Patricia Geary - Strange Toys

“Not for children.” Stan was always much more put out by pictures of naked women than Linwood was.

“If you guys don’t hurry up, we’ll miss Sally the Snake Queen!” June beckoned from the doorway.

“Just a minute.” I opened the car door and pulled Nanette from the backseat. She had the big bills in her bag. Then I shut the door and caught up with the others. The underwear pockets bulged pleasantly beneath my armpits. Perhaps too much so, as Linwood had asked me the other day if I was “developing.”

The first thing you noticed inside the Snake-A-Torium was the dinginess and the powerful odor of animals, unhealthy animals. The second thing you noticed was the old man at the ticket counter. He was wearing a torn Hawaiian shirt (more bare-breasted maidens) over his considerable belly. His unshaven face was sprinkled with gray, and he chewed on a squashed cigar stub.

“Two adults, two children.” Stan’s teeth were gritted. He hated to see animals in pain. Once he caught Deane using spurs on Ace—that was the only time he ever hit her.

“Pet!” June shouted. “Look at this!”

I picked my way through the dusty reptile cages. They were so old and filthy, the place looked like a museum and not a zoo. It’s hard to feel sorry for a deadly black mamba, but you did.

In the center of the snake room there was a big hole in the floor with a railing around it. June was leaning over, gawking. The hole was The Snake Pit, about thirty feet deep and circular. The sides of the pit had been decorated with crudely painted palm trees, dinosaurs, and volcanoes. It looked like something a six-year-old might have done. There were some monkeys, too, and they were drawn so they looked bigger than the trees. I was only a child, but even I knew a little something about perspective.

“It’s time for the show.” June pointed at a fake cardboard clock down in the pit. It hung above the only doorway, and a sign said, THE NEXT SHOW WILL BE AT: and the clock’s hands showed four-thirty.

I glanced over my shoulder. Linwood was looking into a smeared display case. Stan, a horrible expression on his face, was peering into the various snake cages. No one else seemed to be in the room.

Especially not Sammy.

“Here she comes!”

The door opened, and out stepped a large woman wearing a spangled circus costume, one of the ones that look like your stomach shows but really it’s flesh-colored leotard. Her legs were heavy and her hair was an artificial red color that was almost purple. She had a lot of makeup on, but her face still looked old and unhappy. A little hat with feathers rose jauntily from her puffy hairdo.

She curtsied halfheartedly without looking up. If she’d known only June and I were watching, she probably wouldn’t have curtsied at all.

Then she left for a moment, returning with a hefty black and white reptile.

“Aw, it’s a king snake, like Stripey!” June was disappointed. “Anyone can pick up one of those.”

An old record of tinny-sounding hootchie-kootchie music came on. “Sally the Snake Queen!” Someone announced over the loudspeaker.

I turned around and, sure enough, it was the old guy at the counter. He held an oversized microphone up to his mouth, and he was still gnawing away at the cigar.

“Every day, ten times a day, no day a holiday, Sally handles her poisonous vipers!”

Absolutely no expression on her face, Sally wrapped the lethargic king around her shoulders as if he were a stole. Then she tied him around the impressive girth of her middle. Finally, she hauled him between her legs, which gave me a twinge. What a weird thing to do.

“Now, Sally the Snake Queen serenades her cobra!”

Sally tossed the king out the doorway and reappeared with a wicker basket. June was enthralled, so I saw my chance and slipped away. Besides, I really needed some fresh air.

Following the signs TO SNAPPERS, I exited onto a catwalk.

I took a deep breath before I realized it smelled even worse outside. What was the catwalk suspended over, anyway? Alligators! There must have been more than a hundred of them, lolling only ten feet or so beneath me. Remembering Captain Hook, I did not lean over the railing, and I tucked Nanette safely into my outside pocket.

They were such sleepy, ugly things. Their “cage” was not very large, considering how many there were. A dirty trickle of water fed into a shallow concrete pool in which it looked like garbage had been dumped. Regularly. Some alligators lay in the water. Some lay half in, half out. Many lay on top of one another. Nobody seemed to care. Their tiny, sly eyes were uninterested. Unless, I guessed, somebody fell in.

Above the gator pen was a series of what looked like small shacks, the kind migrant farm workers lived in. What would they be doing here, though? Would anybody, however desperate, live in a Snake-A-Torium?

The smell was the saddest, sickest thing in the world.

“Sammy?” I called.

Only the slow splash and shuffle of the plodding reptiles below.

This seemed like the perfect place for him to show. I had my poodle toys to protect me. I had the money just in case. But, it struck me like a bolt of lightning, I didn’t have the book! How stupid can you get? What good was the money without the book?

“Sammy?”

Someone grabbed my elbow—I screamed!

“For God’s sake,” said Stan. “Come on, Pet. We’re getting the hell out of here.”

Stan turned my arm like the rudder of a ship and steered me back through the snake room and out to the car. June was wailing; I could hear her as we approached.

Stan gunned the motor and we tore out of the parking lot.

For a moment, everyone sat tense. Linwood smoked, June snuffled, and Stan… why, he was crying too.

“People like that should be shot!” he said after a moment. Since I was sitting in back of him, I couldn’t see the tears, but I saw his hand go up to wipe his eyes.

“I wanted to see the show!” June lamented.

“Here,” said Linwood. She turned around so she was facing the backseat. “I bought you girls each a present.”

June abruptly stopped crying.

What could she have found to buy in that terrible hole? I patted Nanette in my pocket, melancholy with the sunset, the failure to make contact.

“How could you give that bastard any more money?”

“Your language, Stan. Maybe if he had more money, he’d take better care of those poor beasts.” Linwood dropped a small white object into each of our pairs of cupped hands.

“A tooth?” June held hers up.

Mine was a small triangle, very white, and hot. Hot? Not heat-hot. Instead, it emitted a radiation of sorts. More power , a voice whispered from nowhere.

“Those are alligator teeth,” Linwood said.

“Oh, great!” Stan exhaled loudly through his nose.

“And I want you to use them to make wishes on. If you ever see an animal in pain again, or if you find yourself thinking about the poor creatures we just saw, I want you to hold the tooth and wish that their pain will be healed.”

“Tonight,” said Stan, “I’m reporting that bastard to the SPCA. That’s the only wishing that’ll work around here.”

I turned and stared out the back window. If I’d had the book, would Sammy have been there? Did I need more money too? Or was it possible that expecting him kept him away?

June and I were busily making Pilgrim hats in the backseat. We were in Alabama somewhere, and Stan claimed only two more days to Miami. I was cutting out the shapes: circles of brown cardboard for the top, larger circles with that hole missing (you had to fold the cardboard; June wouldn’t allow a slit) for the brims, and strips to support the space between the brims and the tops. June was on stapler detail. She had a definite way with these things.