By Maggie Riggs
/ Fiction /
Michael watched his shoes toss shadows down on the dry brown grass beneath the swing set in the playground. He was alone in the park. He was often alone, his mother left for the breakfast shift at the Broadway Diner early most days and there was no father. Michael heaved the swing forward and back, forward and back. The swing slowed and he let his sneakers scuff the dirt to watch the eddies of dust swirl beneath him, darting away like tiny tadpoles in a pond he had seen once on the Nature Channel on the cable. Michael was done swinging for the day. It was 6:47am.
If he took a right out of the park, the street he walked would track him deeper into the city, past rows of vinyl-walled houses and cash for checks signs on crumbly brick walls and Alfred the vet who tended the corner of Cottage and Oak where he slept politely most nights when the weather was mild.
But Michael turned left, down Christopher Street, which rich people would refer to as a cul-de-sac but we just called it a dead end. Christopher Street was a street flocked with kids up and down its rows on either side and at the end of which was utopia. That’s what it was for us, anyway. An immense, endless, abandoned grassy lot, bit by the light of our single streetlight when it was dark on its eastern edge, bounded on the western side by a steep hill we rode our bikes down directly toward and into the oncoming traffic of a notoriously busy and dangerous highway intersection. The Field was studded with bottle caps that glittered in the sun and spangled with shards of bottles, blue and brown and amber, and the unendingly fascinating detritus of teenagers. It was a moonscape, a seashore, a universe, and it was ours.
Michael slowed, was stalled, before he could reach The Field by a single figure on the empty street in the cool morning which would not be cool for long. He folded himself behind a blue work van on the edge of the street and peered out, a small woodland creature posting up behind the trunk of a tree.
Joe stood alone and swept the street. Joe was entirely khaki. His skin was a pale leathery beige khaki from weekends and holidays spent visiting his mother at her retirement community in Florida, his shirt was a slightly darker shade of khaki, and his khaki pants were a darker still shade of khaki. Joe’s broom was made of wood with what looked like real yellow straw at the end. It reminded us of pictures in a book we had once seen in school about pioneer families tending their homesteads. We had read in it, too, about little field mice who would scamper up to trim the hair of men’s heads with their small animal teeth while the men slept. In the book, the homesteaders laughed about it good-naturedly. Perhaps glue traps had not been invented yet, we surmised.
Michael waited and watched behind the work van. Michael was not a popular child. Michael’s nose was always red and runny, even in the summer. His clothes were dirty. He was angry all the time. Michael’s mother never called him for dinner when the streetlight came on or yelled down the block if he was not home on time at night. It was hard to be friends with Michael; it often seemed to us that he didn’t want to be friends anyway, but we were all there all the time, always around. We co-existed in the delicate and complex ecology of small children not very well-watched on the street in the summertime.
Michael was the first of us to see the snake.
* * *
Our mothers were barely able to shove orange juice and Pop Tarts at us in the summer mornings before we raced out of our front doors into the street. We would wake and scramble into our jean skorts and shorts and oversized or outgrown t-shirts and inhale whatever was thrust at us. Then out, out, out. There were no mothers in the street and the fathers who were there and had work were at work. Some of our grandparents dragged white plastic chairs out into the driveway to sit and yawn and complain about the sun being too damn hot before they hobbled back into our houses, flip-flops thwacking. The grandparents never bothered us though and we all knew they were not in charge. No one was in charge really, or rather, who was in charge could change daily or hourly among us, the kids. Janine was often the oldest of us at eleven, and thought she should be in charge most of the time but had not seemed to have figured out how to retain command once she had acquired it. We didn’t know how many of us there were, truthfully. Anthony and Christina, Janine, Mich and Mark, Erin and Amanda. Sometimes Sara when she wasn’t too whiny. Michael did not technically live on Christopher Street, he was just around the corner, but he and other children from nearby streets who knew the lawlessness of The Field could also be found there on any given day. We never knew who would be out until we made it past our moms and into the street.
Every day was new and different. Hot and boring and dangerous and exciting and fun and wicked. This summer was the one we discovered how to pour salt on slugs to watch them shrivel and burn in the sun. We would watch the slugs trail slime and ooze across the pavement and pretend to wipe it on each other while we pretended to shriek. We fought a lot; we were kids. But we were capable of coming together for a common cause; we were capable of banding together, of uniting, acting as a single unit in tandem, on the street. Our street. But that was before. That was before the snake.
* * *
By the time most of us had made it out that morning, Michael and Joe stood facing one another on the sidewalk in front of Joe’s house. They weren’t speaking and there was a distance of several feet between them. Joe held his wooden broom with the real yellow straw still on the sidewalk and seemed to be speaking urgently to Michael who stood red-faced and ball-fisted. We weren’t shocked or alarmed. Michael was always in trouble; some adult was always speaking low and mean to him with his red face and runny nose. Michael was one of the bad kids. What could you do, really.
Amanda and Erin were the first to reach them; they lived next door to Joe and upstairs in the apartment they rented from Anthony and Christina’s parents and grandparents. Joe was one of the grandparents, technically, because he was old, though his children were grown and didn’t live with him. Sometimes he brought back sparklers from the corner store on summer nights and would hand them out to us. We liked Joe well enough. Joe didn’t bother us. So it was unusual to see Joe, in particular, in this standoff with Michael.
Joe saw us approaching from both sides of the street, and looked down at the ground and shook his head. He waved us off.
“Nothing here, you kids, you kids go off and play now, you hear me?”
We considered. Joe was an adult with all the authority of adults on the street, which was little. But also, if our parents found out we had been given a direct order from an adult and we had disobeyed, we’d have hell to pay. Still. Yet.
“What is it, Joe?” One of us was pressing our luck, it seemed.
“I told you kids, it’s nothing, I got nothing here. Now go on,” he said.
“That’s not true,” Michael said. He was on one side of Joe and we were on the other. “That’s not true. He’s got a snake there. Under that broom. That’s a real snake.” Michael pointed with one hand and wiped his nose with the other.
It seemed, in that moment, that the sun woke up for real and suddenly it was hot, really hot, nearly tropical with heat. The sidewalk seemed to melt and sway before our eyes; the air thickened, took on mass and weight and volume, The few scrawny oak trees lining the streets seemed to hum and quiver, alert with tiny dark eyes and little leaping things. It felt jungled, exotic, wild.
Not one of us had ever seen a snake up close in real life before. We had seen them in books and on TV and some lucky ones among us had seen them, noses pressed against smudged glass, at the zoo. Janine would later claim she had touched a snake once, her cousin Adam’s pet, but even she knew she was lying and just shut up. The wildlife we saw on Christopher Street was limited to Michelle and Mark’s toy poodle and the errant, desperate squirrel.
A snake, though. A snake.
Amanda and Erin screamed and darted toward their house in retreat before creeping back toward Joe again, in horror and hysterical joy. Mark said cool and bent down with his hands on his knees to peer beneath Joe’s broom. Sara uttered something about snakes being poisonous, and Mich and Janine seemed not to have decided how to react just yet.
Joe ran a hand through what remained of the thinning hair on his khaki head. He did not move the broom an inch but somehow the broom moved.
“It’s moving! It’s moving! It’s slithering!” We all screamed or darted or hopped. Mark threw himself into a fighting stance, prepared to battle the giant creature we were certain was coiled and ready to strike beneath the wooden broom.
“Stop! Stop it now. Look,” Joe said. “It’s a tiny garter snake. It’s just a baby. It’s not gonna hurt none of you.” Joe relaxed the arm holding the broom and lifted its end ever so slightly. And there it was.
The snake was black, unless it was green, and it was no longer than one of the sour straws we used to beg and plead for or one of Mich’s frizzy braids. The snake swirled itself into a coil, a tiny ball, like a rubber band when its shape deflates after you flick it at your deskmate in class. We gasped and recoiled in turn.
“Is it real, Joe?” Janine asked, hopping from one foot to the other, refusing to be trapped with the creature on the same solid ground.
“Of course it’s real, youse all got eyes in your head,” Joe said. Joe sighed deeply and wiped his forehead with his free arm. It was growing hotter by the minute.
“What are you gonna do with it, Joe? Where are you taking it?”
“I’m not taking it nowhere, I’m not gonna do nothing with it, and neither are you. I was letting it go, letting it get itself down to The Field.” Joe stood up straight and looked into the distance, down the street.
“I want you kids to leave this snake alone, you hear me? It’s not bothering nobody, so you don’t need to go bothering it.”
“Oh my gosh, it’s gonna bite us! It’s gonna bite us and stick its poison up in us and then we’re all gonna die!” Sara sobbed.
“Shut UP, Sara!” Mark commanded. It was rare but occasionally Mark could step up, lead us, control the unruly lot of us.
“You can’t tell us what to do.” We swung our heads toward the voice as if on cue in some TV sitcom with a laugh track lying in wait for our antics. Michael.
“You can’t tell us what to do. You’re not in charge of us. We’ll do what we want.” Michael had yet to move from his position on the sidewalk on the other side of Joe and from the sound of his voice and the petulant angry tone we knew so well, he wasn’t going to anytime soon. Still, though. Still. Joe was a grown-up and we didn’t go around talking to grown-ups that way—this blurred the line. Some of us felt a little dizzy, even a slight chill in the humid air.
We waited, tense, uncertain of how this standoff would end. Uncertain of how we even wanted it to end. None of us wanted to be bit by a snake and stuck up with its poison to die.
Joe was silent for a long time. Longer than we expected. Longer than we thought was reasonable from a grown-up, grown-ups who were always telling us what to do and how to do it and when and why (because they told us so.) Joe seemed maybe not to know what to say. This was new. We waited and listened to the trucks bumping through the intersection beyond The Field, and the scrape of lawn chairs on black-tarred driveways, and car doors slamming shut, and someone’s baby down the street howling miserably for her morning cereal. Did we hear the crunch of leaves? The titter of insects? Was it really a baby howling? After all, there was a snake on our street. Who knew anymore.
And then Joe took a step back, toward his house. He hesitated and in a single gesture lifted the broom and let it dangle from his hand beside him. Joe’s eyes were cast down at the ground at nothing, head hung low. Joe sighed again. Like how our moms sighed when we ripped our new school clothes messing around in the schoolyard, or when our dads came home late and clumsy, or when they dug change out of the couch cushions and counted it carefully.
When Joe lifted his face up to us and looked us in our eyes, we knew. We knew, even then, that this was a different kind of day.
Joe let the snake go. He gave it to us. It was ours now, too.
* * *
The street simmered and roiled beneath us under the sun. It was quiet as a graveyard. It was hot. So hot. Even the slim dry brown weeds alongside the curbs seemed to drip fat drops of sweat. Our hair was painted to our heads, our clothes spackled to our backs. We were pink-skinned, salty; delirious with heat.
“What now?” Mich whispered.
We didn’t know.
Joe had retreated into his khaki-colored home. The grandparents had retreated into our popcorn-ceilinged apartments to slap at ancient window AC’s in frustration, as if these small violences would inspire or shame or tame the tiny machines into producing more satisfactory results. The baby crying down the block had been satisfied, stifled, or muted. The snake on the street was still; it waited coiled, ungovernable.
Whether it was Michael who found the stick, or maybe Mark, or Mich, we wouldn’t ever know. The stick appeared in our midst like secondhand clothes we didn’t know we needed, dropped down from the parched oak trees. It was scraggly, blackened from the heat and sun; longer even than a second-grader.
The stick poked the snake. Tentatively.
The stick poked the snake once more. The snake rebounded and we sucked in our breath and gave the snake another nudge. And then another. Another. And another.
And then we all felt a bit muddy about what happened after that. The stick poked the snake; nudged it, pushed it, shoved it. We tapped the snake; the stick touched its head, its tail, its belly, but who could really tell tail from head or belly at that point or really any point before that.
The snake was growing distressed. Its coils multiplied and evaporated and twisted back into corporeal forms. The snake slithered and darted and we tapped it, a light smash, and it went still.
One of us slipped the stick beneath the belly of the snake and snapped our wrist up in the air and the snake somersaulted into space like the Olympic gymnasts we had watched on the cable earlier that summer. We screamed, all of us, maybe even the snake too; impossible to know, impossible to know where it would land. We shrieked and laughed, and then laughed harder: the way the snake shot up in the air, and made a SPLAT!!! sound on the ground when it landed, a little bubble in our comic books.
This went on for a long time. We poked and nudged and pushed the snake with the black stick all the way down the long block. Down toward The Field. No one knew whose idea it was, we didn’t talk about it; it was the only possible place, preordained. It was a thing we all somehow knew without knowing, our child brains a whisper network that worked of its own volition.
By the time we reached The Field, the snake had become strangely compliant. It was no longer coiling and uncoiling, darting or slithering, or even trying to wrap itself around the stick like a rope or the stripe on a candy cane.
“What’s it doing?” Janine whispered.
“It’s sleeping,” Erin said.
“It’s bleeding!” Amanda yelled.
“It is not!”
“It is! Look, that’s blood!”
“Do snakes bleed blood? Real blood?”
“Yes,” Mark said firmly. “No. I don’t know.”
There, on the asphalt at the threshold of The Field, we noticed a trail oozing along behind the snake and up alongside and beneath it. Like the snake had sprung a leak. Or was actually bleeding, real blood.
“We have to get a closer look.”
“No! We can’t get closer, we’ll die! It will kill us!”
“It won’t kill us, they can’t kill us, Joe said they’re harmless and it’s just a stupid baby.”
“We have to get it into The Field.”
The snake didn’t move when we poked it this time and our confidence grew. We grew bolder. We grabbed the stick and wrenched the snake from the asphalt and hurled it forward, flung it up ahead of us and when we saw it try to dart away into the scrub, we smashed at a flailing skinny end of it and dragged it back, back into the tall scratchy weeds beyond the fence where the grass was too high to see beyond. Or into. Where the street had been silent, The Field was riotous with sound. Not the sounds we normally heard while ensconced in the deep weeds, the heavy trucks crossing the intersection crashing past beyond us; their cabs bouncing and bumping and jostling the ground, engines thrumming, horns crashing into the air. But birdsong. The twitch and scratch and burrow of tiny insects. Weeds rubbing together like sandpaper when we rustled them. Mostly it was the sun, though. The full sun, now, beat down on us, making our blood pulse and throb, rhythmic, like something to keep time to, though time seemed to have left the party, slithered out of its box to skulk the perimeter of The Field and our lair inside it. The Field was a feral place, we knew, but not like this.
We circled the snake and it was still.
“Stupid snake,” Mark said and kicked at the dry grass with the toe of a sneaker.
“It’s super gross,” Janine said. She wrinkled her nose and worried the end of her ponytail between small fingers.
Suddenly the snake exploded. It was a blur, a flash, an inchoate whorl of movement, like a tiny tornado trying to burrow itself into the ground. The snake was frantic, furious, rutting with the earth, trying somehow to return to it, its only way out was down, down, down.
And then it began to rain, it rained down rocks. Tiny chipped gray rocks and large round black rocks fell from the sky, out of our small fingers, and blanketed the snake; the snake burrowed faster, more desperately, it shimmied and whirred and splintered the dust. And then it was still.
It was hard to breathe, or we had forgotten how to. Time was made of cotton gauze, thick as the air we tried to swill. We dropped to our knees and panted. The sun tattooed the insides of our eyelids with strange red hieroglyphs.
“Look,” Mark said. We raised our heads from our knees and looked. “It’s his entails.”
“Entrails,” Michael said. We blinked at Michael, slowly remembering he was there, that we were there, in whatever strange place this place had become. And something had transformed the snake too somehow, its sides definitely wet and now weeping strange gobs and bubbles.
“How do you know?” Mark said, thrusting his chin forward.
“I read it in a book,” Michael said.
“You know how to read? I don’t bel—”
“Shut up!” Michael screamed.
“You shut up!”
“It’s hurt. We hurt him,” Michael said.
“You can’t hurt a snake! They’re poison.” Sara cradled her elbows in her hands and rocked back and forth on her heels.
“Course you can hurt ‘em, you idiot.”
“I’m not an idiot! Don’t call me an idiot!” Sara’s face was mottled and splotchy, tears forming in the corners of her nearsighted eyes.
“Did we really hurt it?”
“Yes,” Michael said. “We gotta kill it. We gotta kill it now.”
The whole world buzzed and hummed and crackled. The Field split neatly, definitely, along a precise fault line: the rest of the world, and us on the other side of it.
Sara sobbed and Janine’s rocking grew clumsier, urgent. Mark stared at Michael.
We stared down at the ground. We wanted to go home. We wanted to go home and bury our faces in our mothers’ legs and hear them tell us to shoo and stop dirtying their shorts and to get out from under their feet; we wanted to go home and climb into our beds and wrap ourselves in blankets and watch dust motes somersault in the air and try to catch them on the tips of our fingers. The grownups, we thought, had been right about Michael. Michael was a bad kid. We were right to exclude him from our games sometimes, or to barely tolerate his presence at others; we were right to notice that his mother did not call him home when the streetlights came on, to notice his dirty shoes and fatherlessness; his runny nose, his otherness.
“You’re a sicko,” Mark said. Mark’s eyes were red around the rims and one hand gripped the bottom edge of his shorts, bunching it and releasing. “You’re a weird stupid sicko.”
“I’m not a sicko! Don’t call me that.” Michael’s nose ran steadily, his face contorting around the shapes of the myriad emotions whirling beneath his livid red face. “We got to kill it. It’s almost dead.”
“I don’t wanna kill a snake, I don’t wanna.” Erin joined Sara in sobbing silently in a heap on the blistered ground.
“Course we’re not gonna kill it, we’re not sickos! We were just playing with it, we’re not murderers.” Mark strode back and forth in the small clearing we had made in the high weeds.
“We gotta kill it. He’s almost dead. We gotta.” Michael was a quivering mass of limbs and sweat, a flash of vibrating queasy energy; he looked like he was going to explode.
“We’re not killers!” Mark lunged at Michael, slamming into him headfirst, his fingers scratching, clawing at his face on the way down. They rolled in the grass, tumbling one over the other, sticks scratching symbols into their knees and bottle caps lodging on their forearms, scraping and crying and punching in a swirling blur.
Michael kneed Mark hard in the stomach and wrenched his way out of their tangle, standing and stumbling backwards, fat tears streaming down his dirty, bloody face, carving deep ravines of white on his cheeks as they fell, an avalanche. Mark lay on the ground sobbing, knees pulled up to his chin, holding his stomach.
“You’re all stupid jerks. Stupid jerks!” Michael hurled a small brown stone at no one and fled. He ran through the tall weeds and out of the mouth of The Field and reentered the alternate universe of the street, running for so long we stopped hearing his sneakers thudding.
One by one we stood, dazed and silent, and walked through the deep dry weeds and out of the mouth of The Field and down the street and back into our homes. We didn’t speak. We didn’t even look at each other. We didn’t bury our faces in our mothers’ legs when we got home or fight with our siblings about the TV or whine for popsicles or more space in front of the fans.
We stayed home for two, three days, maybe a fourth, until the boredom and the heat inside made even the now-strange-to-us, changed outside world seem possible again. Cautiously, we emerged, alone or in twos and threes, and made our way out to the street once again. We never went back to the Field, not until we were older, and even then, not all of us ever did.
Slowly things got back to some semblance of normal. Erin and Amanda wore their matching ruffled skirts and jumped rope; we played endless hours of manhunt; we fought and made up and fought and made up; we stole crackers and juice boxes from our houses and pretended to run away forever to the park on the corner.
We wouldn’t see Michael again for the rest of that summer, not until school started in the fall, and then we never spoke to him, but we never had spoken to him at school anyway. Michael had been one of the bad kids before but in the fall he was a ghost. He never got in trouble because he never said a word. Floated through the hallways and the cafeteria and the playground at recess; floated along to school in the morning and floated home again in the afternoon. After a while, we didn’t take much notice of him at all anymore, but then it’s also true that we really hadn’t before either. It seemed to us that Michael had somehow become smaller, had twisted and coiled and burrowed into himself, a small quiet gliding creature who didn’t make much of an impression on even the ground he moved across; who didn’t bother nobody, couldn’t hurt a thing.
* * *
Michael waited at the end of the street and watched the streetlight cut shapes out of the dark to paste up in the air. He was alone in the park for the second time that day. His mother was down at Patsy’s Bar; had left after orchestrating a flurry of loud music, hairspray, cigarette smoke, and perfume. She had put a frozen pizza in the microwave for Michael before she’d gone and told him to lock the door behind her. At least she’d thought of that. Michael stood on one foot and then the other, shifting his weight soundlessly, watching the street. It was completely silent, still; cooler now that the sun had gone. It was 11:47 P.M.
Michael made his way swiftly down the street, steadily, not pausing, not stopping to look or wonder. He approached the streetlight and ducked the arc of light its arms made, an embrace, and hesitated for just a moment before entering the mouth of The Field.
It was different in the darkness. Michael made his way forward by feel and by memory through the places the streetlight couldn’t reach. The chitter and rustle of the sunlit hours had given way to a deep heavy O of quiet. Even the passing trucks seemed to have been muffled by the dark, announcing themselves only in the breathlessness of the wind after they had sped past.
Michael reached the clearing in the tall grass and weeds, pulling thorns and brambles out of his way, tearing their tiny claws from his clothes when they clung to him. The streetlight leaned weakly over one corner of the small space and Michael’s eyes adjusted slowly as he scanned among the sticks and stumps and grass and human debris to find the animal among it.
There it was. It had moved a quarter of a foot, maybe more, but was still generally right in the center of the clearing where they had left it. Michael approached slowly, and dropped down to a knee; a safe, he assumed, distance away, and watched. It seemed smaller than it had earlier that day, the snake. And so did The Field.
Michael watched the snake for a long time. It did not move or rustle or make a sound. Michael began to dig. He smashed a rock into the dry pebbly soil from which nothing worthwhile grew, and dug a small round hole. He scrabbled his hands around in a cluster of grass and weeds until he found what he was looking for.
With a small brown stick, Michael reached out toward the dead snake and gently, gently nudged it; once, twice. When the snake did not reciprocate, Michael placed the stick on the side of the snake opposite him and slowly guided the small length of it into the hole. He reached into his back pocket and pulled out a handful of crumpled items, placing them on the ground before him. He squinted down in the dirt and swatted away the lint. Then he picked up a small square, rumpled at its edges, which he carefully smoothed; he licked a finger and ran it across the shiny surface of a Topps National League All-Star baseball card.
Michael carefully placed Daryl Strawberry beside the snake in the hole, and shoveled the dirt and stones and tiny pebbles he had dug up on top of it. Michael filled the hole completely and cupped a hand around the top of it to make a smooth round mound, on top of which he placed a blade of grass, a small verdant flag in the dark. Michael stood up and walked home alone the way he had come.