State of Wonder - Ann Patchett [111]
Human instinct dictated first that the snake must be kept away from the face, and so Benoit straightened his arm to rigid as if wishing to cast it away from his body while holding on too tight for the snake’s comfort. The reptile’s long, recurved teeth snapped ferociously into the air, diving towards Benoit’s wrist while Benoit whipped the head from side to side, buying time until he could close the distance between hand and head. He rolled onto his side and then his back, managing somehow to pull the first half of the reptile on board while it flailed like a downed electrical wire. At its neck the snake was as big around as Benoit’s wrist, and from there its body, smooth scales of darkest green with black blotches on the back and then creamy light underneath, swelled into a size more in keeping with his thigh. The snake kept pulling up and pulling up, more and more of itself slithering up and onto the deck in thick, muscular rolls where it sought to make its way onto Benoit’s body, extending out against him, kneading him, while Benoit struggled mightily to keep their two faces apart. Do not let the faces touch.
“Put it back!” Nancy screamed in English, the language that stood between Benoit and his dream of being a tour guide. “Drop it!”
“Fuck!” Alan Saturn said, and then repeated the word endlessly for good measure.
He had caught it sure enough but he hadn’t caught it close enough to the head. There was too much available snake above Benoit’s hand, and the snake’s enormous gaping mouth sought purchase, its jaws opening wider than such a little head should reasonably dictate. In a flash there was evidence of many rows of smaller teeth lined up and waiting to clamp into skin. Only by swinging it wildly did he keep the snake from sinking into his wrist. Benoit seemed fixated only on the six inches of the snake between the top of his fist and the tip of its tongue while completely ignoring the enormous body that was working its way heavily onto his own body now, and Benoit, who was wet with sweat and the water the snake brought on board, was laughing. There on his back pinned like a wrestler in an unsporting match, he roared with a powerful joy while he tried to work the one hand upwards with the assistance of the other hand. Easter, ever helpful, grabbed onto the lower half of their guest and tried to pry it off of his friend. There was too much coiling and uncoiling for an accurate measurement but the snake appeared to be fifteen feet long, eighteen when it stretched. Benoit appeared to be five feet, five inches, and he was outweighed by as much as fifty pounds. The three doctors pressed away, screaming various invectives in an unhelpful language. Marina wanted to jump in the water and to run across the lettuce with the long toed birds, but who could say the snake didn’t have a family down there? There was an odor none of them recognized, the smell of a furious reptile, an oily stench of putrid rage that sunk into the membranes of their nostrils as if it planned to stay there forever. The back half of the snake whipped up and made itself a knot around Easter’s slender waist and wrapped and wrapped and at the moment its head swung past, Easter reached into the air, his hand a quarter second faster than the snake, and grabbed its throat just below the head, well above Benoit’s fist. Easter had caught the snake that Benoit had caught.
Oh, the whooping! The triumph and revelry! They shook the jungle with their screams, Benoit and Easter, for sure enough Easter was screaming, and the sound was so piercing, so much like the agony of death, that all three doctors were sure the boy was bitten and they lunged forward with the instinct of human decency to save his life. But Easter was grinning madly as he gripped the snake while Benoit, who was considerably stronger, held fast below. They looked into the creature’s mouth now like a carnival attraction while the tongue, a silvered spark of light, licked