John Godey - The Snake

Torres shouted hoarsely and jumped back. The snake was erect again, hissing, its mouth gaped open. Torres retreated half a dozen paces and looked at his thigh. His beige pants were slightly reddened by a few tiny spots of blood. It didn't hurt there, just a feeling like pins and needles. When he looked up again the snake's body was in motion, curling forward over the sailor's body, moving toward him.

"Cristo, save me," Torres screamed. "Cristo, please save me from this fucking snake!"

He turned away and began to run at top speed.

The snake crawled off the walkway into the grass. It held its head high, and its black forked tongue darted in and out. It disappeared into the darkness.

Five minutes after the start of his panicky flight, Torres stopped running long enough to rub the surface of his revolver with his shirt, and drop it into a trash basket. Then he began to run again.

He had been running headlong, as fast and hard as he could, from the moment the snake had crawled across the sailor's body toward him. For a while, he kept turning his head to see if it was chasing him, though he knew that no snake could possibly travel at that speed. From time to time he reached down to touch the place on his thigh where he had been bitten. It wasn't swollen and it didn't hurt-just the little pinsand-needles feeling-and he took comfort from that. Maybe the goddamn mile-long whore of a snake wasn't even poisonous.

But he began to feel lightheaded, like he had been drinking too much wine, and he was having some trouble breathing. Also, it was taking him too long to get out of the park. He had stayed on the winding footpaths except for once, when he tried to take a shortcut through an uphill bushy area, and he had lost his bearings and almost gotten hysterical until he found his way back to the paths. He always thought he knew the park as well as he knew his own asshole, but now he couldn't seem to find the way out.

After he found the paths again he felt played out and had to take a rest.

So he just sat down on the pavement, facing in the direction he thought he had come from, so he could see the snake coming if it was still following him. Estupido! He had lost it a long time ago. But the fucking animal had scared him shitless, and he couldn't free his mind of the way it kept sliding out of that box, and the way it bit him so fast that he couldn't hardly see it move.

Sitting down and resting didn't seem to do much good. If anything, his breathing was getting worse, and his mouth was filling up with some sticky kind of crap. He couldn't spit the stuff out and had to try getting rid of it with his fingers. He got scared all over again, and he knew he better get to a hospital fast, but he had a hard time standing up. His legs felt weak, and fie was starting to feel sleepy. But he finally pulled himself up and took off again, though he was staggering more than running, and he couldn't breathe good, and the gummy stuff in his mouth was dribbling down his chin now.

He began to sob, and tried to beg some saints to help him, but he couldn't think of any of their names. He was sucking for air, and his arms and hands felt so heavy that he could hardly move them. At last he remembered his name saint, but when he tried calling out to him he couldn't talk, only make sounds like a frog.

He couldn't feel his legs at all now, just saw them going up and down like in slow motion. The pins and needles were spreading upward in his body, and his head kept falling down until his chin bobbed against his chest. After a while it got too hard to try lifting his head, so he just let it hang down. He didn't feel like running no more, either. All he wanted was to lay down and go to sleep. But he kept going, and a little bit later he saw an exit out of the park onto Fifth Avenue. It puzzled him that he was way down near 64th Street, when he should have come out in the high Seventies.

He stumbled through the exit, but couldn't stop himself at the curb. Ms momentum carried him into the middle of the street, where he collapsed.

Through his closed eyelids he saw the brightness of headlights coming toward him, but he didn't try to move. He knew his legs wouldn't work, no part of his body would work. He heard the bad noises he was making when he tried to breathe, and he knew he was gonna die, right there, laying down in the middle of Fifth Avenue.

Patrolman John Nebbia, driving sector car Boy-3, saw the figure stagger out of the park and into the street, where it collapsed.

"See that?" he said to his partner, Patrolman Frank Finnerty.

Finnerty nodded. "Look at the cars. They go right around him, like dodging a pothole. Nobody stops."

"Who stops and gets out of his car at three-thirty in the morning? I'm not crazy about it myself."

Nebbia sped up a bit until he reached the figure sprawled in the street.

There he made a short U-turn that brought the car around in front of the figure, setting up a barrier to protect it from the oncoming southbound traffic. Finnerty was out the door before the emergency brakes were set.

Nebbia turned on his revolving roof light before he got out.

Finnerty was down on one knee, leaning over the man. "What's the matter, feller?"

Nebbia watched the man's brown eyes open and stare upward. He was having trouble breathing, and a heavy gluey mucous discharge glistened on his lips and chin.

"OD'd," Nebbia said. "One more I-Espanic OD. I'll call for an ambulance."

"He can hardly breathe," Finnerty said. "See how blue his face is? Probably a heart attack."

"Me, I diagnose it overdose," Nebbia said. "He's too young for a heart attack. I'll call an ambulance." He straightened up, but instead of going back to the car, yelled at a driver who had stopped alongside them, with his window turned down, to watch the scene. "Move along, move along, chrisesake. You got no home to go to?"

"He looks like he might go out any second, John," Finnerty said. "Let's put him in the car and take him ourself."

"I don't know," Nebbia said.

"What don't you know? He could go any second."

"That's what I don't know," Nebbia said. "You know as well as me that if he dies on us we have to hang around and wait for the M.E., and Christ alone knows how long it takes the wagon to get here, and then we have to inventory his possessions…" He paused, and assessed the tightening of Finnerty's spare Irish face, and shrugged. "Okay, okay, we'll take him ourself."

They carried him to the car. Finnerty got into the back seat with him.

Nebbia spoke into his microphone. "Nineteenth Precinct sector car Eighteen-twenty to Central. K."

In the back seat, looking down at the slumped figure beside him, Finnerty heard Nebbia inform Central that they were transporting a serious OD to East Side Hospital. After Central acknowledged, Nebbia. turned his siren on.

Not OD, Finnerty said to himself, not OD but a heart attack. He tried to remember the emergency procedure he was trained to follow. The only thing he could think of right now was mouth-to-mouth resuscitation. and he wasn't sure he could bring himself to do it with all that crap that was clogging the victim's mouth and oozing down over his chin.

"Move it," he said to Nebbia. "Will you move it?"

As the snake headed into heavy brush, a squirrel fled before its approach. The snake was hungry, and it might have taken the squirrel, but its primal impulse was to seek a place of safety. It crawled deeper into the brush, constantly probing with its deeply forked black tongue. It paused at the base of a tree, erected its head on the taut anterior portion of its body, and looked upward. Then it began to crawl up the trunk of the tree, winding around it swiftly and smoothly, using its prehensile tail for leverage.

It stopped two-thirds of the way up the tree in an area of heavy foliage, and draped itself over the branches in a seemingly patternless arrangement of loose random loops that were designed to distribute its weight evenly.