Living with Snakes by Curley Daniel;

Author:Curley, Daniel;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: University of Georgia Press
Published: 2013-03-12T04:00:00+00:00

Living with Snakes

Death is in the garden

Waiting till you pass

For the cobra’s in the drain pipe

And the krait is in the grass.

—RUDYARD KIPLING

When Peter Watts moved into Indiana Price’s house, the ground rules were explicit. He would have a room in the house, a Federal house near the village out the river road. He would be a presence in the house for her young son while she was traveling. She traveled a lot. She consulted. She moved and she shook. A son—after all, well, you don’t exactly like to leave him at the vet’s. And there would be no sex. She wanted the arrangement to last. She had theories about that. Statistics bore her out. Her own experience bore her out: there are some things you just don’t try to mix. Living arrangements and sex, for example. She wanted someone who would stay. Someone her son could get used to. Someone he might even watch and learn from. Male role models—Peter winced at that—were hard to come by but very necessary, especially about twelve—John had just turned twelve.

Peter’s heart went out to this boy he had not yet seen. If there was one thing he knew, that was what it was like to be a chicken with no chance to peck up gravel for his crop, nothing to chew with. Of course, never having had models himself, having always seen power in the hands of women, he felt like a fraud in this new light. Shall the blind lead the blind? But perhaps he and the boy could teach each other. The whole thing terrified him, but he thought he would try it.

And he was glad he did. With the situation clear between him and Indiana, it was as if they had gone through sex and come out the other side. As if they were waking up together in the morning and it was time to begin to tell her who he was. To pour it all out to her. To account for all the years they had not been together.

He felt this from the first moment they sat together in the room she assigned him. It was a lovely room, the room he had chosen secretly but had been afraid to request. Its windows opened on fields that ran down to the river. Inside, it had the look of a study with a desk and bookcases and best of all a fireplace. She had built a fire that first day and they sat in front of it and drank herb tea and ratified the terms.

He reached far back beyond the things he had told his wife when they were first married, beyond the things his mother knew, to things he had never told anyone, stretching and reaching for things he didn’t even know himself, striving for something to offer her, something absolutely pure and untouched, something just for her, just from him. It was truly that moment of openness that usually comes in bed the first time after sex

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