The Snake

by John Godey

  When it felt the vibrations of the woman’s footsteps in the substrate, it turned away from the child. The appearance of this fast-moving new threat confused it momentarily, and then it turned its attention back to the child, who was now well within striking distance.

  The woman bore down on the child from behind and swept her up in her arms angrily.

  “Didn’t I tell you to stay near me? Bad girl.”

  The child struggled and tried to slip down out of her mother’s hold, her arms stretched outward to the snake. The child almost plunged forward out of her mother’s grip. But the mother held on to an arm, and used it as a lever to lift her off the ground. She shifted the child to her hip, and, scolding, fending off flailing arms and legs, carried her back to the bench. The child screamed with rage.

  ***

  The snake watched vigilantly until they had disappeared from view. It stopped hissing and closed its mouth, although it still remained poised in striking posture. Its tongue darted out. After a moment it turned in a looping circle and crawled back into the brush.

  ***

  The coffee shop was crowded with second-breakfast eaters, and they shared a table with a pair of West Side merchants who debated the merits of Hispanics as customers: tremendous buyers but irresponsible payers. No candles wavered, even though Converse and Holly did some staring across the table. The auspices were all wrong—she had to rush back to her office to do her story, the merchants were loud and diverting, hot coffee was an antiromantic beverage. And, finally, there was a constraint between them, as if, Converse thought, they were both regretful of their unpremeditated passion at the press conference.

  They came out of the cool coffee shop onto the baked pavements of Broadway and awkwardly avoided looking at each other.

  “Well,” Holly said.

  “Well,” Converse said. He was feeling a sense of deprivation, of something unaccountably lost. “You ever see an old flick about Catherine the Great? Douglas Fairbanks Jr.? It’s about two hundred years old.”

  She nodded. “Elisabeth Bergner was Catherine. It’s considered a classic of sorts. Why do you ask?”

  He shrugged. “It just popped into my head. Before. I mean during the press conference.”

  “Oh.” She gave him a quick, up-looking, candle-flame-wavering glance, then turned her eyes down and said, “Better get back to work.”

  “See you around.”

  “See you.”

  “Thanks for the coffee.”

  Maybe they both wanted to linger, Converse thought, and maybe that was why neither of them did. He walked softly so that he could hear her footsteps, and resisted looking back until just before he turned a corner to head eastward toward the park. She was nowhere in sight. No declaration of any kind, no exchange of phone numbers. Just “see you” and “thanks for the coffee.” All for the best. If he thrilled to the sound of footsteps, could a disastrous involvement be far behind?

  At Amsterdam Avenue, a New York Post truck hurled a pile of papers in the direction of a stationery store. The bundle just missed taking him off his feet. He read the headline:

  SNAKE THREE, PEOPLE ZERO

  TWELVE

  The policeman at the desk in the Central Park Precinct recognized Converse and waved him on toward the Commander’s office at the end of the corridor. Captain Eastman, stripped to his shorts, was lying on his back on a cot. There was no ease in his sleep, Converse thought. He lay heavily on the thin mattress, as if at the mercy of the downward pull of gravity, or his problems, or perhaps his age. The hair on his chest was white, matted with sweat.

  Converse shut the door softly and went back through the corridor. In a small office opposite the desk, four hoods were polluting the air with cigarette smoke. They were dressed in dirty jeans, wisps of shirts that exposed their chests, studded leather belts, beards, gunfighter moustaches, long unkempt hair. They were a part of the Central Park Precinct’s anticrime unit.

  Converse stopped. “You guys know the park,” he said. “Where’s the best place to hide? The least people, the most wild areas?”

  Three of the detectives turned to the fourth, and one of them said, “Ask Sergeant Paschik. He’s our first whip, and he’s been here at the Two-two a little over a hundred years.”

  Sergeant Paschik was in his forties but, with his unshaven face and drooping, two-toned, gray-and-black mandarin moustache, he looked no less raffish than his younger colleagues.

  “Sergeant?” Converse said.

  “Uptown. North of 96th Street. It’s a fact that about ninety percent of the people use the park below 85th Street. The Receiving Reservoir takes up most of the space between 86th and 96th, so I would concentrate on the area north of 96th.”

  “Is it less manicured up there?”

  Paschik nodded. “It’s real wild up there. You could get lost in some parts if you didn’t know your way around.”

  “Or don’t speak Spanish,” one of the detectives said.

  Paschik said, “It’s a fact that above 96th the population, east side and west side both, is mostly Spanish. Naturally, they use the park near their own neighborhood. So it’s a fact that it’s not as safe there as in the southern part.”

  One of the detectives said, “I thought the snake was biting people around 80th, around there.”

  “Was,” Converse said. “But its instinct would be to find a wilder and less frequented territory.”

  He thanked the anticrime squad, and they wished him luck. He went home, fed the python and the cat, and went to bed to catch up on his sleep. He dreamed of Catherine the Great, Empress of all the Russias.

  ***

  The handout from the office of Hizzonner the mayor read: “I profoundly regret the tragic death of this fine young man to whose athletic prowess we thrilled so many times in the past.” Jeff had been a second-string pulling guard on the Columbia football team. “Yet, even in this moment of tragedy I cannot pass up the observation that he was foolhardy. If he had not tried to catch the snake, but had merely retreated, no harm would have befallen him.

  “And so I take this opportunity once again to urge the public, with all my heart, to exercise the utmost caution. Above all, do not attempt to take matters into your own hands. The police, with the help of experts, are redoubling their efforts. Do not hinder or hamper them in their work. Do not endanger your own life. Please cooperate.

  The Reverend Sanctus Milanese, the solicitation of whose views had by now become a regular item on the itinerary of the media, said: “The members of the Church of the Purification are conscripted in the army of God to destroy the personification of evil. Can soldiers sit on the sidelines while this messenger of Satan crushes the city in its oily toils? The police are powerless, for it is not given to a temporal force to overcome the Devil. Only the godly are sanctioned for this work, for only they are blessed by Divine guidance. They shall prevail who are pure.”

  “You’re going to continue to search for the snake in defiance of the orders of the police and the mayor’s instructions?”

  “We respond to only one Authority, and His name is God. We will continue our search as before, and there may be new initiatives as God proposes them.”

  The Police Commissioner, told about the Reverend’s statement, said that the police would not tolerate vigilantism in any form or for any reason. Whoever disobeyed the police directives would be dealt with sternly.

  ***

  Jane Redpath refused to be interviewed for television. She said, “I know how much you bastards like to have people weep on camera for the entertainment of your audience, and I realize I’m being unsporting, but you can all go fuck yourselves.”

  ***

  With Jeff’s death, the city turned a corner. It became euphoric. The snake in the park became a jewel in the crown of the city’s obsession with its own eccentricity. The public reasserted its prideful conviction that it inhabited the most put-upon city in the whole world. When bigger and better and more unendurable disasters were contrived, they we
re visited justly upon the city that matched them in stature; which was to say, the city that was superlatively dirty, declining, expensive, crime-ridden, unmanageable, and glamorously unlivable beyond any other city in the world. By lunchtime, gallows humor jokes were already epidemic. And never mind that most of them were retreads of stale ethnic jokes; they worked surprisingly well with the mere substitution of the word “snake” for “Italian” or “Polish.”

  Manufacturers of novelties, famous for their opportunism and dazzling speed of production, succeeded by late afternoon in flooding the city with snake buttons, snake decals for auto bumpers, stuffed snakes of many lengths, designs, and colors. Not long afterward, strikingly realistic, battery-powered snakes of great technical sophistication were to appear. There was a run on canned rattlesnake fillets in gourmet specialty stores, and the brave people who ate them inevitably compared their taste to that of chicken, only better.

  Four Hollywood film companies filed notice of intent to make a movie about a snake in Central Park; by nightfall, one of them had brought a lawsuit against another, charging infringement of its title, “Black Mamba.” The news division of all three television networks patched together half-hour films about snakes for presentation following the eleven o’clock news, with full commercial sponsorship. A porno film, in which a young woman performed the sex act with a squirming and unhappy snake, was revived and did turn-away business at the box office. A nightclub introduced a snake-charming act: a man in a turban playing a flute for a cobra so lethargic from being refrigerated that it could barely spread its hood. Educational paperback books dealing with reptiles flooded the newsstands and bookstores. Herpetologists and zoo curators were at a premium for guest appearances on television talk shows. Snakeskin shoes, jackets, handbags, ties, and belts were snapped up in clothing and department stores. Sheets, pillowcases, and window drapes with a serpentine motif appeared almost overnight.

  Comedians on television, at hotels, in nightclubs, and even in a Broadway show here and there, introduced snake jokes. These ranged from the innocent and simpleminded (“Goodness snakes alive!”, “It’s me, Snake, I mean Jake”) to the dirty and simpleminded (“What’s eleven feet long and stands up when it’s irritated? Sorry to disappoint you, baby, it’s a black mamba”).

  The reptile houses at the Bronx and Staten Island zoos were so packed with spectators that it was almost impossible for any but those in the front ranks to see the exhibits. When a man visiting the Staten Island Zoo used a hammer to smash the glass of a cage containing a sand viper and then attacked the snake with a breadknife, the police were called in to clear the snake house for the rest of the day. The next morning, crowds were kept back five feet from the cages by barriers, and special guards were on hand to protect the snakes from further assassination attempts.

  A well-known showman made the front page of two of the city’s three daily newspapers with his offer of $20,000 for the snake in the park, alive.

  ***

  Throughout the day, alternating between the claustrophobic office of the Commander of the Two-two and the desk up front, where he hovered nervously around the teletype, Captain Eastman had been logging reports from the park. Good news and bad news. Good: there were many fewer people in the park than the day before, whether because they were paying heed to the mayor’s plea or simply because of the heat, which had touched 99 degrees at three o’clock, there was no way of telling. Bad: lots of Puries out, neatly dressed, barely seeming to sweat (maybe they did have an in with God, Eastman thought), methodically checking out likely areas where the snake might be hiding. There had been several minor scuffles with the police who ordered them back onto the walkways, and one serious one. Two members of the Christ’s Cohorts, the Purie security guard, had engaged in a slugging match with a cop. It was only with the arrival of reinforcements that the Puries had been subdued. They had been booked at the Two-two and been held in detention for several hours before it was time to take them to night court, where they were charged with disorderly conduct, assault, and resisting arrest.

  The cop who had fought with the Christ’s Cohorts had lost a tooth. What had impressed him, aside from the fact that they were handy with their fists, was their lack of emotion. “I’ve never seen guys fight like that,” he had told Eastman. “No swearing, no hollering, not even a mad expression on their face. I swear, it gave me the creeps.”

  Technically, Eastman was “coordinating” the police effort in the park. Although he had been deskbound for several years, he had never really become accustomed to it. He thought of it as “sitting on his ass,” when he should be “doing something.” He would have much preferred being out in the field with one of the ESU trucks. Near ten o’clock there was a bit of gruesome comic relief. A grinning cop reported that he and his partner had come upon a Purie wandering through the park, dazed, battered, completely naked, and had taken him to West Side Hospital. He had been snake-hunting in the Ramble, according to his story, when he had been set upon and beaten by a half-dozen men. The cop, winking, describing the Purie as “one of them,” said that he had obviously been gang-shagged.

  Converse arrived with his stick and pillowcase, looking so refreshed and rested that Eastman almost hated him for it. Youth. But the prospect of getting out of the precinct house and “doing something” palliated his sourness.

  “Godssake,” Converse said. “It looks like a mob scene.”

  The driver had taken them into the park through the Engineer’s Gate at 90th and Fifth Avenue, and was following the East Drive around the perimeter of the Receiving Reservoir. The park seemed to be twinkling with lights, and they could make out shadowy figures, some of whom must have been police personnel, others, Puries. Driving, they were almost blinded by the brilliant sweeping floodlight of an ESU truck.

  “Where do you want to stop?” Eastman said.

  “Noplace,” Converse said. “What black mamba in its right mind would turn up with all this going on? Those lights? Those people clumping around everywhere? Forget it. It’s going to hole up and stay hidden until everybody goes away.”

  Eastman’s definition of “doing something” did not include riding around in a police car. “How the hell can you hope to find it if you don’t get out and look for it?”

  “No way,” Converse said. “If I knew all this crap was going on I would have stayed home. Remember what I told you about a snake having to be found by stealth?”

  “Certainly I remember,” Eastman said. “I make it a point never to forget anything you tell me. Then what the hell are we going to do?”

  “It’s hopeless,” Converse said, “and there’s no sense getting sore, Captain. You want to get out, I’ll keep you company. But it’s a pure waste of time.”

  Eastman was silent. He sat hunched against the window of the car, glowering.

  Converse said, “Anyway, our best chance is to catch it basking. It’s one of the few times a snake stays put. I’ll be out here tomorrow morning just before first light.”

  The car rode on between the huge North Meadow at their left and the small East Meadow to the right. The driver slowed down. “What do we do, captain?”

  “Shit, I don’t know. It’s a lovely night for a spin around the park. What do you say, Hortense?”

  Converse shrugged. “I’m sorry, captain.”

  Eastman sighed. “I guess you’re right. Tomorrow morning—you going to pick me up?”

  “I could,” Converse said. But….” His voice trailed off.

  “But you’d rather not?”

  Converse nodded. “It’s really a one man job. You’d simply be trailing along.”

  He’s probably right, Eastman thought, and I can use the sleep. Then a suspicion stirred in his mind. “Look, are you afraid I’ll shoot it or something?”

  “If I find it,” Converse said with a grin, “I’ll turn it over to the Lost Property Clerk.”

  Eastman told the driver to find someplace where he could turn around. “Get a fix on one of the floodlights and
drop me off by one of the ESU trucks. Then take Mr. Converse here to someplace where he can catch a bus home.”

  Converse said, “Don’t waste your time, captain.”

  “Waste of time or not, I’ll be doing something.”

  “Instead,” Converse said, “let me buy you a beer.”

  “I don’t drink on duty.”

  “When are you off duty?”

  “That’s it,” Eastman said. “Never.”

  ***

  Near 115th Street, a rat jumped out of an overturned garbage can. It stopped right in the middle of the sidewalk and looked at him. It was an ugly old bastard, with a scrunch-up face and a long wormy tail and red eyes. Its fur was a mangy gray, same like the color of morning before the sun over the East River would get high enough to clear the tenements and throw a little light around.

  Alvis Parkins said softly, “Shitface, I’m gonna waste you.”

  The rat was watching. It was a smart old rat, and Alvis knew that if he made a sudden move it would take off. So, smiling and talking sweet to it, he began to ruffle up the bottom of his shirt, slow and easy. Gently do it. Slip the piece out quiet, cock it, level it, and then boom, blow old rat away.

  He had the piece in his hand when the rat suddenly took off, scuttering off the curb and racing for the other side of the street. Alvis steadied the piece with both hands, squinting down the short barrel, tracking old rat until he had it right where he wanted it. But he didn’t pull the trigger. He lowered the gun abruptly, shoved it back under his belt, and pulled his shirt over it.

  Dumb shit, he thought, watching the rat disappear in an alley between two buildings, dumb shit, you came near fucking up. Dumb nigger shit, all you need was make a gunshot noise so somebody call the cops and they pick you up for just being in the streets this time of morning, and they spread you up against a wall and find the piece on you. What make it worse, that piece wouldn’t never have shoot straight enough to hit something, especially a old gray running rat. Maybe couldn’t even hit it with a professional piece, a hundred-two-hundred-dollar piece, so how was he ever gonna hit it with a little old twelve-dollar hunk of junk iron. Forget it. Besides, why should he go exterminate a rat in Spanish Harlem? Let the spics kill they own goddamn rats.