Son of the Cotton Mouth Water Rattler seeks revenge

Published 1:25 pm Friday, September 15, 2017

No one knows better than I that this title looks like one you would see on a super-market tabloid — you know, similar to something like, “Dolphin Grows Human Arms and Uses Sign Language.” If I could have thought of something else to call it I would have, but the truth should not be hidden regardless of how weird it may be.

So.

A few weeks ago I reported on a dark tale about a monstrous snake that was making a concerted attempt to eat Matilda the Muscovy duck’s eggs. If you remember the story she was raising those eggs on our back deck in a washtub. The gist of that account was that I fought the reptile off, not once but three times, only to slay it on the fourth attempt.

I believe that his son has returned for revenge — sort of like Michael Myers from the movie “Halloween,” only more slithery. This is, as always, a faithful account albeit somewhat complicated, so you have to read carefully in order to keep up with the twists and turns. 

It begins with the innocent fact that my old truck (aka Big Red) is where I put the bags of garbage we accumulate in our home. This is the same truck whose driver side window won’t roll up and where spiders spin webs and birds nest and lay eggs, a seemingly innocuous detail that nonetheless plays a vital role later on. 

OK, once the truck bed is full I haul it to the dump. Since we had been on vacation for a week, and since I hadn’t emptied it in a couple of weeks before that, the trash was about two stories high. Way overdue to be emptied. I intuitively knew this to be true based on the odor that wafted from the barn to our house.

So I grabbed my keys and headed out to perform this onerous errand. When I tried to turn on the ignition it wouldn’t crank — dead battery. Par for the course. I then pulled my car around and jumped it off. Since the battery was pretty much graveyard dead I let it run for about 20 minutes and returned to finish the job. Satisfied that the truck was now ready to roll I picked up the jumper cables, opened the back door of the truck to put them up and shut the door. At that point, with my superior peripheral vision, and much to my chagrin, I noticed a long black thing crawling from the bed of the truck down its side and right toward me.

When I recoiled from the slimy creature he reared up at me in a most malicious way and stuck out his tongue. Had my bladder turned loose at that precise moment I could have extinguished a brush fire 20 feet away. Fortunately I narrowly avoided that scenario. My next instinct was to head for the hills, or at least the safety of our house, but my legs wouldn’t move and so we just stared at each other for another few seconds. He was identical to the cotton mouth water rattler I had murdered a few weeks ago and thus it occurred to me that this was the son bent on revenge.

It gets worse.

Since I had my gloves on I let out a war cry and swatted at him to little effect except to aggravate him. Then with the speed that only a cotton mouth water rattler has, he shot right through the window that won’t roll up and into the space where spiders were spinning webs and birds were nesting and laying eggs. He then proceeded to crawl under the seat.

A revolting development if there ever was one.

It goes without saying that the trash didn’t get emptied that day and several days later I still had not come up with the courage to do an assessment on whether or not the big reptile had left the friendly confines of the truck. Thus the rubble on Big Red has continued to decay and become even more odorous.

Unfortunately as I considered my options it became obvious that there is no safe and efficient to see if a snake is coiled up under the seat of a truck. Doing so would require putting one’s head in close proximity to the varmint in question giving him a perfect situation to exact his revenge. I thought about leaving the door open so he could get out but with plenty of spiders and bird eggs at his disposal I doubted he would go of his own accord. 

Thus, with no other choices left open I have prepared an advertisement for Big Red and this is what it says: “For Sale By Owner — As Is Condition, Trash And All — Will Not Deliver Under Any Circumstances — Come Get It And It’s Yours — Owner Will Not Be Responsible For Any Mishaps.”

I’m not going to let that son of the cotton mouth water rattler get me. He can take his revenge out on someone else and I can always find a used truck whose windows will actually roll up.

-Email if interested in a good truck to dar8589@bellsouth.net