Water Moccasin Down

Rais'n Up Catfish: Forty-five

After lunch, things were usually pretty slow as we tried to digest our meals (head cheese and liverwurst sandwiches for some, thick-sliced baloney and mustard for me), and adjust to the afternoon’s building heat. It was the time of day I often drove around between different ponds checking water flow and servicing the diesel pumps.

One day, while driving between two small fingerling ponds I saw an enormous, dark snake slicing across the water, its shiny head at times held high above the surface. Since I had to wade into that very pond each chilly dawn to test the water, perhaps you can understand how such undeniable proof of huge snakes within it felt like one of my worst nightmares come true. And that perhaps will at least help explain, if not quite justify everything that followed.

I did what came natural to any ignorant creature facing a thing it fears. I tried to kill it.

I slammed hard on the brakes skidding the pickup to a stop, then reached above the tattered seat for the beat up twenty-two, and waited for the dust to settle.

Steadying myself against the pickup door, I squeezed off a hasty shot.

“Peeoooow.”  The bullet richocheted off the water's surface, mere inches in front of the serpent.

"Damn! Led him too much!" I muttered to the no one, re-aiming.

The snake quickly changed direction, starting back for the other side.  “Ptoom, Ptoom, Ptoom!”  Three quick shots puncuated the water all around him, but again, each missed.

He seemed rattled by then, zig-zagging back and forth, scooting around the pond in a dozen different directions all at once, raising his head from time to time, presumably to see farther, but mostly swimming very low in the water, sometimes even disappearing below the surface. He was obviously shaken.

I took a deep breath, held it and fired again. “Peeeow!”

"Damn! Over his back!" Like a batter at home plate I stamped and scraped the dirt to get a better stance, then slowly aimed yet again.

“Slow breaths, Davey,” I whispered, “slowwwww,” squeezing ever so gently.

“Phhiitt.”  The snake vaulted backward in the water, writhing, then disappeared.

"Got you, motherfucker!” I winced, twitchy with relief. “Hot diggety damn! I got you."

After a brief back-patting and victory dance ceremony I leaned inside the pickup, replaced the gun in its rack and, “wham!” another genius brainstorm crashed in on me, suddenly, feverishly, seductively, smacking me right between the eyes.

Somewhere, you see, just out of sight there in that murky, chest-deep pond lay a huge snake, easily the biggest Cottonmouth I'd seen all summer.

“Wouldn't it be cool,” my pathetically teenage brain began lobbying, “to skin him out, real careful? Make a belt to wear to school, show all my friends back in Walla Walla what a real Mississippi Delta Cottonmouth looks like. Maybe save the skull too so they could see the size of its fangs.

Gah!!!

Youth!

If I even still had a guardian angel at that point in the summer, this is (I’m just spitballing here), where he most likely began to laugh hysterically, or groan, rolling his eyes heavenward. “Can he really be this stupid?” I picture him asking the boss.

I, on the other hand, temporarily oblivious to any other possibilities beyond that one at the bottom of the pond in front of me, kicked a hasty groove into the clay bank with my boot heel to mark the place that monstrous serpent had disappeared, noting about how far out he’d been when I’d last seen him, then scrambled the pickup back to the hatchery to gather a few tools.

I had noticed an old, blue, swim mask hanging on a nail by the refrigerator my first day at the hatchery and had wondered ever since whose it was and what it might possibly be used for. 

Suddenly I knew. It was for snakes. For retrieving big ass, poisonous snakes. Of course it was!

Quick formulations convinced me that between the scratch-lensed mask and a the garden rake we used to scrape built up, rusty sediment off the top of the sand in the hatchery’s crude, water filtration tank, I could easily wade out to where the snake had gone down, dive under and retrieve him, all while maintaining a comfortable, rake handle distance. 

Perfect! Right?

I threw the rake and mask in the back of the truck and drove hurriedly back over to the rearing pond, stopping again at my heel-carved mark in the clay.

Treacherous, midday sunlight, too hot and too bright, and water nearly as warm as the air. I waded in, stepping carefully to minimize stirring up the fish poop and mud on the bottom, and charted my course. Since the pond’s sludgy water was already too murky to see more than maybe a foot, I couldn’t afford to make it any worse. I mean, a fella needs good visibility when looking for a wounded water moccasin. That’s just science; lots and lots of ‘see what you’re doin, know where you’re goin so that snake don’t bite yo ass,’ science.

With each step farther out I kept glancing back to shore, trying to keep on line with my mark, trying as well, though with limited success, to keep my mind from beginning to unravel, imagining my darkest, most watery nightmares.

Each monthly issue of Outdoor Life magazine in those days carried a cartoon variation of some otherwise competent outdoorsman’s deadly mishaps. Readers sent them in, I guess. Poor schmucks who had nearly shit their pants with fear, endured unimaginable pain, and of course, ultimately survived. One month’s feature might offer a six panel retelling of some mauling bear attack in the backcountry of Idaho, and then in the next, of some hunter, miles from the nearest road being gored in the stomach by a wounded Mule Deer buck after the poor fool incorrectly assumed his shot had killed it.

“Surprise, dumb ass!” says the deer.

“Oh, ooops!  Was that my giant antler ripping your entrails apart?”

“Well, shit, Donny Deerhunter, looks like you’re bleeding now, too. Guess that makes us even.”

Whenever they illustrated someone’s encounter with a venomous snake, the illustrated panels invariably showed the offended creature looking angry and evil, eyes full of hatred, muscles taut, fangs fully extended with shiney beads of venom glistening at their tips, aerodynamic, scaled bodies hurtling forward through time and space at light speed, aiming at some innocent hunter’s unprotected lower leg. If only he’d bought a pair of those thick, RedWing boots the cartoon passively implied.

Just my luck; one of those damned articles, fresh from that very morning’s visit to the outhouse kept returning to me as I waded, fearful, pen-and-ink snippets of striking fangs, swelling, rotting flesh and unendurable pain.

It got into my head, burrowing deep. Flicking that fear core of cold sweats and night terrors right on the end of its nose.

I moved steadily nearer my target, despite this storm of distractions, determined to retrieve my prize and as I did, another horrific scene settled upon me, this one from an old noir film, Night of the Hunter. I could never shake off my memories of that absolutely haunting portrayal, evil versus innocence, where Robert Mitchum’s ruddy preacher voice keeps singing the old gospel hymn “Leaning on the Everlasting Arms” while the body of the foolish  woman he married for money and later killed, (I think it was a young Shelley Winters), sat trapped in a submerged car at the bottom of the river, her golden hair swaying in the currents of the deep.

As I neared the place I hoped the snake had died, I kept picturing her flowing blonde hair, her swaying dead body and that menacing fanged monster, wounded and holding his breath down there, just waiting for me to come close enough to attack as his final dying act. Reptile wrath. Snake revenge. I figured I probably deserved it.

Intuition stopped me suddenly and I stood motionless for a minute, wanting to let the mud settle, hoping to see better. Then I began sweeping my rake through the water in long, slow arcs, feeling along in every direction hoping to bag Mr Cottonmouth the easy way. No such luck.

I moved a few steps farther out, again waiting for the water to settle, but this time readying the cheap swim mask over my face.

One nervous breath and its nasty, scratched lens steamed up so bad I might as well have been blind. I ripped the damn off, growing angrier in my fear, dunked it under water, and then spit into it, rubbing it around the way I’d seen Lloyd Bridges do a hundred times on Sea Hunt, then put it back on my face. 

This time I breathed more cautiously, through my mouth, cranking up my courage slowly until it finally felt inflated enough to put my face into that same dank water as the snake. But before I could get my head all the way under water that damn mask began fogging up again. Again, I stood, ripped the mask off, nervously swished it through the water and before my courage faded, took yet another deep breath and ducked under.

Darkness. Silence. Everything brown and foreign, so murky. 

It took a moment for my eyes to adjust, both to the relative gloom and the total lack of visual depth. Muddy impenetrable fog, too thick to breathe ...and warm. Bathwater warm. I was in some vertiginous, liquid sort of Hell. And lurking somewhere nearby, a tormented shape, a huge, vengeful serpent. Maybe the Devil himself, I shuddered.

The longer I held my breath, the less sure I was that I really wanted to find him. I probed ahead, kicking violently with my sneakered feet, struggling to keep my air-filled torso near bottom in the murky pond. I turned my head side-to-side in paranoid jerks, needing to be certain he hadn’t been waiting, wasn't now, somehow sneaking up on me.

All that struggle and near hysterical fear consumed the little oxygen my lungs had gulped within mere moments, long before finding anything snakelike. I surfaced awkwardly, gasped, gulped several quick lungfuls more of the afternoon’s sullen offerings, holding the last one, sunburned lips squeezed tight and dove back under again.

Kicking ever further out, waving the rake in front of me in broad, sweeping arcs, feeling my way along the gooey bottom with my free hand. I was completely disoriented by then. No way to know how murky the water had become or if I was still in line with my mark on shore. Nothing to see through that scratchy lens. Nothing to focus on. Just a wall of liquid brown nothingness.

Intensifying moments pounded in my ear drums until I felt myself knocking at the back door to insanity. Terrified, out of breath and yet desperate to save face.

I had made the foolish mistake of bragging to the guys back at the hatchery about the snake I'd just killed. When they called me a liar, I told them I’d bring the damn thing back to prove it to them. Mose declined to come along when I invited him to help, volunteering his considered opinion, instead that I was “one seriously touched motherfucker.” Zak stirred from his nap in the corner just long enough to lift a newspaper off his face and grin one of his best shit-eaters in my direction.

"Fig-boy, you know he right,” Zak said. “You is crazy! Crazy as a damn shitbird! Sump’n gone wrong in yo head, son.”

He sighed then, rolling his eyes heavenward. I said nothing and he dropped the paper back onto his face. I bit my lip and walked out. No way was I going to return empty handed to face their ‘I told you so's’ and choke on more of those shit-eating grins, so I fought forward, fought with everything in me. Against the water. Against my raging lungs and screaming heart. Against that shit-stained, watery fog, enveloping and hiding my enemy.

Suddenly, then; blood red and pale white.

Terror. Gaping, torn flesh. An eye.

A ghostly head lunged forward at me out of the ruddy soup, just inches from my face.  An immeasurable yellow-white belly. Overlapping, horizontal scales. A severed, bloody neck.

The snake’s eyes were fixed and his mouth wide open. His partially buoyant body swirled and swayed in currents that I was creating, my flailing arms and legs, like the woman in that movie only far more alien, more terrifying. 

Of course the magnificent snake was dead, I know that now. But in that moment, it was moving and I couldn’t breathe. It was so very, very close!

Rage then and uncontrolled terror. I was trapped. I was desperate.

I forgot I was under water, forgot...absolutely everything.

Gasping. Yelling. Praying. Swearing.

Kicking and flailing.

In addition to a serpent's white belly and limp, open mouth hanging there just inches before my face, I immediately had another problem; that of trying to breathe, gasp, exhale exhausted air, inhale catfish shit and muddy water ...and fly, all in the same moment.

It didn't work, of course. It couldn’t possibly work.

I choked, then gagged, falling towards shore. Coughing. Flailing. Vomiting; bologna and Wonder Bread, mustard and Orange Fanta, and Fig Newtons. It all happened so fast. An ugly, sour, acidic blur, that couldn't have lasted more than a few seconds.

Maybe I did fly ...that or possibly, walk on water.

All I know for certain is, I don’t really remember how I got back to shore. Guardian Angel? I don’t remember a damn thing. I do remember seeing the snake, yes, I remember that. And I remember feeling like I was drowning. But then, next thing I know I’m coughing and puking up shit water, laying there sprawled on the muddy bank in my own vomit, shaking so hard I couldn't stop.

How long did I lay there, gasping and shuddering? I honestly don’t know. How long before I could finally sit up? Before I stopped shaking? Time at that point had little meaning. But I was alive, by god, I was definitely breathing.

Eventually I regained enough strength to prop myself against the rear wheel of the pickup, still belching up water and air, wheezing and gagging and beginning to re-gather my wits.

I felt relieved at first, relieved and bloody grateful to be alive.

Embarrassment took a while longer. Then, when a quick survey of my surroundings assured me that no one but a mocking bird had witnessed my foolish disaster, the transformation of my mortification into flaming, white-hot stabs of anger and self-loathing went much, much more quickly.

I cursed everything about my stupid self for freaking out, then, for not having seen the damned thing coming at me, for not grabbing it while I’d had it less than a hand's length from my face. And from there, my wrath turned conveniently upon the snake; that elusive, fanged fuck of a pit viper, who'd cost me my lunch, and nearly my life.

“Goddamn you!” I muttered toward the water. “I hate you! I hate everything about you, you poisonous sonofabitch!

“Do you hear me?” I screamed aloud, sobbing.  “I hate you! I hate you! I hate you!”

Damn if I was going to let some dead, piece of shit snake make an even greater fool of me than I felt most days, already.

I began looking, behind and under the lumps in my throat for courage, that essential courage which had, just minutes before, run screaming out of the watery darkness and away from me, courage that had abandoned and hidden from me in my moment of need.

I found it, but only really in small bits and pieces. Slowly, I scraped these shards of dignity together and gave them a pep talk.

“One more try!” I promised myself. Just one more go at that dead demon’s capture.

Finally, with the mock assurance of MacArthur wading ashore in the Philippines, I slogged back out to the place where the rake handle remained, floating. I grabbed it violently and slashed it up through the water. Every ounce of my bottled anger and fear funneled downward into that sun-bleached handle then, exploding outward through the rake itself.

I scooped and swirled, I prodded and strafed. Searching tines dissecting the water inch by inch, arc after desperate arc, from top to bottom, to top again, but nothing, absolutely nothing sent any messages back through the handle to my hands. Not one bump. Not one thud. Not a single reptilian scale. Nothing.

Somehow, that damnable snake which I had murdered and then been nearly drowned by, had gotten away.

I drove past that pond several times over the next few days desperately hoping his gas-bloated body would float to the surface and give me some peace, but that too was a boyish pipe dream, never to actually be.

Somehow that immense Cottonmouth had found a way to get even with his murderer, even across that brutal veil of death.

Sure, I was the one who had killed him, but so what? 

He has never ceased to haunt me. Not these many decades since.

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© David E. Perry. All rights reserved.

When I was fifteen I lived in a boarding house in Mississippi during the summer and worked, seventy and more hours each week …on a catfish farm where I earned just a dollar an hour. The work was honest, if the circumstances surrounding it were not. My mother was dating the fish farm’s married owner. His wife wrote and signed my paychecks every week. He knew I knew. I knew he knew. I was both liability and oddity, a hard worker trying like hell to be worthy of my paycheck rather than the nuisance brat of some fancy piece of tail.

It was complicated.

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