Lizard World Read Online Free PDF Page A

foot python, was coiled as inertly as a garden hose. As he dropped the bunny in the snakepit, he thought of all the thankless times he’d shoveled out the gator pens and conducted three shows a day at the Snake house. Some day he’d show Uncle Earl and then he’d be sorry. These were the sad thoughts Lemuel Lee was having as he watched the bunny hippety-hop ever closer to the drowsy python.

    Back at the surgery, the alligator and Komodo Monitor lay on adjacent operating tables while Uncle Earl stood nearby in his green mask and gown. Beside him, on a small table, his scalpels lay neatly lined up on a white cloth.
           “You feed the python?”
           “Yep,” grumbled Lemuel Lee.
           “Cleverest of all the beasts of the field,” said Uncle Earl, who was always quoting Scripture.
                              

    Chapter III.
        In which the dragon lives again.

    As Uncle Earl made his first incision between the eyeballs of the Komodo monitor, his memory drifted back to the hot August day in 1918 when he’d watched his daddy perform a similar operation involving a cottonmouth snake and a gila monster. It must have been a hundred degrees in the shade that day -- and the fact that he was watching his daddy perform surgery in a closed-up tent filled with elephant shit didn’t make things one whit better. Ever since that distant day, which was the day of his father’s great discovery, Uncle Earl had known that he, too, was favored with the gift.
           Pushing down hard on the scalpel so it would cut through two inches of muscle, Uncle Earl finished the first cut at the left eyeball and then began a second cut at a right angle to the first. He knew that once he had a good flap, he could pull it back to the skull and get down to the real work.
           “Gimme that small scalpel, willya boy?”
           “Ain’t you gonna cut the gator, too?” said Lemuel Lee.
           “Jes’ shut up and gimme the scalpel.”
           That day in 1918 had been a breakthrough in medical history. Only a genius could have pulled off that kind of thing. No one except his daddy had been able to do it, which is why they’d laughed at him and called him a goddamn liar. No matter what everyone had said, Uncle Earl had seen it with his own eyes and remembered that Webbs’ Wonder of the World had lived a full three months, long enough to get them through until Fat Flora was signed up as a good replacement.
           Uncle Earl’s daddy, Big Jake Frobey, had travelled as a veterinarian with the Webb Brothers’ Bigtop Circus. Not being a very big circus, Webb Brothers mostly set up at county fairs, where they offered lions, tigers, acrobats, freaks of nature and whores. When Uncle Earl’s father wasn’t delivering elephant babies or getting stinking drunk, he was usually hanging out with the freaks of nature, with whom he felt a special kinship. The fabulous Tucci Brothers, those poor twins attached at the trunk and sharing the same rectum, were Jake’s closest personal friends.             So when they died in the flu epidemic of 1918, Big Jake suffered a great personal loss. Uncle Earl remembered very well how his father had moped about for weeks, barely ever sleeping, nearly drinking himself to death. The strange thing was that Big Jake’s misfortune had also proved a blessing. Pushed into coming up with a new act, he’d been given an opportunity to discover the extraordinary talent that, until then, he simply hadn’t known he possessed. Many great inventions are born of necessity and Big Jake’s great discovery after the death of the Tucci Brothers was no exception.
           Uncle Earl’s earliest memories were of his father’s animal experiments in the small, smelly veterinary tent pitched near the big top. Most of those experiments were dismal failures, of course, but that operation in 1918 had been one of those rare occasions