Page 78

July–August 2020

I wasn’t surprised when I saw the elderly woman pushing the double stroller with the empty seats; I had been forewarned. This was on Rattlesnake Road, which winds the four-mile length of Rattlesnake Key on the Florida Gulf Coast. Houses and condos to the south; a few McMansions at the north end.

There’s a blind curve half a mile from Greg Ackerman’s McMansion, where I was staying that summer, bouncing around like the last pea in an oversized can. Tangled undergrowth higher than my head (and I’m six-four) flanked the road, seeming to press in and make what was narrow to begin with even narrower. The curve was marked on either side by fluorescent green plastic kids, each bearing the warning SLOW! CHILDREN AT PLAY. I was walking, and at the age of seventy-two, in the simmering heat of a July morning, I was going plenty slow. My plan was to walk to the swing gate which divides the private part of the road from the part the county maintains, then go back to Greg’s house. I was already wondering if I’d bitten off more than I could chew.

I hadn’t been entirely sure Greg wasn’t putting me on about Mrs. Bell, but here she was, and pushing her oversized stroller toward me. One of the wheels had a squeak and could have used some oil. She was wearing baggy shorts, sandals with knee-length socks, and a big blue sunhat. She stopped, and I remembered Greg asking me if her problem—that’s what he called it—would give me a problem. I said it wouldn’t, but now I wondered.

“Hello. I think you must be Mrs. Bell. My name is Vic Trenton. I’m staying at Greg’s house for awhile.”

“A friend of Greg’s? How nice! An old friend?”

“We worked in the same Boston ad agency. I was a copywriter and he—”

“Pictures and layout, I know. Before he made the big bucks.” She pushed the double pram closer, but not too close. “Any friend of Greg’s, so on and so forth. It’s a pleasure to meet you. Since we’re going to be neighbors for as long as you’ll be here, please call me Alita. Or Allie, if you like. Are you okay? No sign of this new flu?”

“I’m okay. No cough, no fever. I assume you are, too.”

“I am. Which is good, as old as I am, and with a few of the usual old-person medical issues. One of the few nice things about being here in the summer is how most people clear out. I saw on the news this morning that Dr. Fauci is saying there could be a hundred thousand new cases every day. Can you believe that?”

I told her I had seen the same thing.

“Did you come here to get away from it?”

“No. I needed some time off and the place was offered to me, so I took it.” That was far from the whole story.

“I think you’re a little crazy to be vacationing in this part of the world during the summer, Mr. Trenton.”

According to Greg, you’re the one who’s crazy, I thought. And judging by the stroller you’re wheeling around, he wasn’t wrong.

“Vic, please,” I said. “Since we’re neighbors.”

“Would you like to say hello to the twins?” She gestured to the pram. On the seat of one was a pair of blue shorts, on the other a pair of green ones. Draped over the backs of the seats were joke shirts. One said BAD, the other BADDER. “This one is Jacob,” indicating the blue shorts, “and this one is Joseph.” She touched the shirt that said BADDER. It was a brief touch, but gentle and loving. Her look was calm but cautious, waiting to see how I’d respond.

Nutty? Yes indeed, but I wasn’t terribly uncomfortable. There were two reasons for that. One, Greg had clued me in, saying that Mrs. Bell was otherwise perfectly sane and in touch with reality. Two, when you spend your working life in the advertising business, you meet a lot of crazy people. If they’re not that way when they come onboard, they get that way.

Just be pleasant, Greg told me. She’s harmless, and she makes the best oatmeal raisin cookies I’ve ever tasted. I wasn’t sure I believed him about the cookies—admen are prone to superlatives, even those who have left the job—but I was perfectly willing to be pleasant.

“Hello, boys,” I said. “Very nice to meet you.”

Not being there, Jacob and Joseph made no reply. And not being there, the heat didn’t bother them and they would never have to worry about Covid or skin cancer.

“They’ve just turned four,” Allie Bell said. This woman having four-year-old twin boys would be a good trick, I thought, since she looked to be in her mid-sixties. “Old enough to walk, really, but the lazy things would rather ride. I dress them in different colored shorts because sometimes even I get confused about which is which.” She laughed. “I’ll let you get on with your walk, Mr. Trenton—”

“Vic. Please.”

“Vic, then. By ten it will be ninety in the shade, and the humidity, don’t even talk about it. Say goodbye, boys.”

Presumably they did so. I wished them a good day and told Allie Bell it was nice to meet her.

“The same,” she said. “And the twins think you look like a nice man. Don’t you, boys?”

“You’re right, I am,” I assured the empty seats of the double pram.

Allie Bell beamed. If it was a test, I seemed to have passed. “Do you like cookies, Vic?”

“I do. Greg said oatmeal raisin is your specialty.”

“Spécialitie de la maison, oui, oui,” she said, and trilled a laugh. There was something faintly worrisome about it. Probably it was the context. You aren’t introduced to long-dead twins every day. “I will bring you some in the near future, if you don’t mind me stopping by.”

“Absolutely not.”

“But in the evening. When it cools off a little. I have a tendency to lose my breath in the middle of the day, although it doesn’t bother Jake and Joe. And I always bring my pole.”

“Pole?”

“For the snakes,” she said. “Ta-ta, very nice to meet you.” She rolled the pram past me, then turned back. “Although this is no time to enjoy the Gulf Coast. October and November is the time for that.”

“Duly noted,” I said.

I originally thought the Key was named for its shape, which looks remarkably snakelike from the air, twisting and doubling back on itself as it does, but Greg told me there were rattlers, a regular infestation of them, until the early eighties. That was when the building boom hit the Keys south of Siesta and Casey. Up until then those lower keys had been left to doze.

“The snakes were a kind of ecological blip,” Greg said. “I guess in the beginning a few of them might have swum across from the mainland… can snakes swim?”

“They can,” I told him.

“Or maybe they hitched a ride in the bilge of a supply boat or something. Hell, maybe even in the hold of some rich guy’s cabin cruiser. They bred in the undergrowth, where the birds had a hard job getting at the young. Rattlesnakes don’t lay eggs, you know. The mamas squeeze out eight or ten at a time and that’s a lot of snakeskin boots, let me tell you. Those fuckers were everywhere. Hundreds of them, maybe thousands. They got driven north when the southern part of the Key started being developed. Then, when the rich folks came in—”

“Like you,” I said.

“Well, yes,” he said with appropriate modesty. “The stock market has been good to this boy, especially Apple.”

“And Tesla.”

“True. I tipped you on that, but you, being the cautious New Englander that you are—”

“Quit it,” I said.

“Then, when the rich folks came in and started building their McMansions—”

“Like yours,” I said.

“Please, Vic. Unlike some of the stucco and cement horrors in this part of Florida, mine is architecturally pleasing.”

“If you say so.”

“When the rich folks started to build, the contractors found the snakes everywhere. They were teeming. The builders killed the ones on the lots where they were working—Gulf side and Bay side—but there wasn’t an organized snake hunt until after the Bell twins. The county wouldn’t do anything even then, arguing that the north end of the Key was privately owned and developed, so the contractors put together a posse and had a snake hunt. I was still working at MassAds then and day-trading on the side, so I wasn’t around, but I’ve heard that a hundred men and women—a hundred at least—in gloves and high boots started where the swing gate is now and worked their way north, beating the brush and killing every snake they found. Mostly rattlers, but there were others as well—blacksnakes, grass snakes, a couple of copperheads, and, hard to believe but true, a fucking python.”

“They killed the non-poisonous ones as well as the kind that bite?”

“Killed em all,” Greg said. “Hasn’t been many snakes spotted on the Key since.”

He called that night. I was sitting out by his pool, sipping a gin and tonic and looking at the stars. He wanted to know how I was enjoying the house. I said I was enjoying it just fine and thanked him again for letting me stay there.

“Although this is no time to enjoy the Key,” he said. “Especially with most of the tourist attractions shut down because of Covid. The best times—”

“October and November. Mrs. Bell told me. Allie.”

“You met her.”

“Yes indeed. Her and the twins. Jacob and Joseph. At least I met their shorts and shirts.”

There was a pause. Then Greg said, “Are you okay with that? I was thinking about Donna when I offered you the place. I never thought about how it might make you remember—”

I didn’t want to go there, even after all those years. “It’s fine. You were right. Allie Bell seems like a very nice woman, otherwise. Offered me cookies.”

“You’ll love them.”

I thought of the little round spots of color in her cheeks. “She assures me she doesn’t have Covid—which she called the new flu—and she wasn’t coughing, but she didn’t look exactly healthy.” I thought of the double stroller with its empty shirts and shorts. “Physically, I mean. She said something about having medical issues.”

“Well, she’s in her seventies—”

“That old? I guessed sixties.”

“She and her husband were the first ones to build on the north end, and that was back when Carter was president. All I’m saying is that when you get into your seventies your equipment is off the warranty.”

“I haven’t seen anyone else, but I’ve only been here three days. Not even all unpacked.” Not that I’d brought much. Mostly I’d been catching up on my reading, just as I’d promised myself I’d do when I retired. When I watched TV, I muted the commercials. I’d be happy to never see another ad in my life.

“Buddy, it’s summer. The summer of Covid, no less. Once you’re past the swing gate, it’s just you and Alita. And—” He stopped.

“And the twins,” I finished. “Jake and Joe.”

“You’re sure it doesn’t bother you? I mean, considering what happened to—”

“It doesn’t. Bad things happen to kids sometimes. It happened to me and Donna and it happened to Allie Bell. Our son was a long time ago. Tad. I’ve put it to rest.” A lie. Some things you never put to rest. “But I have a question.”

“And I have an answer.”

That made me laugh. Greg Ackerman, older and richer, but still a smartass. When we had the Brite Company’s soft drink account, he once came to a meeting with a bottle of Brite Cola, with the distinctive long neck, sticking out of his unzipped fly.

“Does she know?”

“Not sure I follow.”

I was pretty sure he did.

“Does she know that stroller is empty? Does she know her little boys died thirty years ago?”

“Forty,” he said. “Maybe a little longer. And yeah, she knows.”

“Are you positive or only pretty sure?”

“Positive,” he said, then paused. “Almost.” That was Greg, too. Always leave yourself an out.

I watched the stars and finished my drink. Thunder bumbled and rumbled on the Gulf and there were unfocused flashes of lightning, but I thought those were empty threats.

I finished unpacking my second suitcase, something that should have been done two days ago. When that was done—it took all of five minutes—I went to bed. It was the 10th of July. In the larger world, Covid cases had passed three million just in the United States. Greg had told me I was welcome to stay in his place all the way through September, if I wanted. I told him I thought six weeks would be enough to clear my head, but now that it had cooled off, I thought I might stay longer. Wait out the dread disease.

The silence—broken only by the sleepy sound of waves hitting Greg’s shingle of beach—was exquisite. I could get up with the sun and take my walks earlier than I had today… and maybe give Allie Bell a miss by doing so. She was pleasant enough, and I thought Greg was right—she had at least three of her four wheels on the road, but that double pram with the shorts of different colors on the seats… that was creepy.

“Bad and Badder,” I murmured. The master bedroom’s slider was open and a puff of breeze lifted the thin white curtains, turning them into arms.

I got Greg’s concern about the phantom twins as they related to me. At least now I did. My understanding came late, but wasn’t better late than never the accepted wisdom? I had certainly never made the connection to my life when he first told me about Alita Bell’s eccentricity. That connection was to my son, who also died, and at roughly the same age as Jacob and Joseph. But Tad wasn’t the reason I felt I had to get away from New England, at least for awhile. That grief was old. In this ridiculously oversized house and during these hot summer weeks, I had a new one to deal with.

I dreamed of Donna, as I often did. In this one we were sitting on the couch in our old living room, holding hands. We were young. We weren’t talking. That was all, that was the whole dream, but I woke up with tears on my face. The wind was blowing harder now, a warm wind, but it made the curtains look more like reaching arms than ever. I got up to close the slider, then went out on the balcony instead. In the daytime you could see the entire sweep of the Gulf from the upstairs bedrooms (Greg had told me I was welcome to use the master, so that’s what I did), but in the early hours of the morning there was only black. Except for the occasional flashes of lightning, which were closer now. And the thunder was louder, the threat of a storm no longer empty.

I stood at the rail above the flagstone patio and the swimming pool with my tee-shirt and boxers flapping around me. I could tell myself it was the thunder that had awakened me, or the freshening wind, but of course it was the dream. The two of us on the couch, holding hands, unable to talk about what was between us. The loss was too big, too permanent, too there.

It wasn’t rattlesnakes that killed our son. He died of dehydration in a hot car. I never blamed my wife for it; she almost died with him. I never even blamed the dog, a St. Bernard named Cujo, who circled and circled our dead Ford Pinto for three days under the hammering summer sun.

There’s a book by Lemony Snicket, A Series of Unfortunate Events, and that perfectly described what happened to my wife and son. The house where our car died—because of a plugged needle valve that would have taken a mechanic five minutes to fix—was far out in the country and deserted. The dog was rabid. If Tad had a guardian angel, he was on vacation that July.

All that happened a long time ago. Decades.

I went back inside, closed the slider, and latched it for good measure. I lay back down and was almost asleep when I heard a faint squeaking sound. I sat bolt upright, listening.

You get crazy ideas sometimes, ones that would seem ridiculous in broad daylight but seem quite plausible in the small hours of the morning. I couldn’t remember if I’d locked the house, and it was all too easy to imagine that Allie, a lot crazier than Greg believed, was downstairs. That she was pushing the double stroller with the squeaky wheel across the great room to the kitchen, where she would leave a Tupperware container of oatmeal raisin cookies. Pushing the stroller and believing that her twin sons, forty years dead, were sitting in the seats.

Squeak. Pause. Squeak. Pause.

Yes, I could see her. I could even see Jake and Joe… because she could see them. Only because I wasn’t her I could see they were dead. Pale skin. Glazed eyes. Swollen legs and ankles because that was where the snakes had bitten.

It was ridiculous, idiotic. Even then, sitting upright in bed with the sheet puddled in my lap, I knew it. And yet:

Squeak. Pause. Squeak.

I turned on the bedside lamp and crossed the room, telling myself I wasn’t scared. I turned on the room’s overhead light, then reached through the doorway and turned on the upstairs gallery’s track lighting, also telling myself no one was going to clutch my groping hand and I wasn’t going to scream if someone did.

I went halfway across the gallery and looked over the waist-high rail. No one was in the great room, of course, but I could hear the first spatters of rain hitting the downstairs windows. And I could hear something else, as well.

Squeak. Pause. Squeak. Pause.

I had neglected to turn off the overhead paddle fan. That was what was squeaking. In the daytime I hadn’t even heard it. The switch was at the head of the stairs. I flipped it. The fan coasted to a stop, giving one more squeak as it did so. I went back to bed but left the table lamp on, turned to its lowest setting. If I had another dream, I didn’t remember it in the morning.

I slept in, probably because of my late-night scare, and skipped my walk, but I was up early on the next three mornings, when the air was fresh and even the birds were silent. I took my walk to the swing gate and back, seeing plenty of rabbits but no humans. I passed the Bell mailbox at the head of a driveway enclosed by rhododendrons but could barely glimpse the house, which was on the bay side and screened by trees and more rhododendrons.

During weekday working hours I heard leaf blowers and saw a couple of landscaping trucks parked in Allie’s driveway when I went to the grocery store, but I think she was otherwise alone. As was I. Plus, we were both singles who had outlived their mates. It might make a decent romcom (if anyone made romcoms about old people, that is—The Golden Girls being the exception that proves the rule), but the thought of putting a move on her held zero appeal. Less than zero, actually. What would we do? Push the invisible twins together, one on each side of the stroller? Pretend to feed them SpaghettiOs?

Greg had a caretaker, but he had asked me to water the flowers in the big pots flanking the doors on the driveway side and poolside. I was doing that one twilit evening ten or twelve days after I moved in. I heard the squeaky wheel and turned off the hose. Allie was pushing the pram down the driveway. She was wearing a kind of shoulder sling. In it was a stainless steel pole with a U-shaped hook at the end. She asked me if I was still feeling all right. I said I was.

“I am, too. I come bearing cookies.”

“That’s very nice of you,” I said, although I wouldn’t have minded if she had forgotten. Tonight there were red shorts spread on one stroller seat and white ones on the other. Shirts were again draped over the backs. One said SEE YA LATER ALLIGATOR, the other AFTER AWHILE CROCODILE. If there had been actual kids in those tees, they would have looked cute. As it was… no.

Still, she was my neighbor and harmless enough. So I said, “Hello, Jake” and “Hello, Joe, what do you know?”

Allie trilled her laugh. “You are very sweet.” Then, looking straight at me, she said, “I know they aren’t there.”

I didn’t know how to respond. Allie didn’t seem to mind.

“And yet sometimes they are.”

I remembered Donna once saying something similar. This was months after Tad died and not long before we divorced. Sometimes I see him, she said, and when I told her that was stupid—by then we had recovered enough to say unkind things to each other—she said, No. It’s necessary.

Allie’s sling had a pouch on one side. She reached into it and brought out a Ziploc bag of cookies. I took them and thanked her. “Come in and have one with me.” I paused, then added, “And bring the boys, of course.”

“Of course,” she said, as if to ask, What else?

There was a set of inside stairs going from the garage to the first floor. She halted the pram at the foot of them and said, “Get out, boys, hustle on up, it’s all right, we’re invited.” Her eyes actually followed their progress. Then she put her sling on one of the seats.

She saw me looking at the snake pole and smiled. “Try it, if you like. You’ll be surprised at how light it is.”

I pulled it out and hefted it. It couldn’t have been more than three pounds.

“Steel, but hollow. The sharp point on the end of the hook is to stick them with, but they’re too fast for me.” She held out her hand and I gave her the pole. “Usually you can push them, but if they still won’t go…” She lowered the prod, then gave it a quick lift. “You can flip them into the brush. But you have to do it fast.”

I wanted to ask if she’d ever actually used it and decided I already knew the answer. If there were invisible boys, there were invisible snakes. QED. I settled for saying it looked very useful.

“Very necessary,” she said.

Halfway up the stairs, Allie stopped, patted her chest, and took a few deep breaths. Those hard red spots were back in her cheeks.

“Are you all right?”

“Just a few missed beats of the old ticker. It’s not serious, and I have pills. I suppose I ought to take a couple. Perhaps you’d give me a glass of water?”

“What about milk? Nothing goes better with cookies.”

“Milk and cookies sounds like a treat.”

We climbed the rest of the stairs. She sat down at the kitchen table with a soft grunt. I poured two small glasses of milk and put half a dozen oatmeal raisin cookies on a plate. Three for her, three for me was what I thought, but I ended up eating four. They really were very good.

At one point she got up and called, “Boys, no trouble and no messes! Mind your manners!”

“I’m sure they will. Are you feeling better?”

“Fine, thanks.”

“You have a little…” I tapped my upper lip.

“A milk mustache?” She actually giggled. It was sort of charming.

When I handed her a napkin from the caddy on the lazy susan, I saw her looking at my hand. “Is your wife not with you, Vic?”

I touched my ring. “No. She died.”

Her eyes widened. “Oh! I’m so sorry. Was it recent?”

“Fairly recent. Would you like another cookie?”

The lady might have been off-kilter about her children, but she knew a Keep Out sign when she saw one… or heard one. “Okay, but don’t tell my doctor.”

We chatted awhile, but not about rattlesnakes, invisible children, or dead wives. She talked about the Coronavirus. She talked about Florida politicians, who she believed were hurting the environment. She said the manatees were dying because of fertilizer runoff in the water, and encouraged me to visit Mote Marine Aquarium on City Island in Sarasota and see some, “if they’re still open.”

I asked her if she’d like a little more milk. She smiled, shook her head, got to her feet, wavered a little, then stood steady. “I have to get the boys home, it’s past their bedtime. Jake! Joe! Come on, you guys!” She paused. “There they are. What have you boys been up to?” Then, to me: “They were in that room at the end of the hall. I hope they didn’t disarrange anything.”

The room at the end of the hall was Greg’s study, where I went to read in the evenings. “I’m sure they didn’t.”

“Little boys have a tendency to clutter, you know. I may let them push the stroller back. I get tired so easily these days. Would you like that, boys?”

I saw her down the stairs to the garage, ready to grab her arm if she tottered, but the milk and cookies seemed to have pepped her up.

“I’ll just get you started,” she told the twins, and turned the stroller around. “We wouldn’t want you to bump Mr. Trenton’s car, would we?”

“Bump away,” I said. “It’s a rental.”

That made her giggle again. “Come along, kiddos. We’ll have a bedtime story.”

She pushed the pram out of the garage. The first stars were coming out and it was cooling off. July days are harsh on the Gulf Coast, I’d found that out, but the evenings can be gentle. The snowbirds miss that.

I walked with her as far as the mailbox.

“Oh, look at them, they’ve run ahead.” She raised her voice. “Not too far, boys! And watch for snakes!”

“I guess you’ll have to push the stroller yourself,” I said.

“It looks that way, doesn’t it?” She smiled, but I thought her eyes were sad. Maybe it was only the light. “You must think I’m a regular nutbird.”

“No,” I said. “We all have our ways of coping. My wife…”

“What?”

“Never mind.” I wasn’t going to tell her what my wife had said during the last hard months of our marriage (our first marriage): Sometimes I see him. That was a can of worms I didn’t want to open. I watched her go, and as she disappeared into the gloom of twilight lensing to full dark, I heard that squeaky wheel and thought I should have oiled it for her. It only would have taken a minute.

I went back to the house, locked up, and rinsed off our plates. Then I picked up the book I was reading, one of the Joe Pickett novels, and went down to Greg’s office. I had no interest in Greg’s workstation, hadn’t even turned on the desktop computer, but he’s got a hell of a nice easy chair with a standing lamp nearby. The perfect place to read a good novel for a couple of hours before bed.

He’s also got a cat named Buttons, now presumably residing in Greg’s East Hampton abode with Greg and his current girlfriend (who would no doubt be at least twenty years younger than Greg, perhaps even thirty). Buttons had a little wicker basket of toys. It was now on its side with the lid open. A couple of balls, a well-chewed catnip mouse, and a colorful rubber fish lay on the floor. I looked at these a long time, telling myself I must have kicked the basket over earlier in the day and just not noticed. Because really, what else could it have been? I put the toys back in and closed the lid.

Greg’s caretaker was Mr. Ito. He came twice a week. He always wore brown shirts, brown knee-length shorts with sharp creases, brown socks, brown canvas shoes. He also wore a brown pith helmet jammed down to his extremely large ears. His posture was perfect and his age was… well, ageless. He reminded me of the sadistic Colonel Saito in The Bridge on the River Kwai, and I kept expecting him to pass on Colonel Saito’s motto to his less than energetic son: “Be happy in your work.”

Except Mr. Ito—first name Peter—was the furthest thing from sadistic, and a native Floridian born in Tampa, raised in Port Charlotte, and living across the bridge in Palm Village. Greg was his only client on Rattlesnake Key, but he had plenty of homes on Pardee, Siesta, and Boca Chita. Printed on the sides of his panel trucks (he drove one, his lackadaisical son the other) was the motto AH SO GREEN. I suppose it would have been considered racist if his name had been McSweeney.

It was getting on for August when I spied him taking a break one day, standing in the shade and drinking from his canteen (yes, he had one). He was watching his son circling Greg’s tennis court on a riding mower. I came out onto the patio and stood beside him.

“Just taking a break, Mr. Trenton,” he said, putting on his mask. “Back at it in a minute. I don’t deal with the heat as well as I used to.”

“Wait until you get to my age,” I said. “I’m curious about something. Do you remember the Bell twins? Jake and Joe?”

“Oh my God, yes. Who could forget? 1982 or ’83, I think. Terrible thing. I was as young as that idiot when it happened.” He pointed to his son Eddie, who appeared to be communing with his phone as he mowed around the court. I half-expected him to roll across it at any time. That could spell disaster.

“I’ve met Allie, and… well…”

He nodded. “Sad lady. Sad, sad lady. Always pushing her stroller. I don’t know if she really believes the kiddies are in it or not.”

“Maybe it’s both,” I said.

“Sometimes yes, sometimes no?”