His older brother’s move to save him was probably what caused the snake to strike. Az fearlessly tried to grab the viper by the neck. In what seemed to all of them like a blip in the daylight, a jump in the reel, the big Mexican rattlesnake struck, burying its fangs into the flesh around Aaron’s shinbone. The pain slammed upward, hard through him like the bell of a carnival game.
He fell back into his brother’s arms. The snake remained attached to his shin, stretching itself outward, unfurling its splendorous length. The rest of the scene for Aaron went silent as he seemed to lose his hearing to the upward rush of venom. Alejandro threw aside his staff and grabbed the snake by its fat tail. He waited a second for the snake to dislodge its fangs and go for its next strike.
The last image Aaron saw was Alejandro swinging the snake in a long and powerful arc swiping the summer sky. The centrifugal force stretched the viper to its full length. The gray, green, and black stripes looked like a breach in the sky, the tattooed knuckles of something great trying to push through. Aaron’s vision went black with the thud of the snake’s body slamming onto the summer hardpan.
13.
On her somewhat neglected site Concepcion Klinsman posted a video pan over the photograph of the Klinsman children holding the dead Crotalus lepidus that had struck their little brother. The children stand shoulder to shoulder, the snake lain across their outstretched arms. Missing from the photo are Dan, who felt too old to be in the picture, Mary, who took the photo and wasn’t interested in handling the snake in any way, and Aaron, of course. The snake itself, still fresh and supple, appears to be lounging like something royal in the children’s arms.
Az, his smile a grimace as he fails to hold back tears, balances the tail end and rattle, which hang like a shucked ear of corn from his hand. The other children smile easily as they stand barefoot in their summer shorts, taking up the middle length. Connie cradles the viper’s anvil head, cooing a lullaby, it seems.
The photo was taken just before they handed the body over to the herpetologist from the zoo. It was Jo and Liz who decided on this, rejecting various plans to bury the snake, burn it, skin it, or eat it. The herpetologist rushed down from his lab as soon as he received the call, eager to study this durable and resourceful subspecies, a viper able to summer in the borderlands.
Twenty-six years later the neglected scan was picked up by several grandchildren, Connie’s nieces and nephews fascinated by their rogue aunt who had gone to live deep in the Amazon to work in a dental clinic. From those posts, the scan and photo migrated across hundreds of sites. Klinsman often tried to find it through different kinds of searches, but it remained very easy to find if you simply searched “kids holding big snake.”
Dr. Klinsman brought Aaron home from the emergency room, refusing orders to leave the stricken boy in the hospital for overnight observation. Dr. Klinsman was one of the last physicians to make house calls. He still carried a black house-call satchel. When opened, it smelled of leather, alcohol swabs, and crushed pills. You could close your eyes over the opened bag, imagine yourself healed.
He set his son up in the barn clubhouse, reclined him on a daybed, which he positioned so Aaron could gaze out over the borderlands and the Pacific. Dr. Klinsman expressed many arguments in favor of this decision. It would comfort the boy, let him believe he was out of danger in this space of revelry. The other kids could keep easy vigil during the day, shooting pool, throwing darts, listening to records, letting the summer breeze in through the feed door. At night Aaron’s mother and father took turns staying with the boy.
On only two occasions was he left alone. Soon after Aaron was propped up in the daybed, Alejandro and Dr. Klinsman whispered together at the bottom of the loft steps. Alejandro was telling the doctor what he knew about the snake. The venom coursing through Aaron, though it clutched speech from his throat, sharpened his hearing, his ability to hear and understand Spanish.
“It will not kill him,” Alejandro softly told Dr. Klinsman, “but it will ruin his life. That’s what they say about this snake. That’s what has always been said about this snake.”
The two men shuffled out the door. Aaron could hear the scuff of their boots over the barn floorboards, the crunch of their heels in the dirt. Unmoving but for his eyes, which also felt honed by the venom, Aaron gazed at the twilight sweep before him. The flattened lights of Nestor and Imperial Beach, the black ocean, the sky like dented steel.
“They say,” he heard Alejandro whisper, “that he won’t have his life. That he will have instead the snake’s life. He’ll shed his skin and then be ready to live some more. Yes?”
The gentle yes, Aaron knew, was Alejandro comforting Dr. Klinsman’s tears, tears he never showed his son. Aaron lay stiffly, finding that any small movement created stringy tugs throughout his body, all centered on that constriction surrounding his swollen throat. He imagined himself a crumpled and tangled marionette, but with eyes that flicked and focused easily, painlessly.
Two movie drive-ins were in his view, the South Bay and the Big Sky. On summer nights the Klinsmans would bring popcorn and blankets out onto the barn roof and watch the movies, filling in the dialogue on their own, discussing what might be happening on the silent and distant screens. They had binoculars for the good parts. The South Bay Drive-in still stands and flourishes, perhaps the last of its kind in the entire country. The Big Sky was felled soon after Aaron’s recovery, taking with it—it seemed to him—what was supposed to be his life.
What the little boy saw that evening on the two drive-in screens, which stood equidistant between the Klinsman ranch and the Pacific Ocean, was not the second-run movies that were supposed to be showing that night. What Aaron saw with his venom-sharpened eyes was the two lives that lay before him. On the Big Sky, on the right-hand edge of the window’s view, ran the life he was sure he was supposed to live. There moved the adult Aaron Klinsman, a physician in a dark suit and tie, a stethoscope draped about his neck, his groomed hair parted neatly. A woman from the movie, played by Molly Ringwald, had somehow become his wife, older, in pearls and a skirt. They appeared to be discussing important things, like buying a car and having children. They held cocktails in stemmed glasses. This was who Aaron was meant to be.
On the South Bay screen, to his left, ran something that oddly terrified him, that would have made him scream if his throat were not constricted by venom. It was a simple close-up of how Aaron Klinsman knew he would look at the age of thirty-five. He appeared handsome enough, sincere in his gaze, a smile ready on one corner of his lips. What was terrifying to the little boy was knowing how correct this future version of him was.
The other time he was left unattended during his barn-room recovery still remains a point of contention within the family. Through his medical connections on both sides of the border, Dr. Klinsman learned of another child Aaron’s age who had survived a Crotalus lepidus strike. The plan was to have this little girl come to Aaron’s bedside and show him that everything would be all right. The girl, Aracely Montiel, was in Aaron’s third grade class at Mt. Carmel, had recently been transferred there. Aracely had been bitten in Jalisco, where the snake was indigenous. In fact the snakebite, the Montiel family’s realization that their daughter could go for a walk in their town and get bitten by such a monstrous pit viper, had been the primary reason for their move to the borderlands.
Everything about Aracely Montiel became vague and remained so for Aaron until he finally befriended her in seventh grade. But even then, and in the ensuing years of high school, only certain aspects of her became clear. Some say the visit was called off by the family when certain Montiels found out. Dr. Klinsman claims that it was neither confirmed nor canceled, that he had just put the word out hoping it would get to the Montiels’ private physician. It was never even clear on which side of the border the family resided.
Most of Aaron’s siblings claimed the visit was a venom dream. Dr. Klinsman agreed at first but years later was convinced by Aaron that the visit did actually occur. His mother insisted it was a dream, that nothing so remarkable in her son’s recovery could have occurred without her absolute knowledge of it. Aaron knew it was not a dream. He had only one recurring dream during his recovery.