John Godey - The Snake

The mother looked up. "Peggy, what are you doing there? Get back here at once!"

The child paused, looked at her mother, then crawled forward again.

"Peggy! Damn that child."

She put her book down on the bench and got up and started down the walkway toward the child, her mouth thinned with annoyance, her frown settled deeply between her eyes.

The snake's length was concealed by the brush. Only its head and the erect portion of its anterior were visible. When the child stood up and moved forward, its eyes were almost on exactly the same level as the snake's. The snake hissed harshly, its mouth gaped widely.

When it felt the vibrations of the woman's footsteps in the substrate, it turned away from the child. The appearance of this fast-moving new threat confused it momentarily, and then it turned its attention back to the child, who was now well within striking distance.

The woman bore down on the child from behind and swept her up in her arms angrily.

"Didn't I tell you to stay near me? Bad girl."

The child struggled and tried to slip down out of her mother's hold, her arms stretched outward to the snake. The child almost plunged forward out of her mother's grip. But the mother held on to an arm, and used it as a lever to lift her off the ground. She shifted the child to her hip, and, scolding, fending off failing arms and legs, carried her back to the bench.

The child screamed with rage.

The snake watched vigilantly until they had disappeared from view. It stopped hissing and closed its mouth, although it still remained poised in striking posture. Its tongue darted out. After a moment it turned in a looping circle and crawled back into the brush.

The coffee shop was crowded with second-breakfast eaters, and they shared a table with a pair of West Side merchants who debated the merits of Hispanics as customers: tremendous buyers but irresponsible payers. No candles wavered, even though Converse and Holly did some staring across the table. The auspices were all wrong-she had to rush back to her office to do her story, the merchants were loud and diverting, hot coffee was an antiromantic beverage. And, finally, there was a constraint between them, as if, Converse thought, they were both regretful of their unpremeditated passion at the press conference.

They came out of the cool coffee shop onto the baked pavements of Broadway and awkwardly avoided looking at each other.

"Well," Holly said.

"Well," Converse said. He was feeling a sense of deprivation, of something unaccountably lost. "You ever see an old flick about Catherine the Great?

Douglas Fairbanks Jr.? It's about two hundred years old."

She nodded. "Elisabeth Bergner was Catherine. It's considered a classic of sorts. Why do you ask?"

He shrugged. "It just popped into my head. Before. I mean during the press conference."

"Oh." She gave him a quick, up-looking, candle-flame-wavering glance, then turned her eyes down and said, "Better get back to work."

"See you around."

"See you."

"Thanks for the coffee."

Maybe they both wanted to linger, Converse thought, and maybe that was why neither of them did. He walked softly so that he could hear her footsteps, and resisted looking back until just before he turned a comer to head eastward toward the park. She was nowhere in sight. No declaration of any kind, no exchange of phone numbers. Just "see you" and "thanks for the coffee." All for the best. If he thrilled to the sound of footsteps, could a disastrous involvement be far behind?

At Amsterdam Avenue, a New York Post truck hurled a pile of papers in the direction of a stationery store. The bundle just missed taking him off his feet. He read the headline:

SNAKE THREE, PEOPLE ZERO

The policeman at the desk in the Central Park Precinct recognized Converse and waved him on toward the Commander's office at the end of the corridor.

Captain Eastman, stripped to his shorts, was lying on his back on a cot.

There was no ease in his sleep, Converse thought. He lay heavily on the thin mattress, as if at the mercy of the downward pull of gravity, or his problems, or perhaps his age. The hair on his chest was white, matted with sweat.

Converse shut the door softly and went back through the corridor. In a small office opposite the desk, four hoods were polluting the air with cigarette smoke. They were dressed in dirty jeans, wisps of shirts that exposed their chests, studded leather belts, beards, gunfighter moustaches, long unkempt hair. They were a part of the Central Park Precinct's anticrime unit.

Converse stopped. "You guys know the park," he said. "Where's the best place to hide? The least people, the most wild areas?"

Three of the detectives turned to the fourth, and one of them said, "Ask Sergeant Paschik. He's our first whip, and he's been here at the Two-two a little over a hundred years."

Sergeant Paschik was in his forties but, with his unshaven face and drooping, two-toned, gray-and-black mandarin moustache, he looked no less raffish than his younger colleagues.

"Sergeant?" Converse said.

"Uptown. North of 96th Street. It's a fact that about ninety percent of the people use the park below 85th Street. The Receiving Reservoir takes up most of the space between 86th and 96th, so I would concentrate on the area north of 96th."

"Is it less manicured up there?"

Paschik nodded. "It's real wild up there. You could get lost in some parts if you didn't know your way around."

"Or don't speak Spanish," one of the detectives said.

Paschik said, "It's a fact that above 96th the population, east side and west side both, is mostly Spanish. Naturally, they use the park near their own neighbourhood. So it's a fact that it's not as safe there as in the southern part."

One of the detectives said, "I thought the snake was biting people around 80th, around there."

"Was," Converse said. "But its instinct would be to find a wilder and less frequented territory."

He thanked the anticrime squad, and they wished him luck. He went home, fed the python and the cat, and went to bed to catch up on his sleep. He dreamed of Catherine the Great, Empress of all the Russias.

The handout from the office of Hizzonner the mayor read: "I profoundly regret the tragic death of this fine young man to whose athletic prowess we thrilled so many times in the past." Jeff had been a secondstring pulling guard on the Columbia football team. "Yet, even in this moment of tragedy, I cannot pass up the observation that he was foolhardy. If he had not tried to catch the snake, but had merely retreated, no harm would have befallen him.

"And so I take this opportunity once again to urge the public, with all my heart, to exercise the utmost caution. Above all, do not attempt to take matters into your own hands. The police, with the help of experts, are redoubling their efforts. Do not hinder or hamper them in their work. Do not endanger your own life. Please cooperate."

The Reverend Sanctus Milanese, the solicitation of whose views had by now become a regular item on the itinerary of the media, said: "The members of the Church of the Purification are conscripted in the army of God to destroy the personification of evil. Can soldiers sit on the sidelines while this messenger of Satan crushes the city in its oily toils? The police are powerless, for it is not given to a temporal force to overcome the Devil. Only the Godly are sanctioned for this work, for only they are blessed by Divine guidance. They shall prevail who are pure."

"You're going to continue to search for the snake in defiance of the orders of the police and the mayor's instructions?"

"We respond to only one Authority, and His name is God. We will continue our search as before, and there may be new initiatives as God proposes them."