The Gold Diggers by Paul Monette Page B

and they mouthed each other like divers breathing out of hoses down among the reefs. They went over on one side, then on the other, and reached the point where it was all technique, no room for who they were to each other.
    Sam heard it first, like a film threading through a projector, and he felt a rush of lust at the thought of him and Nick cavorting on camera. They were lying half on the bare floorboards, half on the hearthstone, a single slab greasy with soot and the sputtering of meat. In the fireplace, andirons strong as truck axles held up a couple of half-burned logs. From a long hook at one side hung a cast-iron pot. Someone had taken the ashes away and swept. The snake was curled beneath the logs, the rattled tail in plain sight, about a foot and a half from Sam’s head.
    Nick knew right away, and he spit Sam out and gasped, as if he had to come up for air. Then froze. Sam might have figured it out too late if the change in Nick hadn’t hit him. He had to freeze, too, right away. Because the rattlesnake was moving. But when it did hit him what it was, he was horror-struck and went into a sort of spasm. Nick was still holding him around. He clamped Sam closer, and it seemed to still the shaking like a tourniquet. Buried as they were between each other’s thighs, they were blind. They could only follow it by the rattle, and then, as it glided toward Sam, by the sandpaper sound it made on the fireplace floor.
    It was as if the snake knew he had the upper hand, because he got out of the fireplace and, staying close to Sam, passed along the whole length of his body in a slow sleepwalk. He mulled the killing over. The noise that snapped him awake under the logs and filled his cheeks with vengeance on his enemies had ceased. He did a turn at Sam’s feet and readied for a strike, but he didn’t deign to make the first move. Let the beast breathing hard on the floor move a muscle, though, and he’d spring, mouth gaping, into the nearest swell of flesh, the calf or the buttock.
    In an instant, the sweat began to pour out of Nick and Sam. Between their torsos, hearts knocking hard to be let out and flee, the sweat had them boiling with the heat until they thought they would suffocate. The rattle came now like a drummer biding time with a light, long roll. Nothing happened. Any other time, Nick and Sam could have fallen off to sleep in that position, but now the need to hold still even a minute longer made them shudder and cramp and beg to run. It was only twenty seconds, thirty at most, since they’d first noticed something wrong, when the snake cocked the trigger and got them covered. But already they were like two men on a tiny lifeboat who don’t trust one another with the tiller or the gun. Nick took over, and he cradled Sam in his arms while he tried to figure out what to do when the worst happened. Sam was more scared, and not just because he was closer to the snake. It was a death tied to a nightmare. Unable to even look it in the face, forced to take it in the back, he seemed to be delirious with fever, toxic, as if the venom already bubbled in his blood. And he didn’t turn to Nick. Though Nick held on and would have let him know it was happening to both of them—at least that—Sam didn’t believe in anyone. There was no safety in numbers.
    â€œCan’t you do something?” he whispered.
    â€œI am .” They might have been talking through a two-way radio. The sound was barely audible, but not the pitch of feeling and the tone of voice. “From here on, Sam, it’s all luck.”
    â€œWhat’s it going to do?”
    â€œIt’ll go away. Don’t move,” Nick said. He didn’t believe the one thing and sent the other up as a plea to all of them. Don’t move, something kept saying very clearly in his head, and he meant the two of them and the snake, but a part of him meant the whole world, too.
    The rattle’s last effect was out