Copperhead

They were warned about the snakes right away but did not expect the snakes’ number or the regularity with which they insinuated themselves into the old house, to be discovered working along the shingled porch wall or, say, curled like a cat in the cool corner of the moldering library, or once, in spectacular fashion, arching out from beneath the mantlepiece, presenting a bobbing yard of muscle into the air of the little corner bedroom where they were housed for the year. This particular snake had, it was thought, made its way up the chimney and worked its way beneath the antebellum siding and, seeking light or scenting the air of their room, followed its nose. They were by this time ready, one was to take the five-gallon plastic hardware bucket and with the handy wire-hooked stick, loop the beast and drop it in. The snake could gain no purchase on the plastic sides, and so the next task was to bring the thing down the driveway, beneath the magnificent spreading live oak, across the tufted lawn, across the gravel road, down the path past the rowboat to the lake, and tip it out. One watched it slip away across the sand into the brush. He thought of marking them somehow, to see whether their visitors were returning. But like so many things in his life, at that point his impulses were passing and provisional, his aims evaporating the moment they arose, the only exception being his persistent and deepening wish to have some other girlfriend than the one he did, while at the same time being far too cowardly and essentially inept to address this issue, it also being the case that their situation here struck him as pretty marvelous, this ancient house and its two hundred acres, its adjacent lake and fields, the looming mirror in the corridor with its flaking gold frame in which one did not advisedly gaze too long as always something seemed to shimmer in its corners, ghosts or just the melting intrusion of history and its unpassing presence here. Furthermore, sometimes they had good times together. They laughed, they thought about the future, and at night a station in Baton Rouge broadcast an hour of ethereal electronic music, wordless and drifting, that billowed like blue curtains, she said, in her widening mind, and he admired that, he remembered that, it was a good description, it took note of the height of things in this house, their low position in it and in their lives, which had only barely started. And so. And yet. The weekend she went away he invited someone else to come, another girl, to visit, and she did, wary but unsurprised, probably, by his unseasoned passes, which got him nowhere. She was stiff and unyielding, though she accepted his kisses, a few of them,

before she mentioned the lake, and they went off across the grass and down the bank and here was the steel rowboat overturned on the shore. There would be snakes under it, he was sure, there always were, and in the churning heat they would be seeking shade, and so he warned her, and he flipped the boat with a single heave, and the promised snakes uncoiled in alarm and darted into the water, and as this all happened he watched her expression carefully, seeking whatever it was he was seeking there, in whatever that look of hers was, shock and alarm and a kind of greedy loathing, as though relieved to find the thing that was truly vile right here before her, because in those days, although he didn’t know it, he was always looking for clues to who he really was, the things he could not tell about himself, not yet, not for a while.