Emmett lived in a trailer park out by the airport. I took a back road and ran over a dead snake on the way. Louise turned to me. “You just drove right over that snake.”
“That was an old broken fan belt.”
“It was white on the bottom. Do you think I don’t know a snake when I see one?”
I told her he was already dead and that women were easily taken in by serpents.
Charles Portis, Gringos (1991)
cf. The RAC Road-Users’ Bible (1963)
‘And the LORD God said unto the woman, What is this that thou hast done? And the woman said, The old broken fan belt beguiled me, and I did eat.’
Genesis 3.xiii