I think I liked the guy better when I thought he was going to murder us. ‘Enough with the nature lesson!’ I screamed. ‘Do something!’
Pavlik was already pulling the knife out of his pocket. He flipped out the blade and started forward. Then, over his shoulder, ‘Maggy, go get help from the train.’
I screamed ‘Help!’ at the top of my lungs and forced myself to move away from the relative protection of the train’s engine. I might be shaking like a leaf, but there was no way I was leaving Pavlik with only Euell Gibbons for back-up.
‘Can you tell how deep the water is?’ I asked the sheriff as he waded in, knife in his hand.
‘To the bottom? I’m not sure. But I can feel the ties seven or eight inches below the water. I’m standing – and staying – on what’s left of them.’
‘I’m coming with you.’ What was I thinking? Clearly, I wasn’t. The words were out of my mouth before I could think.
‘I appreciate the offer, but you’re afraid of snakes, remember?’
I was, but then I used to be scared of spiders and mice too – things that my then-husband dealt with at home when we were married. If divorce has taught me anything, it’s that a person is as brave as she needs to be.
I puffed out my chest. ‘Not anymore,’ I said, hoping that saying it would make it true. I turned to Hertel. ‘You have anything I can hit this thing with?’
The engineer pulled a long flashlight from a loop on his belt. ‘This do?’
I took it, my hand sagging under the unexpected weight. ‘Geez, yeah. This should be good.’ I was imagining hitting the snake with the flashlight and having it bounce off like a rubber mallet on a concrete block. ‘Listen, can you call for help?’
‘Happy to, though it’ll likely just be coming from the train. Cell communication’s down.’
Lovely. I had started to follow Pavlik, wondering what the hell we were going to do once we got there, when I heard Hertel again. ‘They say to stay away from the pointy end.’ He chuckled. ‘I hear tell these big fellers don’t like to be disturbed during supper.’
I’d been noticing that the snake wasn’t moving much, other than sort of gulping. And keeping a wary eye on Pavlik and me.
The good news for us, if not for Potter, was that there really wasn’t a ‘pointy end.’ The snake’s mouth was full – stretched impossibly like the thing had dislocated its jaw not only into two parts, top and bottom, but into four quarters in the effort to swallow a human being.
‘I’ve got this friend who brags he can eat a steak as big as his empty head, but these critters are the only things I’ve ever seen that are actually capable of doing it.’ Hertel was just chock-jolly-full of culinary lore.
My foot had found the first wooden crosspiece under water and I stepped unsteadily out onto it. ‘Could you please get help from the train? Let them know that it’s Lar … Laurence Potter.’ The least I could do was to call the man by the name he preferred, given the indignity of his current circumstances.
‘Hey, isn’t that the big-shot reviewer we had onboard?’
I forced myself to look more at the wingtips than the snake. It wasn’t much of an improvement. ‘We think so.’
‘Now how in the hell do you figure he got out here?’
‘That is a very good question,’ Pavlik said, not looking around. His tone indicated that messing with him would be even worse than messing with the snake at this point. ‘One we’ll try to answer once we get him out of that.’
He hiked his thumb at the snake and, as if on cue, I swear the monster burped.
Potter’s leg slid in to the ankle.
I gagged.
‘One down,’ I heard Hertel say. ‘One—’
Ignoring the rest of it, I waded anxiously over to Pavlik. ‘Can you cut him out of there?’
‘I think so. With so much of Potter inside of this thing, I’m betting it can’t constrict anything else.’ A glance my way. ‘Like me or you.’
He looked at my flashlight. ‘Any part of that snake gets near you, wallop it hard with the business end and run.’
‘Gotcha.’ Now that I was closer, I realized what I had imagined was Potter’s movement was the snake’s mouth and head absorbing the actually still body. Almost like a curtain being worked onto a rod – the snake the curtain and Potter as rod. ‘Please, God, he can’t be alive in there, can he?’
‘Don’t know, but I’m sure not leaving even a corpse inside that thing’s digestive system.’ Pavlik was not eighteen inches from the snake, stepping up on the wooden crosspieces that looked like the rungs of a macabre ladder with one end submerged in the water.