Five minutes before the end of Devaughn’s next shift, my grandfather showed up at the security desk wearing rubber waders over stained chinos, holding an empty one-quart Ziploc. He carried a blue NASA knapsack, meant for children, into which he had placed a thermos of lemonade, a first aid kit, and a field guide to snakes and reptiles from the Coconut Creek branch of the Broward County Library. In his right hand he carried a blackthorn walking stick, never used, that Sally Sichel had bought for her husband, Leslie, when his fatal disease first enfeebled him. Until yesterday afternoon the walking stick had been surmounted by a sterling silver duck’s head. In the Fontana Village metal shop my grandfather had (with Sally’s permission) removed this and replaced it with the iron head of a three-pound maul. As he walked across the grounds from his unit, swinging the stick, my grandfather had ignored a number of puzzled looks and two direct queries. But Devaughn understood at once what my grandfather had in mind.
“It was me?” he said, “I’d go with a machete.” Devaughn chopped at his left wrist with the edge of his right hand. “You want to decapacitate it, clean and quick.”
My grandfather made a mental note to see Perfecto Tiant, the chief of the landscaping crew, about borrowing a machete when the time came. He held up the Ziploc bag. “You said you saw its droppings,” he said. “I’d like you to help me get hold of some.”
“Right now.” Devaughn looked skeptical.
“Isn’t your shift over at eight?”
“Yes, sir, it is. But then, see, I’m kind of on Devaughn time.”
“Yeah? And what happens then?”
“On Devaughn time?” Devaughn rolled his eyes to the ceiling. He seemed to be consulting a long menu of pastimes and pursuits. “Well, for one thing? Not picking up a snake bowel movement, putting it into a baggie.”
“Never?”
“No, sir.”
My grandfather and Devaughn stared at each other. The mechanism in the clock on the wall behind the counter advanced with a loud thunk into the next minute of their lives.
“I suppose I might be willing to pay you for your trouble,” my grandfather said.
Devaughn smiled. He found it a comfort to see a show of miserliness in a Jew. He assumed that my grandfather was a millionaire. “How much?” he said.
“Twenty-five. But only if I get something to put in this bag.”
When the day man came in, Devaughn pulled on his billed cap with the Fontana Village logo and picked up his zippered nylon briefcase. My grandfather followed him to his car, a 1979 Cutlass Supreme. It sat creaking in the employee lot, vinyl top bleached and peeled by years in the heat of Florida. Devaughn opened the trunk and put in his briefcase, minus a peanut butter and potato chip sandwich that he folded over twice and rammed with a fingertip into his mouth. He unbuttoned his uniform shirt and hung it on a hanger from the valet hook inside his car. His belly sloshed in the wineskin of a ribbed undershirt. His bare shoulders were ivory-yellow and densely freckled. The freckles, like his hair and eyelashes, were the color of a Nilla wafer. He stuffed the billed cap into the briefcase and, from atop the rear dash, took out a straw cowboy hat whose brim curled up sharply at the sides. At the very back of the trunk, under the rear dash, he opened a toolbox of molded plastic and dug around until he found a machete as long as his forearm, in a leather sheath. Balancing it flat across his upturned palms, he contemplated my grandfather. He was still chewing the sandwich, lips pursing as his jaw worked up and down. “Doubt you going to need it this morning, but,” he said. “You welcome to borrow it if you want.”
“I don’t like to borrow,” my grandfather said. “I’ll rent it from you.”
“Suit yourself, then.”
My grandfather got into the car. It was an oven. He rolled down the window, and the trim of the handle burned his fingers. The air-conditioning wheezed. Its breath smelled of mildew tinged with peanut butter and potato chips.
“Time I really got a good look around in there?” Devaughn said. “It was with Finlay Gadbois, you remember Finlay?”
My grandfather recalled a blond pompadour behind a motocross magazine, two black brogues propped up on the security desk.
“Finlay’s brother was a investigator for some real estate lawyers got tangled up in the whole mess over there for a while? Took me and Finlay for a tour one time, we went right in the front gate. The, uh, droppings was all over the, like, the front porch of the clubhouse.”
“Show me.”
“It’s all chained up, though.”
“Show me.”
“With a padlock.”
My grandfather settled the NASA backpack on his lap and looked out the window at the expanse of Fontana Village. The scene never varied except for the transit of rain, people, and golf carts across it. Shadows of eaves and dormers moved slow as hour hands across the blank faces of the units. Stucco, palm trees, concrete walks, lawns that never seemed to grow or fade. Inverted over everything a glass bell of sky. Shake the whole thing a couple of times and you would stir up a flurry of glitter. My grandfather was tired of looking at it, to a depth of his soul that made him wonder if there might really be something wrong with him. The name and number of the specialist were still keeping company with Hosni Mubarak in the latest issue of Commentary. As soon he had taken care of this snake problem, he told himself, he would make that appointment.
“When I feel like I’ve got my twenty-five dollars’ worth,” my grandfather said, “then I’ll stop telling you what to do. Show me.”
Devaughn put the car in gear. He drove out of the gates of Fontana Village. They made three left turns, bending around a vast South Florida city block. Devaughn turned in to the driveway of the abandoned country club. Grass crazed the driveway. They did not get far before they had to stop. The property had been fenced all around with chain-link drowned in a surf of kudzu. Rusted signs warning away trespassers had been fixed to the fence by the city and by the defeated successors to the original losers of the country club. Among the warning signs stood a gate cabled and locked with a heavy padlock.
My grandfather got out of the car and notched the walking stick up under his arm. He took off his belt and fed it through the loop on the machete’s holster. He put the belt back on. He didn’t think he was going to need it this morning, either, but you never knew. Sometimes a hunter could get lucky.
Beyond the gate, the driveway carried on to an arch in a pink stucco wall. Kudzu had strung its green banners across the archway and worked its fingers into a thousand cracks in the pink stucco. On a frieze over the arc, between a pair of cartographic dolphins, a plaster triton sat on a compass rose, blowing a conch trumpet. The triton had lost its face. The leering dolphins were blackened with grime or mold. The name of the country club was Mandeville.
“That’s where you want to look for him,” Devaughn said, pointing at the cracked blacktop between the chain-link gate and the archway. “Middle of a nice hot road like that, end of the day when the air’s starting to get cool.”
“Where’s this clubhouse?”
“Through the arch, up the road. You can kind of almost see it, something pink there? Long way to go.”
“I see it.”
A shard of pink in green shadow. A forlorn pink, the pink of a tattered flamingo in a roadside zoo.
“Look there!” Devaughn was pointing to the left of the gate, just beyond the fence, under a sprawl of rhododendron.
My grandfather grabbed the hilt of the machete. His hand craved the bite of its blade into muscle. But there was no snake drowsing in a coil under the rhododendron. There was only what appeared to be a scrap of upholstery batting, a rude nest woven of gray twine and ashes. At one edge it devolved into a tuft of down that might once, my grandfather supposed, have been Ramon. It lay on the far side of the fence about three feet beyond the limits of either my grandfather’s or Devaughn’s reach.
My grandfather handed Leslie’s stick to Devaughn.
“What you call this thing?” Devaughn said, hefting it.
“It’s a snake hammer.”
Devaughn nodded knowledgeably. He got down on his belly and poked the stick under the fence toward the twist of scat. Grunting and cursing, he steered its steel tip to within an inch of the scat but no closer. He let go of the stick on the wrong side of the fence and it slid away from him. His body went slack against the ground. “Shit.” He looked at my grandfather, awaiting reproach.
“Decent snake hammer’s going to set you back more than twenty-five bucks,” my grandfather said.
He took Devaughn’s place on the ground and managed, straining, to retrieve the stick. His arms were long in proportion to the rest of him, but he had no better luck than Devaughn in reaching the remnant of Ramon. He stood up. Vertigo swept over him. Fire drew arabesques at the back of his eyes. “Shit,” he said.