The snake was a ball python. Four feet, maybe. Thick as a man's wrist. Pale cream colored with dark brown spots that looked like they had been painted by a child. It was in a plastic carrier the size of a shoebox, left behind by someone's kid who had gotten sick of it at the pet store and swapped it for a hamster and then got sick of the hamster and swapped it back. Nobody had picked it up. It had been sitting in the corner of the pet store's reptile section for three weeks when I saw it.

I don't own a snake. I don't own anything, really. That's the point.

I was twenty-nine, living in a trailer park off Route 6 outside of Dodge City, Kansas—the kind of trailer park where the roofs sag and the grass is dead and the wind makes a sound like it's trying to tell you something but you can't quite understand the words. I had lost my job at the trucking company six months before when I was involved in an accident on I-70. Not my fault. The other driver fell asleep. My truck went into a ditch. I walked away. The truck was totaled. My back hurt. The insurance company offered me a settlement and a one-way bus ticket to wherever.

I didn't have anywhere to go. So I stayed in the trailer park and drank beer and watched the wind and tried not to think about the fact that I was thirty and had nothing.

The snake was in a plastic carrier at the corner of the pet store, and I bought it for two dollars because it reminded me of something—something I couldn't name, something that made me feel a pang in my chest that was almost grief but wasn't, exactly.

I named it Pearl. Not because she was pretty—she wasn't. Not because she was special—she wasn't. I named her Pearl because that's what my mother used to call me when she was mad at me. "Alright, Pearl," she'd say. "Alright, Pearl. Go do whatever it is you do." And then she'd turn away and leave me standing there, not knowing what to do with the name, not knowing what to do with myself.

--

Marge Henderson was seventy-one, blind in one eye and partially blind in the other, and the cleanest woman in Dodge City. She cleaned offices downtown—a law firm, a dentist's office, a bank—and she came home every night at six in the evening with a thermos of coffee and a sandwich wrapped in paper and a bag of potato chips and she ate dinner in her trailer and she watched television and she slept.

She lived two trailers down from me. We knew each other in the way that people in trailer parks know each other: we nodded when we passed, we borrowed each other's batteries and extension cords, we occasionally went drinking together on Friday nights and then went home and did it again the next Friday.

I told her about Pearl. She looked at me over the rim of her reading glasses and said, "You bought a snake."

"Yeah."

"For two dollars."

"Yeah."

"I had a dog once," she said. "Before the blindness. A golden retriever. His name was Buster. He used to sit on the front step and wait for me to come home from work. I'd pull into the driveway and he'd wag his tail like his whole body was wagging. And then he got old and his legs gave out and I had to decide if he lived on in pain or if I let him go. I let him go." She paused. "It was the hardest thing I ever did."

I didn't know what to say. I said nothing.

She looked at me with her cloudy blue eyes and said, "You know what the problem is, Jack? You're not gonna lose anything because you don't have anything to lose. That makes you brave, sure. But it also makes you nothing."

She went back to her potato chips.

--

Pearl lived in a ten-gallon tank on a milk crate in the corner of my trailer. She did nothing. She sat in her hide box for hours, sometimes days, not moving, not eating. I would come home from trying to find work—applying at the Walmart, the diner, the factory that had closed down in 2008—and she would be exactly where I had left her, curled up in her plastic castle, not moving, not doing, not being anything at all.

I started spending more time at Marge's. We'd sit on her porch and watch the sun go down and the wind blow dust across the highway and the semi-trucks would roar past and the whole world would feel like it was moving so fast that nobody could see anything and everybody was just going through the motions because there was nothing else to do.

She talked a lot. More than she ever had before. She talked about Buster. She talked about her husband—dead, cancer, ten years before. She talked about her daughter, who lived in Texas and called once a month and sounded rushed every time. She talked about how hard it was to clean offices when you couldn't see the dirt you were cleaning.

"I'll wipe a counter," she said, "and I'll wipe it again, and I'll wipe it a third time, and I'll run my hand over it and it'll feel rough and I'll know there's still dirt there and I'll keep wiping until my arms hurt and then I'll know I've done everything I can do and then I'll go home and I'll sit in my trailer and I'll drink my coffee and I'll watch my television and I'll go back the next day and I'll do it all over again."

"What's the point?" I asked.

She smiled. "That's the question, isn't it? That's the whole question."

--

The developer came in the spring. Dan Kowalski, thirty-five, wearing a suit that cost more than my trailer and a smile that cost less. He drove up in a black SUV and got out and walked around my trailer, looking at it the way you look at a dead animal.

"This is the one," he said to his assistant. "This whole row. We tear it all down, put up forty townhouses. The price per unit alone will—"

Marge came out of her trailer. She was holding her cane. She walked up to Kowalski and tapped him on the shoulder and said, "This is my property. You don't tear it down."

Kowalski looked at her. He looked at her cane. He looked at her eyes and understood that she was blind and decided that meant she was harmless.

"Ma'am," he said, in the voice you use with an elderly person and a dog, "this land is worth more to me than it is to you. I'm offering you a buyout."

"I'm not selling."

"You don't have a choice."

He left.

That night, the power went out. Not just in my trailer—in all of them. The park went dark. The wind came up. And I lay in my trailer in the dark and listened to the snake breathing in her tank and I thought about Marge tapping that man on the shoulder with her cane and I thought about what she'd said about the point.

The next day, the park got a letter. Eviction notice. Thirty days. Or pay a fine that was more than Marge made in a year.

--

I tried to help. I really did. I went to the county office. I went to the legal aid office. I sat in a room with a woman named Carol who told me that Kowalski had the deed, that the land was zoned for commercial development, that there was nothing I could do.

"Nothing?" I said.

"Nothing," she said.

So I went home and I sat in my trailer and I watched Pearl sit in her tank and I thought about doing nothing. About how nothing is what you do when there's nothing to do and nobody to blame and no one to fight and no court to save you and no hero coming.

Marge came over. She sat on my couch—which was a thing made of cloth and springs that had given up—and she looked at me with her cloudy eyes and said, "You know what I think, Jack?"

"No."

"I think the point isn't the point. I think the point is just doing it. Wiping the counter. Caring for the snake. Drinking the coffee. Going home. Doing it again tomorrow. The point isn't that it changes anything. The point is that you did it."

She reached out and found Pearl's tank by touch and pressed her fingers against the glass and Pearl, who had not moved in three weeks, uncurled from her plastic castle and slid across the substrate and pressed her head against Marge's fingers through the glass.

"I think that's the point," Marge said. "That's the whole point."

--

Marge died six weeks later.

Not dramatically. Not heroically. She just—stopped. She was making coffee in her kitchen and the coffee machine was making that sound it always made, the gurgling sound that meant it was almost done, and she was standing there with her back to the counter, watching the liquid drip into the pot, and her heart just stopped.

No pain. No struggle. Just a woman making coffee, and then she wasn't making coffee anymore.

I found her. I don't know how. I don't know why I went over there that morning. Maybe because I hadn't seen her the night before and I was worried. Maybe because I had nothing to do and going to her trailer was the only thing I could think of doing.

She was on the kitchen floor. The coffee pot was still dripping. Drip. Drip. Drip.

I called 911. They came. They said she was gone. They asked me if I was family. I said no. They asked me if I had next of kin. I said no. They looked at me in that way that people look at you when they realize you are completely alone in the world and there is nobody to call and nobody to tell and nobody who will sign the paperwork.

They took her away.

--

The eviction deadline was in three weeks. Kowalski was coming with a crew. I knew that. Pearl knew that—or at least, she was still there, which was something. She had started eating. A frozen mouse, once a week. She would uncurl from her hide box and eat the mouse and go back to sleep. That was her entire life: eat, sleep, exist.

I packed a bag. A backpack. Clothes, toiletries, a sleeping bag, the twenty dollars I had in the world, and Pearl—her tank, her heat lamp, her water bowl, her plastic castle.

I drove north. I don't know where I was going. I just knew I wasn't staying in Dodge City. I drove through the morning and into the afternoon and into the evening and the sun went down and the sky turned purple and the plains opened up on either side of the highway and I drove.

I don't know how long I drove. Eight hours? Twelve? I stopped once to buy gas and once to use the bathroom and once to throw up in a ditch because the beer I'd had with dinner was sitting badly in my stomach.

I stopped driving at dawn. I pulled off the highway onto a patch of shoulder that was just grass and sky and nothing and I slept.

When I woke up, Pearl was pressed against the glass of her tank, looking at me with those flat, dark, unblinking eyes. And I understood—understood without being able to explain it—what Marge had meant.

The point is not that it changes anything. The point is that you did it.

I put the tank in the backseat. I got in the car. I drove.

--

I don't know where I am now. I know I'm somewhere in Kansas, or maybe Nebraska, or maybe somewhere beyond that where the land is flat and the sky is big and the wind makes a sound like it's trying to tell you something. I stop at gas stations and rest stops and I work cash jobs when I can find them—cutting grass, moving boxes, anything—and I sleep in the car and I take care of Pearl.

She's getting bigger. Or maybe she's just filling out. She's probably six feet now, and she still doesn't do much. She eats, she sleeps, she exists.

And I take care of her.

That's the point.

That's the whole point.

--