by The Science
“Believe you’re out of your jurisdiction, Sheriff,” Al says coolly.
“And I believe such strictures apply only to human quarry,” Stenvall replies. “And I further believe that the two of you are in cahoots.”
“Cahoots!” Al laughs. “With a mindless serpent? If that’s not the most ridiculous...” He trails off as his sister directs three bulky posse members towards him. “I don’t suppose I could appeal to Father for clemency?” he asks Althea.
“Not without a medium,” she replies. “Father died three years ago.”
The men wrestle Al from his seat on the wagon, though he doesn’t struggle. The last thing he does before they bind his wrists with stout scratchy rope is to pluck the mustache from his lip. Their father’s favorite Al is right: it did make him look like a half-wit ignoramus.
Over the course of his life, not solely in the past week, Al has spent his share of nights in jail cells. Such is the life of a snake oil salesman. One thing he’s learned is that people love to gloat at prisoners.
Stenvall and Althea visit in tandem, which Al appreciates. Get everything out of the way at once. Give him some more time to puzzle out an escape from this trap.
They stroll to Al’s cell, the last in a row of them, each occupied by some poor man or woman who couldn’t pay off a debt or got caught trying to better the standing of them and theirs. The ones who didn’t get caught built the jail and hold the keys.
“You’re not half the salesman you think you are,” Stenvall says without preamble.
Hackles raise on the back of Al’s neck, but he’s smart enough not to tussle. Besides, he knows he’s a hell of a salesman. Better to play along.
Mouth crooked in wry acknowledgment, Al half-nods. “Might be you have a point there.”
“I read it in your eyes back home,” Stenvall says. “You weren’t telling me the truth, not all of it anyway. And what do you know, barely outside town limits, I spy an allegedly dead snake slither out of your wagon and go hunting, bringing you a moa like a birddog with a pheasant. That’s when I knew: this was the same snake that killed my family, that destroyed our town. And you sold your soul to it for a little coin.”
“Quite bit of coin, actually,” Al mumbles. Louder, he adds, “Snake never hurt anyone. She tells me she’s innocent, and I trust her more than I trust you. A desire for revenge curdles the heart and addles your mind. You’ve been living with it so many years now, I reckon you’ve mixed up what’s real and what you’ve imagined.”
“The snake’s a killer, and it’ll get what’s coming to it,” Stenvall snaps. Althea lays a hard hand on his shoulder, and he steps back, huffing. Too easy to rile this man.
“And you, sister?” Al asks. “What do you gain from this?”
She sniffs haughtily. “Must be that I’m curdled and addled, myself. But I do expect that watching you hang will leave me mighty satisfied.”
There it is. The sentence. Al’s burgeoning confidence deflates as he feels the noose scratch his throat, envisions his feet dancing in the breeze.
“There’s no call for that.” But his usual cajoling tone now rings flat. “You got everything back. The money Father wanted you to inherit, the business, they’re yours. My gambit failed. Burning the contracts, freeing Portico’s doctors to help those who really need it, letting people live their lives healthy and out from under Father’s thumb. It’s exceedingly clear that it didn’t stick. So, what do you have to seek revenge for?” Al isn’t trying to talk her into anything. He honestly wants to know.
Althea grits her teeth. “Father was never the same after you left. You’d think he actually still wanted you around—maybe he enjoyed the fighting. Maybe your actions made him see the so-called ‘error of his ways.’ I don’t know. But he was never the same, and he never treated me the same after that either, even after I took over the business.”
“Althea—”
“You tried to ruin us, and he had the gall to miss you.” She swivels, sends one parting shot over her shoulder. “That’s enough evidence for me that you’re nothing but an infection that needs to be scraped out.” And she’s gone, the air in her wake positively crackling with spite.
That’s that then. Al’s not getting anywhere appealing to their familial bonds.
If there’s any comfort to be had, it’s that Snake won’t meet the same end. She knows to skip town if Al doesn’t show, before someone who actually wants to hurt her can take their shot. He wishes they’d had a proper send off after all these years, but their lives were thrown together randomly enough, so who’s to say a random sundering isn’t the proper ending.
“It’ll be quite the sight,” Stenvall remarks. “You, wriggling on a rope like a worm on a hook.”
Maybe he intended to give away their plan and maybe not. It could have been a slip of the tongue, Stenvall too eager to demonstrate his own cleverness. But with that turn of phrase, Al realizes that Snake might not be so safe after all. The people of Portico aren’t merely hanging Al. They’re using him as bait.
Long before humanity arrived on the continent that would eventually become home to Portico and Stenvall’s Folly and the big cities to the north and the chicken-feed scatter of frontier towns to the south, gargantuan animals roamed the prairie and forests and deserts and steppes. Moa and snub-snouted bear and stilt-legged caribou and carnivorous bats whose wings obscured the moon and armadillo the size of stage-coaches. And so very many snakes. Rattlers and vipers and bloatheads and cottonmouths and pythons and corals and pipes and splitjaws. They hunted in tall grass and twined themselves up massive tree trunks and sunned themselves alongside burbling streams. Some took up residence in caves. Those hidden serpents survived longer than the rest when humanity showed up and began doing what humanity does to nature—namely, taming it violently.
Not all such creatures were hunted to extinction over the centuries of slow human dispersal, but all came near to it, especially the ones that could speak. Begging for survival only made people despise them more for their attempts at being equal to humanity. Eventually, however, equilibrium established itself, and humanity settled into an uneasy peace with the continent’s dumb bestial remnants. By the time the first settlers established a camp and trading post at the spot that would become known as Kiimamaa, and later Stenvall Mine, and eventually Stenvall’s Folly, Snake was the only one of her kind remaining, and she didn’t even know it, having spent so many decades hibernating deep underground.
Woken by the first stirrings of the mining operation, little more at that time than some men and women tentatively probing the cave walls with primitive pickaxes, Snake cautiously introduced herself. After the humans regained their composure, Snake and they struck a bargain. Safety for Snake; health and happiness for the people of Kiimamaa. It was not ideal for Snake, but she was alive, and she worked with the people. She was content enough.
For years, the arrangement held, and the village prospered. The people there took relatively little from the mine, instead living by farming, fishing, trapping. Snake devoured the occasional cow or pig or mouthful of turkeys, but she always asked first, and the farmers were more than happy to grant her permission. Children dared each other to sneak into Snake’s cave, and she would oblige their fear-seeking with a theatrical hiss, sending them scampering home to chuckling parents who had done the same thing when they were that age.
Snake shed her skin every few decades, growing ever larger, her memories carrying over to her fresh body like vivid dreams. For a day or three, she would forget who she was, hide in her cavern deep below the blossoming Kiimamaa, rattling in fright until someone from town journeyed down to reassure her, providing an offering of livestock, returning above with thick grease that would be transmuted into an elixir that healed wounds both physical and spiritual. Buoyed by the snake oil, Kiimamaa could lay claim to the mantle of healthiest and happiest locale on the continent.
With only a few people living in Kiimamaa, this beatific existence could have stretched on indefinitel
y, but where happy people gather, others seeking happiness are bound to arrive. Some of these people wondered at the lack of mineral exploitation, caring less for the compact with Snake than the promise of material riches. After all, they had tamed this land, and Snake was merely an animal. What right did an animal have to deny them the benefit of her oil when it cost her so little to provide? Why should they stoop to negotiation with a beast? Wasn’t it their place to take whatever they needed, whatever they could? The first time a group of men ventured into her cave and demanded her oil, Snake assumed it was a joke. When they strapped her down and pricked under her scales, collecting drops of the viscous orange fluid, she was so confused and shaken she didn’t even fight back. The second time they came for her, she did, and after that, humans stayed away for a while. Focused instead on their mining, on boring deeper into the stone, stripping it of everything it held inside. By the time that first year of intensive mining was out, the miners had been spending so much time underground that Snake’s tunnels reeked of people.
That spring, Snake shed her skin, but when she woke and flicked out her tongue, the air tasted of smoke and saltpeter and uric acid. This was not her cavern, not the home she knew. Something terrible must have happened. Memories, vague violent flashes, sparked in her brain. Humans attacking her, cutting her. She burst from underground like a geyser, white hot and roiling. Avenging every one of her murdered brethren. The people of Stenvall’s Folly never stood a chance.
After the settlement was decimated, after Snake’s belly was full and bodies lay scattered about, and the bloodlust faded, she remembered where she was, who she was. Though some of the townspeople deserved their fate, many others did not. Shame and anger and despair and righteousness warred within her, and she slithered back to her cavern to meditate and sleep. For all intents and purposes, Snake considered herself dead.
Decades passed, and one day a noble salesman rode into a ghost town.
Al never expected that he’d die in bed, surrounded by loved ones—he isn’t delusional. But he didn’t expect to die hanged for a thief on the dusty outskirts of Portico either. Because, although he may have grifted and conned and bent the truth, he’s never stolen anything, not in any way that an honest person could accuse him of. His sister and Sheriff Stenvall don’t care of course. If anyone lives in Portico who does care whether Aloysius P. McNutt survives the day, Al would appreciate their reveal.
Hot sun beats down on hard dirt and Al’s head. He sits on a bench in the back of a wagon, hands tied behind his back, ankles tied to the bench. He takes stock of the scene, calculating his odds. Sweat dampens the shirtfronts of the men and women building the scaffolding from which he will swing. Every so often, one of them pauses, wipes a brow, consults parchment that Al presumes are assembly instructions. Maybe they’ll construct something wrong and the platform will snap before his neck does.
No sign of Sheriff Stenvall. Al scans the fields. Tall maize stalks, sunflowers overtopping the wagon, brine-apple trees sprouting where some careless traveler spit seeds years earlier. Plenty of places for a lawman and his cohort to hide, waiting to see if a snake will try to save a condemned man. Of course, those same places could camouflage a snake. Foolish as it would be, if Snake does try to save him, the attempt might not be completely hopeless.
Other than the workers, not many have come to witness Al’s shuffling off this mortal coil. Six guards loiter about the scaffolding, sure to be joined by the two accompanying Al in the wagon. Maybe thirty spectators, all poor folk by the look of them—clothes washed more times than the cheap fabric can handle; sunken cheeks belying equally sunken ribs beneath those clothes. These are the people his father bled, the people Al had tried to free by giving them back their health. And if he hadn’t been caught out entering town, he could have finally finished what he started. Yes, he failed then and he’s failed now, but he tried. Not that he did what he did for acclaim, but still, he expected a less enthusiastic reception at his execution. Maybe they work for his sister. Maybe she’s paying them to jeer.
Because Althea is present too. Not back home avoiding the dirty work, not concealed in the fields preparing to battle a monstrous serpent. She wouldn’t miss Al’s comeuppance for the world.
Smirking, she strides to the wagon, motions with the tilt of her head for the guards to untie Al from the bench. They leave his wrists bound, of course.
“Big brother, I never thought I’d see the day,” she says.
Al sighs heavily. “Likewise.”
“Some say that achieving vengeance leaves one feeling hollow afterward—”
“Wise counsel,” Al says. “I’d hate to think my death might sap you of your ambition.”
“It’s a risk I’m willing to take.”
Best as he can with his wrists lashed together behind him, Al shrugs. “I won’t argue with you. You were a kid—you didn’t see what Father did to people. How he built his fortune on this town’s suffering, how he gained his power just because he was willing to be crueler than most. All I tried to do was right the balance a little.”
“Daddy helped people,” Althea snaps, though for a moment Al thinks her voice falters. “He paid doctors to take care of people. Without him, how would they know who to care for or what to charge for it? Starving doctors can’t help anyone.”
“And what about the people who couldn’t pay what Father charged?” Al says, raising his voice so everyone can hear him. “The folks who can’t pay what you charge them now? You think every doctor in town does it for the money? That not a one actually wants to heal people? Go ahead and release them from their contracts, divest yourself from the school. See what happens.” He chuckles ruefully. “I think you’d find that the people of this town are better than you give them credit for. Or at least they’d want to be. All I ever did was honor what Father pretended to promise.”
Althea reddens, and it’s not due to the summer heat. Everyone’s watching them. The spectators, the guards, the workers on the scaffold. Hidden in the foliage, Stenvall and his posse observe as well, Al wagers.
“Daddy trusted you. You! And you betrayed him. Like a worm. Like a weasel. Like a... a...”
“Like a snake?” a raspy voice asks as Snake bursts from the fields on the side of the road opposite the scaffold. Despite the dire straits, Al can’t suppress a grin at Snake’s theatrical flair.
Panicked screams rise from the assembled spectators as they stumble over each other in their flight.
“Wait! Wait!” Al yells. “This serpent isn’t here to harm you. If anyone here remembers me, trusts me, believe me now!”
Althea cuffs Al on the back of the head, and he falls to his knees, pain jolting up his legs and spine. His jaw snaps shut on his tongue, and he tastes copper. Any words he attempts now will come out garbled and dull. The one surefire way to hobble a salesman.
He spits blood and prepares to speak anyway. Snake does so instead.
“Friends,” she rumbles, the final letter of the word a sibilant hiss. “You needn’t fear. For years I have listened my dear compatriot Aloysius describe the wondrous town of Portico and the gentle people here. For years, traveling the plains and forests of the frontier, how many times have I beseeched him to journey home, to share my gifts with those most deserving? It is my utmost pleasure and privilege to stand before you today.” Snake twists her head around, flicks her tail, displaying the lack of legs. “So to speak.”
Hesitant chuckles from the crowd. What do you know? Snake’s picked up some patter. Al watches, rapt. Forgetting about his furious sister standing next to him. Forgetting about the armed men in the fields.
“I have no doubt you’ve been offered snake oil before,” Snake continues, “but has it ever been sold by the snake direct? Who better to vouch for its efficacy? My associate and I, at no financial risk to you—”
A gunshot cracks from the tall grass, and a bullet ricochets off Snake’s scales with a sound like a pickaxe gouging rock. She flinches, her rippling body slapping the ground
. Spectators duck, hands flying to their heads. Al shouts angrily, warning Snake away. Althea triumphantly yawps and draws her own revolver. Little good it will do again Snake’s natural armor. Al hopes.
Snake rears back, bares her fangs. Looses a hiss as loud as a tornado. From the fields, men and women rush her, brandishing guns, machetes, thick ropes, and nets.
Stenvall steps from the field, double-barreled shotgun held to his shoulder, muzzle aimed square at Snake’s open mouth. “You think you can destroy my home? My family? And get away with it? Try to portray yourself as some savior?”
“Your people attempted to steal something freely given. You didn’t deserve it. I wanted them to pay for attacking me, and I lashed out. I was angry. I’m... I’m sorry.” Snake slumps as she speaks, the weight of years heavier than any net. Everyone stares. No one watches Al. He could slip into the fields, fade into the countryside, make for the sea and a boat far away.
This must be Snake’s plan. Distract everyone and sacrifice herself so Al can escape. And here he thought she knew him better than that. Fire rises in Al’s gullet. His hands clench into fists. “Damn it all!” he bellows. “Ain’t none of this fair, and every soul here knows it!”
The roar of the crowd dims for the briefest of moments, but their surprise won’t last. Surely, Al’s not the first condemned man to protest the noose’s legitimacy.
“It doesn’t have to be this way.” Still on his knees, looking at his sister, at Sheriff Stenvall, at the gathered spectators. “Living on the outskirts of civilization doesn’t mean we need to exist on the knife-edge of barbarism. We can work together, all of us, and make something better than what’s here. Maybe I didn’t go about it the most honest way before, but when you’re fighting against a dishonest... We can do better. We can be better. Trust Snake. Trust me, and I promise you, each and every one of us shall improve in health and moreover in happiness.”
