“Name of the game,” Devaughn said.
My grandfather sat in the car with the door open and drank some of the lemonade from the thermos. A small plane droned toward the Atlantic, trailing a banner lettered in red capitals. He struggled to make out the distant text with an urgency he knew to be misplaced.
“Sea and Ski,” Devaughn said.
My grandfather nodded. He took out his wallet and paid Devaughn in full.
“Sorry it didn’t work out,” Devaughn said.
“Care to make it fifty?” my grandfather said.
Devaughn drove my grandfather to a hardware store and waited in the car. My grandfather bought a Yale padlock that appeared to be nearly identical to the one cabled to the chain-link gate. He gave some thought to a pair of bolt cutters, but they were expensive and bulky and he knew the sight of them would spook Devaughn. As it was, Devaughn eyed uneasily the paper bag in my grandfather’s lap.
When they got back to Mandeville, my grandfather climbed out of the car and shut the door. The temperature was ninety-five degrees. Across the feral golf course on the other side of the fence, a million insects played a one-note tone poem entitled Heat. My grandfather leaned in through the window on the passenger side. “Go park the car down the street,” he said. “By the lawn and garden store. I’ll meet you there in two minutes.”
“What you going to do?”
My grandfather walked over to the fence. He matched the padlock to the business end of the snake hammer.
“No,” Devaughn called. “No way.”
“Two minutes.”
“It’s crazy. Why you don’t just go in from the Fontana Village side?”
“Fence.”
“Have to have a hole in it somewheres. All them pets get inside no problem.”
“What do I look like? A shih tzu or an old man?”
“A old man.”
“Here’s where there’s a paved road. You told me yourself they like to lie on hot pavement.”
“So you going to just walk in there in broad daylight.”
“I’m going to need to come back. Probably a number of times.” He hefted the brown paper bag with the lock inside it. “I want to make that easier to do.”
“You going to get us arrested,” Devaughn said. “I can’t have that. I’m an old man, too, and I need this job. I didn’t plan for no financial future like y’all.”
“Two minutes. If I get caught, I’ll say I walked here. I won’t say a word about you.”
“They might put you in jail.”
“I’ve been in jail,” my grandfather said. “I got a lot of reading done.”
Devaughn looked surprised. His gaze drifted down to my grandfather’s feet in the rubber waders and back up to his blue-and-white canvas bucket hat, souvenir of a visit to an Israeli kibbutz that he and my grandmother had made not long after the Six-Day War.
“I might like to re-estimate my opinion of you,” Devaughn said. He leaned across to roll up the passenger window, then backed the car down the driveway.
My grandfather watched Devaughn pull away. He raised the head of the walking stick and brought it down on the padlock. The impact rang up his arm to the elbow. The lock held firm. It took seven more smacks with the hammer to crack it. He yanked it open. He tried to swing aside the chain-link gate, but the kudzu vines held it fast. He pried it open an inch or two with the shaft of the walking stick but not enough to squeeze through. He unsheathed the machete and brought it down. The tendrils snapped like guitar strings. Pain twanged in my grandfather’s shoulder. The gate swung open without a sound.
My grandfather found his fingers trembling as he tore open the packaging of the new lock. After he put the new lock into place, he stooped to pick up some bits of the shattered one. He fitted them into the blister of the packaging with the rest of the old lock and put it in the paper bag. Then he stepped into the snake’s domain. He looked around, listening for a dragging sound, a pop of twigs. He was under the impression that snakes gave off a musk, and he sniffed the air. Twice dapples of sun on shade stopped the blood in his veins. He lowered himself to stoop for the snake hammer, then walked over to the rhododendron and crouched down beside it. He used the tip of the walking stick to slide the scat into the Ziploc bag.
When he tried to stand again, his knees had locked. He planted the stick in the gravel and, grateful not to find himself mocked by the smug expression of a sterling-silver duck, pulled himself up along its length. On his feet once more, he made for the gate and locked it. He slipped the key into an outer pocket of the knapsack, alongside the baggie. Then he walked down the street to the lawn and garden store to settle his account with Devaughn, and to inquire about the going day rate for a machete.
*
“What was it for?” I said. “What did you do with the snake poop?”
“There was a professor at Miami. In the biology department. A herpetologist. He agreed to take a look at it.”
“And?”
“He felt confident it was not the fecal matter of a boa constrictor.”
“So it was an alligator.”
“It was a python.”
“A python? Don’t pythons get really big?”
My grandfather shrugged. The shrug said, Define big. It said, Compared to an ankylosaurus? Not so big.
“Can they get big enough to eat a cat?”
He stuck out his tongue once, twice. I handed him a mug of apple juice and he took a measured sip.
“A python can swallow a deer,” he said.
“Jesus.”
“A cat? To a python? Like a handful of nuts.”
I resisted the urge to point out that snakes did not have hands.
“So, last year,” I said, “like, right after I visited you? And we watched that PBS thing about exotic pets taking over the Everglades? You basically went out into the jungle. And started hunting a python.”
Another shrug: It passed the time.
“So did you use one of those, like, noose-on-a-stick things they had?” I mimed the thrust-and-tug action of the snare tool a park ranger on the program had employed to bag a boa constrictor.
“I had no interest in capturing him,” my grandfather said. “I wanted to kill him.”
“With a gun?”
My grandfather screwed the left side of his face into the comedic half-mask he adopted when he was trying to conceal his disappointment in you.
“Maybe you should be taking notes,” he said. He handed back the mug of apple juice. “I had a snake hammer. Why would I need a gun?”
11
For their sins, Wild Bill Donovan recruited Orland Buck and my grandfather into the Office of Strategic Services. They were sent to study mayhem and spycraft at Area B, an OSS training facility in the Maryland mountains on the present-day site of Camp David. The U.S. military had long disavowed the practice of espionage and deception as beneath its gentlemanly dignity; many of the instructors at Area B were Brits. They had spent their lives subverting insurrections and infiltrating rebellions. They did not care if you forgot to salute them. They thought that training to shoot at a target while standing straight up with your arm sticking out like a turnstile was about as useful as learning how to joust. They were unobtrusive and ferocious men whom my grandfather could not fail to admire.