September 19, 2016 | Occasus | Issue 6 | Creative Nonfiction

Slippery Rope

“Paul!” A blonde, frizzy-haired woman in her fifties sped down our lawn to the front door of our cottage. “Paul, there is a rattlesnake on our property,” she panted. It was Janice, our neighbor from across the street. She was a childhood friend of my mother, who also had two kids of her own: Aaron and Sara. Her husband Tom was a big-shot lawyer, so she was often on her own while staying at the cottage.
           
“Really? How cool,” Paul answered, adjusting his glasses. Paul is my dad. He is roughly six-foot-two and three hundred pounds. He’s sported a grizzly goatee for so long that I don’t think I know what his chin looks like. To the students of Newton’s Grove School, where Paul is the principal and the 12th grade English teacher, he may be as frightening as he sounds but Paul is a sweetheart. He’s generally quiet until he comes up with a joke to say, yet, people see his figure and assume he is capable of hauling, destroying, or moving whatever it is they need.     
           
“Yes. That is exactly what we thought too,” Janice said, sarcastically. “I called Tom and he said the best thing to do is kill it with a shovel.”
           
“I guess that’s one option.”
           
“Paul, it has been slithering up and down our garden for the last hour. I’m worried it might bite Charlie.” Charlie is Janice’s family dog. You know how people say dogs are really smart? Well . . . Charlie tests that hypothesis. He is a shaggy white highland terrier with a permanent grin like he’s just received one of those mysterious $68 checks from the government in the mail. Bottom-line, he looks like he eats water and drinks food; a snake would end him.
           
My father appeared to have drawn the same conclusion, as he sprang into action. “Do you mind if I see the little guy first?” Kind of.
           
“Trust me, Paul; he is not little. I would have asked Aaron to do it but I didn’t want him anywhere near it.”
           
“You’re right. Better to risk the neighbors.”
           
Janice scurried back up our property towards hers, taking a wide birth around her lawn to avoid the snake. My brother and I followed suit. We jogged eagerly up the lawn, one step behind our vast father in his twenty year old faded-blue jeans and his orange sweater with a rip in the collar that appeared to have been through the wash three dozen times.
           
The rattlesnake was clearly visible on the other side of the street, curving slowly, meticulously, through the grass. This snake was no Smaug but its tight, armor-like coat of matte green scales were enough to scare the hide off a donkey.
           
I charged across the street and leaped onto the snakes writhing back, neutralizing its open-mouthed, fanged attack with a firm grip around its neck and wrangled the wicked beast into subordination.
           
Actually, I never crossed the street.
           
Paul walked right across the road towards the snake without even looking both ways. He stood within a foot of the rattler, and stared at the serpent.
           
“Dad, what the hell are you doing? Don’t get so close,” I called, from my safe spot across the street.
           
“Don’t worry, it’s not going to hurt me,” he said, with an excited smile.
           
“It is a rattlesnake.”
           
“They don’t just attack people, you would have to provoke it.”
           
“Well, you are planning on murdering it with a shovel, aren’t you?” My brother chimed in.
           
“That is true,” Paul responded, still gazing wondrously at the rare snake in our midst. To him – a 300 pound man who played football back when a concussion meant you took a sip of water before getting back on the field – the snake was nothing more than slippery rope. However, this was not how my brother and I saw our dad. He may be a large man, but that aspect of him never matched the rest of his personality. He spends his spare time reading science fiction anthologies and comic books, writing short stories, and watching Jeopardy. This was the man whose knowledge we used to refer to as “a curse and a cure.” Any question we had, he had the answer. But if you asked, you ran the risk of him getting carried away and telling you every single fact and detail there is to know about that subject. One time while we were driving to London, I spotted the remnants of a car tire on the road and he explained the economic-value of re-treading truck tires for the remainder of the trip.
           
Seeing him calmly standing next to the deadly serpent, while the rest of us stood a safe distance away, was when it dawned on me who the deadlier of the two creatures really was.
           
“Alright. Let’s see what I’ve got,” Paul said, heading towards the armory (our dusty, old garage). He picked up the first shovel he could find, took a glance at the spade, and said, “This should do.”
           
He walked back across the street, shovel in hand.
           
“Dad, be careful,” I said, super brave and all.
           
“Will do,” he said, jauntily.
           
For a second I felt bad for the snake, seeing its competition lumber toward it. I thought it was probably better it died than get put in a zoo. Rattlesnakes have it tough in zoos. They get put in small tanks half the length of their own body and worst of all, it’s practically impossible for them to escape because they sound like a Mariachi band.
           
Paul stood over the snake with the shovel in both hands, tight to his body, spade down. With a quick lock-out of his elbows, the shovel plunged clean through the snake’s neck (which is technically all of it) and a foot into the dirt.
           
My brother and I, on our side of the street, and Janice and her two kids on the other side of the street, stood mouths gaping, staring at the now motionless rattlesnake.
           
Paul pulled the shovel out of the dirt between the snake’s head and its body, looked up at us with a smirk and said, “I think it’s dead.”

 NATHAN WRIGHT-EDWARDS is an honors Specialization MIT student with a minor in creative writing.