Short story: They called him the Snake By Karl Whitney - - - - I say to them: ‘You’ve got me all wrong; I’m no snake. I can help you. It’s only a tree, and that’s only an apple’. But they carry on pointing at me and talking to each other in strange voices, and it looks like there’s nothing I can do. First of all, a snake is a snake is a snake. Second of all: I’m not one, at least maybe only if you listen to my first ex-wife. This is the way it happened: I’m walkin’ down the street next to the park, on my way to see the game at Murphy’s, when I hear voices beyond the bushes and railings, inside the park. It’s early in the evening and the park’s still open, but it’s what the voices are sayin that brings me in. They’re sayin stuff like: yes, no, but what if, like they’re havin a conversation, but not with each other; it’s like they’re talking to something that isn’t there, but they believe it is. I go in. So I go into the park, and these two crazies are there – a guy and a girl – and they’re naked. Now I’m from a different generation, and all this free love stuff leaves me a bit bewildered, but I don’t bat an eyelid – I’ve seen enough the same in this city up to now to know it ain’t gonna go away anytime soon. They’re just standin’ there blowin in the wind, yakkin away like there’s nothing up; like it’s not October and cold as hell. Smell of struck matches in the air. They had a look in their eyes that told me somethin’ was up – I’d been readin’ that day about drugs and hippies in the Chronicle, you see, and it was all fresh in my mind; I just put everything together. And these two cavortin’ in the shrubbery kinda fit in with everything I was hearin’. I walk up to them and they start tellin’ me about the voices, first the woman, then the man, both tellin’ the same story about how they can’t go near that tree – and here they point at it, leaves gone and fruit hardly clinging barely to the branches, nothin’ special. So I says: ‘Go on’, I says ‘if you want to eat the apple why not?’ I says, ‘Who’s gonna stop you?’ Then the guy comes over and grabs me by the collar of my coat and looks me straight and crazy in the eye and says: ‘God’. By now I have to get out. I’m seein’ that these kids are beyond help, but at the same time I’m interested in seein’ what happens; it’s sort of car crash crazy, you know? I take the woman aside and leave the guy starin’ up at nothing in the sky and I says to her: ‘eat the apple, then you’ll see; then you’ll know everything.’ And then they can get on with their lives, is what I’m thinking. They can put this craziness behind them and maybe make somethin’ of their lives, instead of hanging around parks getting naked and scarin’ innocent folks. And stop worryin’ about some goddamn tree. Again, the smell of struck matches hits me. So she goes, the woman, over to the guy and has a tête-à-tête with him and before I know what’s what she’s torn the apple from the tree and him and her are fightin’ and scrapin’ to try and get a bite of the fruit. It was somethin’ to behold, I tell ya. By now the time is getting’ on, and I’m meant to be in Murphy’s by 6, so I just head off. As I’m walking down the street I see the two kids scramble off behind the bushes, hiding themselves. The park keeper follows them, saying something I just can’t hear. I’m walkin’ away, and I’m thinkin’ about what any of it meant, and I’m so caught up I damn near walk under a cablecar next to the bar. Slow death. As it scuttles away down the hill, bells ringing and people cackling hard from the windows and doors. It’s dark and there’s still the smell of sulfur in the air, same as in the cab on the way home yesterday. When I get to Murphy’s I tell Tom the whole story from start to finish: about the crazy kids in the park; about the smell in the cab and how I’d tried to wash it out with cleaner last night; I don’t tell him about the cablecar. They called me a snake. They thought they were talking to God. Those kids. Tom laughs, slaps me on the back, and tells me I’m alright. -------- Stories | Home | About This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 2.5 License.