Reptile-Wrangling

Last call at the tavern outside San Patricio was a while ago, but everything is still tinted green from flaky overhead cellophane and twelve-hour tape. The other tables are clean, drying at the corners where towels don’t reach. Mockingbirds outside never stopped chirping through the evening. A rerun of yesterday’s spring training game idles along on a small corner TV set. But the patron droops half-dead in the corner, watching long waits between pitches and rare swings. He nurses a partial plate of night-time hash, pale green, dull yellow. His third or fourth stout is gone. A toothpick presses his bottom lip. Outside is still unseasonably hot. Rattling. So goes the air conditioner. The ice machine. The snake from under the floorboards coming up where the patron sits.

With a slow, strained glance, the patron would like to think snake is looking for any scraps of loose corned beef from the kitchen and can only scrounge up cabbage. Or as it slithers between stewing carrots and spilled beer, it finds a sticky door-mouse. Maybe it just wants a toothpick.

The patron thinks on this for a minute or longer. He needs a good glue trap and a shovel to excavate this snake. None of these things are in the bar right now, except the snake, much less in arm's reach, again except the snake despite the patron's obvious revulsion. There's a bartender around here somewhere, isn't there? Can't one of the mixing syrups work to keep the snake stuck for just long enough to toss the whole apparatus into the parking spaces along the street? Honey? Ketchup at the table? It's warm enough that the glue in any form will melt in the morning sun and the snake can leave on its own time after the bartender has some chance to recompose himself. If he and the patron can pin it, even get it wrapped around a barstool and send the stool careening above the rooftops to land who-knows-who-cares-where, that would work. The patron would do most of the careening himself. Conventional wisdom that the snake is more scared of the humans than the humans of it is soothing only when a human doesn't see one the damn things, and really don't want its attention.

And all this is easier for the patron to acquire and accomplish when it is not his nth beer of the night already. He thought he was keeping track at three or four, but now it is just not possible to tell for certain anything except that there is a snake in the tavern getting closer.

The bartender knows better than to make an encounter of the snake in the first place. He mostly stays still. At least, someone will need to open up the door so the snake can make an exit. No guarantee it will leave the way it arrived.

Again, the patron thinks on what to do. He could just keep the doors open and wait, but what if there is another snake that left its wallet at the bar or something? What if he throws the snake out into the cold night so it freezes, except that this early spring night is warm, so nothing happens? What if he keeps it as a pet and the bar can do advertising as the only bar around with a pet snake? What if the snake grows old and full-bellied from corned beef and bread and safe and happy and reunites with its snake family carrying a tongue full of adventurous years, swearing a blood pact never to return in anger?

He (the patron, not the snake now) moves without much rush except in his heartbeat, sneaking into the back office for some glue and a shovel. The snake watches and rattles. The physical process of opening a few doors and scooping with a shovel is not difficult, except… the speed is agonizing. The eye contact with the snake hurts his eyes but he can't possibly look away because the moment he does, the snake will move or strike or something else unpredictable. Hands that know door handles and shovels now recognize nothing without tapping reassurance.

And then the patron scoops up the snake, never looking away. The rattle gets louder as the snake crouches to the far sticky edge of the shovel. Not like the patron wants it any closer. He opens the door with his hip and carries the shoveled snake outside slow and gentle. Each step walks him out of his shoes, also glued to the floor. He douses the shovel in a slow, dripping water bottle to get the snake unglued. The snake leaves without a fuss. No more snake in the tavern. The patron goes back inside to finish his now breakfast hash.