Paul Theroux: The Lower River

Hock unhooked the small door of the box and reached in. He held the squirming guinea pig, which was kicking its short legs. In one motion he lifted the lid of the fish tank and dropped in the guinea pig. The small creature scampered to a corner, darting against the glass, skidding in the thickness of wood shavings, awkwardly tugging its body as though too fat and top-heavy for its short legs.

The snake did not move — that is, it remained coiled. But then its pear-shaped head tilted, its yellow eyes flickered and widened, and it seemed almost imperceptibly to swell, like an inner tube inflated by a hand pump, fattening, tightening, filling its scaly thickness, as though it was visibly thinking.

“I had him drinking milk,” the woman said, looking closer at the panicky guinea pig, the enlarging snake.

“They like their food a little more animated than that,” Hock said.

She was peering in, blinking, her nose almost touching the glass. “Maybe they’ll be friends.”

“How long have you had him?”

“Couple of months.”

“They can go months without eating.”

“After the milk, he wasn’t interested. He let me hold him. He’s bigger than he looks.”

“They can grow to twenty-four feet.”

“He just — like Jerry told you — flattened himself next to me.”

“Because he was planning to eat you,” Hock said. “Seeing if you’d fit.”

“Me?” The woman laughed, moving her body heavily, as if to show her plumpness, to emphasize the absurdity of what Hock had just said.

“You’d be surprised at what a snake like that can fit into its mouth.”

The woman was smiling anxiously at the twitching guinea pig, the staring snake. She said, “You actually think they’re going to get along together in that cage?”

Hock frowned and said, “Let’s leave them to make friends. Okay?”

“Want some herbal tea?”

“Tell us about Witch Camp,” Jerry said.

She led them through the room with the incense and the drapes and the shrine to a small kitchen, and they sat at a table while she heated a kettle of water and made tea, crumbling some tiny black twigs into the pot.

“This is very cleansing. It sort of scours the toxins out of your system and heals your linings.”

And as she went on describing the purifying powers of the tea, Hock reflected on the untidiness of the room, the pots and dishes in the sink, the crumbs on the table, the dull gleam of the sticky toaster imprinted with a film of grease. And the woman herself, dark hair, pale skin, her heavily made-up eyes — blue eye shadow — squinting from her puffy face. She smiled wearily and shook her head.

“The Mud Ritual, like I was saying — insane. People were copulating. I got mud in my hair and my clothes were filthy. I’ve been doing laundry for two days.”

“Copulating?” Jerry was beaming at her.

“In the mud,” she said. “Big turn-on. But not for me. Some of these people just take advantage. The things they put in their bodies! One of them tosses a beer can onto the ground and I goes, ‘This is the earth. It’s your mother!’”

“Maybe a little chilly up in Vermont for getting tagged in the mud?” Jerry said, and he nodded at Hock.

“We’d just done a sweat,” she said. “Sweat lodge?”

“That’s some crazy stuff.”

“A few got wacky-vaced.”

Jerry said, “Excuse me?”

“Like medevaced. But they were toasted, I think on mushrooms.”

Hock was thinking of the snake, the poor thing captive in her apartment, just another artifact, part of the scene. Yet it was a great coiled cable of muscle, glittering, black and yellowish on its dorsum, with a glossy iridescent bluey sheen all over its upper scales, the pupil of its eye vertically elliptical. It simply did not belong here in a suburb of Boston.

The woman was telling Jerry about the Mud Ritual — Jerry giggling. Hock said, “I want to have another look.”

“At Naga?”

“That what you call him?”

“It’s Hindu. Naga the snake.”

“Naga’s the cobra,” Hock said. “This is nsato. That’s what he’s called in the Lower River.”

“Your friend’s kind of interesting,” the woman was saying, as Hock left the kitchen and walked through the shrine room to the back room where the snake lay coiled in the fish tank. Now the python was only partly coiled. Its sculpted head was upraised, its neck looped in a tight and thickened S.

In a whisper behind him, the woman said, “How’s my baby?”

Hock lifted his hand to quiet her. He knew that the snake’s posture, the drawn-back S, meant it was preparing to strike. The small guinea pig had flattened itself into a corner, where it was twitching miserably.

“Are you sure you want to see this?” Hock said in a low voice.

Before the woman could reply, the snake flung its head forward, jaws agape, and crushed the guinea pig against the glass wall of the tank. The jaws closed, but only slightly, and a pale froth brimmed at the edges of its mouth.

The woman was whimpering, Jerry behind her, softly cursing in awe.

“Can you get him out?”

“It’s caught, like a fish on a hook — the teeth are recurved, slanted back. The more the thing struggles, the more he’s pinned. Shall we give them a little privacy?”

“I didn’t need to see that,” the woman said.

“That was awesome,” Jerry said. “Snake was hungry.”

“Do you mind if I come back sometime?” Hock asked.

“Give me your cell-phone number. I might be doing my puja. Like praying.”

“No cell phone,” Jerry said.

The woman said, “That’s nice. That’s righteous.”

Back at the store, Hock thought only of the snake, especially its uncoiling and lengthening across the fish tank to strike at the guinea pig — the woman’s gasp, Jerry’s curses.

He called her a few days later. When he visited again he brought a mouse in a small box, which he kept in his pocket. The rooms were tidier, even neat in places, more candles had been lit. Teya — he remembered the name — was dressed in a dark smock-like dress, her hair drawn back, fixed with an ornate comb, gold hoops on her ears, bangles on her wrists.

Hock wanted to see the snake, but she insisted on serving him tea first. She was more relaxed, kinder-seeming, and yet was watching him closely.

“Hock — like the store?”

“You know the place?”

“I used to get the bus from there,” she said. “My father wore clothes like that. Overcoats with velvet collars.”

“Chesterfield.”

“Yeah. And always a hat. He’d wear a cravat sometimes. I mean, lace-curtain Irish, but he knew how to dress. He was a comptroller over at Raytheon, terrific with figures. He’s retired but he still does consulting. Maybe you could use him.”

Hock said, “I’m selling the business.”

“Bummer.”

“It’s served its purpose. It’s over now. It’s dated, like chesterfields and cravats.” When the woman said nothing, he went on, “Things change, things end, things die. Even love.”

“What are you going to do with all that money?”

“Ask my ex-wife.”

“Money is trouble,” she said. “Are you dating?”

The word had always made him smile. “My ex-wife and I go out now and then.”

“You should consider massages, maybe detoxing.”

“I might take a trip,” Hock said, but until he spoke the words, the whole thought had never entered his head. He was giving voice to the shred of a feeling he had, a buried sense that he should go away. “You notice the snake’s been sleeping more?”

“Definitely. No funny business.”

“Digesting,” Hock said. “You like it here?”

“ Comme çi, comme ça. All the colleges in the area. Kids everywhere — Tufts, Harvard, MIT, kids, grad students, foreigners.”