John Godey - The Snake

Not because he was shocked-after twenty years on the job he had heard everything-but because he had a duty to perform, the attendant said, "You want to give him a decent Christian burial, don't you?"

"He wasn't a decent Christian, so why should he have a decent Christian burial?"

"Well, it's the usual thing…

"I'll tell you something." Her round face hardened to show some of its underlying bone structure. "The sonofabitch never gave me anything but misery, he starved me out, he spent his money on whores, and I never saw a penny of it except once in a while when he was bombed and, you know what I mean, wanted my favours. So if you think I'm going to spend any of my hard-earned money to bury him, forget it. You got potter's field, right?

That's where to bury him."

"Well, we don't call it that," the attendant said. "I can't force you to take the body, but if the city has to bury it, you'll get billed for the expense."

She shrugged.

Meaning, the attendant thought, that billing her is one thing, and collecting another. He said, "Look, he was a seaman, so there's probably a pretty good insurance policy, and union benefits too-right?"

She smiled. "It's the one good thing he ever did for me, and he couldn't help himself-the company took out the policy for him. I got that money coming to me, I deserve it, and I'm not gonna piss any of it away burying him."

"Aw, miss," the attendant said, "in the name of common decency-"

"Potter's field," Betty said. "He'll never know the difference."

This evening's performance at the Delacorte Theatre was to be Richard Brinsley Sheridan's School for Scandal. All 2,200-odd free tickets had been distributed by seven o'clock.

At least half the ticket-holders picnicked in the park, mainly in the areas adjacent to the Delacorte: up by the Belvedere Castle, on the banks of the small oblong Belvedere Lake, by the Shakespeare Gardens, and, in the hundreds, on the burnt-out grass of the Great Lawn. The grass was barely visible for the blankets that covered it, on which people sat or reclined or spread their picnic food and drink.

A certain segment of the crowd, notably the older people among them, were festive and uneasy in equal parts. As New Yorkers, trained in the ways of survival in the perilous city, they held it as an article of faith that one didn't enter the park after, or even approaching, dark. And so there was a heady, nervous pleasure in being here now, a sense of willful violation of common sense, like teasing a bull in an open field. They were aware that there was no real danger, of course, since they Were part of a vast throng, and since there was a reassuringly sizable police detail on hand. Nevertheless, it was an adventure of sorts.

When the performance began at eight o'clock, it was not quite dark. The buildings to the east lay in dusk, and their windows were already sparkling with lights; to the west, the sky was hazily luminous with the setting sun. In a few moments that light would die away, and darkness would fall. Sitting on their wooden fold-down seats in the circular theater, the crowd was dressed for the stilling heat in light summer shirts and blouses, trousers and skirts and halters, and even, here and there, bikini bathing suits and bare chests. The house lights dimmed, and the audience prepared for its pleasure, knowing that, whatever standard terrors would surely transpire in the more remote regions of the park, here it was cozy and secure.

The snake crept swiftly through the darkness, its slender length always in direct contact with the ground, curved into a continuous flowing S-movement, each part of its body following precisely in the path of the part preceding it.

The snake's movement was by horizontal undulation, a series of gentle curves, with the body forced against the substrate at each curve. This method of locomotion was made possible by the hundreds of vertebrae that constituted its backbone. The scales of its lower surface were enlarged, forming transverse overlapping plates whose free edge was directed backwards, and to each of which was attached a pair of movable ribs. When the ribs moved forward they carried the plate, or scute, with them. Since the scute was smooth, and its leading edge was protected by the one over it, it slipped comfortably over any irregularity in the surface. There was one disadvantage: when the scute was moved backward, its free rear edge snagged. Thus, to all practical purposes, the snake could move in only one direction: forward.

Although it had no awareness of it, the snake was, in part, retracing its movements of the night before, after it had escaped from the box. It passed within a few feet of the place on the pavement where Matt Olssen had died, where it had bitten Torres. Its path took it across a segment of the Great Lawn. If the grass, burnt dry and tanned by the sun, was a familiar environment to the snake, nevertheless many of the doors its tongue carried to the Jacobson's organ were alien to it.

It glided over the edge of the grass, crossed a walkway, and slid toward the Belvedere Lake. It veered to the left, away from the great upward fling of light from the Delacorte Theatre, and then crawled down to the water's edge.

As it drank, a great shout of laughter rose from the theater. The snake didn't hear it. It lacked an external ear, an ear drum, a tympanic cavity, and eustachian tubes. It was deaf.

Roddy Bamberger leaned toward the girl and whispered, "Let's duck out of here and go to my place and turn on the air conditioner and bring out the fine sherry wine and…" He brushed her cheek with his lips. "… and anything else your heart desires."

Somebody in the row above shushed him. The girl herself didn't answer, didn't even seem to have heard him. She was sitting forward eagerly in her chair, seemingly transported by what was occurring on the lighted stage. Roddy groaned inwardly. Transported, for Godssake, by a bunch of inept emoters without the foggiest notion of how to speak the witty cadences of the great Irish-what else? — master of the English comedy of manners. Some of the speech was as flat as street talk, some of it so badly imitative of flutey mid-Atlantic English that it verged on parody.

He had seen college dramatic society versions that were better. And, Christ, in London he had been privileged to be present at a National Theatre performance of School for Scandal. After that, this thing was sacrilege!

Looking at the girt, still gazing at the stage with idiot rapture, he couldn't imagine how he had ever thought that profile interesting. What had at first seemed to be an enchanting kind of delicacy was really more aptly describable as simpering. He was an ass to have been beguiled by a profile and a set of agreeable small breasts he had permitted himself to fantasize about in various pleasingly diverting ways.

It was all a bloody mess. He should have had more sense than to have allowed himself to be conned into coming here in the first instance. Free theater-like free anything else-was bound to be lousy theater. What you got for nothing was nothing. Nor should he have deceived himself into thinking that the profile and the quivery little tits might lead to a relationship of lasting (or protractedly temporary) value. The girl was worth exactly one dinner, a little arty talk, the air-conditioned bedroom. A one-night stand, and then goodbye forever.

It was all a bloody mess: the play, the girl herself, the ridiculous heat, the chicken and oversweet domestic wine she had put up, and which they had eaten on the buggy Great Lawn surrounded by hundreds of others eating the same cold chicken and hot wine. He despised the crowd around him-the way it dressed, the way it talked, its manners, its uproarious laughter when Sheridan's wit called for a quiet, appreciative smile. Not to mention its collective smell-a blending of sweat, greasy chicken, and pot.