A Long Skinny Winter

I’ve had the snake room for six years. I had it built to my specifications with plexiglass and artificial ficus (or should I say fakus trees) I bought for them to climb. I’ve been renting various places for the snakes for ten years since they are not allowed where I live. When I first moved here I had to keep them in a regular storage unit with no light until some white mice escaped into other units and they were discovered. Then I rented part of a foreclosed office building and then the back room of somebody’s trailer that had a beehive in one of the windows.

The mouse-eaters get fed twice a week, the fish and frog-eaters three times and there is one that eats lizards, one that eats crickets and one that eats eggs. I go out on rainy nights to catch toads to put in the freezer and walk to the lake to catch fish with a dipnet. Our state has five aquatic snakes of the genus Neonatrix which generally follow a rule that the most aggressive ones are the easiest to keep because they’ll eat anything, while the shy and gentle ones are almost impossible to keep alive. My babies which are just 3” long I got from a guy who does what I’d like to be doing when I’m eighty; he gets four snake calls a day in the Summer and drives a green van with a snake on the side of it. He’s my hero.

On the night of October 31st, the night before winter brumation begins, I was sitting on the floor holding a snake by immobilizing its body in my lap, opened its mouth with forceps and made it eat a large toad head-first.

“Good girl, eat that toad…” I said gently as I stroked its back. “Please eat, it’s good for you…”

The concessions store next door had moved out when leaks from the ceiling ruined their merchandise, and recently a teen grunge band had moved in. They only showed up at night, sometimes after midnight although it sounded like recorded music. As I sat there I heard a young male voice on the other side of the door say “Hey Drake take a look at this…”. I had left a freezer bag stained with blood on a paper towel with a knife and a pair of scissors.

I looked down and there was some lip-rolling going on as she worked the toad down to her stomach. I set her loose in the room as a reward, then I got up and set my Frigidaire thermostat to a cool 58 degrees for brumation. I call it “active” brumation, not shoeboxes in the basement. As I turned out the lights I saw my garden-variety boa looking down at me like a pile of coils on a branch. People think they’re vicious but if I could describe him in one word it would be “stupid”. He can’t catch a mouse for anything even when it’s crawling across his back; I once found him with his teeth caught in his own anus.

--

The complex was once a sprawling textile factory that employed the entire town back when my parents were teens. The owner bought it for salvage and now it’s rented for all kinds of businesses. When I first moved in there were real estate appraisers and tax preparers in the cushy front offices (there was even a community snack area). Now there’s just a Christian overstock store that has fallen on hard times; it spills out into the lobby where one of the ceiling lights is hanging down.

Every winter since I’ve had the snake room something unfortunate has happened. Last year it was the weight of snow on the roof that caused water to pour in and saturate all their bedding. However I was gainfully employed at the time and now I am not, and then I had the misfortune of losing my right eye. It isn’t the same as being completely blind, many of my coworkers were that way; it’s more like looking at the world through a twisted pane of ruby glass, a veil of shadow.

When I was a respected office manager I had to report a very unusual situation. One of our employees charged me with a code 401 (cooking the books) on the same day he himself was charged with misconduct by a female custodian named Juanita Diaz. She reported this to me on a Friday before closing, I notified the employee by email on Monday morning and he immediately responded with a charge of his own making no mention of the complaint against him. Now I couldn’t read the man’s mind, but I had to consider the possibility he brought this up to get out of the charges.

I called the Regional Safety Coordinator, a man I have never seen who polices our branch safety managers the same way they police us.

“We don’t handle human resource situations.” he answered brusquely.

“Yes but if the charges are filed in the order they were received, a responsible employee would face the allegations against him which means there may or may not be a second investigation.” I explained. “This is a conflict of interest, I wouldn’t be surprised if he calls you trying to change the story.”

“It makes no difference.” he answered. “Investigations operate independently, once he enters the charge into the system it will go to National even if he is suspended or terminated.”

I had to nip this in the bud. I called Juanita into my office and asked our office dispatcher to be a witness. The moment he put down the phone that bastard womanizer Roy Crowe came bursting through my office door, his bald head as red as his face. He ran into Juanita in mid-stride who backed away slowly raising a handkerchief to her eye.

“You should be ashamed of yourself.” Crowe raised a thick finger at me as if she wasn’t there and said in a thick deadpan voice. “You’ve fleeced this company for the last time; you’re a bad influence and in my opinion you don’t belong here.”

“You’ve been charged with indecent behavior toward a coworker.” I said calmly from behind the desk. “A good employee would give this your full attention, face your accuser and accept the consequences for it. What’s the matter with you, don’t you have any respect for your female colleagues?”

His scowl was menacing, a look of utter derision.

“Mark my words your days here are numbered.” he threw up his hands and went right back out the door.

Even all my preparations, the presence of his accuser right in his face didn’t give the man pause. In every workplace I’ve known certain personalities tend to dominate other personalities, and the safety specialist is one them. He doesn’t know that he gets the last word simply because there happens to be no other expert in the room, and he certainly doesn’t know entry-level receptionists with an average tenure of six months have their own point of view. We need lackeys; a receptionist can work for six months and resolve customer situations without knowing what a code 401 is. To think he came up with this to cover his own misbehavior.

2

The day after brumation started I received a notice that they’d vacated my position. It was nepotism, pure nepotism. The DGM invited me to apply for a bigger office and it still made no difference. I failed to understand why he suggested it in the first place since he’s the one who greenlights the candidates.

I returned home to my humble apartment in the middle of a quarterly housing inspection. What used to take one day was now a week-long ordeal during which I had to leave the windows open, refrain from cooking and hide my dirty laundry in the closet. Being unemployed doesn’t make you homeless (there are lots of unworking people with a place to live), it just forces you to deal with things that take away your dignity, like… neighbors.

In lean times I simply spent more time in the snake room just as retired people go to the library. Instead of eating out every day I walked to the convenience store although it would have been better if it was Summer when I spend two hours a day feeding and cleaning; this time of year it’s only a daily welfare check on them. The kingsnake is the one I take to the bank with me, the tellers requested it and were playing with it behind the counter until he pooped all over the customer service manager.

I explored the grounds extensively on my daily walk; there is a short cut over the barbed wire fence if you climb the fire ladder up to the roof, a sagging expanse of rubberized foam which is the reason the factory can’t be restored. On the other side is an enormous holly tree that has grown up directly out of the plant manager’s office, followed by a series of cess pools that have filled up around the underground workings of the complex.

A hundred yards past the end of the buildings is where the on-site garage and storage units burned to the ground and half the town lost their belongings. It’s now a pile of rubble where I have found many things, blackened ceramic miniatures and melted records. I passed the auto graveyard that belongs to the owner and was surprised to find an ambulance with poison ivy sprouting from the dashboard. Eventually I came to a trail leading into the woods where the back of the property was marked with an overgrown fence. There was a couple of places where the chain-link had been cut and folded back as if to make an opening for deer to sneak through on motorcycles, except a giant prickly pear cactus had grown up as if it was planted there specifically as a road hazard. This made me think of the credit union that occupied the very front lot of the property. If I was a bank robber I’d choose that bank.

--

The owner was an interesting person, generous and eccentric for wanting a place where there are endless projects that could never possibly be completed, like heaven for a groundskeeper. The opposite of what most people with money aspire toward. When the subject of finances came up he made me a generous offer, I could pay the rent through manual labor and if I wished he would let me work all day.

He led me down to the basement levels of the complex, a vast dark space that was cold and damp year-round which he desired to turn into offices. We would have to knock out bricks with a sledgehammer to put in doorways, which I enjoyed along with helping him build scaffolding and put in wires and insulation.

But two weeks later his part of the job was over and he put a broom in my hand and told me to start cleaning. From that day onward I was working alone in an acre of darkness which required me to wear a winter coat and a headlamp. It was like working in a coal mine, there were piles of rotten wood and rusted machinery surrounded by a lake of orange oxide and he expected me to mop all this, and I still had not paid off my rental balance.

One day I emerged blinded by the Sun, covered in soot and went to wash my black face and hands in the snake room bathroom. Sleeping on the bathroom floor was a homeless couple startled by my appearance. I was kind to them on the owner’s behalf, giving them a couple of days to move out instead of the usual treatment. They sat down and shared my usual hot dogs, and told me they made a living by fishing all night at the city park two miles away, then selling carp to the pay lakes at $60 each and walking to the grocery store on the same street. I was glad I wasn’t homeless myself.

3

My apartment was so inhospitable once the power was turned off I basically only went there to sleep. Then one day the police came to my door with an accusation from one of my neighbors, saying I scratched their vehicle as I was pulling out. This was the family upstairs whose bedframe I could hear rocking against the wall every night. She was livid. They showed me a 2” scratch to her front headlamp and a matching streak on my own vehicle that was nine feet back near the real wheel. I would have had to drive over the sidewalk and through the fence, considering it more likely that she hit me. The woman marched into the housing office looking for video proof but there was none.

The thing is, a person doesn’t have to be guilty to lose their lease. Just being accused was grounds for eviction and she threatened this to my face if I didn’t pay for her damages.

I was screwed. Thank God for the snake room; the floor was rubberized mulch with just enough space for a person to lie down surrounded by snakes. The problem was the whole room needs to hibernate because you can’t find frogs and fish in Winter. Even if I started selling them I’d have to wait until the last one was sold.

I unrolled a sleeping bag, lay down in my winter coat and gave it a try, realizing I was now the warmest thing in the room. The snakes looked at me from their branches and I looked at them.

I tend to have bizarre dreams every night but this time I awoke to find something was wrong with my right eye. I got up and went to the bathroom sink, turning on the dim yellow bulb. My eye looked like it was sealed shut; I reached up and gently pried the lids apart to find an empty socket, and yet I was still able to see. At the back of it was some kind of membrane which parted like a curtain to reveal a dark abyss I thought at first was my pupil.

Prying the socket with both hands I found myself looking at my own face from the other side. I seemed to be disembodied, and floated out of the room and the building without a thought into the night sky. I looked down to see a rotting hole in the roof above my place I didn’t know existed.

Soon I was flying over the town, straight to my workplace (which only makes sense in dreams as it was now daylight and over a month ago). I saw myself at my desk like a fly on the wall. I saw me filing the cash envelopes, padding them with gas receipts and pocketing whatever I wished. I saw that creep Roy Crowe watching me, and then me convincing Juanita the custodian that something he said to her was sexual in meaning.

I was immediately back in my own neighborhood on the night of the fender-bender. I had told the police there was no way I could have inflicted the damage no matter which way the two vehicles were oriented. Now in astonishment I watched myself blithely reversing out of my parking spot, turning and grazing the woman’s car as I changed gears like a maniac oblivious to everything around me. The dream had showed me the truth. I awoke sitting on the bathroom floor disillusioned at what it had chosen to reveal.

--

The property owner found out I was spending the night and had some words with me. I had not yet gone back to my apartment which was my biggest fear, having nowhere to move my furniture which was illegal to leave on the street. It wasn’t a fair trade where I could exchange it for lodging or surrender my vehicle to live as a pedestrian.

There was an eviction notice taped to my door. I went to the office where my aggressive neighbor was already standing with her arms crossed and the housing manager seated behind her desk.

“If your vehicle is found on the lot after ten days it will be towed at your expense.” she said in a weak tone. “If any belongings are found in the house after eviction a moving company will be charged at your expense…”

“Wait, if I’m being evicted why isn’t it the same as if I had died or was never found?” my voice shook.

“Leaving an unclean apartment is a lease violation.” she answered. “If it hasn’t been cleaned your account will be suspended another thirty days before you can leave…”

I struggled to think of some other way around this. Then my eyes fell on a brass letter-opener on her desk, nice and blunt unlikely to break the skin. I seized it and raised it to my face, prying open the eye socket and trying to push my eye out of the way with the point of it as the two women dialed the police and rushed to hold my arms.

“I have to know the truth!” I protested and they wrestled me to the ground.