John Godey - The Snake

Captain Eastman was presented with his assignment by his boss, Deputy Inspector Vincent Scott, who had been the penultimate recipient of a buck that had begun with the mayor, passed to the Police Commissioner, and then descended in orderly steps to a Deputy Commissioner, the Chief of Operations, a Borough Commander, and the Deputy Chief in command of SOD. Eastman, who had left his office at 6 o'clock for his home in Hollis, was recalled by telephone. He arrived back at SOD Headquarters at 8:45.

"About the killer snake in the park," the DI said sourly. "You know which killer snake in which park I'm talking about?"

"Yessir."

"We just been given it."

"I thought we were already working on it."

"Just a couple of trucks and truck personnel helping out. Now we're running the show. You know anything about snakes?"

"Nothing special." Eastman pondered for a moment. "You're supposed to catch them behind the head with a long stick with a clamp at the end that closes up when you press a handle. Like the things grocers used to use years ago to bring packages down from a high shelf?"

"You don't have to catch it," the DI said. "Just get rid of it. Just get in the park and find this sonofabitch and kill it."

"That's what they were trying to do today, and didn't do it. The big problem is the size of the park. You know how big it is, Chief?"

"Certainly, I know how big it is. Fifth Avenue to Central Park West, 59th to 110th."

"Eight hundred and forty-some acres. I don't have any idea how to cover all that area."

"You don't need an idea, you need manpower. These days, everything is manpower." The DI shook his head. "You know how we killed snakes when I was a kid? We grabbed them by the tail and cracked the whip with 'em, just snapped their heads against a rock. Turn up a rock, grab them by the tail, and crack the whip…"

The DI's eyes were inturned, wandering in a distant and undoubtedly more agreeable past. Eastman curbed his impatience and waited for nostalgia to run its course. The DI's mood changed abruptly with a hardening of his eyes.

"You're getting manpower, as much as you need, and if you don't turn that snake up, it's your ass."

Somebody must be kicking his butt, Eastman thought, so he's kicking mine.

Definition of chain of command. He said cautiously, "You say I'm getting manpower? How much?"

"Five hundred." The DI paused to savour Eastman's astonishment. "They want that snake real bad."

Eastman's face was impassive again. "Yessir."

"Pulling them out of the high-crime areas, would you believe it? It's political. It's a red-hot item. You get my meaning? You better damn well turn it up."

"Yessir."

"Planning and Operations is putting the package together. You'll have the five hundred, or so they say, tomorrow morning. They're working late on it. You and me have a date to go down there." The DI's eyes gleamed with bitter amusement. "Not much sleep for you tonight, Thomas."

Who sleeps at night, anyway, Eastman thought, and said, "I wouldn't mind some technical help. There's a young fellow at the Bronx Zoo-"

"Two dead in less than twenty-four hours, that's one thing." The DI shrugged. "People die all the time. But the other thing, the politics, that's serious. You hear the news this evening?"

Eastman nodded. "John Q. Public is bitching."

"Right. That's why you got a whole army of cops to play with. They want a big police presence in the park. You get the meaning?"

"About seven or eight months ago," Eastman said, "there was this rattlesnake some nut kept for a pet in a small apartment house in Washington Heights, I think it was. It escaped, and I went down with a detachment. That was before my knee. We had a couple of those snake catching sticks, I think. Anyway, we evacuated all the tenants, and we tossed that house. I mean really tossed it, cellar to roof, every nook and cranny.

We must have been four or five hours at it, walking on eggshells all the time, and we couldn't find it. Then this young guy from the zoo heard about it and came down with a stick and a bag, and inside of five minutes he found the snake curled up near the boiler in the cellar. He lifted it up on the stick, popped it into the bag, and took it off to the zoo."

"An apartment house," the DI said. "That can't compare to Central Park."

"What impressed me, Chief, was not only that he knew right away where to look for it, but he saw it. For some reason, it didn't rattle. I forgot to ask why." Eastman shrugged. "We checked out the boiler area several times, and it was there all the time, only we didn't see it. But he saw it right away."

"We already got one of these characters, herpa-something, from the Natural History Museum, he's supposed to be helping us."

"I saw him on the tube," Eastman said. "Maybe he's okay, but this young guy… well, he didn't fool around."

"Yeah. I know what you mean. The Museum character acted like a professor, like he did a lot of reading about snakes. Get hold of this kid, if you want to." The DI looked at his watch. "I hope you had something to eat, because we got to go downtown right this minute."

Molting was one of the imperatives that governed the snake's existence.

Unlike most animals, a snake never stopped growing from the moment of birth to the moment of death. Because it literally outgrew its horny outer skin, it was obliged to shed at regular intervals, three or four times a year.

For several days now the snake's skin had been darkening and dulling, and its eyes, sheltered behind transparent protective lenses, had begun to dim. It was time to molt.

Because it was defenseless during molting, the snake sought the shelter of the topmost branches of its tree. It stretched its sinuous length out almost to its full extent, and began to rub its face against a branch of the tree. When the skin around its lips broke away, the process of molting was under way. Squirming vigorously over the next few hours, the snake advanced laboriously, like a finger being pulled out of a tight glove, until it had worked itself completely out of the old skin, which ended up at the tail, inside out.

The new skin was bright, the colours fresh and attractive. The snake was at its handsomest. Its eyesight was keen behind its new transparent lens.

The old skin, feathery, translucent, dropped a few feet after it had been discarded, and then caught and held fast in a net of twigs, undetectable from ground level.

As always after molting, the snake was hungry. In the darkness, it coiled down the tree and sped away in search of food.

Hizzonner was not awake for the eleven o'clock television news. It was just as well; it contained little that might have comforted him. The program opened with a sequence showing the cops who had been sweeping the park leaving as darkness came on: hot, dispirited, out-of-sorts, a beaten army executing a strategic withdrawal.

"Some of these policemen were on the verge of collapse, and those who criticized the effort-or lack of it-were on the whole sympathetic to the frustrated policemen themselves. Mostly, their barbs were directed at the mayor."

The mayoral candidate of the opposition party, wearing a white shirt and tie, his sparse hair ruffled by the breeze from the air conditioner in his elegant living room: "… sorry for this pitiful handful of sincere, dedicated men. The niggardly number of police assigned to hunt down the snake is only too typical of the halfway measures that have characterized this administration for the past four years. The hard-pressed people of our city deserve better. Their God-given right to enjoy the beauty of their park in safety and with peace of mind has been flouted by a mayor who…"

A former mayor, said to be grooming himself for a run for the governorship: "I don't want to come down too hard on the mayor, but if I was still in office I would mount the most comprehensive dragnet ever seen in this city."