They don’t bother to pull him to his feet. They simply fold the door back and fling him down the steps.
The red dog has every joint bone in his body already hurting so he hardly feels it when he hits the ground on his face and chest, though the cut from the glove keeps stinging for the three days he lies in the dark mostly sleeping or re-stuporized by the malaria. Snakes, come out of some phantom place, crawl over him like the times before, but like the times before they don’t bite. They like the warmth of his body. To him they seem clean and pure, as if the ugliness and dirt of the underworld never touches them. There is no grime, no dust, nothing alien on their long bodies that are cool and dry, and the scales under his fingertips, snugly fastened and hard, flexing as the snake stretches out its length, fascinate him.
“We got no reason to spite each other,” he says to them, dark writhers in the stinky dark. They keep the rats away.
The bugs keep up their poking and probing. He rubs dirt on his body to keep the mosquitoes at bay, and when he feels the thin sharp scuttle of a scorpion he stays as still as possible. They never bite him either.
Only the doodlebugs are unimpressed by his efforts or his stature, if that is what it is, as a god among the vermin.
“Chief of the itty-bits,” he says to himself like he is five years old.
The snappish little front-loaded doodlebugs have a tendency to clamp their jaws shut on whatever living things they come in contact with.
“Yi lord,” he cries softly, holding his position so the four-foot swamp rattler lying in the crook of his elbow won’t be disturbed.
He dreams of his mother. She had curly toes with brown nails that had a shine to them. She smelled like he knew heaven smelled. She liked to jump up and down and sing so loud Mr. Culver from next door would send a child over to tell her to stop. She couldn’t read well but she could get anything that was in a picture. She carried photographs around with her of people she didn’t know, given to her by people she didn’t know. My sweets, she called them. She got angry like an animal would get angry, wild and quick and lunging. He never minded being hit by her — not afterwards — he was a child, how could he mind? She looked at him sometimes like she would eat him up with a great relish. He likes that when he thinks about it. In the dreams she runs like the wind, her pale heels flashing.
