7

SNAKES ON A PLAYGROUND

New York City

Cristian Ortiz liked taking his niece to this particular playground because it made him forget he was in a city for a while. Not that Cristian had ever lived anywhere else; he just liked the idea of it, living someplace with a lot of trees. These trees were tall enough to block the sight of big buildings in the background, and the nearest parking lot was at least a quarter-mile away, which kept a lot of people from coming there. No, that wasn’t right. A lot of people came there. But a lot of people didn’t. Cristian spoke and thought in English more than Spanish, but that didn’t mean English always made sense to him.

Most of the adults who showed up were white women, and some of them wore the kind of clothes that advertised that they did yoga or Zumba or some other thing that probably ended with an “uh.” Cristian was all right with that. He couldn’t afford to take his eyes off Noemi for too long, though. The playground was covered with little pebbles, and if Cristian wasn’t careful, his niece would pick one up and put it in her mouth. A few days ago, his sister-in-law had called Cristian over while she was changing Noemi’s diaper. “What’s this?” And when Cristian had looked down, he’d seen three little poop-covered rocks in Noemi’s diaper.

Still, watching Noemi wasn’t too bad. Cristian’s older brother, Marco, was stationed somewhere in sand land getting engineering training for when soldier time was over, and Moncerrat was trying to get a nursing degree. Those classes were kicking Moncerrat’s ass a little, and she and Cristian were both staying with Cristian’s folks, so Cristian didn’t mind helping out with Noemi when he wasn’t driving around, stocking vending machines. If Noemi had been Cristian’s kid, he’d be catching it from his friends for being Moncerrat’s mujer, but watching his niece just made Cristian a good uncle. Didn’t really figure, but not many things did if you thought about them too much. You just had to roll with it.

“Your daughter is adorable.” Cristian had seen the woman who’d spoken around the playground a few times before. Maybe that’s why she was talking to him. She looked to be getting up there but not too old yet, younger than most of those blancas who wait to have a career before having a kid. She looked serious, but maybe that was just the papers she was grading. Or the glasses. Or the careful way she was talking, like she was in a movie. Or the way she smiled, nervous and quick, like she wasn’t used to it. She looked pretty tight in those slacks and that white buttoned shirt, but Cristian just nodded and gave her his no-hablo-ingles smile. Somebody had waved a magic wand and made Cristian a legal citizen after his big brother joined the army, but he’d spent his whole life knowing that talking to white women with money was a good way to get into trouble.

The woman didn’t go back to her grading, though. Those must have been some bad papers. “My two boys are the ones on the monkey bars. Rafe and Jude. They’re pretending the ground is full of snakes. They’re trying to make it from one end of the playground to the other without touching the ground.”

That did sound like fun. Cristian and Marco used to play a game kind of like that when they were kids. They’d pretend a soccer ball was a bomb, and they had to keep it from hitting the ground or they’d all explode. But Cristian carefully didn’t look over at the area that the woman was talking about. He just smiled blankly some more and returned his attention to Noemi. No hablo ingles.

“My ex-husband taught them that game.” The woman’s voice was sad for a second, and then it got angrier. “He was very in touch with being a child.”

“This is why people like you have therapists,” Cristian told her in Spanish. “So you don’t have to talk to strangers in the park.” Or your families, he thought, but Cristian didn’t say that last part out loud. It seemed too mean to put into words, even in a language the woman didn’t understand.

But the woman wasn’t listening to Cristian, anyway. She was staring out at the playground, the skin on her face pulling tight and going pale as her mouth kept opening soundlessly. Gun. It was Cristian’s first thought as he tracked her stare, but it wasn’t some crazy person with a gun. Some pebbles on the playground were shifting in a bad way. Like something was going to come shooting out, like water or oil or lava in one of those old cartoons. But what came out was alive.

The thing was purplish and looked like pictures Cristian had seen of tapeworms in that high school science class that he’d mostly slept through, except it was big, python big, and ended in a round opening that was almost as wide as its body, the mouth full of sharp teeth. Some little kid, a boy, maybe two years old, started waddling over toward the thing, head up in an attitude of wow, and some woman screamed his name and started running after him.

The worm thing swiveled its mouth toward the woman—it didn’t have eyes, so it must have been tracking by sound—and then the monster spit some pale yellow stuff right into the woman’s face from almost twenty feet away. The woman went down flat on her back, making noises out of a melting face that Cristian wasn’t ever going to forget. Not the noises. Not the face. Not ever.

Then everybody was screaming, and maybe that was good, because it seemed to confuse the thing for a minute. Cristian bolted off his bench and headed for Noemi, but he still stopped to pick up the toddling boy who had turned around to stare at his mom. Bending to swoop the kid up saved Cristian’s life. The worm thing spit some of that acid stuff Cristian’s way, but it only caught the outer meat on Cristian’s left shoulder as he dipped down. It probably hurt, but Cristian had bigger problems. He swerved around the worm thing and then swerved again as another patch of gravel started shifting.

Noemi. She was crying when Cristian picked her up with one arm. He almost dropped the other kid, but they were close to some big pyramid-looking stone thing with wide slides on two sides and big steps on the other two. Actually, the thing was shaped like a small ziggurat, and Cristian knew that because his pops had gotten into that Aztec stuff for a while. It was another reason why Cristian liked this place, but he didn’t care about that at the moment. He scooped Noemi up in his other arm and stumbled toward the big metal slide. He tried to run up the sloped surface, but even though the slide wasn’t very steep, the kids in his arms were squirming and screaming and Cristian slipped and fell about six feet up. He started to slide back down. Back to the bottom, where another of the worm things had come out of the ground and was swiveling its head around like a periscope.

Cristian yelled, then wished he hadn’t. The snake thing swiveled in Cristian’s direction, and he rolled sideways on the big base of the slide, tumbling over the two crying kids in his arms. Acid splatted in the spot where Cristian had been, and at least the weight of the thrashing kids kind of anchored him and kept him from sliding down any farther. Cristian reached the edge of the slide, and then he pushed the kids over the slight rise between the slide and the stone stairs on the other side of the ziggurat.

Something sharp bit into Cristian’s ankle, and he screamed and kicked and thrashed until he tore his foot free, leaving a hunk of skin behind. It burned like hell. If that thing was poisonous, Cristian was dead, but not dead yet. Cristian rolled onto the stone stairs of the ziggurat and picked those kids up and staggered all the way up to the top of the concrete playground attraction with only a little bit of a limp.

Then Cristian collapsed at the top of the ziggurat and pinned Noemi and the other kid there, on the solid square stone area between the two opposite slides, about ten feet wide. The kids were still crying, but Cristian had it in the back of his head that even if he died, his body could still protect Noemi this way. But Cristian didn’t die. At least not right then. His ankle still burned, but it kept him awake while he lay there holding on to the kids and listening to the screams.