John Godey - The Snake

"This point" was 3:30 in the morning. The alarm clock was clamoring, and here he was again, looming over her, undepleted and eager, broaching her sore pussy with a miraculous erection. She opened to him, halfway between weariness and helplessness, and wondered if she couldn't catch a catnap in the few minutes until he was done. But instead she responded with enthusiasm to his thrust, and finished up squealing with pain and delight.

While she was showering, he parted the curtain and stepped in with her.

She felt him against her, and realized, incredible as it might seem, that he was prepared for another assault, so she turned on the cold water full force, and even his Phoenix-like member wasn't up to coping with such a deterrent. He dwindled, and then she had to put up only with his cavorting and hollering and pounding his chest and spitting streams of water and a few other locker-room antics. Finally she turned off the water and jumped out of the shower stall, and before he could rouse himself again, without bothering to dry herself thoroughly, put on her jeans and T-shirt. He tried to take them off again, but she fended him off and chivvied him into getting dressed. She diverted him while they drank coffee by praising him for his courage in offering to accompany her to the park. She told him that he was the balmiest man in the sense of being gutsy; she added quickly-she had ever met. His chest-and nothing else, she noted thankfully-swelled with pride.

It was probably true, she thought, as he sipped his hot coffee and made a thoroughly unconvincing disclaimer of his bravery. He was not only one of the bravest men she had ever known, but incontestably the stupidest. The stupidest girl she had ever met was Jane Redpath.

They prepared to leave. She gathered up her tripod and slung her Hasselblad over her shoulder. Jeff stuck a hefty tire iron in his belt, picked up a forked wooden stick and a burlap bag, and they were ready. She thought the tire iron was a pretty good idea, but she wasn't so sure about the forked stick and bag. They reminded her that there was a snake in the park. She had given it some thought earlier, but rationalized her fears in terms of the enormous size of the park. Still, the knowledge of the snake's presence had made her squirm, and she might very well have postponed the expedition if her paper hadn't already been badly overdue.

She warned Jeff that she didn't want him to do anything silly like going off on his own to hunt for the snake. He said the stick was just a precaution, and relax, baby, relax.

In the taxi that took them downtown through deserted streets, he groped her, naturally, and she tried to divert him by being serious and unsexy.

She went on about her photographic project, which was to constitute the thesis for her Physiology M. A., but it didn't slow him down.

"God, I love your apples," he said fervently, with his hand inside her T-shirt.

"Whenever people think of sleep problems," she said in what she hoped was a pedantic, sedative voice, "they tend to think exclusively in terms of human beings. But it's obvious that we can learn much from animals…"

He was nuzzling her neck with his handsomely broken athlete's nose. The cab driver, who drove with his left hand extended through the window, as if to cool his fingers, kept turning his head around at intervals to check the activity in the back of the car.

"Jeff," she whispered. "Stop it, everybody's looking at us."

He placed his hand between her legs. "I can't get enough. You know?"

"How could I not know?" She tried to pin his hand down, but realized that he would take it as a playful test of strength, so she stopped. "Look, in case we meet that snake… I mean, it's not too likely and all, but… I'm scared, Jeff."

It was a fresh effort to distract him, and it succeeded. He didn't remove his hand, nothing as definitive as that, but he stopped trying to poke into her.

"No sweat, baby. If we ran across it, we'll just catch it, and that’s that."

She gave him an only partly feigned shiver. "It's dangerous. I'm so scared.

How are you going to catch it?"

He had already told her how, in detail. He had spent the previous summer in the Southwest on some kind of archaeological dig, and in the evenings, in his free time, had gone out catching rattlers with his colleagues. "Great sport" was how he had described it. But he didn't mind repeating himself.

"It's simple. All you need is a forked stick. You spear them just behind the head with the stick, then you grab them there with your hand — behind the head, so they can't nip you-and just pop 'em. in a bag. Nothing to it.

I hope we run into the one in the park so I can show you.

"But it isn't a rattler. They think it might be a cobra."

"No difference. A snake is a snake. What you have to keep in mind is that snakes have a very low I.Q. When they're threatened, and can't run away, they attack. Well, they have this low intelligence rating, and all they can think of is that they have to bite something. So you give them the stick, and they bite that."

In his enthusiasm he removed his hand from her crotch to gesture, and forgot to put it back. For this relief, much thanks. "They bite the stick?"

She tried to put an enormous amount of curiosity and wonderment in her voice. "And then what?"

"Then you shake them off the stick and pin them down. It's easy."

"Easy." She strove for a tone combining scepticism and admiration.

"Anything's easy, if you really know what you're doing."

He prattled on with earnest enthusiasm as the driver entered the 97th Street transverse and headed eastward through the park. All she had to do was keep him going for another five minutes. The trip back was another matter, but maybe she would be able to think of something.

The snake glided onto the pavement, dry again since the cloudburst. It moved slowly, cautiously, as its tongue brought in the mingled odour substances of many animals.

Once or twice it lifted its head high and peered into a cage. Even when the cages were empty, the odour-substances were strong.

In one cage, two lions were asleep; their powerful smell was familiar to the snake and disturbing. One of the lions twitched uneasily in its sleep before the snake moved on.

The cab driver dropped them at Fifth Avenue and 65th Street. They entered the park through the Children's Gate, and walked toward the Arsenal, ivy-covered red brick, where the park's administrative offices were housed. It was dark, except for a modest floodlight over the steps, and a faint reflection at a downstairs window from lights somewhere in the interior of the building.

Now that they were actually here, Jane felt nervous. If Jeff had any fears or qualms, he didn't show them. Well, that was the wrong way to put it. He didn't show them because he hadn't any. He was fully tooled up for the venture: tire iron in his belt for disposing of muggers, forked stick over his shoulder to deal with snakes. And if there was a night watchman, he would undoubtedly disarm him with sheer ebullience.

They skirted the Arsenal to the left, walking softly on their sneakered feet, circled to their right, and came into the menagerie. It was still an hour or so before dawn, and the menagerie was dark and shadowy except for the thin spread of light from the spaced lampposts. Behind them, on Fifth Avenue, the buildings loomed blackly, except for an isolated light at a window here and there, where, she thought, some despairing soul waited for the dawn or the resolution needed to end his life.

"Okay," Jeff said. "Where do we start?"

He spoke in his normal voice, and in the night-time hush it echoed like a gunshot.

"Shsh. Quiet. You'll wake everything up."

He surprised her by lowering his voice to a creditable whisper. "You're gonna wake them all up anyway with your flash."