Snake Catcher
My mother collected rattlesnakes. On rare occasions she found coral snakes and, once, a Gila monster. It welled up from the desert like it had something to say. She listened.
She was a campground host in Tucson Mountain Park, two miles from Old Tucson Studios. Tourists came from all over the world to photograph saguaros and watch fake cowboys shoot blanks at each other in the red sunsets. But snakes made the desert too real, so her job was to capture and relocate them to another part of the park at least a mile away.
She wore leather boots over her jeans to her knees and carried canvas bags and a green five-gallon bucket. Her shirt read Host on the left shoulder.
She’d drive up to a campsite in a county truck where tourists stood on picnic tables as if avoiding a lava flow.
“Okay folks, let’s settle down,” she’d say. “Just settle down now—it’s harmless.”
She handled diamondbacks as if they might come apart in her hands, like wet paper. Gently, she’d lower the hook and lift the snake from the ground. If it rattled, she’d coo at it, like a mother soothing a frightened child. Its body would bend into question marks and ampersands around the pole. Some tourists would scream; others would lean closer. She’d lower it into the bucket and lay a canvas bag over its curled body, as if a plum that might bruise.
She’d set the bucket in the truck bed and drive figure eights through the park’s winding loops, the motion calming what was still wound inside. Then she’d turn down a ruddy road behind a locked gate to her trailer, her host site hidden behind palo verde and prickly pear. She’d sit in the truck for a moment longer than necessary, looking at her hands before going inside.
On slow days, she’d set the bucket under her ramada and remove the canvas bag. She’d speak to the snake as if to a homesick child away at summer camp.
“How’s your day? What did you eat? How are you holding up?”
Sometimes the silence felt like an answer. Other times it felt like a dare. She’d slip off her gloves and reach into the bucket and run her index finger along the jagged diamonds to the tail, counting its rattles like cards at a Vegas blackjack table.
At dusk, while tourists ate ribeye and pinto beans and listened to cowboy fables around a firepit, she’d put the snake in the bed of the truck and drive it back out to the campground.
Back to the same spot near the same picnic table the tourists stood on. She’d release it as if it had never been moved.
Back where it seemed to belong.
Eric Roller
Eric Roller lives in Raleigh, North Carolina, where he teaches high school English. His work has appeared in several literary journals, including The Chestnut Review and South Dakota Review.