Note: This particular anecdote is in response to a
Facebook posting about the time
Robin Hardy killed a cottonmouth. Robin is the person who deserves the credit, and the blame, for my writing being first published.
Welcome to Fred is dedicated to her. I will be eternally in her debt, which is to say I will never repay the favor. ;-)
Time: Sunday morning, 1975. Location: Fred, Texas.
I was a
freshman in college, home for the weekend. In my first semester at college,
unbeknownst to my parents, I had taken up smoking cigarettes. Now in my second semester, I had become adept at sneaking the occasional smoke when home on leave.
When the family
loaded up in the car to drive to church, I was intentionally late so as to
have the opportunity for a smoke on the quarter-mile walk through the woods from
the parsonage to the church.
I finished my morning ablutions, left the house, and fired up
a cigarette. About a hundred yards into the walk I encountered a snake on the
path. Not a first for me. You can’t live in the Big Thicket for long without
running into snakes. I’d caught a hognose a few years earlier at the same spot
on the trail, and stepped on a rattlesnake one afternoon while storming through the woods in a pique at having been conscripted to paint the pump house.
I peered at the snake, conjuring up my mnemonic rhymes to
determine that this particular specimen had the appropriate color combinations to
kill a fellow. It was my first
chance to dance with a coral snake in the wild. During the long dark watches of
the night in my bedroom I had frequently wondered if I had the nerve to deal
with a coral snake bite.
In case you're unfamiliar with the ways of the coral snake, it’s one thing to pull out your Swiss army knife, cut two Xs
in your leg, and suck out rattlesnake venom. It’s another thing to amputate
your hand. Unlike the venom from vipers, which travels through the bloodstream,
the venom from a coral snake is a neurotoxin. It travels through the nervous
system, causing your respiratory system to fail within hours. You can’t suck venom out of your nerves. Outside of antivenin, the only remedy is to cut off the
poisoned limb, hopefully before the venom has passed the particular joint you are
chopping on.
Yes, quite gruesome, but such is nature, red in tooth and
claw. I had a morbid imagination. I went through my requisite Poe, Lovecraft phase, as one does.As an adolescent I also wondered such
things as whether I could withstand torture for my faith like Brother Andrew.
So here I was face-to-face with my long-imagined foe. I couldn't sanction ignoring such a deadly presence on my home turf. I purposed
in my heart to capture it, admittedly without a clear long-term strategy. I
dashed back to the house, retrieved a five-pound Folgers coffee can, and
returned to the path, where the snake patiently awaited my pleasure. I peeled
the plastic lid from the can, requisitioned a nearby stick, and balanced the
snake on the end of it. After a few attempts I had the coral snake in the can
and the lid snapped down tight.
I did all this one-handed while still holding my precious
cigarette in the left. I carried the can back to the house, secured it in the
pump house, and proceeded to church, savoring the forbidden weed. After the
service and after lunch, my chauffeur to college CRJJr, aka CJ Hecker from
Welcome to Fred, arrived. [Note: CJ Hecker is one of only two characters in the
Fred books based on a specific real person. The identity of the other is left
as an exercise to the reader.]
I stowed my bags in back, set the Folgers can on the
passenger floorboard between my feet, and buckled in.
CJ asked about the can. I showed him the coral snake. He was
not amused.
Despite his displeasure, we arrived at my dorm three hours
later without having to amputate any of our limbs to halt the dreaded
neurotoxins.
I took the snake-in-a-coffee-can to my dorm room where
Fred, my roommate (Yes, I grew up in Fred and had a roommate named Fred. What’s
your point?) and suitemates Ken and Pat were similarly unamused. I slept
soundly that night. I can’t speak for the other inmates.
The next day I took the can to the science building, showed
the specimen to my biology professor, and got his verification that we were
indeed looking at a bona fide coral snake. I then told the professor I that the
snake occupied space I required for other purposes and that he could take
possession for his natural history collection. Like all those before him, he was
equally amazed but not amused. I walked out, satisfied in my vague quest to
make Fred, Texas safer in my own small way.
I don’t know what the professor did with the coral snake.
Perhaps it is on display in the lab even to this day with a small plaque
commemorating my service to humanity. Or not.
Maybe in a future installment I'll tell you the story of how I housed a baby possum in my dorm room for a week. Or not.
Collins can write, which comes as no surprise. He wrote Road to Perdition. This was an early attempt to reinvent the noir tradition. As indicated in the notes, his mentor and his agent said he needed to rewrite it because it was in first-person and over 100,000 words. His other mentor, Mickey Spillane (!!), called it the best private eye novel he'd ever read. Collins fired his agent, finished the novel, and it sold to the first publisher his new agent shopped it to. He went on to write 18 Heller novels, so far.
