“No need for that.” He moved the spade to its neck, its body wrapping itself up the pole. Pinning the head, he put his heel on the shovel and pressed it against the pavement and sawed at its head until it hung by a shred of skin, the body flopping and writhing, rattle still buzzing.
“Is it dead?” a boy asked.
“Yeah. But yall be careful.” Suddenly he heard Larry’s voice when he said, “That head’ll still kill you. Them fangs is like needles.”
“Can I have the rattles?” the mullet boy asked.
Silas looked at the women.
“Fine with me,” the fat one said. “His birthday’s next month.” She winked to let him know it was a joke, and he bent to work cutting the dry cartilage off with the shovel and kicked it out of the snake’s range. The boy picked it up and smelled it, then ran off shaking it, the other boys and the dogs following.
With the shovel, Silas scooped the diamondback, two feet long and heavy, still moving a little, and carried it across the road and flung it over the bobwire fence into the woods. Olivia left, declining to take the wet envelope, but Silas stayed around, getting statements awhile, making notes, thinking Shannon might come yet, trying not to flirt too much with Irina. He found himself telling the story about the time he tried to run over a snake, big brown cottonmouth with yellow stripes on it. In that very Jeep yonder. This after he’d just got back down here from Oxford.
“Oxford,” Irina said.
“Hush,” Marsha said, “and let him finish.”
“You can’t just roll over no snake and go on,” Silas said, tipping back his hat, “cause that’ll just make em mad. You gotta back over it and spin your tires if you want to kill it.” That’s what he was trying to do, he said, braking in the middle of the road, backing up, trying to stop on it. When he had its tail under his back driver-side tire, the snake biting the rubber, he popped the clutch. But instead of spinning out dead, the moccasin spun up, alive, into his wheel well. Silas drove forward leaning out with the door open, waiting for it to drop, to fall out from under his Jeep. “It never did,” he said.
“Shit,” Irina said. “What happened?”
“It died up in there. In the rocker panel. Smelled bad for two months. Hottest part of the summer. Sometime,” he said, “driving along, I swear I can still smell it.”
The women were smiling.
“Served you right,” Irina said.
When he glanced at his watch his smile left. He’d have to hurry to make it back to Chabot for the five-thirty shift change. He couldn’t miss it again. Miss Voncille’s hair was at stake.
“Ladies,” he said, touching the brim of his hat, presenting Irina with one of the cards he’d paid for himself. “Call if yall remember anything else.”
“Oh we will,” Irina said.
FIFTEEN MINUTES LATER he stood on the road in front of the railroad tracks in the orange vest and his sunglasses, so sweaty his hat was heavy, his uniform a shade darker where it stuck to his belly. To his left the mill grumbled and droned and saws screamed out like people burning in a fire. He blew his whistle and held up his hands for both lanes of cars to stop, then stepped off the hot pavement and waved on the line of pickups waiting to leave the mill yard, dirty men with hard-hat hair lighting cigarettes in their air-conditioned cabs, some heading over to the Chabot Bus for a beer, which Silas wouldn’t mind doing himself.
His cell phone began to buzz. He wasn’t supposed to answer during the shift change and stood fanning the trucks on, the drivers in cars on the highway glaring at him as if he’d chosen to be out here screwing up their day, as if this had been his life’s goal, the reason he’d destroyed his arm pitching college baseball and joined the navy and then, discharged, gone to the police academy in Tupelo and spent ten years babysitting students at Ole Miss, breaking up frat parties, manning the gate at football games, giving DUIs, years of preparation to come ruin their day. He’d thought this job would be different.
More horns blared and he waved harder, each driver creeping his truck over the raised tracks. To further complicate things-a loud whistle from the north-here came the two-thirty freight train from Meridian, forty-five minutes late, rounding the curve under its storm of smoke and slowing as it readied to stop and be loaded with logs and poles. Blowing his whistle, Silas stepped in front of an oncoming truck, a big Ford F-250, with his hand up, and the driver, who happened to be the mill foreman, slammed on his brakes then rolled down his window.
“You could’ve let me through,” he said. “Shit, 32, I’m going fishing.”
Silas bit down on his whistle as the train approached, its shadow casting him in a moment of shade.
“God damn it,” the foreman said and leaned on his horn.
Silas ignored him and took off his hat and spat out the whistle so it hung at his chest on its string, fanned himself with the hat. His cell was buzzing again. Fuck it, he thought and dug it out. Mayor Mo wanted to fire him for talking on the phone, let him.
“32?” It was Angie.
“Yeah?”
The phone crackled. “32,” she said again. “We at Larry Ott’s house like you said?”
“Yeah?”
“Oh my God,” she said.
three
THE FIRST THING he noticed was that they didn’t have coats. It was just after dawn in March 1979, a Monday, Larry’s father driving him to school and dragging a fume of blue exhaust behind his Ford pickup. The spring holidays had come and passed, but now a freakish cold snap had frozen the land, so frigid his mother’s chickens wouldn’t even leave the barn, the evergreens a blur outside the frosted truck window and him lost in yet another book. He was in eighth grade and obsessed with Stephen King and looked up from
The pair of them was standing at the bend in the road by the store, a tall, thin black woman and her son, about Larry’s age, a rabbit of a boy he’d seen at school, a new kid. He wondered what they were doing here, this far out, before the store opened. Despite the cold the boy wore threadbare jeans and a white shirt and his mother a blue dress the wind curved over her figure. She wore a cloth around her hair, breath torn from her lips like tissues snatched from a box.
His father passed without stopping, Larry turning his head to watch the boy and his mother peer at them from outside.
Larry turned. “Daddy?”
“Ah dern,” said his father, jabbing the brakes. He had to back up to meet them, then he leaned past Larry on the truck’s bench seat (an army blanket placed over it by his mother) and rattled the knob and they were in in a burst of freezing air that seemed to swirl even after the woman had shut the door. They were all forced together, Larry against the boy on one side and his father on the other, uncomfortable because he and his father almost never touched, awkward handshakes, whippings. For a moment the four sat as if catching their breath after a disaster, the truck idling. Larry could hear the boy’s teeth clacking.
Then his father said, “Larry, thow a log on that dad-blame fire. Warm these folks up.”
He turned the heater to HI and soon the black boy beside Larry had stopped shivering.
“Alice,” said his father, pulling onto the road, “introduce these younguns.”
“Larry,” the woman said, as if she knew him, “this is Silas. Silas, this is Larry.”
Larry stuck out his calfskin glove. Silas’s slender brown hand was bare, and despite the quick soul shake it gave, Larry felt how cold his skin was. If he gave him one of his gloves, they could each have one warm hand. He wanted to do this, but how?
They smelled like smoke, Silas and his mother, and Larry realized where they must live. His father owned over
