The Snake

Saturday I sat in the office much of the day cultivating ass pimples. Around noon I heard a commotion, an out of the ordinary cry that calls one from their normal stupor. I got up and went outside to find LuLu and Hugo looking towards the side of the office towards the corner where we keep the garbage cans. Richard, the young student who was helping us during easter week was farther away from what ever was startling the others. He seemed in distress. "A snake, a snake",  they said. "Richard encountered a snake!" 
     Hugo and myself entered the space to find a grey snake about a meter and a half long mingling with the brooms.  Richard, who eats only powdered protein in order to appear more macho, ran for safety of the upstairs balcony. Hugo and I each grabbed a broom and ushered the snake towards the parking lot. The gray snake was very agressive biting at the brooms and writhing incessantly. It looked like a black mambo only smaller but I knew it just couldn't have been  venenous,, besides black mambos are from Africa. 
     I pinned the snake as best I could with the broom bristles and Hugo picked it up by the tail. It swirled back and forth like a scared acrobat as it hung from Hugo's hand. Hugo and I proceeded to go out back. With the broom handle I gently kept the snake's head a distance from Hugo's body. As we passed the half closed window of our bedroom, my wife who was inside doing her whatevers heard the snakemeisters passing. A herpetological wind had preceded us set in motion by the maids. Snake news travels like a brush fire here. My wife's voice emanated from the room in a screaming run on sentence. "Don't bring that thing in here, where are you going with that vibora, kill that frigging snake, Hugo come here,, no don't come here, what are you doing? Just kill it!  You see Mexicans aren't very conscientious environmentalists. Once when I switched three incandescent bulbs in the house of 50 watts each for three LEDs totaling 16 watts my wife's face contorted and she urged me to return everthing to its previous state because she thought the LED color was destroying the ambience of la casa. Mexicans kill everthing that moves except butterflies and snakes are top of the mexican hit list. It is a wonder to me that there is still a rich natural complex even if much of it is threatened.
     This time, however, I wasn't going to kill this snake. An incident a few years ago had made me adamant. A maid had exited the kitchen to find a 6 foot boa lounging on the house porch. At the time of her discovery I was riding back to the hotel on my bike and when I received the news delivered in screeching panic via cell phone from my wife I didn't know if it was a ten foot rattler threatening clients. "Snake" to most Mexicans can mean anything that crawls. Arriving at the hotel I went out back to the house where there were three maids armed with brooms screaming that they would never return to work if I did not kill this snake. At that moment they looked like a tribe of Ubangis confronting the ghost of an ancestor. I tried to explain about boas but no one would listen. They just accused me of being less than a man for not jumping onto the animal and strangling it to death. 
     I cut a forked stick and tried to pin the head of the snake, but it was still on the tile floor, not on soft earth where the stick could have penetrated the soil and held fast the serpent. It slithered away and into a hole beneath the pavillion. "Well", I said,"It's gone." These were the key words unlocking all the accumulated snake hate and misinformation from the year 3,000,000 BC to the present. They ganged up on me and urged me to do something lest the serpent return, lie in wait, then drop down from a bush coiling about one of their necks choking them slowly their eyes bulging from their almond heads.
     I got the hose and inserted it in the hole beneath the pavillion allowing the orafice to fill and overflow for 20 minutes yet the boa never appeared. I pictured it trapped in its muddy tube now deformed by water holding its breath until it could no more and expiring. I covered the hole with a cairn of rocks to please everyone. I swore, however, this wasn't going to happen again even if it was a rattler. 
     Hugo and I let the gray snake go in the tall grass in back of the hotel where there is lots of field and few dwellings. It quickly slithered away  into the dry grass and disappeared. I wished it luck, thenI rushed to the computer to identify the snake,, or really this incident couldn't count as a learning experience. After 20 minutes of searching I found what I think it was,, a racer. The agressiveness, movement, size, and color seemed to fit.