A/N: Updated, one-shot-ified, and imported from . Designed to play nicely with Nines's characterization in Desert of Ghosts.
It's one of the first real things he learns.
Snakes die two deaths: the one you cause—when you pull off their head or separate their spine, the tongue of your boot welling with toothmarks—and the one that comes right after. That first time is quick, a single bullet or a bloody chop. The second lasts longer. The second death makes them dance; nature wakes them back up only to make them roil; it twitches small latched backbones, rolls fine diamond heads in the dirt. It grabs every one of their long catgut innards and twists them into love knots. That's the one that ends them for good. That's the one that makes them pay.
Every time a snake bites, she tells him—and at the time he's not sure if it's science, a saying, or somebody's religion—some of that venom is left in their vein. It pools there for years. The sick gnarled rattlers and the fat water moccasins reach their size from the kills they've made, peel their color from the blackness of personal history. That evil makes their whole body swell, fills up saddlebags on either side of the brain.
When a snake dies, their heart will stop, and suddenly the organs can't hold it in anymore. All that poison releases back into the meat that made it. It spills like a flash through the head, a madman dance down their spine, when all the nerves pop and shriek and fry. You think it's a last throe of life, the muscle memory flailing. But the second death is more than that. It's the price of the toxin. All those mismatched fights, all those murders in tall grass, all those killing lies come back to burn everything clean. There's not much justice in the world. But there is fire and there is pain in the green of a dead snake's eye.
He has caused a lot of snakes to die—some crawling on their bellies, some walking on their feet. The number of legs or the color of coat never matters. They all spit and coil the same. You can see the devil well up in the second death until every stitch lays flat and limp and cold.
He guesses he'll die two deaths, too.
If there are two things Nines Rodriguez knows—knows now or knew then—it's how to kill snakes, and what to expect when one kills him.
She told him a lot of things like that in the time they were together. They weren't the hoping kind of stories—not ones you tell children at nighttime, with their seacliff mansions, caballeros, willow trees, or men with slanted swords. Hers weren't the stories everyone wants. They weren't the stories anyone wants, but what you want is a mendacious notion. Those weren't the sorts of cloud castles she built.
She didn't do much fiction. She told hard, hurting, dog-eat truths.
He can't remember all of those truths, and the echo where her voice was is now a tin space inside the walls of his ribs. But the important ones are still there, even though the texture is gone, even if he can't recall exactly when she said them or why, or how, when she told stories, her dark eyes turned to copper in the middle-country sun.
There's a million details he's lost now, but some of them stick. Her look was the same kind of clever old coyotes have. Scrappy and purposeful, and aware of its margins. Her gate was that startling stomp of flat-footed leaders who walk with great confidence, who pick their way down dirt paths and cornfields full of fangs. She wore a coat when they travelled, and he holds on to that, too: it was battered beige leather that hit at her shins, drew her a strong, sullen figure somewhere in-between woman and man. Her hair was the endless, limp browned black of deserts, not undercut by blue like his—and he'd follow it when they walked long roads, seeing how red light scorched through the rough ends. He'd follow the sound of her shoes on packed, parched earth that melted to blood when it thundered. He'd follow until they stopped at the next farm with work and watch her lean face for a yes or a no. She rarely smiled and never with teeth—she was ashamed of her missing one—or ashamed of who knocked it out.
She wasn't that way out of meanness. It was just the person she was. Even when she drank, whisky from paper, she was sober to the bones. She'd never say what she thought until everyone else was silent and she was utterly sure. Her mouth was thin and fierce and straight. Her tall linen skirts were eggshelled with dust. Her stare was made up of two hard points, old stone blue.
He called her Marcela. She didn't like ma'am. He hadn't figured out she was his mother until he was seven, eight years old.
It's an unusual thing to realize the woman you've always somehow known to follow is the same one who birthed you, who carried you inside, who lay down in a migrant pergola and tore you into the world before you killed her. It hit him suddenly with the weight of a big blackiron freight. You can call that boy dumb if you please—with his lanky body, his dark hair, his own old stone look. Following her had always seemed like the natural thing to do. Thinking about why hadn't mattered.
She made space for him. She brought him along. She'd wash his cuts and pluck off his bugs, share her canteen, stew unappetizing lemongrass teas when he felt woozy. She found him food when he couldn't find it on his own. She washed their humble clothes in creekwater. She built them slumping shelters and tiny fires to sit beside when the wind went spiteful. He would come home to sleep when he cared to, no matter when she did; he'd creep through tall crops, brushing off crickets, and crawl into a pallet beside her, the little soft spot she'd made up for him. He would swallow a tinny morning meal of the coffee beans she boiled in meat cans. He was never afraid to ask when he needed, and that's how they lived: moving, unrooted, both feeling so much older than their young, handsome cheekbones let on.
Call it whatever you want. He has never known anybody like that, and hasn't loved anyone like that since.
The day David realized Marcela Rodriguez Arredondo was his mother was also the first time he nearly died. He doesn't remember everything about that day. He can't recall if he apologized to her or not. He was only a child, less than ten, and sometimes children are stricken stupid by the most obvious things.
What he does remember is the vibrancy of that ground. Greenest thing you'd ever see, late June in a Missouri orchard—it's ryegrass, fescue, delicate baby leaves from the early bearing trees. None of the workers' boys or girls wore anything on their feet that time of year. They'd sprint through purple clover and yellowjackets with tough, awkward limbs, fighting each other in-between hours, hauling back sticky tarp bags full of whatever grew there. It was peaches that summer—overripe, stout pink ones. He can't recall the name of the man who owned them, but he remembers the sweet rot-scent, the wing buzzing, and the big white-painted manor house on the crest of that awful-green hill. Marcela said they paid good wages. He didn't know anything about money. He only knew that the chicken hawks and the black-eyed Susans meant they would be heading north again, a wagon train from Oklahoma, a barge up the Mississippi, or—when she didn't want to travel with anybody else—a long, tiring sojourn through dogwoods and soy.
He'd had one of those peaches in his hand. It was a damp, shady evening, grasshoppers and dew on the legs of his trousers. He was standing under a bough to eat and not really watching or expecting anything. One of the things he absolutely can't remember is what kind of mindset it takes to stop, rest, and not feel badness bearing down.
You know, he never heard it. Rattlers are supposed to warn you off—a bulky, hideous snake with a terrible temper but with enough mercy to tell you about it in advance. If you live in snake country, you learn their trill through the bluegrass like a death call. He didn't hear it. Possible he was too busy swatting hornets off the sugar on his arms to notice. Possible something hacked its tail tip off, a brushhog blade or shovel nose. Maybe that one just had a taste in its mouth for the blood of a stupid boy. He can't tell you if a snake acts to be wicked or if it's just in its nature to be a wicked thing.
When a snake speaks—whether it's a fork-tongue or smooth words through too-white teeth—fresh air makes venom crackle at the back of its throat. Go on and dub that one an old farmer's tale. This is one of the things you might be told, but that you don't feel, that you don't know, until you learn for yourself. Hike bare-foot in the dustbowl. Get to a city, one with towers and smog, one where short-haired women in black suits walk on knives and everybody grins like they've got something sharp. Find a million-dollar man in a thousand-dollar chair and get him to talk. These are the people who hiss from the heart. Listen close; you'll hear it. Then you can tell him what's real and what's not.
That sound was enough. The boy knew what was there before he needed to look. He lowered his fist dripping with the pit inside and saw it.
It was a massasauga. A thick, gnarled, glittering weave of serpent laying in the cool shade. Biggest one he's ever seen—arrowhead skull; crosshatched back, gorgeous and scarred; ferocious, insulted brows. These are the snakes good Catholics dream about, that kill horses and boil off men's calves, the kind with bites that turn you to charcoal before you crumble and die. These are the snakes that devour underweight, walking children with deep gazes and sad expressions. He could smell wet reptile. His toes were in the shadow of the twitching black tail.
It reared up—he swears this is true—looked him right in the face, and told him you'll die, boy.
Snakes don't understand accidents, missteps, or do-what-I-have-tos. They are easily angered and easily bruised. It's the way their country makes them, stuck between vultures and wolves and rakes; creatures like that can't forgive, cannot let-be once some lines are crossed. They take it real personal. They want repayment, a pound of flesh. They are not reasonable no matter what they promise. And maybe it might've been personal or it might've been bad luck, but David had stepped on that snake and he hurt it, and it wasn't going to let him free.
He couldn't swallow or move or throw the peach in his hand, hope it would snap. He could reach down and touch its beads. He could feel all the fine hairs stand up on his back and was mesmerized by how fast fruit turned to death in his mouth. Those unblinking eyes are the vilest green.
This is how I die, David thought. He was six, seven years old and he could see himself go still and stop in the orchard below that pristine white house. He didn't want to faint or fall over. He would lay down, carefully, his ankles turning black and his lungs pulling apart, right in the dew of this grass; the snake wouldn't matter by then; and he would fill up with the blue in a cloudless five o'clock sky. They could bury him right here. Or maybe they wouldn't need to bury him, at all—maybe the loose dirt would yawn him in, make everything sink until there was just that bark smell and sleep. He'd breathe shallow breaths to keep his blood moving slow. He wouldn't scream and cause a fuss. He'd make it last as long as he could.
Thern bang, and David thought he'd been bitten, thought he'd been killed, but it was Marcela from nowhere with her gun in her hand—the one she kept under the bedding, the one that looked like a rebel. She fired, and the bullet blew its body in two. He saw the head come off that snake at the neck. And the neck, he swears, the neck stood gaping at him another ten seconds before falling over, like it didn't know its brain was gone, like it was waiting for the real death.
The vertebrae danced in the grass where he'd dropped the peach to cover his ears with his shirtsleeves. Barrel smoke, that far house, the dead look on Marcela's face, the figure-eights tangling in the orchard. He understood everything then.
She slapped him for not looking out for himself, and he started to cry. So she slapped him again, and the warmth of the nose blood mixed with the tears tasted like life.
He didn't know where his mother came from, that day or any day. He didn't know how she got that Argentine gun, who his daddy was, or what she bled through her soles to leave behind. But he does know she never left him.
There are a lot of them out there. Snakes, that is: copperheads; pit vipers; cottonmouths with bleached, taunting gums; sidewinders, ridge-nosed and tiger-striped; puff adders; corals. It's not just the ones that boast and rattle. Some of them are a quiet kind of hate, a vicious kind of mean, the sort that slither into a baby's bed and tap at its ears. Some lunge for the shins and other flare. Some will shy away for cover at feeling the vibration of your march; some'll come running for it, curious, crazy-eyed. There are different ways to deal with different dangers. You've just got to do enough math to figure which one you're facing down.
Marcela's stories: two times to kill a snake, crawl down in a ditch if a twister roars, how to tell when a white man cheats, and know your enemy.
If you're going to get bit by a snake, you better find out what kind of snake it is.
Here's one he remembers:
When David was eleven, maybe twelve, they went to live in a labor camp just north of the Ohio River Kentucky border. David liked living in the camp. Marcela didn't like it so much. The place was sharecropped between three overseers and went on for miles: pretty rows of beanstalks, pepper bush, potato peels, beets. Menacing pines surrounded them in needle-cone acres on every side. You'd have to cut through those dark trees to the railroad, on horseback or car, but the horses were for plowing and none of them had cars. What they had was sun and workers and seeds that did pretty well. It was a decent prairie farm. It was all let out by a Mr. George Gussie who lived in a mammoth townhouse with his family outside Evansville, some four hours away.
Each overseer had a cute country home on a corner, and set between was the dormitory—The Hands' Building, they called it—robin-egg blue, ten windows, two-stories high.
He was lucky that thing hadn't collapsed in the whole year-some they spent there. It was a badly-shingled, moaning flophouse that shrieked in stormwind and had only one pot-bellied stove for the bunch of them inside. There were no rugs to speak of. The air flow was too scant to rush out heat but uninsulated against winter chills. It was a barren place, a temporary place, a place people swept in-and-out of. But it had floors and walls and the ceiling didn't leak, and sometimes that's enough.
David liked that they had a room. It was a dreary, claustrophobic room now that he thinks of it again: one bedframe, one cabinet, no natural light blinking in. They couldn't fit a table so usually ate outside. Always stunk of iron, sweat, and lard—a haze that seeped in from the sparse, creaking common room where their neighbors fried bacon that tormented his guts. Marcela found a tin trough to use for a bath, and it lived leant up against the only free corner they had. But she kept it clean, kept it safe, and kept it. They'd sleep with that gun under her pillow, a knife in the mattress crease. They had a hundred mundane things to squabble about, see-to, get done.
He was never sure how many different families shared The Hands' Building, but there were twelve bedrooms on each floor, and more hands than could fit. Tents went up for those who couldn't get a roof. Any given night, you'd find young people sleeping on hay mats outside, stitching hammocks to evade the beetles and ants. That was a rough patch for other mothers' sons, though. Marcela had a place to be.
There were a lot of other kids at that camp, some boys and some girls, some his age and some older. Italian, Negro, Polish, a fair number like him. He can't remember anybody's name, but he can remember a Jewish girl who used to pick up pond frogs and put them on you, who was always giving people dandelions, who died of scarlet fever in December and gave everybody a contagion scare. They burned up the room she had so nothing would catch. Good God, he didn't know what a Jew or a pogrom was.
That camp was the first time he can recall having friends. David was tongue-tied a lot of the time, a product of his personality—he was whipcrack skinny, somber, the kind of boy writers want to write about—but he liked having other small bodies around, and they didn't judge too harsh. They were all wretched children. He didn't know that at the time.
Other things he didn't know: free market, naturalization, slaughterhouses, census papers, anarchist, strikebreaker, wetback, union mills, why you shouldn't practice kissing with a girl named Daisey-May Booker (even though Daisey-May Booker kissed everybody), why they lit another girl's baby blankets on fire after she got sunk in the ground. How come we move so much? How come George Gussie lives in too many rooms with his Evansville family and I only have this one? It's the things a kid doesn't know to ask that keeps them from wanting to kill people, to catch a death and die.
What he did know was snakes. What he did know was how to drift through being poor.
Another thing David knew was how to read. They did it together, but never by that house, and never by anyone else. Or he read; she'd have him stand behind as her quick fingers pinched green beans, sundown warming his back, stumbling over the periodicals some of the campesinos saved aside to pass around. Goldman, Baginski, Alexander Berkman and Grace Potter. Zucchini, strawberries, sour yellow pears. "And You?", eyed russets, "Vive Le Roi," Sacco and Vanzetti. She wanted to hear the English print articles and said he could make the words sound better than her. They still sounded awful, but now he knows what she meant, and why that's important to a kid with his face.
She never taught him much Spanish. No good to come from that; you are American, you are already there. There—as though it was not the same wheat field or apple grove, as if he was on the other side of a river, thigh-deep and waiting for someone who wasn't going to come.
"The King is dead," he'd wobble, the evening heat soaking through the coarse cotton collar he wore, the bangs itching beneath his cap, the bees pestering about to drink their sweat and snakes always underfoot. His hands would shake around the cheap, brittle paper as they always did when he tried to speak under this clear white out-nowhere sky. "Then love and live and laugh and sing—The world is good and life is free—There's not a single care I know that's worth a single tear from me."
David Rodriguez is an American boy, a woman's child; he has no accent and his look is far and grim and too blue for who they want him to be.
It was always too-something in Marcela's house.
"Too many flies in here," she'd curse, chase them out their door with a crack of towel, because they didn't have a window in their hotbox little room.
"Too warm to go out there," she's warn, and yell him back inside when some neighbor children tried to skate on the fishing lake. David was so mad at her that day. He watched them slip about and throw mittens full of snow at one another, and he grumbled nasty language on the splintery stoop. He told her it wasn't fair, she wasn't thinking, and when he was a man she couldn't tell him what to do. Marcela said aren't you going to be in trouble then. It was maybe an hour before the ice cracked through and two of those kids froze to death on a too-warm February day.
"Too much hair on your head," she'd scold, affectionately, and scald her pocketknife in a kettle fire before taking it to the back of his neck. It always stung getting haircuts. The blade would invariably be a little too hot, and her petite, bony hands would pull. Marcela wasn't the type who smooched or hugged, but sometimes—usually in the middle of cutting his hair—she would take both his ears, hold his skull between her palms, and rest on the things she was trying to keep there.
He doesn't know how she did any of it at all.
It might seem unbalanced, these things he's telling you: how a kid can know so much and not know anything at all. It's not, though. It's the most normal thing can be. Being poor is all about knowing and not-knowing. The poor are brilliant and ignorant and industrious and dour and miserable and happy as they need to be to survive. More than anything else, poor is ugly.
Ugly doesn't mean the same thing as it does in that other place, though—doesn't mean what it means in Evansville, St. Louis, Chicago or sprawling California towns. David learned quickly there is more than one way to be ugly. It can come in the grain of your face, the vice of your conscience or the violence in your marrow. It can come in machetes and canines and shotguns and knuckles full of brick. It can even come in purple lipstick and gunshot heels. Ugly is a damn good master of disguise. But because it's not always clear the ways ugly dresses up, you aren't often sure what you're dealing with; you can only be certain whether or not you are rich or you are poor.
One thing is certain: David Rodriguez is poor. Everyone he has known enough to call by name is poor. But Marcela is beautiful, even with her broken tooth, even with the horrible things she has done and had-to-do with the flat brown planes of her hands.
He understands now how his mother got herself that room, but how isn't something a boy with dry socks and a down quilt worries about. It was a sore, hulking house. It was a horror house and David liked it. God damn him, he did.
He remembers the first man he shot, but he doesn't want to remember the second death, or the ugliness of that small room.
Here's something you ought to know about men like George Gussie.
The first time David saw Mr. Gussie—that was the name, if he didn't tell you before: George Jeremiah Gussie, G.J. Gussie, like his parents planned it out for the advertisements, envisioned a catchy Hancock on the City Bank checks. If you can believe that unbelievable shit is up to you. Whether you buy it or not, the first time he saw Mr. Gussie, it was on the Clydesdale stable lawn, just about four hours after Evansville Protestant must've let out, between the blushing sweetbriar and a tomato patch. All three overseers knew he was coming and told everybody to stay the hell away. David had every intention of staying the hell away, but even from crouching in that patch, there was no way to miss Gussie. They all saw him screech up in a choke and a plume of vermeil dust. He stepped out of a Ford so black and so sun-shined you couldn't look directly at it without pain lighting up your eye.
He was kind of fat, Mr. Gussie. Kind of soft and kind of fat, with a spotless gray suit, squeaking leather shoes, a San Diego beard and a bowler with one pheasant feather stuck in. These things never bothered him then, but now there's a ripple in the memory, and a rattlesnake wearing a tie. You know, Nines doesn't think George Gussie ever noticed David Rodriguez existed, never knew him from Adam, and why the fuck would he?—not until trod-on, not until given a reason to kill.
But Nines had already been told snakes don't really need reasons to kill. They grow them instinctually, have them born-in, just like the toxins in the gunbarrel of fang.
What you should know about this kind of man is that, when he makes a routine, he'll stick to it. They like their laws, George Gussies. They like their fast, black Fords and their Sundays and their way-things-used-to-bes.
With all those other proper-order, money-bought, cool steel things, George Gussie liked Marcela, and every third Sunday of the month, he'd drive up in his fast black Ford, and he'd make her fuck him in that shitty labor camp room.
Being poor is ugly—but not half as ugly as the ugly, rattling rich.
It's a difficult thing to be sick when you're young. Not the kind of sick with a flu or a cough, but that bones-deep sick—the low heat that radiates out, clenches everything, makes the liquids simmer, shrieks talon and claw at the insides of your ribcage. You know that sick. In men, it makes you put your fist through the wall, makes you make somebody hurt. In kids, it's a little different. There are some like to blame that on the DNA that he'll get someday, on politics, on being Brujah. Brujah blood—people say so with scorn or with pride, but most of it's bullshit, a good excuse to be clannish and crude. Nines knows he's felt that monstrous kind of sickness a long time before feeling the other one. It's part of being a wretched child, and of learning, gradually, surely, inescapably, what you are.
At the age of twelve, or whatever he was, a kid's switchblade is dull, his truths still hazy. David didn't understand a lot of bad bargains the world asks you to make. He didn't know what concession means and never heard the word rape. He was more pissed off than worried when Marcela told him to go somewhere else for a while, find some more work, don't come back until late. She had that offhand way of calling you lazy. But if he'd watched the tall grass harder, maybe what happened to three people that ugly summer Sunday wouldn't have, and who knows where on earth they'd all be.
That's the useless hindsight Nines doesn't like having. He hasn't thought about this in a real long time, and he won't for another—so maybe by the next, more will have been lost to him, memories buried in a hundred years of snakes.
But for now, here it is: what he remembers, what is left of his story to tell.
The night he shot George Gussie had been a gorgeous goddamn weekend. Mild sun, kind breeze, the sort that blows cotton around and rolls pretty waves on shallow water. He'd almost caught a great big bullhead that morning—broke a cane pole, snarled a line, wrestled free and all that fish plopped right back in the lake. It got a spur in and his thumb bled like a bitch. Can't remember that burnt little girl's name, but he can remember a dinner he didn't eat. Go figure that one. Go figure it's the meaningless shit that hangs on.
David went home hungry that evening. He could recall being angry. Hunger'll do that to you, and the whole country felt it keen a decade later, but this was the petty trashcan-kicking kind of anger boys stoke up when they want to steam. He lunked the half-mile back to The Hands' Building in a sunset looked like watered wine. He trudged through turnips with heavy feet, daring the snakes not to flee, huffing things like goddamn no-count sunnuvabitch because it made him feel better to talk like a man. And he'd brained a lot of copperheads by then. Sometimes David thought he'd kill 'til they thinned out and left. You know, he's not even sure why he was such a stormy little bastard on a beautiful day like that, but there it was, and here it is.
Another thing Nines has learned: Never judge where the fire is from a field away. Sometimes the glow is more than just embers; sometimes the rope is a venomous snake; sometimes the mist is smoke. Get close. Stand outside the door. You can hear when something is wrong.
He's never remembered exactly what happened next.
Here is what must have: David heard something awful, a thing he didn't want to learn. He opened that door and he went in the room and he saw George Gussie on his mother and then that Argentine gun was in his hand so he shot George Gussie, shot him onto the small square of ground. There was redness flowering and everything went real slow. Marcela sat up and maybe she said something with her blouse gaping and her insignificant left breast and her broken front tooth but he couldn't see her. George Gussie was coiling, twisting, all that toxin and all those hideous ugly colors spilling out. He was gushing the floorboards and hissing you'll die, boy, you're going to die so David walked up real calm and real clear and shot him again, in the head this time, where you ought to fire when you kill a snake. By now he's living in nothing at all. The tiny, horrible room has fallen away, his mother's fallen away, and it's just him standing there with the black Molina and brains all over the ground.
A gunshot isn't the same when you deal it and when you don't. It isn't a BANG! or a bell or a shattering if your own hand's on the hammer and your mind's gone lucid and sharp. Two shots: pop-pop. Two shots and the king is dead—he's heartless, mindless, twice dead—and David's killed a man, a rich white Ford-driving man, a man with a family house in Indiana who owns the dejected little hole they sleep in and likes to think with the brains plastered outside of his head that he also owns all of them.
An American boy has nowhere and everywhere to go.
And now she's screaming, no—he's screaming—and there's wet all over, and the corpse on the floor is a butchered reptile color, and he'll die, boy. They're going to hang him; he's going to be burned in a fire like that little girl was. He feels he can't breathe. Maybe I'm already dead, David thinks, they already killed me—but it's Marcela's fingers sealing his mouth, clamping, pushing the scream back in. She's kneeling on the floor between him and George Gussie's meat and pinching his nose and begging him shh and her eyes are full of white and blue. There's unhappy feet outside and somebody shouts and she shouts back. "Fine," she says; it's all fine, everything's all right, too much liquor, boy spooked himself. It's all right. He can't get any air and can't look at that wilted mass on the boards.
Maybe they know what goes on in this room better than he ever did. Those feet must go away, because David doesn't die yet. It's dark and adrenaline has collapsed, leaving nothing, not even moonglow; there's not enough space between these walls. George Gussie lays there inert and terrifying, scarier than a wealthy man ever was alive. He can smell the powder and hear wheezing from that jaw a bullet opened up. Marcela holds his mouth shut for he doesn't know how long. It's only her breathing and the mirror of her eyes. He doesn't know where the light in them comes from.
It is a real kind of a thing to kill a person—even a bad person. It's the realest thing there is.
When you do something that real, and this is the funny part: it doesn't feel real in the time that it should. It doesn't feel real when the slick reek is still on your clothes and everything inside your chest has gone. That's a self-preservation tactic, he's learned; the body gets slack and sure and shivering so it can do whatever's needed to get away. It wants to last as long as it can, you see. David stood there in the death he made, stopped and still, trying to drink up the blue in his mother's eyes like he was going to drink up sky though orchard trees. When she peeled her hand away, not certain if he could hear any of the shhes she told him, it wasn't glistening blood; it was just saliva and the stuff that's run from his nose. There was a splatter on the washtub, a crater in the bed. He kept wondering why he wasn't unmade and why he wasn't dead.
Some things you can't leave forever, not even when you run as long as she has.
In some old fallow field of his mind, George Gussie is still there in the wet part of the floor.
You should let a dead snake alone. That's not because they deserve it—as if they merit some kind of respect—but because even a decapitation can still be dangerous. There might be poison there still licking. David didn't want to touch him but he has to. God, he didn't want to touch him, but Marcela couldn't move a murder on her own. She got her elbows levied beneath the flopped weight of his pits, the smashed cup of skull beneath her chin, and dug her heels down. Help me, his mother told him, we have to do this, so he did. He'd followed her this far; there was nothing else for him to do. They struggled and labored and heaved in the quiet malevolent dark. He didn't understand how she can look so wild and be so methodical.
They couldn't move him. A second death in, a snake this size, is too heavy to hide—all the venom'd erupted, and made the flesh sluggish. She gave up. He dropped the man's perfect leather shoes.
Wait, Marcela told him. Her toes were silent beyond the creak of their door.
In this moment, he is alone in that room for a forever. Every pore howls. He knows what is in here. He can't tell if his eyes are opened or closed.
Then Marcela came back with a fire axe and she took George Gussie to pieces: arms, legs, torso, head.
David saw none of this. It happened, and he watched, but he saw none of it—it's a void on his brain. There is only a sound left for the memory. It's an anything-sound. It's the put of a motor bouncing over a bumpy road, still far away. It's the coal being shoveled downstairs. It's the thump of shining black leather shoes: clip-clop-clip-chop. It's all of those and it's none of them. There is just the whistle of steel when his mother brings the hatchet high over her head.
God help him forget that sound and that horror-house room.
When it was done, they stuffed it in lime bags. Everything fit. They sank George Gussie in a fine white powder, bit by bit, bundled him up, let the Ohio carry this away. Then they ran another time. They ran straight through those witching-tale woods, fingers grabbing other fingers, filthy, not bothering to look or watch or see. They ran until daylight, until the railroad tracks. They ran until they couldn't bear to run anymore, and then they waited for a cargo train, one slow and poor and corroded enough not to head anywhere important, nor to wear any locks on the empty last cars.
Nines doesn't really remember that run. He just knew he was out of that room, out of that house, out of that field, out of all the dark cramped places he knew before.
What he remembers is the morning. Morning is when you always remember, when your mind comes back to you. Maybe that's why he can't remember things like he used to anymore.
That gilt Monday morning, the morning after he shot a man and fled from the gore, David knew he'd remember rumble of tracks—the groan of wheels, the shudder of them, the way brown train car paint rusts a red clay color like the ends of her hair. He watched the Oklahoma wheat rushing past in glee-gold. He watched Marcela sitting on the lip of that car with one leg out and the light on her face. It was a harsh kind of day, a face-the-music day, one where nobody could sleep and nobody wanted to think. Their minds and hands were empty. He stood with his arms hugging his sides in the opposite end of the car. They didn't speak.
They didn't speak, and they didn't sleep, and it seemed like maybe they'd never do any of those normal things again. But then David—goddamn dumb fake-American boy—David started smiling. He started smiling because it's so horrible, because it's so foul, and then she did, too—and then they were laughing, laughing because the king is dead, laughing because they chopped up George Gussie like firewood and threw him into a river dressed in dog-cheap burlap—and because when things get that bad, he's learned, there's nothing else left but to taste the blood and drink the poison and show your teeth and laugh.
He called her Mama after that. She said maybe she didn't really mind.
How many years that was, Nines can't say. It's another thing lost, snakeprints curling in sand. He can't remember which state she died or what from or where he buried her. He can't remember the weight of that Molina in his hand when it was still somehow justified. He can only say he followed Marcela everywhere—at a distance, shuffling feet—keep walking, niño, or start running—and thought no one would've known he was her son were it not for the look split between them, the unfine metal color cupped inside their sockets, and the secret they kept tighter than they kept anything else.
I am so damn sick, he'd sometimes say. They'd be trudging up the side of a road, in the middle of a cornfield—there'd be a rattle in his ears, a big stick in his fist, a dead body that needed to be killed again. Little voice, little boots, little hates. I am so damn sick of all these snakes.
"You're too small to be that sick," Marcela'd tell him. He knew the handgun was right in her coat and not to be scared. But he couldn't help being sick.
"I don't care. I hate them. They never leave. Son-of-a-bitch," he'd cuss, and she wouldn't care like she sometimes did—not this time—and he'd be hitting the wild reeds, stamping his heels, listening for a hiss, hoping it would scream. "These goddamn sneaking pieces of shit. I want to kill every last goddamn one of them. I would if I could, you know, I would. They can't act decent. Can't be like the rest of us are. There's never one and then bang, that's it, that's all. They never just die. I hate it," he swore. "I hate it."
When them became it, Nines doesn't know. He isn't sure what happened on all of those roads or in all of those rooms—where all the snakes were, where the dead ones fell, where the live ones are still hissing and swelling green evil up to their eyes. He knows what is. He knows what he's learned. He knows what he has to do.
"There's a lot of snakes in the world," she told him. "You better start that battle early, boy."
But David's not worried. Time, he knows, is on his side. He's got his whole life to kill snakes.
And a little after, too.