Forrest Gander: The Trace

* * *

On the desert highway, there was little traffic in either direction. They’d been trailing a white pickup for ten minutes or so when suddenly the pickup swerved sidewise into the breakdown lane and swerved back onto the highway again. Dale glimpsed the balling, writhing snake at the same instant. He glanced into the rearview mirror and must have made some low sound, because Hoa asked, “What?” with alarm in her face, peering ahead at the road, then back at him.

“What are you doing?”

Dale was slowing down, pulling over onto the apron. Hoa’s book jostled in her hands as the tires bounced over pebbles and sand.

“That asshole just swerved to run over a snake.”

Hoa tried turning around in her seat to look out the back window, but her seatbelt restrained her. “And — ”

“It’s still alive, I just want to kick it off the road.”

“You’re not. Are you serious? It’s completely dangerous.” She filled the small space of the car with her protest. They had a long way to go, it was risky backing up, the snake would die anyway, trucks were coming. Nevertheless, he was backing up in the breakdown lane. Dale couldn’t see the snake, couldn’t see it, and then there it was in the rearview mirror. No closer than it appeared. He backed as far to the side of the breakdown lane as he could, opened the door and said, “I’ll be right back,” looking again to make sure no cars or trucks were coming. He jumped out and edged around the back of the car, which beamed pure malevolent heat at him, stopping for a moment to mug through the back windshield at Hoa.

The snake wasn’t moving anymore. It was a fat rattlesnake of some sort, not too large, maybe three feet or so, it was hard to tell, the way it was twisted up and the tail end was smashed and the snake seemed to be dead. Dale was wary of getting too close. He stood a couple feet away looking at it. Beautiful simplicity. The face with its dark band across the eyes, the perfect geometry — oh, he thought, a diamondback — the big white scales underneath bloodied and black, annealed to the road. He considered for a second pulling off the inch-and-a-half long rattle and bringing it to the car, but Hoa would have a fit, and besides that, he didn’t want to desecrate the snake that way. Dismembering it. A truck really was coming now. Flushed with the heat whelming from the road, he jogged back to the car.

The eighteen-wheeler whooshed by and the idling rental car quivered in its wake, the backdraft sucking at Dale’s shirt and riffling his hair over his forehead. He opened the driver’s side door, and they were on the road again.

“I’ve heard even a dead snake can bite you,” she said.

“I don’t think that’s true.”

“Heard it from a guy I dated once. He knew. He was a herp. That’s what reptile specialists call themselves. He was my TA in biology. He told me people in North Carolina are five times more likely to be bit by a poisonous snake than in anywhere else in the U.S.”

“He told you that?”

There was an insistent ding ding ding ding . Hoa reached for her seatbelt and fastened it.

“I can’t remember all of it,” she said. “He’d been bitten twice. Once on the finger by a baby rattlesnake. It was just a nick, but he said it was like someone holding a match to his finger for hours. His whole arm swelled up and the finger turned black and he went back to the bar.”

“Back to what?”

“He was from Onslow County. I think he used to go to a bar in the hills in the summer, and on the way he’d stop when it was night and brush rattlesnakes off the road so they wouldn’t get run over. He loved them the way people love cats or dogs. I remember he said whenever the weather changed, he could feel the place where the bite-hole was in his finger. But the story I remember better was the other time he was bit. The snake wasn’t even poisonous. He’d been showing me this fantastically long snake in his lab, maybe eight feet. It was skinny, not like a rattlesnake, a coachwhip. I asked him how he caught it, and he said he and his crew, the herps, right? — they were driving around near some new housing development outside of Asheville when he saw it cross the road. With all his crew looking on, he thought he’d impress them with some technique for catching snakes he’d read about in a reptile book he had as a kid. All this guy thought about was snakes. Knew everything about them.”

“Except how not to get bit.”

“He let me feed a cottontail to this diamondback in his lab. It was good enough for one date.”

Dale adjusted his sunglasses. They were slipping down his nose on the film of sweat he’d exuded after stepping out of the car for forty seconds. Hoa had lifted herself using a yoga move and crossed her legs beneath her, turning in her seat so that her spine was almost against the door and she was facing him.

Dale glanced over at her. Her shorts had risen to expose that long, ribbony muscle in each of her inner thighs. Sartorius, the longest muscle in the body. Hers were amazingly well-developed. She still had a dancer’s legs.

“So,” Dale said.

“So he grabs this long coachwhip snake by the tail and straddles it so his back is to the snake. It’s still trying to crawl away of course. And he starts yanking the snake forward between his closed legs. He told me the idea was to pull it through your legs smoothly so the head gets pinned behind your calves. Then you just reach back and grab it by the neck. It can’t do anything to you.”

“Yeah,” Dale said. “I grew up doing that all the time. Me and my herp crew.”

“But this snake was so long that before he could get enough of it through his legs to reach back for the head, it was swinging around.”

“Like a whip?”

“Yeah, like a whip behind him and biting him over and over on his shoulders and his scalp. He said the worst part was looking over and seeing his friends in the car laughing their heads off.”

“Sounds like a bright guy.”

“Unlike my husband who stops to ferry dead snakes across the two-lane.”

“Well,” Dale said. “You have been consistent.”

Further on, they were driving past an immense horseshoe canyon, its scalloped vertical sides plunging down to a high talus slope dotted with bushes. Two golden eagles wheeled above the rim. Hoa thought she spotted a mountain goat moving laterally across the sheer red rock. She saw something, but she wasn’t sure, and then it was behind her. Two tiny diesel buses swelled in the watery distance of the perfectly straight highway and roared toward them in tandem in the opposite lane. They had a brief glimpse of the passengers’ faces looking through tinted glass at their own faces looking back at them, everyone imagining a fragment of a story for the other.

“Check that out,” Hoa said, turning over her book in her lap, pointing to the mottled ruins of a building beside the road. In dense, blue-green brush a few hundred yards away, Dale could make out a rough circle of stacked stone columns.

“Maybe an old spring house?” Dale offered. “Shafter’s up ahead. It’s a ghost town, an old mining town. Last time I came, a few families still lived there. There’s a little creek where it’s suddenly lush, and a clump of trees full of birds. The bird noise was incredible. But mostly it’s ruins, a bunch of old stone walls marked up with graffiti. And this cemetery where the graves are piled knee-high with stones. In the shape of caskets. I think it’s to keep coyotes from digging them up.”

Hoa said. “I’m low. Tell me something. It can’t have anything to do with Ambrose Bierce.”

“Alright. Turn the music down.”

She picked her phone from the cup holder and paused the music.