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.”
“I’m okay.”
“Come on.”
“Fine. Plain coffee in the Victory Venti size.”
The girl behind the counter handed them their drinks with a cheery grin and wished them both a blessed evening. Dill and Lydia found their seats.
“How do we not have a Starbucks here yet?” Lydia asked. “I’ve literally seen a Starbucks that had another tiny Starbucks in the bathroom. And anyway, how is a coffee shop Christian?”
“It implies that normal coffee shops are satanic.”
“Which they totally are. It’s like, can I please just get a cup of coffee without having to kneel before Lucifer and pledge my eternal soul?”
“Here’s your latte. Will that be cash, credit, or the blood of a virgin?”
They laughed, content to procrastinate doing their homework.
“We learned in church that the Starbucks logo is satanic,” Dill said.
“Of course you did, and of course it is. What’s the reasoning?” She made air quotes around “reasoning.”
“Mermaid demon.”
“Ah, yes. But your new church is slightly less nutty, right? No snakes?”
“No snakes.”
“So while we’re here in the temple of Christian coffee, do you still have the snake verse memorized?”
This was exactly what Dill hated talking about, but he humored her. “Mark sixteen eighteen. They shall take up serpents; and if they drink any deadly thing, it shall not hurt them; they shall lay hands on the sick, and they shall recover.”
“Bravo.”
“You don’t know if I got it right.”
“Eh. It felt right. It felt Bible-y. I have such cred coming here with you.”
“I’m not that faithful. I volunteered for the praise band because I was scared of the snakes.”
Lydia sipped her latte. “Well, I assume you could also play and sing reasonably well, not that I’ve ever heard you do both at the same time.”
Dill shrugged. “I guess.”
Lydia appeared to be pondering. “Back to the snakes. Do you think that’s what Jesus really meant? Maybe he was like, ‘And theoretically, you could probably pick up snakes,’ and Mark’s over there writing and he’s like, ‘You should literally pick up snakes. Cool, Jesus, got it!’ And Jesus is going, ‘Well, calm down with the snake business. Don’t be weird; just be a decent person. It’s really more of a metaphor.’ And Mark is writing, ‘Definitely pick up actual literal snakes and drink actual real poison like rotten grape juice or other Bible-y poison.’?”
“Who knows exactly what he meant?” Dill tried not to sound impatient with the conversation. He really did enjoy Lydia’s showing interest in his life.
“I’m sorry, do you hate talking about this?”
“No, it’s fine.” Let me just turn the temple of Christian coffee into a black pit of lies.
“Am I going to hell for joking about it?”
“Not if we find some snakes for you to handle. And I slipped some arsenic in your latte when you weren’t looking.” They laughed.
Dill sighed, the way he did when he knew he’d procrastinated doing something for as long as he could. He fished around in his bag for his schoolbooks. “Homework on the first day of school,” he muttered under his breath.
“Hey, Dill? Hang on a sec.” Lydia spoke quietly, the snark gone from her voice. “There’s something I want to talk to you about.”
Dill’s heart began to race. Over the past few years, when people had prefaced something they were about to say with “there’s something I want to talk to you about,” it proved to be nothing he wanted to talk about.
“There’s something I want to talk to you about. Your father is in trouble.”
“There’s something I want to talk to you about. We need you to testify.”
“There’s something I want to talk to you about. Your mother was in a very serious accident coming back from visiting your father in Nashville, and she might not pull through.”
“There’s something I want to talk to you about. With the house, the church, your father’s legal fees, and my bills from the accident, we’re about two hundred seventy thousand dollars in debt.”
“There’s something I want to talk to you about. I’m leaving you behind to go on to a bigger and better life, and I’ll never think about or speak with you ever again.” Probably.
“Okay,” Dill said.
“I want to do some school shopping with you. The kind where you actually shop for schools.”
Dill eyed her blankly, not quite processing what she was saying.
“Colleges. I want you to go to college.”
“Why?” Dill’s heart continued to race. What Lydia said wasn’t bad in the way he feared, but it still wasn’t what he wanted to hear.