T. Boyle - Wild Child and Other Stories

And the nice thing is they’ll come to you and curl up on the couch or wherever, because of your body heat, you understand.” The man — he wore a nametag that read Bozeman and he looked to be in his forties, with a gray-flecked goatee and his hair drawn back in a patchily dyed ponytail — clearly enjoyed dispensing advice. As well he should, seeing that he was charging some four hundred dollars for a single reptile that must have been as common as a garden worm in its own country. “But most of all, though, especially in this weather, you’ve got to keep him warm. This is a tropical animal we’re talking about here, you understand? Never — and I mean never — let the temperature fall below eighty.”

Gerard tried the light on the nightstand, but it was out. Ditto the light in the hall. Outside, the snow fell in clumps, as if it had been preformed into snowballs somewhere high in the troposphere. In the living room, the thermostat read sixty-three degrees, and when he tried to click the heat on, nothing happened. The next thing he knew he was crumpling newspaper and stacking kindling in the fireplace, and where were the matches? A quick search round the house, everything a mess (and here the absence of Marietta bit into him, down deep, like a parasitical set of teeth), the drawers stuffed with refuse, dishes piled high, nothing where it was supposed to be.

Finally he retrieved an old lighter from a pair of paint-stained jeans on the floor in the back of the closet and he had the fire going. Then he went looking for Siddhartha. He found the snake curled up under the kitchen sink where the hot water pipe fed into the faucet and dishwasher, but it was all but inanimate, as cold and slick as a garden hose left out in the frost.

It was also surprisingly heavy, especially for an animal that hadn’t eaten in the two weeks it had been in the house, but he dragged it, stiff and frigid, from its cachette, and laid it before the fireplace. While he was making coffee in the kitchen, he gazed out the window on the tumble of the day, and thought of all those years he’d gone in to work in weather like this, in all weathers actually, and felt a stab of nostalgia. Maybe he should go back to work — if not in his old capacity, from which he was gratefully retired, then on a part-time basis, just to keep his hand in, just to get out of the house and do something useful. On an impulse he picked up the phone, thinking to call Alex, his old boss, and sound him out, but the phone line was down too.

Back in the living room, he sank into the couch with his coffee and watched the snake as it came slowly back to itself, its muscles shivering in slow waves from head to tail like a soft breeze trailing over a still body of water. By the time he’d had a second cup of coffee and fixed himself an egg on the gas range, the crisis — if that was what it was — had passed. Siddhartha seemed fine. He never moved much even in the best of times, with the heat on high and the electric blanket Gerard had bought for him draped across the big Plexiglas terrarium he liked to curl up in, and so it was difficult to say. Gerard sat there a long while, stoking the fire, watching the snake unfurl its muscles and flick the dark fork of its tongue, until a thought came to him: maybe Siddhartha was hungry. When Gerard had asked the pet shop proprietor what to feed him, Bozeman had answered, “Rats.” Gerard must have looked dubious, because the man had added, “Oh, I mean you can give him rabbits when he gets bigger, and that’s a savings really, in time and energy, because you won’t have to feed him as often, but you’d be surprised — snakes, reptiles in general, are a lot more efficient than we are. They don’t have to feed the internal furnace all the time with filet mignon and hot fudge sundaes, and they don’t need clothes or fur coats either.”

He paused to gaze down at the snake where it lay in its terrarium, basking under a heat lamp. “I just fed this guy his rat yesterday. You shouldn’t have to give him anything for a week or two, anyway. He’ll let you know.”

“How?” Gerard had asked.

A shrug. “Could be a color thing, where you notice his pattern isn’t as bright maybe. Or he’s just, I don’t know, what you’d call lethargic.”

They’d both looked down at the snake then, its eyes like two pebbles, its body all but indistinguishable from the length of rough wood it was stretched out on. It was no more animate than the glass walls of the terrarium and Gerard wondered how anyone, even an expert, could tell if the thing was alive or dead. Then he wrote the check.

But now he found himself chafing at the cusp of an idea: the snake needed to be fed. Of course it did. It had been two weeks — why hadn’t he thought of it before? He was neglecting the animal and that wasn’t right. He got up from the couch to close off the room and build up the fire, then went out to shovel the driveway and take the car down the long winding community road to the highway and on into Newhouse and the mall. It was a harrowing journey. Trucks threw blankets of slush over the windshield and the beating of the wipers made him dizzy. When he arrived, he was relieved to see that the mall had electricity, the whole place lit up like a Las Vegas parade for the marketing and selling of all things Christmas, and with a little deft maneuvering he was able to wedge his car between a plowed drift and the handicapped space in front of the pet store.

Inside, Pets & Company smelled of nature in the raw, every creature in every cage and glassed-in compartment having defecated simultaneously, just to greet him, or so he imagined. The place was superheated. He was the only customer. Bozeman was up on a footstool, cleaning one of the aquariums with a vacuum tube. “Hey, man,” he said, his voice a high singsong, “Gerard, right? Don’t tell me.” He reached back in a practiced gesture to smooth down his ponytail as if he were petting a cat or a ferret. “You need a rat. Am I right?”

Gerard found himself fumbling round the answer, perhaps because the question had been put so bluntly — or was it that Bozeman had become clairvoyant in the instant? “Well,” he heard himself say, and he might have made a joke, might have found something amusing or at least odd in the transaction, but he didn’t because Marietta was dead and he was depressed, or so he reminded himself, “I guess so.”

The rat — he didn’t see it; Bozeman had gone into the back room to fetch it — came in a cardboard container with a molded carrying handle on top, the sort of thing you got if you asked for a doggie bag at a restaurant. The animal was heavier than he’d expected, shifting its weight mysteriously from one corner of the box to another as he carried it out into the snow and set the box on the seat beside him.

He turned on the fan after he’d started up the engine, to give it some heat — but then it was a mammal, he figured, with fur, and it didn’t have as much of a need because it could warm itself. And in any case it was dinner, or soon to be. The roads were slick. Visibility was practically zero. He crawled behind the snowplow all the way back to Newhouse Gardens and when he came in the door he was pleased to see that the fire was still going strong.

All right. He set down the box and then dragged the python’s terrarium across the floor from the bedroom to the living room and set it to one side of the fireplace. Then he lifted the snake — it was noticeably warm to the touch on the side that had been closest to the fire — and laid it gently in the terrarium. For a moment it came to life, the long run of muscles tensing, the great flat slab of the head gearing round to regard him out of its stony eyes, and then it was inert again, dead weight against the Plexiglas floor. Gerard bent cautiously to the rat’s box — would it spring out, bite him, scrabble away across the floor to live behind the baseboard forever as in some cartoon incarnation? — and, with his heart pounding, lowered the box into the terrarium and opened the lid.