The Birthing House Page 7

  ‘Sorry to bother you. You know where we can go swimming?’

  Eddie peered over her shoulder. The boy’s lacquered buzz cut and wispy thin sideburns reflected sunlight and made his acne gleam.

  Conrad smiled. You see me, you little fuck? Good, ’cause I’m on my way. Alice and Luther crossed leashes and started whining to go for a ride.

  Nadia blinked at him. ‘You want to go swimming?’

  ‘My dogs are just about to croak from this heat; thought we’d find a watering hole.’ Luther and Alice pawed at the door. ‘Conrad, your new neighbor? It’s Nadia, right?’

  Eddie continued to project his best thousand-yard stare through the windshield. It was nine hundred and ninety feet short. Conrad winked at Nadia - work with me, girl. Nadia smirked - she got it.

  ‘They look like they could use a swim,’ Nadia said. ‘Hey, hot doggies, what’s up?’

  ‘By the way.’ Conrad nudged the door open so the dogs could play their part. ‘I’m Conrad Harrison, you must be Teddie, right?’

  ‘Eddie,’ Eddie said, scowling at Conrad’s outstretched hand. Nadia was cooing at Luther and Alice as they nosed into her lap.

  ‘These two are Luther and Alice, my sweet little baby bulls.’ Conrad felt a pang of guilt for using them this way, adding to the stereotype he and Jo had tried to prove undeserved ever since adopting the mutts. ‘Oh, don’t worry, though. Terrier mixes are no different than any other species of dog. In fact, they’re a lot like people. Most are good, some are bad, and it all depends on who raises them.’

  ‘Shit, I gotta go, Nads, get those dogs outta my car.’

  ‘Sorry, Eddie. Let me just - hey, where was that watering hole, did you say?’ Conrad made a show of trying to pull them out, leaning over Nadia. ‘Darn it, they don’t want to come out. Come on, Alice, let’s get out of the nice man’s car.’

  ‘Here, let me.’ Nadia hauled herself out and unwound Alice’s leash from her legs.

  Conrad pulled Luther from the front seat. ‘There we go, all clear. Sorry.’

  ‘Tssh,’ Eddie said and turned to his girlfriend. ‘We going or what?’

  ‘Hold on.’ Nadia turned to Conrad. ‘You still need to know how to get to Governor Dodge?’

  ‘The what?’

  ‘The lake up the state park. Dogs are allowed.’

  ‘Oh, yeah. Cool.’ He stood there in the street, nodding at her.

  ‘Tell you what,’ she said, glancing back at Eddie, who was revving his engine. ‘Why don’t I draw you a map?’

  ‘That’d be helpful.’

  ‘Eddie, why don’t you—’

  Eddie squealed the tires and blew the stop sign near the Kwik-Trip, cranked his music and floored it around the corner.

  Nadia watched the spot where Eddie had just been, then nodded and snapped her fingers.

  ‘Thanks for that.’

  ‘Oh, no, it wasn’t—’

  ‘Yes, it was. I needed rescuing and you rescued me.’

  ‘If that’s true, then I’m glad I was walking by. I should get them home. You going this way?’

  ‘I live next door, don’t I?’

  ‘So, you do live at home?’

  ‘Where else would I live?’

  ‘I don’t know. None of my business, actually.’ Dumbfuck.

  She walked beside him as the dogs careened, sniffing every inch of the sidewalk. He noticed her small feet, the retro Eastland mocs she wore with no socks, the laces done up in that preppy pretzel thing like two little boat fenders hanging over the sides - shoes Holly used to wear. She wore simple blue canvas shorts and her calves were muscled, a soccer player’s legs. A plain white tee on top, snug over the soccer ball of her belly. He guessed she was five or six months along, but he was afraid to ask. The rest of her was shorter than he remembered. Compared to his nearly Amazonian wife, this was like walking a girl home from school. It felt like he was already courting her, and that couldn’t be right, no matter how much benefit of the doubt he gave himself.

  Nadia said, ‘Oh, and don’t tell my parents, okay?’

  ‘About?’

  ‘About Eddie,’ she said.

  He kept his eyes on the sidewalk. ‘Of course.’

  What else could she have meant, ’Rad?

  ‘Hey, by the way,’ she said. ‘What’s with the red light?’

  ‘The red - oh, in the garage. Must seem pretty weird, huh? New neighbors and there’s a spooky red glow emanating from the garage.’

  ‘I wasn’t spying.’

  ‘No, I know. It’s kind of neat, actually. Or at least I think so. Do you want to see them?’

  ‘Them?’

  ‘Yeah,’ he said, tromping faster as the dogs pulled him through their little Eden of a backyard. ‘I pretty much guarantee you haven’t seen these before. Come on.’

  Nadia followed him to the detached garage where the red light glowed night and day.

  ‘There’s nothing dangerous in here, you have my word. But before we go in, do you have any phobias?’

  Nadia stepped back, crossed her arms and pursed her lips.

  Conrad nodded. ‘I guess I better just spit it out. I have snakes. Non-venomous, harmless snakes. In cages.’

  This was the moment when they either turned and fled or got all bright-eyed and brave.

  ‘Snakes. You have snakes, like for pets?’

  ‘Ah, not so much pets as a hobby. Snakes aren’t really pets, because they don’t like or dislike people. Well, some of them are afraid of people, but most of them are indifferent.’

  ‘Yikes.’

  ‘If it’s not your thing, we don’t have to—’

  ‘Show me.’

  ‘You sure?’

  She nodded quickly, tensed but excited.

  ‘I knew you would be brave.’

  They stepped inside. Conrad dropped the leashes and deactivated the ADT system as the dogs went on a sniffing spree along the indoor-outdoor carpet. The six hanging fixtures housed twin four-foot Vita-Life bulbs and the space was full of purple-tinted white light. A portable swamp cooler for dangerously hot days sat in the corner. The old workbench was clean, with towels, water bowls, plastic hide-ins and cleaning products stacked neatly to one side. Along the front of the bench hung three stainless-steel gaff hooks that looked like dental instruments made for an ogre.

  Nadia noticed none of these things. Her attention was fixed on the fiberglass cages on the rolling iron racks against the south wall. The cages were four by two by two feet each, three to a tier, two tiers wide for a total of six. The front panels were sliding glass doors with keyed locks. Without the aid of a human hand, nothing was getting in or out of these cages.

  In the corner of each cage and rigged to a series of digital thermostats, a lamp holding a one hundred and fifty watt infrared bulb glowed, ensuring that the thermometers read 86.5 degrees, twenty-four hours a day, year round.

  ‘They can’t get out. Have a closer look.’ He waved her on.

  Nadia stepped forward cautiously, looking back at him with huge eyes. ‘Oh-my-gosh, this is so crazy. If my mom saw these she would die!’

  ‘Yes, let’s not surprise her then, shall we?’

  Nadia stepped closer to the only cage with some activity. Inside, perhaps eighteen inches from the girl’s face, his largest female was peering over a natural wooden branch siliconed to the wall. Half of her nearly six feet stretched up, her head raised as if in prayer to the invisible sun. She moved like a levitating wand, the muscles along her neck and mid-body holding her steady, exposing the cream-colored belly and vertical slashes that swept up and back like tiger stripes before fading into the iridescent black velvet scales that covered the rest of her fist-thick girth.

  ‘That’s Shadow, my largest female.’

  Shadow’s forked tongue waved lazily, testing the air as she moved closer to the heat-radiating patch of fuzziness that was the girl.

  ‘Holy shit!’ Nadia put a hand over her mouth. ‘Is she going to bite me?’

  ‘No, she�
��s just checking out the action. Snakes have very poor vision, so what she’s seeing now is just your general shape. They don’t have ears, so when you see her tongue moving like that she’s tasting the air, so to speak, sensing vibrations.’

  ‘So she can hear my voice?’

  ‘She might feel it. And in the wild, they sense vibration on the ground, approaching animals.’

  ‘What are they, boa constrictors?’

  ‘They are a type of constrictor, but not boas. A very rare species called Boelen’s, or black pythons. They’re found only in the mountains of Papua New Guinea.’

  ‘Where’s that?’

  ‘Near Australia, at the end of the Indonesian Archipelago. They’re heavily protected and somewhat illegal to export from their native country, and very illegal to import into the US.’

  ‘What’d you do? Smuggle them?’

  ‘One of the curators at the San Antonio Zoo is a friend of mine. Dr Hobarth sold me these wild-caught specimens at a reduced rate, off the books, so I could try to reproduce them. Captive-bred babies are more stable, free of the parasites you get with wild caught animals.’

  ‘People buy these? How much?’

  ‘Wild caught, not much. Too hard to keep. But assuming the babies are healthy and eating, which is the hardest part, to get them eating once they hatch, they’ll go for eight to ten grand per head.’

  Nadia gaped at him. ‘Ten thousand dollars? For a snake?’

  ‘And each female may produce six to twelve eggs. I’d have to split the proceeds with the zoo, of course.’

  ‘That’s . . . that’s a lot of money,’ she said. ‘Why snakes? Is this like your job or something?’

  ‘It used to be. When I turned sixteen, my first job was working in a tropical fish and reptile store - Dr Hobarth owned the shop while he was finishing his Ph.D. By the time I got out of high school, I had thirty-five or forty snakes in my bedroom. King snakes, milk snakes, rat snakes, boas, pythons, a couple of iguanas and a monitor lizard. My mother was very patient with me. I used to do shows for elementary schools, give talks at the Humane Society. I reproduced some of them, sold the babies for a few hundred dollars here and there. Sold off most of my collection to pay for college. I always wanted to keep Boelen’s, but I could never afford them. Then I sort of came into a little money, and here they are. They are my favorite species.’

  ‘How do they . . . you know . . . ?’ Nadia blushed.

  ‘What?’ He knew but he wanted to hear her say it.

  ‘Do it.’

  ‘Snakes aren’t all that different from people. Once their primal needs are met - food, shelter, the right climate - they just hook up. It’s survival, so they aren’t too picky, as long as they are healthy. They cross paths, the decision is practically made for them. The actual physical part is a little different. With snakes, the boys have two.’

  ‘Shut up!’ Nadia said. ‘Two? That’s so gross!’

  ‘Yeah, well, you do with what Mother Nature gives you, I guess.’

  ‘Then what?’

  ‘Then they wrap their tails around each other in a twist. Sometimes the male uses his mouth to hold the female by the neck. They sit like that for a few hours or a few days. Then they separate and move on.’

  ‘What does your wife think?’

  ‘She’s not afraid of them, but I think she sees them as some juvenile part of me that won’t grow up, you know? Like I should be too old for this kind of creepy-crawly kid stuff. Maybe she’s right.’

  ‘She won’t be complaining when you buy her a new car with the money from the little kiddy snakes, right?’

  ‘No, she won’t. Do you want to hold one?’

  ‘Do they have poison?’

  ‘No, pythons are not venomous. They constrict their prey before swallowing them whole.’

  ‘Is she going to constrict me?’

  ‘No, she is very tame and she would never try to eat you because you’re much too large.’

  ‘What does she eat?’

  ‘Rodents, birds.’

  ‘Like rats?’

  ‘Or chickens. But I’ve got them on rats now.’

  ‘Ew! Where do you get rats?’

  ‘Pet stores.’

  ‘Isn’t that kind of mean?’

  ‘Everybody’s got to eat.’

  She watched the snake. ‘Are they slimy?’

  ‘No, those are the amphibians. Snakes are smooth, not slimy.’

  ‘She is sort of beautiful.’

  ‘Here.’ Conrad unlocked the door. Shadow did not flinch, even when he picked her up, supporting her body like a garden hose draped over his forearms. He went slowly, more for Nadia’s benefit than the snake’s.

  Nadia screwed up her courage as the serpent stretched out and raised her head, her tongue flickering gently, moving toward his face. The snake rested her neck against his shoulder and began slithering over his back while her tail hung semi-loose over his arms and waist.

  ‘I can’t believe I’m doing this.’ Nadia set her hand on the snake’s back and did not recoil at the first touch. ‘She’s so smooth. Like velvet.’

  ‘Boelen’s have exceptionally smooth scales, very delicate skin. See the iridescence there, the way it makes little rainbows in the light?’

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘Boelen’s survive in the higher elevations because her black scales absorb heat.’

  ‘What’s that on her lips?’

  Shadow had come around his other shoulder. On her top lip, the vertical scales were thicker, the black grill of a sleek new car.

  ‘Those are called pits. She senses heat with them. For hunting. ’

  Nadia let the snake slither forth, feeling the muscled length settle on her arms. Conrad stepped from under the snake’s body and allowed the full weight to hang on her.

  ‘Oh my God. She’s amazing.’

  ‘Yes, she is.’ He could see that she was proud of her bravery.

  ‘Thank you for showing me this, Conrad. This is really, really cool.’

  ‘My pleasure.’

  She was like the camp kids that came to the Humane Society. They started the hour crying and cowering in the corner. By the end they were fighting each other to be next in line while their parents stood stiffly at the back of the room, eyes accusing him. Except with Nadia there wasn’t much fear to begin with.

  ‘Hey, Conrad. What are those?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘There, in the box thingy.’ She pointed. ‘The white stuff? Is that her poop?’

  ‘Uh, maybe.’ Snakes defecated white calcified urates, like hardened marshmallows. ‘Those are kinda big to be - hey, wait.’

  He froze, trying to process what he was seeing.

  ‘What is it?’

  ‘My God.’

  ‘What’s wrong?’ She had seen something in his eyes.

  ‘Those are eggs.’

  ‘And they’re not supposed to be?’

  ‘They can’t . . . she’s never—’ He checked the locks on all the cages, opened Shadow’s cage and searched under her hide-in, the water bowl, the paper substrate. Foolishly looking for what he knew wasn’t there, a sign that another of the animals had gotten inside with her. ‘She can’t have eggs, not now.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘Because Shadow has never, never once been with a male. Hobarth documented everything meticulously. And she’s not even mature. I wasn’t planning on putting her with the others until next spring and, even then, that was a dream. I figured two years, but this, uh-uh. There’s no way.’

  ‘They don’t just lay eggs like chickens or something?’

  ‘No, they need to be fertilized. They must mate to become gravid. No mate, no eggs.’

  ‘One of the others got to her, you think?’

  ‘No. Not a chance. And if they did, what, they locked themselves back in? No. The crazy thing is, I was just thinking how she looked too slim.’

  ‘It’s a good thing, though, right? She’s not sick?’

  ‘No, she seems heal
thy,’ he said, returning to the eggs. Eight or nine white orbs the size of a cue ball, all but two stuck together in a moist clutch. He was wide-eyed, giddy and a little frightened.

  ‘That’s like, what? A hundred thousand dollars?’

  ‘Nadia, it’s much more than that,’ he said, stars in his eyes. ‘This is a virgin birth.’

  ‘Okay,’ she said. She didn’t understand he meant it literally.

  ‘This is a miracle.’ His eyes were full of a hunger that made her step back.

  ‘Really? Wow. I . . . I guess I should be getting home.’ She headed for the door. ‘Thanks for everything.’

  ‘No problem. Sorry, I’m a little out of it. I need to call someone. Dr Hobarth’s going to freak.’

  ‘Okay,’ she said. ‘Good luck.’

  ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘You must be some kind of luck.’

  He was still laughing when she shut the door behind her.

  An untouched female. Nine Boelen’s eggs.

  ‘Holy shit.’

  11

  His hand was on the phone when he realized she still didn’t know he’d bought the snakes. She would argue that he was being silly and juvenile. But this wasn’t the same as the organic juice pyramid scheme, or the Pre-Paid Legal side business, or any other half-assed endeavor he’d thrown his hat in with over the past five years waiting for his real life to begin. These were different. They were an investment, one he knew would soon pay large dividends. She would understand. Once she laid her eyes on the offspring. But even with the good news about the eggs, he had to catch her in the right mood.

  He set the phone down and it rang immediately, startling him to fumble the receiver.

  ‘Hello?’

  ‘Conrad!’ A one-word accusation. ‘Where have you been?’

  He heard her crying and was seized by the idea that she knew he had walked Nadia home and lured her into the garage.

  ‘I was in the yard. What’s wrong, Jo?’

  ‘I’m not, I’m not feeling so good. I’m having a hard time staying in class. I keep telling myself it’s just nerves but it won’t go away. I keep thinking about it.’

  ‘About what?’

  ‘About what? Everything. This, us! I’m living in a hotel in a random city, I don’t know anybody. You have no idea what this is like.’