The snake moved.
My body tensed at the feel of it moving and once tensed, I held it tensed. It moved down my chest and across my belly and it seemed to take a long time for the extended body of it to travel the entire way and finally to be gone.
Now! my body yelled—now is the time to get away. But I held the body quiet and slowly opened my eyes, so slowly that sight came back gradually, a little at a time, first blurred sight through the eyelashes, then through narrow slits, and finally open eyes.
When they had been open before, I had seen nothing but the ugly, flattened, skull-shaped head pointing down into my face. But now I saw the rock roof that loomed four feet or so above my head, slanting downward toward my left. And I smelled the dank odor of a cave.
I lay, not upon the couch where I had gone to sleep to the sound of rain upon the roof, but on another slab of rock, the floor of the cave. I slanted my eyes to the left and saw that the cave was not deep, that it was, in fact, little more than a horizontal crevice weathered out of an exposed outcropping of limestone.
A snake den! I thought. Not one snake, perhaps, but probably any number of them. Which meant that I must remain as quiet as possible, at least until I could be sure there were no further snakes.
Morning light was slanting into the front of the crevice, touching and warming the right side of my body. I rolled my eyes in that direction and found that I was looking down a narrow notch that climbed up from the main valley. And there, down in the notch was the road that I had driven and there was my car as well, slanted across the road. But of the house that had been there the night before there was now no sign. Nor of the barn, nor the corral or woodpile. There was nothing at all. Between the road and where I lay stretched a hillside pasture spotted with clumps of heavy brush, tangles of blackberry thickets, and scattered groups of trees.
I might have thought it was a different place entirely had it not been for my car down there on the road. The car’s being there meant this was the place, all right, and that whatever had happened to change it must have happened to the house. And that was crazier than hell, for things like that simply do not happen. Houses and haystacks, corrals and woodpiles, and cars with their rear ends jacked up do not disappear.
Back in the rear of the cave I heard a slithering sound and a dry rustling and something went very swift and hard across my ankles and lit with a crunching noise in a pile of winter-dried leaves just outside the cave.
My body rebelled. It had been held in fear too long. It acted by an instinct which my mind was powerless to counteract and even as the reasoning part of me protested violently, I had already jackknifed out of the cave and was on my feet, crouching, on the hillside. In front of me and slightly to my right a snake was streaking down the hillside, going very fast. It reached a blackberry thicket and whipped into it and the sound of its movement stopped.
All movement stopped and all sound and I stood there on the hillside, tensed against the movement and listening for the sound.
Swiftly I scanned the ground all around me, then went over it more slowly and carefully. One of the first things that I saw was my jacket, bunched upon the ground, as if I had dropped it there most carefully—as if, I thought with something of a shock, I had meant to hang it on the chair back, but there had been no chair. Up the hillside just a pace or two were my shoes, set neatly side by side, their toes pointing down the hill. And when I saw the shoes I realized, for the first time, that I was in my stocking feet.
There was no sign of snakes, although there was something stirring around in the back of the cave, where it was too dark for me to see. A bluebird winged down and settled on an old dry mullen stalk and looked at me with beady eyes and from somewhere, far off across the valley, came the tinkling of a cowbell.
I reached out with a cautious toe and prodded at the jacket. There seemed to be nothing under it or inside of it, so I reached down and picked it up and shook it. Then I picked up the shoes and without stopping to put them on beat a retreat down the hillside, but very cautiously, holding in check an overpowering urge to run and get it over with, to get off the hillside and down to the car as quickly as I could. I went slowly, watching closely for snakes every foot of the way. The hillside, I knew, must be crawling with them—there had been the one upon my chest and the one that went across my ankles and the one still messing around in the back of the cave, plus God knew how many others.
But I didn’t see a one. I stepped on a thistle with my right foot and had to go on tiptoe with that foot the rest of the way so I wouldn’t drive the spines that were sticking in the sock into my flesh, but there weren’t any snakes—none visible, at least.
Maybe, I thought, they were as afraid of me as I was of them. But I told myself they couldn’t be. I found that I was shaking and that my teeth were chattering and at the bottom of the hill, just above the road, I sat down weakly on a patch of grass, well away from any thicket or boulder where a snake might lurk and picked the thistle spines out of my sock. I tried to put on my shoes, but my hands were shaking so I couldn’t and it was then I realized how frightened I had been and the knowledge of the true depth of my fright only made me more so.
My stomach rose up and hit me in the face and I rolled over on one side and vomited and kept on retching for a long time after there was nothing further to bring up.
The vomiting seemed to help, however, and I finally got my chin wiped off and managed to get my shoes on and get them tied, then staggered down to the car and leaned against its side, almost hugging it I was so glad to be there.
And standing there, hugging that ugly hunk of metal, I saw that the car was not really stuck. The ditch was far shallower than I had thought it was.
I got into the car and slid behind the wheel. The key was in my pocket and I switched on the motor. The car walked out of there with no trouble and I headed down the road, back the way I’d come the night before.
It was early morning; the sun could not have been more than an hour or so into the sky. Spiderwebs in the roadside grass still glittered with the dew and meadowlarks went soaring up into the sky, trailing behind them the trilling tatters of their songs.
I turned a bend and there the vanished house stood beside the road, just ahead of me, with its crazily canted chimney and the woodpile at the back, with the car beside the woodpile, and the barn that leaned against the haystack. All of it as I’d seen it the night before, in the flare of lightning flashes.
It was quite a jolt to see it and my mind went into a sudden spurt of speed, scrambling frantically to account for it. I had been wrong, it seemed, to think that because the car had been in the road that the house had disappeared. For here was the house exactly as I had seen it just a few hours ago; so it stood to reason that the house had been there all the time and that the car had been moved and I’d been moved as well—a good mile up the road.
It made no sense at all and, furthermore, it seemed impossible. The car had been stuck tight in the ditch. I’d tried to get it out and the wheels had spun and there had been no moving it. And I—drunk as I might have been—certainly could not have been lugged a mile up the road and laid out in a snake den without ever knowing it.
All of it was crazy—the charging Triceratops that had disappeared before it could drive home its charge, the car stuck in the ditch, Snuffy Smith and his wife Lowizey, and even the corn squeezings we had poured down our gullets around the kitchen table. For I had no hangover; I almost wished I had, for if I did I could blame on the fact of being drunk all that was going on. A man couldn’t have drunk all the bad moonshine that I remembered drinking and not have felt some sort of repercussions. I had vomited, of course, but that was too late to make any difference so far as a hangover was concerned. By that time the foulness of the booze would have worked its way well throughout my body.
And yet here was what appeared to be the self-same place as I had sought refuge in the night before. True, I had seen it only in the flare of lightning flashes, but it all was there, as
I remembered it.
Why the Triceratops, I wondered, and why the rattlesnakes? The dinosaur apparently had been no real danger (it might even have been a hallucination, although I didn’t think so), but the rattlesnakes had been for real. They had been a grisly setup for murder and who would want to murder me? And if someone did want to murder me, for reasons which I did not know, surely there would have been easier and less complicated ways in which to go about it.
I was staring at the house so hard that the car almost went off the road. I just barely jerked it back in time.
There had been, to start with, no sign of life about the place, but now, suddenly, there was. Dogs came boiling out of the yard and started racing for the road, bawling at the car. Never in my life had I seen so many dogs, all of them lanky and so skinny that even when they were some distance off, I could see the shine of ribs just underneath their hides. Most of them were hounds, with flapping ears and slender, whiplike tails. Some of them came howling down to the gate and streamed out into the road to head me off and others of them didn’t bother with the gate, but sailed across the fence in flying leaps.
The door of the house came open and a man stepped out on the stoop and yelled at them and at his shout they came skidding to a halt, the entire pack of them, and went slinking back toward the house, like a gang of boys caught in a watermelon patch. Those dogs knew very well they had no business chasing cars.
But right at the moment, I wasn’t paying too much attention to them, for I was looking at the man who had stepped out to yell at them. I had expected, when he’d stepped out, that he’d be Snuffy Smith. I don’t know why I expected this—perhaps because I needed something on which I could hang some logical explanation of what had happened to me. But he wasn’t Snuffy Smith. He was considerably taller than Snuffy and he didn’t wear a hat and he didn’t have a pipe. And I remembered then that the man could not have been Snuffy Smith, for there had been no dogs last night. This was the neighbor that Snuffy had warned me of, the man with the pack of vicious dogs. It would be worth your life, Snuffy had warned me, to go walking down that road.
And it had been damn near worth my life, I reminded myself, to stay with Snuffy Smith, sitting at the kitchen table and drinking moonshine liquor with him.
It was incredible, of course, that I should give credence to the fact that there had been a Snuffy Smith. There wasn’t any such person; there simply couldn’t be. He and his pinheaded wife were zany characters that paraded through a comic strip. But hard as I tried to tell this to myself, I couldn’t make it stick.
Except for the dogs and the man who stood out in the yard yelling at them, the place was the same, however, as Snuffy’s place had been. And that, I told myself, was beyond all reason.
Then I saw something that was different and I felt a great deal better about the entire crazy mess, although it was a small thing to feel very good about. There was a car standing by the woodpile, but its rear end wasn’t jacked up. It was standing on four wheels, although I saw that a couple of sawhorses and a plank were leaning against the woodpile, as if the car only recently had been jacked up for repair, but that now it had been fixed and taken off the blocks.
I was almost past the place by now and once again the car headed for the ditch and I caught it just in time. When I craned my neck around for a final look, I saw the mailbox that stood on the post beside the gate.
Lettered on it in crude printing, made with a dripping paintbrush, was the name:
T. WILLIAMS
3
George Duncan had grown older, but I recognized him the minute I stepped into the store. He was gray and shaky and he had an old man’s gauntness, but he was the same man who had often given me a sack of peppermint candy, free, when my father bought a box of groceries and, perhaps, a sack of bran, which George Duncan lugged in from the back room where he kept his livestock feed.
The storekeeper was behind the counter and talking to a woman who had her back to me. His gravelly voice came clear across the room.
“These Williams kids,” he said, “have always been a pack of troublemakers. Ever since the day he came sneaking in here, this community has never had a thing but grief from Tom Williams and his tribe. I tell you, Miss Adams, they’re a hopeless lot and if I was you, I wouldn’t worry none about them. I’d just go ahead and teach them the best way that I could and I’d crack down on them when they stepped out of line and that would be the end of it.”
“But, Mr. Duncan,” said the woman, “they aren’t all that bad. They have no decent family background, naturally, and sometimes their manners are appalling, but they really aren’t vicious. They’re under all sorts of pressures—you can’t imagine what social pressures they are under …”
He grinned at her, a snaggle-toothed grin that had grimness rather than good humor in it. “I know,” he said. “I know. You’ve told me this before, when they were in other scrapes. They’re rejected. I think that’s what you said.”
“That is right,” she told him. “Rejected by the other children and rejected by the town. They are left no dignity. When they come in here, I bet you keep an eye on them.”
“You are right; I do. They would steal me blind.”
“How do you know they would?”
“I’ve caught them doing it.”
“It’s resentment,” she said. “They are striking back.”
“Not at me, they ain’t. I never done a thing to them.”
“Perhaps not you alone,” she said. “Not you personally. But you and everyone. They feel that every hand is raised against them. They know they aren’t wanted. They have no place in this community, not because of anything they’ve done, but because this community decided, long ago, that the family was no good. I think that’s the way you say it—the family is no good.”
The store, I saw, had changed but little. There were new items on the shelves and there were items that were missing, but the shelves remained the same. The old round glass container that at one time had held a wheel of cheese was gone, but the old tobacco cutter that had been used to slice off squares of chewing tobacco still was bolted to the ledge back of the counter. In one far corner of the store stood a refrigerator case used for dairy goods (which explained, perhaps, the absence of the cheese box on the counter), but that was the only thing that had been really changed in the entire store. The potbellied stove still stood in its pan of sand at the center of the store and the same scarred chairs were ranged about it, polished from long sitting. Up toward the front was the same old pigeonholed compartment of mailboxes with the stamp window in the center of it and from the open door that led into the back came the redolent odor of livestock feed, stacked up in piles of burlap and paper bags.
It was, I thought, as if I’d seen the place only yesterday and had come in this morning to be faintly surprised at the few changes which had been effected overnight.
I turned around and stared out the dirt-streaked, fly-specked window at the street outside and here there were some changes. On the corner opposite the bank a lot, that I remembered as a vacant lot, now was occupied by a car repair shop thrown up of cement blocks and in front of it a single gas pump with the paint peeled off it. Next door to it was the barber shop, a tiny building that was in no way changed at all except that it seemed somewhat more dingy and in need of paint than I remembered it. And next to it the hardware store, so far as I could see, had not changed at all.
Behind me the conversation apparently had reached its end and I turned around. The woman who had been talking with Duncan was walking toward the door. She was younger than I’d thought when I had seen her talking at the counter. She wore a gray jacket and skirt and her coal-black hair was pulled back tight against her head and knotted in the back. She wore glasses rimmed by some pale plastic and her face had upon it a look of worry and of anger, mixed. She walked with a smart, almost military, gait, and she had the look of a private secretary to a big executive—businesslike and curt and not about to brook any foolishness on the p
art of anyone.
At the door she turned and asked Duncan, “You’re coming to the program tonight, aren’t you?”
Duncan grinned with his snaggled teeth. “Haven’t missed one yet. Not for many years. Don’t reckon I’ll start now.”
She opened the door then and was swiftly gone. Out of the corner of my eye I watched her marching purposefully down the street.
Duncan came out from behind the counter and shambled toward me.
“Can I do anything for you?” he asked.
“My name is Horton Smith,” I said. “I made arrangements …”
“Now, just a minute there,” said Duncan quickly, peering closely at me. “When your mail started coming in, I recognized the name, but I told myself there must be some mistake. I thought maybe …”
“There is no mistake,” I said, holding out my hand. “How are you, Mr. Duncan?”
He grasped my hand in a powerful grip and held onto it. “Little Horton Smith,” he said. “You used to come in with your pa …”
“And you used to give me a sack of candy.”
His eyes twinkled beneath the heavy brows and he gave my hand an extra hearty shake, then dropped it.
It was going to be all right, I told myself. The old Pilot Knob still existed and I was no stranger. I was coming home.
“And you’re the same one,” he said, “as is on the radio and sometimes on television.”
I admitted that I was.
“Pilot Knob,” he told me, “is plumb proud of you. It took some getting used to at first to listen to a home-town boy on the radio or sit face to face with him on the television screen. But we got used to it at last and most of us listened to you and talked about it afterwards. We’d go around saying to one another that Horton has said this or that and we took what you had to say for gospel. But,” he asked, “what are you doing back? Not that we aren’t glad to have you.”
“I think I’ll stay for a while,” I told him. “For a few months, maybe for a year.”