up a manhole, get into the sewer, catch the bits of paper….
The phone rang. The bitch, he thought, she wasn’t taking any chances, she wrote down my phone number. He picked up the telephone. It was Captain Eastman.
***
The police operation ended officially at 5:45, although its failure had been conceded long before the last few exhausted cops straggled out of the park into Cathedral Parkway. The mayor, who was known—and liked being known—as a “fighter,” refused to acknowledge defeat until he had heard from the Police Commissioner himself, who phoned from his limousine, which was speeding southward to take him to the mayor’s meeting.
The mayor, his staff, and several high officials of the city administration were gathered in the conference room. The mayor sat on the dais, between the colors of the United States and the orange and blue flag of the City of New York. Outside the room, the news media were waiting to be admitted for a promised press conference. With the arrival of the Police Commissioner, the mayor opened the meeting of what, depending on his varying mood, he referred to as “my official family” or “this pack of lazy, backbiting Schleppers.” He called upon the P.C. to report.
