Living with Snakes Winner of THE FLANNERY O’CONNOR AWARD FOR SHORT FICTION Living with Snakes Stories by Daniel Curley Paperback edition published in 2013 by The University of Georgia Press Athens, Georgia 30602 www.ugapress.org © 1985 by Daniel Curley All rights reserved Set in Linotron 202 Baskerville Printed digitally in the United States of America The Library of Congress has cataloged the hardcover edition of this book as follows: Curley, Daniel. Living with snakes : stories / by Daniel Curley. 134 p. ; 23 cm. Contents: Trinity—The inlet—The other two—[etc.] I. Title. PS3553.U65L5 1985 813’.54 84-22773 ISBN 0-8203-0767-x (alk. paper) Paperback ISBN-13: 978-0-8203-4441-6 ISBN-10: 0-8203-4441-9 “The First Baseman” originally appeared in the Cimarron Review and is reprinted here with the permission of the Board of Regents for Oklahoma State University, holders of the copyright. ISBN for digital edition: 978-0-8203-4494-2 TO AUDREY Acknowledgments The author and the publisher gratefully acknowledge the magazines in which stories in this volume first appeared. New Letters: “Trinity” and “The Contrivance” New England Review: “Wild Geese” Story Quarterly: “Reflections in the Ice” and “Living with Snakes” Cimarron Review: “The First Baseman” Chicago: “The Inlet” Quarterly West: “Billy Will’s Song” Mid-American Review: “Visiting the Dead” Another Chicago Magazine: “The Other Two” Contents Trinity The Inlet The Other Two Revenge Wild Geese Reflections in the Ice Living with Snakes The First Baseman The Contrivance Billy Will’s Song Visiting the Dead Trinity And then the Andersons met again at the deathbed of their child. Theirs had been a particularly vicious divorce. Every item of property had been the subject of separate and distinct acrimony, each book in the bookcase, each stick in the woodbin, each plastic spoon in the picnic basket. Their lawyers hated them. The judge contemned them and, being merely a human judge, arranged everything with absolute impartiality, the settlement best calculated to infuriate both sides. He arranged custody of the child with a miracle of checks and balances that would have tried the patience of saints. A Solomon would have seen at once that the only thing to do was divide the child. Even then, venom would have flowed over how it was to be done, lengthwise or across. It must be clearly understood that the death was something for which neither could blame the other. There had been no carelessness, no oversight, no omission on either hand. Nor had the child taken it on herself to punish her parents by sudden death, by happy accident, real or feigned, or by the slow torment of anorexia. No, she was a perfectly happy child of divorce who simply chanced to sicken and die at her summer camp. He—Lars Anderson—came back from walking in the Highlands. She—Dolores Anderson, nee Sanchez y Silvera—came back from skiing in New Zealand. For five days they faced each other across the child, listening to each heavy breath as if it were the last and to be remembered always. Long before the end they prayed an earnest prayer of no faith for a miracle, for life or death, for release for all of them. The silence when it came was worse than the labored finality of each breath. There was now nothing to listen to but each other. She heard him say, “Are you all right?” He heard her say, “Can you stand it?” Of course they were neither of them all right. They could neither of them stand it. They leaned on each other out of the room and down the corridor and into the elevator. In the privacy of the elevator she confessed, “I blame myself.” “You mustn’t,” he said. He was quickly estimating the value of a similar confession on his part, but he didn’t want to get into a fight over who had the greater sense of guilt. He didn’t want to start up old times. He was still debating within himself when the elevator stopped at the next lower floor. They sprang apart as if they had been seizing a moment of desperate love. The door opened and a priest strode in. He was red-faced and gray and smelled of after-shave and deodorant—or perhaps that was the flowers he was carrying. He made them feel disgusting after their long vigil, as if he were seeing in their clothes and in their eyes the true state of their souls. The priest addressed himself to the control panel of the elevator, but with a bowl of flowers in each hand he was unable to manage the button. He gestured his helplessness with the bowls, with his shoulders, with his head, with a helpless smile. “Will you please punch Two for me?” he said. “Oh,” Lars said, “sorry.” And while he was saying it, Dolores pushed the button, barely in time. The priest began his charge out of the elevator. “Have a good day,” he said, managing to add no priestly overtones to the cliché. He looked at neither of them. “It’s not likely,” Lars said. “Our child has just died,” Dolores said. The priest was now out of the elevator. “I’ll pray for him,” he said without pausing or turning around. “I’d rather you didn’t,” Dolores said. “We don’t believe,” Lars said. “We’re all the same in God’s eyes,” the priest said out of the middle of his striding back. The doors closed. Lars and Dolores fell into each other’s arms. It was suddenly real. That night at Dolores’s motel they comforted each other as best they could. Mute despair led to half words. Half words led to tentative pats. Pats led to caresses. Caresses led to embraces. And embraces led to the blind old pantomime of denying death, futile and forever hopeful. They fell asleep to Do you remember? and Do you remember? They woke to a dream of remembering. Dolores remembered First Tooth, First Step, First Word. What Lars remembered chiefly was that earnest hand clutching his forefinger as they walked on Sunday morning through the zoo, communing with the beasts, their careful substitute for Mass. “We never did find our totem animal,” he said. “It might have helped,” she said. “Please don’t start that,” he said, retreating all the way to comforting pats—but no further. “Sorry,” she said. But each lay in the dark and reviewed the dim, massive, fierce shapes in an endless frieze: the hopelessly large and the unimaginably small, mammoth and amoeba, saber-toothed tiger and midget shrew, blue whale and plankton, all raging with assertive life. Lars and Dolores still had the rest of their lives to choose, although the choice was no longer important. They didn’t really want to know where they had gone wrong. “What it comes to,” he said, “is that there is no one else, anywhere on earth, who can remember with me.” “Yes,” she said. Although her answer was undoubtedly the right one, he had a sense he was talking to a star which might already have been extinct for a thousand years before this present light reached the earth. But that light, he knew, was all he had. And it was by this light that they decided—no, they decided nothing. They followed the light without knowing or really caring if it was a Star in the East or the very ignis fatuus. They found themselves together again in the old house, which Dolores had never left. The gaps in the bookcase were plugged. The woodbin was replenished. The picnic basket once again had its full complement of spoons. All was as it had been, although everything was different. Together they burned their child’s clothes, her books, her games, and all that was hers. But they made a strict calculation of the value and gave that sum, anonymously, to Goodwill Industries. “We must keep her picture,” Dolores said.