A Feast of Snakes (14 page)

Berenice high-stepped across the linoleum rug and hugged Elfie like a sister. “Just got here,” she said. “Come through the door this minute. How you been, honey?” And without waiting for an answer: “You looking good. You looking one hundred percent.” She turned and pointed to the two babies lying now curled in exhausted sleep in their playpen in the middle of the room. “You got two handsome little man-babies, honey. I was just looking and thinking how handsome them little darlings were.”

Elfie blushed. “Thank you. Me and Joe Lon … Joe Lon and me, why, we think that… think that too.”

“You want a drink?” said Joe Lon.

Berenice shifted her beatdown magnificent haunches and turned to look at him. “A little light something might be nice before we eat,” she said.

“Oh, I’ll get it,” said Elfie quickly. “Let me get it.”

“Let me help you,” said Berenice.

“No, I can …” But the two of them were gone through the door together before she could finish.

When they were gone, Willard said: “She used to bubble a bottle like a goddam sawmill nigger. Now she wants a little light something. Jesus!”

“I got a little light something I’m gone give her,” said Joe Lon.

“She needs to be opened up some so she can breathe,” said Hard Candy, “that sister of mine does.”

“You gone try to put wood to Berenice?” said Willard. “Right here in the trailer with the babies and the old lady standing around?”

“Shut up, Willard,” said Joe Lon bitterly. “It ain’t nothing funny.”

“Don’t tell me to shut up,” said Willard Miller. “I’ll come over there and let you smell you daddy’s fist.”

They sat glaring at each other, but Joe Lon was bored with the game. Seemed it was one game after another.

“I don’t understand,” said Duffy, but he already suspected he did. “Run it by me again.”

“Them two used to be a case here in Lebeau County,” said Willard evenly without ever taking his eyes off Joe Lon. “They used to be a case when Joe Lon here was Boss Snake of the Mystic Rattlers.”

“She’s a fine-looking girl,” said Duffy Deeter.

“The world’s full of fine-looking girls,” Joe Lon said sourly.

“It ain’t full of Berenices,” said Willard. “Was, she couldn’t strike a lick on you like she does.”

“Then it must be my turn,” said Joe Lon. “Git everybody out of the trailer after we eat them snakes.”

“How the hell I’m sposed do that?” said Willard.

“You’ll think of something,” said Joe Lon. “You Boss Rattler now. It’s you goddam job to think of something.”

But he didn’t think of something. He was not the one. It was Susan Gender at the suggestion of Duffy Deeter who thought of something. After they had eaten the snakes and after Lummy had brought another bottle of whiskey and stood around at the back door long enough to tell them how Big Joe had called the store for somebody to come and bury Old Tuffy, and Duffy Deeter had found out that tomorrow night there was going to be a dog fight—champion dogs on which money could be bet—after all of that, during which time Berenice had talked excitedly and in detail about her trip to Europe to study French and Joe Lon had sat listening, choking on both snake and the thought that he had spent
his
time and life selling nigger whiskey and watching Elfie’s teeth fall out, they were once again cramped into the living room when Susan Gender said: “Hard Candy, let’s go outside and have us a twirl-off. Settle this snake down some.”

Susan Gender was excited. They were all excited, except Elfie, who sat feeding the babies Gerber’s strained food out of little green and yellow bottles. They were excited because they watched Berenice still compulsively talking unaware that they were setting her up to be, as Hard Candy said, ventilated by Joe Lon, who by this time had his game face on and was ready to work.

“We can settle the snake and you can all be judges,” said Susan Gender. “You feel up to a twirl-off, Hard Candy?”

“Always,” said Hard Candy.

“You’re up against a good one,” said Berenice. “My sister is a good one.” She crossed her strong baton-twirling thighs and Duffy Deeter thought Joe Lon would fall out of his chair. They were only waiting for Elfie to finish spooning the last jar of Gerber’s into the older baby. “We both went, you know, to the Dixie National Baton Twirling Institute for two summers. Two summers each, both of us.”

“Jesus,” Duffy said. “Really?” Besides liking the marvelously absurd ring of
Dixie National Baton Twirling Institute,
he loved the excited enthusiastic way Berenice had been babbling ever since she got there.

“Right,” she said. “It’s on the campus of Old Miss.”

“Dynamite,” said Duffy.

She talked on, a little breathlessly, waving her hands, her eyes turning now and again to check Elfie’s progress with the baby food.

“When we were there the Director of the Institute was Don Sartell. He’s known as Mister Baton, you know.”

“I didn’t know that,” said Duffy. He was wishing he and Joe Lon could double-team her little ass and thereby force her to give up all her secrets.

“I’m done,” said Elfie, turning her ruined smile on them. “This youngan ain’t eatin another bite.”

“Let’s get to that twirl-off,” said Duffy. He looked at Elfie. “Want to take the playpen outside for the babies?”

“Oh, they’ll sleep now they full,” she said. “We can leave’m right where they are.”

They let Elfie pass first through the door followed by Willard, Susan Gender, Hard Candy, and finally Duffy, who cast one lingering look over his shoulder toward Berenice just passing in front of Joe Lon. Joe Lon’s face was gray and tight. He looked a little out of control. Duffy closed the door.

As the door closed Joe Lon took her arm and spun her to face him. “Don’t!” Berenice said. “God, we can’t, not here.”

“Oh, I magine we can,” he said.

She wasn’t listening. She’d already broken one of her nails tearing at his belt. He took her by the wrist and led her down the short narrow hallway to a little room and threw her on the bed.

“Git naked and take a four-point stance,” he said.

The bed was right next to a wall and she braced herself firmly against the window ledge. He struck her from behind like she’d been a tackling dummy.

“You’ll make me holler,” Berenice said.

“Holler then,” said Joe Lon Mackey.

“You know how I always holler,” she said quickly. And then: “Oh, Jesus, honey, honey, honey Jesus.”

“Is that what you gone holler?” he demanded. “Is it
Jesus honey!”

She could no longer talk. He had driven her close against the window. The blinds were drawn, but around the edge, through a half inch of warped glass, he could see Hard Candy and Susan where they were twirling off while Willard and Duffy and Elfie squatted on the hard-packed dirt, watching. Elfie kept turning back to stare at the trailer, sometimes right at the window where they were locked together looking out. Berenice’s hair lay in a damp tangle on her neck. Sweat ran on their bodies, darkening the sheet under them.

Joe Lon held the sharp blades of her hip bones, one in each hand, while he looked absently through the window. Berenice slowly turned her head to gaze fondly back at him over her shoulder.

“I must tell you, darling,” she said, “I love Shep.”

He told himself that he didn’t care one way or the other if she loved Shep but that talk of love was the last thing in the world he wanted to hear from her. From anybody. He refused to meet her eyes and finally she turned to gaze with him through the warped glass at Elfie where she still squatted outside the trailer with Willard Miller and Duffy Deeter.

“It doesn’t mean I didn’t love you,” she said.

“I don’t want to hear about it,” he said. “I don’t need that.”

“All right,” she said.

Outside, Elf turned to look quickly back toward the trailer but then she didn’t look any more because Willard put his hand on her shoulder and started talking to her, pointing at the girls, who were taking turns testing each other in complicated little dance routines, their silver batons flashing like swords in the sun. In the other room the babies slowly started crying, almost like singing, a chorus of something sad and interminable.

In a light conversational voice while they watched Susan Gender skip across the bare dirt yard outside, Berenice said: “You know, darling, baton twirling is the second biggest young girls’ movement in America. Did you know that? Uh huh, is though. Girl Scouts is Numero Uno. That means first. But baton twirling is
the
biggest if you don’t count Girl Scouts.” She turned to smile at him over her shoulder. “The reason is … well, there’s three of them.” She didn’t look back at him, but she braced herself with one hand and held up the other hand with three fingers for him to see. “Three. First you don’t have to go nowheres. You can do it in the living room or like them out in the yard—out in the yard. Second. No expensive equipment. Third. You can practice alone.”

“What good is it?” said Joe Lon.

“What?”

“I said what good is it?”

“Here, think about this. Did you know there’s a
Who’s Who in Baton Twirling?”

Joe Lon said, “Studying them goddam foreign languages is done ruint you mind.”

“You honey,” she said, smiling back at him as she did. He made her grunt. She had to use two hands to keep from being punched through the window.

He watched Elfie glancing over her shoulder toward the trailer, ignoring the splits, the whirls, the twirling flashing batons. He did not know what love was. And he did not know what good it was. But he knew he carried it around with him, a scabrous spot of rot, of contagion, for which there was no cure. Rage would not cure it. Indulgence made it worse, inflamed it, made it grow like a cancer. And it had ruined his life. Not now, not in this moment. Long before. The world had seemed a good and livable place. Brutal, yes, but there was a certain joy in that. The brutality on the football field, in the tonks, was celebration. Men were maimed without malice, sometimes—often even—in friendship. Lonely, yes. Running was lonely. Sweat was lonely. The pain of preparation was lonely. There’s no way to share a pulled hamstring with somebody else. There’s no way to farm out part of a twisted knee. But who in God’s name ever assumed otherwise? Once you knew that it was all bearable.

But love, love seemed to mess up everything. It
had
messed up everything. He could not have said it, but he knew it. It was knowledge that he carried in his blood. Elfie was watching the window through which he was looking. He felt her eyes on his eyes. And the wavering window glass made her face softer, more vulnerable and afflicted with the pain of child-bearing than he could stand to look at.

The golden plain of Berenice’s back, gently indented along the spine by twin rolls of smooth muscle, was speckled with glittering drops of sweat. The musking odor of her came to his flared nostrils like something steaming off a stove. She was still talking, had never stopped talking.

“… see, it’s beginning solo, intermediate solo, advanced solo, strutting—beginning and military (I was always good at strutting)—two baton, fire baton, duet, trio and team …”

It was a wonder Big Joe had not killed his mother. Everybody thought it a miracle that he had not. In many ways, Joe Lon knew, it would have been better if he had. If Big Joe had simply and quickly blown her head off with a shotgun his little sister might not today be lying in a bed stinking of her own shit.

The babies were screaming louder now. The older boy was banging the barred side of his playpen in a rage with his rattle. Out in the yard Elfie sat with her eyes steadily on the room where he held Berenice, she still compulsively talking, in her four-point stance. Susan Gender and Hard Candy Sweet were no longer twirling. They seemed to be in an argument about something, their fists balled on their hips, their legs straddling.

“… and they arguing right now because competition is exact. It’s exact, Joe Lon, in your twirl-off, it is. In each one it’s a judge and a scorekeeper. The scorekeeper …”

His mother had left for reasons of love. Deserted them all: Big Joe, himself, his sister Beeder, the big house. And in deserting them had left an enormous ragged hole in their lives.

The note had said.
I have gone with Billy. Forgive me. But I love him and I have gone with him.

They knew who Billy was well enough. He was a traveling shoe salesman, and Mystic was one of his stops. It had been for years. He was short and nearly bald, a soft, almost feminine-looking man who always wore the same shiny wrinkled suit and drove a rusting Corvair car. And the bitterest, most painful thing Joe Lon ever had to do was admit to himself that his mother had been fucking that little shoe salesman for reasons of love when she had a house and a husband and children and a flower garden and friends and a hometown and a son famous through the whole South and meals to cook and clothes to wash, a woman like that—no, not a woman, his
mother
—lying down on her back with a little man who walked always leaning slightly to the right from carrying a heavy suitcase full of shoe samples.

“… oh, it’s exact all right, the competition is. You take your advanced solo, for instance.” She moved her hips languidly against him as she talked. “Your advance solo has to last at least two minutes and twenty seconds and not more than two minutes and thirty seconds.”

Big Joe had gone and gotten her. Billy lived in Atlanta and Big Joe had gone there and found his wife sitting in a little ratty flat on the edge of a neighborhood full of niggers (Big Joe had given all the details day in and day out for a year after it happened), found his wife sitting alone because Billy was out on his sales route with his suitcase full of shoes and Big Joe had picked her up and brought her home. It was morning when they got back to Mystic and Joe Lon and Beeder were in school. Beeder came home that afternoon still wearing her little tassled uniform from her cheerleading practice and found her mother sitting in her favorite rocker wearing Big Joe’s tie. She was wearing her husband’s tie and had a one-sentence note pinned to her cotton dress. Beeder had never been the same since.