Zero at the Bone (17 page)

“I can’t explain it,” he said. “I just wish you wouldn’t.”

12

WHY did it have to be snakes?

Katherine clicked the padlock shut and leaned over to scratch her ankle. Anything else she could at least tolerate. Anything in the entire world but these squirming, twisted, smelly vipers.

After thirteen days of working here, she still hadn’t gotten used to their proximity. She felt constantly edgy and her skin prickled as if she were about to break out in a rash.

And it had been almost two weeks with no progress on any front. The only thing she’d accomplished was losing ten pounds she hadn’t wanted to lose. Every morning she had awakened before dawn in her father’s house and done the grim countdown: the number of days left until the foreclosure. Now there were only seven.

She stuck her key into the padlock on the next exhibit and sprang it open, then lifted it off the hasp so she could open the door a crack to peek inside. Beadlike dark scales glinting in the light, the two long bushmasters lay so intricately intertwined you couldn’t tell which head belonged to which snake. They lay under a silk fern near the front of the exhibit. Good. The farther away, the better.

She shut the door softly so as not to attract their attention since they might be sleeping, but who could tell with creatures whose eyes were eternally open in a glassy stare. She reached into the canvas shoulder bag with the huge cloth gauntlet that protected her left arm past the elbow and pulled out a quivering white mouse. With her right hand, she squeezed the scissorlike handle of the long feeding stick to open the clamp and, holding her breath, stuffed the mouse in and let the clamp close slowly on its squirming body.

Most of the snakes ate dead mice, freshly killed by “cervical dislocation,” as the disgusting Alonzo Stokes called it, grinning as he pronounced the words. But not these prized bushmasters. Hatched and raised personally by Alonzo Stokes’s own hands, they were so finicky, he maintained, they could eat only living mice, stuffed right into their horrendous gullets. God.

She opened the door again and inserted the feeding stick with its trembling offering toward the larger snake, which raised its flat head at the mouse’s approach and flicked its black forked tongue in the direction of the warm blood. She pressed the mouse right against the snake’s sinister slit of a mouth, which opened slightly in response to the pressure. The mouth appeared nowhere near large enough to receive this adult mouse, but she’d seen the impossible happen before, so she persisted and watched the unhinged jaw open and open, until finally it gaped wider than the snake’s own body. Inexorably, the jaws spread around the mouse. Suddenly the mouse stopped its shuddering and went limp. Probably shock, or the venom may have found its way to the small central nervous system.

She felt a ripple of repulsion start in her neck and undulate down her body. This was accompanied by the now familiar urge to scratch all over. It was almost instinctual, this fear and loathing she was powerless to control. She had thought it would wear off with exposure to the creatures, but it hadn’t diminished an iota in the almost two weeks she’d been working in the reptile house. Oh, God, give me a vicious Doberman anytime.

When the mouse was firmly wedged in the gaping maw, she squeezed the handle of the stick to open the clamp and release the mouse, just as she had been taught.

She watched to be certain that the snake had firm control and was using its backward-curving fangs to move the mouse toward its esophagus before she withdrew the stick. Reaching into the bag for another mouse, she found she had been holding her breath during the procedure and had to gasp for air as if she’d been underwater. Panting, she shut the door and leaned her shoulder against the protruding white fiberglass box which formed the back of the exhibit. A sign on the door announced the correct antivenin in case of a bite, and a neon-orange sticker proclaimed:
HOT
! As if she could forget that these were highly venomous snakes, fully capable of inflicting a lethal bite, not just on a mouse, but on a full-grown human being.

To reassure herself, she glanced toward the big red emergency button that was to be pushed in case of a snakebite. She flinched in surprise when she saw Alonzo Stokes slouched against the refrigerator watching her. He gave a jerky thumbs-up with a nicotine-stained thumb and grinned. Under the cold fluorescent lights, the pockmarks on his cheeks looked like moon craters. She didn’t smile back. God, the man must have had a world-class case of acne fifty years ago.

This was her first solo feeding after his intensive tutorial last week and, predictably, there he was watching, checking that everything was done perfectly for his darlings. Katherine thought she had known perfectionists before, but this man was fussy and demanding beyond anything she had seen. He oversaw every detail of what went on in the reptile house, even though he was a curator and most curators did not get into the day-to-day work of caring for the animals. But Alonzo Stokes personally trained all keepers, supervised the Tuesday feedings, checked the cage cleaning, even climbed in and scrubbed rocks to demonstrate how he wanted it done.

He had explained to her why the bushmasters merited this special feeding treatment. They were often fussy eaters, difficult to maintain in captivity. He said the day the first clutch of twelve eggs hatched in his office was one of the best days of his life.

Big deal. Snakes fucking. Disgusting. Just the sort of thing to excite the senses of an Alonzo Stokes. They even had their own special room in the back for breeding so they would have more space and privacy. A snake brothel.

She took a deep breath and reached into the sack for another mouse to feed to the smaller bushmaster. She opened the door and repeated the process, relieved that the snake opened its mouth and received the mouse readily and that the other one seemed totally involved in the slow and horrible digestion of a whole live mouse. That was the one good thing about feeding these creatures: at least you could be sure that a mouth stuffed with mouse could not attack.

As soon as she had withdrawn the feeding stick, she closed the door firmly, put the padlock back, and snapped it shut—a beautiful sound.

She turned to see if the curator was still watching. He was. No doubt to be sure she recorded on each snake’s record card what she had just done—one of the many cardinal rules. She removed the gauntlet and held it in her teeth while she pulled a pen from her pocket and filled in the two large index cards on top of the exhibit box. Underneath the last entry she wrote the date and “1 A,” indicating she had successfully crammed one adult mouse into each of the bushmasters. The classification of mice used on these cards made her ill: “F” was for “fuzzy”—a newborn mouse; “P” stood for “pinky”—a baby; “J” was for “juvenile”; and “A,” for “adult.” Somehow she was sure that Alonzo Stokes had come up with these classifications. It was the sort of thing that would amuse him.

She put the glove back on and looked up to see Alonzo’s mouth twisted in what might be a smile in a normal person; but after a two weeks’ exposure to his idiosyncrasies, she knew it to be a grimace of scorn. Wearing gloves was not recommended for working with snakes, he had told her. None of the other four reptile keepers wore them.

“They just make you careless and reduce your dexterity,” Alonzo explained. “And they really don’t give you much protection. Most of the snakes have fangs long enough to bite right through if they get the chance. And what about the rest of your body? Are you going to wear body armor?” Still, she felt the need to wear the one glove. It provided a layer, albeit an inadequate one, between the reptiles and herself. It kept her skin from crawling right off her body.

When she saw Alonzo turn and head toward his office at the back of the building, she exhaled and got on with the work.

The Gaboon vipers were the next charges in her new area of responsibility. She unlocked and opened the door to peer in at them. One was curled up in its hiding box; she saw the blunt tip of its tail protruding. But where was the other, the bigger one, the female? Her eye scanned the exhibit in panic. Sometimes it was hard to find even these big snakes because the exhibits were filled with rocks and artificial plants to replicate the snake’s natural habitat. Ah! She drew back with a jerk when she saw the big one right under the door.

She knew that because the exhibit floor was a foot lower than the door, it was unlikely a snake could escape while the door was opened briefly, but still, when she saw the viper’s broad flat head rising toward the opening, she panicked and slammed the door shut, holding it closed. God. Would she ever get over this fear? It was wearing her to a frazzle. Hundreds of times a day she caught sight of a snake and her body involuntarily tensed, ready to run for her life. Each time she’d hold her ground, grit her teeth and carry on. But where was it going, all that adrenaline that got released? It seemed to be accumulating as a sour bile in her stomach that had made eating almost impossible.

She pulled the list out of her shirt pocket and confirmed that the Gaboon vipers were to have one live mouse each, not force-fed. Well, that was something. At least it gave the mice a sporting chance.

She reached in her bag and pulled out two squirming mice. Quickly, she cracked the door open, just wide enough, and pushed them through the narrow opening. The first one tumbled into the cage obligingly, but the second one, a handsome, nervous-faced piebald, had hooked its long incisors into the glove’s empty tip above her index finger. She inserted the finger with the mouse hanging from it through the door and tried to shake it off, but when it let go, it lurched backward and fell to the floor just under the cage, hitting the ground running. She knelt quickly to retrieve it, but the mouse had scampered under the baseboard beneath the cages before she could make a grab at it.

Damnation. Well, it was gone. Nothing she could do about it now.

As she rose from her knees, she smacked her head smartly on the sharp corner of the exhibit door. Ow. Shit! Still open. She thrust the gloved hand up and slammed it shut. That’s all I need on my first try feeding them alone—a mass escape. She stayed hunkered down in front of the cage feeling the tears fill her eyes as they did regularly these days. Her hatred for the reptile house was unspeakable. This had been the worst thirteen days of her life. All she wanted was to go home, but in another week there wouldn’t be any home to go to, and she was no closer to solving her problems than she had been when she started here.

A deep voice above her head said, “How’s it going, Katherine? Need any help?”

She looked up and was comforted to see Wayne Zapalac, one of her fellow reptile keepers. He had gone out of his way to be kind and helpful to her since her first day on the job—so kind that she was beginning to overcome her initial bias against his appearance.

“I just lost one of the live mice,” she said. “It must be right around here.”

With a quick knee-bend, Wayne squatted on thick, powerful thighs and surveyed the floor. He held a hand up to Katherine to keep her from speaking as he inched his way across the floor toward the incubator with the baby tree boas. His work boots made no sound at all. With a graceful lunge, he flew forward, shot out a hand under the incubator and came up with the spotted mouse in his fist.

“Wow,” Katherine said, truly impressed with the capture. She opened the door a crack. “It goes in there,” she said.

Wayne flicked it in easily, then opened the door all the way as he stood up. Resting his thick, hairy arms on top of the exhibit, he leaned over and gazed down into it, watching one of the vipers begin to stir and flick its tongue out. From wrist to bulging biceps his arms were covered with crude tattoos. She wasn’t sure what the pictures were because she had felt embarrassed to look directly at them before. But now she could stare without his noticing. One was a scroll saying, “Semper fidelis,” and another was a serpent coiled around a branch. Underneath it said, “Don’t tread on me.”

He looked up at her. “The feeding’s a little rough first time, isn’t it?” he asked.

“Yeah,” she confessed. “I like the mice. Sometimes I feel like I’m feeding a higher life form—these bright-eyed mammals—to sustain a lower one.”

He chuckled a low, from-the-belly sound. His neck was so thick that his head appeared to rest right on his sloping shoulders. “I know. Reptiles weren’t my first choice either. I had my heart set on working with the big cats when I came here. Actually, it was your father who decided I really wasn’t cut out for it. He thought my presence stirred the cats up—something about my energy. I was disappointed then, but he may have done me a favor. I’ve come to love some of these snakes.”

The question erupted from her. “Why?”

“Why do I love them?” he repeated with a note of surprise in his voice. “Well”—he looked back into the exhibit, where both vipers were heading toward the piebald mouse trembling in the corner—“these guys because they’re so beautiful. Haven’t you noticed?” He gestured with his hand for her to join him. All his motions were graceful and gentle, she noticed, in spite of the bulk of his thick, muscled body.

She took a step forward so she could see in, too. He shook his head in wonder. “The pattern looks like an oriental rug, doesn’t it? One that’s very old and faded. The green and the violet are so soft and pastel they look like a watercolor painting, when the paint’s all diluted and washy so you can see the paper through it.” Katherine looked in at the big female and saw that it was true. Then she turned her gaze to Wayne, astonished at the sensibility couched in that loutish body. He was transfixed, staring at the vipers. It gave her a chance to study him. In profile, his blunt nose and heavy jaw had a simian look. A tiny diamond stud earring twinkled in his left ear. She estimated his age to be mid-thirties, or maybe older.

“And the head,” Wayne continued, “broad and flat like a leaf, and those black triangles that point at that silvery eye. It’s something you could never invent.” He looked over at her to see her response.