When we got back to the hotel we sent Noah right back out to the qwiktrip for beer and candy. We ended up just giving him all our cash because we kept thinking of delicious things. Get Reese's Pieces, but only if you also get plain M&Ms. Oh, and Snickers. And Twix. He headed out and we yelled down the hall, Kit-Kat! Heath! We ran to the window and waited until we saw him down in the parking lot. ALMOND JOY! He waved and we could hear him laughing at us.
We lay on the beds and watched terrible television. When Noah came back he was laughing again, out of breath, hysterical. He laughed so hard he hurt himself and then lay there and moaned.
Finally he told us. He'd been standing in line holding three kinds of beer and eighteen pounds of chocolate behind a guy who was buying a fireplace log. The guy paid and left the store, Noah stepped up and paid for his loot and also left the store. This gives you the two of them walking away from the store, Noah about 20 feet behind the other dude.
So Noah was enjoying the stroll, enjoying the evening. It was a nice night, warm and breezy, and even the walk from the stupid convenience store to the stupid hotel was nice, mostly due to the sweet sea air and the canopy of viny, spanish-mossy trees hanging over the sidewalk. And then a snake dropped out of a tree and landed on my brother's face!
Noah's not squeamish about any creepy animal but he is practical enough to know that you don't want to fuck around with an unknown variety of snake on your FACE in the dark. So he snapped into the set of gyrations I imagine anybody would do in this situation. The snake could have been grabbed and flung, had he used his hands, but his hands were busy holding bags full of candy and beer, and he hadn't had time to think this through, but, he said, I do not drop beer.
So he was doing the jerky freakout (I like to imagine those horrifying plastic wiggly guys at car dealerships, with the stream of air blown up inside them to make them epileptic for Subarus) when the guy who bought the log heard the commotion and turned around and said, Hey, you ok? And my brother just yelled SNAKE! so the guy came running and said I'LL KILL IT WITH MY LOG! and he whonked my brother on the shoulders and back until the snake was on the sidewalk and then, still yelling, he smashed it with the log until the log was in little pieces and the snake was no longer moving.
They both stood there panting and looking down at all the bits on the sidewalk and that's when they both realized that it had not been a snake at all, it had been a bendy piece of vine that had fallen out of the tree onto my brother's head. Noah offered to buy the guy another log but he just shook his head, disgusted, and walked away.
It was months before Noah would admit that no part of this story was true. Well, he says, ok there was a guy who bought a log.
