On a pygmy rattler

I remember a typical Florida summer day: hot, humid, and sunny. The state has these regular afternoon showers that swing in off the Gulf from the west, so this one had either passed already or had not yet come. Anyway, it’s July and on the sixth level of Dante’s Inferno. These Midwesterners I live around tickle me with complaints about thirty percent humidity when Floridians see the temperature and humidity competing daily. Of course, Floridians call forty “frigid.” Perspective minus empathy reduces any complaint to absurdity.

Dad was home, too, which made me think at first it was a weekend, but when I tell him that I’m writing about Tony getting bitten by a rattlesnake he informs me it wasn’t. He had been working on 17th Street near the softball fields at Fruitville Park, where I found the largest of my sharks’ teeth collection and once saw a man and housecat magic show. So, it’s late enough in the day that Dad is home from work and—hearing me yelling—carries Tony inside the front door of our 1901 Bern Creek Loop house.

The floor is linoleum. Had to have been because tile wasn’t something my parents went for in home-building during the 80s. My memory is fixated on a fancy light fixture above Tony that matches the dining room chandelier. Its glass plates on hooks created prisms. The dining room chandelier is larger and will catch the rising sun most days, splashing the western wall of the living room with swirling spectrums—a kaleidoscope of separated morning light.

But now, Tony is lying beneath the fancy light fixture. Dad is kneeling over him, trying to suck out the venom from the snakebite and between sucks tells me to pray. I’m told I went directly to my room while Tony asks, “Am I going to die?” I don’t see Mom. She had been cooking supper, she says, but is probably at this point making the emergency call and explaining to the 911 dispatcher where in the boondocks we live.

I realize there’s more in my memory than expected. He was five and I seven in the summer of 1986. We were playing catch. If you google the place, you might see a concrete driveway extending from the garage door. I’m standing straight out from the front door and just to the left of the concrete. Further to the left—southwest of the house itself—stands a two-tree island, a halfway point between the house and pond. I will find wire that one of the trees had grown around, like flesh bulging out around too-tight clothing. The wire surprised me because I thought this property was untouched before we bought it. Florida is a farming state, though. At one point in this sapling’s life, someone tortured the tree with wire fencing. Near the wired tree Tony was standing, barefoot in shorts and t-shirt when he stepped on the rattlesnake.

He and I had just switched positions when he’s suddenly hopping on one foot—his left, I believe—yelling, “I’ve been bit by a snake!” Tony is not a large human at five, and he’s also got Dad’s genes, which means he’s thin to compliment his agility. I will be told later that he weighed thirty-five pounds at the time, which is about as much as a cinderblock, and that pygmy rattler pumped as much venom into him as a full-grown man being bitten seven times. I run to tell Mom, who gets Dad, which is how Tony ends up inside the front door under the fancy light fixture asking if he was dying with Dad sucking on his ankle and me praying in my room.

We were living in a development where we expected to see snakes. I remember helping Dad during the lot-clearing phase cut a path through the palmetto bushes from the main road to where the house would stand. Why I as a six or seven-year-old took part in this phase of construction knowing the snakes that were out there is beyond me. A family friend named Ken Yoder would nail snakes skins to plywood boards, monstrous diamondbacks measuring over six feet that he killed when excavating. Stashed their fangs in a Skoal smokeless tobacco tin and showed us kids after Wednesday evening prayer meetings for kicks. Mom claims that they knew little about snakes in Florida, which seems hard to believe at this point, but she did grow up in the Midwest where you can walk through weeds up to your ninnies with little to no thought of snakes. During the clearing phase, we talked of getting alligator boots when we finally moved to the Florida wilderness. I guess you can make all kinds of projections from the comfort of civilization that you just kind of disregard when you get comfortable living in the sticks.

Conversations about what to do in the event that someone got bitten, however, often included whackado home remedy solutions. We heard of cutting an “X” between the bite marks to help drain the venom, of hooking up the jumper cables to a car battery and shocking the hell out of a person. Crazy stuff that scared elementary-age me. We did hear of the risk in sucking the venom out with your mouth, though. A canker sore or a cavity could be a fatal entry for the venom since it was that much closer to the brain. So, when I saw that Dad didn’t hesitate to suck the venom out, I knew he was risking everything and prayed harder.

But where was I? Mom’s on the phone. Mom hangs up the phone, and Dad and I jump into our Oldsmobile Omega to meet the ambulance out on Fruitville Road so that we can lead them back to where we lived.

Our car itself was on life support. A tiny, five-speed manual with the takeoff power of a Roomba. Dad has the window down and is spitting out of it, afraid—he relates—of having a cavity. He’s still telling me to pray. The ambulance meets us at the corner of Fruitville and whatever road leads back to the Bern Creek development, and here’s where my memory gets really spotty. I remember a rather burly paramedic entering the front door with gear that looked a lot like the toolbox Dad kept all his brick paraphernalia in. The medic kneels down and checks Tony’s vitals.

Dad tells me that the medics moved too slowly. He wanted them to do something. I know what Dad’s impatience looks like. Filly-fart around on his scaffolding and he’ll show you how to get a move on because he’s not making money unless brick are being laid. Mom rides with the medics while Dad and I pedal hard to keep up in the Omega. The next memory is of us following the ambulance to Sarasota Memorial Hospital down on US 41, which must have felt like a thousand miles away to my worried parents. I won’t see Tony again until he’s at the children’s hospital in Gainesville—Google tells me it’s called “UF Health Shands Hospital”—though I’ll see his helicopter leaving the top of Sarasota Memorial, a dragonfly tilting away from a live oak’s breached root toward a spacious lily pad on a distant pond. I’m watching from the vantage point of the gas station on the opposite side of US 41. It’s a now Circle K, says Google.

Somewhere in the mix of Tony being bitten, Dad carrying him in, and the paramedics slow-motioning Tony off to the hospital, Dad found the rattlesnake still in our yard, killed it, and brought it with us. “The doctors would need to know what they were dealing with,” he relates. It scared the nurses half to death when he pulled it from the plastic grocery bag. Unfortunately, under the influence of fatherly aggression, he besmirched the identifiable markings on the head, forcing the doctors to rely on the snake’s thickness and colors to make the diagnosis. Mom and Dad painfully remember that the next several hours at Sarasota Memorial consisted of watching in helpless horror as the swelling crept up Tony’s leg, of doctors tracking the swelling with a magic marker, of hearing that an Indian doctor who specialized in snakebites was in Gainesville, and of learning that Tony would be airlifted to Shands.

I don’t see Tony in my mind during this time at all, but I can imagine what the experience was like to a degree. My son, Asher, had a stomach surgery at six weeks old, so I know the helplessness of seeing doctors trying to get IVs in veins too small for needles, of little limbs connected to expensive-looking, beeping machines that can create comfort and terror all too suddenly. “Gut-wrenching” describes it well. Every organ within the deepest parts of me wants to fix the problem, alleviate the suffering, return life to normal, and my innards—like an internal combustion engine—are at full throttle and ready to . . . To what? There’s nothing you can do. No “D” for “drive.” No movement to make. They just churn with me in neutral. “Terrible” doesn’t get it.

The rest of my memories surrounding this scary event in my brother’s life are few and seemingly insignificant. I didn’t make the initial trip to Gainesville with my parents. They left me with the Sommers more than likely because they didn’t know how long we’d be in Gainesville, but I wonder if they simply didn’t know what to expect. How scared were they that the outcome would be fatal? Do you let a brother watch his brother die? Who would be his Orpheus?

At some point, however, Tony’s condition improved, and we drove from Sarasota to Gainesville, which is the trip where I was introduced to cruise control. The Sommers’ beige Monte Carlo zipped on down the highway without Mike pressing the gas pedal. I still see the pedal—depressed and holding—all on its own. Do I need to say the Omega didn’t have cruise except on downhill slopes? Then, there’s the memory of entering Tony’s hospital room and seeing his leg swollen and bruised elevated by a contraption above his bed. He’s sleeping with his face toward the window. Dad tells me that I asked rather loudly, according to his impersonation, “Tony, are you miserable?” My son, Malachi, is currently seven. I can hear him applying a similar form of seven-year-old tact.

I see little of Tony at Shands, too. Perhaps the trauma hid these images from me. I’m told his leg turns black—“mottled” is what my parents call it. The swelling continues until the specialist from India instructs them to elevate the leg. My memory, however, is transfixed on the room. There’s a lot of white: the sheets, the sling, the walls. I even see white curtains in my memory, though I doubt there’s this much white. It is after all a children’s hospital, which are usually brightly colored. The sling reminds me of a crane, straddling the work space, dominating in architecture, clanging about whenever the nurses adjust it. For now, it’s silent, in position, and steady, working while my brother sleeps.

Tony gets sick hours after being at home, a memory confirmed by my parents. They were surprised he was able to come home after only three days in Gainesville, and the doctors will admit they should have kept him longer and prescribed him an antibiotic. His fever spikes, and they put him in the bathtub, Mom says, which cools him.

Later in the same day he comes home. There’s some sort of celebration at our house and a lot post-trauma talk, the kind that comes like a dam breaking. People are no longer holding their breath. The lights from our small plot of civilization are punching out at the rural night sky crowded with stars. I see our house from the concrete drive, which is where I’ll stay because it’s out of the grass. The grass is scary. It will eventually be tamed by the cats we get, but on this night full of terror and hope, it’s off limits.