Shading my eyes with my hand I saw, slithering into the old dog house, a green garden snake. It was so terrifyingly fast, so elusive that I thought I imagined it. But that skin, intensely green, was bright against the dull, clay-colored ground and withered, yellow grass. Its long, thin body roped past my sneakered feet, making brushing sounds in the dead grass, gliding, like it knew exactly where it was going, into the darkened corners of the dog house that had been empty for years.
My grandma, Nana used to keep dogs in that dog house, every now and then, when they’d show up on her doorstep in the middle of our West Texas summers, wrapped in a towel and put in a box, like an Amazon package someone had stolen and unceremoniously returned. Why her house, out in the country in Levelland, Texas, more than an hour from the city of Lubbock, had been subject to receiving abandoned dogs, I can’t answer. She was a fragile woman in her later years, with short, curly, red hair and translucent, veiny skin. Soft-spoken and easily bruised, she loved my sister and me completely, as we were her only grandchildren. Her closest neighbors were several miles out, down unpaved dirt roads, dropped between cotton and peanut fields, shielded from tractors and irrigation pivots by clusters of pine trees. Nana’s house was the same, resting in a similar cluster of pines that would litter the dirt with a mattress of their dried needles.
For all of my childhood summer visits, until Nana got sick and my grandpa got meaner, we were in a drought. The farmers would whisper about it to one another in the church pews like odd prayers, begging for rain, hiding from the heat. From 2010 to 2015, Levelland experienced the driest weather since the 50s. Really, though, they’re always in a drought, because as soon as one is flooded out, another begins, parching the town and clouding it in dust. During grueling seven-hour car rides with my little sister and my Dad, I always knew we were close to Nana’s house by the way the car would fill up with the smells of oil, cow shit, and dust. Bluebonnets on the side of the road turned into tumbleweeds, and a sweetness layered with diesel and ammonia, minerals and sweat, crept into our noses. There’s an egg smell too, did you know, that comes from all three? It reminds me of our breakfasts out in that country house, eating scrambled eggs with ketchup, the way my Dad ate them back home in Austin, foul-odored egginess cut by cloying acidity. Still, they were too dry.
Everything was dry. It was always dry.
The dog house, too, was dry, blue paint cracked and peeling off the roof like dead skin, wooden boards caked with red dust, splitting around rusted nails. Pine needles had been swept into it by the wind, making homes for spiders and deer mice, but no one had ever bothered to clean it out. When I was little, my sister and I would visit for a few weeks during those dry summers, spending most of our time outside in the dry heat, riding horses, walking in cotton fields, playing pretend among the pine trees over the doghouse. I always wanted to crawl inside that decomposing shack, but I feared, like a lot of things, the dark corners, so I never did.
I squinted at the opening of the dog house and wondered whether to bend down and peek my head into those needle-packed corners. Wanting the snake to make the first move to be sure it was real, I became suddenly aware of the tall grass I was standing in, chest tightening in terror for a second, or even a third snake. Did snakes travel in packs? Would this snake bite me? Would they believe me when it did? I’d heard farmers’ tales of rattlesnakes from my Grandpa, an intimidating, beer-bellied Texan who my sister and I called Pawpy. He told us to stay away and run if it started rattling. But this snake didn’t look like a rattler. It was menacingly fast, thin, and so green, completely unlike the heavy-bodied rattlesnakes of West Texas. Would they believe how green it was?
Over dinner that day, while we chewed on country-fried chicken and boxed mashed potatoes, I told Nana and Pawpy of the snake. Pawpy always came back to the house covered in dirt, caked on by sweat, slamming the screen door even in the absence of wind. Dust would stick in the folds of his skin, in the creases between his angry eyebrows. He’d never wash up before dinner, just plunked himself down at the little kitchen table, wrenched the lid off a lemon-lime Gatorade, and started our prayer.
“Don’t you start lying now,” Pawpy had said after I’d finished relaying the story, fearing all the while its green body would slither into the house while we ate, fearing it would bite me, taunting me with its invisibility.
“It’s a sin to lie.” He’d said.
How little I’d cared about sinning then.
If ever that snake were to shed its skin, it would be Pawpy’s own underneath and beneath it, dust. Did no one else see the snake, slithering in the doghouse, through the front door? It was under my bed. It was in my closet. It was sitting right across the kitchen table, smelling like sweat and fear and boxed mashed potatoes. It was the thing telling me I was a liar, telling me I was a sinner at the kitchen table. It was the thing chanting to Nana that she was stupid and didn’t she know that? It was the thing yelling at me in the truck for not believing in God. It was the thing screeching at me that I was going to hell. It was right there, and no one else believed in it but me.
It was the snake in the dog house that only I could see.
