Lightning People (15 page)

“That's a lie,” a boy with spiked blond hair yelled. “It's an eagle.”

She stared down at him hard as if to indicate that, in a less
democratic country, his impertinence might render him prime beef for the alligator pit. “It is an eagle. But it wasn't always. To continue, the rattlesnake is in a group of venomous pit vipers found only in the New World. Benjamin Franklin picked the rattler for a number of anatomical reasons. As the rattlesnake has no eyelids, Franklin prized it as a symbol of vigilance. Consider the utility of the rattle itself. The fair warning of danger the snake offers its enemies before it strikes. In 1754, before the Declaration of Independence was signed, Franklin drew a political cartoon of the rattlesnake cut into eight parts. He wrote, ‘Join or Die' under it. There was a superstition in those days that a snake cut into pieces could come back to life before sunset. He was encouraging the eight colonies—”

“There were thirteen colonies,” the teacher corrected.

“That came later. He encouraged the colonies to be united as one body or die alone in the desert of war. Think what a different country you would be living in if the rattlesnake graced the coins in your pockets and was stamped across the president's podium during press briefings. Think of the Middle East waving snakes angrily into news cameras to protest the war your president started.”

This speech was not her invention. Okay, “desert of war” onward had been ad-libbed to provide a little menace to her lines. But Abrams had penned this pat introduction to herpetology twenty years ago as a method of drawing the listener in on historical hooks, endearing the reptiles sleeping behind the dense plexiglass to the visitors shielding their eyes as if navigating a house of horrors. Snakes wrapped around proud founding fathers instead of suffocating necks, snakes biting warship enemies in national defense rather than ankles in the garden. Abrams forced every staff member to memorize it and often listened by the door to ensure it was being delivered with the proper inflections. Del did not use the inflections. She waved the school group to follow her to the window of a bull snake coiled under a piece of driftwood. She explained the patterns on its skin as an imitation of the rattlesnake, a visual trick in the wild, a Darwinistic tactic to keep the animal alive by mimicking a far more venomous cousin, like an unloaded gun fending off a police force (she wasn't allowed to use that comparison).

These public tours were her least favorite duty, right above gassing the baby mice with carbon dioxide on feeding day. Her years in the department gave her seniority never to speak to a children's group, but Kip had begged a switch when a Catholic high-school sisterhood had crowded the entrance in skimpy plaid skirts and crisscrossing A-cup trainers a week ago. She forced herself to continue. “Many snakes are strategic actors in making us believe they are dangerous, when really they are anything but.”

Del wasn't thinking about the bull snake or the argyle diamonds webbing down its epidermis. She wasn't looking for signs of Abrams listening by the door. She was thinking of the phone call she would make to Frank Warren, Esq. as soon as this tour concluded. Madi said that Warren was the best for climbing the prickly branches of immigration law all the way to a green card. Del imagined green cards blooming on maples, dropping like open leaves, drying into curls in the baked dirt.

“Ma'am, have you ever been bitten by a snake?”

A hush fell over the school group, as if something extraordinary were about to be revealed.

“Dry bites,” Del clarified, instinctively rubbing her wrists. “Once or twice. No poison. I've never been struck by any of the venomous here. We are extremely careful. We have procedures that make those possibilities impossible.” The image of Francine dropping the diamondback on the floor came into her head, but she did not feel the need to relay this mishap to an audience only now growing accustomed to the display cases. “Snakes don't always inject poison. Sometimes they strike as a warning. It stings, maybe ten minutes.”

“Would it kill you if they did?”

Del smiled and the teacher frowned at the fat black girl in skinny black glasses conducting the Q&A.

“Depends on the variety of snake. But we keep antivenom on hand in the lab to be on the safe side. If antivenom is administered into a strike victim in time, say two or three hours, death is usually preventable.”

“Which snake is the deadliest?” the girl persisted. Del felt an immediate liking to her, and, of course, it helped that she was the
only non-white member of her class and, because of this, must have learned courage faster than the rest. It always amazed her how quickly the subject of death entered these tours—lions, tiger sharks, and honeybees all killed far more efficiently with bigger yearly death tolls, but her specialty was construed as the armless grim reapers, the creeping killers under the porch stairs.

“Diamondbacks, cobras, inland taipans, these are the vipers with the potent juice. This bull snake wouldn't hurt you more than a pinch, although I'm sure he wishes he could.”

Bites were the mandatory occupational duty that Del was good at. The roaring Whirlpool refrigerator in the lab held twenty-nine antivenoms for the entire New York county, icy packets ready to be grabbed and thrown in the Honda Civic parked out back with the keys in the ignition for a race to the emergency room. She had taken this course of action only five times in her career. The general polyvalent was marked green on the top shelf for unidentifiable bites. The monovalents, marked in red and labeled by species, were used for those rare victims who knew what variety attacked them—knowledge usually acquired because they owned them illegally as pets. Del stocked the antivenoms. She knew the exact location of each packet in the refrigerator. She knew the different symptoms for each bite. The rattlesnake, for example: swelling, bleeding, nausea, chills, salivation, spasms, tingling of the tongue, fluctuations in blood pressure; this venom was a hemotoxin: a rapid rise in the heart rate, paralysis of the circulatory muscles. She knew the exact serum to neutralize these effects. Twenty minutes ETA from hospital call to emergency desk. She had obsessively run through the symptoms on those five drives out to the hospital and often repeated them to herself on the subway to work:
bleeding, nausea, extreme fluctuations in the blood, heart attack, swelling, dilated pupils, cramping, vomiting . . .

She did not recite these symptoms to the class. Instead she told them how farmers released snakes into cornfields to kill the vermin that infested the crop. She told them how rattlesnakes burrow together in winter in complex societies, sleeping intertwined through the cold just above the frost line; how recent studies indicated that the rattlesnake was losing its rattle in certain newly developed urban
areas in the Southwest where their warning could not be heard over the highway traffic.

When Del had entered the lab that morning, she had taken her notebook up to the nursery to inspect its newest addition. Del had tapped her fingers on Apollo's tank and had watched with relief as his black shovelhead dipped low. He was still alive. His tail rose, and he struck his fangs against the glass. A rattle wouldn't crown Apollo's tail until the first time he shed. The tail was powered like a heart, an involuntary muscle beating out of fear, a little maraca playing on diamond skin.

As the tour ended and the class funneled out of the hall into the yellow heat of the park, the black girl walked up to Del and poked her hip.

“Can I ask you something?”

“Of course.” She smiled. “I liked your questions.”

“What I want to know is if the rattlesnake loses its rattle, like you said, then basically it will be exactly like a bull snake. Am I right?”

“Physically. But you forget that the rattlesnake still has venom stored in its glands.”

The girl nodded anxiously and rushed to her next question. “Won't bull snakes mate with rattlesnakes, then? Could they, I mean?” She grinned in embarrassment, pushing her glasses farther up the bridge of her nose. “If they don't know.”

“They know. They know to keep clear of each other.”

“But,” the girl said impatiently. “Then if rattlesnakes can just lose their rattles because of traffic, why can't the bull snake just grow a rattle? And then, why don't bull snakes make poison too? I mean, why only copy the skin? Why not get what really hurts?”

“These are excellent questions,” Del said, lowering herself on her knee and placing a hand on the girl's shoulder. She had never been good with children, but when she met a smart one, usually the oddball outsider, an inexplicable wave of affection swam through her, which she assumed must be the closest thing she ever felt to a maternal instinct. “You should consider a career in biology when you grow up. We need smart researchers like you.”

“Oh, no, I could never do that,” the girl gasped, backing away from the threat. “I'm going to be an actress. I definitely want to
do movies. I want to be a Hollywood star at least by the time I'm your age.”

As the girl sprinted off to join her classmates, Del wondered if she were the only person left in America who did not dream of the fame that comes from imitating others. Even the indigenous bull snake pretended to be a rattler. Del had married an actor. Why did fulfilling a dream in this country always mean becoming someone else?

She made her way through the lab door in the exhibition hall, passing Abrams in the long hallway to the break room. He stopped her with an uncharacteristic greeting, which unnerved her before she noticed the visitor behind him, a thin smiling woman with woolwhite hair tied unevenly in a bun. “Sarah, this is Delphine Kousavos. She's on staff here. She attended Columbia.” The visitor's face brightened, and they shook hands. “Sarah Isely is a visiting researcher at your alma mater. She wanted to see some of our collection.” Del was about to ask her what she was researching, but Abrams grabbed the woman's sleeve and led her away, unwilling to waste any more time than necessary in demonstrating his kindness to the subhuman slaves of his department.

The clock in the break room struck noon. Kip cut a tuna sandwich in half and offered her the smaller portion. His red pompadour was slicked above his forehead like an upturned hat brim, but the fluorescent overheads turned his freckles a corrosive green.

“No thanks,” she said to the sandwich. “And we're never trading tour groups again.”

Kip reached into the Whirlpool refrigerator stocked with the antivenom and pulled out a can of orange soda.

“Were there any lookers?” he asked.

“They were twelve, you asshole.” He shrugged, choking on the sandwich hanging from his teeth. “Who was that woman with Abrams, anyway?” she asked.

“Researcher. Something about poisons being used for medical testing.” Kip pointed to the morning newspaper spread across the table. “I just read that a couple got married on top of Mount Everest this week. Can you believe that? The first time in history. They took their oxygen masks off for the five-minute ceremony, and the groom
started hallucinating, saying he didn't know where he was. They had to keep him from walking over the edge.” Kip put his hand to his mouth and mimed an invisible oxygen mask. “You know what he should have said to her at the top?”

“It's all downhill from here,” Del replied, predicting the punch line while searching under the newspapers for her notebook with the lawyer's number copied in its pages. When she looked up, Kip was holding his sandwich meaningfully between his fingers with a hurt expression on his face.

“I love you. He should have said I love you and that they were going to be happy together and nothing would ever come between them. God, isn't anything sacred to you? Are you really that cynical? Poor Delbert.”

“You really are an asshole,” she said. She slipped out the back door, stood in the shade of the department's dumpster, and dialed Frank Warren on her cell phone. After she introduced herself, he broke down the first, necessary steps of proving a marriage to the INS. “You and your husband need to know as much about each other as possible,” he told her, as she copied his words down on paper. “They will ask the most intrusive questions in the interview, so try to memorize simple things. The brand of shaving cream he uses. Where you first met. I've done this job for fifteen years, and you'd be surprised what couples don't know about one another. And please, Mrs. Guiteau, keep a photo album. No one likes unsentimental couples. Not even the U.S. government.” That was the first time Del had ever been referred to as “Mrs.” She repeated it to herself, as if to commit a new taxonomy to memory.

WILLIAM WALKED THROUGH the midtown Flower District with a slow stagger to reduce the clinking noise in his backpack. He had wrapped the contents in newspaper to avoid chips, but the stoneware vase was knocking against the silver nineteenth-century mantle clock. The dinner set kept jangling at the bottom of the bag. He slowed past the stalls selling birds of paradise, dripping azaleas, and palm fronds, careful not to get his feet caught in the green hoses that lassoed across the sidewalk, suddenly yanked by gardeners into trip wires. One fall and the entire inventory would be worthless, and then what?

The pawning of Jennifer's antiques had begun a month ago. Checking a bank balance that had dipped into three digits, William had promised, rolling an ivory sculpture of the god Orissa into a bath towel, that he would only sell one or two items, the least prominent and most unappreciated in their time together as husband and wife. He had found two Chinese women, black-market dealers, who ran their operation behind a plant store devoted to exotic cacti. These twin sisters, or at least they both had the same lipless mouths underneath their matching red visors, were willing to pay in cash at a hefty
discount in lieu of his providing an authenticity certificate. “Very nice,” one would say, with eyes that consulted the other, “but hard to sell. We give you three hundred dollars.” Once or twice became once or twice each week, and even William had been astounded by how many things looked missing in the apartment, as if they had been burglarized by a picky thief. And maybe, he could swear, it had. Maybe when and if Jennifer returned, divorce papers in hand, he would be long gone to Los Angeles having to perform the minor acting role of crime-wave victim by phone. “Wasn't the alarm set? Did you check the door to the patio? What are you waiting for, call the police!” At first he felt guilty for selling Jennifer's collection, unrolling the goods for the Chinese sisters to inspect before they dropped each piece into a velvet drawstring bag. But with each new extraction, as the amount looted become more obvious to the apartment, his sense of blame diminished. Jennifer must have known what kind of financial trouble he would be in, how desperate life would get. Did she imagine he would sleep surrounded by all of those riches and find work at a restaurant or folding jeans at H&M? He needed money to live.