CHAPTER 16
______________

The Snake’s Dinner

Shortly before three-thirty, Nickie set out for Grover’s house. She’d seen it from the back—at least a glimpse of it beyond the shed and the fruit trees—but now she saw the front for the first time. It was a one-story yellow house with two battered tricycles standing out in the yard and three saggy steps leading up to a porch. On the porch was a couch covered in green material worn almost to white on the seat and arms, and on the couch sat a very old woman wearing a red housedress with a zipper up the front and a baggy lavender sweater. As Nickie came up the walk, the old woman peered at her.

“You’re not from here,” she said.

“No,” said Nickie. “I’m just visiting.”

The old woman nodded. She was wearing, Nickie noticed, yellow bedroom slippers with ducks on the toes.

“I’m looking for Grover,” Nickie said.

But Grover must have seen her coming. The door opened, and there he was. “You did come,” he said. “Amazing.”

“Got yourself a girlfriend,” the old woman said to Grover.

“She isn’t my girlfriend, Granny,” Grover said. “Just a girl.”

Inside, the house was dim and crowded. The TV was on—it was the president, announcing that only four days remained before the deadline he’d set for the Phalanx Nations. But no one was paying attention. The living room was full of sagging furniture, and every piece of furniture seemed to have a child climbing on it, or curled up in it, or crawling out from under it. They all stared at Nickie when she came in.

“My brothers and sisters,” Grover said, waving a hand at them.

“How many are there?” Nickie asked, spotting another one toddling up the hall.

“Six. The twins and four more. Plus me—I’m the oldest.”

He led her down a short hall that went right through the house. The walls were covered with photographs—school pictures, wedding pictures, baby pictures, some in frames and some stuck up with thumbtacks.

They went out the back door, and Grover led the way across the sloping yard, over the dead grass and brown rain-plastered leaves, between the gnarled trunks of the fruit trees, down to the shed beside the alley.

Nickie began to feel nervous. Her stomach clenched.

Grover twirled the dial of a combination lock on the latch and opened the shed door. She followed him in. The air had an earthy smell. A few garden tools, mostly broken, hung on hooks on the walls. On a shelf across one wall were the two snake tanks, and on other shelves, and on the floor, and on a small table and a chair were piles and piles of magazines and flattened cereal boxes, soap boxes, and cake mix boxes. The whole mess was sprinkled here and there with little bits of bent cardboard.

“What’s all that?” Nickie asked.

“Contests,” said Grover. “Sweepstakes, lottery tickets, stuff like that. There’s gobs of dollars out there being given away. I enter everything I can find.”

“Why?”

“Because I need money, obviously.” He made a “how can you be such a moron” face at her. “I want to go on the Arrowhead Wilderness Reptile Expedition this summer, which costs three hundred seventy-five dollars, which I don’t have. So I’m going to win it.”

“People hardly ever win contests,” Nickie said. “I don’t know anyone who has.”

“Well, you will pretty soon,” Grover said. “Look at this one.” He held up a page torn from a magazine. “You write one paragraph, no more than a hundred words, saying why Armstrong Pickles are the best. Want to hear my paragraph?”

“Okay,” said Nickie. She glanced uneasily at the two glass tanks on the shelf, but she didn’t see anything inside, only dry leaves.

Grover rummaged around on the table and came up with a sheet of binder paper. He read: “Last Sunday night, I was studying for my math test. It was late, and I was tired. My eyes kept closing so I couldn’t see the numbers in my book. I thought, How am I going to pass this test if I can’t stay awake? Then inspiration hit me. I needed an Armstrong Pickle! I jumped up from my chair and ran to the refrigerator. I pulled one of those big, green, pimply pickles out of the jar. The first cool bite made my brain go ZING! And the next day I got an A on the test.” Grover looked up, grinning. “Only ninety-eight words.”

Nickie laughed. “It’s great,” she said. “What do you get if you win?”

“You get five hundred dollars plus a whole free crate of pickles,” said Grover. “There’s all kinds of contests. Ones where you think up a slogan, and ones where you make as many words as you can out of some product’s name, and ones where you solve a cryptogram, and—”

“Have you won any of them yet?” Nickie asked.

“Oh, yeah,” said Grover. “I won six free boxes of Oat Crinklies, and I won a bunch of coupons for Rosepetal laundry soap. Just no money yet, but that will come.”

He turned to the snakes. “All right,” he said. “Time to get down to business. First the milk snake. He hasn’t eaten for a few weeks.”

“A few weeks!”

“Yep. They don’t eat much in the winter. Snakes out in the wild around here crawl down underground and hardly eat at all till spring. Hey, you know what I saw when I was up in the mountains looking for snake food?”

“What?”

“I saw that terrorist. The one who broke the restaurant window.”

“You did? Weren’t you scared?”

“Nah. He was far away. Big, though. Huge. I just caught a glimpse of him.”

Grover took the top off one of the tanks. Inside it, the snake stirred, lifting its head and then more and more of itself from the bark and dry leaves that covered it. Rings of black, yellow, and reddish-brown striped its long body.

“It doesn’t look a bit like milk,” Nickie said.

“I know it,” said Grover, gazing fondly at the snake. “It’s called that because people used to find them in their barns and think they’d come to milk the cows.”

From a small cardboard box next to the snake tank, he took out the tiny mouse he’d shown Nickie before. It was pink and wet-looking, with a tiny head and bulgy bluish eyes, and tiny legs with tiny toes like fringe at the ends. It was moving slightly in Grover’s palm, but it looked limp and weak.

“Bye-bye, baby,” Grover said. He picked up a long pair of tongs, the kind people use to turn meat on a barbecue grill. His teasing manner was gone now. He moved carefully. All his attention was on what he was doing. He gripped the tiny mouse with the tongs and waved it back and forth before the snake’s head. The snake lifted the front half of its body into the air. Its tongue flicked in and out.

“I don’t know,” said Nickie. “Maybe I don’t want to watch.”

But it was too late. The snake struck out and snatched the mouse. It withdrew into the tank and wrapped a coil of itself around the mouse’s body to hold it still, and then it opened its mouth extremely wide and began to stuff the mouse’s head into it.

“They always eat things headfirst,” Grover remarked. “And they have expandable jaws.”

Nickie froze in horror, but she couldn’t take her eyes away. It took only a few seconds for the pink body of the mouse, still wriggling, to disappear down the snake’s throat. For a second, a bit of tail hung over the snake’s lower jaw. Then the whole mouse was gone. The snake stretched out on the sand again. Behind its head was a mouse-sized bulge.

Nickie breathed out. She hadn’t realized she’d been holding her breath. She felt ill. “It’s horrible,” she said.

“Not really,” said Grover. “It’s how the snake lives. If I didn’t give him a mouse, he’d catch one himself.”

“How can you stand to do it? The poor little mouse.”

Grover shrugged. “It’s nature,” he said. “Nature likes the snake just as much as the mouse.”

“I guess so,” Nickie said.

“Well, that’s it,” said Grover. He set down the tongs and put the lid back on the tank. “At least you didn’t faint.”

“I’ve never fainted,” said Nickie. She felt upset—somewhere between sick and angry.

“Want to see the red belly eat?”

“No. It’s too weird.”

“It’s not weird at all,” Grover retorted. “It happens every day, hundreds of times. If you want to see something really weird, go over to Hoyt McCoy’s house in the middle of the night. He cracks the sky open. I saw it.”

“Come on,” said Nickie. “You’re making that up.”

“No! I really saw it. A long, skinny line in the sky. He’s doing something weird over there. Maybe he’s sending signals to enemy nations! Or he opens the sky, and aliens and demons ooze through!” Grover wiggled his fingers in a creepy, oozing way.

Nickie just shook her head. With Grover, she didn’t know how to tell the difference between truth and kidding. “I have to go now,” she said. So Grover led her back across the yard and into the house, down the hall among the toddlers, and out onto the front porch, where the grandmother was still sitting on the old couch.

“Going already?” the old woman said.

“I showed her the milk snake,” said Grover.

“No wonder she’s leaving in a hurry.”

“Fed him his dinner,” said Grover.

“It was gruesome,” Nickie said.

“No kidding,” said the grandma. She eyed Nickie with interest. “You going to introduce me to this young lady?” she asked Grover.

“This is my grandmother, Carrie Hartwell,” Grover said to Nickie. “We just call her Granny Carrie.” He turned to his grandmother. “And this is Nickie,” he said.

“Nickie Randolph,” said Nickie. “My great-grandfather lived here. His name was Arthur Green.”

“Ah,” the grandmother said. “He was on the side of the angels.”

Nickie wasn’t sure what this meant, but it sounded all right. She said goodbye and walked back out to the street. Her legs felt shaky and her stomach churned. Was it good, she wondered, to feed a baby mouse to a snake? It wasn’t good for the mouse, but it was for the snake. Was it evil for Grover to do it? She just didn’t know.