FYI.

This story is over 5 years old.

The Fiction Issue 2009

“Fathers and Snakes”

Clancy Martin used to make a living as a jewelry salesman. Now he is a translator of Nietzsche and Kierkegaard and an associate professor of philosophy at the University of Missouri.

A few years ago Clancy Martin used to make a living as a jewelry salesman in Texas, a job that mostly consisted of conning and lying to a lot of people. Now he is a translator of Nietzsche and Kierkegaard, an associate professor of philosophy at the University of Missouri, and an author who recently published an extremely entertaining first novel entitled How to Sell to heaps of well-deserved critical acclaim. The novel, by the way, is about a young jewelry salesman in Texas who lies to and cons a lot of people. After we asked him to send something for this Fiction Issue that you are now holding in your hands, Clancy wrote the story that you’re about to read. “This story runs very close to my own childhood,” he told us. “I had an obsession with pets and spent lots of time in parks in Calgary, Alberta, catching garter snakes and other animals that I would keep for a few months and then release. I was writing a story about that when I got to thinking about one time when my father promised to move me down to the States with him. My parents were divorced. He drove up to Calgary from Florida (he was on his way to California but was going to grab me along the way) and then, in Calgary, changed his mind and left me there, after I had already told my mom I was leaving and why I had to leave. This sort of catch-and-release parenting seemed like a strange parallel to my catch-and-release pet owning.” Rather than turning on our light I found my binoculars and my sneakers in the dark. I didn’t want to wake Pat because he would ask to come along. It was the day Dad was coming to get me. My backpack was hanging next to the door above my suitcase. The suitcase was full of clothes and a few books and ready to go. The backpack was for the snake. My stepfather, Blair, had said, more than a year ago, “That’s it. No more pets.” Last week when Dad agreed to take me with him to the States I asked him, “Could I bring a snake? It could live in a shoebox until we get to Coronado,” and he said, “Why the hell not?” I didn’t have enough money for the corn snake I wanted at the pet store, so I was going to capture a garter snake in the wild. You can catch them if you know how. Outside on the porch the two bundles of heavy Sunday newspapers were already there, next to my old wagon and my canvas papers bag. I could do them late for once. “I don’t want you delivering the goddamn papers, Clancy, like you grew up in a barn,” my dad had said when I first told him about the paper route. “Running around town with a newspaper in your hand is no job for a Martin.” “It’s just for some extra money, Dad,” I said. Tomorrow, I would be gone, and my stepsister would take over my route. Once I was down the steps I thought: I doubt they even have newspaper boys in California. What fathers can never speak about is the relief of leaving them, the children. They insist that they only left their mothers. I remember a consoling line from a Donald Barthelme story. It could only have been written by a man who had left his children behind. In the story the mother has told their daughter, all the years she was growing up with her mother while her father was living somewhere else, that the father left them because the daughter, as a baby or small child, made too much noise for him to do his writing. When he learned this from his daughter, that this was the lie she had been told, he repeated the line to his daughter over and over again, so that, he says, the untruth of it might be etched into granite. He insists that it was a lie, you understand, but repeats the lie over and over again, so that his daughter will understand what a lie it was. Yes, that is the line we repeat to ourselves, that we left because of the child, in the hope that we convince ourselves of its opposite: We did not leave because of the child or the children, we only left because of that awful wife. But then there is also always the echo of the line as it is spoken, and the cruel question that doubles back like the snake that bites itself: Why did I leave, truly? In the park we most often used to walk to, me and my daughter, I still remember the way the leaves were that September, October, and November, the way she liked to kick up the browned leaves with her small feet. When you live away from your child, the child is like a ghost limb after surgery. You still try to move the limb and use it to do things. You still have as many nerve endings in the limb as before it was removed. But those cut nerves are protesting, of course, the amputation. Every afternoon when my stepdad came home from 1835 House—that was the halfway house for alcoholics he directed—he and my mother would take our dog out on a long walk. When I was little my mother told me: “We walk too far. You couldn’t walk that far if you tried and I can’t carry you.” After the walk my stepfather took a nap, and we had to play downstairs so we wouldn’t disturb him. Saturday our stepfather went to work, but he took Sundays off and on Sunday mornings their walk lasted until noon. The older kids kept an eye on us, or we had the house to ourselves. My little brother and I watched Wide World of Sports and ate Old Dutch salt-and-vinegar potato chips. Mom bought potato chips every other week and because there were two bags in a box we were divided up in natural pairs: Pat and I always shared a box of salt and vinegar, my stepsisters Lisa and Teryn had dill pickle or ketchup, my stepbrothers Drew and Jeff ate barbecue, et cetera. Once your bag was gone you waited until the next time she bought chips. Pat would eat his one chip at a time, while we watched M.A.S.H. or The Mary Tyler Moore Show, and enjoy the way I struggled not to look at him, because I had already eaten mine the first day Mom brought them home. In the evenings, after dinner, our stepfather worked at Collector’s. That was his antique store. I did not understand until many years later the true reason he worked day and night the way he did. It was not for the money. My mother pretended not to understand this, and even used his hard work as a weapon against us. At the dinner table, for example. “Do you see how much your stepfather is working? He leaves at six in the morning and isn’t home until ten at night. Do you know why he works so hard? It’s for you children. The least you could do is show some gratitude. The least you can do is eat what you are given.”

Annons

I was a picky eater. “My carrots are mixed up in my rice, Mom. I can’t eat it like that.” “They’re barely touching each other, Clancy. Stop it.” “We don’t waste food in this house,” my stepfather would say, looking down at his plate. Our mom often told us the story of how she warned our stepfather, when he proposed to her: “I will marry you, but my children come first.” As a boy I heard this and understood it to mean that Blair was not permitted to discipline us. Now, with children of my own, and with a wife who is the stepmother to my oldest daughter, I understand that she was saying more than that. But he did not yell at us or spank us like he did his own children. In the new house we rented when they married there were the seven of them, his kids, and the three of us. He was toughest on my stepsister Lisa. He often beat her with the handle of a plunger. He would also pull her around the house and up and down the stairs by her long sandy-brown hair. One time, when my mother was in the hospital for a broken foot, and I was on the phone with a friend for too long, he kicked open the door to my bedroom and pulled the phone from my hands by the cord. He broke the latch on my door. “You selfish little bastard!” he yelled. “Your mother has been calling from the hospital! The phone’s been busy for hours!” As though he loved my mother more than I did. During the walk out to the hunt I imagined what it was like to be the garter snake, so that I might have better luck at finding him: Was he hungry when he woke? I came from my dark hole in the riverbank and the grass was cold and wet. I slid my head beneath the blades, because there would be birds, searching with their talons, and raccoons, and skunks. I had rescued a young garter snake from the jaws of a toad, once, though by the time I freed it its back was broken and I had to crush its head with a rock. Then I picked up the toad, angry, but not intending to hurt it, just to give it a look. It bit my thumb and the pain was shocking, like you had hammered a nail all the way through the keratin and the flesh of the thumb. I dropped the toad and it sat there, watching me, next to the wilted corpse of the snake. “Eat it now,” I said to the toad. “If you want it so bad.” Whenever he visited, Dad would take me for long drives and tell me about our family history. “He was a faggot,” he said, about my stepfather. I didn’t care one way or another. “Everybody in town knew it. They still make jokes about it around town. ‘Blair Moody, that faggot,’ everybody says. Ask any Mason in town. Or the boys at the Glencoe Club, they’ll tell you. He has quite a reputation. Why do you think those kids turned out the way they did? That’s why your mother picked him. She knew she wouldn’t have to go to bed with him. You know she had to have an operation after they married. Did I ever tell you that, son?” I did not speak. I didn’t know how to discourage him. “To make her smaller. So she could satisfy him. After years with your old man, they didn’t have a choice. It’s an operation they do in the States.” “Dad, can we talk about something else, please?” “I’m just telling you the truth, son. I know it’s hard for you to hear, but I think you are old enough for that now. It’s very important, son. I’m not going to lie to you. That’s your mother’s job.” It was a three-mile walk to Stanley Park where I would find the snake. At the corner of Sixth Street and Wilshire I tripped on my shoelace and stumbled over the curb onto my hands and knees. There was no one around to see me fall. I tied my sneaker again. It was cold but you could smell spring coming. In California people were already on the beach, Dad said. You could take surfing as your gym class in junior high school. “Maybe even in the fourth grade, son,” he said. My pack was making my back sweat and I took off my sweater and put it in the big pocket. My backpack had two zipper pockets and I figured if it was a one-footer I would use the smaller one, it would be more comfortable in there, but if it was a longer snake I would use the large pocket. It would like having the sweater in there with it to stay warm and it could learn my smell that way. I wanted the biggest snake I could find because they were easier to feed. The little garter snakes you could feed worms but often they wouldn’t take them, what they needed was tiny fish and tadpoles, and you couldn’t catch those. Not while we were on the road. If it was a three- or four-footer I could feed it mice or goldfish. We could buy a mouse just about anywhere on the drive and that would last him a week. I figured you could buy a feeder fish in any town, too. I didn’t like to think about a goldfish flipping on the bottom of the snake’s cardboard box, though, gasping. And it would moisten the cardboard. A mouse, you could look the other way while it hopped around and when you looked back it was gone. Plus you couldn’t leave the mouse alone with the snake for long, or else it might eat a hole in the snake and kill it, which made it fairer than with the helpless fish. But I doubted a mouse would kill a garter snake. That was more what might happen with a big sleepy python or a boa constrictor. Years later, when I was living with them during high school, and my stepbrothers and stepsisters had moved out, my stepfather, Blair, started to enjoy a more openly menacing tone. I was stealing things from the house at this time and there were lots of confrontations. “For drugs? Was it for drugs? You don’t steal books for money for a girl. Tell me the truth, Clancy. You little thief. What are you on?” He was not a tall man but he was wider than me, he had a kind of bulldog muscularity, and his hands were in fists. I was sitting on my bed. I wanted to remind him, then, that she had been my mother for 16 years, long before she ever met him, and that before then she had loved another man, a better man than he was, and that man was my father, and for that matter my father could kick his ass. I wanted to remind him about the time my father beat him in front of his own house with his kids watching from the windows, and that my father would have killed him, that day, with his bare hands, if one of his kids hadn’t called the cops. But I did not say a word. After I crossed the long dark field of Elbow Park I climbed the hill, and when I came down the hill on the other side there was the roof of the Glencoe Club, and the club’s outdoor swimming pool, still covered with a blue tarp for winter, and the empty parking lot. We had lost our membership to the Glencoe Club a couple of years before. It happened when I was in second grade. My mother had adopted my stepsister Teryn so that she would be my real sister. The plan was Blair would also adopt Pat and me, so before he did they changed our last names to Moody. We got new membership cards to the club and I was Clancy Martin Moody instead of Clancy William Martin. I didn’t care one way or another, though I suspected that we were trading down, and that my stepsister had traded up. But the problem at the club was that our memberships were under “Martin” and there was some money left over as credit from the divorce, money that we could get on our monthly dues if we were Martins but we couldn’t get as Moodys, so they wouldn’t let us back in the club. Then I think the club spoke with my dad and we were Martins again and had to get another set of membership cards, and our mother explained that Blair wasn’t going to adopt us after all, but she was also going to adopt our other stepsister, Lisa. “So the girls get adopted but the boys don’t,” one of my stepbrothers commented. He was the same stepbrother who, years later, strung black crepe paper all over my stepfather’s antique store and called in death threats to my mom. I crossed the parking lot. My dad had broken two ribs in this same parking lot when I was a baby. He was gunning the engine with a buddy of his on the seat behind him and his buddy reached up and popped the clutch and the motorcycle jumped straight up in the air and came back down on top of my dad. His buddy slipped off the back and was fine. My dad was in the hospital for a week after that motorcycle accident, and he sold his bike and never bought another one.

I had about a mile and a half to go, and the sun would rise soon. My first wife has not remarried, so I have not learned what it is like for your child to call another man her father, or even some variant on “Dad,” some pet name that was likely to arise. When I was in college the shorthand version for the two of them, my father and my stepfather, was “Dad in Calgary” and “Dad in Florida,” which became “Florida Dad” and “Calgary Dad.” This was how my little brother and I referred to them between ourselves, or with our mother. To our older brother it was always “Dad” and “Blair.” He was not a traitor the way we were. One year, shopping for Father’s Day cards in the Stetson University bookstore, there was only one I liked, so I bought the same card for both of them. I called my mom to tell her how funny it was, because the catchphrase was “One of a kind Dad!,” some nonsense like that. She laughed. She promised not to tell them. I would find the garter snakes on the riverbank, on rocks, watching for fish. They would have their heads up and their black eyes would be motionless in the morning sun. Their yellow and green heads and the white, rippled skin that runs from under their mouth down their bellies. When I got to our school I cut through the division 1 side, where the first through third graders had their playground and the brick dodgeball court. Back when I was in grade 2 and Pat was in grade 1 we were playing on the jungle gym before walking home and we saw our stepsister Teryn and another girl throwing a caterpillar against the brick wall there. They were division 2 kids and were not supposed to be on our side. It was a large, hairy caterpillar. It would stick to the brick for a second and then roll down the wall. When it hit the concrete it started to crawl. Then they picked it up and threw it again. Teryn looked at me once before she threw it. I was across the schoolyard, through the square hole in the chain-link fence around the playground, and out onto the empty boulevard. I could cross without even pressing the crosswalk button because there was no traffic at all. I couldn’t see a single car or even hear one. Then it was the wooden bridge across the gulley and I was almost to the river. Another trick is you watch for freshly shed skin. These are easy to miss, because once the snake is out of its scales the narrow bag it has escaped is like a popped balloon, but a balloon made of gossamer. So it looks like a rolled-up bit of plastic or a shiny spot on the gravel. Plus the fresh snake when it emerges feels like sprinting for cover because of the brightness of the world it sees with its fresh eyes. They are most vulnerable when they are shedding, but they are still very soft when they first try out their new skin. What a pleasure it must be, one of those overexcited pleasures that quiver on the border of pain, to feel the world with one’s whole body, to move across the earth with those new nerve cells and raw muscles. I bet even the glass-needle teeth of the snake tingle then, with his electricity, and as soon as his stomach settles he is burning with hunger. At the time of my divorce Blair and my mom had closed the antique store and moved to Texas. “To be near my sons,” my mother said, but I knew Calgary had become too expensive on their retirement budget. Soon Blair was nearly paralyzed by a mysterious pain in his back. “It’s just some tests,” Mom said. “But he won’t be in to work all week. He’s never missed a day before. Not even when he had that flu.” “It doesn’t matter, Mom,” I said. Soon they found a rare form of leukemia and started him on radical chemo. Turned out the back pain had nothing to do with the blood disease, and I was skeptical. “He’s been living all these years in perfect health and he goes in to the hospital because of a twisted back and they discover he has six weeks to live? Doesn’t that sound like an odd coincidence to you, Mom?” “This isn’t helping, Clancy,” she said, and I shut up. But the chemo killed him in about the six weeks the doctor said it would. I stood at his deathbed in their TV room. The nurse from Hospice was in the hallway. Pat was standing there with the nurse and our mom, asking questions. It was past the asking-questions time but I guess it made them feel better. Pat was taking it hard. “I just wanted ten more years,” my stepfather said to me from his bed. It was a special bed they had wheeled in for him with an undercarriage and railings. Part of the point of all the metal latticework was to help them carry him out again. “Get some rest, Dad,” I said. I had taken to calling our stepfather Dad. For years I had avoided calling him anything to his face. I can’t say why he had become Dad now. Maybe because Pat had called him Dad for years and I thought it was something Pat and I could share. Or it may have begun when our own real father died, a few years back. The truth was Blair had become a much better imitation father over the years. Like a kindly uncle. “Rest?” he said, and frowned at me, irritated. “I am about to get plenty of that.” Both fathers liked sports cars. Blair never owned the sports car he wanted, because of all those children in the house, but he always drove one: a Mustang or a Firebird or, in later days, a black Pontiac Fiero. We were not allowed in his cars. When I bought my first BMW I took him for a loud, dangerous drive. I noticed how he gripped the seat with both hands when I cornered. My dad owned real sports cars and, when he was a kid, even raced them. He won the Manitoba Hill Run and others. He had an MG and a Volvo R-Sport and a Jaguar. The first time I ever drove a stick, when I was 15, was in his silver Audi convertible coupe. Blair’s mother abandoned him as a boy and he never knew who his father was. He was raised by his great-aunt Dood. I only met her twice. She lived in a large house in Mount Royal behind a stone wall. I remember the flowers that grew over the wall. The first time I met her she took me by the wrist when she showed me her rose garden. I never met my father’s mother. She was a grand lady who had entertained one of the queens of England in her home. Mom liked to tell the story of how my father had tried to kill his mother once, when he was a teenager, by shooting her with a rifle on the stairs. She had him arrested. The cops picked him up during a high school dance. My mother was there and dancing with him when they cuffed him. Both fathers wore blue blazers with handsome polo shirts in many different colors, and had dozens of pairs of shoes, and liked expensive colognes. Both liked to tan. But my dad lived in Florida, Arizona, or California and spent time by the pool or on the beach, and my stepdad used QT self-tanning lotion. When I was 15 and 16, living at home, I would use that self-tanning lotion and then add water to it so he wouldn’t notice I had stolen a palmful of it. Eventually he must have discovered the theft. When my mother asked me, “Have you been using Blair’s tanning lotion?” at the time I proudly thought the reason she asked was the same old thing: He wasn’t allowed to accuse me. But of course that wasn’t it. It was that a grown man couldn’t very well ask his teenage stepson about his cosmetic products. “The saddest thing is what he did to those poor kids. You know they were in the sack before his first wife even died. Screwing like rabbits in that ramshackle lean-to of his over on 34th Avenue. That house was an embarrassment to the whole neighborhood. Mind you, the neighborhood was nothing to brag about. With his wife dying of lung cancer in the next room. Charming. Can you imagine what that must do to a child’s consciousness? Knowing your old man is shacking up with another man’s wife in your own house, under the same roof with your dying mother?” “Are you sure about that, Dad? That doesn’t sound like Mom. I don’t remember anything like that.” “Son, please. You were five years old. They were married the same summer she died. She died in May, as I recall, and they were married that June.” As I crossed the bridge over the deep gulley that separated the city from Stanley Park I could see the main body of the river, beyond the trees. Beneath me the creek that fed from it rushed down. The river was high from the snowmelt and it was still black from the night. I tried out my binoculars and I could see better with them. But there was nothing stirring except the water. I knew I needed the biggest snake I could find. Because the thing is that feeding reptiles is how you kill them. My iguana Sam had died from starvation when he was only a baby. I tried to feed him bananas and strawberries but he wouldn’t eat much. I would pinch off little pieces and try to force them into his mouth but it wound up rubbed across his dimpled, puzzle-piece jaws. Sometimes I would throw a bit of it away so that my mom would think he had eaten more than he had. But then one morning I picked up Sam and he wouldn’t lift his head. His legs wouldn’t wriggle. He was not as green as he ought to have been. I showed him to my mom—I didn’t want to, because I didn’t want to disappoint her—and she said, “You better call the vet.” “It says in my book that they love hibiscus flowers. I think if we had some hibiscus flowers he would eat them,” I said. “Could we get some hibiscus flowers at a store?” The vet explained that he wasn’t an expert in lizards. “I know more about parrots and turtles,” he said. But then he said that I should get some vitamins into Sam immediately. “Shouldn’t I bring him in?” “I would tell you to bring him in but I don’t think there’s much we can do for him.” I said, “Do you think he’s going to be OK?” It just slipped out. “I don’t know,” the vet said. “But reptiles can surprise you. They can go weeks without eating.” When I told my mom that the vet said we had to go to the pet store to buy medicine she surprised me and said we could go, after she took Pat and Teryn to the mall. “You should come too, Clancy,” she said. “A few hours won’t make any difference for your lizard.” By the time they were home he wouldn’t even move his tail. But it didn’t hang down the loose way it should if he were sleepy, either. We drove to the pet store and bought the vitamins. In the car on the way home I forced the dropper between his lips but the brown liquid vitamins poured out of his mouth. His jaws were stiff. I went out the back door of my room and sat on the porch. I held him, rubbery as a piece of cardboard, in my lap. He was my first real pet, I thought. There were clouds coming in and I could feel a few drops of rain. You could see the mountains from that back porch, like a dark line of night sky along the horizon. I was going to stay out there with him. The rain started up. I took off my t-shirt and wrapped Sam up in it. I left his face out. His dewlap was shriveled up into that triangular space beneath his chin. I took off my wet jeans and my shoes and my socks and sat in my underwear. I put my shoes under the doormat outside my door so they wouldn’t get any wetter. It was very cold but warmer without my jeans on. Sam was in my lap. I had my knees up and my arms around my knees. His face was looking at me and I used my thumb to close his eyes. I hoped Pat wouldn’t come ask me what I was doing. Sam felt like he was made of bone and paper. I sat away from the house to avoid the runoff from the roof. If we had gone before the trip to the mall we might have saved him. When I came down through the last patch of trees and bushes to the riverbank the sun had risen and I could see my timing was perfect. The ice melted on the edges of the river. It felt like snakes would be upstream. So I headed in that direction, toward the mountains. “He was a brown-bag drunk. We were all drunks, but some of us did it with class. You know what they call a Billy Martin cocktail at the Glencoe Club, son? Take two straws and stick them in a bottle of Bacardi. Not poor old Blair Moody. He was down in the gutter like a goddamn Indian. They fired him from his job, he was a small-time furniture salesman, and if it wasn’t for the money from the divorce he probably never would have worked again. They caught him stealing. Ran him right out of the business. But he knew how to play your mother, all right. He saw an easy way out. Get the wife away from Billy Martin and you can take his whole fortune. And I trusted him. Hell, he was my sponsor, if you can’t trust your sponsor who can you trust? You should have seen that dumb bunny the day I caught them, son. He heard me coming in his front door and he was scrambling for the back. I caught that yellow pansy with a flying tackle in the kitchen. Smashed their kitchen table flat as a pancake. Thank God your mother called the cops or I would have killed him with my bare hands. I’d be sitting in prison today.” Then, on the riverbank, just where I expected, I found a snake. But I want to save that part of the story for last. Now, coming back from Stanley Park, with the snake cupped in my two hands, I knew I was late. I ran the last mile or so because I didn’t want Dad to leave without me. I ran, and then walked when I was out of breath, and then ran again. I looked for his car when I turned the corner onto Sixth Street. But there was no strange car parked in front of our house. Not on the other side of the street, either. I stopped and caught my breath. Just because he wasn’t there yet didn’t mean he wasn’t coming. I bet I made better time than I thought I had. I could duck in the back door, take the kitchen stairs up to Teryn’s room, then get back out front and load the papers and get the routes done before my stepdad and Mom even knew I was home. When Dad arrived I would be out on my route and he could throw my suitcase in the trunk and we would be set. I wouldn’t even have to go back in the house. That was a good idea, I should grab my suitcase out of my room when I got Teryn. Then I could put it on the porch where my wagon ought to be and everyone would see I was ready. The back door was open and I came in softly. But I had bad luck. There was Mom standing in the kitchen, next to the dishwasher. Blair was there too. I would have to explain about the papers. He had his arms on her, which they didn’t do when we kids could see. Then I saw she was crying. What had he done to her, I wondered? Maybe now he was going to be mean to her because I wouldn’t be around to keep an eye on him. “It’s okay, Vic,” he said. “You’re allowed to cry. It’s the right time to cry. Everything is going to be all right. He’ll be back, you’ll see. You’ll get your son back. Bill Martin is not ready for that kind of responsibility. He’s not even 11 years old.” I went back out into the yard before they might notice me. Anyway, what does he know? I’m almost 11, and 11 is a lot bigger than he thinks. My mom was still shaking on his shoulder. I had never seen her cry before. It was awful. Her face looked as red as a pig’s. I knew who had done this to her. It was not his fault.

At the funeral home where we cremated Blair my mother collapsed onto me. I had not held her like that before. Her full weight was in my arms. She was a small, fit, slender woman, but her heaviness was intimate and awful. If I hadn’t owed her so much I could never have borne it. Later that day the two of us hiked around downtown Fort Worth. We walked for five or six hours and because we are both walkers with poor senses of direction we circled the downtown, trying to find our way home. The buildings looked like they could tip on the edge of the city and fall off. “Why do you think things were the way they were, Mom? In our old house. With Dad, I mean. He was a good dad to us these last few years. He was even sort of wise.” That was as close to the subject of 3220 Sixth Street, our old house, as I would ever come with her. It was cruel to bring it up days after his death, of course. I expect that was why I did it. To do it to him, or to her, or to both of them. “I am not sure what to tell you, Clancy,” she said. “I’m not making excuses for him. He was a wonderful husband. He just wasn’t a father.” After Teryn and I delivered the papers I didn’t want to go back home. I wanted to send her ahead to see if my dad was there yet and if he was she could ask him to get my suitcase and I would meet him at the corner. How could I say good-bye to Mom, now? But I couldn’t explain to Teryn why I wanted her to do that, and anyway she barely knew who my dad was. I was sure she didn’t like him. We never talked about my dad in our house. So I did not have a choice. When we came up the sidewalk, Teryn pulling the wagon and me with the canvas papers bag over my shoulders, I saw him. He was sitting on the porch steps, two or three steps down from the top. My suitcase was still there at the edge of the porch. “Son!” he said, and ran to me. He threw his arms around me. I held him very tightly. He was weeping like he did when he saw us. He smelled like his cologne and his pipe. I wanted to keep my face in his chest, like that, until he teleported us to California. Then I could call Mom when we got there.

“Son, sit down,” he said. “We need to have a serious conversation.” There on the steps, with his arm around my shoulders, he explained. “You need stability, son,” he said. “Don’t blame your mother. She said you could go. I am proud of her for that. Proud and grateful. But we both agree you are better off here right now, son. Maybe next year, or the year after. You’re about to start fifth grade, Clancy. Come down and live with your old man for junior high school. Give it a couple of years, son. It kills me to say this to you.” At some point during his speech I let the snake go. He didn’t see the way it looped down the steps and folded itself into the grass. Don’t get run over, little snake, I thought. When he drove away I could see he was smiling and crying. He was hitting the steering wheel with the palms of his hands. I stood there on the porch and watched him drive up the street. I was all alone there on the porch. Now I had to go back into the house and face my mother. With my suitcase in my hand. I left the suitcase on the porch. I climbed the stairs to my room. Maybe when I came back downstairs we could all pretend it hadn’t happened. I wished I had that garter snake, then. I didn’t want to see Blair’s smile when I explained to my mother that my father had left without me. But this is what happened at the park, before I turned for home. I tried not to walk too quickly so that I might not make a lot of noise. I stepped on larger rocks, when I could, so that my feet would not crunch in the gravel and snow. The spots of ice along the riverbank looked like enormous white crabs waiting at the edge of the water. The water was high and fast and I knew I would not find any snakes in there. Fish could not swim in that current. So I looked for hollows behind boulders and other places where a pool might eddy together. At first I had been on the shadowy side and then I realized, no, the ones over here will still be asleep, the sun wakes them, warms them, and sets them into motion. So I looked for a place to cross, and at a bend I found a string of big rocks and made my way over them, balancing with a long branch. Twice I almost went in. Then I was on the bright side of the bank and my chances were better. I watched the sun to try to see how long I had been out. It was an hour to get home. Dad would be there by ten, he said, which probably meant around lunchtime, but I still had to get my papers delivered. He couldn’t sit there with Mom and my stepfather while Teryn and I ran around the neighborhood. Birds were jumping in the branches and I watched the low ones I might reach and the tops of the bushes in case a snake might be hunting up there. A big one could capture a bird in its jaws. A smaller bird or a baby bird. The bank was empty. I wasn’t going to find a snake. They would have snakes in California, though. I could catch a milk snake or even a California king snake in the woods down there. A pine snake. Those were all friendly snakes that made excellent pets but they were over $100 by the time they were shipped up to Canada. And king snakes you couldn’t buy at all. Those were the best. I looked further up the riverbank, and then lifted my binoculars and scanned all the way up until the river turned. It was too early in the season, I figured. They were all still underground. In a few weeks I could have found one. Now I had to get home before Dad beat me there. I turned around and started walking, quickly, back toward the bridge. You couldn’t run on the bank with the knee-high rocks but you could skip and jump with nobody looking and it was almost as fast as a run. My binoculars bounced around my neck so I stopped to catch my breath and put them in my backpack. When I looked back up I saw it. It was as green as the underside of a new leaf. It had that glossy look and I knew it must have shed its skin only this morning or maybe yesterday. It was still, on a boulder in the sun, facing toward me and away from the river, overlooking a shallow pool beneath it. It was right where it should have been. I must have passed it coming the other way and not seen it. I had passed this spot about 15 minutes before. It was at shoulder height and maybe 15 feet away. But it was looking straight at me. I hadn’t moved and it was not moving. I wondered if I could back up, head a few paces into the woods, and circle around behind it. But the bushes and trees were thick at the edge of the river and there was dead wood, too, from the winter. It would be noisy. I decided to try to approach it directly, one step at a time. A snake might seem to stare at you and be asleep or be concentrating on its prey. When I stepped, looking for a large rock to place my foot on so I would not slip or make a noise, keeping myself low, it did not move. Now I had to shift my weight and that was more difficult. But I took another step and the snake was motionless. It was asleep. Dozing in the morning sun. Three more steps and I could jump and grab it. It was about the thickness of your finger. I would catch it at the middle in case it pulled back its head or darted forward. I had told my friends I had caught snakes in the wild before but I never honestly had. I lunged. It was in my hand. It was warm. I was careful not to squeeze too tightly. It coiled and urinated or sprayed that yellow-white fluid they have but did not try to bite. I washed it quickly in the cold water of the river and it wrapped around the heat of my hand. Then I looked at it. The way it curled itself into my hand and clung there, searching with its small earnest head, I wished it could understand English so that I could explain to it about California. You’re going to like it there, I wanted to tell it. I’ll make you a nice big cage with a glass front and you can eat mice when you are bigger. It was used to a deep hole with other snakes. But the large pocket with my sweater was too big. I could keep it in my hands, I thought, where it will stay warm. You are coming with me, I told it. You have a better home now.