10. Rattlesnakes .2

I shrugged.

“What happened to them was a fucking shame, if you’ll pardon my French. She was young when it happened. Thirty? Might have been, or a bit older. Her husband was much older. Henry was his name.”

“Is it true snakes got the kids?”

He pulled down his mask, took another drink from his canteen, put his mask back in place. I’d left mine in the house.

“Yeah, it was snakes. Rattlers. There was an inquest, and the verdict was death by misadventure. The papers were more discreet back then and there was no social media… except people talk, and that’s a kind of social media, wouldn’t you say?”

I agreed it was.

“Mr. Bell was in his office upstairs, making calls. He was some sort of grand high poobah in the investment business. Like your friend Mr. Ackerman. The missus was taking a shower. The boys were playing in the backyard, where there was a high gate, supposedly locked. Only it really wasn’t, only looked that way. The county detective in charge of the investigation said the gate latch had been painted over several times on account of rust, and it didn’t catch the way it was supposed to and those boys got out. She used to push em in the stroller—don’t know if it’s the same one she’s got now or not—but they could walk just fine and they must have decided to go to the beach.”

“They didn’t take the boardwalk?”

Mr. Ito shook his head. “No. I don’t know why. No one knows why. The searchers could see where they went in, there were broken branches and a little piece of a shirt hanging from one of them.”

SEE YOU LATER, ALLIGATOR, I thought.

“It’s about four hundred yards from Rattlesnake Road to the beach, all of it choked with undergrowth. They made it about halfway. One of them was dead when the searchers found them. The other died before they could get him back to the road. My Uncle Devin was in the search party and he said each of those little boys had been bit over a hundred times. I don’t believe that, but I guess it was a lot. Most of the bites—the punctures—were on their legs, but there were more on their necks and faces.”

“Because they fell down?”

“Yeah. Once the poison started to work, they would have fallen down. There was only one rattler left when the search party found the boys. One of the men killed it with a snake pole. That’s a kind of thing, has a hook—”

“I know what they are. Allie carries one when she walks near dark.”

Mr. Ito nodded. “Not that there are many snakes now. Certainly no rattlers. There was a hunting party two days later. Plenty of men, a regular posse. Some were building contractors and their crews, the rest were from Palm Village. Uncle Devin was in on that one, too. They went north, beating the bush. Killed over two hundred rattlers on the way is what I heard, not to mention assorted other wrigglies. They finished up on the point of land between Daylight Pass and Duma Key… at least where Duma used to be, it’s underwater now. Some of the snakes swam away and probably drowned. The rest were killed right there. Uncle Devin said another four or five hundred, which has got to be bullshit, pardon my French. But I guess there were plenty. Henry Bell was part of that group, but he wasn’t in at the finish. He fainted from the heat and the excitement. And the sorrow, I guess. Mrs. Bell never saw the little boys where they died, only after they’d been, you know, fixed up in the funeral parlor, but their father was part of the search party that found them. They took him to the hospital. He died of a heart attack not long after. Probably never got over it. I mean, who would?”

I could relate to that. Some things you don’t get over.

“How did they kill all those snakes?” I had been to the end of the Key, to that small triangle of shell beach between the pass and the little crown of greenery which is all that remains of Duma Key, and I just couldn’t picture such a mass of snakes there.

Before he could answer, there was a loud clattering. Eddie Ito had driven onto the tennis court after all.

“Oy, oy, oy!” Mr. Ito screamed, and ran toward him, waving his arms.

Eddie looked up from his phone, startled, and hauled the riding mower back onto the lawn before it could do major damage to the court surface, although there would be plenty of dirt and clods to clean up. So I never got the end of the story.

Donna and I buried our son’s body in Harmony Hill Cemetery, but that was the least part of him. We found that out in the months that followed. He was still there, between us. We tried to find a way around him and back to each other and couldn’t do it. Donna was withdrawn, suffering from PTSD, taking pills and drinking too much. I couldn’t blame her for getting stranded at the Camber farm, so I blamed her for an affair she’d had with a loser named Steve Kemp. It was brief and meaningless and had nothing to do with the goddam clogged needle valve, but the more I scratched that sore place the more inflamed it became.

Once she said, “You’re blaming me because you can’t blame the universe.”

That could have been true, but it didn’t help. The divorce, when it came, was no-fault and not contentious. I could say it was amicable, but it wasn’t. By then we were both just too emotionally exhausted to be angry at each other.

That night, after hearing Mr. Ito’s version of the twins’ deaths—hardly reliable, but maybe in truth’s ballpark—I had trouble falling asleep. When I did, it was thin. I dreamed that the double pram was rolling slowly down the driveway from the road. At first I thought it was rolling by itself, a ghost pram, but when the security lights came on I saw the twins were pushing it. They looked exactly alike and I thought, No wonder she puts them in different shorts and shirts. Beneath their mops of blond hair, the faces were somehow wrong. Or maybe it wasn’t the faces; maybe it was their necks, which looked swollen. As if they were suffering from the mumps. Or Covid. When they got closer I saw their arms were also swollen, and marked with red dots like flakes of red pepper.

Squeak, pause. Squeak, pause. Squeak, pause.

They came closer still, and I saw there was a rattlesnake in each of the seats, squirming and coiling. They were bringing me the snakes as a gift, maybe. Or as a punishment. I had been away when my son died, after all. My reason for going to Boston, trouble with an advertising account, was partly an excuse. I was angry about Donna’s affair. No, furious. I needed to cool down.

I never wished her dead, I tried to tell the little blank-eyed children, but maybe that was only half-true. Love and hate are also twins.

I came to a soupy consciousness but at first thought I was still dreaming because I could still hear that rhythmic squeaking. It was the fan in the great room—had to be—so I got up to turn it off. I hadn’t even reached the bedroom door before realizing the squeaking had stopped. I walked down the gallery, still more asleep than awake, and didn’t even have to turn on the light to see that the fan blades were motionless.

It was the dream, I thought. It just followed me into half-waking.

I went back to bed, fell into real sleep almost at once, and this time there were no dreams.

I overslept because I’d been awake in the middle of the night. At least I thought I had; maybe the walk down the gallery to check on the fan had also been part of the dream. I didn’t think so but couldn’t be sure.

I wouldn’t have walked if the day had been hot, but one of the Gulf Coast’s fabled cold fronts had come in overnight. They’re never very cold, you have to live through a Maine winter to experience a real cold front, but it was in the seventies, and the breeze was refreshing. I toasted myself an English muffin, buttered it liberally, and set out for the swing gate.

I hadn’t gone a quarter of a mile before I saw buzzards circling—both the black ones and the red-headed turkey vultures. They’re ugly, awkward birds, so big it’s hard for them to fly. Greg told me they show up by the hundreds if there’s a red tide, gobbling the dead fish that wash up on the beach. But there had been no red tide that summer—the prickling in your lungs is impossible to mistake for anything else—and these birds appeared to be over the road instead of the beach.

I expected to find a dead rabbit or armadillo squashed in the road. Maybe someone’s runaway cat or puppy. But it wasn’t an animal. It was Allie. She was lying on her back by her mailbox. The double stroller was overturned at the head of her driveway. The shorts and shirts had spilled out and were lying on the crushed shell. Half a dozen buzzards were squabbling over her, hopping around, jostling each other, pecking at her arms and legs and face. Only pecking isn’t the right word. They were snatching at her flesh with their big beaks. I saw one of them—a redheaded turkey buzzard that had to weigh five pounds—dig into her exposed bicep and raise her arm, shaking its head and making her hand wiggle. As if she were waving at me.

After a moment of shocked paralysis I charged them, windmilling my arms and yelling. Several took clumsy flight. Most of the others backed off along the road in big clumsy hops. Not the one with its beak in her arm, though; it continued to shake its head, trying to tear a strip of flesh loose. I wished for Allie’s snake pole—a baseball bat would have been even better—but you know what they say about wishes, beggars, and horses. I saw a fallen palm frond, picked it up, and began waving it.

“Get away!” I shouted. “Get away, you fucker!”

Those fronds weigh almost nothing, but the dry ones make a loud rattling sound. The buzzard gave one more yank of its head and then launched itself and flew past me with a scrap of Allie’s arm in its beak. Those black eyes seemed to mark me, to say your turn will come. I punched at it but missed.

There was no question that she was dead, but I knelt beside her to make sure. I’m old now, and they tell me that one’s thought processes dim even if you’re not struck by Alzheimer’s or dementia—the slipp’d pantaloon, and all that—but I think I’ll never forget what the carrion birds had done to the nice lady who needed to pretend her long-dead children were still alive. The woman who had brought me oatmeal raisin cookies. Her mouth was open and with the lower lip gone, she appeared to be wearing a terminal snarl. The buzzards had gotten half of her nose and both of her eyes. Blood-rimmed sockets stared at me with terminal shock.

I went to the far side of the road and threw up my English muffin and my morning coffee. Then I returned to her. I didn’t want to. What I wanted was to run back to Greg’s house as fast as my creaky old-man legs would carry me. But if I did that, the buzzards would return and resume their meal. Some were circling overhead. Most were roosting in the Australian pines and palmettos, like vultures in a horror movie version of a New Yorker cartoon. I had my phone and called 911. I reported what had happened and said I would stay with the body until the police arrived. An ambulance would probably also arrive, much good it would do.

I wished I had something to cover her mutilated face and realized I did. I set the stroller upright, moved it to the thick wall of rhododendron and sea grape at the side of the driveway, and took one of the shirts draped on the back. I put it over what was left of her face. Her legs were splayed and her skirt was up to her thighs. I knew from TV that you’re not supposed to move a body until the police come, but I decided fuck that. I put her legs together. They had also been pecked, and I thought those red dots looked like snakebites. I took the other shirt and covered her legs from below her knees to her shins. One shirt was black, the other white, but they both said the same thing: I’M A TWINDAVIDUAL!

I sat down beside her, waiting for the police and wishing I’d never come to Rattlesnake Key. Duma was the Key that was supposed to have been haunted—so Mr. Ito had told me—but as far as I was concerned, Rattlesnake was worse. If for no other reason than it, unlike Duma, was still there.

The Bell driveway was bordered with bigger shells. I picked some up and every time one of those buzzards came close, I pegged a shell at it. I only hit one, but it gave out a very satisfying squawk.

I waited for the sirens. I tried not to look at the dead woman with the tee-shirts over her face and legs. I thought about oatmeal raisin cookies and about a trip I made to Providence ten years before. I was sixty-two then and thinking about retirement. I didn’t know what I’d do with my so-called golden years, but the joy I’d always felt in the advertising biz—composing just the right slogan to go with just the right idea—had started to grow very thin.

I was there, along with two other hotshots in the Boston agency, to talk to an eloquence of lawyers: Debbin Debbin, if you please. Their headquarters was in Providence, but they had offices in all the New England states, specializing in auto accident claims, disabilities, and slip-and-fall injuries. The Debbins’ crew wanted an aggressive ad campaign that would blanket all the TV stations from Cranston to Caribou. Something jazzy, they said. Something that will make people call that 800 number. I wasn’t looking forward to the meeting, which was apt to be long and contentious. Lawyers think they know everything.

I was sitting in the lobby of the Hilton Hotel the night before, waiting for my compatriots, Jim Woolsy and Andre Dubose, to come down from their rooms. The plan was to go out to Olive Garden and brainstorm, the ultimate goal being to come up with two good pitches. No more than two. Lawyers think they know everything, but lawyers also get easily confused. I had a notepad on which I’d jotted: WHY GET FUCKED WHEN YOU CAN DO THE FUCKING? CALL DEBBIN DEBBIN!

Probably a non-starter. I flipped the pad closed, put it in my jacket pocket, and glanced into the bar. That’s all I did. I think about that sometimes, how I might have looked out the window, or back at the elevators to see if Jim and Andre were coming. But I didn’t. I glanced into the bar.

There was a woman on one of the stools. She was dressed in a dark blue pants suit. Her hair, black and streaked with white, was styled in the kind of cut, maybe what hairdressers call a Dutch bob, that brushed the nape of her neck. Her face was only a quarter turned to me as she raised her glass to sip, but I didn’t need to see more. There are things we just know, aren’t there? The tilt of a person’s head. The way the jaw angles into the chin. The way one shoulder might always be slightly lifted, as if in a humorous shrug. The gesture of a hand brushing back a wing of hair, the first two fingers held out, the other two curled toward the palm. Time always has a tale to tell, wouldn’t you say? Time and love.

It’s not her, I thought. It can’t be.

All the time knowing it was. Knowing it could be no one else. I hadn’t seen her in over two decades, we’d fallen completely out of touch, not even holiday cards for the last dozen or so years, but I knew her at once.

I got up on legs that felt numb. I walked into the bar. I sat down next to her, a stranger who had once been my closest friend, the object of my lust and my love. The woman who had once killed a rabid dog in defense of her son but too late, too late, too late.

“Hey, you,” I said. “Can I buy you a drink?”

She turned, startled, ready to say whatever it was she meant to say, thanks but I’m meeting someone, thanks but I’m not looking for company… and saw me. Her mouth made a perfect O. She swayed backward on the stool. I caught her by the shoulders. Her eyes on mine. Her dark blue eyes on mine.

“Vic? Is it really you?”

“Is this seat taken?”

Jim and Andre did the brainstorming session by themselves, and the lawyers ended up greenlighting a really awful advertising campaign featuring a has-been cowboy star. I took my ex to dinner, and not at Olive Garden. Our first meal together since three months after the divorce. The last ended in a bitter argument; she threw her salad plate at me and we got kicked out. “I never want to see you again,” she said. “If you need to tell me something, write.”

She walked away without looking back. Reagan was president. We thought we were old but we didn’t know what old was.

There were no arguments that night in Providence. There was a lot of catching up and a fair amount of drinking. She came back to my room. We spent the night. Three months later—long enough for us to make sure this wasn’t just some kind of holding-onto-the-past mirage—we remarried.

The police came in three cruisers—maybe overdoing it for one dead old woman. And yes, there was an ambulance. The shirts were removed from Allie Bell’s corpse and after an examination by the EMTs and the sort of in situ photographs no one wants to look at, my neighbor was zipped into a body bag.

The county cop who took my statement was P. ZANE. The one who took the photographs and videotaped my statement was D. CANAVAN. Canavan was younger, and curious about the stroller and the child-sized clothing. Before I could explain, Zane said, “She’s kinda famous. Loopy but nice enough. Ever heard that song, ‘Delta Dawn’?”

Canavan shook his head, but as a country music fan in general and a Tanya Tucker fan in particular, I knew the one he was talking about. The similarity wasn’t exact, but it wasn’t bad.

I said, “It’s a song about a woman who keeps looking for her long-gone lover. Mrs. Bell liked to push around her twins, although they were also long-gone. They died years ago.”

Canavan thought it over, then said, “That’s fucked up.”

I thought, Maybe you have to have lost a child to understand.

One of the EMTs joined us. “There’ll be an autopsy, but I’m guessing it was a stroke or heart attack.”

“I’m betting on heart attack,” I said. “She took pills for arrhythmia. They might be in her dress pocket. Or…”

I went to the stroller and looked in the twin pouches on the backs of the seats. In one there were two little Tampa Rays baseball caps and a tube of sunblock. In the other was a bottle of pills. The EMT took it and looked at the label. “Sotalol,” he said. “For fast or irregular heartbeat.”

I thought she might have overturned the stroller while trying to get her medication. What else could it have been? She certainly hadn’t seen a rattlesnake.

“I imagine you’ll have to testify at the inquest,” Officer Zane said. “Are you going to be around for awhile, Mr. Trenton?”

“Yes. This summer it seems like everybody’s sticking around.”

“True,” he said, and self-consciously adjusted his mask. “Walk with us. Let’s see if she left the house open. We should lock it up if she did.”

I pushed the stroller, mostly because nobody told me not to. Zane had taken the pills and put them in an envelope.

“Jesus,” Canavan said. “I’m surprised that squeaky wheel didn’t drive her nuts.” Then, considering what he’d just said: “Although I guess she sorta was.”

“She brought me cookies,” I said. “I meant to oil it that night, but I forgot.”

The house behind the wall of rhododendron and palmetto wasn’t a McMansion. In fact, it looked like the sort of summer place that in the mid-twentieth century, long before the Richie Rich types discovered the Gulf Coast Keys, might have been rented to a couple of fishermen or a vacationing family for fifty or seventy dollars a week.

There was a bigger, newer addition behind it, but not big enough (or vulgar enough) to qualify for McMansion status. The garage was connected to the house by a breezeway. I looked in, cupping my hands against the glass, and saw a plain old Chevy Cruze. There was enough light coming through the side windows for me to make out the two small child seats side by side in the back.

Officer Zane knocked on the door of the house, a formality, then tried the knob. It opened. He told Canavan to come with him and roll videotape, presumably so he could show his bosses, including the county attorney, that they hadn’t lightfingered anything. Zane asked if I wanted to come in. I declined, but after they had gone inside, I tried the side door of the garage. It was also unlocked. I wheeled the stroller inside and parked it beside the car. There were thunderstorms forecast for later in the day, and I didn’t want it getting wet.