The last time I cooked for Lee Marvin, we ate snake. I was sceptical. He was adamant. As ever he was right, the reptile was excellent. But then it would have to be, if it were to be cooked for one of the greatest men of the 20th century. Actor, lover, fighter. Man of action. Man of few words. 

Every man alive, without exception, secretly wishes he were Lee Marvin.  

The day I cooked for him, we were riding the sierra that ran through his ranch. He was an incomparable caballero. He could do anything on a horse. He taught me to ride and whilst I can handle myself, I will never come close to his horsemanship.

We had started at dawn, after a breakfast of beans and coffee and stopped every so often, dropping from our horses, fully clothed, into the cool, clear water that pooled in the bends of the creeks we passed. It helped wash away the sweat of the long riding and nights of heavy drinking under stars that were engaged in celestial shootouts.

The sun was getting low in the sky and I watched as he leaned down out of his saddle, fully extended his arm and picked up a stone the size of a wolf’s testicle. He hoisted himself back up and twisted round and threw the stone straight at me. 

Luckily, he wasn’t actually aiming at me. He was aiming at a snake in a tree we were passing. A diamondback, he told me later. 

Nasty snake, bad bite – was how he put it.

He hit the snake fully on the head and killed it outright. 

He drew to a halt and dismounted, walked over and toed the inert, defunct mother of all sin. As soon as the boot made contact with the snake, it sprang back into action. Not to back life, just action. It was writhing and convulsing but he simply pinned the snake to the ground just behind its head with his boot. He slowly withdrew a knife from within his clothes, crouched down and cut the snake’s head off. 

He lifted his boot but it still jumped and writhed. It reminded me of the way chickens run around when decapitated, seemingly trying to escape the end that they had already met. He picked it up, put it into a sack. 

‘Sorry kid, you’re cooking,’ he said, handing me the sack.

An hour later, we made camp next to the creek and I began to get ready for the night – a night with Lee Marvin was never predictable and was often quite hard work. Particularly the next day. 

I waded into the water and removed the snake from its sack. I was fairly appalled to see that it was still moving. Not so vigorously, but writhing nonetheless. I took out my knife and made a small cut in its skin, enough to be able to peel it back. I bit down on the fleshy, bony stump where the head used to be and pulled the skin off its body. Still the creature writhed, but slowly now, like a dancer using his arms to pretend to be a snake. 

I washed the skin before turning it back, right side out. When I had finished I hung it to dry from the limb of a tree that was overhanging the river. I still have the snakeskin. I keep it on the dashboard of my car. I then washed the snake in the cold water. Finally it was inert, a good couple of hours after its death. 

I walked back up to the fire wondering how I was going to grill it, when I saw him coming towards me with the branch of a tree, cutting away its limbs. What now? I thought and took a step back. But all he did was to take the snake from me and lay the two things alongside each other, near the fire. 

‘Wait,’ he said, and disappeared into the woods.

So I waited. It started a couple of minutes after he reappeared carrying a bundle of leafy oak cuttings. “It” was the unaided union of the snake and stick. Right there on the ground by the fire, the snake began to move once again. It twisted its rattle around the end of the stick and curled and rolled until it was completely corkscrewed around the stick’s length. 

‘Shit,’ I said. 

‘Yep,’ he said, and threw the cuttings on to the fire. 

He sat with his arm out straight, holding the weird snakestick in the smoke just above the heat, whilst he went into a monologue at full volume about a night’s drinking with Bob Mitchum and some French sex workers, only he didn’t call them that, in a town he claimed had been liberated by the two them at the end of the war.

He talked for half an hour without pausing, without even seeming to draw breath, all the while feeding the smoke and holding the snakestick in it. He finished up by saying  ‘Okay, now you,’ and he handed it to me.

I poked about in the embers until I had them nice and white with a red glow beneath. I put two rocks about a foot apart in the fire and laid the snake across them, turning it every minute or so. Juices dripped on to the embers and hissed. 

Its flesh, a pinkish white to begin with, had now turned a beautiful, golden brown. It smelled good. 

I pulled the stick out of the long coil and cut it into two halves and we ate. 

Snake is just one long spine and ribs so it can be tricky to eat if it’s thin. But this was a diamondback and about four foot long and weighing five pounds or so. We could pull off whole hunks with our teeth. It was young so its flesh was reasonably tender for a creature that is all muscle. 

I sat chewing, thinking about its flavour. It tasted like mackerel. And we were about 400 miles from the sea.

Mr Marvin liked it. He didn’t say as much. In fact he didn’t say anything. I could just tell he was enjoying it. Every now and then he would shake a few drops of Tabasco onto his next mouthful and chew it slowly. 

He wiped  his mouth with his sleeve as the last mouthful went down. ‘Right, I’m ready.’

The sun had gone down.

And the drinking began.

You can find Matthew Marke’s killings every Tuesday at matthewmarke.substack.com