She smiled, and he entered the gate of the fence surrounding the pool, walked over, put the sack on the pool deck, and sat in the chair beside her. He smiled and pointed to his cap as he looked at her. She laughed lightly.
“Nice,” she said. He nodded, very seriously.
“Good for the sun,” he said, and she laughed again.
“Very hot day,” he said. “I got some snakes here.” He tilted his head in a secret, conspiratorial manner in the direction of the bag. “Quite good to eat,” he said. “You ever fix snake?”
“No,” she said. “You?”
“No,” he said, “woman’s work.” But he smiled and added, “A very skillful and artful thing to do, I think. You wanna try it?”
“Absolutely,” she said.
He gathered her hat and purse for her and helped her up and into her robe. Then he gave her back her purse and picked up the gunny sack in his other hand. Then they went back to the room.
He had been there before he had gone to the pool. He had cleaned out their hibachi and put fresh charcoal under the grate, and he had placed the grill in the corner of the small patio outside the sliding glass doors in the rear of the room. Tucked under the edge of it, held so that breeze would not scatter them, were a few pieces of torn newspaper. Inside, over the formica counter to the right of the sink in the small mirrored alcove between the room and the bath, he had spread some newspaper with waxed paper over it. In the sink was a square plastic container with the name of the motel on its side, the ice bucket full of chipped ice. On the counter to the other side of the sink was more waxed paper, and on top of it, beside small restaurant packets of salt and pepper, was a small pile of odd-looking plant clippings. Among them was a tiny, delicate blue flower at the end of its own cut stem. His knife rested beside the clippings. It had a bone handle and looked like some kind of fish knife. Both the clippings and the knife blade were touched with drops of water from the washing he had obviously given them.
“What a beautiful little flower,” she said.
“Very beautiful,” he said. “Very good with snake.”
She was a very good cook, and he was very good with his knife. After he had put the snake meat in its bags on top of the ice and had hung the skins to dry over the latticework that separated the patios in back of the rooms, he began to work at the pile of clippings. He cut the small flower off first and put it to the side. Then he stripped some of the greener stalks of their side growths, putting them between his thumb and the blade at their bases, then squeezing and turning his wrists slightly. When he had finished this, he slit each stalk down the middle, revealing its greener inside; the stalks looked a little like leeks. Then he cut them in two-inch sections.
“Don’t know about this salt and pepper,” he said.
“I can take care of that,” she said. “Is snake dry or oily? It looks dry.”
“Snake is very dry,” he said.
“We’ll need some oil,” she said. She got oil from the styrofoam picnic basket they carried with them.
“Is it open or closed when they cook it?”
“I remember they do it open, I believe,” he said.
“I thought it might be,” she said. “We can do it on foil with holes in it, to let the smoke through and keep the juices in.”
The story Bob White had told about hunting rattlers had to do with using hand shadows to get them away from holes. In the story he had told of the one time he had felt very close to a snake. This had happened as the snake watched the shadow, becoming in its fury and intensity sort of hypnotized. What had happened was that he had gotten himself kind of lost in watching the snake’s eyes watch the shadow of his hands. It was almost as if the eyes drew him closer, the sheer will of the unblinking force causing the shadow and his hands with it to move too close to the snake. He had awakened in time, and the snake just missed his hands when it struck. He had felt very close to the snake that time.
While they were working, he with the clippings, she with the foil with the holes in it for cooking the snake and with the oil and the salt and pepper, she thought about the other story, the one she had enjoyed most, the familiar one about his childhood that had reminded her, in its way, of her own.
IT IS SAID THAT I WAS BORN ROBERT WHITELAW IN NINETEEN and twenty-three. They say this was before much development out this way, and things were pretty good for Indians, almost as good as they are now, but in the middle there things went downhill. My grandmother, who was a Pamet Wampanoag, had come from the East with her father after her mother had died. She married my grandfather, a Pima, and my father was born to them. When my father got ready to begin to think about getting married, my grandmother fixed him up with a Pamet woman who had come out West for other reasons. This woman became my mother. I begin to remember very well about the times when I was seven years old and up. Maybe I remember the tail end of those good times they say were going on in ’twenty-three. But this story is about a time when I was ten years old, so you can forget about what I have just said and listen to what I am going to tell you. My family was not too poor; my father had a few horses, and he worked some on the railroad there. On this day we went in to that place where you picked me up. It was different then, that road was the highway then, and that place was a store with a lot of supplies in it and a place where people who drove along stopped to buy souvenirs of the Southwest. Behind that place they had rattlesnakes and armadillos and some prairie dogs in cages. I think they had a coyote there, but he was very scrawny if they did. People I knew sold them snakes sometimes.
Well, on this day my father took me and we went there, to that place. My father wanted to get some rope there or something. When we rode up, there were a few cars there, maybe five of them, old cars like they used to drive then, but then the cars were new. I wanted to stay outside and watch the people stretch and go out back to see the snakes and things, so I did that while my father went inside to shop around. It was a hot day, and I had an old derby hat on my head. I believe I found that hat along the highway one day. There were two families there who had stopped there in a fairly big car. There were two men and two women and four or five kids. The kids were older than I was. The grownups were younger than my father. One of the men had a camera and a stand for it, and he was taking pictures. He would tell the people to move around so he could take their pictures in front of things. They kept moving around, and once he even had them stand in front of the big car so he could take their picture there. Hell, I thought, that man is nuts with that camera. I used to talk to myself in that way. It was the way my father talked sometimes about white men, and I loved my father and the way he talked. I was leaning against the side of the building there, and I had a weed in my mouth to keep it wet, and I had my derby hat tilted down on my forehead against the sun, but because I thought it looked good that way too. I think I must have looked very funny there, the way kids can do when they stand around like that.
Anyway, those people were looking over at me sometimes, whispering to one another, laughing sometimes, looking the other way. The man with the camera wasn’t seeing me though, though he might have when he pulled up, because he was busy moving the people around for picture taking. Finally, he did see me though, and when he did he just stopped everything, left his camera sit on his stand, put his hands on his hips, and just stared at me. I looked away from where I was looking at them, but I couldn’t keep my head away, and when I turned it back, the man spoke to me. He said something like, Hey, kid, come here a minute. I thought I had nothing to do so I went over there. He said he would give me a quarter if I would take some pictures with them. I said okay. The first one was for me to push the button while he lined up with the others in front of the car. I did that one. Then he said I should get in line and he’d take my picture with the others. After that he wanted to take a picture of me in my derby. Then one of the kids talked to one of the women, who told the man I should put on one of those headbands they sold in the store with a feather in it. I took that picture with the kids. They too put headbands on.