Reptile House
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Cover Design: Sandy Knight
Interior Design and Composition: Richard Foerster
Manufacturing: Versa Press, Inc.
BOA Logo: Mirko
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
McLean, Robin.
Reptile House / Robin McLean. — First Edition.
pages cm. — (American Reader Series, No. 24)
ISBN 978-1-938160-65-3 (pbk. : alk. paper) — ISBN 978-1-
938160-66-0 (ebook)
I. Title.
PS3613.C5774R47 2015
813'.6—dc23
2014040140
BOA Editions, Ltd.
250 North Goodman Street, Suite 306
Rochester, NY 14607
www.boaeditions.org
A. Poulin, Jr., Founder (1938–1996)
For Mom and Dad
Contents
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
1. Cold Snap
2. Take the Car Take the Girl
3. The Amazing Discovery and Natural History of Carlsbad
Caverns
4. Rabbit’s Foot
5. No Name Creek
6. The True End to All Sad Times
7. For Swimmers
8. Blue Nevus
9. Reptile House
Acknowledgments
About the Author
Colophon
Cold Snap
In December, the valley cars barely turned over. Batteries died.
Blankets were coiled on the sills of frosted windows, tacked over ill-
fitting doors. Wood split with a tap of an axe. The ice on the lake
was three feet thick, then five, then seven, then the auger froze.
When the wind died down, the townsfolk had parties on the lake
below the Ledges, the deepest part of the lake, so warmest water, so
best fishing. The fish huts all huddled together. The friends built
fires in the middle of pallets with brush hauled out in trucks parked
behind the huts. The fire was taller than the roofs. It leaned with the
wind. They drank hot drinks with gloves, red noses at rims, leaned
away from the lick of flame. Their boots shuffled and stamped toes
awake; winter’s good fun when it’s a real winter. They breathed
steam around hats and muffs, told jokes across the fire, clapped
mitts and laughed hard about the cold snap.
Lilibeth could see all from the boat launch. The party was a mile
away from the windshield. She chewed chicken salad from the deli
counter. She bobbed her head to the oldies station the next valley
over, which cut out while her head bobbed on. This chicken was
good. Its plastic bin balanced on the steering wheel so her gloves
were free. She’d gotten the binoculars in the divorce. She chewed
and watched the huddle move around the flame melting a crater in
the ice: no danger in this cold, but what did the fish think? The light,
the shapes. Some coming disaster. The lake aboil. The crater would
freeze smooth, always did, with charred sticks, broken glass, and
bark swimming in it. She’d lost the fish hut in the divorce, but the
gambrel roofline was distinctive. She squinted for it in the lenses,
but fish huts all look the same at twilight.
Last winter had been warm, so they weren’t expecting it. The
mercury dropped every day. In town, at the school and meeting
places, they talked ozone holes and natural cycles and getting
suckered by headlines. They wore wool socks. They ordered extra
blankets from catalogues.
It got colder still. The furnace ran 24/7 at the Food Boy, the only
store in the valley with a deli and pharmacy section. The snow
machiners bought no gas. The station owners groused. The men
stayed in and finally painted the babies’ rooms and fixed the drips in
basements. Easter Creek froze, the ice dammed up, then the creek
burst and overflowed the dam, until the dam broke loose and took
Smitty’s Bridge out.
“That bridge was too low anyway,” people said, taking pictures.
“That bridge had it coming.”
The Town Council voted on the bridge. The road crew erected a
fence and sign as directed, then the wind came up and flung the
fence in the creek and the sign high up in a downstream tree, Road
Closed! Go Back! which they thought was funny and took more
pictures. They voted again, a second resolution, calling for a less
casual effort, for concrete blocks, no dirt work was possible, secured
with reliable knots to reliable trees. The Town Clerk should have
arranged the work, but broke his leg the next morning. Lilibeth
found him sprawled on black ice, called the ambulance, yelled
“Hello!” and waved them into Elm Street. She’d been walking her
dogs. Further resolutions were tabled when the pipes froze in Town
Hall.
Lilibeth had once known all the resolutions. She used to take
minutes, a public service, given her handwriting. But since the
divorce she’d been lying low. She lived with the dogs in a house on
the hump of the hill in the middle of Elm Street. The chickens lived
in the shed. The house fit her budget and was tucked in the pines,
which leaned so far the house was nearly invisible. Electric wires
dropped down to the roof through branches and needles. The pines
hardly swayed in greatest gusts. Her new address was not yet added
to the Newsletter list, so she was not up on things.
The valley got colder. The pipes froze downtown in the houses
and shops on Main Street. The houses up on the hills and slopes
lasted longer due to thermal inversions. On the lake, the drifts
climbed the fish huts, ramped up the walls until the kids off school
could scramble to the roofs then slide back down again and again,
their mothers watching from idling cars, calling out “enough!” when
they thought about frostbite. At night, the drifts wrapped around the
sides until only the doors that opened inward opened at all. One kid
stayed overnight on a dare. They tried to cut him out in the morning.
The mother was frantic. The oil plugged the chainsaws. The
handsaws’ blades snapped in two. The heads of mauls dropped off
their handles. Such was the freezing differential between ash wood
and steel.
“It’s too cold to keep trying,” the police chief said since it was
too late anyway. “You people go home.” They all did but the mother.
Many went to the fire hall. They huddled around the radio. The
broadcast died during the lead-in: post office frozen three towns
north.
“POs should be immune,” they agreed at an emergency meeting.
“Given federal regulations on pipe depth.”
“The plumbers must be making a mint,” they said as backup
generators hummed.
The price of stove wood went sky high. Families played board
games together for the first time in years.
When the broadcast died, Lilibeth was listening in a bathtub not
deep or fancy, but hot and reliable. Her dad had bought the radio in
Hong Kong in the service. It was top of the line in its time. She’d
got it in probate. She got out of the tub to shake it. She dripped on
the floor, which was cold on her feet.
She’d gotten the house cheap, a foreclosure, as-is. It needed
paint. The porch sagged, with mice in the crawlspace, but the
furnace was good as were the roof and well. She jiggled the toilet
handle, which was running nonstop again. The plumber had not
called back yet. She brought the phone to the edge of the tub and got
back in. She’d given Norm her number weeks ago, a fireman. It was
his idea despite his wife’s death last year. Norm was a shy one. He
had only one friend outside the crew, an old miner.
Lilibeth splashed.
She’d met the old miner once on Norm’s doorstep. They’d
popped by Norm’s at the same time. Lilibeth rang the bell. The old
miner carried a tray with a turkey.
“I need the oven,” the old miner had said when Norm appeared.
The turkey was pink, freshly plucked, and pimpled. The old
miner stepped in past Lilibeth, searched for salt and pepper, took a
shower. He slept on a rug by the wood stove as the turkey roasted.
Turkey scent filled Norm’s house just as Lilibeth was leaving.
“That old boy will be the last man standing,” Norm had said.
The miner’s face glowed in the firelight. He was very thin, but
used no blanket.
“I don’t know about that,” Lilibeth had said.
In the bath, she watched the phone when not watching her knees,
which were islands washed in the tropical sea with hot foamy
bubbles. The washcloth was a baby eel, which dove around coral
reefs, her calves, ankles, and thighs. She dried her hands and pressed
a few digits of Norm’s number. She did not understand. She set the
phone down. She’d turned up the thermostat in the hallway and the
furnace rumbled. “Let the man come to you,” the book said. “Never
push a man or he’ll head for the hills. A man likes to feel in charge.”
The pines tapped the roof gently as the wind whipped and
arched over Elm Street and everywhere.
“We’ve never seen such a cold snap,” they said when Fish and
Game closed. “Till the road gets better,” the Game Warden said.
Some went to Florida. Roads drifted in over notches and passes.
Some wells had hand pumps and people pumped into buckets until
their eyelashes stuck together. The ice on the lake was twenty feet
deep according to the high school science club, which met anyway.
Tree limbs snapped power lines, candles burned low, and oil
tanks emptied. Animals made dens. Emergency meetings served hot
chocolate and sweet rolls. Birds tucked away somewhere. School
closed for another week. Story time moved to the fire hall for the
littlest kids. The engine bays had never been fuller. The kids loved
the ladders and pole from the bunk room and the first-aid kit was
near at hand. The firemen peed down by the creek where the bridge
had been, jogged down through trees in full gear and masks.
“Someone will forget and drive right off that,” one said. His
beard was ice.
“Even lawyers need to eat,” another said. They zipped up quick
and jogged back through trees again. Masks fogged then cleared,
fogged then cleared.
Town Council resolved to call the tank farm two valleys over for
additional oil trucks. They were told to call the Capitol and left
messages. The fire hall was busy. They ate on paper plates around
the blower. The dogs chased the cups that cart-wheeled away.
“This is fun!” the kids said.
“The capital N in Nature,” the librarian said.
The leach fields and septic tanks were soon rock solid, then
septic lines. Old outhouses were cleared of shrubs grown in. Others
rolled trashcans to the edge of decks with curtains around them.
Holes were cut in the seats of wicker chairs and buckets placed
under. This was hardest on the sick, elderly, and shy. City fathers
looked the other way. They’d decide on the collection and disposal
at next Town Meeting.
Lilibeth read like a scholar. The books on self-improvement
were stacked by her bed. Her TV had been broken since her last
boyfriend. It sat on the porch as if looking for the street. He’d
kicked the screen in, a sheriff’s deputy-in-training. Maybe Norm felt
a conflict of interest that she’d dated a fellow man in uniform. She
did not understand. Until the radio died, she’d not missed the TV.
She took baths while reading. She took baths and filled out job
applications. Norm’s wife was the most likely reason. “He needs
time before his next commitment,” the book on grief said. “Don’t be
overeager during the healing phase,” another said, “Soul-mating
takes time.” He’d suggested she trim back the pines, a fire hazard. “I
like the closed-in feeling,” she’d told him. He had not offered his
chainsaw though he was certified. It had been their one night
together.
Things could always be better. The warning light in her car was
a little golden engine. The guy from the shop had not called back.
She tried to remember if she owed him money. The trees around her
house seemed bigger and thicker in this cold, to lean down like a
tent. She’d missed her period, and though the test was negative, her
message no doubt had upset Norm. When she ventured out with job
applications, his car was at the fire hall, not his normal shift. The
parking lot was full, some party, the faces and heads behind the frost
of the roll-up glass of engine bays. She pulled in and watched. Some
people waved at her. Even her ex-truck was parked there, the one
with the hitch to pull the fish hut. She must have forgotten some
holiday because all the shops were closed on Main Street. She’d
knocked on the glass, “Hello! Hello!” She left the applications in
doorways, under flowerpots and stabbed by the edges of shovels.
The flag at the cannon in the square had been ripped by the wind.
The cars were drifted-in. The meters were red, all out of time, not a
single ticket.
She saw a group, a family, and called, “Hello!” The family was
so bundled, she could not be sure if they were male or female. A
bundled baby swung from a parent’s hip, its small face crushed to
the larger shoulder, perhaps crying over a frostbitten nose or ice-
cold feet or numbed earlobes. She squatted to study their stampede
of tracks. They turned down an alley. They never turned. She nearly
felt their heat under an awning, almost sniffed their smell around a
corner. She followed for a while, then she looped back to the square
past the antique shop and hardware store.
It felt colder in town than at her house. She stamped her boots
and hugged her arms. It felt much colder. She marveled at this
impression. How real it seemed, how actual, factual, reliable, true.
How apparently based on sensory perception, the nerves in the face,
for example, the capillaries of the ears when the hat flew off and
tumbled away. The pain in the lungs, deep breaths required for
catching the hat, for leaping a drift.
She stood at the flag by the cannon. She folded the last
application and stuffed it in her pocket. She would have to rewrite it.
The chase had rumpled it terribly. Her car rumbled and puffed all
alone by the library, and she marveled at the power of the mind,
since she knew from her readings that such impressions of doom
were purely psychological: mere exaggerations of the current
conditions caused by the scar tissues of grief—swollen up layers of
disappointment, sadness and anger, the book said, which ganged up
to distort perception, to disable the afflicted. Don’t believe this
empty town. This coldest cold. This Death of the World.
She wrote her real problems on paper. They hung on the fridge
behind a magnet. She studied the list while eating soup from a can at
the oven door, open to 350°:
Mice in crawlspace.
Percolator plug / missing / lost.
Woodpile low / get wood
Dogs tracking bark into house
Dogs chewing braided rug
Engine light / engine light
Chicken feed
Find job / anything
Toaster adjustment
When the bath started acting up, she added it below: Bath /
coughing / investigate.
There were other issues: In the morning, she found the chickens
huddled together under the light bulb. They were not happy. They
pecked each other out of boredom and stress, the chicken book said.
She dabbed cream between feathers on the scabby parts. She told
them to simmer down, look on the sunny side. Things are always
worse for someone else. Her snow pants pockets needed patching,
for example. Quarters fell out and anything smaller. Her phone card
minutes ran to zero. She lost the charger for her phone, so how
could the shops call for an interview? She drove down Main to add
notes about the charger. Her applications still flapped in the
doorways. The extended new holiday apparently continued. She
would buy a calendar after her first paycheck.
The plumber’s office door was open. She left a note on the desk
chair about the tub. “I can’t live without it.”
When the hand pumps froze, people filled their jugs at the Easter
Hill Spring, an old pipe in the slope that poured out constantly. The
plows cleared the pullout to it. The pipe was the width of a thumb. It
filled a cistern built by a Water Committee decades back. A
historical plaque said some old miner dug the spring out for his
mules.
“It’s artesian,” some Committee members had argued.
“Geothermal,” said the ones who’d been to college.
“It’s God either way,” said the religious faction. “The Flock will
not go thirsty.”
During the cold snap, they kept a fire burning by the spring.
Each family backed in with empty jugs and a stick of wood they
threw on the fire. Kids tapped the fire’s edges with their boots. As
the cold pressed in, the pipe lengthened and thickened with days and
weeks, until the ice on the pipe was an elephant’s trunk with a
smirky tip where wind had shaped it and the water dripped out.
Some women wouldn’t look at it. Men and boys made jokes.
Exhaust from the tailpipes sank and swirled, and people coughed.
They filled buckets and tubs and screw-top jars. They dragged the
heaviest through snow to tailgates. Birds landed on the cistern and
were shooed away. Town dogs licked the runoff.
Once, Lilibeth pulled in at the pullout to see about the hubbub:
cars abandoned, jumper cables hanging out, water jugs half-buried.
She waved at friends she’d not seen for ages. She shook her head
and mouthed her question. “No water?” her lips said. “I’ve got water
at my house!” Her eyes and teeth were big and her mittens excited
as they pointed toward Elm Street. The friends tapped on windows
too iced up to roll down and pointed at their phones. “On the line to
the Capitol,” their lips said, and Lilibeth nodded as if she understood
they were requesting reinforcements, water trucks and propane
rations, a generator at school so the kids did not fall behind.
Sometimes she’d have liked to hurl a rock: to coil the arm, to let
fly at glass, but it was hard to justify such an idea.
The old friends waved goodbye. They gave thumbs up with
empty milk jugs. A show of support, she thought later, for finally
getting up and running, surviving her troubles, like writing GO
TEAM GO! on the glass.
The plumber didn’t show. Norm didn’t call. The little golden
engine on the car’s console was now a constant. The town’s sudden
holiday must have been extended. Days dropped away and away.
The sink and toilet were fine, but now the tub was failing. It
sputtered a tepid twisting trickle. It groaned as if giving in. Water
boiled in pots to supplement, in the kitchen, on the wood stove. She
dumped hot over the cold sheen of bubble bath. She stirred the
mixture and got in with a book about self-employment, but who
could dream with all this worry? In the morning, she drove to the
plumber’s house. The door was open, “Hello!” The fire hall lot was
empty, the weeks-long party was over. All engines gone. The school
was dark. The library drop box was frozen shut. She kept the books.
Capitol Radio reported frost to twenty-two feet. All Governor’s
staff was in the emergency bunker, well-stocked, but the pantry
bunker froze. The canned goods were crushed, oozed when heated.
The staff cooks asked to bring their children down, but with so little
space no one else was permitted. Rivers froze to the bottom. Dams
iced in. Rail lines snapped at critical junctions. Coal cars stood in
the western fields. Southern news crews showed footage of icicles,
people chipping, sucking, so thirsty, so thirsty.
