Five minutes before the end of Devaughn’s next shift, my grandfather showed up at the security desk wearing rubber waders over stained chinos, holding an empty one-quart Ziploc. He carried a blue NASA knapsack, meant for children, into which he had placed a thermos of lemonade, a first aid kit, and a field guide to snakes and reptiles from the Coconut Creek branch of the Broward County Library. In his right hand he carried a blackthorn walking stick, never used, that Sally Sichel had bought for her husband, Leslie, when his fatal disease first enfeebled him. Until yesterday afternoon the walking stick had been surmounted by a sterling silver duck’s head. In the Fontana Village metal shop my grandfather had (with Sally’s permission) removed this and replaced it with the iron head of a three-pound maul. As he walked across the grounds from his unit, swinging the stick, my grandfather had ignored a number of puzzled looks and two direct queries. But Devaughn understood at once what my grandfather had in mind.
“It was me?” he said, “I’d go with a machete.” Devaughn chopped at his left wrist with the edge of his right hand. “You want to decapacitate it, clean and quick.”
My grandfather made a mental note to see Perfecto Tiant, the chief of the landscaping crew, about borrowing a machete when the time came. He held up the Ziploc bag. “You said you saw its droppings,” he said. “I’d like you to help me get hold of some.”
“Right now.” Devaughn looked skeptical.
“Isn’t your shift over at eight?”
“Yes, sir, it is. But then, see, I’m kind of on Devaughn time.”
“Yeah? And what happens then?”
“On Devaughn time?” Devaughn rolled his eyes to the ceiling. He seemed to be consulting a long menu of pastimes and pursuits. “Well, for one thing? Not picking up a snake bowel movement, putting it into a baggie.”
“Never?”
“No, sir.”
My grandfather and Devaughn stared at each other. The mechanism in the clock on the wall behind the counter advanced with a loud thunk into the next minute of their lives.
“I suppose I might be willing to pay you for your trouble,” my grandfather said.
Devaughn smiled. He found it a comfort to see a show of miserliness in a Jew. He assumed that my grandfather was a millionaire. “How much?” he said.
“Twenty-five. But only if I get something to put in this bag.”
When the day man came in, Devaughn pulled on his billed cap with the Fontana Village logo and picked up his zippered nylon briefcase. My grandfather followed him to his car, a 1979 Cutlass Supreme. It sat creaking in the employee lot, vinyl top bleached and peeled by years in the heat of Florida. Devaughn opened the trunk and put in his briefcase, minus a peanut butter and potato chip sandwich that he folded over twice and rammed with a fingertip into his mouth. He unbuttoned his uniform shirt and hung it on a hanger from the valet hook inside his car. His belly sloshed in the wineskin of a ribbed undershirt. His bare shoulders were ivory-yellow and densely freckled. The freckles, like his hair and eyelashes, were the color of a Nilla wafer. He stuffed the billed cap into the briefcase and, from atop the rear dash, took out a straw cowboy hat whose brim curled up sharply at the sides. At the very back of the trunk, under the rear dash, he opened a toolbox of molded plastic and dug around until he found a machete as long as his forearm, in a leather sheath. Balancing it flat across his upturned palms, he contemplated my grandfather. He was still chewing the sandwich, lips pursing as his jaw worked up and down. “Doubt you going to need it this morning, but,” he said. “You welcome to borrow it if you want.”
“I don’t like to borrow,” my grandfather said. “I’ll rent it from you.”
“Suit yourself, then.”
My grandfather got into the car. It was an oven. He rolled down the window, and the trim of the handle burned his fingers. The air-conditioning wheezed. Its breath smelled of mildew tinged with peanut butter and potato chips.
“Time I really got a good look around in there?” Devaughn said. “It was with Finlay Gadbois, you remember Finlay?”
My grandfather recalled a blond pompadour behind a motocross magazine, two black brogues propped up on the security desk.
“Finlay’s brother was a investigator for some real estate lawyers got tangled up in the whole mess over there for a while? Took me and Finlay for a tour one time, we went right in the front gate. The, uh, droppings was all over the, like, the front porch of the clubhouse.”
“Show me.”
“It’s all chained up, though.”
“Show me.”
“With a padlock.”
My grandfather settled the NASA backpack on his lap and looked out the window at the expanse of Fontana Village. The scene never varied except for the transit of rain, people, and golf carts across it. Shadows of eaves and dormers moved slow as hour hands across the blank faces of the units. Stucco, palm trees, concrete walks, lawns that never seemed to grow or fade. Inverted over everything a glass bell of sky. Shake the whole thing a couple of times and you would stir up a flurry of glitter. My grandfather was tired of looking at it, to a depth of his soul that made him wonder if there might really be something wrong with him. The name and number of the specialist were still keeping company with Hosni Mubarak in the latest issue of Commentary. As soon he had taken care of this snake problem, he told himself, he would make that appointment.
“When I feel like I’ve got my twenty-five dollars’ worth,” my grandfather said, “then I’ll stop telling you what to do. Show me.”
Devaughn put the car in gear. He drove out of the gates of Fontana Village. They made three left turns, bending around a vast South Florida city block. Devaughn turned in to the driveway of the abandoned country club. Grass crazed the driveway. They did not get far before they had to stop. The property had been fenced all around with chain-link drowned in a surf of kudzu. Rusted signs warning away trespassers had been fixed to the fence by the city and by the defeated successors to the original losers of the country club. Among the warning signs stood a gate cabled and locked with a heavy padlock.
My grandfather got out of the car and notched the walking stick up under his arm. He took off his belt and fed it through the loop on the machete’s holster. He put the belt back on. He didn’t think he was going to need it this morning, either, but you never knew. Sometimes a hunter could get lucky.
Beyond the gate, the driveway carried on to an arch in a pink stucco wall. Kudzu had strung its green banners across the archway and worked its fingers into a thousand cracks in the pink stucco. On a frieze over the arc, between a pair of cartographic dolphins, a plaster triton sat on a compass rose, blowing a conch trumpet. The triton had lost its face. The leering dolphins were blackened with grime or mold. The name of the country club was Mandeville.
“That’s where you want to look for him,” Devaughn said, pointing at the cracked blacktop between the chain-link gate and the archway. “Middle of a nice hot road like that, end of the day when the air’s starting to get cool.”
“Where’s this clubhouse?”
“Through the arch, up the road. You can kind of almost see it, something pink there? Long way to go.”
“I see it.”
A shard of pink in green shadow. A forlorn pink, the pink of a tattered flamingo in a roadside zoo.
“Look there!” Devaughn was pointing to the left of the gate, just beyond the fence, under a sprawl of rhododendron.
My grandfather grabbed the hilt of the machete. His hand craved the bite of its blade into muscle. But there was no snake drowsing in a coil under the rhododendron. There was only what appeared to be a scrap of upholstery batting, a rude nest woven of gray twine and ashes. At one edge it devolved into a tuft of down that might once, my grandfather supposed, have been Ramon. It lay on the far side of the fence about three feet beyond the limits of either my grandfather’s or Devaughn’s reach.
My grandfather handed Leslie’s stick to Devaughn.
“What you call this thing?” Devaughn said, hefting it.
“It’s a snake hammer.”
Devaughn nodded knowledgeably. He got down on his belly and poked the stick under the fence toward the twist of scat. Grunting and cursing, he steered its steel tip to within an inch of the scat but no closer. He let go of the stick on the wrong side of the fence and it slid away from him. His body went slack against the ground. “Shit.” He looked at my grandfather, awaiting reproach.
“Decent snake hammer’s going to set you back more than twenty-five bucks,” my grandfather said.
He took Devaughn’s place on the ground and managed, straining, to retrieve the stick. His arms were long in proportion to the rest of him, but he had no better luck than Devaughn in reaching the remnant of Ramon. He stood up. Vertigo swept over him. Fire drew arabesques at the back of his eyes. “Shit,” he said.
“Name of the game,” Devaughn said.
My grandfather sat in the car with the door open and drank some of the lemonade from the thermos. A small plane droned toward the Atlantic, trailing a banner lettered in red capitals. He struggled to make out the distant text with an urgency he knew to be misplaced.
“Sea and Ski,” Devaughn said.
My grandfather nodded. He took out his wallet and paid Devaughn in full.
“Sorry it didn’t work out,” Devaughn said.
“Care to make it fifty?” my grandfather said.
Devaughn drove my grandfather to a hardware store and waited in the car. My grandfather bought a Yale padlock that appeared to be nearly identical to the one cabled to the chain-link gate. He gave some thought to a pair of bolt cutters, but they were expensive and bulky and he knew the sight of them would spook Devaughn. As it was, Devaughn eyed uneasily the paper bag in my grandfather’s lap.
When they got back to Mandeville, my grandfather climbed out of the car and shut the door. The temperature was ninety-five degrees. Across the feral golf course on the other side of the fence, a million insects played a one-note tone poem entitled Heat. My grandfather leaned in through the window on the passenger side. “Go park the car down the street,” he said. “By the lawn and garden store. I’ll meet you there in two minutes.”
“What you going to do?”
My grandfather walked over to the fence. He matched the padlock to the business end of the snake hammer.
“No,” Devaughn called. “No way.”
“Two minutes.”
“It’s crazy. Why you don’t just go in from the Fontana Village side?”
“Fence.”
“Have to have a hole in it somewheres. All them pets get inside no problem.”
“What do I look like? A shih tzu or an old man?”
“A old man.”
“Here’s where there’s a paved road. You told me yourself they like to lie on hot pavement.”
“So you going to just walk in there in broad daylight.”
“I’m going to need to come back. Probably a number of times.” He hefted the brown paper bag with the lock inside it. “I want to make that easier to do.”
“You going to get us arrested,” Devaughn said. “I can’t have that. I’m an old man, too, and I need this job. I didn’t plan for no financial future like y’all.”
“Two minutes. If I get caught, I’ll say I walked here. I won’t say a word about you.”
“They might put you in jail.”
“I’ve been in jail,” my grandfather said. “I got a lot of reading done.”
Devaughn looked surprised. His gaze drifted down to my grandfather’s feet in the rubber waders and back up to his blue-and-white canvas bucket hat, souvenir of a visit to an Israeli kibbutz that he and my grandmother had made not long after the Six-Day War.
“I might like to re-estimate my opinion of you,” Devaughn said. He leaned across to roll up the passenger window, then backed the car down the driveway.
My grandfather watched Devaughn pull away. He raised the head of the walking stick and brought it down on the padlock. The impact rang up his arm to the elbow. The lock held firm. It took seven more smacks with the hammer to crack it. He yanked it open. He tried to swing aside the chain-link gate, but the kudzu vines held it fast. He pried it open an inch or two with the shaft of the walking stick but not enough to squeeze through. He unsheathed the machete and brought it down. The tendrils snapped like guitar strings. Pain twanged in my grandfather’s shoulder. The gate swung open without a sound.
My grandfather found his fingers trembling as he tore open the packaging of the new lock. After he put the new lock into place, he stooped to pick up some bits of the shattered one. He fitted them into the blister of the packaging with the rest of the old lock and put it in the paper bag. Then he stepped into the snake’s domain. He looked around, listening for a dragging sound, a pop of twigs. He was under the impression that snakes gave off a musk, and he sniffed the air. Twice dapples of sun on shade stopped the blood in his veins. He lowered himself to stoop for the snake hammer, then walked over to the rhododendron and crouched down beside it. He used the tip of the walking stick to slide the scat into the Ziploc bag.
When he tried to stand again, his knees had locked. He planted the stick in the gravel and, grateful not to find himself mocked by the smug expression of a sterling-silver duck, pulled himself up along its length. On his feet once more, he made for the gate and locked it. He slipped the key into an outer pocket of the knapsack, alongside the baggie. Then he walked down the street to the lawn and garden store to settle his account with Devaughn, and to inquire about the going day rate for a machete.
* * *
“What was it for?” I said. “What did you do with the snake poop?”
“There was a professor at Miami. In the biology department. A herpetologist. He agreed to take a look at it.”
“And?”
“He felt confident it was not the fecal matter of a boa constrictor.”
“So it was an alligator.”
“It was a python.”
“A python? Don’t pythons get really big?”
My grandfather shrugged. The shrug said, Define big. It said, Compared to an ankylosaurus? Not so big.
“Can they get big enough to eat a cat?”
He stuck out his tongue once, twice. I handed him a mug of apple juice and he took a measured sip.
“A python can swallow a deer,” he said.
“Jesus.”
“A cat? To a python? Like a handful of nuts.”
I resisted the urge to point out that snakes did not have hands.
“So, last year,” I said, “like, right after I visited you? And we watched that PBS thing about exotic pets taking over the Everglades? You basically went out into the jungle. And started hunting a python.”
Another shrug: It passed the time.
“So did you use one of those, like, noose-on-a-stick things they had?” I mimed the thrust-and-tug action of the snare tool a park ranger on the program had employed to bag a boa constrictor.
“I had no interest in capturing him,” my grandfather said. “I wanted to kill him.”
“With a gun?”
My grandfather screwed the left side of his face into the comedic half-mask he adopted when he was trying to conceal his disappointment in you.
“Maybe you should be taking notes,” he said. He handed back the mug of apple juice. “I had a snake hammer. Why would I need a gun?”