The Gaboon Viper

By Bob Johnson

Featured art: “Lydia’s Kettle” by Judith Skillman

So that was that. She’d failed to save him, though no one could say she didn’t try. As the first raindrops hit his forehead—splashing where they met a smooth place, vanishing where they found a crease—Alice had pounded his chest and shouted, “Roger! Roger!” 

She’d slapped his cheeks, put her lips on his and blew, felt his throat for a pulse. 

Only moments earlier the man had stood at Alice’s door—face large and sunburned, pen hovering over a clipboard—and said, “Allow me to introduce myself, madam. My name is Roger Sinclair.” 

Yet before he could say another word, his mouth formed a perfect O, his eyes rolled back, and he dropped across her threshold, dead as Mussolini.

It was raining in earnest an hour later when Alice’s husband Walter came home from his job at Sellersville Security. The EMTs were loading the dead man into an ambulance, and Alice was on her knees in the foyer, mopping the tile with a sponge. She knew parts of a body let go when a person died, though of course she’d never seen it happen. The flood of urine poor Roger Sinclair had produced was astounding.

“What is all this about?” Walter said, though before she could answer he exhaled loudly through his nostrils and went upstairs to change. Everything was her fault—a flat tire on the Honda, his favorite TV show interrupted by a news alert, a cloudy sky during an eclipse—so why should a dead man on the threshold be any different?

She finished her cleaning and went to the kitchen to begin dinner. Today was Monday, and Monday was pork chop night, but the business at the front door had thrown her timing off, so she started the potatoes only after the meat was frying, ensuring that one would be undercooked or the other overcooked when Walter sat down.

She was desperate to talk to someone, but her only child Marianne lived in Saugatuck, Michigan, and Marianne hadn’t spoken to either of them in years, after Walter disowned her for working in a medical marijuana dispensary. 

Otherwise, Alice didn’t have any friends to speak of, because Walter thought women were flighty and careless, and Alice was woman enough for one house.

At the dinner table, he ate the potatoes without comment, though he sliced open his pork chop and peered into it. The world was a dangerous place, he often said, the trichinella roundworm just one of its perils. He was similarly concerned about E.coli, and he insisted that Alice plant any bee-attracting flowers thirty feet from the house, because he’d been stung as a boy and the soles of his feet had itched for hours afterward.

When Walter and Alice had first met, he was finishing his engineering degree at Purdue. Everything about him had predicted a promising future, and everyone in Alice’s circle—her mother, her sister Ellen, her friends at Lafayette community college—had said she’d be a fool to let such a sober, gifted man slip through her fingers. 

But his imperious manner had alienated colleagues and superiors alike and now, at sixty-two, he rose every weekday, stuffed himself into a shirt with the Sellersville Security logo stitched onto a pocket and drove alone through the leafy neighborhoods of Fort Wayne, installing burglar alarms in the houses of rich people.

And every night he came home and described to Alice the homeowners—women in tennis skorts, men in loafers and no socks—who met him at their front doors, who didn’t know a diode from an exciter, who followed him about as he fitted motion sensors to their windows and cameras to their mantles, as if he, and not a prospective intruder, was the treacherous one.

The meat passing inspection, he filled his mouth and studied Alice as he chewed. “Explain that business at the door,” he said after he’d swallowed.

She’d been reading, Alice answered, when the bell rang. She looked out to see a man in short-sleeved shirt and tie standing on the porch. He held a clipboard and wore a nametag, and nothing about him seemed threatening in the least. 

Walter nodded. “Have I told you about the Gaboon viper?”

“I believe you have, dear.”

“Describe him to me.”

“No, Walter. I—”

“The Gaboon viper is the among the most venomous snakes in the world. It hides in the mottled leaves of the African rain forest floor and is invisible to its prey.” He sliced another bite, then pointed his knife at her. “For all you know that man was hiding venomous intentions behind a clipboard. Yet you opened the door to him.” 

“He seemed very nice,” Alice said.

“Of course, you don’t know that, do you?”

“Plus, he’s not a threat to anybody, now that he’s dead.”

Walter shook his head sadly. “A home invasion happens every twenty seconds in this benighted nation. That man’s death may well have been Providence.”

—

After Walter left for work the next morning, Alice read the Gazette from front to back, but nothing described a Roger Sinclair dying on the streets of Sellersville.

She washed the dishes, then put on her coat and hat and walked to the Stop N’ Shop. If she’d waited for the weekend, Walter would have driven her there, sitting in the Honda as she stocked up on bread, coffee, and whatnot, but she was anxious to speak to someone about what had happened.

The sun was shining, and as she walked she looked pleasantly from side to side for a familiar face. Doris Froelich was deadheading her geraniums, though when Alice called to her the woman waved and went inside. The mailman passed across the street, but his scowling, harried manner had always frightened her.

When she arrived at the Stop N’ Shop she nodded at the manager, Mr. Pomeroy, but he was stocking fruit bins and, like the mailman, always seemed beleaguered by something. There was no one else she knew in the store, however, and she lingered near him several times before finally saying, “It’s a lovely day, if a bit cool.”

Pomeroy flinched—Alice wore soft-soled shoes because the house had pinewood floors, and Walter insisted on a quiet home—but he recovered immediately. “Hello, Mrs. Rooney,” he said. He wiped his forehead and nodded at a crate of tangerines on his cart. “It’s always something, hey?”

Alice interpreted his greeting to mean he didn’t have time for chitchat, but her heart was full from the past twenty-four hours—Roger Sinclair’s face going from affable to stricken in an instant, the squelchy sound his body had made when the EMTs placed him on a gurney, Walter not once asking if it was awful seeing someone die. 

“The most interesting thing happened to me yesterday,” she said.

Pomeroy looked left and right, then dried his hands on his apron. “And what was that, ma’am?”

“I was reading my magazine,” Alice began, “when the doorbell rang.” A twitch in the grocer’s eyelid said she should hurry to the meat of her story. “I looked out and saw a man with a clipboard.”

Pomeroy picked up a tangerine. 

“I opened the door, and he introduced himself,” she said quickly, “and then he dropped dead. On the spot. Before he could say another word.”

Pomeroy returned the fruit to its crate. “Are you talking about Roger Sinclair?”

Alice felt a great relief. “Yes, Roger Sinclair. Did you know him?”

“Of course, Mrs. Rooney. He was the local Democratic party chair. He lived in Foxwood Hills. Sellersville’s abuzz with it.”

Alice didn’t follow politics, and Walter thought the people in Foxwood Hills were a bunch of snoots. “It was a dreadful shock,” she said, though she couldn’t deny her disappointment. Everyone knew about Roger Sinclair. Pomeroy already spoke of him in the past tense. What had been the event of her lifetime had, from one moment to the next, become a detail the grocer would pass idly to friends. (“I talked to the lady whose house he stopped at. He died right in front of her.”)

“My husband,” she said dully, “was angry I opened the door to him.”

“For heaven’s sake, why?”

“Because,” Alice began, then paused. She’d been about to describe the Gaboon viper, but it came to her Pomeroy would think she was crazy. She remembered in that moment sitting in a doctor’s office with five-year-old Marianne and overhearing an old woman in the next examination room. “I can’t keep my wits about me,” the woman had said in a frail, weepy voice. “I have the strangest thoughts.”

Alice had seen that Marianne was listening, and later she’d told the little girl that people sometimes lose their bearings as they age. They’re sad and alone and wounded in spirit, and they become like someone drifting in a rowboat who realizes suddenly that the shore is far away, a storm is brewing, and there are no oars to row themselves back with.

“That woman was”—she’d liked the way the words sounded, so she said them again—“wounded in spirit.”

Now she looked Pomeroy in the eye. “He was angry because he feared that Roger Sinclair was like the Gaboon viper, a snake from the tropical rainforest that hides in dead leaves and attacks its prey when they least expect it.” 

When the grocer stared, she continued. “Walter thinks the world is a dangerous place, and I was foolish to open the door to someone I didn’t know.”

On her walk home, Alice wondered why she’d plunged ahead and told Pomeroy about the Gaboon viper, when her memory of the woman in the doctor’s office was clearly a warning from her subconscious mind to keep her mouth shut. 

She decided finally that the grocer’s look of blank astonishment was exactly the tonic she needed. She wasn’t crazy. Walter was. Pomeroy’s face had said it all.

—

Roger Sinclair’s obituary appeared in the next day’s Gazette, where he was lauded for his devotion to the Democratic party and his love for children. He’d been a successful Toyota salesman, customers said, because he was a straight shooter. He’d enjoyed golf and discussing politics with friends at his country club. He was survived by his wife Gail, his son Joel, and his adoring granddaughter Emily. 

He’d been sixty-one years old when he died, canvassing for votes before the city election. A memorial service would be held in two days at Labuzienski’s Funeral Home and, owing to the deceased’s affection for dogs, the family asked that donations be made in his name to the Humane Society. 

The photograph with the obituary must have been recent, because it looked much like the man at Alice’s door. Swarthy face, large teeth, hair rising from a gentle widow’s peak to a glossy crest, like a silverback gorilla.

When Walter was away, Alice often spoke aloud, usually in answer to the latest unpleasantness between them. “Nonsense,” she’d say, “that chicken breast was cooked to perfection,” or, “No other woman on earth irons her husband’s underwear.”

Now she said to the quiet rooms, “The Gaboon viper my foot.”

Far from being dangerous, Roger Sinclair was beloved, a man who liked dogs and children. She closed her eyes and struggled to come up with something that Walter liked.

Pistachios. He clearly liked pistachios. Not because he’d said so—he never said anything nice about anything—but because he became cross if she forgot to keep the pantry stocked with them.

The television show COPS. Again, he’d never declared affection for the program, but he watched it every night as he munched on his pistachios.

Alice rarely looked up from her romance novel when COPS was on, though now it came to her that the people in the show—angry, shirtless men; women with razors in their purses—validated Walter’s suspicions about the world. Wickedness was everywhere. It took only nighttime and alcohol and a policeman’s flashlight to drive it from its hiding place.

She read the obituary again. Today was Wednesday. The service would take place Friday, when Walter was at work. Labuzienski’s was ten blocks away, but Alice was used to walking when she needed to get somewhere. She would attend, telling family members that she and their husband/father/grandfather had been together at the moment of his death.

She spoke aloud once more, rehearsing what she would say to the widow, Gail Sinclair. “I was with Roger when he took his last breath.”

—

At the dinner table that night, Walter rustled his newspaper as Alice washed the dishes. “I see your man was a model citizen,” he said.

Alice felt a tingle in her bosom—a frisson, her novels called it—at the notion that Roger Sinclair was her man. She put Wednesday’s meatloaf pan in the rack. “I told you he was nice.”

Walter blew air through his nose as he had when Alice was sopping Roger Sinclair’s urine in the foyer. “First, we don’t know that he was”—Alice didn’t turn, though she knew he was making quotation marks with his fingers—“‘nice.’ And second, he was a country clubber and a car salesman. In other words, a snoot, a swindler, and, by the looks of his photograph, a womanizer.”

Whenever Walter said such things, Alice answered with a “Yes, dear,” or “That certainly makes sense.” This time she only smiled at her reflection in the window over the sink.

—

The next day, Alice went through her closet, choosing a gray skirt and black suede jacket for the viewing. She hadn’t worn the jacket in years but, because she suffered from irritable bowel syndrome and ate only a bite or two at meals, she hadn’t gained weight as she’d aged. When she tried it on, it sheathed her body like second skin.

Otherwise, she would wear her hair in a bun, sparse jewelry, light makeup. The dead man’s family didn’t know her from Eve, and the last thing she wanted to do was attract attention. Better to sit quietly, blend in, reveal herself when the time was right.

At the table that evening Walter frowned at her over Thursday’s pot roast. “What in the world are you so happy about?” he said.

Alice realized she was smiling again. “I was thinking,” she said, “about the Gaboon viper.” She stared at her husband as the grocer Mr. Pomeroy had stared at her. “Comparing a man on an Indiana street to a poisonous snake in Africa…well, if I were to pass your notions on to Dr. Simmons, he’d recommend locking you up somewhere.” 

Walter’s mouth fell open, and Alice made a trapped, peppery sound. It was meant to be a laugh but, because she was so out of practice, it came out like a sneeze.

—

Friday morning came. Alice dressed in skirt and bra and applied her makeup. She was a pale woman, partly because she rarely went out without a hat, and partly because her forebears had lived for millennia on cloudy, Irish hillsides. She remembered how swarthy Roger Sinclair had been at the door, and she applied a bit more rouge and lipstick than normal. When she’d finished, her lips were a modest red, her cheeks had an apple-ish glow.

She put on her blouse and suede jacket and studied herself in the mirror. No one had ever called her pretty, though both her mother and her sister had insisted she was “nice looking,” and once on a bus in Chicago, a stranger—Alice remembered a yellow tie and tobacco-stained fingertips—had called her “handsome.”

She set out on foot for Labuzienski’s. The sky was heavy, and rumbles of thunder accompanied her as she walked, and she scolded herself for not checking the forecast. Sellersville’s only bus went twice a day to Fort Wayne, but that was all, and the town was too small to support a taxi service. She might have asked Walter to delay leaving for work and drive her, but he would have fussed and lectured and, worse, perhaps come into the funeral home, crossing his arms as he waited, heaving great, martyred sighs.

Soon raindrops were slapping the sidewalk, and she ducked beneath the drug store’s alcove. A knock on the window startled her, and she turned to see the old druggist Mr. Ambrose waving her in, but she shook her head. Another woman might have stepped inside and told Mr. Ambrose she was on her way to her book club or the dentist, but Alice had never been able to spin a tale when the need arose. She would have ended up talking about Roger Sinclair and Walter and the Gaboon viper, and the prospect of doing so exhausted her.

She straightened her skirt, and then noticed large, mottled raindrop stains on her jacket. Dark at their centers, spattering outward, they resembled images from Walter’s Cops episodes, where a bullet’s passage or a blow to the head sprayed blood on a wall. She dabbed uselessly at them with a tissue, then sighed and waited for a lull.

“It’s not like anyone there will know me,” she said aloud, her voice echoing strangely beneath the shelter.

The storm eased, and she began to walk again, but then the skies opened, the stores gave way to houses, and she had no place to hide. Her hat sagged beneath the deluge, and strands from her bun trailed wetly down her cheeks.

She stepped off a curb and broke a heel on her pump, and though she searched briefly for it in the gutter, it wasn’t as if she could reattach a shoe’s heel in the rain, and soon she was galumphing along without. 

She imagined the picture she made. Makeup smeared, clothing awry. She recalled riding in the Honda in Fort Wayne—Walter at the wheel, little Marianne in the back seat—and seeing a woman and a man stumble from a tavern. The woman was heavily painted, with a high, thrusting bosom like the figurehead on a ship. She was weeping, and the man was shouting, “Not on your life!”

Marianne had piped up from behind, asking what they’d seen, and Walter had taken it upon himself to explain. “That woman,” he’d said grandly, “is a…she’s a…” 

Alice couldn’t remember the silly word he’d chosen—Hussy? Trollope?—but, despite the compassion she’d felt for the painted woman, she’d held her tongue.

When she arrived at Labuzienski’s, she found a ladies’ room and hurried inside. Her jacket was beyond salvation, but otherwise she primped and preened as best she could. As to her broken heel, she couldn’t very well go barefoot, but limping drunkenly among mourners was also impossible, so she slammed the surviving heel against the sink’s edge until it snapped off, transforming her pumps into misshapen flats.

The violence of the repair made her dizzy, and she sank onto the toilet seat, trying to remember what she was doing. 

Mere feet away, Roger Sinclair lay in repose. She hadn’t known him, nor did she know his widow Gail, his son Joel, his granddaughter Emily. When she revealed herself, they would stare at her as Mr. Pomeroy had stared, as the druggist Mr. Ambrose would also have stared, had she ducked in from the storm and told him about the Gaboon viper. 

Yet she and Roger Sinclair shared a bond no other woman could claim! She’d held him in her arms, put her lips on his, sponged his fluids from her threshold.

“If I were Gail Sinclair,” she said, “I’d want to thank that woman.” 

She stood, gave herself a final once-over, and stepped into the hallway. Soft music beckoned, and she followed liver-hued carpet to a room teeming with mourners and a forest of lilies and carnations.

The coffin was against a far wall, where Alice glimpsed Roger Sinclair’s stern profile above a satin pillow. She found a place in the line, dimly aware of whispers and curious glances. When it came her turn to stand over the body, she paused so long people behind her bumped and fretted like movie goers waiting at a ticket booth.

She barely recognized the man before her. In life, in the seconds she’d seen him alive, Roger Sinclair had been full of vigor and good will. In death—in a navy suit, tortoise-shell glasses, powdered cheeks—he was shrunken, annoyed, lips in a waxy pout.

He looked like any of a dozen men she knew. His silver hair might have belonged to the old druggist Mr. Ambrose, his frown to Mr. Pomeroy, his disappointed mouth to…to Walter. She stepped out of line and fell into a chair. A knot formed in her throat and swelled upward. Her eyes filled. Mourners passed in a watery haze.

“Is she family?” a woman whispered.

“Not likely,” a man whispered in return. “He didn’t have anyone besides Gail and Joel and the granddaughter.”

“Well, she’s obviously someone,” the woman said.

The man chuckled, lowering his voice further. “Roger had a lot of ‘someones.’”

Alice barely heard. “Get ahold of yourself,” she whispered fiercely. She was as pathetic as that woman in the doctor’s office, all those many years ago.

She wiped her eyes and stood. There, across the room, was the widow. Alice knew her from her brave smiles, from the young man at her elbow, from the little girl—it had to be the granddaughter Emily—squirming and yawning at the young man’s side. 

Alice threaded her way toward the trio, trying to remember the words she’d prepared. Her mouth went dry, her knees trembled. She recalled being moments from stepping onto the stage during a high school play—how had she had the courage to do such a thing?—and experiencing the same sensations. It was stage fright, the director had whispered, pushing her toward the footlights.

An old couple stood between her and the widow, and Alice thrust between them with such vehemence they stumbled. The widow flinched and stared. Without a smile, her face was small, wary—nose and mouth bunched at its center like a rabbit’s.

“I knew him…” Alice said, then bit her lip. That’s not what she’d practiced! “I was with your husband. I held him. I—"

“I know who you are, or rather what you are,” Gail Sinclair said. “Which one are you? April? Louise?”

Alice stammered, “I’m Alice…Alice Rooney. I was with Roger when—”

“I don’t care what your name is. How dare you show yourself here?”

Alice’s eyes became unmoored from her intentions, moving randomly from the widow to the son to the granddaughter. The little girl’s wide-eyed face reminded her again of Fort Wayne and Marianne and the painted woman outside the tavern. Alice had wanted to explain—That woman is lost, sad, like folks get sometimes—but Walter would have lectured about sloth and debauchery, and she’d only given a look of pity to her daughter and hoped it was enough.

Without knowing how she got there, she found herself outdoors and walking toward home—to her romance novels, to porkchop night, to Walter and his pistachios. The rain was still falling, and her broken shoes hurt her feet, so she kicked them off and made her way barefoot over the grit. The houses were dark beneath a purple sky, their windows empty as a dead man’s eyes. 

Then an urge struck her—as synaptic and careless as when a wild creature breathes or eats or ruts—and she spun and walked back to Labuzienski’s.

Inside, she followed the liver-hued carpet to the coffin room, where she wound through mourners to stand among the bouquets at Gail Sinclair’s elbow. She didn’t make a sound, though after a moment the widow turned, gaped, recoiled. 

“If you’d loved him like I did,” Alice said softly, “he wouldn’t have strayed.”

Bob Johnson lives and writes in South Bend, Indiana. His stories have appeared in The Common, Vol. 1 Brooklyn, American Fiction, The Barcelona Review, and elsewhere. His story “The Continental Divide” was named Short Story of the Year in The Hudson Review, 2019. He holds an MFA from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, and he has attended the Breadloaf and Kenyon summer workshops numerous times. You can find him on Twitter @WriterRLJ.

Judith Skillman is a painter, poet, educator, and editor. Her poems have appeared in Prairie Schooner, Shenandoah, Threepenny Review, Zyzyyva, and elsewhere. She is the author of more than twenty full-length collections of poetry, most recently, A Landscaped Garden for the Addict, Shanti Arts, 2021. You can learn more about her work at judithskillman.com.