Valhalla, Georgia

Crocodiles are easy. People are harder.
–Steve Irwin

In 2006, Steve Irwin was killed by a stingray. The Telegraph reports that he was stabbed hundreds of times by an animal roughly six-hundred-pounds and seven feet across, wing to wing. His cameraman said he passed peacefully, in shock.

In 2011, my father moves to Savannah. I decide to drive down. It is November. We keep the fireplace loaded, but it’s too warm to burn the wood. We should be celebrating. Dad has come back from six-months of rehabilitation in Jacksonville, where he gave his life to Christ.

Of course, my father says, it’s a process. There are setbacks. It may be that he will never have it whipped. Not forever. Religion allows for that. It is understanding. Redemption is a guarantee. And if you ever get a chance at a guarantee, my father says, you take it.

I am a shaman. This is not like a priest who communicates with God regularly and with certain privileges. Receiving a response. And it is not like a faith healer or snake handler who implores God to sooth an arthritic body or allow someone to speak in languages that no living person knows or else make animals calm. This is not even like actual Shamanism. I am a shaman where shaman means a person with the right idea. A godly idea, made for a singular purpose.

My purpose is to get my father into heaven. To this end, I have driven from my home in Alabama with three timber rattlesnakes in the backseat of my car, all of them tied in one pillowcase, kept without a meal for two days.

I have been granted a vision of the afterlife. I know how it works. The rich side and the quiet side. I know who goes where.

I believe I was granted this vision because my father and I watched Steve Irwin on television three nights a week, and because once, when I was four or five, we fed strips of fried chicken to three alligator whelps we were keeping in our cast iron tub. My father taped their mouths closed. Told me, “Get behind their ears.”

A few years later, we adopted a black racer named Pudge. It was an indoor-outdoor pet that lived, generally, beneath the roots of an oak in our front yard and, occasionally, on our screened porch, where my father and I planted snakes for Pudge to “hunt.” Usually garter and rat snakes. We’d stare from the dirt yard outside, crouched with our faces pressed to the screen, watching Pudge strike and coil, then inch his enemy down.

The morning I earned my driver’s license, my father leapt from our truck, sprinted twenty yards, and dove onto the back of a five-foot alligator. He said it was walking towards the road. He didn’t want it to get hit. We fit a dog collar around its neck and tied it to the bumper of my mother’s car. It was Mother’s Day.

As a child, I knew: heaven was wild. It was made for the wild. Everyone knew animals were wise. That in their silence was an unmatched intimacy with God, the planet, and certain truth. Steve Irwin met the animals in the wild, where he was bitten and stung with extreme presence. The closer a person was to animals, the closer they were to God.

I didn’t know what new kind of Jesus my father had signed on with, if not the wild one. When he was on the phone, I had a hard time knowing if he was drunk. I second-guessed my instincts, listening to him talk. I saw him fighting pythons in my sleep, and he spoke to me with a clarity I hadn’t heard for years while the snakes crushed his ribs. I had to drive to see him.

Now he tells me that over thirty percent of alcoholics die alcohol-related deaths. He’s watching the muted news while he speaks, slumped down in an easy chair and looking near dead already. I ask him if that isn’t like saying most knife fighters die from being stabbed? “This is a disease,” he says. “And it may kill me.”

Next he tries to give me things. His deer rifle. Some stiff dress shoes. A collection of novels by Louis L’Amour. The only book he reads now is the Big Book. I turn it all down.

We watch silent flood footage on the TV set. Men and women in the tops of trees. “That’s a mess,” my father says.

“Yeah.” For a moment, I’m twelve again and he’s working nights. Not coming home until the middle of the day. I don’t see him. We don’t talk. He leaves infrequent notes on the refrigerator that say, in block letters, I LOVE YOU or DID YOU EAT ALL THE LUNCH FISH? I consider that I have grown callous and unfair. I’m lucky to have him here, sober and with a project. Re-establishing his life. Getting to work regularly. Maybe I should be proud of that. It’s just that, all my life, he taught me to be proud of something else.

“Go and get us a Coke, son.”

I slip out to the car and retrieve the sack of snakes. They’re too dazed to strike the cotton anymore. With care, I empty the rattlers into the central hallway of my father’s house. They slither towards the living room, apprehensive of the carpeted floor. They know what to do. I’ve seen it a dozen times.

I walk back to the garage. “Dad,” I say. “Help me organize these tools?”

Do I want to kill my father? I want to save him. I want to jar him. After years of watching his decline—admiration turned to confusion to pity to contempt—I want to see him fight with something real. Something scaly. Something that will remind him of who he was. Call that Achilles back from whatever beach. Or kill him. Send his soul to Valhalla, Georgia.

I will thank the timber rattlers and shoo them outside while the cargo lamps of the Valkyries’ Dodge pickups light their approach into my father’s front yard. I’ll cry happy when they drop the tailgate and load him into the bed, then putter away to the land of deep woods and crushed oyster shell roads, and men who latch small lizards to their earlobes and noses, and hard fighting monster bass, big as dogs.

“Come on,” I say. “I don’t know where these tools go.” I hear the tortured spring of the easy chair as he stands, walks my way, lumbers into the dark hallway where the snakes are. Decide, I think. Choose to live.

“Great God!” he shouts. “There’s snakes in here! Three snakes.”

I hang my head around the corner to see him retreating, crow hopping over the carpet to his kitchen. “What kind are they?” I ask.

“Shit, I don’t know.”

“Did you check? Where is the light? Maybe they’re nothing. Could be garters.”

He comes back with a flashlight and shines the snakes, who are rattling sweetly, their brown backs agreeing with the carpet. Blending in. They form three, tight coils. Saying, Try us. Really, come try.

“Shit. It’s rattlers.”

“Seems like it,” I say. “Got a stick? We’ve moved worse.”

“Stick nothing,” he says. “We ought to call the police. Animal Control.” He starts checking his kitchen drawers.

“Have you seen my phone?” he asks. I watch him rolling open drawers and then, “Christ!” My father’s phone is slammed to the floor. I can see him stomping it to pieces. I wonder how close it came to his neck. How high he lifted the phone before he saw the brown recluse clinging to the case. A spider no bigger than a quarter, but able to send him to the higher plane to join Steve Irwin, wrestling alligators forever, nose-striking bull sharks, stalking misty valleys with every caveman killed by mammoth tusk.

Without belief in luck, I found the spider in the garage yesterday. It had a body the color of a pecan and fuzzy mandibles. Once, my father captured four in one day. We kept them alive and in separate jars at my school’s Nature Fair. We labeled our display King Killers, after the folk legend that Native Americans slipped the spiders into baskets of maize they were forced to cede to British colonists. A bite on the hand might take the whole arm.

“What is it?”

“Fucking spider.”

“Did it bite you?”

“No. My phone is wrecked. Call the police.”

“My phone’s dead,” I say. “Here.” I toss an oak limb over the snake pile. I chose it for the “L” bend at its end. The perfect tool for pressing the neck of a snake to the ground. “Get them with that.”

“Why don’t you do it?”

“I don’t know how,” I say.

My father leaves the stick on the floor and does a little panic dance while the snakes crawl towards the kitchen. Snake Raphael and Snake Michael. And this one here, stretching out towards my father’s bare feet, he is like Milton’s Abdale, who, though he was the least of the angels, struck Satan across the brow with a spear. Knocked him on his ass. I’m praying: Go on, little Abdale. Go!

But Dad tears open the rolltop breadbox. I didn’t know he kept a handgun in the kitchen.

“Stay in the garage,” he calls, and starts in on the rattlers, the gun deafening in the house, a sharp ringing fills my ears. The bullets score the floor. One puts a hole through the drywall when it bounces off the concrete floor. My father clips the heads from three snakes in five shots.

For the first time in shaman-hood, I am at a loss. I don’t know what to do. Maybe I had done enough.

“Christ’s sake.”

I collect the busted snakes from the floor. “You want me to save the rattles?” I ask. He’s breathing heavy, leaning on the kitchen counter. Says, “No, Son, no.”

*

When Steve Irwin died, I was already out of the house. My father was separated from my mother, living alone in a slouchy, tin-roofed place next to the peanut factory across town. That didn’t stop him from stumbling around her front yard at odd hours, picking up sticks and shed palm fronds until the deputy sheriff arrived. He had already tried to kill himself by driving his truck into a municipal dumpster, though, he said after, he had only fallen asleep at the wheel.

Soon after the accident, he called me. I was at a party in Atlanta and stepped outside. “I love you,” he said. His voice was shaky. Weepy. “I love you, too,” I said. There didn’t seem to be anything else coming. No other sentiment. He hung up soon after but called back a week later, sounding worse, to say the same. I figured it was just a matter of time before he ended it. Maybe that sounds hard hearted. What could I say?

“Steve Irwin died,” I told him the next time he called.

“Had it coming,” my father said. “That guy was a nut.”

That’s when the python dreams started. The snakes started hardening themselves into points in my head. I started to relive the old times with the alligators and the raccoons and all the other crawlies. I think it was because I wanted to understand. Clairvoyance.

When Steve Irwin left the world, it was like he dragged a film from over it, and I could see the connections between man and myth. I saw the loving contest of a man leaping onto a saltwater crocodile—for love. This is not a perfect union of understanding. Steve Irwin cannot talk with the animals, but he can rely on them. He can rely on their actions to be sincere. He can be sure that the animal wants to live. It was his joy to observe this will. In being near it, I believe it solidified his own will to live. To grow, to educate, to be thrilled.

Today, my father and I are cramped into a booth at the grocery store. We are eating fried chicken wings, green beans, mashed potatoes and brown gravy. “I mean, can you believe that?” he says. “Can you believe any of that?” He holds his hand up, makes the shape of a gun. “I mean I just dropped the sights down on them,” he says. “Pow.”

There’s some life in him. It’s more than I’ve seen in a while, but I’m not convinced. When I was young, he would have considered it cowardly to kill a snake—anything less than a diamondback. Now he’s celebrating. So excited. He’s spitting food across the table. He’s bearing down too hard with his fork and knife, sawing through the Styrofoam lunch tray.

“You didn’t have to shoot them,” I say. “You could have used the stick.”

“There were three rattlesnakes in the house, and you threw me a stick. Does that make any sense to you?”

“What about Pudge?” I say. “You caught him with your bare hand.”

“That was different. Non-venomous.”

“I’m just saying, you never shot them before.”

“Well, I didn’t see you jumping in,” he says. “I don’t know what I’ll do about my phone. I have to call my sponsor.”

I didn’t think about that. About that sort of recovery. I was thinking of death or glory. I was thinking of him bleeding a stop-and-go fountain from his foot, cut while we fought a storm on St. Catherines Sound. Nose to the waves, the wild rise and brutal fall. The cooler smashed and the boat’s deck sliding in blood and ice and bass and flounder. I don’t know how we made it home except he willed it so.

I have spring-boarded off my father’s example. Off his wages. I have gone to college and I have become someone who would probably not know my father, even when he was at his best. Even when he was catching peacocks with cast nets. Even when he was taking me trapping. We were selling raccoons so I could go to Kennedy Space Center on an overnight fieldtrip. I never asked if that humiliated him or if he was having as much fun as me, getting up early and drinking black coffee, checking the cages in secret places that only we knew. We let the possoms and stray cats and foxes go free, but hefted, like trophies, the fat, forty-dollar raccoons.

But now I see him, red-eyed over his chicken wings because we don’t have much to say to each other anymore, and I get red-eyed over mine, and I remember what a girlfriend of mine said after the Atlanta party call when I was praying he’d wander off like a dog and die. She said love doesn’t always look the same, year after year. It requires more of us as we age. It’s not the freely given, all-forgiving thing it used to be.

I am a shaman, and I have learned that love, and only love, can save us from the hell that’s coming. Love of bravery and goodness and things with sharp teeth. Heaven is wild, and you can’t go if you let your mistakes crush you under a bottle or in a car or quietly on the end of a telephone line with nothing to report but the day’s work.

“Come on,” I say. “Let’s go home.”

We pull into the front yard, and I start walking.

“Where are you going?” he asks.

“Come on and see this,” I say. “I see something moving.” I hop the fence girding the backyard, but he stays on the other side.

In the depths of the backyard, I lift the little brown tarp I stowed the animal under. A three-foot alligator thrashes left to right. It’s terrified, hissing and backed up against a skinny pine. There is no electrical tape holding this alligator’s mouth closed. Not anymore. Like a miracle, it appeared to me beneath the streetlight last night, come to save Dad’s life. I just hope it’s big enough.

I cut the rope that’s leashing the alligator. It lunges, snaps, misses. Thrashes out. Even with an animal this size, relatively small, my leg numbs where the tail connects with a slap.

“Dad,” I say. “I need you out here.” I can see my father on the far side of the fence, looking in at the alligator and me, moving over the grass, the gator making short rushes and stopping and me trying to circle around it and stay out of range, grabbing at its tail.

“I need your help,” I say.

“Get out of there!”

“Come help me. We’ll get him somewhere safe. Take off your shirt,” I say. “We’ll get it on his eyes.”

My father pulls off his t-shirt and walks through the metal swing gate. He joins me in the gator dance. The gator knows it too. It whips around to show its teeth. “Watch the tail,” my father says. “Get behind him. You remember how to do it?”

“No,” I say.

“Christ,” my father says. “I’ll put the shirt over his eyes. You’re going to have to jump on him. Press down on his head. Press down hard and hold the mouth closed. He’s not so big. He’s a teenager. Are you ready?”

“No,” I say. “I can’t do it. I need you to do it.”

“Shit, son. I’m old. Let’s leave it be. Let’s get in the house.”

I see my father lowering the shirt, see his belly heaving with his breath. See quitting on his sweaty face. The defeat. But I am a shaman.

I take a step back and sit on the ground.

“What are you doing?”

Eye-level with the alligator, it looks bigger. The eyes are cracked yellow and black, dry grass over Lincoln River. River of my youth.

“What are you doing?”

This gator has no idea where it is now or what part it has to play in my father’s salvation. It only knows itself. It only knows how unscrew my foot from my leg after it claps on. The gator is hissing. I believe what it’s saying.

“Get up!”

The gator makes its charge. Before it can snap onto my arm, my father dives onto its back. He slams the wad of his shirt over the bulges of the little alligator’s eyes. He bashes and grinds his elbow into the long head. He presses and grips the jaws closed with brown, leathery hands. He’s beautiful. He’s divine. He’s bleeding from somewhere, his nose, and crimson is smeared all across his face and dripping down his chin and over the alligator.

“Get up,” he says.

I fall to my back. Feel the Earth turn. See that the tree birds are pleased by our mortal goings-on. They are flitting from limb to limb, speaking in tongues, stretching brown thrush feathers against the cold, clear sky. They are rapt in praise and witness. They are descending to join us. Winged Valkyries all around.