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“Vic, then. By ten it will be ninety in the shade, and the humidity, don’t even talk about it. Say goodbye, boys.”
Presumably they did so. I wished them a good day and told Allie Bell it was nice to meet her.
“The same,” she said. “And the twins think you look like a nice man. Don’t you, boys?”
“You’re right, I am,” I assured the empty seats of the double pram.
Allie Bell beamed. If it was a test, I seemed to have passed. “Do you like cookies, Vic?”
“I do. Greg said oatmeal raisin is your specialty.”
“Spécialitie de la maison, oui, oui,” she said, and trilled a laugh. There was something faintly worrisome about it. Probably it was the context. You aren’t introduced to long-dead twins every day. “I will bring you some in the near future, if you don’t mind me stopping by.”
“Absolutely not.”
“But in the evening. When it cools off a little. I have a tendency to lose my breath in the middle of the day, although it doesn’t bother Jake and Joe. And I always bring my pole.”
“Pole?”
“For the snakes,” she said. “Ta-ta, very nice to meet you.” She rolled the pram past me, then turned back. “Although this is no time to enjoy the Gulf Coast. October and November is the time for that.”
“Duly noted,” I said.
I originally thought the Key was named for its shape, which looks remarkably snakelike from the air, twisting and doubling back on itself as it does, but Greg told me there were rattlers, a regular infestation of them, until the early eighties. That was when the building boom hit the Keys south of Siesta and Casey. Up until then those lower keys had been left to doze.
“The snakes were a kind of ecological blip,” Greg said. “I guess in the beginning a few of them might have swum across from the mainland… can snakes swim?”
“They can,” I told him.
“Or maybe they hitched a ride in the bilge of a supply boat or something. Hell, maybe even in the hold of some rich guy’s cabin cruiser. They bred in the undergrowth, where the birds had a hard job getting at the young. Rattlesnakes don’t lay eggs, you know. The mamas squeeze out eight or ten at a time and that’s a lot of snakeskin boots, let me tell you. Those fuckers were everywhere. Hundreds of them, maybe thousands. They got driven north when the southern part of the Key started being developed. Then, when the rich folks came in—”
“Like you,” I said.
“Well, yes,” he said with appropriate modesty. “The stock market has been good to this boy, especially Apple.”
“And Tesla.”
“True. I tipped you on that, but you, being the cautious New Englander that you are—”
“Quit it,” I said.
“Then, when the rich folks came in and started building their McMansions—”
“Like yours,” I said.
“Please, Vic. Unlike some of the stucco and cement horrors in this part of Florida, mine is architecturally pleasing.”
“If you say so.”
“When the rich folks started to build, the contractors found the snakes everywhere. They were teeming. The builders killed the ones on the lots where they were working—Gulf side and Bay side—but there wasn’t an organized snake hunt until after the Bell twins. The county wouldn’t do anything even then, arguing that the north end of the Key was privately owned and developed, so the contractors put together a posse and had a snake hunt. I was still working at MassAds then and day-trading on the side, so I wasn’t around, but I’ve heard that a hundred men and women—a hundred at least—in gloves and high boots started where the swing gate is now and worked their way north, beating the brush and killing every snake they found. Mostly rattlers, but there were others as well—blacksnakes, grass snakes, a couple of copperheads, and, hard to believe but true, a fucking python.”
“They killed the non-poisonous ones as well as the kind that bite?”
“Killed em all,” Greg said. “Hasn’t been many snakes spotted on the Key since.”
He called that night. I was sitting out by his pool, sipping a gin and tonic and looking at the stars. He wanted to know how I was enjoying the house. I said I was enjoying it just fine and thanked him again for letting me stay there.
“Although this is no time to enjoy the Key,” he said. “Especially with most of the tourist attractions shut down because of Covid. The best times—”
