The Great Snake Escape

Chapter 1

One

The female screaming in the next room was an octave somewhere between the train whistle of the Burlington Northern and the whistle they blew down at the Kentucky Bottom mine at quitting time.

It shredded forty-year-old Floy Beaudine’s focus on the black whiskers on his chin and the razor moving across his jaw.

Blood spurted. He ignored it. He didn’t know what had happened, but he knew his wife, Mayrene, was in trouble.

He dropped the razor in the sink and flew out of the bathroom, naked as the day he was born and dripping blood with every step.

He could still hear the shriek and was pretty sure she had yet to take a breath when he came around the corner into the kitchen.

She met him coming up from the basement clutching a quart jar of green beans canned from last year’s garden—all five feet of her tiny Tinkerbell self, curly red hair standing on end, eyes wide in absolute horror, with a drop of spittle at the corner of her mouth.

Without wasting time for an explanation, she drew back and slapped Floy so hard that blood from his bleeding chin splattered on the wall beside them, then she handed him the jar of beans and kept on running.

“What the hell? What the hell?” he yelled and followed her, the jar of green beans clutched against his hairy chest.

He saw the tail end of her skirt as she disappeared into their bedroom, slamming the door behind her. His hand was on the doorknob when he heard the lock click, but he was too late to stop his momentum. He slammed into the bedroom door as the quart jar of beans shattered against his chest.

Juice and beans splattered, while shards of broken glass went everywhere, including the ones now embedded in the hair and flesh of his chest.

“Oh shit,” he moaned, looking down at his bloody chest and the mess he was standing in. More blood was dripping and the cuts were stinging like hell. He would never look at green beans the same way again, and he still didn’t know what was wrong. “Mayrene, honey! Talk to me! What’s the matter?”

Her scream was down to a whine, and he could tell she was bawling the ugly cry from the way her voice shook.

“Elvis is missing! The tank is empty and I am not coming out of this room again until you find him, and then so help me God, this time one of us will be leaving for good. It’s either him or me!”

Floy groaned. Damn ten-foot reticulated python.

He’d had Elvis before he’d ever met Mayrene.

She’d known he had Elvis when she married him.

She didn’t like snakes, but she wanted Floy and ignored the snake, but this was Elvis’s third escape in the five years they’d been married.

Now she was getting itchy, and Floy still didn’t understand how it kept happening.

He knocked on the door. “Honey Bee, you have to let me in. My clothes and wallet are in there.”

He heard her running again, then drawers opening and slamming shut.

The door in front of him swung inward. He caught a glimpse of the hysteria on her face as she threw the wallet, along with an armload of clothes and underwear, into the hall.

They landed in the blood, the glass, the green beans, and the bean juice.

Before he could say, “Help me Jesus,” she slammed and locked the door. Again.

Floy blinked. Shit was getting serious. It was the maddest he’d ever seen her.

Side-stepping the glass, he fished his clothes out of the beans and glass and carried them into the spare bedroom, then ran back into the kitchen to get a broom, dustpan, and mop to clean up the floor before his feet got cut, too.

It occurred to him as he was scooping green beans into an empty wastebasket, that he’d never done house chores in the nude before. While it kept everything cool, it was also a little bit scary. Too many dangly bits around all that broken glass.

By the time he’d gotten everything wiped up and his cuts cleaned and bandaged, almost an hour had passed. He eyed himself in the bathroom mirror, checking the seeping razor cut on his face, and frowned.

His shoulders were wide; his body spectacularly muscled from twenty years of hard physical labor.

His hair was black and razor straight, but sorely in need of a trim.

There were tiny lines at the corners of his eyes from all the years of working outdoors, and today, a slight flare to his nostrils, mostly from the pain.

Best he could remember, he looked like his daddy but had his mama’s green eyes. They’d been dead twenty years now, and this house—his house—was all he had left of them and his childhood.

He headed down into the basement with trepidation, hoping his wife had been wrong.

It wasn’t that he doubted her word, but he’d been counting on the fact that she’d been confused by him having two snake tanks instead of the one, because he’d just bought the new larger one for Elvis yesterday to replace the one his python had outgrown.

That proved not to be the case.

Mayrene hadn’t been mistaken. Elvis’s new tank was as empty as the old one.

The sliding door on the tank had been pushed aside, which likely meant Floy had upgraded to the wrong size tank, and it had given Elvis too much room to maneuver.

The jumble of items that were now on the floor marked the direction of his exit.

Floy groaned. “Dammit, Elvis! You never used to act like this. I have never made you miss a meal. Where the hell did you go?”

He started to search the full basement, looking under shelves, behind his granddaddy’s war chest, behind a large stack of old screen doors—anywhere a big-ass python could hide—but found nothing.

Frustrated and pushing toward the point of panic, he paused to scratch his head and felt something squash beneath his fingers.

Frowning, he carefully picked a piece of green bean out of his hair and turned around to look for a wastebasket. That’s when he felt the draft.

He looked up, straight at the open basement window to his left, then at all the things knocked over on the table below it. At that point, he thought about screaming, too. Elvis wasn’t just out of his tank. He was out of the house—as in gone!

The last two times that had happened, the people in Blackjack, Kentucky had gone into a meltdown.

They’d blamed Elvis for every cat and dog that had gone missing, even while Floy kept telling them pythons don’t eat daily, and that it takes days for even one feeding to digest. It had cost him over five hundred dollars in lost animal claims that ended up being proved to be hawks and coyotes and the like, not a snake making local cats disappear.

Now it had happened again.

With one swift pivot, he bolted up the stairs. He needed to make like Richard Petty and find Elvis fast.

It was just after ten o’clock, but the town of Blackjack was unaware that Elvis was on the loose. People were going about their business, some in haste, others moving leisurely past the window displays up and down Main Street.

Judge Benton, Esquire, the local lawyer in Blackjack, was on his way to the barbershop.

Judge was his given name, not his official job title.

The Esquire after his name was the designation indicating he was a lawyer, but it often confused the hill people who rarely came down into town or ever had need for a lawyer in their lives.

They read the sign as Benton Esquire being the judge and lawyer.

When the need arose, Judge accepted being called Mr. Esquire now and then without cracking a smile.

Judge’s brother, Moses, who went by the name Moe, was the only barber in town, and today that was Judge’s destination.

Upon arrival at the shop, Judge parked and went inside.

“Morning, Moe,” Judge said, as he took off his suit coat and hung it on the rack.

“Morning, brother. Take a seat. Are you in a hurry today? Do you have court or anything?” Moe asked.

“No, I’m good. Just the usual,” Judge said, and dropped down into the chair, giving himself a casual look in the mirror as Moe fastened a cape around his neck.

He was still the brown-haired man with high cheekbones and blue eyes, with a body built more like a lumberjack than a man who would be sitting behind a desk, but Judge dealt with law and the infractions thereof without regard for fashion.

Moe began by running his fingers through his brother’s hair a couple of times to feel where the heaviest weight was and what needed shaping, wondering, as he did, why God gave Judge the good hair while he was going bald, and decided it was most likely the randomness of DNA.

Then he picked up a comb and scissors and went to work, ignoring the female chatter at the other end of his shop.

Years ago, the only two hair stylists in Blackjack had rented out the far end of Moe’s barber shop for a salon. Moe separated one area from the other by installing a partial wall of wooden trellises between the spaces, then stringing artificial ivy all over it for the sake of everyone’s privacy.

The women had set up their workstations with two stylist chairs, plumbed for a shampoo station, and walled off a corner at the back for storage, along with a washer and dryer, and went to work. Now no one gave the unusual setup a second thought.

Today, as Judge was getting a haircut, Calico Randall and Donalda Carmichael, the two stylists at the far end of the room, were working on their own customers, while Farrah Riordan, the resident manicurist, was polishing her own nails for lack of anything else to do.

Calico was putting highlights on April Carter’s hair.

April’s husband, Fred, was the local Baptist preacher.

The church congregation piously referred to the couple as Brother and Sister Carter.

The use of those particular words referring to a married couple always struck Calico as a little incestuous, but she’d never been one to judge.