Snakes (Part Four)
One of the first things our contractor Heath told me was that he hates clean-up on a job site. Having never worked at a job site, I couldn’t really speak to this preference. It seemed to me at the time that clean-up had to be easier than almost any other job that might need doing, and I readily volunteered to do it. I couldn’t pound a nail in straight or cut a board with a miter saw, but I had put myself through college on a combination of housecleaning and modeling for artists. Surely I could clean up the job site and do it well. After one week of clean-up duty, I understood. Buffing an already tidy house to a higher sheen is an entirely different task than hauling out bag after bag of rotting plaster and piss-soaked insulation.
We wear Tyvek suits and heavy-duty respirators when we work with the insulation, but the fibers still worm their way under the suits and into our skin. My eyes itch constantly now, and I have developed a strange rash along my waistline. Whenever we have to handle insulation, and we’ve handled five rooms of it so far, we come home and take a cold shower. The water closes the pores so that when we rub the soapy washcloth over our flesh, the fiberglass doesn’t get ground deeper into our skin. Jesse likes to plunge under the water and get it over with, but I hang back and struggle to go under. It has become our running joke—a symbol of our individual states of mental health. We have always shared the removal labor equally, but now, because we have found a snake buried under the insulation and because I am terrified of snakes, I refuse to stand knee-deep in the stuff and shovel it into bags. My job is to hold the contractor bags open so that Jesse can wrangle heaping shovelfuls into their maw.
I am keeping a close watch on the insulation. For me, the nightmare scenario would be Jesse hefting a scoop up that actually contains a snake, the snake, our snake. And I am certain that it’s still in the insulation. I can feel its presence, which sounds melodramatic, but I know that if there’s a snake to be seen, I am bound to see it. I’ve also read on the Internet that snakes are lazy creatures. Once ensconced in an area with food and shelter, they tend to be unwilling to leave unless forced, and as the days get chillier and the daylight hours fewer, snakes become even more lethargic. It’s mid-September, and I know our snake doesn’t have much impetus to leave. Nearly every single piece of insulation we’ve pulled out so far has been cat or mouse urine-soaked, and mouse turds rain down on us like wedding rice every time we mess with something above our heads. Our all-you-can-swallow mouse buffet is open for business, and our snake has bellied up for seconds and thirds. I hear Tom shout something that’s completely garbled and then the sound of his feet on the basement steps. He comes to the doorway brandishing a silvery piece of plastic.
“A shed,” he says. “From the box sill.”
I lean closer and now I can see the shimmery scales and the tube-like shape. I scream, a shivery treble with a gutteral edge underneath. I am literally convulsed by the fear. I drop the contractor bag, and my arms wrap around my middle. I can feel a heavy downward pressure in my pelvis, and my feet can’t stay connected to the ground. I dance in place, a sort of half-run, half-hopping movement. Tom looks at me with appreciation.
“That’s a great scream,” he says.