Florida(47)
I have nothing, she said, and he said, All the better. Everyone pulls their weight, doing things around the house or in the barn, where they had a business reselling discarded items on the Internet, which paid for the water and electric and some of the food they didn’t just salvage. They tried to live without money as much as possible and did pretty well.
He stopped and grinned at her.
That’s it? she said. Even in the tent city there had been more implicit rules.
Yup, he said. It’s heaven.
She thought for a minute and said, Or hell.
Same difference, he said, and poured her a coffee.
* * *
—
The party had grown organically, as things did in the Prairie House. Now there were skinny-dippers, splashes of surprising white in the sinkhole, and a keg circled by Christmas lights strung up on an oak tree. She turned from the bonfire where she was standing, the silhouettes of dancing bodies still in her eyes.
Beyond the party, the prairie unscrolled, calm and impassive, meeting the sky with an equal darkness. She found herself moving into it, each step a relief from the drunken voices, the flaming moths of paper spun from the fire, the sear of the flames. Past the first hummock of trees, the darkness took on a light of its own, and she began to distinguish the texture of the ground. She moved calmly over the pits of sand, palmettos biting at her calves, strange sudden seeps of marsh. Small things rustled away from her footsteps, and she felt fondly toward them, for their smallness and their fear.
After ten minutes, human noise had scaled to nothing, and insect noise took on urgency. Her body was slick with sweat. When she stopped, she felt the first itch. She kept herself still and was so quiet for so long that the prairie began its furtive movements again. The world that, from the comfort of the fire, had seemed a cool wiped slate was unexpectedly teeming.
She could smell the rot of a drainage ditch some well-meaning fools had dug through the prairie during the Depression. The land had taken the imprint of their hands and made it its own. She thought of the snakes sleeping coiled in their burrows and the alligators surfacing to scent her in the darkness, their shimmy onto the land, their stealthy bellying; how she was only one living lost thing among so many others, not special for being human. Something crawled across her throat.
She was frozen. The sweat cooled on her body and made her shiver. There was no relief in the sky vaguely filmed with stars, a web vaster than she could imagine. There was nobody around, nobody to deliver her back to the solace of people.
* * *
—
The night on the prairie returned to her during the long and terrible birth of her daughter, years later, after her mother’s funeral on a hill white with sleet. A shot in the spine took the pain away, and she floated above herself, safe in the beeping of the machines.
But something went wrong very suddenly. The nurses’ faces pressed in; the world shifted to frenzy. She was wheeled into a cold room. It was almost Christmas and a poinsettia hunched in the corner, making her think of the black dirt in the pot, all the life there. Her body shook so hard it rattled the aluminum slab she was lying on. There was an unbearable pressure inside her as the doctor pushed the knife in. Then the old panic returned, the darkness, the sense of being lost, the fangs she’d imagined on her ankles that were palmetto cuts, the breath of some bad spirit hot on her nape. Then she had seen the glow in the dark and stumbled back to the bonfire. How delicate the ties that bind us to another. A gleam in the dark. The bell on a nurse’s neck chiming. The bodies leaning in, the pressure so intense she couldn’t breathe, the release.
SNAKE STORIES
Babe, when Satan tempted Adam and Eve, there’s a pretty good reason he didn’t transform into a talking clam.
It was my husband who said this to me.
* * *
—
This statement of his has begun to seem both ludicrous and dangerous, like the three-foot rat snake my younger son almost stepped on in the street yesterday, thinking it a stick.
* * *
—
Walk outside in Florida, and a snake will be watching you: snakes in mulch, snakes in scrub, snakes waiting from the lawn for you to leave the pool so they can drown themselves in it, snakes gazing at your mousy ankle and wondering what it would feel like to sink their fangs in deep.
* * *
—
All around us, since the fall, from the same time other terrible things happened in the world at large, marriages have been ending, either in a sort of quiet drifting away or in flames. The night my husband explicated original sin to me, we were drunk and walking home very early in the morning from a New Year’s Eve party. Our host, Omar Varones, had made a bonfire out of the couch upon which his wife had cuckolded him. It was a vintage mid-century modern, and he could have sold it for thousands, but it’s equally true that the flames were a stunning and unexpected soft green.
* * *
—
I feel like a traitor to my own when I say this, but it’s wonderful to walk beside a man who is so large that nobody would mess with him, toward your own bed, at a time when everybody is sleeping save for the tree frogs and the sinners. I have missed my walks late at night, my dawn runs. Even though my neighborhood is a gem, there have been three rapes in three months within a few blocks of my house. Nights when I can’t sleep, when my nerves jangle me from one son’s bed to the other’s, then back to my own and then out to the couch, I can even feel in my bloodstream the new venom that has entered the world, a venom that somehow acts only on men, hardening what had once been bad thoughts into new, worse actions.