Sticky Fingers
Prologue
August snapped its suspenders against a proud chest of Santa Ana heat. Laboring against the invisible oppression of weather, I sprinkled aromatherapy oils on my clean bed linens and smoothed a pillowcase. When I bent down to gather the dirty sheets, I glanced toward the white ruffled bed skirt and saw a rattlesnake staring back at me.
Now what I knew about snakes you could hold in one hand – preferably an unbitten one. But it doesn’t take much to know a rattler when you see one.
I looked at the specimen coiled on my bedroom floor about two feet away. He had cocoa diamonds along his back, blotches of taupe on his sides, and a definite pit viper head. I looked at his rattle. It wasn’t shakin’, but I was.
When the snake looked up at me, he saw a solid woman old enough to experience the occasional hot flash yet young enough to boogie. He saw thick chestnut hair with a few strands of silver. My ethnic print blouse belied remnants of my hippie days; the denim cutoffs just said it was Saturday. In all, I saw a handsome but dangerous snake; the snake saw a handsome but daunted woman.
Watching National Geographic, I can appreciate the beauty of snakes and their role in the ecosystem, but when they take me by surprise in my bedroom, I find my attitude less enlightened. I put one foot gingerly behind the other and started to back out of the room.
Suddenly the snake’s tail vibrated like a cicada with Parkinson’s. I stopped; quieted my breathing. The snake was between me and the phone on my nightstand; I couldn’t reach it. The tail stopped rattling. As beads of perspiration dripped down my cleavage, I inched backwards again.
When I was out of striking range, I hurried the last few steps, closed the door behind me, and raced for the phone in the kitchen. Three button punches later, I was telling the dispatcher my problem. “Help! Right away! Someone tried to kill me with a rattlesnake!”
I won’t bore you with the dispatcher’s calm and tedious interrogation (I can just see the Help Wanted for that position: “Must have disposition cooler than William Buckley. Lack of human empathy a plus”), but eventually I understood two things: she was sending Animal Control to deal with the snake, and she didn’t believe it was a murder attempt.
But I did. What hills are to San Francisco, canyons are to San Diego: they rise; we dip. The canyons enable us to live in a metropolis, battling traffic jams and enjoying the fine arts, yet never be more than minutes from hawks, sage, coyotes, raccoons, lizards, fennel, possums, horehound, skunks, owls, foxes, cactus, and yes, snakes.
Wild animals, except for the occasional possum or skunk, don’t often venture into our residential neighborhoods -- they have too many canyons to choose from. There’s little reason for a rattlesnake to enter a home in an established residential neighborhood four full blocks from the nearest canyon entrance.
I wasn’t satisfied with the dispatcher’s reassurances. Standing in the hallway outside my bedroom, I cracked open the door. The rattler hadn’t moved.
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