“I’m not waiting here all day,” Hely whispered, but then across the street the screen door opened and out stepped Mrs. Dorrier in her white cap and blue uniform. Following was the sun-baked Yankee woman, in dirty scuffs and a parrot-green housedress, with Pancho hooked over her arm. “Two dallors a pill!” she squawked. “I’m takin forteen dallors of medicine a day! I said to that boy down there at the pharmacist’s—”
“Medicine is expensive,” said Mrs. Dorrier politely, and turned to go; she was tall and thin, about fifty, with a gray streak in her black hair and very correct posture.
“I said, ‘Son, I gat emphysema! I gat gallstones! I gat arthritis! I—What’s your problem, Panch,” she said to Pancho, who had stiffened in her grasp, his gigantic ears cocked straight out from the side of his head. Even though Harriet was hidden behind the tree, he still seemed to see her; his lemur-like eyes were fixed directly on her. He bared his teeth at her and then—with rabid ferocity—began to bark and struggle to get away.
The woman whacked him with the flat of her palm across the top of his head. “Shut your trap!”
Mrs. Dorrier laughed—slightly uncomfortable—and picked up her bag and started down the steps. “Next Tuesday then.”
“He’s all worked up,” called the woman, still wrestling with Pancho. “We had a winder-peeper last night. And the police come next door.”
“Great day!” Mrs. Dorrier paused, at the door of her sedan. “You don’t mean it!”
Pancho was still barking up a storm. As Mrs. Dorrier got in her car and slowly rolled away, the woman—standing on the sidewalk now—whacked Pancho again, then carried him inside and slammed the door.
Hely and Harriet waited, for a moment or two, breathless; and when they were sure that no cars were coming, they dashed across the street to the grassy median and dropped to their knees by the bicycles.
Harriet jerked her head at the driveway of the frame house. “Nobody’s home over there.” The stone in her chest had lifted somewhat and she felt lighter now, level and swift.
With a grunt, Hely wrenched his bicycle free.
“I need to get that snake from under there.”
The brusqueness of her voice made him feel sorry for her without understanding why. He stood his bike up. Harriet was astride her own bicycle, glaring at him.
“We’ll come back,” he said, avoiding her gaze. He hopped on and, together, they kicked off and glided down the street.
Harriet overtook him, and passed, aggressively, cutting him off at the corner. She was acting like she’d just had the shit beaten out of her, he thought, looking after her hunched low on the bike and pedalling furiously down the street, like Dennis Peet, or Tommy Scoggs, mean kids who beat up on smaller kids and got beaten up themselves by larger ones. Maybe it was because she was a girl—but when Harriet got in these mean daredevil moods, it excited him. The thought of the cobra excited him too; and though he didn’t feel comfortable explaining to Harriet—not yet—that he’d set half a dozen rattlesnakes loose in the apartment, it had just occurred to him that the frame house was empty, and might be for some time.
————
“How often do you think he eats?” said Harriet, who was stooped over pushing the wagon from behind as Hely tugged it ahead in front—not very fast, because it was almost too dark to see. “Maybe we should give him a frog.”
Hely heaved the wagon down from the curb and into the street. A beach towel from his house was draped over the box. “I’m not feeding this thing any frog,” he said.
He had been correct in his hunch that the Mormon house was empty. It had been only a hunch, nothing more: based on a conviction that he, personally, would rather spend the night locked in a car trunk than a house where rattlesnakes had been found crawling loose. He still had not mentioned to Harriet what he had done, but all the same he had brooded upon his actions sufficiently to justify his innocence. Little did he realize that the Mormons, in a room at the Holiday Inn, were at that very moment discussing with a real-estate lawyer in Salt Lake whether the presence of poisonous vermin in a rental property constituted a breach of contract.
Hely hoped that nobody drove by and saw them. He and Harriet were supposed to be at the movies. His father had given them money to go. She’d spent the whole afternoon at Hely’s house, which wasn’t like her (usually she got tired of him and went home early, even when he begged her to stay) and for hours they’d sat cross-legged on the floor of Hely’s bedroom playing tiddlywinks as they talked quietly about the stolen cobra and what to do with it. The box was too big to conceal on the premises of her house, or his. At length they’d settled on an abandoned overpass west of town, which spanned County Line Road at a particularly desolate stretch, outside the city limits.
