Everyone on Eleme Street had Baba Fyneface's number saved under one name SNAKE.
Not Fyneface, not Mr. Ihenacho, not even Baba, just SNAKE, in capital letters, because when the day came and on Eleme Street, in the rainy season, the snake always comes and nobody wants to waste time scrolling their phone for his number.
The call usually goes the same way. A woman's voice, too calm, the specific calm of someone standing very still. "Baba, it's under the freezer." or "Baba, my son said there's something behind the water drum, and he won't stop crying," or once, memorably, at 2 a.m.: "Baba, I don't want to alarm you, but I think it's in the ceiling, and I think it's been in the ceiling for some time."
He always said the same thing back. "I'm coming. Don't kill your generator, I need the light."
Baba was sixty-two years old, he always walk with a stick for his bad knee, and has been catching snakes off Eleme Street and the surrounding blocks since before most of the street's current residents were born. He did it for free, mostly, sometimes a neighbor would pressed a few notes into his hand, sometimes a plate of jollof rice would appeared at his gate the next morning, unexplained, and he understood this to be a payment too. His wife had stopped asking him to quit around year eleven. "God kept you alive this long doing this," she said. "I'm not going to argue with God."
Tonight it was the Adeyemi's house. A green mamba, by the daughter's description, though the daughter was fourteen and had described the neighbor's lizard as a crocodile the previous summer, so Baba Fyneface kept an open mind as he ducked through the low doorway with his catch-pole and his torch and his one good flashlight, the other having died two ceilings ago.
It was, in fact, a green mamba. Curled behind the refrigerator, in the warm dark where the compressor hummed, in exactly the spot a sensible snake would choose on a cold night.
The family stood crowded in the doorway behind him, the mother, father, their fourteen year old daughter, a smaller boy who kept trying to peer around everyone's legs for a better view, delighted rather than afraid, the way small boys often are about the things that should frighten them most.
"Everybody should go outside," Baba Fyneface said, not turning around.
They all went outside, he was alone with the refrigerator and the hum and the snake, which had gone very still in the way that meant it was aware of him and deciding what to do about it, which was, Baba Fyneface always thought, the worst moment not the strike, if it came, but the deciding.
He had been bitten twice in forty years. Once by something that turned out, thank God, to be harmless. Another by something that was not, and he had spent nine days in the General hospital and had not, to this day, told his wife the full truth of how close it was.
He lowered the pole.
"I'm not here to hurt you," he told the mamba, in the low, unhurried voice he used for this part, the part nobody watching ever understood, that you did not rush a frightened animal, you gave it a story to follow, a way out that felt like the snake's own idea rather than a trap. "I know it's warm back there. I know. But this is not your house."
It took eleven minutes. It felt, as it always did, like considerably longer. When the pole finally closed around the body, firm, unhurried, no sudden movement to panic it further, Baba Fyneface exhaled through his nose and did not allow his hand to shake until the snake was safely bagged, and even then, only a little, only where no one could see it.
He carried it out through the front room. The family had crowded back in from the yard, and the small boy said, in the awed voice of someone who has just watched a magic trick, "Baba, aren't you scared?"
"Every time," Baba Fyneface said.
"Then why do you do it?" he persisted
He considered the question the way he considered most questions from children, which was seriously, because they were usually the only ones still asking the real ones. He thought about the nine days in hospital. He thought about the eleven minutes just now, and the particular silence of a house waiting to find out if a man was going to walk back out of it. He thought about how, if he didn't come, someone else in this house would have to try, the father, maybe, with a cutlass and no idea what he was doing, and how that story tended to end much worse than his did.
"Because somebody has to," he said, "and I've had more practice being scared than anyone else on this street."
He refused the money the owner of the house tried to press on him, as he always do and only accepted the flask of tea the wife pushed into his free hand instead, as he always do, and walked home under the humming streetlight with a bagged mamba over one shoulder and his bad knee complaining with every step, already half-listening, out of old habit, for his phone.
It rang again four days later. He was in the market, choosing tomatoes.
"I'm coming," he said, before the woman on the other end had even finished saying his name. "Don't kill your generator, I need the light."
Image is ai generated.