Brian is sure it was an American alligator. He describes the vivid markings as though he can see them still. Kevin is equally certain that it was a caiman, which is a type of small crocodile. I suppose Kevin should know since he was the one who dropped down into the enclosure outside the reptile house at the National Zoo and kidnapped one of its 4-foot-long inhabitants in the dead of night.
My mother’s goal was to fill her house with living things. Children were the first order. But she also took in dogs, birds, turtles, rabbits, and hamsters. And Mom imbued her children with a love of all living things.
Kevin started with a box turtle named Timothy. When Kevin was eight years old, he read that box turtles hibernated for the winter. He dug a hole in the backyard just before Thanksgiving and put Timothy in it. He covered the turtle with an inverted clay pot and some dirt. He placed a stone — definitely not a headstone — on top of it, so he would know where to find Timothy in the spring.
Easter came in late March the following year. And on Holy Saturday, Kevin decided it was time to resurrect Timothy. He got a shovel out of the garage and removed the stone marker. He gingerly dug into the earth, circling around the turtle until he could lift Timothy gently out of his winter retreat.
Kevin set Timothy down on the grass, several of us watching to see if this event would require a more traditional burial. After about five minutes, Timothy lifted one of his dirty feet and then another. Kevin figured the turtle would be hungry when he woke up, so he had some celery leaves and a few earthworms at the ready. Timothy slowly made his way over to his breakfast and began to eat.
It wasn’t a complete surprise then that when Kevin was a teenager, he brought home a boa constrictor and kept it in a 30-gallon terrarium in our unfinished basement. He and Brian found a guy named Miller a few blocks away who sold fish, tropical plants and a host of reptiles out of his basement. Soon they had another boa and a couple of small caimans, each of them no more than two feet long.
When Kevin came to the kitchen for dinner, he set the boa on the table, and the snake wrapped itself around the base of the lazy Susan, barely perceptible. My mother wasn’t overly fond of having the snake join us for dinner, but she was flexible, not unlike the snake.
Mom was not pleased when one of the boas lifted the top of the terrarium and slithered its way to freedom. Once she found one hanging from a pipe over the washing machine. Another time she was greeted by a snake sunbathing on the window ledge when she was on her knees weeding a flower bed.
It was a surprise, though, when Mom walked down into the basement one summer morning to find a 4-foot reptile with a fairly long jawline in a blue plastic kiddie pool outside the laundry room. As she scrambled eggs for Kevin and Brian a half hour later, she remarked that one of the caimans had gotten very big. Yeah, Kevin said, I’ve been giving him a lot of meat. Mom was unfazed.
Several months before, Kevin noticed that the outdoor enclosure next to the reptile house at the zoo was filled with caimans, varying in size from three to six feet. One night he was talking to some friends about how cool it would be to have one. His friends were all in. They rode to the zoo one Friday evening in two cars and parked on the side street off Connecticut Avenue just south of the zoo. The others waited while Kevin, Mike, and Steve went into the park.
While the zoo was still open, the boys hid in a ditch in the buffalo enclosure not far from the pedestrian entrance. At eight o’clock, a guard rode by in a golf cart to lock the gate. After he drove away, the trio climbed out of the ditch and headed for the reptile house. It was a moonless night, and they hadn’t realized how hard it would be to find their way in the dark. Finally, they came to the reptile house.
Kevin climbed over the enclosure wall and landed with a thud. Caimans scattered, mostly into the moat that edged the enclosure on three sides. One four-foot caiman ran to the wall of the building. Kevin was able to grab him just behind his head and across his stomach. He handed the small beast to Mike and went back over the wall. They wandered in the dark, looking for an exit and found themselves at the car entrance to the park, which had tall iron gates — closed and locked.
Mike and Steve shimmied under the gate, and Kevin handed them the croc. Kevin slid under, and they handed it back to him. As they walked the block and a half to the car, people strolling up and down Connecticut Avenue were clearly curious about their cargo, but no one stopped them. Not even to chat.
The caiman lived with us for several months, eating raw beef and occasionally escaping the confines of his kiddie pool and surrounding chicken wire fence. Kevin hauled a large rock into the basement and put it in the pool. He found a grow bulb fixture and clamped it to a chair nearby. The light warmed the rock and made a nice spot for the creature to sunbathe. He says the little croc was fairly easy to hold if you grabbed him in a way that made it impossible for him to turn his head or open his jaws. Apparently, the muscles that open their jaws are much weaker than the muscles that close them.
After about six months, I realized he deserved better accommodations, Kevin says. I sold him to Miller for twenty bucks. He knew this came nowhere near covering what he’d spent for meat, but the caiman would have a better home and would continue to thrive.
A couple of decades later, Brian was at the bar of the Knights of Columbus in Silver Spring. The bartender, Gerry O’Neill, was one of many enterprising Irish men and women who came to America to make money. He married my sister-in-law Geraldine’s first cousin, Nell Foley. Gerry worked two 40-hour jobs as a building engineer. He also picked up side work on the weekends. That night, he told Brian about coming to our house to work on the furnace years before: When I went down to the basement, I thought to myself, Why is there a kiddie pool in the basement? So, I walked over and looked into the pool. There was a f—king monster in it!
Coda: The sad ending to the tale of Timothy is that a few days after he was resurrected, my mom got into her car in the garage next to our house and began to back down the driveway. Timothy, enjoying his new-found freedom had spent most of the morning traveling across the yard and down the driveway. My mom rolled her right rear tire over the poor guy. Winter couldn’t kill him, but the car did him in. We had a proper burial and repurposed the rock that indicated his hibernation spot to cover his final resting place.
Life of Reillys 