“How long a side trip?”
“Not long at all. Once we leave the interstate, the first road is paved but the second is just gravel, and the third is all natural shale. But none of it’s bad road, and it all leads up into the hills, not into the flats, so the chances we’ll be caught by a flash flood are so small they don’t worry me at all.”
“How small?” I asked.
“Tiny, really.”
“How tiny?”
“Infinitesimal, child.”
The desert doesn’t get much annual rainfall, but what it does receive tends to come all at once. A lot of terrific Japanese poets have written uncountable haiku about the silvery delicacy of the rain and about how it vanishes so elegantly into the moonlit river or the silver lake or the trembling pond, rain like a maiden’s tears, but not a line of any of them was appropriate to this insane storm. This was more of a Russian rain, in particular a mean Soviet rain, coming down like ten thousand hammers on ten thousand anvils in the People’s Foundry of the Revolution.
Mrs. Fischer said, “Mazie’s exit is about two miles ahead.”
When we got there, the highway sign didn’t say anything about Mazie. Instead, it warned ABANDONED ROADWAY / NO OUTLET.
When I noted this discrepancy between what Mrs. Fischer had promised and what the reality proved to be, she reached out to pat my shoulder with her right hand, driving only with her left, though in her defense, I must admit that she had slowed to sixty for the exit.
The two-lane paved road had been built in an age when we were still going to war with European nations, and it consisted of more potholes than blacktop. Fortunately, it didn’t go far before it gave way to the gravel road, which was more accommodating, although the deluge was so intense that I had to lean forward and squint to see the track, which seemed always about to wither away into sand and sage.
After we had gone no more than a quarter of a mile on the gravel, the headlights flared off a sign with reflective yellow letters that announced DANGER / STAY OUT / ARTILLERY RANGE / MILITARY VEHICLES ONLY.
When I questioned the wisdom of ignoring such a warning, Mrs. Fischer said, “Oh, that’s nothing, dear.”
“It seems like something,” I disagreed.
“It’s not official. Mazie and Tracker put that up themselves, years ago, to scare people off.”
“What kind of people would want to come out to this godforsaken place anyway?”
“The kind you want to scare off.”
By the angle of our ascent, I knew we were driving into low hills, although in this darkness and downpour, I couldn’t see well enough to confirm what I felt. Mrs. Fischer told me when the gravel gave way to a trail of broken shale, though I couldn’t feel any difference in the ride.
Shale is brittle and over the millennia is laid down in thin strata, so the fragments can be sharp, which is why I said, “Hope we don’t have a flat tire out here.”
“It isn’t possible, child.”
“No disrespect, ma’am, but of course it’s possible. Why wouldn’t it be possible?”
She glanced at me and winked. “One-Ear Bob.”
“What—you have some kind of armored tires or something?”
“Some kind of something,” Mrs. Fischer confirmed.
Before I could press for details, we had to stop because of all the snakes.
Twenty-one
IF YOU ARE FOND OF TARANTULAS AND RATTLESNAKES, this desert will delight you no less than the Metropolitan Opera enchants lovers of Puccini, Donizetti, and Verdi. It is a veritable festival of spiders, a jubilee of snakes with ten times more fangs per square mile than in Transylvania, and with more forked tongues than you would find even in the halls of Congress.
Mrs. Fischer was quicker than I to recognize what surged across the broken-shale track, illuminated by the headlights, and she braked to a full stop before driving over them. I leaned forward, fascinated by the creepy spectacle of at least a double score of six-foot-long rattlesnakes seething through the storm, some of them slithering flat to the ground, others with their heads raised, all moving south to north, as though they were livestock driven by herdsmen. Their sinuous bodies glistened in the rain, wet dark scales reflecting the halogen beams as if some magical energy shimmered through their muscular, continuously flexing bodies.
Perhaps their subterranean nests had flooded, forcing them out into the downpour, but that seemed unlikely because their instinct, which was really something more like a program, compelled them to choose their lairs with entrances shaped to direct water safely away. Besides, rattlers hunt singly, not in packs, and they don’t pursue prey at speed, but for the most part lie in wait. These snakes seemed unnaturally compelled, neither escaping from flooded dens nor driven by a need for food, but harried to some mysterious purpose.
I thought of the rats earlier in the day, of the yellow-eyed coyotes in Magic Beach more than a month previously, and I expected these serpents to turn their flat, wicked-looking heads toward us and reveal, by their interest, that what they sought was us. But they glided across the road without seeming to be aware of the limousine.
“They can’t do what they’re doing on a night like this,” Mrs. Fischer said.
“You mean the rain?”
“No. The chill. They’re cold-blooded.”
Of course. Unlike mammals, reptiles don’t maintain an optimal body temperature, and their blood warms and cools according to the temperature of their environment. They hunt when the desert, having banked the heat of the day, pays it out to the night. In weather as chilly as this, they should be coiled harmlessly in their nests, lethargic, dreaming the dreams of predators, if they dreamed at all.
Had the double score of snakes become hundreds, I wouldn’t have been surprised. Logic argued that such a strange scene might easily get even stranger.
Instead, the last of them slithered off the shale and among ragged clumps of mesquite, and Mrs. Fischer said, “All that lightning a while back … I think it meant something.”
“What do you think it meant?”
“Nothing good.”
She took her foot off the brake pedal, and the limousine eased forward.
To my right, at the periphery of vision, a flicker of movement caught my attention, and as I turned my head, an open-mouthed rattler slammed against the window in the passenger door, making a sound like bare sweaty fists smacking hard into a punching bag in a gym, and fell away at once. Two more erupted through the night, whiplike, eyes aglitter, fangs bared, drops of milky venom spattering the glass on impact and diluted at once by the sluicing rain. A coiled snake can strike at prey exactly as far away as the snake is long, maybe more than six feet in this case, because these were big suckers, unusually big, well fed on tortoise eggs, mice, kangaroo rats, grasshoppers, lizards, tarantulas, and a variety of other treats that you won’t find in your favorite all-you-can-eat buffet.
Mrs. Fischer said, “Goodness gracious,” alerting me to the fact that not all the thudding of snake flesh against limo was on my side of the vehicle.
Undulant serpents seemed almost to swim through the dense wind-driven rain, and collided with the driver-door window, four in quick succession.
“Well, I never,” Mrs. Fischer declared, sounding displeased with Mother Nature for this rude assault.
As she tramped on the accelerator, a rattler came over the port fender, snout-first into the windshield, where its hypodermic fangs hooked around a wiper blade, squirting venom. The wiper stuttered before lifting, almost broke, but then flicked the lashing reptile into the night before slapping back onto the windshield to resume rhythmically clearing away the rain.
“Good glass,” I said.
“Yes, it is,” she agreed.
“One-Ear Bob?”
“Absolutely.”
We left the snakes behind.
Mrs. Fischer eased up on the accelerator.
I said, “You ever heard of snakes attacking a car?”
“No, never.”
“
Me neither. I wonder why they would.”
“I wonder, too. And I don’t believe a snake can spring that far.”
“The length of its body, ma’am.”
“These came farther than that.”
“I sort of thought so, too.”
Bullets of rain broke against the armored glass.
“Have you ever eaten rattlesnake, dear?”
“No, ma’am.”
“It tastes good if you prepare it right.”
“I’m a little bit of a finicky eater.”
“I sympathize. The taste of lamb makes me gag.”
“Lambs are too cute to eat,” I said.
“Exactly. You can’t eat too-cute animals. Like kittens.”
“Or dogs. Cows are nice, but they’re not cute.”
“They’re not,” she agreed. “Neither are chickens.”
“Pigs are a little bit cute.”
Mrs. Fischer disagreed. “Only in some movies like Babe and Charlotte’s Web. Those are fairy-tale pigs, not real pigs.”