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Asian Water Snake
by Vince LiCata Ever since I was eight, I'd spent the summer with my Aunt Katherine and Uncle Gus in Louisiana. The summer I turned twelve, Aunt Kat decided to try her hand at being a bounty hunter. Certainly, she needed the money. Uncle Gus had all but drained their bank account a few months earlier when he left Aunt Kat for a woman I only ever heard referred to as "that gun show whore". But, I think it was about more than money. Something that had been held underwater during eighteen years of marriage to Uncle Gus was floating to the surface. This is why, at somewhere around midnight, two days after I turned twelve, I found myself standing ankle deep in swamp water, struggling to stay awake, while Aunt Kat scanned the horizon with a ancient pair of binoculars she said were leftover from when Uncle Gus used to hunt deer instead of beaver. After a moment, she lowered the binoculars and pointed across the flat expanse of water and grass at something that looked like an amusement park in outer space. "That's it," she said, and she kept on pointing, her arm extended towards the unreal lights rising out of the swamp. "That's the refinery," I said. At this distance the refinery had a bizarrely calming and ethereal look to it. It was like gazing at a futuristic city. The complicated multitude of lights was beautiful in the darkness, its allure betrayed only by the periodic flames bursting from the tops of the tallest towers, and by the barely detectable gaseous haze surrounding it all like a luminous fog. "Not that," she said. "In front of it." The only other thing in view was the darkness itself, pushed closer by the constant, shrill, insect-frog buzz that surrounded us. After a moment she spoke again, "And I believe that that is a manufacturing plant not a refinery, probably plastics. Do you see a dark outline blocking some of the light from the left edge of the plant?" It took me a minute to find it. "Yes, there--" Then I pointed too. She didn't look where I was pointing. She bent over and picked up a flashlight and Uncle Gus's deer hunting rifle from inside the flat bottomed pirogue. The boat was floating in the same four inches of water in which we were standing. She pulled the gunstrap over her head and onto her shoulder. The rifle hung diagonally across her back, and she fiddled with the strap until she settled on threading it between her breasts. "It's a one story building," she continued, "built to blend into the swamp. Built by the military to train soldiers for swamp fighting. Abandoned now. That's where he'll be." She lifted one foot into the boat. "Um, Aunt Kat?" I said. She looked directly at me, and said., "It's a guess, but it's not a wild guess. It all makes sense. That's where he'll be hiding." "But Aunt Kat-" "No buts about it, mister-I'm going out there, and you're staying here. We discussed this on the drive over here. I know you weren't asleep." "Aunt Kat, I'm trying to tell you that there's a snake on your boot." She shined the flashlight at the boot she'd just placed in the boat, and before the reptile could adjust to the brightness she grabbed it by the tail and flipped it sidelong into the darkness. "Asian water snake," she said, staring in the direction she'd thrown it. "Not native to this area. Rare. Very poisonous. Probably escaped from a zoo or somebody's personal collection." She steadied the boat with her hand, then stepped in the rest of the way and sat down in one continuous motion. "Don't worry," she said, looking at me now, "the likelihood of finding another one is low. You can sleep in the car if you're worried." Then she pushed the pirogue off into the dark, toward the light. It turned out that the small concrete building in the swamp was exactly where he was hiding. I've never figured out how to tell where the current of truth is in Aunt Kat's river of assertions. It also turned out that that night was the last time I saw Aunt Kat standing on her own two legs. I woke up at dawn and waved down a passing car. No cell phone. The driver helped me wave down another car. The sheriff didn't find Aunt Kat until nearly noon, with a bullet lodged in her hip. Her fugitive quarry was long gone. Aunt Kat was out of the hospital within a month, but they say she'll probably never be able to walk on her own again. This coming summer I'm supposed to help her out by pushing her door to door to sell encyclopedias on compact disc. She says she wants to earn enough money to get an electric chair so she can apply to be a store detective at the new mall. She says no one in their right mind would be suspicious of a woman in a wheelchair. |
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