Unexpected Guests

It was just past noon when the kids came downhill through the yard. Two white, one black, all about ten or eleven—they followed the same ley lines as the neighborhood deer, the fat raccoon, the fox that always had someplace else to be in a hurry. All wore tees and shorts to stay cool on a ninety-plus-degree day as if their skinny arms and legs were portable fans.

“There’s kids in the yard,” Cammy said, her voice croaking in surprise or panic. Strangers never wandered through her patchy grass.

“Probably live on the street below,” I said, my hands busy sorting through Cammy’s pills and placing the exact number of each in the daily slots of her plastic carrier.

She ignored me or didn’t hear and was up quickly, pulling open the sliding-glass door. “Can I help you with something?” she said, her voice that precise mix of menace and fear I once heard her use trying to shoo off a murder of crows that stopped here for a cacophonous rest in trees beyond the fence line.

The children kept walking. One of them said, “We came from up there,” meaning the road, as if they could’ve materialized from elsewhere.

Cammy turned to look at me, her eyes almost crossed, the wrinkles on her face going from parallel to wavy. She turned back and shouted in a motherly voice, “Be careful going down that hill. It’s rocky and uneven.” I don’t know whether the kids heard her, but she slid the door closed and watched a moment more before shuffling back to her comfortable blue recliner.

I had been her caretaker for seven years, at least five days a week and some nights. I fixed her meals, washed her clothes and sheets, made sure she never ran out of meds and always took them on time. She didn’t like me at first, treating me as if I were another one of those squawking crows. Her son hired me through a service after she fell one evening, couldn’t straighten out her leg, and spent the next eighteen hours on her bedroom floor. “I don’t need a monitor,” she said, while John showed me around her oversized house that she refused to leave. “If I wanted a permanent houseguest, I’d have called your brother. God knows Jerry wouldn’t turn down rent-free accommodations for a while.”

“Don’t mind Mom,” John said. “She acts like she doesn’t want company, but you know….” He trailed off and never finished the thought.

Camelia Harlow had been a prominent lawyer in town, as had her late husband. They made their money suing hospitals, trucking companies, and whatever other deep pockets they could empty. I remember seeing their billboards along the highway when I was a kid: Harlow and Harlow, Attorneys-at-Law—If you get injured, give us a call. Those days were long past. Stuart Harlow died two decades ago, and Cammy retired soon thereafter. Now, perhaps because of all the ambulances she’d chased, she lived in constant fear of them chasing her.

“Don’t worry,” John said, right before he headed back to his own busy life and job, “she’ll warm up to you.”

It took some time, but she went from seeing me as her prison guard to treating me like a maid, then eventually a poor, unfortunate nephew or niece (she didn’t know which, refused to ask, and I never let her off the hook by saying).

“A lot of traffic in the yard today,” I said, standing at the kitchen island behind her, my tone both surprised and annoyed. 

Folks rarely came by the house. From time to time, joggers would loop around the cul-de-sac, but they would’ve had to come another fifty feet downhill from the road to reach Cammy’s front door. Today was different. First, a guy in a green polo and white shorts made it all the way to the sliding-glass door and knocked before either of us knew he was there.

Cammy stared meanly from her chair.

I slid the door open.

“I’m the neighborhood bug guy,” he said, which sounded a lot more alien than I think he intended. “I see you have a problem with ants.”

“Not interested,” I said.

“We’re not interested!” Cammy shouted behind me. She sounded like the Wicked Witch of the West.

The man said, “Do you have someone else?”

I almost replied, That’s rather personal, but caught myself and said, “That’s none of your concern.”

He held up a brown tablet. “I have to put down a reason.”

“No, you don’t,” I said. “We’re not interested. Now, please leave.”

“We’ll call the police!” Cammy shouted.

That got his attention. The guy said, “Okay, then,” and walked back toward the stairs leading up to the road, probably cussing us under his breath. That wasn’t my concern. If Cammy had taught me one thing over the last seven years, it was that you didn’t try the hard sell here. Nobody was buying. Nobody cared. Except me, that is, and I got paid for it.

“Can you believe that guy?” Cammy said.

“The nerve,” I replied, holding out the word. “Neighborhood bug guy.” I laughed.

“For the creepy-crawlies.”

“Just another creep,” I said.

The second unexpected guest arrived an hour later. I stood outside smoking a USA Gold menthol when I spotted him strolling, old-fashioned clipboard in hand, toward the concrete stairs that led to the house. He was as young as the other guy, but looked like a duck with eyebrows. He moved like one, too, his head appearing to bob along well in front of his feet. As soon as he stepped one beat-up Reebok onto the walkway, I shook my head and shouted, “We’re not interested!”

He stopped, but shouted back, “Not even for your gutters?”

“I said we’re not interested!” I decided then that if he came within two feet of me, I’d burn him with my cigarette.

He didn’t say anything else, waving his clipboard over his shoulder as he turned to head back up the stairs. His brown shirt blurred and soon disappeared entirely amidst trees and shrubs along the cul-de-sac.

“Who was that?” I turned to find Cammy staring through the doorway. She could be sneaky when she tried.

“Just another clown,” I said. “Wanted to sell you a bucket full of glitter.”

“Can I have one of those?” she said. At first, I thought she meant the bucket of glitter, but saw her point to my cigarette.

“You know you’re not allowed,” I said, already fishing the pack from my pocket. “John’ll be mad.”

“Only if you fink,” she said.

“Not me. I mind nobody’s business but mine.”

Cammy and I had bonded over the occasional shared smoke. She never intended to quit, but when her health deteriorated so much that she couldn’t drive, John took her keys. After that, it wasn’t long before buying cigarettes became too much of a struggle. She had a neighbor smuggle her a carton every now and then, but John would find out and say in his condescending tone, “I thought you agreed to give those up.” She hadn’t, but couldn’t tell him that.

When she learned that I smoked, she acted nicer to me, so I returned the favor. About once a day we’d stand on the patio together, both of us puffing away like fiends. I think that few minutes brought her more joy than anything else. She often said the same thing: “If I knew I was going to live this long, I’d never have let him force me to stop.”

Today, by the time she finished her breathing treatment, as we called it, she had

forgotten all about the two guys. She remembered only after those kids came through the yard. “It’s heinous,” she said. “Grossly indecent. All these people are invading my privacy. They have no cause to bother me. If I were twenty years younger, I’d sue them.”

“If you were twenty years younger, you wouldn’t be here to notice.”

“That’s … a valid point, Counselor,” she said, chiding me, “but as the great Samuel Clemens said, never let the truth get in the way of a good story.”

I felt myself grin. Cammy still had some fire to her, though she rarely showed it as more than gripes and meanness.

“Now, as I was saying, if I were twenty….” She stopped, open-mouthed, her eyes staring past me out the glass door.

I turned and saw those three kids running clumsily up through the yard toward the road. One of them stumbled over a rock and fell to his knees, stretching out his hands an instant before he would’ve face-planted. He picked himself up as rapidly as he could, because the other two didn’t stop to help him. He ran after them, his legs wobbly on uneven ground.

“Told them to be careful,” Cammy said.

“Wonder what got into them. Looks like they were scared to death.”

“If I had to guess, I’d say they probably saw the snakes.”

I nearly dropped her bottle of Plaquenil. “What snakes?” I said, turning from where the third kid had disappeared up the road.

Cammy twisted in her chair so she could make eye contact. Her hands together on the blue arm formed one great, gnarled claw. “Well,” she said, drawing out the word as if about to impart the most scandalous gossip, “Stuart and I had a garden down at the far end of the house. I’m sure you’ve noticed it. Its rock border resembles a snowman when you see it from the deck.” 

I had seen it, though I wouldn’t have described it as a garden. Its outline looked more like stone crop circles in the grass.

“In the old days, it had rows of squash and carrots, lilies all around that bloomed in

March, and a big crabapple tree right in the center. Gorgeous. The older we got, the less time we had for taking care of it. When Stuart got sick, it was overgrown like a little forest. He decided he wanted to do something about that garden, so he hired a couple of guys—cousins, I think—to clear it—weeds, roots, vines, the dead crabapple, and everything. About two hours in, one of the guys came pounding at that door…” She pointed at the glass. “…and shouting, his face red and crazed. ‘Snakes,’ he kept saying. ‘Snakes.’ Stuart thought he had lost his mind. When the man finally calmed down, he told Stuart there was a whole nest of copperheads in the garden.”

“Oh, no”

“Now, I don’t know if they were copperheads or ringnecks or racers or what, but he said copperheads, and neither Stuart nor I were going down there to discuss their ancestry.”

I shivered, picturing a nest of snakes, copperheads or otherwise. I’d had a fear of them ever since I almost stepped on one on my way to the school-bus stop with my eyes blurry and the sky just starting to lighten. As soon as I spotted it, I startled awake and leapt over without slowing my momentum. I ran the rest of the way, fearful I’d turn to find the thing slithering after me. “That’s terrible,” I said, “and terrifying.”

“Stuart hired somebody else, somebody not related, to come over and deal with the copperheads. Then he hired a whole new crew to clear the garden. The cousins wouldn’t return.”

“Scared ’em,” I said.

“Out of their wits,” she replied.

“So, what makes you think the snakes are back? There’s no overgrown garden anymore.”

“I know they’re back,” she said. “I put them there myself.”

I was twisting the lid back onto one of the medicine bottles when she said that. My hand slipped, and the lid shot across the kitchen island like a white flying saucer before spinning and rolling on the Formica.

Cammy said, “It was a tribute. Stuart told that story to his dying day. He loved to talk about those snakes and reenact the hapless cousin banging at the door. He’d say, ‘Should’ve seen the look on his face. Couldn’t make lines that crooked with an Etch A Sketch.’ When he passed, I thought it’d be a good way to remember him, so I bought a half-dozen rubber snakes and carefully placed them between rocks, heads barely visible on one side, tails on the other. I figured that if anybody saw them, they’d ask about them. Then I could tell this story about Stuart and the cousins.”

“Wow,” I said. I thought she was a genius. “How many times have you told it?”

“This is the first,” she said. “Nobody goes back there except the lawn guys, and I don’t talk to them. John deals with all that.” She paused, and I felt her sadness as much as I had felt her anger earlier. “Anyway, that was years ago. I’d forgotten about those snakes until now.”

I wanted to keep the conversation going, but her flashback had become grief, and her grief turned into silence. For a while, the only sound was the rattling of pills as I stored all the bottles back in their plastic tote.

 

A little later, when I stepped outside for my next cigarette, I expected Cammy to follow

me for a rare second smoke. I would’ve given it to her. She deserved it. Yet not even her gaze came with me. She sat in her chair, staring at the blank gray of the TV screen as if watching a film about nothingness.

I decided to go to the old garden to see those snakes for myself. I took slow, careful steps down the slick, rocky slope of the yard. I saw a buck sleeping on a pile of leaves in the woods to my left, and downhill on my right, a postal truck plodding along the street. Ahead of me were patches of grass and patches of earth, followed by rocks in the pattern of a figure eight. A couple were missing, and a couple others had separated, rolling a few feet farther down. I picked those up and placed them back in their spaces. There were no snakes, though. I walked the whole perimeter, looking between every pair of rocks. Nothing. Not even a scrap of rubber tail as if someone had cut the head off with a shovel.

What scared those kids? I wondered. They had run away as if fleeing some demonic Baptist hellscape.

I shrugged.

Who knows with kids? They have their imaginations to fill up their lives.

As for the snakes, I wondered whether they were Cammy’s fantasia. No, I knew her too well. She spoke with as much joy about those props as about her husband, and his absence mattered to her. There could be no faking that.