"Serpentine" by Dan Townsend

Marsh's father would have considered this snake breeder the worst of them, and there were some sad cases in the parking lot at Valley State. They sold reptiles from warped folding tables and rusty tailgates. This breeder's forehead glistened sweaty. The creases in his neck were lined with dirt, and a crescent of gut winked beneath his T-shirt where it dropped over the elastic of his sweatpants. When Marsh saw the man's stomach hair, he remembered dead spiders from bathtubs in houses he'd stripped as a greenhorn. His son Beau tugged his wrist, pulling him closer to the breeder.

Marsh's father had been dead since Beau was in diapers. Strong and quiet, he'd been to Vietnam, not that he talked about it, not that he talked about anything. He only spoke when his team was losing, and then he cussed yelling. Now, Marsh regretted that his father was never a giver of advice. He wished for traditions, sacred rites to uphold. Instead, he had to come up with his own. This is what brought him and Beau to the junior college parking lot, the two of them separated from the snake breeder by a scuffed card table.The breeder said, “Had one just like her when I was your age,” pointing to the boa constrictor with a twitch of his face. Beau didn't look up from the bin where the rounded shapes of the snake's pattern pressed against the clear plastic.Each month, Marsh and Beau took as much time walking back to the truck as they spent in the meeting. The sky was always the slow purple of dusk, and behind them in the yellow grass, a family of crickets would chirp proudly despite the caged predators. The sale of animals at the meetings was not permitted, but what happened outside, before and after the posted meeting times, did not concern the East Texas Herpetological Society. Beau would peer inside each breeder's bins and cages. Iguanas and horny toads, sometimes pythons, would blink at him from boxes familiar to cats traveling by plane. He'd extend his fingers as if to poke through the dark squares of a cage, but he never did. Marsh didn't say anything. Usually he kept his hands in his back pockets, eyeballing the breeders, picturing their snaggle-toothed girlfriends, and wondering what their mommas told the ladies from church. It was a sorry kind of man that turned a dollar selling lizards, but still, each month, Marsh trailed Beau through the spectacle.“What do you think, boss?” the snake breeder asked. He tapped the clear bin with his knuckle. It had a purple lid that Marsh knew closed with a satisfying progression of clicks. The snake didn't move, but Beau looked up at the breeder, then back to Marsh. Air holes had been drilled in the lid, though Marsh wouldn't have noticed if he hadn't, months earlier, gone to Walmart to buy the same containers after tripping over toys abandoned between the bathroom and the kitchen. His wife Paulette had told him to do something about it if he didn't like the mess. It was just after his accident, and he was home all the time. He called her bluff and bought the bins only to remind her of that fact each time he found a toy forgotten on the carpet.Beau sucked in his bottom lip and made a whiny noise that Marsh took for begging. He looked down at his son, suspicious. He squeezed Beau's shoulder to quiet him. The boy loved the herpetological society meetings, Herp Club. He brought a notepad and pen. He wrote down the particulars of habitats and feeding schedules. He drew pictures of animals he liked. Tonight he drew turtles, not snakes, but Marsh was glad to see his son excited about the boa constrictor.“I'll take care of her. I promise,” Beau said. The snake's name was Clementine. The breeder said Clementine was a runt, full-grown at three and a half feet. She'd be a good first snake, to get the boy started, much easier than dogs, especially the growlers that filled the neighborhood where Marsh had been staying with noise each time someone set a trash can in the alley. The breeder aged Clementine at fifteen years, at least. His contractor friend found her coiled in the attic of an old house he was fixing up to rent to college students. The man looked knowingly at Marsh, a smile forming at the corners of his mouth like milk running off the edge of a table.“If it turns out to be a pain in the ass,” he whispered, stepping forward, leaning into Marsh's shoulder, “you could let it loose somewhere and say it died. You could always remind him how the snake man said it was old.”Marsh responded by narrowing his eyes.“Your boy,” the breeder said, nodding to Beau. “He won't know the difference.”Then he stepped back, crossing his arms, his smile forcing Marsh to acknowledge a reality he would rather ignore. With his pale belly and pockmarked cheeks, the breeder represented a life of dirty glass aquariums and back rooms musty from the wet sand of reptile incubators, the husks of dead crickets. Marsh could picture himself stomping through the condominium of his son the snake man. He could see himself snatching up empty fast food bags and beer boxes, shutting off the television, and telling the boy to get out there and do something with himself. Marsh looked at the breeder, knowing his time was short. How many grades had this man been held back? It hadn't been two hours since Marsh learned his son would have to repeat the fifth grade. Marsh knew Beau wasn't very smart, but as of today, it was official: Beau was stupid.Marsh put his thumb over his nostril and blew a string of mucus to the concrete. His father wouldn't approve of these people. He would never have gone to a Herp Club meeting.  The breeder unlatched the top of the bin and looped Clementine around his neck. Nearby Herp Clubbers — skinny men, sandals with socks, Hawaiian shirts — had gathered behind Marsh and Beau, pausing to catch a glimpse of someone handling a snake. The breeder hadn't lied. Clementine was lethargic, uninterested, its knotty head just keeping level as the breeder twisted and turned, playing like he was modeling the animal.“Lookie,” he said. “It's a feather boa. Get it?” The breeder twisted and curtseyed. As the onlookers laughed politely, Marsh remained silent. After the snake returned to the bin, winding itself into a lazy coil, Beau rattled off one dumb question after another. Could it kill a cat? Could it kill a squirrel? Could it kill a bird? Could it kill a baby? Marsh had discovered Herp Club during a job running power to some new study rooms in the library building, the last job before his accident. He'd seen the flyer for Herp Club hanging on the wall. It didn't look too fancy, and he liked that about Valley State. He thought its ambitions were modest compared to other colleges, not that he'd been on many campuses. He'd been to A and M once to watch the Aggies. He'd driven by North Texas and Baylor. He could spot them from the highway. He imagined the university students lounging with their feet up on the chairs, chatting with each other on their cell phones, too caught up in their own silliness to feel any guilt about spending their parents' money. Here at the junior college everyone appeared sunken-eyed. None of them looked happy to be in the library. No one stayed for very long, and most of them kept their backpacks on. These students wore the uniforms of reality: scrubs, deliveryman shorts, supermarket golf shirts.The job lasted only a week, and Marsh hated seeing it end. Usually he relished saying goodbye to a place on his last day, weighing the slim chances of ever again seeing the inside of another building where he made the lights go on for the first time. Moving from job to job, walking into rooms he'd never seen, each project presenting new versions of the same problems — Marsh loved working a trade. No matter the décor, every building had the same guts. He would miss Valley State because it seemed more aware of this. The students there wanted to be nurses and teachers. They aspired to work, and Marsh could respect that.He imagined Beau turning out to be one of the broad-shouldered young men hurrying to class, windblown, like he'd just come from the lake. He hoped Beau would smile at the girls and call the janitor lady Ma'am.  It wasn't that far off. Every day Beau had something new incarcerated in the plastic aquarium Santa Claus brought him, and before that, a pickle jar with holes popped in the lid. Everyone was welcome in the Herpetological Society. The flyer's exclamation points implored Marsh, making it seem the society would be thrilled to have Beau and him as guests. In a grainy black and white photo below the next meeting date, an iguana smirked from its perch on the knuckle of a weathered branch. When he'd come to get Beau earlier that night, Paulette told Marsh they needed to talk, her voice coming from the pocket of her soft palette. That tone meant she had been thinking and had reached a decision. These decisions concerned him, their marriage, their finances. He figured she wanted money for something, special tennis shoes for sculpting her rear end, a new cell phone, plane tickets for her sister to visit. Marsh did not attend little league games. He passed on making the toy racecar for Cub Scouts. He refused to set foot inside the elementary school, the cinderblock children's jail smelling of piss recently mopped over, but he never missed first-Thursday Herp Club meetings.They'd been going to meetings for almost a year, since the library job, and last time Beau had been outside when Marsh's tires hit the driveway. Tonight, Paulette waited in the garage, her arms folded underneath her bosom, the neighbors' dogs yowling loud but harmless, nothing like the dogs behind the house where Marsh had spent the month since the last Herp Club meeting. Paulette popped her knuckles and toes, her back and neck, working her way down her body, like she would in high school before a volleyball match. Paulette could pop everything.“I don't have an extra dime,” Marsh said. “It's been a slow month. I need to get Beau to the meeting.” She had on her white stretch pants that made her look bigger than she was. When she walked to the step leading into the kitchen, he jangled his keys, calling on the ally of a familiar sound to ease the tension.“This is important,” she said.Between them, in the orange light of the garage, was the second refrigerator full of beer and Cokes and the venison sausage no one would eat. The meat was tough, sinewy, and the extra pepper Marsh used to season it didn't kill the gamy flavor. He'd tried cooking it in breakfast burritos one night, mixing it with scrambled egg and fried potato, all the salsa they could handle. But Beau and Paulette wouldn't eat the burritos, so he'd had to warm frozen chicken fingers. When the timer sounded, he slapped the cookie sheet on the bare table along with a plastic bottle of white salad dressing. The hot metal blistered the tabletop. Beau burned his mouth, and not long after that Paulette decided it would be best if Marsh stayed somewhere else for a while.Now, as she leaned on the top of the refrigerator, it embarrassed Marsh to see the stubbly skin of her underarm. It was barely June and already hot in a way that made the outdoors unpleasant for a person of Paulette's size. The winter had been mild, and soon the bugs would be awful. The warm light of the garage exaggerated the shadows around her mouth, revealing how she had begun to wrinkle. The old wisdom would hold true. She would look like her mother. She would get jowly.“I met with Beau's teacher and counselor and one of the principals,” she said. They had an unspoken agreement: Marsh didn't say anything about Paulette not working, not exercising, not doing much of anything, and she cared for their son.She said, “They're holding Beau back.”“What do you mean? Holding him back. He ain't retarded is he?” Marsh didn't understand. He put his keys in his pocket, just barely, so a few hung loose.“He's not retarded. He might have a disability. There are tests.” Paulette kept her arm on the refrigerator and flapped her hand to the rhythm of the word disability. Marsh knew he could've found a prettier girl for himself if he hadn't gotten Paulette pregnant, a girl with long, muscular legs and a high rear end.“If he's not retarded, then what are they holding him back for? Can you tell me that? Did you ask?”“Quiet,” she whispered. It was the same voice she once used to warn him, don't or you'll wake the baby. “He doesn't know yet.”She didn't move when he pulled open the refrigerator, grabbed a beer, and knocked the door closed with his elbow. The bottles clanked loud and dangerous. Marsh didn't dream of his son growing up to be president or having some amazing, successful career. Marsh had absorbed his father's quiet example of how honest and satisfying a simple life could be, how truth was hewn from the grind, in getting by, breaking even, and not aspiring to much more than what a man could attain easily with the untroubled progression of years.“His reading and math skills are too far behind.”“So he failed. You're not helping him with his schoolwork.” Marsh squinted and took a drink. He tried to stick to beer around the family.“They said held back.”“Did you tell their sorry asses they made a mistake?” He twisted his middle finger and thumb to flick the bottle cap into the trash can.“I tried. I told them Beau doesn't like school.”“Well. They're going to get a load of me tomorrow,” Marsh said.She had her hair pulled back, and when she turned, he spotted the scar from where she received nine stitches as the girl who was hurt playing on the neighbor's trampoline. Paulette didn't wear her hair up outside the house. Marsh knew it was because of that scar, though they'd never discussed it. It was one of those things he'd come to know just being around her. He wondered if that had changed since he left. Before Beau was born, Marsh would take Paulette from behind and stare at that scar. It inspired the rhythm of trampolines and then a memory of pain.She disappeared into the glow of the kitchen, and Marsh took two beers to the front yard where he drank quickly in long pulls. He could move back home as soon as he quit drinking, but he wasn't ready to do that. He was getting there. He'd all but quit hard liquor, and only teenagers got drunk on beer. This held-back thing confirmed his suspicion that his son was more out of control than Paulette let on. He could feel the day he would move back coming on like a storm, but for now, there was something he needed to settle inside himself.When he took his bottles to the trash at the end of the garage, above the hula hoops, he spotted his father's old bag from the service hung on a nail, their family name stenciled blocky on the green canvas. Marsh wished he'd done a bit in the service, just a couple years. Then his father could've been proud of him, and Marsh could know that feeling for Beau. Footsteps could be followed. That's where Beau would end up, the Marine Corps, where they'd beat him into the man no one else was allowed to. “I'll tell you what, little boss. You get your daddy to buy Clementine, and I'll throw in two of these here blue-plate specials. For free.” The snake breeder held up a squealing red-eyed rat. Beau jumped back. Its teeth seemed more plastic than bone, and its scream was small and terrifying. Beau leaned forward to get a better look. It was darker now and a bug flew in Marsh's ear, making a buzz and going silent.“He's going to eat those?” The pitch of Beau's voice rose the same way it did when he asked questions about gruesome stories from the news. This was a good sign — Beau wanting to see the snake kill things. It seemed like the right interest for a boy his age.“Oh yes,” Marsh said.“Daddy, I have to have Clementine.”Marsh looked down at his son. He had a dimply smile and nubby features. He looked like his mother. The Marine Corps would make soup out of him. Beau didn't have any brothers to burn his face on the living room carpet. It had to be the Marines, Marsh thought. The boy would have a lot to prove.“Yeah. All right,” he said, reaching for his billfold. He knocked the heels of his boots together as if they were clumped with mud, the sound of a decision made. Marsh threw a couple twenties on the old table in front of the snake breeder and his stack of plastic cages. He imagined he and Paulette would sit down together and give Beau the news. They'd get the little guy some ice cream. They'd say it didn't mean anything. What was best for him was to do fifth grade twice. There's different things that's best for all of us. Marsh's fall had come after they'd been to enough Herp Club meetings that a few of the regulars remembered Beau's name. It was the job after the library, and the pain had left Marsh buying painkillers off boys in sagging pants outside Murray's gas station. He had been working with a greenhorn named Wesley, and Marsh was leaning crooked, reaching behind himself to feed a braid of number ten wire up through the void between floors of the new medical center annex. They'd been adding runs for an A.C. unit and extra receptacles, items their superintendent had missed in the drawings, wire that should've been pulled long before the ceiling frame went in. If asked, Marsh would say he hated working for that boss because he always screwed things up, but Marsh wouldn't want to work for anyone else. When he was fixing mistakes, no one gave him lectures about moving faster or wasting materials. No one told him how lucky he was to have dental. Soap for a slick pull was everywhere. The floor hadn't gone in yet. It was the third time that morning they'd tried to make the run. Nobody heard pull. When the wire jerked forward, it surprised Wesley, and he stumbled, kicking the ladder. Marsh lost his balance. Six feet, and he was too messed up to work again. He'd fallen on a job box and destroyed two disks in his back.  The pills got him through the handyman projects he took to supplement the disability checks, but Paulette wouldn't let him back in the house because of the drinking and the strip clubs, the coming home at all hours, messed up, with a new dent in the side of his truck. He had enough tools and he'd worked for enough outfits that he could get by installing track lighting. Paulette threatened to divorce him on a rainy night a few weeks after he'd tried putting venison in breakfast burritos.“You divorce me. What'll you do?” he shouted. “You'll get a job? My ass.”Beau sat close to the TV in the den. When Marsh put his hand on the table, he was surprised to feel the bubbles through the tablecloth from where the baking sheet burned the wood laminate.“I could get my life together,” Paulette said without lifting her eyes from her jigsaw puzzle. She would finish the puzzle and glue it, completed, to a piece of plywood. She'd take it to the sports memorabilia store and have the puzzle framed in a shadow box.“Yeah. You and me both.” That night Marsh went to the Title Town Sports Café where they'd begun playing rap music after ten. Marsh didn't think of himself as racist because he knew real racists. There were tornado warnings on TV that night, but no one cared. They watched the sports channels like always and kept a little TV in the corner on the local weather. Wednesday nights they had karaoke. Tuesdays, a man with a goatee hosted a trivia game played by soft-faced boys wearing pants wrinkled around the crotch from sitting all day. Marsh knew the answers to the questions about TV shows from the seventies, but he didn't like socializing with the wrinkled pants crowd, constant in their complaining about the commute to Dallas. They had to be up early, as if that were a good excuse not to drink one more.Marsh wanted to fill his belly with beer and watch an aimless show on one of the sports channels, one with lots of running-back highlights and archival footage of Bear Bryant snarling sideways at the camera. He wanted a baseball game that had been decided early. Highlights exhausted him, and that's all Title Town wanted to show, a never-ending string of touchdowns and home runs.He left Title Town Sports Café on a trivia night and never looked back. He paid the twenty-dollars cover and started going to a strip club two exits outside town where they played Hank Williams Junior and eighties hair metal. The girls called him sweetheart and pretended to agree with him when he made comments about politics and current events. One of the TVs stayed on a cable channel so that every night he could see the Florida Gators lose. These pleasures he was not yet prepared to give up, and when Paulette shook him awake one morning a few weeks later, after another night at his new favorite place, she'd reached a limit he didn't know existed. She filled a suitcase with clothes and propped it up in the rocking chair passed down to them from an uncle Marsh never met. She said she was leaving to take Beau to school. She used her decision voice. After she dropped him off, she was going to get breakfast. Marsh needed to be gone by the time she got back or she'd raise holy hell. She could assure him of that. He could come back when he was ready to start living like a man. After the Herp Club meetings, Marsh usually took Beau home, dropping him off without taking the truck out of drive, and that's what Marsh was going to do until Beau opened the box on his lap and picked up one of the rats. He rubbed his nose to its nose and asked in a squeaky whisper: “Who's my cutesy-wootsy baby boy?” Marsh didn't respond at first. The Steve Miller Band was on the radio.“You are. Oh yes you are. You're my —”“Son.” Beau held the rat so its pink hind legs pawed herky-jerky in search of the ground. “Put the rat in the box.”  Beau lowered the rat into the box, its body making a papery noise as it backed into a corner. “Now let it alone.”Beau set the box on the floor mat and held it in place with the sides of his feet. Marsh made a left. He drove to a park behind the community center. There was an outdoor basketball court where the nets on the goals had disappeared long ago. The swings were broken, the chains dangling loosely. On the decaying infield, dandelions bloomed between second and third base, not far from where Marsh parked under a humming streetlight.He got out of the truck, Beau hopping from his seat and following to where the outfield met the parking lot. On the grass, Marsh bent his knees, holding his hands out, his palms cupped one behind the other, his fingers crossed to make a basket. He had something to teach, something that was his responsibility to pass on.“Punch me hard as you can. Right here.” Marsh nodded at his hands in a show of sincerity. Beau made a fist and looked at it. When he threw his punch, one of his feet flung up backward. He held his fingers all wrong, a lumpy ball of knuckles. When he made contact, his hand flattened like a tent blown down by the wind.“Again,” Marsh said. Beau did the same thing, the punches landing with the force of a lolling fly ball. “You been cutting the grass like I showed you?”Marsh's father had taught him two things, to cut the grass and throw a punch.“Yeah.” Beau dropped his fist, and his arm fell limp at his side. Marsh's father had shown him how to fill the mower with gasoline, work the choke, and crank the motor on the first try. He'd been shown once.“Yes, sir. Goddamnit. You say yes sir when your father asks you if you done your chores. You got that?” Marsh smacked the side of the boy's head lightly, just enough to make his hair flip upward. “Now hit me.”The punch had the same form, but there was more power behind it. Marsh's weight shifted to his heels. A trilling note of pain sounded in his back.“Again.” It was harder still, but off-center. Marsh winced, the pain in his back moving sharp and quick. “Now watch,” he said.When he was a boy, Marsh had come home from school with a black eye, and after his father had showered and turned on the news, his mother told him about the fight in the schoolyard: the kids chanting, the towheaded boy whipping Marshall good, the principal giving licks for fighting even though Marsh had lost badly. His father popped the tab on a beer and told him to wait on the patio. The man stacked his palms behind one another, making a wall of his hands. He told Marsh to hit him. His father's palms were rough and dry. His fingernails seemed thicker than other people's and his smell reminded Marsh of burning paper.His father lit a cigarette and held it in his lips, not flinching when Marsh hit him hard enough to make the ash feather down onto his shirt. Marsh practiced punching on him for a week, the same time each evening, until the night came when his father returned from work to find Marsh with cotton balls shoved up his nose and blood on his teeth. The boy reopened his cut lip when he smiled.“I beat that boy until he wouldn't get up,” he told his father, his teeth rinsing bloody. Marsh had whooped him so good the blond boy crawled to puke in the dirt beneath the playground slide that hid them from the weary teachers in charge of recess.His father waited, his face expressionless, as if there was more to Marsh's story, and for a moment the boy wondered if his version of what had happened was the truth.Then the man said, “It's because you did like I taught you.”Marsh said, “Yes sir.” There in the community center parking lot, under the electric noise of the streetlight, Marsh showed Beau how he dropped the foot on his punching arm. He turned so Beau could see the twist of his body from a different angle. His back stung hard and constant now, but Marsh still held his form, moving in slow motion and then even slower. It was like swinging a baseball bat, he explained, except to step into it, you slide your foot backward. Pull back. Coil the body. The tension should be in the hips, the power unwinding up through the torso. It should be felt, the body tightening. Take all that. Let it out the end of your arm. Punch through the target. Don't just connect with your enemy. Destroy the thing.When Marsh demonstrated, he closed his eyes and imagined all the fury in his back moving through his fist.“Now. Try it.” They could hear a few boys laughing somewhere in the distance, but neither of them moved.“Again,” he said, his knees quivering from the pain in his back. “Don't think about it.” Beau's foot swept backward again, kicking up in a pirouette. Marsh thought of the breeder and the feather boa.“You're thinking too much. Hit me.” Beau's lips puckered. He held his breath. His face went red.“Harder.” Marsh had to separate his feet and take a wider stance, the punches coming with surprising force. “Harder.” Marsh could barely stand the pain, but he knew his son would be able to hurt another boy his age. He didn't stop himself from enjoying the thought. “Keep going.”Beau stopped and started crying, slow at first and then heavy. Tears streamed down his cheeks and rolled off his chin, and Marsh assumed for a moment that Beau was crying for him, that his son knew how badly his back hurt. Then Marsh had the urge to tell Beau he would have to repeat the fifth grade. When Marsh saw children crying, he felt compelled to give them more bad news, to make them realize there were plenty of good reasons to cry, and since they were already taking a break to shed a few tears, he might as well give them one more thing to cry about.“I don't want to feed the rats to Clementine. I want to save them and raise them up.” Beau wiped his nose with the back of his arm. His face was splotchy, red and white.After a moment, Marsh said, “I'll make you a deal. You can save one. You can let it go right here, now. The other one gets fed to Clementine.”“Why can't I keep them both?”Marsh blamed Paulette. This was her fault. The baby talking, the back talking. He couldn't wait for the Marines. If Marsh had done that around his father, there's no telling what would've happened. He reached out and smacked the boy, harder this time, so Beau's face jerked to the left. The boy squealed, but the sudden reach, the extension and contact, unlocked a new level of agony in Marsh's back. He turned with his fists clenched and leaned against the truck, his shoulders on the passenger window, his forearm over his tear-heavy eyes.“When I say something, that's the way it is.” His voice was steady, an order. Beau made a pout, but he nodded. Marsh waited while he went around the truck, climbed over the driver's seat, and took out the box with the rats' claws making a terrible scratching noise against the cardboard.  “Pick one. We ain't got all night.”Beau looked like he might say something, but he didn't. He whimpered slower as he reached into the box and held up the rat with a brown splotch on its belly. He whispered something into the back of the creature's head and set it down at the edge of the community center outfield. Beau sniffled as the rat darted a few feet forward and stopped to smell something before running in the direction of a drainage ditch.“You got to feed the other one to Clementine. I'll know if you didn't,” Marsh said. They climbed into the truck and drove in silence, no radio. Marsh warned Beau to keep Clementine and the rat in the garage, at least until morning. His mother wouldn't appreciate the surprise. When the boy didn't respond, Marsh said, “It's better this way. At least one has a chance. We couldn't say that before.” From the house, Marsh drove to the strip club where he saw the end of a weeknight football game between Virginia Tech and some sorry school he'd never heard of. He drank bourbon and Coke. A brunette named Sharmane danced on his lap. An old man with a patchy beard sat at the table next to him. The old man stared at Sharmane while he opened a beer with his teeth. He blew her a kiss, and for an answer, she took off Marsh's hat and ran her palm over his head.“Why can't all men be like you?” she asked.Marsh said, “Don't know. Be a better world if they was.”  After the Virginia Tech postgame ended, a pro football documentary came on. It was about the Ice Bowl, the Packers and the Cowboys. The strip club dance mix blared in time with the pink stage lights. Marsh sipped bourbons, watching the highlights of the old game as Sharmane writhed on his inseam. No one around them smoked a cigar but the smell lingered, blending with Sharmane's perfume to cloud the air with a leathery musk.He watched Vince Lombardi breathe smoke on the television fixed to the wall. He watched the offensive line wag and cinch in the slow motion of the game's deciding play. The quarterback took the snap and slithered over the back of the lineman to score the winning touchdown. Marsh could feel the steel coldness of the Wisconsin dirt in his knuckles, his cheeks cracking in the frozen wind. When the players gave their testimonies, they reminded Marsh of his father, their noses bent, their foreheads sloped in the craggy grade of a volcano. He would've been about their age, maybe a little older. Their sentences were short. Even that quarterback, middle-aged in the film, answered quickly, offering a shy smirk, as if unable to delineate the simple wisdom of the quarterback sneak. The camera didn't stay with any one man for too long. They were less individuals and more thatched strands of a larger thing, a continuum that couldn't be captured in one frame.When Marsh looked up from his drink to the TV, he caught the old man at the next table staring at him.“Everything all right there?” he asked.“That was a game,” the old man said.“You're right about that.”Sharmane stood. The song was over, and Marsh gave her another twenty dollars from his breast pocket.The old man said, “Won't never be like that again.”A new song came on, and later, a new documentary about another unforgettable game.Marsh spent two hundred dollars on Sharmane and her friend Amber. He drank bourbon until he passed out at his table and had to be loaded into a cab by one of the boys working security. Marsh had planned for it to be that kind of night. Once he'd unloaded Clementine and the white rat beside the bicycles in the garage, he promised himself that — after tonight — he would never slip up again. Marsh woke the next morning to Wesley slapping his cheek and kicking the sofa.Marsh's head felt heavy, his limbs weak. He sat up. “Follow me,” Wesley said. “I don't like this shit. You ain't staying here, you going to pull shit like this.”Marsh followed Wesley to the open front door where he instantly recognized the plastic bin with the purple lid. Even without his name Sharpied across the top, he knew what was inside and that it was for him. Wesley rambled on about how it was his house and he was doing Marsh a favor, how he didn't need all this before work. Marsh ignored him.“I'll take care of it,” he said.Marsh had been staying with Wesley for six weeks. Wesley felt awful about tripping over that ladder, and Marsh had been able to use that guilt to his advantage. Wesley said he wanted to do the Christian thing whenever possible.The bin had written across the top, Hell no Marsh! Clementine barely moved when he cracked the lid. She languished in the shape of a rounded-off W, the point in the middle blunted by a bulge in the snake's belly the size of a white rat. Marsh smiled, closing the bin and lifting it, his back pulsing and sore. The pain made him remember Beau and the school. The snake had eaten, its swollen middle a testament to the lesson learned, a purpose fulfilled. Wesley's old extended cab funneled white smoke to the end of the street, and Marsh set the snake box on the coffee table. He pulled on the jeans he'd worn to the strip club. He could smell the bar in his clothes, the liquor on his skin. Each movement revived the soreness in his back. The familiar memory of a regrettable night surfaced, but today was different. He knew what to do.Behind the house was an alley, and on the other side of the alley was the Pinsons' place. The Pinsons had an eight-foot privacy fence showing black and orange beware-of-dog signs. Wesley told Marsh the Pinsons had to put up the fence and the signs by court order, after some brat walking home from school got attacked cutting through their yard. Wesley thought it was hilarious how the Pinsons' dogs attacked children too stupid to avoid strange animals.“Sign of the times,” Wesley had said, pausing to spit tobacco juice in a Styrofoam gas station cup. “Little fuckers think they're so goddamn special that a hungry Rottweiler won't take a chunk out of their leg.”The Pinsons would have the dog put down, but they'd get another one. Somehow, it would be just as mean. The dogs went crazy barking as Marsh approached the fence with the snake. He hoisted the bin up to his chest and slid his hand underneath the bottom so it rested flat. He spread his legs to send the pressure to his knees, a stance he'd learned over years of lifting things too heavy for one man. He kept his other hand on the side of the bin for balance. In one basketball motion, Marsh threw Clementine over the fence into the Pinsons' yard. Then he doubled over, squeezing his kneecaps, shuddering as the discs in his back radiated a hot, sharp pain.He could tell it was past eight from the cars missing in the alleyway drives. Wesley could be fired again if he hit traffic. Marsh leaned his shoulders against the fence, easing the tension in his back, the hangover in his head. His breath was sour, his tongue swollen. Specks of stripper glitter reflected the morning sun through the hairs on his wrist. The sky was proud and blue. He began to wonder what he would do after he took a handful of Advils and ate some Doritos. The thought made him feel small. Where to begin? Much needed fixing, setting right. Then he remembered he had to get to the school. There were people to straighten out. He needed to shower and pull himself together. He would shave and make eggs with whatever meat was in the house. No more Doritos. He wouldn't take no for an answer. He was done with compromise. But it could all wait a few more minutes, until the Pinsons' dogs finished with Clementine. As he listened to the approaching growl, Marsh thought of the Marines running through the rain of an angry jungle on a morning much worse than this.Dan Townsend's stories have appeared in Drunken Boat, SmokeLong Quarterly, FRiGG and Wigleaf.  He lives in Alabama.