he sign said "The Largest Live Rattlesnake Exhibit on the Planet," so of course I had to go.

"How you?" asks the man at the entrance. We'll call him Clete. "What brings you to these parts?" Clete has a scruffy white beard and aviator sunglasses. He's a big man, with rough dirty hands and camouflage pants. He is smoking.

"Your sign," I say, stepping inside. "Now how do you know you have the largest exhibit on the planet?"

Clete takes a drag. "Cause I know snakes and I know the snake business and I know I got the biggest exhibit of rattlers. Species that is."

The inside is small, kind of like a converted garage. The walls are lined with glass tanks, maybe 30, with one rattler each. They're smaller than I expected, like garden snakes except for the big Diamondbacks, fat eight-foot coils of heavy-breathng snake.

"Where'd you get these?" I ask.

"Caught 'em," says Clete.

"No you didn't," I say, because Clete seems the kind to pull your leg, if you know what i mean.

So Clete steps toward me with his forefinger out, his grimy black forefinger, the nail ringed with mud, and that's when I see the bite, like a hardened blister above the knuckle.

"How many times have you been bit?" I ask.

"Three times."

"You're not scared of them?" I ask, because my mind is engaging in fantasies where all the glass tanks shatter and the snakes slither down to my feet.

Clete shrugs. "You're more likely to get killed by a pit bull than a rattler. You're more likely to get killed by a postman."

I am thinking that Clete would make a good photo. Right underneath the entrance, where it says "Rattlers and Reptiles." A real Texas character, Clete. And I could take the picture, and then show it to my friends, and they would laugh and think about my adventures and how I'm a good photographer and stuff.

"So can I do you for anything else?" Clete asks, and I think about the photo, which I suddenly really want, but now it feels creepy and weird. Exploitative. Like we'd be laughing at Clete, all grizzled and wizened and craggy, the old Texas coot, the ol' codger, the Crazy Snake Guy. Oh God, I'm doing that thing again.

So I just ask Clete for directions to Albuquerque, and I shake his dirty hand with my dirty hand, and I go on my way. But man, he would have made a good picture.

(I write this in Santa Fe, at probably the last Internet portal I'll have for a week. I'm headed to Mount Zion and Bryce Canyon in southern Utah. See you in Vegas.)