Oil Boy by Will Richter
A reticulated python takes one hour to swallow a human body whole. Or at least that’s what Putri, our on-resort host/servant/paid friend, told us back at the pergola – a bit of jungle trivia to pair with our Blue Hawaiians. But when I asked her how she was so sure (after all, had anyone ever stood there with a stopwatch and timed it?), she smiled but didn’t answer, which disappointed me, me who did not want to file her into that class of people, like politicians and regulators, who slide away from direct questions, me who liked Putri and wanted to tip her well. In any case, it seemed suspiciously long. But perspective is everything. For example, one hour no longer seems like such a long time now that I am the one being eaten.
Half of my body is in the snake’s mouth. The legs. Whether it’s been exactly half an hour I don’t know, but it can’t be more than a few minutes since that snout, those teeth, came up only to my thighs. From that position the snake and I could look at each other comfortably, both expressionless – I because I am frozen by her poison, and she because she is a snake. But no more. Now her jaws are around my hips and, due to the awkward angle at which I lie (face-down, my cheek against the dirt), her eyes are lost to mine forever.
I don’t know why I think of the snake as a her instead of a him, but I suspect it has something to do with Ada. Yes, something about this situation reminds me of her, although admittedly this feels less personal than the slow strangulation of our marriage – less like a vendetta and more like a drowning, a fire, an earthquake, something natural. As it turns out, there was nothing ever natural about my mar-riage to Ada.
I suppose if Ada were here she would blame this situation, like everything else that goes wrong, on climate change – and thus, by extension, on me. Dirty oil man that I am, there is always a way to lay any calamity at my feet, even my own swallowing. Think of the habitat loss. Those starving pythons, etc. And if no one comes along to save me in time, if I end up entombed forever in the belly of this serpent, clearly it’s because I’ve spent my life separating bitumen from sand to fuel Grandma’s car pool to Bingo.
Horrible man!
My great hope is the arrival of someone from the resort. Maybe a guest stretching his legs after lunch, a valet taking a stroll and a smoke in the steamy Indonesian jungle. It could happen. I’m not far – maybe a fifteen-minute meander, a brisk ten minutes. And luckily I’m near the path. There it is, right there. You would never miss me: a fit, well-proportioned man of thirty-nine sticking out of a snake. Yes, someone will come.
I just hope it’s not Ada.
But that’s unlikely. She’s been looking forward to that lesson in Muay Thai kickboxing, which should be happening right around now. Ada has always liked to kick her way into shape. Kenpo. Ka-rate. Not that she ever needed any shaping. After all, that’s why they hired her, the marketing people, Kody and Tricia and Stacey and all the rest. Because she was a bombshell, she and those others, the Drop-dead Drillers. It never made it to print, that ad. Someone used the word “desperate.” The oil derrick. The cleavage. But I still have a copy, used to keep it in my office, then my bedroom, and then, finally, when Ada couldn’t stand it anymore, the back of a drawer. She had no sense of humour about it. She said it reminded her of a bad time, a rock-bottom time. I said it reminded me of the day we got together.
Ada, my Ada . . . Yes, all right, I admit it. Even now, even as I sub-merge inch by inch into the maw, my thoughts, as always, keep cir-cling back to her. To the squeeze of her hand under the table, to the warmth of her breath over snow, to all those moments of particularity that led me on and on to this. And why not? What else, really, are my thoughts to do?
When she stormed off the set, I was the one assigned to smooth things over. Though originally employed for my talents in corporate law, already I’d gained a reputation for conflict resolution, for walk-ing into a crooked situation and making it straight again. And it’s true: I’m good at that kind of thing. I have an instinct for diplomacy, a winning tendency to sympathize emotionally and intellectually (al-beit temporarily) with whoever it is I’m talking to – something the company appreciates and is willing to pay top dollar for. Ada is less impressed. She calls it a weakness of character and is unmoved when I tell her it’s just the way that I am. Even now, for instance, I have some sympathy for the python. After all it’s not her fault that today she happened to swallow an entity of unusual sentience, subtlety, humour, refinement – in short, a human being. To her I am simply meat. And who am I to begrudge another living thing its meal?
At first I thought Ada was crying. She sat on the curb outside the studio, still in her Dropdead Drillers getup, her face buried in a pair of upturned knees. This of course aroused my sympathy (at that time I remained unaware that she was incapable of tears), and I hitched up my pants, squatted beside her, and put my hand on her shoulder.
To this day I’m surprised she didn’t tear my arm from its socket. But I suppose she really was feeling low, too low even to savage me. Instead she raised her hard clear eyes framed in curls (later I would identify those curls with her father and brothers, the whole bru-tal Knutsen clan, but at that point they seemed merely pretty). She looked me up and down and said, “You’re paying me. You got your pictures and you’re paying me.”
Things might have ended there if not for a pure coincidence. After arranging Ada’s payment and finishing the shoot, I was hungry. I went to my favourite bistro in downtown Calgary for a late lunch, and there, at a corner table, was Ada.
She sat alone. No meal, just a glass of water, which she had not touched. I sat near but not too near. At no time did she appear to no-tice me, but when I became momentarily distracted by a St. Bernard passing outside the window, leading its owner on a leash, suddenly there she was, taking a seat and unbuttoning her coat and setting a duffel on the seat beside her.
“You’re buying,” she said. “I’m broke.”
“Didn’t we just pay you?”
She shrugged. “That’s spoken for.”
I didn’t ask what she was doing in a restaurant if she couldn’t
pay. I didn’t ask her anything. I ordered a clubhouse and she did the same and we ate and looked out the window like both of our necks were broken and we couldn’t do otherwise. Normally a silence like that would be unbearable for me, but in this instance it seemed per-fectly natural. I was actually surprised when, after I’d paid the bill and rose to leave, Ada roused herself and turned my way.
“Where do you live?” she said.
“Pardon?”
“I said, where do you live.”
Nearby, I told her.
“Write down the address.” She flipped the receipt and slid it over.
“I’ll be there tonight.”
It’s up to my solar plexus now. Strange that I don’t feel anything – no tightness, no warmth, no pain – but I suppose that must be some effect of the poison. I don’t know; I can’t ask. Anyway, maybe it has nothing to do with the snake. Maybe at this point I’ve simply lost the ability to feel.
I peer into the jungle.
Save me, jungle.
But the jungle doesn’t care. I hear birds – or screeching, anyway.
Maybe a monkey, a tribe of monkeys. I imagine the Knutsens out there somewhere, swinging down from the branches, their wild furry faces emerging one by one from the green.
It took a while for her to mention them, the other Knutsens. Ac-tually for a long time she didn’t talk about much of anything at all. She arrived that evening with that same small duffel, set it down by the door, and then for weeks did little except eat and sleep and watch TV, lying, always, on the couch. Whatever sexual fantasies I’d enter-tained were quickly dispelled. She was using me, yes, but not for that. In fact the only thing she seemed to like about me was my rainforest shower head, admittedly a wonderful object.
Still, I didn’t exactly object to the new arrangement. I fed her and cleaned up after her and in exchange I got to look at her as much as I wanted. For now that was enough. Sometimes she would stand at the eighteenth-story windows, her skin dewy from coffee steam, and gaze out at the city that oil had built, at the snow drifting down in the orange lights, and I would even allow myself the delusion that we were a real couple, that our relationship was something more than parasitic.
She didn’t mind if I sat with her. I’d come home in the evening after work with kung pao or pad thai or beef biryani and we’d eat it in front of the TV. That’s how I learned about the Knutsens. We were watching the news and a story came on about a farmer accused of blowing up a construction site, a new oil sands project being put together by one of our brother companies in O&G. So far the farmer hadn’t been charged with anything. There was no proof of any crime, only a suspicious proximity to the farmer’s fields and the fact that he had threatened and harassed the company for months. The news program showed him roaming his farmland on foot, hunched against the wide white prairie wastes. Cut to a closer view of the hirsute maniac in the blowing snow, foaming into the camera and claiming mutant cows and stillborn babies, a pestilential tide visited on him and his family by that all-powerful oil company. I couldn’t follow it all and didn’t try, hardly paying any attention until Ada said, “That’s my father.”
father.” How old was Ada at that time? No more than twenty-two or twenty-three, though she seemed both younger and older. Younger, in the way she seemed content to rely on me. Older, in the way she had clearly seen plenty of my type before.
She had no home, no friends, no job, just an agent whose periodic calls would be followed by auditions, then silence. One day I sug-gested that maybe show business wasn’t for her, and she said, “Of course it isn’t.” She spent a lot of time online and in front of the TV, totally absorbed, waiting for I knew not what.
Sometimes we would talk. She liked to ask about my work, about the oil sands, her queries becoming increasingly granular. She asked about energy ratios, extraction costs, the price on the market and what that meant. She wanted to know about GHG emissions and how they compared to conventional oil and natural gas and solar. “It just isn’t viable,” I said of the latter. “Much as we might like it to, the world can’t yet run on sunshine.” That interested her. She had a head for moral complexity. She seemed to accept the “ethical oil” argument without question, agreeing that as long as the world drove cars and flew planes and shipped microprocessors across the sea we may as well avoid lining Mohammad bin Salman’s pockets in the bargain. I didn’t question her avidity. I didn’t wonder why she seemed so eager to accept every word that I said.
It’s amazing what our eyes will do when they’re desperate. A shadow becomes a man, a knothole a child, a crooked vine a woman stooping to feel the earth.
The fangs are on my ribs now. The snake is just a mouth, a curl of tail, a silence. I’m beginning to lose hope. I wish I could say to the snake, “Don’t do this, you don’t know me, this isn’t fair.” There is no sun here. It isn’t screeching I hear, but laughter. The python’s tail is at a great distance. The scales don’t need the sun but glint anyway, spotted brown, a rotten banana, a gleam of yellow against the green, Christmas lights on a pine bough, a fire jumping in a hearth, a warm shadowed flicker against a log wall and a crucifix and Ada and the Knutsens seated here and there. That was silent, too, the Knutsens like the snake, unjolly in their flannels, the mother, Zena, with the other wives and girls (not Ada) in the kitchen, slopping coffee into big cups. There was no cup for me.
When Ada invited me for Christmas, I didn’t know that I was to be a surprise guest. The windows were framed in bars of ice. The father, Arved Knutsen, wouldn’t look at me or at Ada or at anything except the wide-plank beams of the ceiling – and the brothers did likewise. The smell of roast beef mingled with body odour and coffee. It was a large cabin but a larger family, especially when the door opened with a frozen gasp and the younger boys piled in for dinner, their chatter ceasing as I tried to engage them, all of them looking to their frown-ing mothers, then going wherever I was not.
Before dinner Arved stood and read aloud from the Bible, something from Ecclesiastes, I don’t remember, and his family bowed their heads as though every mispronunciation was divinely inspired. I felt a hand, then, folding into mine and squeezing it under the table, and I looked at Ada and expected some acknowledging expression but instead saw only the pulsing of her carotid, her gaze fixed on the table, and I realized that the hard hand in mine was intended as our little secret, that in that moment it was the two of us against them.
What other memories of that night? A dark empty barn. Blackness – cold seeping in from every hinge, a single bulb flickering on, Arved’s grey bearded face in the half-light, his pig eyes. I had my arms around myself, shivering. I wore no coat, as I hadn’t expected to be out of the house so long, had only stepped away for a moment to escape that room and that crackling fire and the general air of doctrine and menace, and then Arved emerging, gesturing, insisting, angry. “Well,” he said. “Come on, Oil Boy. Let me show you.” The barn smelled of ice and old hay. I looked at the beams and for a moment thought of a hanging, the whole Knutsen clan gathered there in hairy silence, Arved stringing me up. Against one wall a line of freezers gently wheezed. Arved crossed to them and opened them one by one and said, “Look, Oil Boy. Look what you’ve fucking done.”
In a strange way, it’s hard to think of the python as even being alive. Its movements are imperceptible from moment to moment. It has no breath. I do not think it feels.
But there. What?
Something. A shifting in the trees, a yellow shirt, a pair of wide
black eyes in a frightened face.
A boy.
He crouches there at the edge of the path, his eyes on mine. In his hand, a stick. I see it tremble but otherwise he doesn’t move, only stares and stares, and I want to shout but my tongue is frozen, my whole body frozen, and I can only put my pleading into my irises, into my brain, into my thoughts that scream and scream – help me!
He reaches out with the stick. For a second it prods my shoulder. I feel nothing and it prods again. Don’t poke me, you idiot! Run, run!
Ten years old at most, this boy, a collage of skinny arms and chapped feet. Does he belong to the resort? To one of the employees? Is he an employee himself? Yes – when finally he turns and dashes off along the path, that’s the direction that he takes. Within moments he merges with the trunks and vines. He blurs into the shadows and then becomes one.
And now nothing, nothing but me and the snake and the memory of that boy. But was that even real? I try to recall every detail – his trembling hands, his frightened face, dark still eyes coated in frost, a freezer full of bodies, young bodies of all kinds.
A yearling sheep, two calves, little chicks, an embryonic foal. Arved showed me their tumours, their deformities – on one of them a second, shrunken head; on another, the absence of a mouth. “This is your people’s work,” he snarled. “Why don’t you take a good close look?” He was standing so close I could smell one of his teeth, the decay. “If it’s all the same to you,” he said, “we won’t dig up the human ones tonight.”
We didn’t stay for Christmas. The flight attendant on the small re-gional flight wore a Santa hat and a false patina of cheer. Ada didn’t play along. She hardly spoke and ate no almonds from the packet. I was thinking of the moment when she kissed me. It had happened that morning, the two of us walking arm in arm. I was telling her about her father, what he’d shown me. The kids played nearby, throwing ice at one another as two mothers watched and laughed, and Ada suddenly took my arm and pulled me around and then it happened, the kiss. When it ended all was silent, the kids and moth-ers watching, their breath curling up, and in that moment I wondered if the kiss was for me or for them. “Let’s get out of here,” she whis-pered. “Let’s never come back.”
Ada stooped slightly as she looked out the window. Past her I could see the wing of the plane and then flat white clouds, the occasional glimpse of prairie snow peeking through, the sun glaring on both. “You’ll hurt your eyes,” I said, and she straightened and turned to me and smiled.
“You’re all blotchy,” she said. “I can’t see you.”
I took her hand and kissed it. For some reason I thought of the foal in the freezer, its frozen hairless skin. I said, “Maybe we should get married.”
“What?”
I smiled. “Just to show them.”
She wasn’t smiling anymore. She kept on looking at me, her ex-pression inscrutable, and suddenly I felt the cabin depressurize. I felt the windows fly open, my body falling through emptiness. “Be seri-ous,” she said. “Are you really asking?”
It’s a strange moment when you realize that a snake has its mouth around your heart. You think of its teeth, what they might puncture. You think of your bleeding organ impaled.
No one else has come along the path. I’m sure that no one ever will.
I wonder at which point I’ll die. When her mouth slips over my
neck? Or will it be the head?
But what if I don’t fit? She’s a long python, sure – probably six-teen or twenty feet – but I’m no midget, either. Did the python think of that? Has she considered all the risks?
Putri . . . what did Putri, that wellspring of diverting python fac-toids, have to say about it? Something about a python occasionally biting off more than it can chew, so to speak. A human body might make a good meal, but it might also burst a python at the seams – the tables, to mix my metaphors, suddenly turning. Or maybe tables have nothing to do with it. Maybe nothing is more natural than for an animal to inhale too much human and then to die.
But that’s starting to sound like Ada, or at least the Ada she would become. Or was she always that other, more hostile version of herself? Before we got married, did I even know her at all?
The trophy wife, that’s what my buddies at the office like to call her now that things have turned sour. But I object to that. In marry-ing her I may have been shallow, sure, but not in the typical way. I just allowed myself to presume too much. That her silences concealed a sympathetic depth of understanding. That her questions about my work came from genuine, benevolent curiosity. That the two of us, as in that moment of hands-clasped solidarity under the dinner table, were on the same side.
The wedding was a simple affair, Ada’s half of the aisle empty, mine occupied only by a single sobbing mother and a few boys from the company. That night we had sex for the first time (that delay my first inkling that Ada hadn’t strayed so far from her religious roots after all), and afterward Ada became contemplative, a little puzzled. “Anyway,” she said, “probably preferable to Cousin Rickart.”
She gave up work, fired her agent, who must have been surprised to hear from her, and enrolled in community college. After convinc-ing the enrollment officer that her backwater Christian schooling amounted to something, she took courses in literature, history, psy-chology, philosophy and, god help her, political science.
Has there ever been a seedier den of impracticality than a college-level political science department? I could soon test that question for myself. I’d come home to find the entire student body there in my apartment, loud and lumpy undergraduates swilling my single malts and admiring the view as they lamented the world’s inequities. And they’d be quite convincing, too. After a night of haranguing I’d find myself completely turned around, ready to abandon the corporate life and all of its evils, only to wake the next morning with the thought that if ever that pack of idealists seized control I’d soon be retreating into a fortified and well-stocked bunker – or at least investing in a donkey, a plough, and a wide-brimmed, sun-protective hat.
That’s when Ada and I began to fight in earnest. I’d accuse her of being fickle, an idiot, a follower. But even in my most heated mo-ments I knew it wasn’t true. She didn’t follow anyone in that depart-ment; they followed her. She had an aura of command and a sharp staccato delivery that embodied the revolutionary spirit, and soon she had the research to back it up. She wrote a paper on the banana unions of Central America – or lack thereof. She became intimately familiar with supply chains and all of their innumerable injustices. Of course I argued every point, but my macroeconomics were no match for her first-person accounts, for her rapes and intimidations and extrajudicial killings. After a while I noticed that her voice had a different timbre, deeper and stronger. One night I heard the others asking about her father, about her rebel Knutsen blood, and was hor-rified to see her acting coy, a small self-satisfied smile on her lips as she played up the connection.
Why did she marry me? I came to wonder that all the time. Money seemed a plausible and even obvious reason, but with Ada the pic-ture of the grubby opportunist never quite fit. She never talked about money, spent little, cared less. More likely I simply represented for her a convenient alternative to the life she’d been groomed for, a re-pudiation of Cousin Rickart and all cousins everywhere. Or maybe her reasoning went beyond such simplicities – beyond reason itself. Every Sunday she drove to a small bare church where the congregants spoke in tongues, a fact she kept secret from her political friends. Who was she in those moments – her lips convulsing, her hands flailing and clawing, her body writhing on the floor? And did she, like me, lie awake at night, pondering such questions?
The neck, as it turns out, isn’t the one to kill me, because here I am, up to my neck in snake. Which I suppose leaves the mouth and nose as my likely terminus points – in other words, not much longer now. Soon the python will finish the job and begin the slow, uncon-scious process of digestion. After that she and I will become one in a way that Ada and I never managed, not in the college years after marriage, not when she graduated and found work with an environ-mental advocacy organization, not that day, me idling my Mercedes in a traffic jam, cursing the intersection-clogging protest ahead of me and then seeing her, seeing Ada, on the other side of the glass, and she not noticing me at all.
She didn’t believe in divorce, and when I told her the concept was nothing like Santa Claus she said I’d known about her religiosity when I married her, that I ought to recognize that some acts are irre-vocable. She couldn’t keep the contempt from her voice any longer during these disputes, and to avoid hearing it I spent as much time as possible at the office or out in the field, engaging in negotiations. Not that the negotiations went much better. The old tricks and argu-ments didn’t work as well as they used to – my opponents more re-calcitrant, informed, cynical. Or maybe I’d lost my touch, had gotten tired of commiserating and introduced money too quickly and tact-lessly. My managers brought me in for meetings, expressing concern. They’d become puffier, my managers, and greyer. Oil prices were fall-ing. There was talk of divestment, decarbonisation, stranded assets. You don’t look well, they said, by which they meant you don’t look convincing.
The final humiliation: Ada’s reconciliation with her family. I’d find her on the balcony in any kind of cold, talking on the phone with her mother. One Christmas she left me alone and took the small re-gional flight to that wasteland she called home, seeking, I could only guess, absolution. When the police discovered C-4 on Arved’s prop-erty I thought that might bring Ada to her senses, but no. One of the brothers – Adam or Aaron or Abel or Alwin, I don’t know – took the blame and awaited his court date while Arved no doubt scowled and scratched his beard and got older and spent his nights with his freezers, counting duplicated heads. And Ada, Ada made excuses. She talked of uneven playing fields and other threadbare analogies, and then she didn’t talk of it anymore at all.
Bali was my idea, my last Hail Mary. I showed her the hammocks, the beaches, the digitized blue water, a February trip to get away from winter and our problems, and Ada, to my surprise, agreed. Our flight attendant wore purple and didn’t smile and rattled ice into plastic cups with medium-paid efficiency. We had the aisle to our-selves, Ada and I, the plane strangely empty and funereal, a ghost ship. There’d been talk of a virus spreading in China, but we paid it no mind.
Initially I had some hope that we could reconcile, at least for the duration of the trip, but Ada wasn’t interested. On the flight she ig-nored me, tried to read a book of poetry, William Carlos Williams, but I didn’t allow it, agitated by her silence, thinking of a different day, a different patch of air in the sky. “Why did you marry me?” I asked, just like that, not even bitter, just wanting to know, and she raised those hard clear eyes and looked at me like the flight attendant had, without smiling, then looked away and murmured something under her breath.
“What’s that?” I said. “What did you say?”
She shook her head and didn’t answer at first. Then she placed a
finger on a page and began to read:
”As if the earth under our feet were an excrement of some sky
And we degraded prisoners destined to hunger until we eat filth.”
She paused, looking out the window. “That’s how I think of you sometimes,” she said, turning back. “Like the filth I have to eat.”
A shadow, a knothole, a vine. A man, a child, a woman, a pair of running feet, swinging arms, pumping legs – a flap-shirted figure running along the path.
The boy.
Can a heart lift inside a serpent’s maw?
Her lips are on mine now – the kiss of the python. Has it been fifty-eight minutes? It doesn’t matter because the boy has returned just in time, and others, too, the boy like a bloodhound leading the pack – a tall muscular man with a machete and the resort’s signature teal polo, and a second teal behind him, a shorter figure, huffing and puffing . . . and could it be? Yes, the magnificent Putri, here to see the embodiment of all her trivia. And then another man, shorter still, and now that man pushed aside, Putri aside, the muscular man and the boy aside, everyone aside as she bursts along the path, legs pink from exertion, those Kenpo legs flashing through the undergrowth – Ada, my Ada who loves me at last, and all I had to do was almost die, almost disappear, just the tippy tip of me peeking out, just enough to breathe . . . to breathe . . . But what did Putri say about breathing?
Ah, yes. Now I remember.
She said a python doesn’t eat a living animal. First it lunges and coils and crushes. It strangles and suffocates and kills, and only then does it swallow. Breathing doesn’t come into it.
And isn’t that funny? To lie inside a python, thinking and wish-ing that you might yet live, while all the while you’re already dead.
And here comes Ada along the path. I see her sweat, hear her foot-fall. Closer, closer, the others jangling after. But my Ada in the lead, far ahead . . . And it’s not only funny but sad, too – me lying dead in-side a snake and Ada here at last to save me, Ada so full of hope, Ada running through that distance that never closes, Ada running and running as though we still have time.
Will Richter’s stories have appeared in The Threepenny Review, Witness, The Fiddlehead, subTerrain, Arts & Letters, Fiction International, Eclectica, and Fictive Dream.