Chapter 5 - The Cold Flesh of the North
The animal inside the marine plywood was not an Illinois bullsnake.
It was a female Python bivittatus—a Burmese python—nine feet, seven inches from the blunt, pit-lined rostral scale to the hard, horn tip of her tail.
She was not the bright, yellow-and-white albino that teenagers buy at the state fairgrounds in Du Quoin; she was the wild-type green, the color of pond scum over black shale, with blotches the shape of burnt oak leaves running down her dorsum in irregular, jagged bands. Her girth at mid-body was fifteen inches—the size of a telephone pole or a man’s thigh—and her belly scales were yellow-grey, stained with the brown uric-acid wash of a cage that hadn't seen clean pine shavings since the freeze in January.
Dr. Ronald Vance, who kept the reptile collection at the Henson Robinson Zoo on East Lake Shore Drive, arrived forty minutes after the fire truck.
He didn't come in a squad car; he came in a fifteen-year-old Volvo wagon with two plastic garbage bins and three six-foot aluminum snake hooks rattling in the cargo deck. He was sixty, with white hair that stood up like thistle-down and the calm, slow-motion movements of a man who had been bitten by four different species of pit viper and had learned that haste is the only thing that kills you.
He stood in the bedroom doorway with Daniel, his spectacles sitting halfway down his nose, looking at the Quikrete bags.
"She’s cold," Vance said. He hadn't touched the wood yet. He was listening to the frequency of the strikes against the lid. "The house is seventy, but the floorboards are fifty-eight over the garage. She’s torpid. If she were eighty-five degrees, she’d have had that hasp off three months ago."
"She bit the kid," Daniel said. He was leaning against the door jamb, his notebook in his left hand, his pencil tracing the line of the window spikes. "Twice. On the forearm."
Vance took a pair of heavy leather welding gloves from his hip pocket.
"A nine-foot Burmese doesn't bite an eight-year-old child to feed, Harris," Vance said, his voice flat as pond ice. "If she hit that girl to feed, you’d have found the child in the box with her ribs stove in and her heart stopped in forty seconds. A constrictor that size hits with eighty teeth that point backward like fishhooks. It hits because it’s terrified, or because it’s being handled by someone who smells of warm blood and doesn't know how to support the belly."
Daniel looked at the zoo director. "He wasn't handling her."
"Then why was she out?"
"Ask him," Daniel said, pointing with the pencil toward the landing where Miller was being loaded into the second cruiser in double-locked transport irons. "He told the sergeant that the girl needed to learn how to keep her hands to herself."
Vance didn't answer.
He climbed over the galvanized tin, his sneakers quiet on the oak. He set the two snake hooks against the plaster, spat into a tin cup he had brought from the car, and took the corner of the first Quikrete sack.
"Terry," Vance said to Sullivan, who was still standing by the window with his Halligan. "Get the other end of this sixty-pounder. And don't drop it. If you crack the plywood, she’ll come out through the gap like wet liver."
They moved the three bags one by one, setting them on the floorboards with a dull, powdery whump that made the drywall dust drift down from the ceiling cracks.
The lid didn't have a latch.
Miller had used three-inch drywall screws through the lip—four on each side—driven with an electric driver until the heads were buried two millimeters into the pine grain.
Sullivan took a battery-powered DeWalt drill from his tool pouch, set the bit into reverse, and backed the eight screws out. The metal was hot; they smelled of friction and scorched fir as they dropped into the palm of his glove.
Vance took his six-foot hook and caught the underside of the lid at the north corner.
"Watch the face," Vance said. "They don't jump, but they can strike their own body length if they get their tail anchored against a batten."
The lid came up four inches.
The light from Daniel’s Streamlight went into the box.
The snake was lying in a double figure-eight, her head resting on the third coil from the bottom, her tongue coming out between her labial pits with that slow, six-second flicker that tests the air for lipid molecules. Her left eye was milky—the blue-grey opacity that comes before a shed—and her lower jaw had three missing teeth where the bone had been bruised against the wood.
Underneath the coils, half-buried in the soiled cedar shavings, lay three objects:
A child’s plastic tea saucer, yellow, with the picture of a cartoon mouse in the center.
A silver stainless steel kitchen spoon with the initials E.M. engraved on the handle.
And a small, red spiral-bound notebook—the three-by-five kind that children use for third-grade vocabulary words—with the cardboard cover chewed away at the margins by mice.
Vance didn't look at the book. He slipped the crook of the aluminum hook beneath the snake’s first third, lifted forty pounds of muscle with a single, smooth hoist of his shoulders, and dropped her head-first into the fifty-gallon plastic garbage bin Sullivan had set on the tin.
The tail came last—cold, dry, the skin rough as sharkskin where the old scales hadn't cleared the cloaca.
Vance clicked the lid onto the bin, turned the two plastic latches, and sat down on the Quikrete sacks with his head between his knees.
"God almighty," the old man whispered. "The smell in that wood."
Daniel didn't move toward the bin.
He knelt by the empty plywood box, his gloved fingers reaching into the shavings to pick up the red notebook by its wire spine.
The paper was damp, soft as wet flannel.
On the first page, written with a purple Crayola marker in the large, uneven block letters of an eight-year-old who had only learned her cursive the previous November, were four lines:
MAY 12 - THE SNAKE SLEPT ON MY FEET.
JUNE 4 - IT WAS COLD. DADDY SAID BE STILL.
JULY 1 - DADDY SAID THE SNAKE LIKES THE WAY MY HEART TICKS.
JULY 19 - IT BIT MY SLEEVE. I DID NOT YELL.
Daniel closed the book.
May you like
He laid it on his thigh, took off his grey Stetson, and set it on the rim of the plywood box.
His knuckles were very white against the red cardboard—so white that the old scar across his second joint, where he had caught a piece of glass from a broken storm window on Eleventh Street in nineteen-eighty-nine, looked like a drop of lard on a piece of clean butcher’s paper.
