“Now, Sally the Snake Queen serenades her cobra!”
Sally tossed the king out the doorway and reappeared with a wicker basket. June was enthralled, so I saw my chance and slipped away. Besides, I really needed some fresh air.
Following the signs TO SNAPPERS, I exited onto a catwalk.
I took a deep breath before I realized it smelled even worse outside. What was the catwalk suspended over, anyway? Alligators! There must have been more than a hundred of them, lolling only ten feet or so beneath me. Remembering Captain Hook, I did not lean over the railing, and I tucked Nanette safely into my outside pocket.
They were such sleepy, ugly things. Their “cage” was not very large, considering how many there were. A dirty trickle of water fed into a shallow concrete pool in which it looked like garbage had been dumped. Regularly. Some alligators lay in the water. Some lay half in, half out. Many lay on top of one another. Nobody seemed to care. Their tiny, sly eyes were uninterested. Unless, I guessed, somebody fell in.
Above the gator pen was a series of what looked like small shacks, the kind migrant farm workers lived in. What would they be doing here, though? Would anybody, however desperate, live in a Snake-A-Torium?
The smell was the saddest, sickest thing in the world.
“Sammy?” I called.
Only the slow splash and shuffle of the plodding reptiles below.
This seemed like the perfect place for him to show. I had my poodle toys to protect me. I had the money just in case. But, it struck me like a bolt of lightning, I didn’t have the book! How stupid can you get? What good was the money without the book?
“Sammy?”
Someone grabbed my elbow—I screamed!
“For God’s sake,” said Stan. “Come on, Pet. We’re getting the hell out of here.”
Stan turned my arm like the rudder of a ship and steered me back through the snake room and out to the car. June was wailing; I could hear her as we approached.
Stan gunned the motor and we tore out of the parking lot.
For a moment, everyone sat tense. Linwood smoked, June snuffled, and Stan… why, he was crying too.
“People like that should be shot!” he said after a moment. Since I was sitting in back of him, I couldn’t see the tears, but I saw his hand go up to wipe his eyes.
“I wanted to see the show!” June lamented.
“Here,” said Linwood. She turned around so she was facing the backseat. “I bought you girls each a present.”
June abruptly stopped crying.
What could she have found to buy in that terrible hole? I patted Nanette in my pocket, melancholy with the sunset, the failure to make contact.
“How could you give that bastard any more money?”
“Your language, Stan. Maybe if he had more money, he’d take better care of those poor beasts.” Linwood dropped a small white object into each of our pairs of cupped hands.
“A tooth?” June held hers up.
Mine was a small triangle, very white, and hot. Hot? Not heat-hot. Instead, it emitted a radiation of sorts. More power, a voice whispered from nowhere.
“Those are alligator teeth,” Linwood said.
“Oh, great!” Stan exhaled loudly through his nose.
“And I want you to use them to make wishes on. If you ever see an animal in pain again, or if you find yourself thinking about the poor creatures we just saw, I want you to hold the tooth and wish that their pain will be healed.”
“Tonight,” said Stan, “I’m reporting that bastard to the SPCA. That’s the only wishing that’ll work around here.”
I turned and stared out the back window. If I’d had the book, would Sammy have been there? Did I need more money too? Or was it possible that expecting him kept him away?
Chapter Nine
June and I were busily making Pilgrim hats in the backseat. We were in Alabama somewhere, and Stan claimed only two more days to Miami. I was cutting out the shapes: circles of brown cardboard for the top, larger circles with that hole missing (you had to fold the cardboard; June wouldn’t allow a slit) for the brims, and strips to support the space between the brims and the tops. June was on stapler detail. She had a definite way with these things.
Linwood fooled with the radio until she got the news, a Florida station. A balmy eighty degrees in Miami!
“The poodles will swelter in these costumes,” June muttered. Always the traditionalist, she’d like us to sit on Plymouth Rock while we ate our turkey.
Stan was trying to sing something, even after all the times Linwood had tormented him about his voice.
“I’m trying to hear the news.”
He went on singing, so she shut off the radio.
I cut out another circle and brim. “How many more?”
June did a quick head count. “Seventeen.”
Linwood turned around. “Why do you have their pillows out like that?”
I kept my head down. My cheeks grew hot.
“They like to sleep while they’re riding in the car.” June was cool as sherbet. “It’s so boring and tiring for them. They’re used to playing outside and seeing their friends.”
“What other friends do they have besides each other?”
What Linwood was getting at was that June didn’t have any friends. I mean, every now and then she caught one, but she scared her away almost instantly.
“How would you know?”
Linwood turned back around, restless. She thumbed through an old magazine, threw it on the floor, lit a cigarette.
“Do you think we should call her tonight?” Stan seemed to know what the problem was.
June and I froze, soundless. It was beneath our collective dignity to ask about Deane, but that didn’t mean we didn’t want to know what was going on.
“I’d like to,” Linwood pleaded.
Why did they have to be so caught up in her always? We were here. They never agonized about us like that.
Stan sighed. “She won’t be any better.”
“You don’t know that.”
“But I can make an educated guess, can’t I? Unless they move the court date.”
“When is the court date?” I had such a big mouth.
“We’ll discuss this later,” Stan said.
“As if I’d brought it up,” Linwood said.
“I didn’t say that.”
“Well, you implied—”
Oh, just shut up! I felt vicious, the thoughts screaming in my head. It was like cabin fever in an automobile. I wanted everybody dead, but the instant that thought wheeled into my mind, I wheeled it right out again. I really wanted… what? I really wanted to stop making these stupid Pilgrim hats, for one thing.
Out the window was green grass, green trees, an occasional white farmhouse with a car or two in front. The way you could tell it was cold out there was that bruised color to the sky. That, and the shade of green, not the blinding vibrant one of summer but the resigned shade of autumn.
“Keep cutting.”
“Yassah, boss-ma’am. I’sa gwine keep cuttin’ dem hats, awrite.”
June punched me on the bruise, but at least I got a chuckle out of the front seat.
“Let’s stop there,” said Linwood.
A bright pink billboard announced cactus candy, cold lemonade, and “the world’s cleanest restrooms.”
“Not much cactus around here,” Stan observed.
Running Redskin’s was the name of the curio shop, and it was twelve or so miles away. That gave me time to cut out at least six more hats. But what I wanted to do was watch the billboards, to see if Sammy might be there. This time I’d be prepared: my pockets contained poodle toys and money, and, burning against my thigh, the book.