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  For my boys, Calvin and Emmett

  Part One ROOSTING

  Chapter One

  The reason to have a peacock, I would have thought, is self-evident.

  When you suddenly, and without any relevant experience or hint of prior interest, come into possession of one, it is understandable that people would be curious as to why. Yet they present the question in a way that suggests they genuinely cannot see what should be plainly obvious. I’m sure it was from exasperation that George Mallory finally said he was climbing Mount Everest simply because it was there.

  So: because of feathers. That is the reason. And colors.

  Because a peacock is a wondrously improbable apparition, ethereal, an avian experiment strayed from a misty place where pretty things are whispered about before being made fully real. Because looking at one makes you happy. Because Keats was right about truth and beauty.

  Also because, in this particular instance, anyway: Elvis, too. And because the first gifts you give the woman you’ve already decided you want to marry are freighted with enormously high stakes, some, even, that you can’t possibly recognize until many years have passed and then one afternoon there are peacocks in the yard.

  We were both writers, she in New York and I in Boston, and we met in the usual way people did before smartphones and swiping apps, which was through friends. When we still lived in different cities, I would pick up Louise at the Back Bay train station and take her to my house in Swampscott, a hamlet on the edge of the ocean north of Boston. The drive between the station and the house was a dreary slog past the airport and the greyhound track and sketchy secondhand-car lots on roads clotted with traffic and squeezed by crooked buildings smeared with soot. “I’m wooing you,” I told her on the first visit, which was true. “This is the scenic route.”

  I narrated the highlights as best as I understood them, which was mostly from writing about murder and thieving and the hoodlum idiocy of the decaying Boston mob. “I knew a guy who used to fix races,” I said when we passed the dog track. “He said in a pinch you can just kick ’em in the nuts.” I pointed into one of the denser neighborhoods beyond the guardrail. “My first story for the Herald was over there,” I said. “Convenience-store stickup. Guy got pistol-whipped.”

  She was charmed by those anecdotes, I told myself, by those dark tales so casually revealed. There is an element of mythmaking in the early days of dating: You craft the best imagined version of yourself, she crafts hers, and if you’re lucky, you believe each other long enough for those two stories to twine together and begin to unspool a new one. That, at the time, was my best version: seasoned crime writer.

  Louise, for her part, liked to say that she was never more Southern than when she lived in her Brooklyn walk-up. She fried chicken for me in the eight-piece electric skillet her mother mailed from Tennessee, and she gathered fresh collards from the bodega on the corner to stew in salt pork. She slipped spears of pickled okra into glasses of gin poured from the bottle in the freezer. We would sit with our stiff martinis near the window to watch the curious foot traffic circulating through the brownstone across the street. “That’s a brothel, isn’t it?” she whispered one night—not in judgment, I was certain, but to hint that she, too, was aware of things in the shadows.

  Halfway between the train station and my house, traffic often stalled us in front of a storefront the color of penicillin mold called the Green Spot that, from the outside, appeared to sell only three things: lobsters, spider plants, and plaster busts of Elvis. “Mob shop,” I told her. “That’s gotta be a front.”

  She smiled every time we passed it after that. “Mahbstas and lahbstas,” she’d purr. “Lahbstas and mahbstas.”

  I bought her one of those Elvis busts for our first Valentine’s Day. A gift under such circumstances has to be precisely calibrated, as it reveals both your intentions and how closely you’ve been paying attention. A plaster Elvis was playful enough, but it was also hollow, literally and figuratively, and with a coin slot cut through the top. It hardly suggested my depth of feeling. I needed ballast.

  She had told me, late one night when the okra spears were almost gone, about the book that made her want to become a writer, Flannery O’Connor’s A Good Man Is Hard to Find. I wasn’t very familiar with O’Connor, but I knew that the title story involved an escaped convict and multiple homicides, which I took as one of those small illuminating details that suggested Louise and I were well suited for each other.

  I tracked down a first edition and had it wrapped and ribboned and leaning against Elvis’s cheek when she arrived at my house. I baked a chocolate cake, deflated and with frosting like spackle, and set that next to Elvis, too. I thought it important she knew at the beginning that I wasn’t afraid to fail.

  Almost twenty years later, Elvis is in her office, the chips in his hairline touched up with Sharpie. The book is on a shelf in our bedroom. When I notice it every now and again, I remember Louise in a soft blue sweater and the light of a fire, one knee drawn up to her chin and talking with her hands the way she does when she’s especially enthused. She’s telling me for the first time about the Georgia farm where O’Connor famously raised peacocks. “In Milledgeville, same town as the state penitentiary,” she’s saying, because by then all of our best stories led to crime. “It’s where they used to keep the electric chair.”

  That was a nice detail, the chair. I’d forgotten about the peacocks, though. We never know which parts are going to be important.

  Still, that’s another way to answer the question.

  * * *

  A more immediate explanation is to say that we already had the chickens and that we got the chickens because the snake died. He was a ball python, a docile species native to sub-Saharan Africa and big-box pet stores, and the only thing Emmett wanted for Christmas that year and, frankly, for every gifting occasion since kindergarten. He’d start lobbying a few weeks before his birthday, resume after he’d finished his Halloween stash, pick up before Valentine’s and again near Easter. The calendar provides a surprising number of days on which to give a boy a snake.

  The odds were always against him. Louise is afraid of snakes, as well as other toothy, wormlike creatures, such as lampreys and eels. But Emmett was in third grade that year, probably old enough to keep a pet confined to a tank, and he had greatly improved his pitch. He stressed the word ball and curled his hands into a small lump so his mother wouldn’t confuse it with one of those Burmese monsters that might eat the cat. “And ball pythons are really gentle, Mom,” he said. “They’re not dangerous like all the copperheads in the yard.”

  That was true. There are copperheads in the yard. We’d moved to North Carolina thirteen years earlier, when Louise was pregnant with Calvin, Emmett’s older brother, and we now live in a slate-roofed farmhouse on a misshapen acre shaded by pecans and sugar maples. There’s an old smokehouse a few steps from the kitchen door, an aging barn across a graveled drive, and, around back, an abandoned greenhouse that’s been converted into my office. The neighborhood is not remotely rural—the crop fields that surrounded the house long ago were subdivided into tracts of single-family housing, and we could walk to the nearest Target if we put some effort into it—but from a certain angle, the property can appear to be a farm still. It helps the illusion that the
re is a paddock in front of the barn, in which the neighbors keep a pair of Nigora goats and a miniature horse they brought home in a minivan. His name is Chief.

  The decision to trade a cottage on the north shore of Boston for a Potemkin farm in North Carolina was impulsive, which typically we are not. Louise and I are both magazine writers, a job that requires only a laptop and access to an airport, and we’d been musing about moving somewhere warmer and brighter before we had children. As it happened, her father was treated for cancer in Durham, and Louise flew down every few weeks to keep him company. In between chemo and cranial radiation, the two would amuse themselves by scouting old houses. No one was home when they stumbled upon this place, so Louise’s father told her to stand lookout while he peeked in all the windows. She was rightfully hesitant, but the old country lawyer in him was convincing. “No one will mind me,” he said. “I’m a bald old judge with cancer, harmless as they come.” He poked around long enough for Louise to get nervous. Then he got back in the car and sat there for a moment, not saying anything, just looking at the barn and the sweep of the porch. “This is it,” he declared. “The one.”

  In fairness, we’d only ever seen two copperheads. But Emmett made a persuasive point: If we were already surrounded by venomous serpents, what was the harm in caging a small, timid python in his room?

  “Can you promise me a snake won’t get out?” Louise asked about a week before Christmas.

  “Nope,” I said.

  She frowned at me.

  “I mean, I’d hope it wouldn’t get out. The cat would kill the poor thing.”

  She frowned harder.

  “We don’t have to get him a snake,” I said. “We never have before. We can steer him toward something else.”

  She let out a long sigh. We both understood perfectly well that a snake was inevitable. “Fine, let’s get him the snake.” Her shoulders twitched, a reflexive shudder. “Christmas always makes me do things I’ll regret.” That wasn’t true, I knew, but the Flingshot Flying Monkeys of two Christmases past had been somewhat traumatic.

  I bought a snake the next day from a chain pet store, along with a tank and all the recommended accessories. Cosmo—Emmett was certain of the name—was supposed to be from Santa Claus, so I set up his tank in my office. I put aspen shavings on the bottom, set a water dish in one corner and a ceramic cave in another, and, between those, balanced a piece of driftwood upon which Cosmo could bask. Plastic gauges stuck to the wall measured the temperature and humidity, and a timer switched between two heat lamps, white for day and red for night.

  Unlike Louise and Emmett, I had always been agnostic about snakes. I found them to be neither scary nor particularly interesting, and Cosmo did nothing to nudge my opinion. He was a basic and unpretentious brown mottled with spots the color of toasted oats, and a thin strip of scales along his spine caught the light from his day lamp; if he’d moved, he might have twinkled. But he did not move. Except for his tongue swabbing the air, he remained motionless. In the wild, he could have been mistaken for a tidy pile of dirt.

  When I went back to my office that evening, though, the light from his heat lamp threw a fingerling shadow toward the door. Cosmo was stretched out and mostly vertical, balancing on his back third and nosing along the top edge of the tank. He slowly lowered himself, moved to a corner, rose again. He was bigger than I’d thought when he’d been curled up, more than a foot long. He checked the entire perimeter, crawled over his cave, across the driftwood, down to his water dish, then back around to the top of the cave.

  We stared at each other for a few minutes, or seemed to, anyway. For all I know, Cosmo was looking at his own reflection or a smudge on the glass. But a boy in the third grade could easily imagine Cosmo was focused intently upon him, communicating, even, like that boa constrictor Harry Potter busted out of the zoo. The thrill was immediate, bubbly, because that right there was the privilege of Christmas parenting: the ability, or maybe the hubris, to appropriate the bonkers joy your child will feel when he wakes up to what he wished for. The feeling is a sort of arrogant relief, both that you’ve accomplished something special and, at the same time, not miserably failed on the most important day in a kid’s year.

  * * *

  On Christmas Eve, after we read The Night Before Christmas from a fragile spiral-bound pop-up book that my mother read to me and her father read to her, the boys always read aloud their notes to Santa Claus, inquiring as to his well-being and requesting no more than three gifts. Then they toss them into the fireplace, having been convinced that magic smoke is the fastest conveyance to the North Pole.

  Calvin went first. He is two years older than Emmett and had long ago figured out the impossibility of an obese man delivering gifts to the entire world in a single night; our neighborhood alone, he’d calculated, would take the better part of an hour. But he was sentimental enough to want to believe and kind enough to indulge his parents and, for several Christmases prior, not whisper anything about it to his brother. He asked only for a fish tank and a scooter, both of which were already in my office, fully assembled and wrapped.

  Emmett stood before the fire next, holding his note with both hands. “ ‘Dear Santa,’ ” he began. “ ‘For Christmas I would like a real, living ball python.’ ” He put an italic emphasis on the word living, as if Santa might get confused and bring him a stuffed toy or forget to feed an animal in the bustling months before the big night.

  Louise shared a subtle, satisfied smile. We had achieved peak Santa. No left-field gift requests, no forgotten batteries, no tiny pieces to lose. We would be in bed by eleven.

  I went back to my office after both boys were asleep and it was time to put presents under the tree. Cosmo’s tank was glowing on the floor, but something was off, out of place. I had a twitch of panic.

  It took a second to adjust: The thermometer was missing.

  No, not missing. Misplaced. It was on the floor of the tank instead of the wall, faceup in the shavings directly under the lamp, its needle pointed at a proper basking temperature of 91 degrees.

  I slid open the top, reached for the thermometer. There was a riffle in the bedding, something pale and ropy shaking off the wood chips. I finger-swept the shavings away from the thermometer’s dial and found Cosmo’s head beneath it, lolled back but eyes open and tongue flicking. The thermometer was stuck to his throat.

  I tried to separate the two, the round thermometer and the snake, but immediately stopped: The adhesive didn’t give a hint of releasing. My panic gestated quickly. Christmas is when parents atone for the accumulated disappointments of the year, make up for the excess travel, the cranky deadline sprints. Santa was supposed to deliver a snake in seven hours, dammit. This was not the time for a soul-crushing complication.

  I sprinted up to the house and found Louise in the bedroom, sorting candy for their stockings. “There’s a problem,” I said as quietly as I could. Calvin’s bedroom is directly above ours. “Shit. I think it’s a big problem. Shit, shit, shit.”

  “What, what, what?” She hopped up. “Please tell me something awful didn’t just happen.”

  I mouthed the word snake, grabbed her hand, and started pulling her out of the room.

  Down at my office, she gawped at Cosmo on his back with a big round thermometer on his throat. It was a very confusing scene. “What did you do?”

  “I didn’t do anything. Stupid snake must’ve pulled it down on himself.”

  “He can’t be dead.”

  “He’s not dead,” I said. “But we gotta get that thing off of him.”

  We had a bottle of reptile spray—a concoction of aloe and emollients that I thought might loosen the adhesive—and a butter knife that could function as a dull scalpel and pry bar. But this was a two-person job.

  “Oh God, do I have to touch him?” Louise scrunched up her face.

  “You have to hold him, and I have to spray him.”

  She looked at the snake, looked at me. We had deeply serious expressions. C
hristmas depended on our skill with a kitchen utensil and a spray bottle.

  “Okay,” she said. “I can do that. Wait, do I have to do that? Seriously? No, right, it’s fine. I can hold a snake. Of course, yes, I can do that.”

  She took a calming breath and reached in. Cosmo didn’t have a lot of fight, so Louise just had to prop him up. I sprayed the joint between the snake and the adhesive until it was soaked, peeled the thermometer back a millimeter or two, doused everything again, waited for more of the sticky to melt. Louise had Cosmo almost completely upright at this point, and he seemed to be glaring at me over the big round dial.

  “Does this hurt him?” she asked. “Oh, jeez. We’re probably torturing him.”

  She was empathizing, I realized. Bonding, even, with a snake.

  It took about twenty minutes, but the last of the adhesive finally let go. The thermometer took a few scales with it, but Cosmo wasn’t bleeding, and when I picked him up for a closer look, he wrapped himself in a lazy coil around my wrist. He wasn’t obviously damaged, though when I set him back in the tank, he slithered directly into his cave and hid.

  We unplugged the lamps and the timer, and I carried the tank up to the house, set it on a desk near the Christmas tree. Cosmo was still hiding. “What if he’s dying in there?” Louise said.

  Oh, hell. Dead snake is pretty high up on a kid’s list of worst Christmas presents, like savings bonds and socks. We needed a plan. If Cosmo was dead, two days would be enough to find a replacement.

  Louise does all the Santa writing, which is totally different from her real handwriting because children are smart. Emmett’s present came with a nice note, written in Santa’s loopy tweenage script:

  Dear Emmett,

  Because your snake traveled very far to get here, and because this is a new home, he will need some quiet time to feel safe. Do Not handle him until December 27. This will give him time to learn your voice, the sights and sounds of his new home. I know you will take very good care of him—and he will be a good pet. Merry Christmas, Santa.