by Jim Algie
Then, holding the head in his hand and the tail up in the air, Yai and the announcer showed the crowd how to tell if the snake was male or female. The announcer rubbed its belly, near the tail, and two little penises—each no bigger than a clitoris—popped out on either side.
When the two of them approached the side of the bleachers where the three sailors sat, Yai conceded that he should give them one last chance. They had all been drunk last night. He’d been in the wrong too.
After the snake’s twin penises popped out, he looked in their direction and smiled. “You have two?”
The older one with an alcoholic’s pitted complexion, a pug nose and bloodshot eyes (the man who had assaulted him the night before) sneered, “No, but mine is a helluva lot bigger.”
“Oh my god, you have four,” said the snake-handler with a laugh.
A couple of the other jarheads laughed, too, but the older guy spat, “Fuck off, ya lil faggot,” reminding him of the cobras that spit venom into the eyes of their prey.
Now this was too much. The reincarnation of a water buffalo had humiliated him last night and now again in front of a crowd of forty people. So Yai figured he had every right to make the sailor lose face, too. As he knelt down beside the cage with the biggest king cobra in it, he picked up a piece of rope, whirled around and threw it in their direction. It landed right in the older guy’s lap. He screamed and leapt to his feet, knocking the piece of rope to the ground and kicking it away.
“No snake,” Yai yelled to the crowd, “only rope. He is no big man. He no Arnold Schwarzenegger. Him afraid too much.”
A few people laughed.
But the sailor started screaming insults at him, most of which he didn’t understand, and it took all three of his friends to hold him back from jumping into the snake pit. Finally, after about two minutes of more threats, his friends got him to sit down and shut up.
None of the Thai staff were going to kick him out and nobody in the crowd was going to stand up to him. But if Yai stopped the show and slunk off now, the American would win the battle. His face would be broken into a thousand pieces. He couldn’t just walk away. His dignity was at stake. And what else did a poor man from the boondocks have but that?
With the wooden stick he brought out the biggest king cobra: a five-meter-long, black-and-grey monster as thick as the Marine’s flexed bicep. As soon as he dropped it on the carpeted floor of the pit it moved away from him in a rapid series of S’s.
This male was fresh from the jungle on Phuket. Yai had only done two previous shows with him.
“The king cobra is the world’s most poisonous snake,” said the announcer over a whistle of feedback through the PA. “One bite from this snake has enough venom to kill a thousand rabbits.”
The audience gasped when the serpent raised its hood and reared up into the striking position—a meter off the ground—while hissing and flicking its forked tongue in Yai’s direction.
A little girl in the audience sobbed, “Daddy, don’t let the ugly snake kill him.”
As fast as a Thai kick-boxer, the king cobra lunged at him. Yai veered back, quivering with fear. He took a quick look over at the bleachers to see that the sailor with the bloodshot eyes was now sitting by himself in the front row, just above the snake pit.
What would this drunken idiot do next? Jump into the pit and attack him?
In a dramatic baritone the announcer said, “Ladies and gentlemen, our special attraction, what you wait your whole life to see: ‘The Death Kiss of a King Cobra Show.’”
Yai bent down so that his head was at the same height as the serpent’s. Only two meters separated them. In order to distract it, he stuck out his left hand in front of the cobra’s face, while he slowly crept around to his right. His only real advantage was that snakes have very poor eyesight.
But his concentration was blown; he couldn’t stop thinking about the sailor. His fear of the man jumping into the pit and getting both of them killed was so strong that he kept sneaking peeks to make sure he was still sitting in the bleachers.
Except for the flicking of its tongue, the snake was still now and facing towards his left hand.
Now he got down on his knees. Closer he crept, trying to bring his knees down softly so the snake would not feel the vibrations.
Now his face was only six inches above the cobra’s head, so he could see the white chevron on its hood. Yai held his breath and puckered his lips, lowering his face inch by inch, when another snake leapt at him.
He turned towards it and lashed out with his right arm—and that’s when the king cobra sunk both of its fangs into his nose.
Yai screamed and clutched his nose, feeling the blood spurt from the wounds and roll down his fingers in hot scarlet streams. As the cobra raised itself up to strike again, Yai rolled to his right and saw the piece of rope he’d thrown at the sailor lying on the ground beside him.
Then he looked up and saw the American standing there, listing to his left with a big gloating grin on his face, while the rest of the audience was abuzz with shock and fear.
Nobody came to help him. Nobody dared to stand up to the sailor.
Already he felt the venom kicking in and clouding over his vision. But he fought it off, got to his feet, grabbed a smaller cobra from its cage, staggered over towards the Marine, pulled the snake back like a bullwhip and lashed him across the face with it. Again and again, Yai flogged him with his live whip, until the venom made him too dizzy to stand and he sank to his knees.
Darkness swallowed him.
When Yai regained consciousness he was laying on his stomach in the jungle. He tried to move his arms, but they were gone. He tried to move his legs, but they were gone, too.
His first horrifying thought was that the sailors had cut off his arms and legs and left him to crawl around the jungle on his belly.
But then he saw a forked tongue dart out of his mouth and realized that he must have died and been reincarnated as a snake. Or had he descended into some Buddhist hell?
While he couldn’t hear, he could feel vibrations tingling along his underbelly, which warned him that a predator was nearby.
Quickly Yai slithered towards some tall grasses, went up and over a dead log, and then weaved and twisted his way around a pool of water. The thrill of using his new body made him forget his fear for a little while. But when he stopped the tingling in his underbelly was like having an alarm clock going off inside him.
While his new body was much more agile than his old one, his vision was much fuzzier. So he flicked his tongue out to smell how close his enemies were to him.
Close. Very close.
And there were a lot of them.
But what were they? And what sort of snake was he?
He flicked his tail faster and faster to propel himself, but the ringing in his guts didn’t stop. Weaving to and fro he searched for a hole in the ground, a big rock, or a tree that would hide him, but there was nothing except tall grass, twigs, leaves and small stones.
Finally, he slithered into a small clearing and found himself surrounded by hundreds of golden cobras.
Cobra Gold 2000, he thought.
Yet more serpents crawled out of the ground all around him: Asiatic rat snakes, Burmese pythons, paradise tree snakes, banded kraits, red-tailed pit vipers, Oriental whip snakes and even a dogtoothed cat snake.
The golden cobras, which all had bloodshot eyes, slithered in for the kill, biting, paralyzing, and then swallowing the other snakes in gulps.
The vibrations caused by all the hissing and all these jaws snapping shut made Yai feel like he was in an earthquake zone.
So he whipped himself around and tried to retreat, but more golden cobras came out of the tall grass behind him.
He was hemmed in from all sides.
Instead of attacking Yai, they slithered right past him, and into what had become a nest—or an orgy—of writhing reptiles. The sun gleamed off their golden skins as they coiled themselves together into one 15-meter-
long body which sprouted seven heads.
Phaya Nak, the Lord of the Serpents.
All the deity’s fangs dripped rubies of blood, his eyes were the same color, and his biggest head was crested with the skulls and bones of other snakes. As he reared up into the striking position, raising his seven hoods simultaneously, the day went dark.
Perhaps the Serpent Lord might protect him as he’d protected the Buddha from the rain while he sat under the sacred bodhi tree to attain enlightenment.
“Phaya Nak, Phaya Nak, please protect me,” he prayed.
“No, you have become the lowest snake of them all. You’re as predatory as that bargirl you insulted and as violent, stupid and drunk as that sailor you attacked,” said the Serpent King in a voice that rumbled like thunder.
With that, Phaya Nak’s biggest head darted down, snatched him up in fangs the size of stalactites and swallowed him.
Through the sewer-damp darkness, Yai crawled towards a chink of light that fell through a crack in the floorboards that opened into a room where his mother sat in her faded sarong looking so old and forlorn and shrunken that she could have been one of those old monks with magical powers whose bodies never decomposed after they passed away.
She was the one who would be the most saddened by his death. He crawled towards her, ready to press his forehead against the dirt beside her wrinkled feet and beg her forgiveness for the six years he’d been away, showing off for foreigners like he was the big star of all the snake-handlers, not some son of a farmer from a village where his mother still ran the TV off a car battery, but an action hero playing to an audience of rich tourists who gave him a little of the respect and the adulation he craved.
In his new reincarnation his own mother did not recognize him. She picked up her broom and, like a good Buddhist who would never even kill an insect, swept him towards the front door like he was nothing more than a millipede.
When Yai regained consciousness he was laying in the middle of the snake pit, the announcer’s blurry face looking down at him, and the bitter taste of the antivenin serum in his mouth. He felt like he’d just been awakened after two hours of sleep, still drunk from the night before.
Through a maze of legs, he saw the sailor rolling around and groaning, “I’m dyin’, Kenny, I’m fuckin’ dyin’.”
Yai grabbed the announcer’s arm, made him explain everything that had happened to the sailor. The American was so big and drunk, he said, that the serum seemed to be having little effect on him. Now there was none left. The ambulance was on its way.
Shaking like he had malaria, hot flashes alternating with bone-piercing chills, Yai wiped the sweat from his forehead with one hand while he daubed at the blood on his nose with a handkerchief. He was thinking about his journey into the spirit world, when he overheard the sailor say to one of his friends: “Just tell mom that I love her, and you tell Linda and Kev to take real good care of her, okay?”
So the sailor was human after all. It was not a coincidence that they had both been thinking about their mothers. That was a sign from the Serpent Lord. Yai had asked him for protection and the god had granted his wish.
Now he had to do something to help the sailor. Otherwise he really would be reincarnated as a snake.
So he told the announcer to explain to his friends that he was going to suck the venom from the sailor’s wounds and spit it out. It was a risky move, he knew, because if there were any microscopic cuts in his mouth, then he would get another dose of poison.
Since the sailor was completely unconscious now, and the ambulance was nowhere in sight, his friends agreed.
Kneeling over him, Yai sucked as much as the venom out of the bloody holes in his right arm before spitting it out. Then he tied a bandana around his arm as a tourniquet that would prevent the poison from spreading through his bloodstream too quickly
Another tourist ran over and said that they’d flagged down a taxi. The sailors picked up their friend and carried him towards the pick-up truck, which had a metallic shell on the back and two rows of seats for passengers. Just as they reached the truck, he woke up and flailed around. When they put him down, he staggered over and grabbed Yai by the arm, waving off his friends. To them he said: “This lil prick’s mine.” To Yai: “Get in the back.”
One of his friends tried to climb in the back with them, but the sailor waved him off. “I said, ‘He’s mine.’ Get your ass in the front.”
He pushed Yai into the back of the pick-up truck. The snake-handler looked around the small crowd for the announcer, or any of his other friends from the snake farm, but the cowards had all deserted him.
The only thing that eased the tension was that one of his friends told him that Yai had tried to save his life.
That didn’t seem to have too much effect on the hulk with the pug nose and bloodshot eyes, though; he was still swearing, groaning, sweating profusely and shivering with the same hot flashes and cold chills that Yai felt.
Did they have time to make it to the hospital, which was more than thirty kilometers away?
The two of them sat on opposite sides, the sailor near the back, so he could prevent Yai from jumping out. A breeze carrying the smell of spongy earth blew in through the open sides of the truck.
As the truck sped off down a two-lane highway hemmed in by plantations of spindly rubber trees, the Marine pointed at him and said, “You sure are one crazy lil son of a bitch, ya know that? What the hell didja think you were doin’ back there anyhow?”
Yai returned his glare. “Why you hit me in bar last night?”
“’Cause you slapped that poor girl ‘bout five, six times. That’s why.”
Horrified, Yai looked away. Had he really smacked that bargirl?
“I cannot remember. I was drunk too much. But you don’t know what she say me. She speak no good about my mama.”
The American shook his head and his jowls flapped. “Doesn’t matter. Ya don’t hit a woman never. My dad was a Marine for twenty-two years and those are the first things he taught me in life: ya don’t kick a man when he’s down and ya don’t hit a woman never. Them’s the rules, Mister Drunk Asshole.”
“Why you throw rope on me? Snake bite my face because you.”
“’Cause you threw the fuckin’ rope at me first. Or don’t you remember that either?”
“Only joking, make funny… not serious.”
“But it wasn’t funny. I mean, Jesus Christ, walkin’ around askin’ guys if they got four dicks. Like what kinda weirdo faggot shit is that?”
Yai daubed at the wounds on his nose with his headband while plotting his defense should the sailor attack him again. Yai had one hand on the rail above him. If he grabbed the rail with his other hand and swung towards the sailor he could kick him in the face with both feet, which might just send him hurtling out the back of the pick up truck. But with all the bumps on the road and his motor skills intoxicated with venom, it might just be him who went sprawling across the tarmac, shedding skin like a serpent.
The sailor lifted up his blood-spattered T-shirt and wiped some sweat off his face with the bottom of it. “You better pray that we’re okay, or you’re in mighty big trouble, man.”
“I think we okay,” said Yai, although he wasn’t really sure. If he had absorbed some more venom through a tiny cut in his mouth, it might be poisoning him a bit more slowly than usual. And if he was going to die, then why should he back down from this bully?
The snake-handler looked him square in his bloodshot eyes. “How many people you kill in Marine?”
“Huh? What the hell kinda question is that?”
The sailor squinted at the thick jungle.
Yai figured he was reliving all the murders he’d committed and all the atrocities he’d seen.
Finally, he muttered, “Too many… in El Salvador.”
Yai had no idea what El Salvador was. Was it a country or a famous battle? “How many?”
The American looked over at him, sadness and guilt making him look much
older and uglier than he really was. “One is too many, okay? One is far too fuckin’ many. So ya get drunk and you think that’ll make all the demons go away, and for a coupla hours they do, maybe a coupla days, but they always come back see, always.”
The sailor was holding the bar above his head with one hand, wiping sweat from his jarhead with the other and rocking from side to side. Over the whine of the wind and the drone of the engine, Yai could barely make out what he was saying. It was almost like he was talking to his conscience. “That’s what the ads on TV useta say, ‘Join the army, it’s not just a career, it’s an adventure,’ or some shit like that. I don’t know, man, finding a mass grave in Guatemala with two hundred women and children hacked to death with machetes, that’s not the kind of adventure I signed up for. But I had to do somethin’ to get off that poor ol’ farm and I wasn’t good enough to get a football scholarship.” He looked at Yai, blinking his eyes to focus them. “You’re a farm boy too, ain’cha? I can spot ‘em a mile away. It’s ‘cause we got a certain way with animals, see? There you are in the snake pit with the most dangerous reptiles in the world, and you’re still treatin’ ‘em with so much love and respect. Fuckin’ A that impressed me.”
Yai had to get him to calm down and stop moving around so much. “You, I, same same farm boys. Sometimes good, sometimes bad, sometimes drunk and angry too much.”
“Yeah, I s’pose we ain’t all that different, a coupla violent drunks on the long road to hell. Which don’t mean we’re ever gonna be buddy buddy or nothin’.” The sailor put his elbows on his knees. “Ya know somethin’, man, not that I’m one to talk, but you’re all fucked up. You gotta get off this island.”
“I know. You’re fucked up too, Mister Drunk Asshole.”
The American slapped his thigh and laughed. It was like one of those barroom scenarios where two drunks could not stop laughing. Each time one stopped the other started, so the chorus continued.
After a minute of delirious laughter, the Thai driver and the other sailors looked through the back window at them with puzzled expressions on their faces.
As the pick-up sped past a Buddhist temple, Yai saw two seven-headed statues of Phaya Nak on opposite sides of the stairway leading up to the main shrine, the green balustrades forming their two serpentine bodies. Sunlight gleamed off their golden heads.
