The Serpent King

by Jeff Zentner

  This time while he was there, it was like sitting on a beach enjoying the sun while the tide rose cold around his ankles. This will be gone by this time next year.

  It also felt like sitting beside the hospital bed of someone who was having a good day, but who was expected to die. He knew because he had done that before.

  The harvest was good that year in Raynar Northbrook’s lands, and they feasted often on the heavy oaken table that sat in his great hall. He called for bread and meat until he was sated and threw the unfinished scraps to the dogs who slept by the fire that roared in his hearth. He was in high spirits.

  “I forgot to tell you, Dr. Blankenship, I love your table.” Travis ran his hand over the reclaimed barnwood surface he was helping Dr. Blankenship clear.

  “Thanks, Travis. You are a man of excellent taste.”

  Travis beamed. He didn’t often get compliments on his taste—one of the inherent hazards of wearing a dragon necklace.

  While Travis helped Dr. Blankenship tidy up, his phone buzzed. I’m bored. Sitting here playing with my dog. What are you doing? Amelia texted.

  Travis put a plate in the dishwasher. Just had dinner at a friend’s house. Helping clean up. What’s your dog’s name?

  Sounds fun! His name is Pickles.

  No way! My best friend’s name is Dill!!!

  LOL WHAT???? Someday we should get Dill and Pickles together.

  Definitely.

  “I’ve been on a Werner Herzog kick lately,” Lydia announced. “And it’s my turn to pick. So this week’s Friday-night movie is Cave of Forgotten Dreams.”

  Lydia’s parents retired to their front porch rockers with glasses of wine and books while Travis followed Lydia and Dill to the TV room.

  As they watched the documentary about the 32,000-year-old cave paintings in France’s Chauvet cave, interwoven with Herzog’s heavily accented existential musings, Travis couldn’t help but wonder what his father would say if he were there. What’s this fag talking about? Can’t understand a thing that comes out of his mouth. For his part, Travis enjoyed it, as he did anything that carried the whiff of the firelit, ancient, and mysterious.

  “So, I’ve been thinking about permanence lately, and how we live our lives without the world ever noticing we’ve come and gone,” Lydia said as the end credits rolled.

  “Lots of Christians think the world is only six thousand years old,” Dill said. “So think about that. Those paintings have been there for almost five times longer than that.”

  “Kinda makes you wonder what we’ll leave behind,” Travis said. “I want to leave something behind for people to remember me by. The way kings do. Or the cave painting people.” He learned this about himself even as the words left his mouth.

  They sat for a moment, contemplating.

  “We should leave something behind,” Travis said. “For people to remember us by. Our own version of cave paintings.”

  Lydia didn’t have any joke at the ready, which meant she liked the idea. “But not a cave. I don’t want to go crawling around in any caves.”

  “The Column,” Travis said, after thinking for a bit. “None of us can draw, but we could write stuff on it that’s important to us.”

  “This is good. I smell a blog post in this,” Lydia said. “First things first. Everyone have something they can write? Dill?”

  “I have some of my lyrics I can write.”

  “Trav?”

  “I’ve memorized what Raynar Northbrook had engraved on the marker to his best friend’s tomb. It’s my favorite.”

  “Okay. So I’m the only one who needs something. Let me think while I change.” Lydia ran upstairs and returned a few minutes later, having donned a more appropriate outfit for tromping through the woods.

  “Okay,” she said. “Permanent markers. Big ones.”

  “Walmart,” Travis said. He was rarely the catalyst for their activities, and he was proud.

  “Walmart on a Friday night? We’ll get to see all our friends from school!” Dill said.

  “Ohhhhh, yes,” Lydia said. “We have been missing out on the Friday-night Walmart hijinks while watching Herzog documentaries. Let’s reassert our social position.”

  Starlight filtered through the green canopy of towering oaks and magnolias on Lydia’s street. Sweat trickled down Travis’s back the minute he hit the muggy air. But he didn’t mind. This was as good as Friday nights got.

  They pulled into the Walmart parking lot as the moon was rising bright and silver in the sapphire sky. Whooping, giggling, and music came from a clump of parked cars in a corner of the lot as they parked and walked in. Travis left his staff in the car.

  “Dilllll­lllll­lldooooo­ooooo­. Chlamydiaaaaaa,” someone shouted.

  Lydia shook her head. “This is my life. Getting yelled at in a Walmart parking lot on a Friday night by somebody doing a bad impression of a PG-13 fart-joke-movie comedian.”

  “We were just watching a smart documentary, so it’s not really your life,” Travis said.

  “I’m starting to think we haven’t been missing out on much with the Walmart parking lot scene,” Dill said.

  “Got any cookies, Girl Scout?” someone else shouted.

  Lydia never went anywhere without the perfect outfit. She wore a vintage summer camp T-shirt and a pair of khaki hiking shorts and boots from the 1970s.

  “I guess I deserved that,” Lydia said.

  Do all the losers from your school hang out at Walmart on Friday night? Travis texted Amelia.

  Definitely, she texted. It’s like we live in the same town.

  I wish. I love my friends but it would be so cool to be able to talk about Bloodfall with you in person.

  They bought their markers and drove to the unnamed gravel road that ended in a stand of trees beside the Steerkiller River, which bisected Forrestville. The air smelled like kudzu, mud, cool gravel, and dead fish.

  That smell. Suddenly Travis is fourteen. He’s with his mother at Saturday-night worship at the Forrestville Original Church of God. A new family has been attending their small congregation. Crystal and Dillard Early Jr., the wife and son of Dillard Early Sr., the snakehandling Pervert Preacher. The Earlys’ meager congregation has collapsed in their pastor’s absence, and the Original Church is the best they can find in Forrestville to replace it. They’ll get their speaking in tongues and Holy Spirit and laying on of hands to heal the sick. They’ll have to handle their snakes and drink their poison at home if they’re so inclined.

  They sit in the back beside Travis and his mom. Neither looks like they’ve slept in months, and they probably haven’t. Dillard doesn’t make eye contact with anyone. He seems to be drawing little comfort from being in God’s house. He looks friendless and forsaken. Travis has had a taste of that. He gets a lot of suspicious looks himself because of his clothes and proven penchant for reading unchristian books.

  He also knows something about loss and sleepless nights. His big brother Matt had died in a roadside bomb blast in Afghanistan the year before. Their father had never been especially nice, but he was at his worst when he drank. He started drinking more when Matt died. A lot more. And Travis has changed too. He used to love books and video games about modern soldiers, but now they only remind him of Matt. They remind him of how Matt would email him pictures of him and his buddies sitting on their Humvee, cradling their weapons. Which means his old books and video games remind him of grief and loss and of not living up to Matt’s legacy. So he gets his fix of heroism and combat from fantasy books. He thus manages to escape a world in which big brothers die in faraway places. As soon as his mother figures out how he’s finding solace, she brings him home the first book in the Bloodfall series from a shopping trip to Nashville, a recommendation from a bookstore employee.

  Travis catches Dillard’s eye and smiles and waves. Dillard, expressionless, returns the wave. Something tells Travis to speak with him. Travis has always been taught that the feeling to do good is the Holy Spirit speaking, and when you
feel that call, you’d better answer. Plus, he’s been feeling a bit lonely himself. One of the consequences of his decampment into the world of fantasy was leaving his meager group of friends—mostly from church—behind.

  He slides over to Dillard and offers his hand. Dillard shakes it.

  The next time they’re both at youth group, Travis asks Dillard if he wants to go see this cool place his brother showed him before he left for Marine Corps boot camp. It’s a good place to sit and be alone with your thoughts. And Travis doesn’t mention this, but it’s a good place to escape your father when he drinks and watches football, and reminisces about what a great football player your dead brother was, and asks you how you’d like the job of coaching a bunch of African American (but he uses a different word) millionaires and won’t let it go until—to appease him because his belt has been known to come off—you lie and tell him you guess you wouldn’t want that job. And then you hate yourself for being a coward and not saying what you really think. You hate yourself for not being good at sports like your dead brother. You hate yourself for not being as brave as the people you love to read about. And you just want to be somewhere where no one makes you feel that way.

  “Travis, you can bring the staff this time,” Lydia said, yanking him back to the present. “This place always creeps me out a little at night.”

  “What if a possum or a raccoon sees you with me? Wouldn’t that be embarrassing?”

  “Bring the staff before I change my mind.”

  “I have my Taser and pepper spray too,” Lydia said. “My mom’s armed me well.”

  “What’s your deal?” Dill asked. “You planning on running into like twenty murderers?”

  “I’m a vocal woman in the public eye. I take precautions.”

  “Maybe Trav and I should start wearing suits and sunglasses when we hang out with you.”

  “Are you done?”

  “Yeah.”

  They picked through the brush at the base of the railroad bridge. By the river, a chorus of whistling frogs joined the clamor of insects. Dill led the way with a flashlight from Lydia’s car.

  Lydia swept the ground using the LED from her cell phone. “I’m scared of snakes.”

  “If we have a problem with snakes, Dill can handle it,” Travis said. “Get it?”

  Dill slapped at a mosquito. “Yeah. I got it.”

  The turf grew marshy beneath their feet. Lydia tried taking a couple of pictures with her flash.

  “Kinda cool,” she said. “Getting a sort of Ryan McGinley vibe. Either of you want to strip down and run around naked in the dark while I take your picture?”

  Dill stepped behind Lydia and peered at the photos. “Not especially.”

  “I’d crack your camera lens,” Travis said.

  “Oh come on, Travis. You have a beautiful body. Dill, tell Travis he has a beautiful body.”

  That line from Freaks and Geeks, one of Lydia’s obsessions, had been a running joke with them ever since Lydia had made Travis and Dill watch every episode in a single day. The joke never failed to slay them.

  They reached the large concrete bridge support column that rose out of the ground before the river. They made their way to the side, the mud sucking at their boots, where a small metal ladder covered in chipped green paint hung. To get to the Column—situated in the middle of the river—they had to climb up the ladder on the riverbank column, walk out over the river on the catwalk under the bridge, and climb down another ladder to the Column.

  “I’m wondering if I should invoke the ladies-first privilege to avoid having to climb up after you on muddy, gross rungs, or if I want one of you to go first to make sure a giant spider hasn’t made a nest up there.”

  “A giant spider like Sha’alar, the Spider Queen,” Travis murmured, loud enough for anyone interested to ask who Sha’alar was. Nobody asked.

  “Here.” Dill gripped the ladder, raised a foot, and scraped his boot on the column before stepping on the bottom rung. He did the same with his other boot. “Best of both worlds. Now you won’t get your muddy hands all over what’s left of my body when Shalimar or whatever kills me.”

  They climbed up the ladder and squeezed through the tight hole at the top to a catwalk. Travis had to hold his breath.

  “We need to remember to bring some butter next time so we can grease up Travis,” Dill said.

  Travis laughed, trying to suck in his gut. “Come on guys, give me a yank.”

  “Not before you buy a gal dinner,” Lydia said in her best 1940s sexpot voice, flicking ash from an imaginary cigarette.

  “If only you walked through holes as easily as you walked into that,” Dill said.

  They finally dislodged Travis and continued on the narrow catwalk out to the Column. Travis had to walk hunched over to keep from hitting his head. They got to another hole with a ladder and slipped down it.

  “I have an easier time going down the holes than up them,” Travis said.

  “Not even touching that one,” Lydia said in the 1940s voice.

  “We are thoroughly violating this poor bridge,” Dill said.

  “I didn’t mean it that way. God dang, you guys.”

  They finally reached the Column, where there was space to spread out. Dill discreetly kicked a condom wrapper into the water below.

  “Every time we come here, I try to figure out why this ladder exists,” Dill said.

  Lydia rummaged through her bag for her book and their markers. “Right? It’s like ‘Hey, Butch, whyncha climb down and see if the Column is still there.’ ‘Okay, boss. Thumbs-up! The Column is still here!’ ”

  “No, but you have to come down to clean and paint the metal parts and make sure the rivets and welds and stuff are sound,” Travis said, slapping the Column. It made a hollow, metallic ring.

  Lydia examined a wide, flat spot and brushed the dirt away. “How is it every time we’re talking about the real world, you manage to bring up fantasy, and every time we’re talking about fantasy, you manage to bring up the real world?”

  Travis shrugged. “My fantasies are more interesting than the real world and machines and tools are more interesting than you guys’ fantasies.”

  Lydia took a picture of a blank spot. “Sure. We’ll go with that. Hand me a marker.”

  Lydia went to work on her spot, using her cell phone light. Dill and Travis went around to the other side with the flashlight and took turns.

  Travis’s marker squeaked. “Be really, really careful not to fall, guys. Safety first.”

  “There are probably worse ways to die than falling into a river, having a great time with your friends right up until the end,” Dill said.

  “What would be you guys’ ideal way to die? If you could choose?” Travis asked.

  “Jeez, Trav, way to go dark on us,” Lydia said. “But hey, I smell more blog post fodder. Dill? You seem like you’ve thought about it. Kick us off. The conversation, I mean. Don’t literally kick us off the Column.”

  Dill thought for a second. He looked out at the river, at its eddies and swirls, the patterns forming on its surface and disappearing. He listened to the ordered chaos of its sounds. The moon ascended, Venus beside it. On the horizon below, a radio tower rose into the indigo sky, its red lights blinking lazily. A warm evening wind carried a breath of honeysuckle and linden from the banks. A train whistled in the distance; it would soon rumble over them with a sound like waking up to a thunderstorm. He was a tuning fork, made to resonate at the frequency of this place, at this time.

  “Here,” Dill said. “This would be fine. Lydia?”

  “Surrounded by servants tearing their clothing and wailing, begging to join me in the afterlife so that they can continue to serve me.”

  “I don’t even know if you’re joking right now,” Dill said.

  “Okay, fine.” She thought for a few moments. “I’m fascinated with Martha Gellhorn’s life and death. She was a journalist and hero of mine. She did all sorts of amazing stuff. She said she wanted to die
when she got too old to think well or be interesting. So she popped a cyanide capsule when she was ninety or something. If there was a way I could explode with beautiful heat and light, like a firecracker, that’s what I’d want. I want people to talk about me and remember me when I’m gone. I want to carve my name into the world.”

  They heard the train approaching. “I’ll go after the train,” Travis yelled as it thundered overhead.

  When it passed, he spoke quietly, looking at the river. “I’d want to die with glory. On a green battlefield as an old warrior, with my friends around me.” He paused, gathering his thoughts. “I could join the Marine Corps like Matt if I just wanted to die in war like he did. But that’s not what I want. I don’t want to die in Afghanistan or some foreign country. I want to die fighting for my home. For a cause that means something to me. That’s why I wrote the thing I did.”

  Dill handed him the flashlight. “Let’s see it.”

  Travis shined the flashlight on what he wrote.

  Rest, O Knight, proud in victory, proud in death. Let your name evermore be a light to those who loved you. Let white flowers grow upon this place that you rest. Yours was a life well lived, and now you dine in the halls of the Elders at their eternal feast.

  “I had no idea those books meant that much to you, Travis,” Lydia murmured. “Now I feel bad about making all those Bloodfall jokes.”

  “Does that mean you’ll read them?”

  “No.”

  “They’re amazing. I forget about everything I’m not good at and everyone I’m not when I read them. They make me feel brave.”

  “Do we know how to party on a Friday night or what?” Lydia said.

  “Hey, Lydia, maybe after you move away, when you come back to visit, we can all come here and add stuff to the Column,” Dill said. “If that wouldn’t be too boring.”

  “Totally. That doesn’t sound at all boring.” Lydia took a picture of what Travis wrote. “Okay, Dill. Show us yours.”