Page 21 of The Serpent King

“All right, all right. Tall young man, hardworking. There should be a girl or two out there,” Lamar said.

“Maybe there is,” Travis said, popping open his can.

“If there is, he don’t care about it,” his father said, as if Travis weren’t sitting right there. “Too busy with them friends of his. Hey, guess who he runs around with?”

Lamar shook his head.

“Grandson of the Serpent King,” Travis’s father said.

Lamar looked from Travis to Travis’s father and back. “Well. How about that. Dillard Early’s grandson?”

“No,” Travis said. “You’re thinking of Dill’s dad, not his papaw. Dill’s dad is named Dillard Early too. He’s the snakehandler.”

Travis’s father eyed him in wonderment. “No, I ain’t talking about the Pervert Preacher. I mean Dill’s papaw. You telling me Dill ain’t told you about his papaw, the Serpent King?”

Travis shook his head, bewildered. “No. I didn’t even know Dill had the same name as his papaw. He don’t care to talk about his family.”

Travis’s father snorted. “You reckon?” He slapped Lamar on the shoulder. “Tell Travis the story of the Serpent King, old man. You remember it better than me. He ought to hear.”

Lamar grunted and reclined in his chair, folding his arms across his beer gut. “Lord above. I ain’t thought about the Serpent King in a long time. Long time.” He rubbed his white beard and adjusted his Carhartt ball cap. “Well, first off—there’s three Dillard Earlys. There’s Dillard Serpent King. There’s Dillard Preacherman, son of the Serpent King. And there’s the one who you’re friends with, son of the Preacherman. Now, he’d be Dillard III, but after his papaw died, his father became Dillard Sr. and he became Dillard Jr. Only reason I know how that works is that I’m the third Lamar Burns. But I became Lamar Jr. after my papaw died.”

Travis pulled up a metal folding chair and sat down. “Okay.”

“So Dillard Serpent King used to have a home place up Cove Road. They had a little spread of land and Dillard worked in town as an auto mechanic. Dillard Serpent King had two kids. Dillard Preacherman and a little girl named…I forget now. Ruth. Rebecca. Something of that nature.”

“Ruth,” Travis’s father said. “I believe it was Ruth Early.”

Lamar spit in his can. “Anyway, Dillard Serpent King loved that little girl. I’d see them every Saturday come into town; she’d be dressed in a pretty white dress and they’d go for ice cream. Now, story goes that one day, Dillard Serpent King is sitting on his porch, whittling or doing something, and he hears a scream. ‘Daddy, come quick.’ So he runs toward the screaming and there’s Ruth lying on the ground. A big old copperhead’s bit her right in the neck.”

Lamar formed a V with his two fingers and made a stabbing motion at his neck. “So Dillard Sr. shouts for Dillard Preacherman to go call an ambulance while he stays with Ruth. And Dillard Preacherman does, but it’s too late. The poison from the snakebite goes right to her brain and ffffffft. Dead.” Lamar drew a finger across his throat.

Travis felt cold in the air conditioning in his sweat-sodden T-shirt. Between the quick-decaying rush of excitement from seeing Amelia for the first time and the caffeine making his head spin, he was glad to be sitting.

Lamar continued. “So he buries his little girl on their land and then he goes funny in the head. Now, folks guessed at this part, but he started killing snakes out of revenge. Must have thought he’d better kill them all, since he couldn’t say which one killed his baby girl. He keeps showing up for work, but after a while, he starts coming in with snakeskins pinned to his clothes, and snake heads worn on a string around his neck. Well, it’s awful strange, but don’t nobody want to say anything to the man because he lost his baby. He gets worse. He wears more and more skins the more snakes he kills. He quits bathing and shaving and cutting his hair and he stinks like something dead. He gets skinnier and skinnier. Looks like a snake himself. Finally, his job has to cut him loose. He’s scaring the customers. He gets this weird look in his eye. I remember seeing him after things had really gotten bad for him. Shuffling down the street, snakeskins hanging from his clothes. That scraggly long hair and beard.”

Lamar stared off, eyes unfocused, shaking his head. His voice became quiet. “Tell you what—you looked into his eyes? You saw a walking dead man. Gives me chills to think about it. I’ve seen things in my life. I been to Vietnam. I ain’t never seen anything like the way grief rotted that man from the inside out. Chewed him up. That’s when folks started calling him the Serpent King. They wasn’t trying to be ugly or funny. They was just trying to make some sense of it, I guess. Folks do that when they scared. Look out, they’d say. Here come the Serpent King. Folks is afraid of grief. Think it’s catching, like a disease.”

Travis waited for Lamar to finish the story. “So what happened to him?”

Lamar shifted uncomfortably in his seat. “All I know’s what I heard. That one morning, Serpent King went up to his little girl’s grave and laid on top of it with a Coke bottle of rat poison and drank it down and died there. Say Dillard Preacherman found him lying there. Can you imagine that? Seeing that happen? I don’t wonder why Dillard Preacherman got funny in the head himself. That ain’t to excuse him. But.”

No one spoke. Lamar gazed out the window, a troubled look on his face. “I don’t like to tell that part of the story. Ain’t fond of any of the story, t’ be honest. But since your dad asked and he signs my checks.”

“Don’t be an old pussy, Lamar.” Travis’s father spit in his can with a little clink. “So them Dillard Early boys are all a little touched in the head, seems. Sooner or later. About the time they decide to mess with serpents.”

Travis’s stomach had started to feel like it had a snake or two writhing around in it. He shuddered. He tried to wrap his mind around Dill having this much darkness in his bloodline. Obviously, he knew about Dill’s dad. But this was different.

“Such a damn shame. Think on that,” Lamar said, holding up a finger. “One snake did all this to one family.”

“Don’t cry about it too much, Lamar,” Travis’s father said. “Ain’t you heard the story of Adam and Eve? One snake already did us all in. Whole damn human family.”

“Seem like at least the two older Dillard Earlys both tried to be the Serpent King in their own way. The first by killing them. The second by handling them,” Lamar said, spitting in his can.

Travis’s father spit in his can again, got up, and slapped Travis on the back. “You like kings and princes and shit? You still might not want to be around when your buddy snaps and tries to take his papaw’s and daddy’s throne. That ain’t no lucky name he’s got. That’s for damn sure.”

Dill preferred studying at the library to studying at Good News Coffee. For one thing, he hated feeling pressure to buy something. For another thing, Good News, a Christian-themed coffee shop, provided him with too many reminders of a world he didn’t like thinking about, especially when he was with Lydia. But she insisted.

“I’ll have the Luke Latte in the Good News Grande. Wait…Matthew Mocha…no, Luke Latte after all. Dill? I’m buying.”