So much to lose.
She must deal with this, and fast; but nothing on the bed would be of help to her in a snake chase, snake fight. The chest of drawers contained but a few articles of clothing, nothing else, because they were living out of suitcases for the short time they were here. In fact, suitcases were open on a bench at the foot of the bed and on a straight-backed chair; neither the luggage nor the furniture suggested a strategy for this battle.
The snake still coiled near the baseboard, under the window. Luminous eyes. Head weaving as if to the music of a charmer’s flute.
“Hoing! Yikes!” Sinsemilla had compressed the anecdote into two words. She rollicked even to this abridged version, abusing the bed more than might have any gaggle of giddy girls at a pajama party.
Forgetting to use the brace’s mechanical knee joint, swinging her caged leg from the hip, Leilani hitched and clumped toward the closet, which regrettably put the bed between her and the snake. She was convinced that the moment the slippery little reptile was out of her sight, it slithered toward her, coming at her from under the bed.
“Baby, baby,” Sinsemilla said, “look at this, look, look. Baby, look, see, look.” She extended her hand, offering something. “Baby, it’s okay, see, baby, look.”
Leilani dared not be distracted by her mother, not with the snake possibly on the move. But Sinsemilla couldn’t be ignored any more than you could ignore an asteroid the size of Texas hurtling at Earth with impact predicted for noon Friday.
Sinsemilla’s left hand was clenched. She opened it to reveal a wad of bloody Kleenex that Leilani hadn’t been able to see before. The crimson tissues dropped out of her grip; in the meaty part of her palm were two small wounds.
“Poor scared thingy bit me when the lights went out.”
Dark with clotted blood, the holes no longer oozed.
“Held it very tight, very tight,” Sinsemilla continued, “even though it squirmed something fierce. Took a lot of time to work its fangs out of me. Didn’t want to tear up my hand, but I didn’t want to hurt thingy, either.”
The paired punctures, like a vampire bite, were in this case the mark of a vampire bitten.
“Then I held poor scared thingy a long time in the dark, the two of us here on the bed, and after a while thingy stopped squirming. We communed, baby, me and thingy. Oh, baby, we bonded so totally while we waited for the lights to come on. It was the coolest thing ever.”
Leilani’s hard-pounding heart seemed to clunk as arrhythmically and as awkwardly as a panicked girl with one shackled leg might run.
Warped Masonite, cracked plastic glides, and a corroded track conspired to prevent her from sliding the closet door with ease. Grunting, she shoved and shook it out of her way.
“No venom, baby. Thingy has fangs but no poison. Don’t wet your panties, girl, we’re doing less laundry to conserve electricity.”
As in Leilani’s own closet, a tubular-steel pole, approximately two inches in diameter, spanned the seven-foot width. Only a few women’s blouses and men’s shirts hung from it.
She glanced down at her feet. No snake.
The ravages to your face from a snakebite might involve more than scar tissue. Maybe nerve damage. Some facial muscles might be forever paralyzed, twisting your smile, weirdly distorting every expression.
The pole rested in U-shaped brackets. She lifted it up and out of the fixtures. The hangers slid off the rod, taking the clothes to the closet floor.
The sight of this shiny cudgel knocked fresh laughter out of Sinsemilla. She clapped her hands, oblivious of the bite, excited by the prospect of the entertainment to come.
Leilani would have preferred a shovel. A garden hoe. But this length of tubular steel was better than bare hands, something to keep the serpent away from her face.
Gripping the pole in her right hand as if it were a shepherd’s staff, she used it to help maintain her balance as she stumped toward the foot of the bed.
Waving her hands in the air as a gospel singer waves praises to the heavens while shouting hallelujahs, Sinsemilla said, “Oh, Lani, baby, you should see yourself! You look so completely St. Patrick, in a total snake-driving mood!”
Hitching clumsily but warily alongside the bed, telling herself, Calm. Telling herself, Get a grip.
Leilani wasn’t able to act on her own good advice. Fear and anger prevented mind and body from being properly coordinated.
If the snake had struck her face, it might have bitten her eye. It might have left her half blind.
She cracked her hip against the chunky post at the corner of the footboard, fell against the bed, but at once levered herself upright, feeling stupid, feeling clumsy, feeling as though she were the Girl from Castle Frankenstein, lacking only bolts in the neck, an early experiment that hadn’t gone half as well as the creature that Karloff played.
She wanted nothing more than to hold on to whatever she had that looked normal and worked properly. This wasn’t so much to want. The twisted leg, the deformed hand, the brain too smart for her own good: She couldn’t trade those in for standard-issue parts. She hoped only to keep the strong right leg, the good right hand, the pleasing face. Pride had nothing to do with it, either. Considering all her other problems, a pleasing face wasn’t just about looking good; it was about survival.
When she rounded the end of the bed, she saw the pet-shop terror where she had left it, stacked in scaly ringlets under the window. Evil-looking head raised. Alert.
“Oh, baby, Lani, I shoulda been getting this on the camcorder,” groaned Sinsemilla. “We’d win big bucks on TV—that show, America’s Funniest Home Videos.”
Face. Eyes. So much to lose. Get out. Leave. But they’d bring her back. And where would the snake be by then? Somewhere, anywhere, everywhere, waiting. And what if her mother took it with them when they hit the road in the motor home? In that tin can on wheels, already trapped with Preston and Sinsemilla, she’d have this third snake to worry about. There’s no way to flee outside when you’re cruising at sixty miles per hour.
Holding the pole in front of herself with both hands, Leilani wondered what maximum distance a snake could travel through the air when it flung itself out of a tight coil. She thought maybe she’d read that it could shoot twice its length, in this case five to six feet, which might leave her unbitten, but if this particular specimen happened to be ambitious, if it always gave that extra ten percent, like the hero of some demented children’s book—The Little Snake that Could—then she was screwed.
Leilani didn’t have a fearsome capacity for violence, maybe not any. She never fantasized about being a whole-of-limb, hard-bodied, martial arts wunderkind. The Klonk way wasn’t the way of the Ninja. The Klonk way was to ingratiate, to amuse, to charm, but while you could expect a high degree of success with this approach when you were dealing with schoolteachers and ministers and sweetly daffy pie-baking neighbors, all you would get for trying to charm a snake was your eye on the end of a fang.
“Better go, thingy, better squiggle,” Sinsemilla advised gleefully. “Here come bad-ass Lani, and dis here girl mean bidness!”
Because any hesitation would lead to the complete collapse of Leilani’s will, she had to act while desperate with fear and fierce with anger. She surprised herself when she choked out a strangled cry, part misery and part fury, as she jabbed the lance hard at the coiled target.
She pinned the thrashing serpent to the baseboard, but only for two seconds, maybe three, and then her sinuous whipping adversary nailed loose.
“Go, thingy, go, go!”
Jabbing, jabbing, Leilani poked the villain once more, crushed it against the baseboard, bearing on it with all her strength, trying to hurt it, cut it in half, but again it writhed free, no easier to kill than a serpent of smoke, as hard to nail down as your father’s identity, as what happened to your brother, as just about anything in this screwy life, but all you could do was keep jabbing, keep trying.
As the snake slithered along the wall and under the tall chest of drawers, Sinsemilla bounced on the bed: “Oh, trouble now, trouble with a capital S-n-a-k-e. Thingy’s pissed, hidin’ under the highboy, him bruised and bitter, him havin’ a hissy fit, him broodin’ up bad snaky revenge.”
Leilani hoped to see bloodstains on the baseboard—or if a snake didn’t have exactly blood in it, then a smear of something else that said mortal wounds as clearly as a lot of good red gore would have said it. But she saw no blood, no ichor, no snake syrup of any kind.
The sawn-off circular end of the hollow tubular pole wouldn’t be as effective as a sharp knife, but it would cut even tough scales and muscled coils if driven hard enough, if a lot of insistent pressure was put behind it. Her sweaty hands had slipped on the polished steel, but surely some damage had been done to the snake.
The chest of drawers stood against the wall, on four stubby legs. More than live feet high. Four feet wide. Maybe twenty inches deep. The bottom rail cleared the floor by three inches.
Snake; under there somewhere. When Leilani held her breath, she could hear the angry hissing. The reverberant bottom of the lowest drawer amplified the sound in that confined space.
She’d better get a fix on the creature while it was stunned. She backed away, dropped awkwardly to her knees. Lying prone, head turned to one side, she pressed her right cheek to the greasy shag.
If Death had pockets in his robe, they smelled like this filthy carpet. Nauseating waves of righteous anger still churned Leilani, and the rotten-sour sludge of scent that pooled on the wall-to-wall gave her another reason to worry about losing her apple pie.
“Oh, listen to that snaky brain a-hummin’, listen to old thingy schemin’ up a scheme, like when he wants to kill him a tasty mouse.”
The silk-textured light, as red as Sinsemilla’s favorite party blouse, barely brightened the nest of shadows under the chest of drawers.
Leilani was gasping, not from exhaustion—she hadn’t exerted herself that much—but because she was worried, scared, in a state. As she lay squinting for a glimpse of the beast, her face only six or seven feet from the reptile’s crawlspace, she breathed rapidly, noisily, through her mouth, and her tongue translated the stink of the carpet into a taste that made her gag.
Under the chest of drawers, shadows appeared to throb and turn as shadows always do when you stare hard enough at them, but the lipstick light kissed only one form among all the shifting phantom shapes. Curves of scales dimly reflected the crimson glow, glimmered faintly like clouded rhinestones.
“Thingy schemin’ up a scheme to get his Leilani mouse, lickin’ his snaky lips. Thingy, him be dreamin’ what Lani girl gonna taste like.”
The serpent huddled all the way back against the wall, and about as far from one side of the chest of drawers as from the other.
Leilani rose to her knees again. She seized the pole with both hands and rammed it hard under the furniture, dead-on for the snake. She struck again, again, again, furiously, burning her knuckles from friction with the shag, and she could hear the critter thrashing, its body slapping loudly against the bottom of the lowest drawer.
On the bed, Sinsemilla romped, cheering one of the combatants, cursing the other, and though Leilani wasn’t any longer able to make sense of her mother’s words, she figured the woman’s sympathies were with the thingy.
She couldn’t clearly hear Sinsemilla’s ranting because of the snake lashing a crazy drumbeat on the underside of the chest, because of the pole punching into the snarled coils and knocking on the baseboard and rattling against the legs of the furniture—but also because she herself was grunting like a wild beast. Her throat felt scorched. Her raw voice didn’t sound like her own: wordless, thick, hideous with a primitive need that she didn’t dare contemplate.
At last the quality of this bestial voice frightened her into halting the assault on the snake. It was dead, anyway. She had killed it some time ago. Under the tall chest of drawers, nothing flopped, nothing hissed.
Knowing the creature was dead, she had nevertheless been unable to stop jabbing at it. Out of control. And who did those three words bring to mind? Out of control. Like mother, like daughter. Leilani’s accelerator had been pressed to the floorboard by fear, rather than by drugs, also by anger, but this distinction didn’t matter as much to her as did the discovery that she, like Sinsemilla, could lose control of herself under the right circumstances.
Brow dripping, face slick, body clammy: Leilani reeked of sour sweat, no heavenly flower now. On her knees, shoulders hunched, head cocked, wild damp hair hanging in tangles over her face, hands still clenched with such rage that she couldn’t release the pole, she made her bid for being Quasimodo reborn, only nine and a return to Notre Dame still years away.
She felt diminished, humiliated, shaken—no less afraid than she’d been a moment ago, but now for different reasons. Some serpents were more frightening than others: the specimens that didn’t come in ventilated pet-shop boxes, that never slithered through any field or forest, serpents invisible that inhabited the deeper regions of your mind. Until now, she hadn’t been aware that she herself provided a nest for such potent snakes of fear and anger, or that her heart could be inflamed and set racing by their sudden bite, so quickly reducing her to these spasms, these half-mad headlong frenzies, out of control.
Like a gargoyle above, Sinsemilla leaned over the footboard of the bed, her face shadowed but her head haloed by red lamplight, glittery-eyed with excitement. “Thingy, him a hard-ass stubborn little crawly boy.”
Leilani didn’t actually make sense of those words, and she was saved only because she met her mother’s eyes and saw where they were focused. Not on her daughter. On the nearest end of the makeshift cudgel, just behind Leilani’s two-hand grip.
The tubular-steel rod was hollow, two inches in diameter. The snake, not dead after all, seeking refuge when the battering stopped, had squirmed inside the pole. By this pipeline, it traveled unseen from beneath the chest of drawers to Leilani’s exposed back, where now it slowly extruded on the floor behind her like the finished product of a snake-making machine.
Whether the serpent moved slowly because it was hurt or because it was being cautious to deceive, Leilani didn’t know, didn’t care. Just as the full length of it oozed from the hollow cudgel, she seized it by the tail. She knew that snakehandlers always gripped immediately under the head to immobilize the jaws, but fear for her one good hand caused her to choose the nether end.
Slick it was, wet-slick and therefore injured, but still lively enough to wriggle fiercely in a quest for freedom.
Before the snake could wind back on itself and bite her hand, Leilani shot to her feet faster than her braced leg had ever before allowed, playing cowgirl-with-lariat as she rose from the floor. Swung like a rope, stretched long by centrifugal force that thwarted its inward-coiling efforts, the reptile parted the air with a swoosh louder than its hiss. She swung it twice as she stumbled two steps toward the chest of drawers, the bared fangs missing her mother’s face by inches on the first revolution, and then during the third swing, the serpent met the furniture with a crack of skull that took all the wriggle out of it forever.