A Feast of Snakes (7 page)

He had watched, unable to move, to believe either that she actually meant to do what he knew she meant to do. Putting shit in her hair was something he had never seen her do before. He had seen her do some pretty bad things but not that.

He got up and backed toward the door, refusing to let himself turn his face from her, saying as he went: “Lord help us all. Sister Beeder, Lord help us all.” He had not called her Sister Beeder since they were children. She was already back in bed watching the snow, listening to the static before he got through the door.

In the truck, under the pecan trees bare and black in the bright heavy moon, he sat without turning on the motor or lights and let half a bottle of whiskey down his throat. He gagged against the whiskey but he held the bottle to his mouth anyway, feeling his stomach tighten against the warm bourbon. He could not shake the image of his sister easing her befouled head back into the pillow. But gradually it did recede. As he sat there in the dark hurting himself more and more—as much as he could stand—with the whiskey the memory of the whole evening grew unsure and lost all significance whatsoever.

Later—he wouldn’t remember how much later—he saw his daddy come through the door out onto the porch and come down the steps into the yard. He led Tuffy on a leash, the jagged lightning-bolt scars blacker in the bright moonlight. Big Joe walked slowly, waiting for the dog, whose brutal squared head hung nearly to the ground. Joe Lon watched them limp, the old man and the bloodied dog, across the wide bare yard toward the kennel, where the other pit bulls were growling and barking and snapping at the wire of their individual cages.

The dim light from the television set still showed in his sister’s room when he made the turn in his pickup truck to drive toward home.

***

It wasn’t even ten o’clock in the morning and the actual hunt was still nearly forty-eight hours away, but there were already at least a thousand people camped in and around Mystic. They had come in an unrelenting, noisy stream starting long before daylight. Some of them ended up in tents, some bedded down in the backs of pickups, some sat in the open doors of vans, and a great many were in campers of one kind or another. Joe Lon’s field was over half full, and spaced neatly along the orderly rows of snake hunters were the white chemical outhouses called Johnny-on-the-spots.

Probably less than half of the people who had arrived were hunters. The rest were tourists of one kind or another, retirees stunned with boredom, people genuinely curious about snakes but who had never seen a live one outside a cage, young dopers who wondered about saying gentle, inscrutable things to one another about God, Karma, and Hermann Hesse.

Almost everyone had brought pet snakes to the hunt. Mostly they were constrictors and black snakes and water snakes. They carried the snakes around with them, passing them from hand to hand, comparing them, describing their habits and disclosing their names.

A surprising number of craftsmen were setting up their wares all over Mystic. Some of the wares were in elaborate booths, pulled in separate trailers, but a lot of things were being sold right off the tailgates of pickup trucks. There were sketches and paintings of snakes, and every imaginable article made from the skin of diamondbacks: cigarette cases, purses, wallets, belts, shoes, and hats. One group of longhairs was featuring—hanging all over their Volkswagen van—various articles of underclothing, plus several well-crafted items that could only be dildoes of different shapes and sizes; all were marked with the unmistakable pattern of the snake. Several of the dildoes had reshaped and formed rattlesnake heads, complete with fangs. The longhairs had been reported earlier to Sheriff Buddy Matlow by several Senior Citizens, and Buddy, who had been through many of these roundups before and consequently knew that everybody had to be given considerable slack, even longhairs—came by and told them to try not to shock the older folk, that this was all good clean fun, well organized and controlled by himself and his staff and, besides, that it was sponsored by the Greater Mystic Chamber of Commerce, made up mostly of farmers, and therefore had to look after its good name.

Then Buddy bought himself two snake-headed rubbers with diamondback patterns and put them in the glove compartment of his Plymouth patrol car.

But the most spectacular craftsman of all, the one who had the largest audience watching her work and who commanded the biggest prices for the work she did, was an ancient little lady who sat under a white bonnet in a cane-bottom rocking chair making mosaics out of the individual rattles from the tails of diamondbacks. There were several on display; one of them—the largest—about a yard square was of a buck deer stamping a diamondback to death. It had taken the rattles from one thousand, one hundred and sixty-two snakes to complete and the little lady under the white bonnet who never raised her eyes from the stretched canvas she was working on in front of her was asking three thousand dollars for it.

Joe Lon Mackey could see the lady from where he sat at the little white Formica table in his double-wide drinking coffee. The crowd around her stood silently in a little semicircle as she worked fastening the rattles to the stretched canvas. She’d been to every roundup as far back as Joe Lon could remember. And she had always had the three-thousand-dollar mosaic with her.

He suspected she was asking so much because she actually didn’t want to sell it. It was a fantastic thing to see, though, unbelievable really, with the buck deer, his nostrils flared, reared onto his back legs, the razorlike front hooves poised to strike the already cut and mutilated snake on the ground. And because it was so spectacular, Joe Lon supposed some sonofabitch would come by sooner or later dumb enough to pay what she was asking. The world was in short supply of a lot of things but one of them was not dumb sonofabitches with more money than was good for them.

Joe Lon had gotten up early that morning and gone out, partly to see if Lummy and his brother George were properly placing the chemical toilets and partly—mostly—to get out of the bed and out of the house before he had to face Elfie.

When he woke up about daylight, the whole sorry business of the night before had risen before his eyes, the memory of his sister flooding back upon him and his daddy limping out behind the house with the battered half-ruined bulldog, and then worse, much worse, how it had been afterward when he had got drunker and drunker, remembering that Berenice was coming home, remembering how it used to be with her, thinking about everything the world had promised him and then snatched away until he was stone drunk on the scalding bourbon and drunk on the honeylegged memory of Berenice.

He somehow managed to get what he wished was true confused with the facts of his own life. It wasn’t the first time it had ever happened. It was a little quirk his head had of working when he was lost in the sour mist of bourbon whiskey. He had gotten out of his pickup truck in the dark—the moon had gone now, setting behind a black cloud—and gone through the dark, narrow little passageways of the double-wide, stripping his clothes as he went, and fallen finally, savagely, in the bed, not upon his child-ruined wife Elfie but upon the heaving flesh of the University of Georgia’s golden head cheerleader, Berenice, or so he thought in the addled disorientation of his alcohol-splattered brain.

But of course it had been poor old Elf, caught unawares and sleeping, her sore flapping breasts vulnerable to his hard square hands. She had come awake with a little muffled cry, protesting, her thin arms trying to push him away, but he had her pinned, driving her against the headboard of the bed. It was a God’s wonder he hadn’t broken her neck. And when he woke up the next morning he saw her pale face turned off toward the window, her lips partly open, showing her discolored tongue and teeth, the blue smear of a bruise running up from the corner of her mouth, and he knew as the sorry night came back to him in painfully clear memory that he had called her Berenice again and again while he had taken her through the whole routine of enthusiastic sexual gymnastics he and his old high-school sweetheart used to work upon each other’s bodies when the world was still a place where such things were not only possible but also a great singing joy in his heart.

There was no joy singing in his heart though when he woke up and realized what he had done, so he had slipped quickly into his Levis, a T-shirt, and a denim jacket, and left the trailer. When he fired up his pickup, he heard both baby boys scream simultaneously. He wondered if something might not ail them younguns, crying the way they did all through the day with such fantastic stamina.

He drove over to the high school first, where they were already building the snake. The cheerleaders, led by Hard Candy Sweet, had sorted out their materials and were starting now to stretch the chicken wire over the frame that eventually would be a papier mache rattlesnake standing thirty feet high and coiled to strike. That night after the dancing it would explode in one sudden bursting bonfire. Hard Candy was up on a piece of scaffolding and turned to wave to him, but apparently wasn’t going to come down to talk to him. He wanted to ask her about Berenice, to ask if she had gotten in from the university yet. Eventually though, watching her bend and stretch there inside her tight red-hot little short shorts (the weather was still holding warm), moving her firm round arms, making her little titties lift and soar, made him impossibly anxious to see Berenice, so he left and drove back to his ten-acre campground, where sure enough Lummy and his brother George had set out the Johnny-on-the-spots in just the neatest and best way, so that he could hardly believe it.

He was standing by the little lady under the white bonnet looking at her thousand-snake masterpiece, admiring the way the deer’s hooves showed sharp as razors there above the snake, when Lummy appeared out of the crowd at his elbow.

“Mistuh Joe Lon?”

Joe Lon did not turn to look at him; rather he recognized his voice and kept staring at the fine sharp detail of the rearing deer’s hooves. “Everthing’s fine,” he said. “You and George done a good job gitten them shitters ready.”

“Say we done good,” said Lummy. “Howsomever, it don be whatall I come to axe you bout.”

Joe Lon looked at him for the first time.

“It be Lottie Mae.”

“What about her?”

“I want to thanks you for gittin Mistuh Buddy to letter loose.”

Joe Lon said: “It’s all right. I’as glad to do it.”

“Sompin bad wrong with Lottie Mae,” said Lummy.

“What ails her?” said Joe Lon, only half listening.

“She be hexed I thinks,” said Lummy.

“Hexed?” said Joe Lon, thinking:
Just nigger talk. I spend half my goddam life listening to nigger talk and the other half of it totin whiskey to them. God knows what I did to deserve it
. Believing as he did, though, in the total mystery, power, and majesty of God, Joe Lon assumed he had done
something
, and that he would never find out what it was.

“Mama say she been acting powerful strange since she come in las night,” said Lummy.

Joe Lon waved his hand as though brushing away flies. “Look,” he said. “You or George one got to stay at the store all day today. I want it kept open to midnight and I want it opened up right now. I ain’t gone have no time for the store today.”

“I know no Sherf ain’t gone hex no gul. Special no nigger gul. Sherf got sompin else to do cept go roun hexin on nigger guls.”

Joe Lon blinked. It was as though Lummy had not heard him. And he knew Lummy would go on like that until he took care of Lottie Mae’s hex.

“Okay. Right,” said Joe Lon. “I’m gone ask Buddy first chance I git. But you right. He ain’t hexed nobody, much less Lottie Mae. I’ll tell him that being the sheriff, he better see who done it. Is that okay?”

“He ain’t gone do that.”

“He will if I tell him to…”

Lummy gave Joe Lon his blue-gummed smile. “Don think twice. George and me is put our minds on it. Go on and don think twice.” He slipped back into the crowd and was gone.

Joe Lon walked around awhile, looking at the booths and speaking to a few people, assuring some of the visitors that, yes, the store would be open tonight, right on until midnight. He saw his old coach, Tump Walker, who was one of the great high-school coaches in the country, and who was Honorary Chairman of the rattlesnake roundup. He was scowling and dripping tobacco juice.

“I tell you, son, they crazier ever year, they are. It’s one tourist here that’s tainted. If he ain’t tainted, I never shit behind two heels. You know what he’s got?”

“Whatever it is wouldn’t surprise me.”

“Surprised me, by God. Sumbitch’s got five hundred snakes over there
in
cages in his trailer. Ever kind of snake you could think of’s what he’s got.”

“Why you reckon he’s got’m?”

“Beats the shit out of me,” Coach Tump said. “Just loves goddam snakes enough, I guess, to go around the countryside in a camper
packed
with’m.”

They stood watching each other, thinking about the tainted tourist. Finally, Coach Tump said: “Seen you daddy lately, son?”

“Yes sir. Coach, I seen’m lately. He’s fine. How you been?”

Coach Tump sent a long solid stream of tobacco juice into the dirt, shifted the cud in his mouth, hustled his balls and said: “I been real good. But what I thought to ask you was, how’s you daddy’s Tuff?”

“Trainin real hard, Coach Tump, trainin
real
hard.”

“By the good Lord, I alius said, they’d never beat one of you daddy’s dogs in the fourth quarter. Aye God, they come to fight.”

“Daddy’s lookin to retire Tuff. He
knows
he’s gone retire Tuff, and then ole Tuff’s gone be boss stud of all the pits.”

“We all know he will, son.”

Joe Lon, always diffident in the face of his old coach and teacher, said: “Listen, Coach, you go on by the store and tell Lummy to give you whatever it is you want. Tell’m to mark it down to me.”

Coach Tump said, “You alius was a good boy, son,” slapped Joe Lon on the back, sent another stream of juice on the air, and walked away in his rolling bowlegged stride.