T. Boyle - Wild Child and Other Stories

It had rained the night before and the path was slick beneath my feet. I came within an ace of losing my balance on a switchback with a considerable drop to it and that drove the professor and his drawing right out of my head. There was the sound of running water everywhere, a thousand little streams sprung up overnight to churn away at the side of the mountain, and the wind picked up so that the branches of the trees rattled overhead and the leaves came down like confetti. I was almost to the creek where I was planning to gather up some damp twigs and get a fire going so I could roast my wieners and take in the glory of the day from a new perspective, when I came around a bend in the trail and saw a figure up ahead. A girl.

Dressed in khaki shorts and a denim jacket. Her back was to me and she was bent at the waist in a patch of sun just off the trail, as if she were looking for something.

I stopped where I was. It was always awkward meeting people on the trail — they’d come for solitude and so had I, and a woman alone would always view a man with suspicion, and rightfully so.

There’d been attacks, even out here. It took me a moment, poised there with my feet still in their tracks, before I recognized her, Mary-Louise, bent over in a column of sunlight with her blond hair clipped short and the back of her neck so white it was like an ache.

For a moment, I didn’t know what to do — I was about to turn away and tiptoe back down the trail, but she turned her face to me as if she’d known all along that I was there and I scuffed my hiking boots on the dirt just to make some noise, and said, “Hi. Hi, Mary-Louise.” And then a joke, lame, admittedly, but the best I could manage under the circumstances: “I see you’ve stepped up in the world.”

She’d turned back to whatever it was that had caught her attention and when she looked at me again she put a single finger to her lips and then gestured for me to come closer. I moved up the path as stealthily as I could, one slow step at a time. When I reached her, when I was standing over her and seeing what she was seeing — a snake, a blacksnake stretched out across a fallen log in the full glare of the sun, its scales trapping the light like a fresh coat of paint — she gave me such a look of pride you’d think she’d created it herself. “It’s a blacksnake,” I said. “A big one too. They can get to be ten feet long, you know.”

“Eight feet,” she said. “Maximum. The record’s a hundred and one inches.”

“And you didn’t have to shush me — I mean, it’s not as if they can hear.”

“They feel the vibrations. And they can see.”

We both looked down at it. Its eyes were open, its tongue flicking. There was no hurry in it because the sun was a thing it needed and the season was going fast and soon it would be underground. Or dead. “You know,” I said, “it’s really a black racer—”

“Coluber constrictor,” she said without turning her head. “That’s the scientific name.”

The wind beat at the trees and a shadow chased violently across the ground, but the snake never moved. “Yeah,” I said, out of my league now. “It’s amazing how fast they can move if they want to. I saw one once, when I was a kid, and it was in this swamp. A couple of inches of water, anyway, and it went after a frog like you couldn’t believe.”

“They move by contracting the muscles of their ribs. All snakes have at least a hundred vertebrae and some as many as four hundred, did you know that?”

“But no legs. Their lizard cousins have legs, though, and how do you think they got them? And out west — I saw one once in the Sierras — they have a legless lizard, just like a snake, but it’s not.” I should have left it, but I couldn’t. “Why do you suppose that is? I think — no, I know — it’s because of evolution, and that legless lizard is a link between the snakes, who don’t need legs to crawl into tight spaces, and the lizards that can get up and run. Like us.” She didn’t say anything. The trees dipped and rose again. The snake lay still.

“Once,” she said, turning all the way round to stare at me as if I were the wonder of nature and the snake no more than incidental,

“in the spring? I was with my mother and we were standing outside my friend Sarah’s house, a farmhouse, but it’s not a farm really, just an old stone place with a barn. Right there, while we were saying goodbye and getting ready to walk to our car, these snakes began to come out of a hole in the ground right where we were standing.

Garter snakes.”

I wanted to tell her that they balled up like a skein of yarn to survive the winter, hundreds of them sometimes, that they gave birth to live young and that the babies were on their own after that, but I didn’t. “Red and yellow stripes,” I said. “And black.”

She nodded. Her eyes went distant at the memory. “They were like ribbons,” she said. “Ribbons of God.”

She liked his hands. His eyes. The way he looked at her as if he could see beneath the skin, as if he were modeling her from clay, his fingers there at her jawline, at the orbits of her eyes, feeling their way across her brow. She’d stepped in out of the hard clean light of early summer, announced herself to the receptionist and barely had time to leaf through one of the magazines on the end table before she’d been ushered into this room, with its quiet shadows and the big black-leather reclining chair in the middle of the floor — it was like a dentist’s chair, that was her impression, only without all the rest of the paraphernalia. And that was good, because she hated the dentist, but then who didn’t? Pain, necessary pain, pain in the service of improvement and health, that was what the dentist gave you, and she wondered about this — what would this give her? The recliner said nothing to her, but it intimidated her all the same, and so she’d taken a seat in a straight-backed chair just under the single shaded window. And then he was there, soft-voiced and smiling, and he pulled up a second chair and sat close, studying her face.

“It was the Botox I was interested in,” she heard herself say, the walls soaking up her words as if she were in a confessional. “These frown marks, right here?”—she lifted a hand to run two fingers along the rift between her eyes—“and maybe my eyes too, underneath them? I thought — well, looking in the mirror I thought they looked a little tired or saggy or something. Right here? Right along here? And maybe you could — if there’s some procedure, nothing radical, just some smoothing out there? Is that possible?”

She couldn’t help herself: she laughed then, a laugh of nerves, yes, because all this was strange to her and he hadn’t said a word beyond that first soft hello, just fixed those eyes of his on the lines of her face and hadn t let go even to blink. “I guess it’s because I’m coming up on my birthday — next week, I mean. I’ll be thirty-five, if you can believe it, so I just—”

“Yes,” he said, rising, “why don’t you have a seat here”—indicating the leather recliner—“and we’ll have a look?”

On the way out, she stopped at the desk to make an appointment for the Botox treatment. Both secretaries — or no, one was a nurse flipping through files in the far corner — had flawless faces, not a line or wrinkle visible, and she wondered about that. Did they get a discount? Was that one of the perks of the job? There was a color brochure to take home and study, forms to sign. The Botox was nothing, he’d assured her — simplest thing in the world, and it wouldn’t take more than fifteen minutes — and the procedure on her eyes was very routine too, a snip of the excess skin and removal of the fat pads, the whole thing done in-office, though she’d be under sedation. It would take a month to heal, two to three months till it was perfect. He had run his fingers under her chin, stroked the flesh below her ears and pressed his thumbs into the hollows there.