Life Expectancy Read online

  “Mom has developed three primary revenue streams. She provides a variety of snakes to movie and TV productions. There for a while, it seemed every music video used snakes.”

  My mother was delighted: “So she rents out the snakes.”

  Dad asked, “By the hour, the day, the week?”

  “Usually by the day. Even a snake-heavy movie only needs them for maybe four, five days.”

  “There isn’t a movie these days that wouldn’t be improved by a lively bunch of snakes,” Grandma Rowena declared. “Especially that last Dustin Hoffman thing.”

  “People who rent snakes by the hour,” Lorrie said somberly, “are for the most part not reputable.”

  This intrigued me. “I’ve never heard of a disreputable snake-rental company.”

  “Oh, they’re around, all right.” Lorrie grimaced. “Very tacky outfits. They rent to individuals by the hour, no questions asked.”

  Dad, Mom, and I exchanged baffled looks, but Weena knew the score: “For erotic purposes.”

  Dad said, “Yuch,” and Mom said, “Creepy,” and I said, “Grandma, sometimes you scare me.”

  Lorrie wanted to make one thing clear: “My mother never rents snakes to individuals.”

  “When I was a child,” Weena said, “Little Ned Yarnel, the boy next door, was bit by a rattlesnake.”

  “A free snake or a rented one?” Dad asked.

  “Free. Little Ned didn’t die but he got gangrene. They had to amputate—first a thumb and finger, then everything to the wrist.”

  “Jimmy, dear,” Mom said, “I’m so glad we didn’t have to cut your leg off.”

  “Me too.”

  Dad raised his wineglass. “Let’s drink to our Jimmy not being an amputee.”

  After the toast, Weena said, “Little Ned grew up to be the only one-handed bow-and-arrow champion ever to compete in the Olympics.”

  Amazed, Lorrie said, “That isn’t possible.”

  “Dear girl,” Weena said, “if you think there were lots of one-handed Olympic bow-and-arrow champions, you can’t know much about the sport.”

  “Of course, he didn’t win gold,” Dad clarified.

  “A silver medal,” Grandma admitted. “But he’d have won the gold if he’d had two eyes.”

  Putting down her fork to punctuate her astonishment, Lorrie said, “He was a cyclops?”

  “No,” my mother said, “he had two eyes. He just couldn’t see out of one of them.”

  “But don’t you need depth perception to be good at something like the bow and arrow?” Lorrie wondered.

  Proud of her childhood friend, Weena said, “Little Ned had something better than depth perception. He had spunk. Nothing could keep Little Ned down.”

  Picking up her fork again, taking the last morsel of crab from her plate, Lorrie said, “I’m fascinated to know if Little Ned might also have been a dwarf.”

  “What a peculiar but somehow charming idea,” my mother said.

  “Just peculiar in my book,” Grandma disagreed. “Little Ned was six feet tall by his eleventh birthday, wound up six feet four—a big lug like our Jimmy.”

  No matter what my grandmother thinks, I am inches shorter than Little Ned. I probably weigh a lot less than he did, too—except if the comparison is limited to hand weight, in which case I would have a considerable advantage over him.

  Comparing my own two legs, my left weighs more than the right by virtue of the two steel plates and the numerous screws that now hold the femur together, plus the single steel plate in the tibia. The leg required considerable vascular surgery, as well, but that didn’t add an ounce.

  At dinner there in early November 1994, the wound drains were no longer in place, which improved the way I smelled, but I still wore a fiberglass cast. I sat at the end of the table, stiff leg thrust out to one side, as if I hoped to trip Grandma.

  Weena finished her crab, smacked her lips in the flamboyant manner that she believes is a right of anyone her age, and said, “You mentioned your mama makes snake money three ways.”

  Lorrie patted her wonderfully full lips on her napkin. “She also milks rattlesnakes.”

  Appalled, my dad said, “What kind of supermarket from hell would sell such stuff?”

  “We had a cute little milk snake lived with us for a while,” Mom told Lorrie. “His name was Earl, but I always thought Bernard would suit him better.”

  “He looked like a Ralph to me,” Grandma Rowena disagreed.

  “Earl was a male,” Mom said, “or at least we always assumed so. If he’d been a female, should we have milked him? After all, if you don’t milk a cow, it can end up in terrible distress.”

  The evening was off to a splendid start. I hardly had to say anything.

  I looked at Dad. He smiled at me. I could tell he was having a wonderful time.

  “There’s not actually milk in a milk snake,” Lorrie said. “None in a rattler, either. What my mother milks out of them is venom. She gets a grip behind the head and massages the poison glands. The venom squirts out of the fangs, which are hypodermic in rattlers, and into a collection beaker.”

  Because he considers the dining room to be a temple, Dad rarely puts an elbow on the table. He put one on it now, and rested his chin in his hand, as though settling in for a long listen. “So your mother has a rattlesnake ranch.”

  “Ranch is too grand a word, Rudy. So is farm, for that matter. It’s more of a garden with just the one crop.”

  My grandmother let out a satisfying belch and said, “Who does she sell this venom to—assassins, or maybe those pygmies with blowguns?”

  “Drug companies need it to make antivenin. And it has a few other medical uses.”

  “You mentioned a third revenue stream,” my father reminded her.

  “My mother’s a real ham,” Lorrie said with affection. “So she takes party bookings. She has this fantastic act with the snakes.”

  “Who would book such an act?” my father wondered.

  “Who wouldn’t?” my mother asked, probably already thinking ahead to their anniversary party and Weena’s birthday.

  “Exactly,” Lorrie said. “All kinds of corporate affairs like retirement parties, Christmas parties. Bar mitzvahs, the American Library Association, you name it.”

  Mom and Dad removed the appetizer plates. They served bowls of chicken corn soup with cheddar crisps on the side.

  “I love corn,” Grandma said, “but it gives me flatulence. I used to care, but I’m not obliged to anymore. The golden years rock.”

  Raising a toast not with wine but with his first spoonful of soup, Dad said, “Here’s hoping that bugger won’t weasel out of a trial. Here’s hoping he fries.”

  The bugger, of course, was Punchinello Beezo. The following morning, he would attend a preliminary hearing to determine if he was mentally fit to stand trial.

  He had gunned down Lionel Davis, Honker, Crinkles, and Byron Metcalf, a longtime leader of the town’s preservation society, whom he had tortured to obtain information about access to the passageways under the town square.

  In addition, the explosions had killed two members of a cleaning crew at work in the courthouse and a hobo assessing the treasures of a Dumpster behind the library. Martha Faye Jeeter, an elderly widow living in an apartment in the building next door to the courthouse, had also perished.

  Eight is a heavy toll in human life, but considering the extent of the destruction, scores of victims might have been expected. Lives were spared because the explosions were two stories underground, and some of the force vented into the subterranean tunnels. The library, the mansion, and the bank imploded, crashing down into their cellars and subcellars as though brought to ruin by the precise formulations of a demolitions expert.

  The courthouse largely imploded, as well, but its bell tower toppled into the building next door, bringing sudden fury into the quiet life of the Widow Jeeter.

  Her two cats also were squashed. Some citizens of Snow Village seemed to be angrier about th
is outrage than about either the human or the architectural losses.

  Punchinello had expressed regret that hundreds hadn’t died. He told police that if he could do it all over again, he would add packages of napalm to ensure a firestorm that would devastate many square blocks.

  Portions of the street and the park subsided into Cornelius Snow’s secret passageways. My fine black sporty coupe with yellow racing stripes had been swallowed by one of these sinkholes.

  Remember when I said that I hadn’t met a young woman whom I could love as much as I loved that seven-year-old Dodge Daytona Shelby Z? Funny thing—I didn’t mourn the loss of it, not for a minute.

  Although Lorrie would have looked good in the Shelby Z, she would look even better in a 1986 Pontiac Trans Am, not black but maybe red or silver, a color to match her exuberant spirit. Or a 1988 Chevy Camaro IROC-Z convertible.

  My problem, however, was one that any young baker on a bread-and-cake wage could appreciate. There were men in the world who, upon getting one look at her, would buy Lorrie a Rolls-Royce for every day of the week. And not all of them would look like trolls.

  “You don’t think they’ll send the bugger to some asylum and let him off the hook?” Dad asked.

  “He doesn’t want that himself,” I said. “He’s saying he knew exactly what he was doing, and it was all about revenge.”

  “He’s crazy in his way,” Lorrie said. “But he knows right from wrong as sure as I do. Maddy, Rudy—this soup is fantastic even if it causes flatulence.”

  Grandma Rowena had a relevant story: “Hector Sanchez, lived over near Bright Falls, killed himself with a fart.”

  The rationalist in my father was stirred by Grandma’s assertion. “Weena, that’s just not possible.”

  “Hector worked in the hair-oil industry,” Grandma recalled. “He had beautiful hair but not much common sense. This was fifty-six years ago, back in ’38, before the war.”

  “Even then it wasn’t possible,” Dad declared.

  “You weren’t even born yet, Maddy, neither, so don’t tell me what wasn’t possible. I saw it with my own eyes.”

  “You’ve never mentioned this before,” Dad said, suspecting a fabrication but not ready to make the accusation. “Jimmy, has she ever mentioned this before?”

  “No,” I confirmed. “I remember Grandma telling us about a Harry Ramirez who boiled himself to death, but not this Hector Sanchez.”

  “Maddy, do you remember ever hearing this before?”

  “No, honey,” my mother admitted, “but what does that prove? I’m sure it just slipped Mother’s mind until now.”

  “Seeing a man fart himself to death doesn’t just slip your mind.” To Lorrie, Dad said, “I’m sorry, dear. Our table talk isn’t usually this low.”

  “You don’t know what low is until you’re eating canned ravioli while listening to stories about snake cankers and the smell of a tornado that’s sucked up the contents of a sewage-processing plant.”

  Impatiently, Grandma said, “Hector Sanchez never slipped my mind. This is just the first time we’ve been in a conversation where the subject came up naturally.”

  “What was Hector’s job in the hair-oil industry?” Mom asked.

  “If he blew himself up with a fart fifty-six years ago,” Dad said, “who cares what he did in hair oil?”

  “I’m sure his family cared,” Weena said. “It put food on their table. Anyway, he didn’t blow himself up. That isn’t possible.”

  “Case closed,” my father said triumphantly.

  “I turned twenty-one, and my husband, Sam, took me to a tavern for the first time. We were in a booth. Hector was on a bar stool. I ordered a Pink Squirrel. Do you like Pink Squirrels, Lorrie?”

  Lorrie said yes, and Dad said, “You’re driving me so crazy with this, I’m seeing pink squirrels right now, crawling on the ceiling.”

  “Hector was drinking beer with lime slices, sitting just one stool away from this bodybuilder. He had biceps the size of hams and the prettiest tattoo of a snarling bulldog on his arm.”

  “Hector or the bodybuilder?” my mother asked.

  “Hector didn’t have any tattoos, at least not in any place that was visible. But he had a pet monkey named Pancho.”

  My mother said, “Was Pancho also drinking beer?”

  “The monkey wasn’t there.”

  “Where was he?”

  “Home with the family. He wasn’t one of those monkeys that likes running around to gin mills. Pancho was family oriented.”

  Mom patted Dad on the shoulder. “That’s my kind of monkey.”

  “So Hector, sitting on the bar stool, he cuts a ripe one—”

  “At last,” my father said.

  “—and the bodybuilder takes offense at the smell. Hector tells him to buzz off, though he doesn’t say buzz.”

  “How big was this Hector?” Lorrie wondered.

  “I’d say about five feet seven, a hundred thirty pounds.”

  “He sure could have used the monkey for backup,” Lorrie said.

  “So the bodybuilder punches him twice, grabs him by the hair, and smashes his face into the bar three times. Hector falls off the stool, dead, and the bodybuilder orders another boilermaker spiked with two fresh eggs for the protein.”

  My father glowed with vindication. “So I was right. Passing gas didn’t kill him. The drunken bodybuilder killed him.”

  “If he hadn’t farted, he wouldn’t have been killed,” Grandma insisted.

  Finishing her soup, Lorrie said, “So how did Harry Ramirez boil himself to death?”

  Next came the entree—roast chicken with chestnut-and-sausage stuffing, polenta, and snap peas—followed by celery-root salad.

  When, past midnight, Dad rolled in the dessert cart from the kitchen, Lorrie couldn’t make up her mind between a tangerine cream tart and a slice of genoise; she took both. She sampled the coeur à la crème, the budino di ricotta, and the Mont Blanc aux marrons, then chose four items from the three-tiered cookie tray.

  She ate a springerle cookie with intense concentration until she realized that everyone at the table had fallen silent. When she looked up, all of us were smiling at her.

  “Delicious,” she said.

  We smiled.

  “What?” she asked.

  “Nothing, dear,” my mother said. “It just seems like you’ve always been here.”

  Lorrie left at one in the morning, which was early for the Tock family but late for her. At nine in the morning, she had to teach two angry Hungarians to dance.

  The angry Hungarians are a story unto themselves. I’ll save them for another book if I live to write one.

  At the front door, as I stood with the aid of a walker, Lorrie kissed me. This would have been the perfect end to the evening…if she hadn’t kissed me just on the cheek and if my entire family had not been two feet away, watching and smiling and, in one case, indulging in too much lip-smacking.

  Then she also kissed my grandmother, my mother, and my father, which didn’t make me feel so special anymore.

  She returned to me, kissed me on the cheek again, and that made me feel somewhat better.

  When she breezed out of the house and into the night, she seemed to take most of the oxygen with her. In her absence, breathing hurt a little.

  Dad was late leaving for work at the resort. He had delayed in order to see Lorrie off.

  Before he left, he said, “Son, no self-respecting baker would let that one get away.”

  While Mom and Grandma cleared the dinner table and loaded the two dishwashers, I settled into a living-room armchair and leaned my head back against the spider-pattern antimacassar. With my stomach pleasantly full and my castbound leg raised on a footstool, I felt beached.

  I tried to read a mystery novel, one in a series about a private detective with neurofibromatosis, the disease made famous by the Elephant Man. He traveled from end to end of San Francisco in his investigations, always wearing a hooded cloak to conceal his deformed fe
atures. I couldn’t get into the story.

  With dinner cleanup completed, Grandma returned to the sofa and to her needlepoint. She had begun a centipede pillow.

  Mom sat at the easel in her alcove and worked on a portrait of a collie whose owner wanted it portrayed in a checkered neck scarf and cowboy hat.

  Considering my life and the dinner just enjoyed, I naturally gave some thought to eccentricity. As I write about the Tock clan, its members seem odd and singular. Which they are. Which is one reason why I love them.

  Every family is eccentric in its own way, however, as is each human being. Like the Tocks, they have their tics.

  Eccentric means off or aside from the ordinary, off or aside from what is considered normal. As a civilization, through consensus, we agree on what is normal, but this consensus is as wide as a river, not as narrow as the high wire above a big top.

  Even so, not one of us lives a perfectly normal, ordinary life in every regard. We are, after all, human beings, each of us unique to an extent that no member of any other species is different from others of its kind.

  We have instinct but we are not ruled by it. We feel the pull of the mindless herd, the allure of the pack, but we resist the extreme effects of this influence—and when we do not, we drag our societies down into the bloody wreckage of failed utopias, led by Hitler or Lenin, or Mao Tse-tung. And the wreckage reminds us that God gave us our individualism and that to surrender it is to follow a dark path.

  When we fail to see the eccentricities in ourselves and to be amused by them, we become monsters of self-regard. Each in its own way, every family is as eccentric as mine. I guarantee it. Opening your eyes to this truth is to open your heart to humanity.

  Read Dickens; he knew.

  Those in my family don’t wish to be anyone but who they are. They will not edit themselves to impress others.

  They find meaning in their quiet faith, in one another, and in the little miracles of their daily lives. They don’t need ideologies or philosophies to define themselves. They are defined by living, with all senses engaged, with hope, and with a laugh ever ready.

  Almost from the moment I had met her in the library, I had known that Lorrie Lynn Hicks knew everything that Dickens knew, whether she had read him or not. Her beauty lay less in her physical appearance than in the fact that she wasn’t a Freudian automaton and would never allow herself to be defined by those terms; she was nobody’s victim, nobody’s fool. She was motivated not by what others had done to her, not by envy, not by a conviction of moral superiority, but by life’s possibilities.

  I put aside the novel featuring the Elephant Man detective, and I levered myself up from the armchair, into the walker. The wheels squeaked faintly.

  In the kitchen, I closed the door behind myself and went to the wall phone.

  For a while I stood there, blotting my damp palms on my shirt. Trembling. This nervousness was less acute but more profound than anything I’d felt while under Punchinello’s gun.

  This was the trepidation of a climber who wishes to scale the world’s highest mountain in record time, who knows that for a certain window of his life he will have the skills and the physical resources to achieve his dream, but who fears that bureaucrats or storms, or fate, will foil him until his window closes. And then who will he be, what will he become?

  During the six weeks since the night of the clowns, we had spoken by phone many times. I had committed her number to memory.

  I keyed in three digits, hung up.

  My mouth had gone dry. I squeaked to a cabinet, got a drinking glass, squeaked to the sink. I drew chilled and filtered water from the special tap.

  Eight ounces heavier but still with a dry mouth, I returned to the phone.

  I keyed in five digits, hung up.

  I didn’t trust my voice. I practiced: “Hi, it’s Jimmy.”

  Even I had given up calling myself James. When you realize you’re fighting a fundamental law of the universe, it’s best to surrender to nature.