The Serpent's Sage

By Phillip Arrington

When spoiled thirteen year old Barry Taylor wanders into a side-show performance at Sally's Beach county fair during the hot weeks of late summer, l964, he can't take his eyes off of the gruesome spectacle of an elderly black woman, Otilla Mae Carver, eating lives snakes to horrify spectators. Barry soon becomes obsessed with "Doc" Burgess's freakish meal ticket and sneaks away from home to meet her. Mesmerized by "Otie's" bizarre spiritual philosophy, Barry decides to abandon his bookish isolation, his skeptical fantasies, his ill-tempered parents, and the superficial beliefs of the small North Carolina coastal town he grew up in. Barry concocts a fateful plan to rescue his new found mentor from the life of a carnival freak and become her devoted disciple. For the residents of Sally's Beach's, Barry's and Otie's sudden, mysterious disappearance becomes the town's greatest mystery. Coping with that mystery exposes the troubled pasts of Barry's parents, the Sheriff's, and the town itself. Sliding from present to past, reality to dream, The Serpent's Sage is, is a spiritual love story of two outcasts whose brief and unlikely bond takes shape at a time when the traditional landscape of the South—and all America—seems destined for dramatic changes.
A native of North Carolina, author Phillip Arrington has been teaching literature and composition for almost thirty years. His other book, Rhetoric's Agons (2008), is available as print-on-demand at Amazon.com.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Phillip Arrington
• Release date: Jun 6, 2013
• ISBN: 9781301034789

Phillip Arrington

A native of North Carolina, Phillip Arrington has been teaching literature and composition for almost thirty years and has published articles and poems in various academic journals and literary magazines. His other book, Rhetoric's Agons (2008), is available as print-on-demand at Amazon.com.

Book preview

Chapter 1

When the boy awoke in the soft, already warm September morning, he knew he wouldn't get to go to the fair that night. He wasn't sure he'd be able to go at all. He'd thrown another fit the evening before. That's what his mother called them. He'd learned long ago that silent obedience got him nothing from his parents but more denials. And what he wanted increased each time his parents tried to appease him.

He'd written that down last night. In his notebook. The squeaky wheel gets the grease, his mother had said. A lie, he'd assured himself on the back page. A squalling kid beats out the wheel every time.

And we're not about to take you nowheres if yer going throw fits like that, his mother had threatened.

His father spat out obscenities and pushed away from the dinner table to light a Salem. Just once I'd like to eat a goddamn dinner when I come home from work without hearin you two cussin and fussin. He blew out a halo of smoke and sucked down the last drops of sweet tea.

The boy thumped and pounded on his bedroom wall while his parents tried to watch their favorite evening TV programs. His door locked from the inside. Then he stopped and sat down beside the window facing town, watching the fair's lights, listening hard for screamers on the rides.

The day before his fit, he'd found his father's lemon-flavored gin and poured it down the sink. To spite his father, who'd already refused to take him to the fair and who liked a slug of gin after work. The boy wanted to punish him. He'd seen his mother do it many times.

He'd hidden in his tree house that afternoon and listened to his mother scream out his name from the back porch facing the creek woods behind his house.

Barry! Barrrrry! You better git yer ass in this house fore yer Daddy comes home.

He'd just sat there, thumbing through one of his monster magazines. Her voice grew louder, more shrill, as if more volume would substitute for an authority and respect she was certain she possessed and her son seldom showed her.

He knew his mother would never come into the woods to find him. She was too afraid of the bugs, the poison ivy, almost any natural thing. That tree house would protect him—for a while anyway.

I've never been to a county fair, he'd protested. I want to go on the rides. See the shows.

Yer Daddy's gonna ride you if you don't say yer sorry. That gin costs money! And yer Daddy's not exactly rollin in it. You act like we aint never took you nowheres before. You been to carnivals. You went to one in July, down by the beach.

County fairs have more rides. And you can ride em longer. It was a weak protest, a lie. But his mother wouldn't catch it. Wouldn't even bother.

He never recorded his own lies in his notebook. He believed young people had to lie. It was a matter of survival. Lie to the liars, he thought. What else could he do?

Barry's father didn't whip him that night. Or most nights. His mother didn't either. They let him go to bed and sleep on the sharp rock of their steadfast denials.

In his notebook he wrote: They say they'll whip me if I keep acting this way. On the second page, They never do. They give in because it's easier. They love what's easy. I'm never easy. I can't afford to be.

He dreamed that night. Of the fair. The lights wheeling against the dusk falling on Sally's Beach. The machine roar and grind, belts pushing rides to drunken speeds. Him pinned to the back of the bright red shell of the Tilt-a-Whirl. Crowds of faces flowing round like dirty water down a drain. Flying, flailing legs on the Giant Swing. Hurtling down the first drop of the newly added, quivering wooden coaster.

Over the loud speakers, above the delighted screams, the game barkers called to their customers, Daddy Gin! Daddy Gin! Drink it down and ride it round.

Then his mother's voice swallowed up the fair's sounds. Barrrry! She screamed for him to come home, balancing on the flagpole over the House of Mirrors, holding a spatula like a conductor's wand.

The twirling fair lights grinned at him with gapped teeth. His head filled with the smells of frying peppers and onions, the pink and orange splashes of dusk, then night, the black velvet curtains that crushed the reds and yellows out of the glitter and glare of spinning bulbs encrusted with suicidal moths and mosquitoes.

Then his mother was calling him to breakfast. Toast and milk gravy.

He got up and ate quietly. Maybe she'd change her mind about the fair. Maybe she'd convince his father. Maybe the kitchen sink no longer smelled of gin.

I'm comin, he answered.

He could hear the bi-plane blasting above the house. The air-cracked voice called all in Sally's Beach. Called them to come soon, come now, for the best ticket prices ever. Look under the mattress, the loudspeaker ordered, and bring the whole family for the best county fair ever!

Chapter 2

Once they passed through the sun-faded canvas flaps of the tent, they still could only see the silver bulb of hair twined tight around a spar of driftwood carved into a bone.

A ten-by-ten wooden box hid the rest, nailed together from lumber scraps from a refrigerator crate, braced now with smooth, well-sanded slats for customers' arms, hands, hats, the sipping cups of moonshine, bourbon, and coke. The box sides were just high enough to conceal what she did inside. They couldn't see that unless they paid.

Above the tent flap a crack-creased banner. Faded streaks of paint. A careless, crude cartoon. A black woman, torso wrapped in leopard-skin, hair boned, nose-boned, squatting in some unrecognizable brush. Her smile all gored fangs gnashing a helpless pygmy python, eyes bulged, full moons pitted with two black holes.

Under that, tall hand-drawn red letters spelling out The Snake Eater. Under that, showing times. Afternoon Showings—Two to Four. Evening Shows—Six to Eight and Nine to Eleven. Monday through Saturday. Then taller, black letters. Admission. 50 cents.

The Snake Eater's tent was as far from the fair midway as possible, away from any children's rides, games, or concession wagons. Far from the rodeo stalls, the hog competitions, the jelly and pie contests, the palm readers. Even far from the two-headed baby in a glass jar of formaldehyde and the strip-tents where dancers, some far too old to be embarrassed, others too young for shame, ascended the stage already naked and oiled for dancing.

This location marked the show's status among the county fair attractions—at least in the eyes of organizers and sponsors. But the Snake Eater had been a popular attraction for many years for those easily bored by bearded ladies, geeks, or sword swallowers. They came in to escape blazing tobacco fields or lint showered yarn mills. They came because they couldn't see this on any of the three channels.

Behind the tent sat an old postal van Doc Burgess bought at auction the week after Kennedy's head was blown apart in Dallas—the second van he'd owned since he'd changed his show for her. Burgess liked to think the confusion and chaos of that national disgrace let him steal that van with a fifty dollar bid. He felt no guilt about attending an auction when most Americans were weeping for their slain President. He'd heard some quietly applaud the assassin.

Burgess himself never voted. Never would. At least not unless Huey Long rose from his dirty sleep to wage another campaign. Him Burgess admired, for his wild speeches, his professed love of the working man. No one since had ever touched Burgess, least of all a Harvard-talking yankee raised on bootleg profits.

Burgess had scraped off the federal markings on both vans and repainted them. A deep jungle green replaced the eagle and flag, and pictures of his Snake Eater, on both sides, the back, even the hood. Almost the same cartoon on the tent-banner.

I wants em to see her ever which way they come at me, he told anyone who asked, and many who didn't. Then they'll really want to come in there and watch what she does.

The wooden box was the center of the tent ten paces in. Burgess could pack as many as thirty customers inside except on very humid days, when human and reptile smells mixed so thick with smoke and sweat customers struggled to breathe.

So he put two rust-blotted window fans missing their grills on opposite sides of the tent. They hummed and shivered, tumbling the odors that couldn't be dispersed.

Early arrivals leaned elbows on slat railings, perched drinks, hats, and caps there. Mostly men, clusters of acne-scabbed teenage boys loosely and eagerly encircling their elders.

Sometimes a newly wed couple, with the wife's face crushed into the groom's shoulder, he looking down at his bride's cringing and up again, at the Snake Eater. On his face just the faint line of an unknowing grin, an eye squinting at what it saw to relieve itself from what it was seeing.

It's sicknin, the wife would repeat just loud enough for others to hear. A protest made in the name of taste, decency, some higher morality the wife had believed in since she could speak. Then the same protest repeated as she pulled her head out of the husband's shoulder for another look, another gasp.

Nothin I aint seen before, the husband lied.

Farmers in bib overalls, fresh from the fields, manure still caked in brogan creases, stared and sipped whisky. GI's from Fort Bragg twitched and snickered, nudged each other with winking grins and stammered beer breath.

Where in hell ya find that thang, they said to themselves more than Burgess.

Oughta put her out of her miseries.

Chases that snake meat with coffee.

The teens pushed against the inner circle around the box for closer looks. A few brought their sweethearts—the ones they could talk into it. Like the new brides, they hesitated at first but never turned away once the Snake Eater began performing.

By the end of each show all had seen the Snake Eater do what they paid for. Bite off the head of one snake then another.

Inside the box Burgess had placed a small, partly inflated baby pool and several inches of water, a few stones. As close as he could get to some picture of a tropical grotto he'd seen in the National Geographic.

The Snake Eater sat on a wad of towels crammed inside of two stacked tire treads. A few snakes swam and slithered around her. Black snakes, garter snakes, corn snakes, many smaller ones—whatever Burgess could catch or pay others to. But none venomous. He had to protect his investment and his customers.

The snakes slid over her bent, bony legs, her scrubbed knees and wrinkled bare feet, all seeking a way out of the pool, the box. None got far before she pinched behind the head, bit it off, and pulled off gobs of meat from the still winding spine. She then reached for the metal coffee thermos to wash down the flesh in full, dark gulps. Each gesture deliberate, even artful, as much ritual as prayer.

She did this for about an hour or until most of them left, shaking their heads. Sometimes they tossed an empty cup into the box. Sometimes they vomited once they got to the entrance. Or sooner. But never in the box. Burgess saw to that He'd collar and drag them to a dark corner of the tent and push their heads down over a sand bucket to catch the whisky and greasy corndogs gobbled on the midway.

Burgess was in the tent for each show. He'd bark out her hideous wonders as a garbled chorus for every cleaned spine tossed aside for the next victim. Always ready to refill the thermos with more coffee. Fresh if he had it, old and rancid if he didn't.

The Snake Eater never seemed to notice. Never spoke. Never complained. She just caught, bit, chewed, swallowed, and drank the coffee. She never looked at them. Took no mind of their disgust, shock, and helpless fascination. She never flinched at any gasp or curse. The customers could just as well have not been there at all. She didn't need to hear them. Didn't want to. She didn't need to hear Burgess either. His pitch hardly ever varied. She never changed her act either. Repetition and rapt constancy was her comfort.

My Snake Eater's a god-fearin woman, Burgess always made sure to say as they left. That's the only way she can eat them snakes like she does.

Chapter 3

It wasn't that they were glad he was dead. That would have been impious, even to themselves. They just weren't particularly interested in his dying.

So it was easy to count the few sagging umbrellas around Sheriff Womble's grave that afternoon in l970. The Sheriff had devoted his entire career to protecting every living soul in Sally's Beach, black and white. But to many his devotion never made up