The bounty was five thousand dollars. The snake was twelve feet long and ugly as sin. The man who offered the bounty was the sheriff, who had a face like a clenched fist and eyes that had never looked at anything without suspicion since the coal mine closed.

"State grant," he said. "Fifty states, fifty thousand dollars. This town gets five thousand for whoever puts the thing down. You want the money, O'Malley?"

I had been unemployed for eleven months. My trailer sat on a patch of scrub land off Route 50, and the water heater had been broken since October. My ex-wife had taken the kids to Columbus and hadn't called since November. I needed the five thousand dollars like a man needs air.

"Where is it?" I asked.

"Old mine shafts off County Road 12. Been killing livestock for two months. Last week it took a goat. This week it might take a dog. Next week it might take a kid. You want to be the hero?"

I didn't want to be a hero. I wanted the five thousand dollars. But a hero it was.

The truck was a 1998 Ford that started only when I prayed to it, and even then it only sometimes. I drove out to County Road 12 with a hunting rifle that belonged to my father and a box of twelve shells that I had been saving for Christmas. I had not fired the rifle in three years. I was not sure I remembered how.

The mine shafts were a scar across the landscape, open wounds where the earth had been ripped open and the coal ripped out and then nobody had bothered to fix the wound. The ground was uneven, broken by decades of mining subsidence, and every step was a negotiation with gravity.

I found the tracks at dusk. They were massive — each one the size of a dinner plate — cutting across the mud like furrows. I followed them for an hour, my heart beating fast for reasons I couldn't identify. Fear, certainly. But also something else. Something that felt like purpose, if purpose meant walking into the dark with a rifle that might not work and a courage that was mostly whiskey.

The snake was in an old coal car, half-submerged in the mud, sleeping with its mouth open and its tongue flicking in and out like a metronome. It was darker than I expected — not black, not brown, but something in between that absorbed the light rather than reflecting it. Its scales were thick and leathery, and the head was broad and flat, like a trowel.

I raised the rifle. My hands were shaking. I aimed at the head, which was what you did in the movies, and I pulled the trigger.

The rifle kicked back into my shoulder with a force that made me dizzy. The bullet struck the snake's shoulder, not the head. It screamed — a sound like steam escaping from a pipe — and thrashed. The coal car overturned. Mud and water and broken coal scattered everywhere. I fell backward into the muck and the snake was on top of me, its weight crushing, its heat radiating through my clothes like a furnace.

I fumbled for the rifle. It was gone, lost in the mud. I grabbed a piece of coal and hit the snake's head with it. The coal shattered. The snake bit me.

The bite was not deep — just two puncture wounds on my forearm — but the pain was immediate and excrucious, like someone had driven a red-hot nail through my flesh. I kicked the snake in the head, hard, and it released me. I scrambled backward through the mud, clutching my arm, and the snake retreated into the coal car.

I did not go home. I sat in the mud for two hours, drinking from a half-empty bottle of bourbon and waiting for the poison to kill me. It didn't. The snake was non-venomous — a python, not a rattlesnake. I had been bitten by a python. The thought made me laugh until I cried, and then I cried until I was too tired to laugh. My arm was swollen and purple, and the wound was warm to the touch. I wrapped it with a strip of my shirt and lay back in the mud, staring up at the grey sky, wondering if this was what it felt like to be irrelevant — hunted by a creature that didn't even want to eat you, killed by something that didn't even try.

When I woke up in the morning, the snake was gone. I found it at noon, sleeping in another coal car, half a mile away. I killed it with a rock. It took me three hours and I used every ounce of strength I had. When it finally stopped moving, I collapsed beside it and passed out again. I woke up to the sound of rain, the first rain in two weeks, falling on the snake's body and washing the mud from its scales, revealing a colour I had never noticed before — a deep, almost blue-black that caught the weak light like oil on water.

The sheriff came with a crew the next day. They carried the snake out on a flatbed truck, and the media came, and the sheriff gave a press conference, and I stood in the background looking like a man who had just survived a war instead of a man who had nearly died fighting a snake with a rock.

The five thousand dollars arrived in a cheque two weeks later. I cashed it and paid off the water heater.

But the snake was not just a snake.

It decomposed in the mine shaft where it had died, and the decomposition released toxins into the soil and water that had been sitting in the snake's body for decades — heavy metals, pesticides, industrial waste from the factories upstream that had contaminated the water table and been absorbed by the snake when it drank. The mine shaft was a conduit, a natural pipeline connecting the surface to the groundwater, and the snake's body was a time bomb of concentrated pollution.

Within a month, the water in the nearby housing project started tasting different. Within two months, people started getting sick. Skin rashes. Coughing. Headaches. A six-year-old girl developed leukemia.

The state tested the water and found levels of arsenic and mercury that were ten times above the legal limit. They closed the housing project. The families were relocated to motels and temporary housing. The land was declared a Superfund site.

The five thousand dollars was the only money that came into our town from the whole incident. The cleanup estimate was two hundred million dollars.

Nobody blamed me directly. They didn't have to. They just stopped looking at me when I walked down the street. Stopped waving. Stopped pretending that everything was going to be okay.

My sister Marie packed up and moved to Columbus without telling me. She left a note on the kitchen table: "I'm sorry, Jack. I love you. But I can't watch you drown anymore."

I sit on my porch every evening and watch the field where the snake died. The grass has grown back. The mine shaft is covered with chain-link fencing and a sign that says DANGER — CONTA MINATED SOIL. The wind blows dust across the field. Sometimes I pour my beer on the ground and say "here's to that" to nobody.

The snake is gone. The poison remains. And I am still here, which is the worst part of all.

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