Fiction by Ken Teutsch
Ken Teutsch is a writer, performer, and filmmaker living in central Arkansas. His stories have appeared in anthologies and in such diverse publications as Mystery Magazine, Andromeda Spaceways Magazine, and Cowboy Jamboree. He also records music in the guise of perennially failed country music “star,” Rudy Terwilliger.
Snakebit
What’s in a name? That which we call a rose/By any other name would smell as sweet. —William Shakespeare, Romeo and Juliet
I wish my name was Brian, because then sometimes people would misspell my name and call me Brain. —Mitch Hedberg
On a warm summer afternoon, they sat in lawn chairs under the sycamore tree in Rat’s mother’s front yard, Rat Riley and Marty Huffman, a cooler between them. Rat intended to recruit Mary, and had lured him over by acquiring a case of Bud Ice and inviting him to come help drink it. Marty was Rat’s lifelong friend. He will be yours, too, if you buy him beer.
As Rat laid out his plan, Marty occasionally emitted a noncommittal grunt. While neither particularly averse to illegality nor particularly clever-p-even when sober—Marty had enough sense to know the perils of association with Rat Riley in a criminal enterprise. Ultimately, his decision would come down to the outcome of the struggle between his own better judgement and Rat’s persuasiveness, reinforced by Rat’s beer.
“Man, it’s candy from a baby! I ain’t jokin’. Do I look like I’m jokin’? ‘Cause I ain’t. I’m serious as a heart attack, I shit you not. It’s a done deal. Money in the bank. I ain’t kiddin’. Do I look like I’m kiddin’? Cause I ain’t.” Nothing could be safer, Rat assured him. The place had no security at all, because who would imagine anybody robbing it?
“Yeah but,” said Marty, squinting and pointing a finger, “Yeah but…” Rat waited, but Marty’s objection, whatever it was, apparently escaped him. He finally merely shook his head and drank his beer.
Rat pulled a piece of paper from his hip pocket. “Listen at this. Kingsnake, fifty to a hundred. Hognose, two to three hundred. Corn snake, as much as five hundred–”
“What’s a corn snake?”
“Shut up. Even a damn garter snake can go for nearly a hundred bucks! And man, for the fancy ones? Like a cobra or a gaboon viper? You won’t believe it. Believe me!”
“People buy garter snakes?” Marty laughed. “When I was a kid, I used to catch ‘em and play with ‘em. What’s a baboon biter?”
“Gaboon,” said Rat, folding the paper. “Viper. It’s a kind of…I don’t know. Just listen. I’m tellin’ you, there is a huge underground snake market!”
Marty screwed up his face. “So, do we gotta use a shovel, or—”
Rat kicked the lid shut on the cooler. “Illegal snakes,” he said. “Snake nuts will pay big money, especially for the deadly jungle kind. Black mambas. Bushmasters.”
“Bushmaster’s a gun,” said Marty, eyeing the cooler.
“The gun is named after the—" Rat hopped from his chair and sat on the cooler. Marty blinked and looked up at him. “Nevermind that! Just think about what I’m tellin’ you.”
Marty nodded, upended his beer can, belched. “Tell me it again,” he said.
~~~~~~~~~~
With his axe blade face, BB eyes and buck teeth, William Joseph Riley’s nickname could have been Rabbit Riley. But it wasn’t. By his sixteenth year, the year in which he embarked upon his life of crime, even William Joseph Riley himself thought of himself as “Rat” Riley.
In that sixteenth year, face hidden by a red bandana more appropriate for robbing a stagecoach, he burst into the Dollar General one evening waving a cap pistol and demanding cash. He hadn’t reckoned on the clerk being a high school classmate, one quite familiar with his greasy hair, beady eyes, whiny voice, and belt buckle with a big, bronze “R.” As she disgustedly handed him a wad of bills, she said, “I know it’s you, Rat.”
“No it ain’t!” he cried, and fled on foot.
By the time he got home clutching his haul (thirteen dollars and a Hershey bar), a sheriff’s deputy was already sitting on his front porch. Rat’s mother had just brought the deputy a glass of tea. Rat had to sit and wait for him to finish it before going to jail.
Now, fifteen years after that first trip to jail and following a long succession of similar trips to similar jails, Rat Riley was two months free after yet another trip to yet another jail. This time it had been for breaking and entering, falling short of the more serious charge of burglary because in the end nothing had been stolen. In the course of robbing the home, Rat became distracted. A three-DVD set, History of the WWE: 50 Years of Sports Entertainment, sat on a shelf next to the television he intended to steal. He had just reached the introduction of Stone Cold Steve Austin when the homeowner returned, body slammed him and called the police.
The consensus among everyone who knew him or knew of him was that Rat Riley was snakebit. Flat out cursed. Even when his own stupidity wasn’t to blame, a getaway car failed to start; a passing officer checked a doorknob at precisely the wrong moment; a dye pack exploded. Nevertheless, Rat Riley was the scrawny, snaggle-toothed personification of self-confidence. In the face of all evidence to the contrary, he was perpetually certain that his luck was just about to change. This newest plan, now? This was definitely the one. His big payday. No doubt about it.
~~~~~~~~~~
A week before the conference under the sycamore tree, Rat had learned a new word: Herpetologist. Sitting outside his parole officer’s door suspecting the bastard was deliberately making him wait, he picked up a copy of the local newspaper some other poor parolee sucker had left there. On an inside page was the headline: For Goodness Snakes! Local Professor Wrapped Up in Reptiles. Below the headline was a photo of a grinning, balding man with a very large snake draped over his shoulders like a scarf. The story was a profile of a biology teacher at the community college. It was heavy on stupid snake puns and his colleagues’ jokes—if they were jokes—about what a weirdo he was. This guy, it seemed, was a renowned reptile expert whose collection would be the envy of a roadside snake farm.
“Over twenty specimens,” the story said, “including many rare species.”
It just so happened that a couple of weeks before that Rat, who out of professional interest kept an eye out for crime stories, had read of an unusual bust down in Florida. An honest-to-God Federal Task Force had worked for months building a big case against a snake trafficking ring. These herpetrators had been raking in hundreds of thousands of dollars a year peddling illicit reptiles.
Who knew there was so damn much money in snakes? And who knew there was a veritable Fort Knox of the damn things right down the road?
Rat Riley now knew both.
~~~~~~~~~~
When not being a petty criminal, Marty Huffman worked as a day laborer and house painter, but his handyman skills were not what recommended him as the perfect accomplice. That would be the fact that for his work Marty owned a 2013 Ford Econoline van. It was just past midnight when that van clattered up to the rear entrance of the community college’s Vernon P. Simpson Science and Technology Building.
Marty eyed the dark facade with some trepidation. The afternoon’s beer had long since worn off and, not for the first time, he was regretting a choice made while drinking. “How are you so sure there ain’t no alarm?” He stared straight ahead at his hands on the wheel. Marty wore one of his painter’s masks, but Rat had opted for a more badass look—a neck gaiter that turned the lower half of his face into a skull. In the murky darkness Marty found Rat too spooky-looking to view straight on.
“I ain’t stupid, stupid! I checked.” Rat pulled on a pair of gloves. “I been in there, roamed all up and down the halls. There’s a rent-a-cop, but he spends all night on a couch over in the student center, the lazy bastard.”
Sure enough, they strolled right into the building through unlocked doors. Rat tip-toed along the hallway ninja-style despite the fact that the clanking of the dolly Marty was pushing echoed so loudly that Marty thought it might wake the security guard all the way across campus. They halted outside a door labeled, “Biology Lab.” Rat held out a hand and whispered, “Crowbar!” “Huh?” said Marty.
Five minutes later, when Marty got back from the van with the crowbar, Rat went to work on the door. Eventually, he handed the crowbar back to Marty, who broke the lock, and the door swung open. They stepped into the room. The bright slivers of streetlight leaking in around the curtains exposed only shadowy shapes of chairs, long tables, and walls lined with shelves. Rat held out a hand and whispered, “Flashlight!”
Five minutes later, when Marty got back from the van with the flashlight, Rat turned it on and played it around the room.
Shelves lined two walls. On the shelves were glass cases like fish tanks, except they held no water. Marty stared, wide-eyed. “Jesus Christ! Is all of them full of snakes?” Rat approached one of the cases. “Might be a few lizards,” he said. “We don’t want them.” He shined his light on the label on the case. “Rhinoceros Viper. Huh. Never heard of that one.” He held the light up to the glass. “Whoa! Look at this weird-ass thing! Got horns.” He tapped the glass with the flashlight. “I’ll bet this one will go for—"
A screeching hiss like a punctured truck tire cut through the air and both men jumped back so quickly that Marty crashed into one of the tables and scooted it across the room. Rat let out a shaky laugh. “Loud sumbitch, ain’t he?”
“My God, Rat!” Marty moaned. “You really want to mess with these things?” He wasn’t particularly squeamish about snakes, but he’d never encountered so many at one time, and this one looked and sounded like something from a horror movie. That wasn’t all. “That sticker says ‘Danger. Do not—‘”
“Don’t be a pussy!” Rat snapped. “Let’s go.”
Even with glass between them, coming so close to the creatures made Marty break out in goosebumps. Luckily, most of them were sluggish and barely moved, but a few writhed around disturbingly, and the diamondback rattlesnake raised hell at being manhandled. It even struck at the glass, causing Marty, who was doing most of the lifting, to simultaneously nearly drop the case and soil his underwear.
~~~~~~~~~~
It took over an hour, but at last it was done. Eighteen glass cases and their twenty-two no-shoulder occupants were precariously stacked up, nearly filling the back of the van. Rat slammed the door with a satisfied grin. Everything was going according to plan. This time he was finally—
“Rat! Rat!” Marty whispered.
Rat turned to find that the Rat Riley curse had at last kicked in.
A golf cart rolled to a stop on the sidewalk. The cart contained a large, round-bellied man wearing a white short-sleeved shirt, black clip-on necktie, and a ball cap bearing a badge-shaped logo with the word, “SECURITY.”
By this time of night, Officer—he liked to call himself “Officer”—Randall Perry would usually have been comfortably tucked away on his sofa in the Student Center just as Rat Riley assumed him to be, but two nights previously he had been rudely awakened there by an unanticipated visit from his supervisor. Officer Randall now had a new protocol: a clipboard was placed in each building. He was required to write down and initial on said clipboards the time he entered and left each building. Each building was to be checked at least three times in the course of his shift. In fear of losing his cushy job, tonight he was strictly following that protocol. Only later would he hit upon the strategy of simply filling in all the times on his first round and then going beddie-by.
He applied the cart’s parking brake and shone his flashlight on the two men standing next to the shitty van. “Hey,” he said, “what you boys up to?”
“Nothing,” said the one with a skull for a face.
Officer Randall considered this assertion but ultimately rejected it. “Ya’ll just stand right there and don’t move,” he ordered.
The big one seemed inclined to comply, or else he was just scared stiff, but the skinny one gave a little hop into the air, turned and yanked open the van’s passenger door. He screamed at the other one to get in. While Officer Randall fumbled with his radio, the van started and, over his loud objections, took off and roared down the driveway.
They very well might have gotten away clean had it not been for the speed bump.
It was a brutal speed bump, an aggressive and excessive speed bump, a tooth-jarring speed bump even when encountered at the driveway’s posted 5 MPH speed limit. The fleeing van was doing thirty.
When the front wheels struck, dust exploded from the air conditioning vents and everything on the dashboard—cigarette packages, candy wrappers, unpaid bills—sprang into the air, as did Marty and Rat. The instant they, the trash and the front wheels came crashing down, the rear wheels slammed the obstruction and similarly bounded skyward. Marty then, much too late, jammed his foot down on the brake pedal.
There was an Armageddon-level crash, and the interior of the van was transformed into the center of a tornado in a glass factory. The air filled with a crystalline fog, a shimmering, flickering, sparkling cloud intermixed with gravel, moss, little tree limbs and bits of metal. Other shapes flew among the chaos as well—dark, ropy, writhing shapes. Marty’s ill-timed use of the brake sent the entire mass plunging forward.
The van lurched to a halt. Rat’s head whacked the windshield. He felt as if he had been thrown into a barrel of razorblades. His vision was blurred and reddened by blood from the many cuts on his scalp and face. From somewhere nearby came the ear-piercing wail of a steam whistle, followed by a metallic creaking sound.
The van’s yellow dome light came on. Marty had opened his door. With the added light, Rat’s vision cleared somewhat, and he realized that what he had taken to be a steam whistle was Marty letting out an endless, unbroken shriek. A familiar hiss like screeching air brakes joined the steam whistle, and he watched Marty wrestle something off his shoulders and drop it onto the steering wheel. Marty then fell out onto the ground amid a shower of glass shards, popped up again and bolted away, arms waving. The inhuman shriek, still unbroken, faded as he sprinted into the night.
Rat watched the fat, green-checked creature draped across the steering column twist and fall with a crunch into the driver’s side floorboard. There was glass everywhere, along with dirt and other litter. The smell in the van reminded him of that time the paper mill drained the lake. From behind him came a rustling and crunching–things moving in the debris. Through his pant leg he felt scales contracting and expanding as something oozed across his thigh.
Words appeared in his mind—fancy, exotic words from various Wikipedia entries he had recently read, words he had only skimmed at the time, but which now stood out in neon: Neurotoxic. Hemotoxic. Cytotoxic.
He looked down at the snake coiled in his lap, its shiny, unblinking eyes staring back at him. Its body was circled by shimmering, brilliantly colored stripes—black, yellow, red.
“Red and yella,” Rat mumbled, “kill a fella.”
He heard a buzzing sound and looked up again. Another snake, this one black and brown and thicker than his forearm, lay stretched across the dashboard directly before him. It flicked its tongue. From its ass end came another burst of noise. Rat looked into cold, remorseless eyes as so many of his namesakes had done down the eons.
A Rat and a rattlesnake…
Like all those rodents before him, Rat Riley found himself hypnotized, unable to move, helplessly awaiting his fate.
Well, shit, he thought.
He was surprised at how calm he felt. He thought it over. Yes, it certainly appeared as if he was about to die, but the fact didn’t really seem to trouble him that much. The simple fact was that it kind of had to happen, one way or another. One of his plans was bound to turn out like this sooner or later. This way was a bit more dramatic than he might have anticipated, but still…something did trouble him, though. Not the prospect of dying. He could deal with that. It was the failure itself. The all-too-familiar humiliation. Knowing how, when people heard about it, nobody would be surprised. Look! Rat Riley’s brilliant plan has gone tits up!
Again.
How could it be that it just kept happening? Every single time?
Rat felt a stab inside his chest—an actual physical tearing, as though his heart was splitting down the middle. It was the rending of his previously seamless iron indifference to reality. Through the crack, light came streaming in.
I’m jinxed. Cursed.
Snakebit.
With that thought, he began to laugh. Once it started, he couldn’t stop. The rattlesnake lifted its head and recoiled as though unused to such disrespect. This made Rat laugh even louder.
The coral snake flipped and twisted on his lap. “Yeah, yeah, yeah,” Rat said, “Piss off!” He brushed the writhing snake into the floorboard and returned his attention to the rattlesnake, his laughter trailing off at last. The two stared at each other.
“Well?” said Rat.
The quick tongue flicked. Seconds passed. The rattlesnake made no move.
“Shit,” Rat grumbled. “I ain’t got all night.”
He opened his door and stepped out. Broken glass cascaded out around him. Brushing glass from his shirt, Rat stumbled off into the darkness. The rattlesnake watched him leave. If it was disappointed, it hid it well.
~~~~~~~~~~
After the police showed up, checked the van, fled in terror from the van, and refused to go anywhere near the van, someone suggested they get Professor Snake Whisperer out of bed and down there to deal with his little friends. By dawn a head count had revealed that seven snakes had not survived the crash, and four of them had simply vanished, including his prized six-foot diamondback rattler. The bereaved Professor assured the public that these were peaceable creatures who would never attack a person unprovoked. He was less clear on what exactly a venomous snake finds provocative.
Marty Huffman was picked up that afternoon. He steadfastly maintained that his van had been stolen two days previously and that he therefore didn’t know nothing about nothing. Asked about the many fresh scratches and cuts on his arms and face, he said that he had fallen off a ladder while painting a house and landed in a rosebush. This story seemed dubious, but everyone agreed that Marty sounded very sincere when he declared, “I wouldn’t go near no God damn snake if you paid me a thousand dollars!”
~~~~~~~~~~
Rat reached home shortly after dawn to find his mother at her kitchen table having her first cup of coffee. When he shuffled into the room, she gasped in shock. “My Lord!” she cried. “What in the world happened to you?”
“Long story,” he said.
Mrs. Riley took a deep breath, and Rat braced himself. He knew that his life, and therefore hers, too, had been one long series of just such long stories. “Are we fixing to have another visit from the police?” she said. Her voice was pained.
Rat automatically reached for a lie, but found his quiver was empty. “Don’t know,” he said. “Maybe.”
Mrs. Riley shook her head in what might have been sadness or might have been disgust. “Boy,” she said. She sounded as exhausted as Rat felt. “When are you gonna quit all this foolishness?”
She had asked him that before. Many times, in one form or another. Now, for the first time, he actually considered the question. He pondered it, in fact, staring into space for so long that his mother began to become worried. Then he said, his voice dreamy, “I don’t know. I kinda believe…maybe I just did.” He shrugged. A few shards of glass shook from his hair and fell tinkling to the floor. His beady eyes re-focused, and he gave her a sheepish, snaggled-toothed grin.
Mrs. Riley’s sharp expression melted away. She shook her again, in resignation this time. “I don’t know,” she said. “I just don’t know.” She pushed her chair back from the table. “Go on and wash yourself and put some peroxide on them cuts. I’ll make you some pancakes.”
“Thanks, momma,” Rat said, turning to go. “I’m sorry about the trouble.”
“I know you are, Billy,” she said.
She was the only person in the world who called him that.