Chapter Two
The Serpent Story
Representative Alfred Alongo had time off. It was the Christmas season. He took his wife and two small children on a nature walk along the east rim of the Lake Okeechobee dike, close to what you could call a country-western RV park, or another redneck Riviera. The park sat out in the giant lake on a piece of dry land called Torry Island.
There was a one-lane bridge for cars to take turns crossing to and from the island, but Alfred parked on the east side before the bridge and led his family and family dog north on the dike to a more private spot, telling his children every other step of the way about the benefits of walking. Alfred was a state representative for Palm Beach County and was so well known and recognized by the public that people were always pestering him for conversation. This Christmas weekend, he wanted private time with the wife and kids.
They walked about a mile. They intended to fish and had their cane poles, bobbers, and a jar of crickets to catch the bream and blue gills the lake was full of. The children, six and seven, acted afraid of the water when a four-foot alligator tore off from the shallows by the edge where Alfred wanted to fish. So Alfred, a short, narrow-shouldered, slightly built man, waded into the water up to his knees to assure them it was safe.
A large snake, a female python with camo markings, blind in one milky eye, lay in the reeds; she had been trying to ambush the small gator that had left in a hurry. Alfred’s little dog had been in his lap with its head out the window on the drive out, and when the snake got a whiff of dog smell on Alfred, she came out of the reeds like a bullet.
She grabbed a love handle around Alfred’s middle—python jaws are strong enough to drag a grown deer into the water—threw two coils around the representative that felt like a big, cold hand, and wrapped her prehensile tail around a small pond apple tree in the water. The cold hand belonged to a two-hundred-pound, twenty–foot, half–Burmese, half–Indian rock python—a half–breed that moved faster and was meaner than the more plentiful pure Burmese python found in the Everglades.
Chapter 2 continues in the full book…