Snakeman

Snakeman

by

Ann Swann

When we lost Droopy to distemper, Mom vowed not to get another puppy. We were not rich, and she’d already spent a whole week’s grocery money at the vet trying to save him. Besides, the sight of our poor little shepherd under her bed, convulsing with fever, would stay with us forever.

But then came Simon.

He was a good-sized pup. Half boxer, half pit bull, he came to our family from a young man whose new apartment complex didn’t allow pets. Apparently, it was either us or the pound.

The stout brown pup stole our hearts from day one. Just like a kid, he got in as much trouble as any of us, maybe even more. Then, he got sick. We didn’t know the distemper virus lived on in the dirt of our yard. Even after six weeks.

And we didn’t have any more money for the vet. But Mom was determined. She did for him what she did for any of us when we got a respiratory infection. She rubbed his chest with menthol salve, wrapped him in a blanket and fed him chicken soup and lots of it.

His real name was Simon—at least, that’s what the previous owner said—but my stepdad, Bull, gave him the nickname Snake because after he recovered, that dog was so happy to be alive he wriggled all over. But Snake didn’t really cover that dog’s massive personality. The name Snake quickly morphed into Snaker, Snakeman, or even The Snake. Capitalized. He was that important.

The vet said Mom’s cure didn’t really save him. He said most likely the virus was weak and the dog simply much stronger and slightly older than poor little Droopy had been. Whatever. We knew Mom saved him. Snake knew it, too. Over the years, he proved time and again that he was our special protector. We all fell under his jurisdiction. Maybe it was just a trait of his breed (breeds), but we didn’t think so.

He was different. Special. Before long, he even became a favorite of Mrs. McGuinn, the wealthy widow lady across the street. That surprised us all, given the fact that Snake’s favorite pastime was chasing her feral cats through the park-like setting of her huge yard.

Mom tried to apologize for him each time she dragged him home, but Mrs. McGuinn wasn’t the least bit put off.

“Don’t worry about it,” she said. “He never actually catches any. I think it’s all a game.” More than once, we saw her patting The Snake on the head. He would go out the doggy door, over the cinderblock fence, and straight to her yard.

Over the years, she became so smitten with him, she even sent him a personal invitation to her granddaughter’s fifth birthday party. After some debate, Mom allowed him to go. She was rewarded with photos of him sitting at Mrs. McGuinn’s immense dining table with his party hat on and his cake and ice cream on a china plate before him. Mom said, “I hope she at least put plastic under his butt. Those chairs look like they’re covered in damask.”

There were several smiling little girls seated around the table, all dressed in their birthday finery, and then there were a couple of other pictures that showed him chasing bubbles and popping balloons. In every photo that silly dog was still wearing his crooked paper-cone hat. And every single photo was labeled Solomon. We don’t know if she simply misunderstood his real name all those years, or whether he told her that was his real name. They had quite the connection, that much I do know.

One day, a new dogcatcher arrived in our area. Right away, he spied the Snake keeping watch over our North Sixth Street neighborhood. Mom said it was the funniest thing she’d ever seen when she looked out the front door and saw Snaker headed for home with the dogcatcher hot on his tail. That’s not what tickled her funny bone, though; it was Mrs. McGuinn, that sweet southern lady, who dashed out in the street, flagged the new man down, and read him the riot act right there in front of God and everybody. Mom said that dainty little old woman’s white hair was flying almost as wildly as the curse words. Needless to say, The Snake was spared a trip to the pound that day.

Perhaps as a way of showing his gratitude, Snaker soon brought home one of Mrs. McGuinn’s once-feral cats and kept it for a pet. The old tom had a yellow-striped coat and a crooked tail. He sauntered right into our living room between Snake’s front legs. In fact, the dog wouldn’t come in without the cat. They were quite a sight sitting together on Mom and Bull’s bookcase headboard watching out the window for “Naddy”—our nickname for Bull since we didn’t actually call him Daddy—to come home from work.

The Beatles at Shea Stadium had nothing on Bull when he came through that side door. We’d yell “Naddy, Naddy, Naddy,” and the fur would fly. Snake always led the charge with Julie the dachshund, Mr. Dee, the poodle, and now Tom, the cat, making up the entourage. Plus us kids, of course. But who could hear us over all the yips, howls, and meows?

But Bull wasn’t the only rock star in the family. To Snake, Mom also shared top billing. They went everywhere together in our nondescript Plymouth sedan with the clear, bubbly-textured plastic seat covers.

At the Piggly Wiggly, Mom would park, roll down all the windows and go inside. If Snake got tired of waiting in the car, he would jump out and sit by the big glass doors. When he saw her coming, he would hop back in the car window.

One day, Mom came out just as Snake jumped back in the window. She stowed her groceries in the back seat, got in and stuck her key in the ignition. But the key would not turn. That’s when she noticed a pair of blue baby booties hanging from the rearview mirror. Mom didn’t have any little babies. She knew right away what had happened. The Snake had jumped into the wrong car. Mom said she cussed him the whole time she unloaded and reloaded her groceries into her identical car two spaces away. She admitted she prayed the baby-booty-owner would not come out and catch her taking her groceries out of their car.

She got lucky that time. No one caught her. But she said that wasn’t the case with the woman from across town who called her on the phone and asked if she owned a large brown dog named Snake.

When Mom confessed that she was the owner, the lady asked her to please come and remove said dog from her kitchen. It seemed he’d fallen in love with her English bulldog and simply followed her in through the doggy door from their backyard. Not only did we have difficulty keeping him inside our cinder block fence, it was also difficult to keep him out of anyone else’s fenced yard.

“He’s very well-mannered,” the lady told Mom on the phone. “But I can’t convince him it’s time to leave. He just sits there looking at me with those big brown eyes.” Mom said the lady chuckled self-consciously when she said, “I’m glad you put the phone number on his tag. I knew his name, but not his number.”

Mom didn’t even ask the woman how she knew his nickname. On his tag, it said Simon. When she hurried to the woman’s house to retrieve him, she said Snake strolled right out the front door and leapt in the passenger window of the old Plymouth as if he’d simply been waiting for his chauffeur to arrive.

I don’t know why Snake didn’t bring his girlfriend to our house. I suppose he couldn’t get her over the cinderblock fence. I hope it wasn’t because he was ashamed of us.

Nothing in the neighborhood escaped his attention. He even patrolled our rooftop once he discovered he could climb the brick waterfall in the backyard, walk the length of the fence, and make the short leap from the well house to the steep slant of the attached garage. Seeing him perched on the edge of the shingles like a furry gargoyle was always quite a sight.

Although Mom was embarrassed by his actions from time to time, she usually got away unscathed. Bull’s brother, Uncle Joe, was not so fortunate. Snake got revenge on him in the most appropriate way.

In the warmer months, Uncle Joe always wore a white straw cowboy hat. Being ornery, he would sometimes use that hat to tease Snake by waving the hat in his face, making him jump for it.

“You’ll regret that someday,” Bull told him.

Sure enough, someday finally came.

It was high summer when Uncle Joe stopped by for a visit one afternoon. He and Bull were standing in the side yard, chewing the fat, Uncle Joe holding the white hat loosely against his leg, when out of nowhere, Snakeman barreled past. Without a pause, old Snake snatched that hat out of Uncle Joe’s hand, ran off a short distance and tore the evil thing to shreds. Then he looked up, chest heaving, pieces of the brim dangling from his jaws, and stared right at Uncle Joe as if to say, “Whaddya think about that?”

Shaking his head, Uncle Joe simply got in his car and drove away.

Bull walked back to the house, grinning. I’m not absolutely certain, but I think I heard him mutter, “I told you.”

I began to wonder if the old dog was a reincarnated teenaged boy. He had quite a thing for cars, and his favorite napping spot was on top of the Plymouth.

Once, he even got to drive.

Blonde and blue-eyed, my sister, Jay, had lots of teenaged suitors. The Snake loved to help her greet them. If the weather was cold or rainy, he would often go to the door wearing his windbreaker with the hood up. Mom called him the doggy Unabomber. If one of the guys tried to skip the official greeting and just drive up to the curb for a sit ’n’ visit, well, The Snake was liable to take part in that, too.

One evening, Jay’s friend, John, and his brother, Corey, came over. It was still summertime, so Snake wasn’t wearing his hoodie, but since the boys’ old Chevy didn’t have air conditioning, all the windows were rolled down. John was acquainted with Snake, but his younger brother had only heard rumors. For some reason, they called our dog Godzilla. I think he had a reputation. But apparently Corey assumed he would be safe staying in the car while John went up to the door.

Snake must’ve already been outside when he heard the car idling at the curb. Who knows? He may have been watching from the roof. Without warning, he sidled up to the vehicle and hopped in the passenger window. Corey didn’t even stop to put the hand brake on. He just slid right on out the driver’s side door and let the dog have it.

I don’t know if Corey knocked the car in gear when he slid out, or whether Snakeman found first on his own, but however it happened, for a few minutes that dog was driving down the street. Naturally, he drove past Mrs. McGuinn’s house, the show-off. He was probably headed to his English girlfriend’s place, but I guess we’ll never know. Corey ran to the door yelling, “Help! Help! Godzilla’s stealing my car!”

Fortunately, The Snake couldn’t reach the accelerator.

Jay and John caught him at the corner.

Another time he almost got us in trouble was the afternoon we girls were goofing around in Mom and Bull’s bedroom while they were gone. We were like Dr. Seuss’s Thing 1 and Thing 2, giving each other piggyback rides, falling backward onto the huge king-sized bed, and generally cutting up and acting stupid.

Of course, Snaker heard the commotion and decided he wanted to play, so the next time I leapt on Jay’s back, Snake leapt up against her chest and knocked the pair of us backward into the wall. The combined weight of two teenage girls and one large dog made a person-sized hole in the sheetrock.

I’ll never forget how quickly we scrambled away from that hole with our hands covering our mouths. Brilliant thinkers, we pushed a thin metal bookshelf in front of the damage and hoped for the best.

The next day, Bull said, “Girls, what the hell happened to my bedroom wall?”

Naturally, we blamed the whole thing on poor old Snakeman. And just like Uncle Joe, Bull simply shook his head and cut his losses. It was hard to argue with the four-legged kid—he never talked back.

Someday, I’ll tell you about the afternoon Mom baked brownies for my classroom and set them to cool in the middle of her new dinette. The table still bears the dog-claw scars, and one of the chairs didn’t survive at all. But that was a long time ago.

I sure miss those days. I miss that old dog. His life was long and mostly happy. He knew he was a member of our family.

It broke our hearts when he died one sunny afternoon when I was sixteen years old. We had moved to a new town, next door to the trucking company Bull had been hired to run. The day it happened, Snake and I were walking over to the truck shop to fill up a brown paper grocery bag with ice from the company’s big machine.

I was barefoot and hurrying, the parking lot between our house and the shop nothing but stinging white gravel. We needed the ice for dinner, for the iced tea.

The sky was bright blue, the sun perfectly round and hot, and my stepbrother, Bill, and his wife, Terri, were home for Sunday dinner. Bill had decided to mow the front yard before we ate. The air was almost green with the smell of that freshly cut grass.

Halfway back to the house, I noticed Snake was no longer beside me. When I turned to see what was keeping him, he was already head down, legs splayed, sides heaving. As soon as I turned around, he crumpled.

I screamed for Bill, but he couldn’t hear me over the mower. I didn’t want to leave Snake even long enough to get help, but he was too big for me to carry.

I ran as fast as I could to the house, yanked open the door and tossed in the ice. “Something’s wrong with Snake—” and that’s all I had to say. Everyone jumped up and ran. Bull scooped him up and carried him to the car, held him in his lap all the way to the vet while Mom drove. But it was no use. He was gone. His big heart had played out.

In hindsight, I’m so thankful that Snake’s previous owner moved to a place that didn’t allow dogs. I can’t imagine what, or who, could have possibly filled the gaping hole in our lives if we’d never been blessed with that old dog, that old Snakeman. He was the best, absolutely, the best.