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He gave me a fixed look. “Right. How do you know that?”
“Seen them in the Franklin Park Zoo.” I told this lie with a straight face. “That’s in Boston. Also, you know, in nature programs.”
“Well, it’s a good description. Only you have to think of dozens of gourds, maybe hundreds, and a whole graveyard full of bones.”
I thought of Greg’s big bathtub. And one hand rising out of the writhing mass.
“Have you been to the north end of the Key, Vic?”
“I walked up there just the other day.”
He nodded. “I haven’t been there on foot since the snake hunt, but I’ve seen it plenty of times out fishing. The Key has changed a lot in the last forty years or so, been built up something terrible, but the north end is just the same now as it was then. A shell beach that looks like a great big lopsided triangle, am I right?”
“Just right,” I said.
He nodded. The mask went down. A sip of water. The mask went up.
“That’s where the snakes ended up, with no place to go except Daylight Pass. Backs to the water, you could say, except snakes are all back, aren’t they? That half-acre of beach was covered with them. You couldn’t see the shells at all, except every now and then for a split second or two as they moved around, shaking their tails. They were crawling all over each other, too. Enough poison in those snakes to kill half the people in Tampa, you would have said.
“We had a bunch of firemen from the Palm Village station and a bunch more from up Highway 41 in Nokomis. Big strapping fellows. Had to be, because they had twenty-gallon Smokechaser packs on their backs. What used to be called Indian pumps. Those things are made more for fighting brush fires, of which we have a lot, but they didn’t hold water that day. They were filled with kerosene. When we had the snakes—most of em, folks found strays for months after—with nothing but water behind them, those boys sprayed them very good and proper. Then my old friend Jerry Gant, Palm Village Fire Chief, long gone, fired up a Bernzomatic propane torch and flung it. Those rattlers went up in a sheet of flame, and the stink—oh my God, it was terrible, and I could never get it out of my clothes. None of us could. Washing em didn’t do any good. They had to be burned, like the snakes.”
He sat quiet for a moment, eyes on his glass of water. He would return to the reason he’d come, but right now he wasn’t here at all. He was seeing those burning rattlesnakes and smelling their stench as they writhed in the flames.
“Duma was still there back then, and some of the snakes swam for it. Maybe a few even made it, but most drowned. I don’t know if you noticed there’s a whirlpool where the water from the bay meets the water from the Gulf—”
“I’ve seen it.”
“That whirlpool… that eddy… was stronger when Duma Key was still there, because the water came through with a lot more force. I bet it’s sixteen feet deep right there where the water spins, maybe more. Dug out the channel bed, you know. Plus the tide was low that day, which increases the spill from the bay. We saw snakes spinning in that eddy, some still on fire.
“And that, Vic, was the Great Snake Drive of Eighty-Whatever.”
“Quite a story.”
“Now you tell me one. About how you knew Alita Bell and how you found her.”
“I didn’t know her at all, and I only saw her twice. Alive, I mean. The second time she brought me oatmeal raisin cookies. We ate some at this very table. Had them with milk. I said hello to the twins.”
“Did you, now?”
“Maybe it sounds crazy, but it didn’t feel crazy. It felt like the polite thing to do. Because in all other ways she struck me as completely rational. In fact—” I frowned, trying to remember. “She said she knew they weren’t there.”
“Huh.”
Hadn’t she also said and yet they are? I thought so, but I couldn’t quite remember. If she had, she was right. I knew that now for myself.
“And someone brought that stroller back. Not once, but twice.”
“Yes.”
“But you didn’t see anyone.”
“No.”
“Didn’t hear anyone.”
“No.”
“Didn’t notice the motion lights going on, either? Because I know Ackerman had em put in.”
