A Feast of Snakes (11 page)

Poncy said: “My friends call me Poncy. Honest to God they really do call me Poncy.”

Duffy Deeter said: “He told us that on the road, last night.”

“That’s what he told us,” said Susan Gender. “We met’tn at the Magnolia Truck and Rest Stop coming into town and that’s what he told us.”

Joe Lon seemed to grow hot, to burn all along his veins. He looked at Willard with genuine puzzlement. “I’m damned if I know what to do about this.”

Duffy Deeter sat down on the bench, smiling, gazing with great fondness upon the bulging mound of Susan Gender’s blender, as he called it in moments when he felt good. Listening to these country boys playing with the old man pleased him. It amused.

They kept Poncy lifted on his toes while he frantically explained that he was born in Cuba, brought to Tampa at the age of five, and educated at the University of Florida. Here he started an addled singing of the University of Florida’s Alma Mater, with Susan Gender screaming in the background that he fucking-A-well had the words right.
That was it.
He stopped singing and was rapidly talking about his life’s work in bananas when Hard Candy Sweet appeared between two tents across the road.

She came straight to them and. said, “What you two assholes doing to this little sapsucker?”

“We was gone kill him,” said Willard, smiling. “But I think we’ll just leave him alone and let him bore his goddam self to death.”

They let him down on his heels. Joe Lon straightened Poncy’s shirt, smoothed his collar. Then he raised Poncy’s chin with the end of his little finger and looked directly into Poncy’s eyes. “But you ain’t no traveling salesman, are you?”

“No. No sir! Retired. I’m re …”

“You didn’t retire from being no salesman neither, did you?”

That was precisely what Poncy’s specialty had been. And he had risen to Director of Sales for all of bananas before he was through.

But he saw that was not the right answer. “Engineering,” said Poncy. “I was an engineer.”

Joe Lon gave him a thin whiskey smile. “Got a uncle that was a railroad man.”

Willard had introduced Hard Candy to Susan Gender and it turned out Susan had been an undergraduate head majorette herself back at Auburn University in Alabama and they went down and lined up hip to hip on the grass at the end of the trailer working on a little routine.

“Now after the first kickout, you spin and do a split,” said Hard Candy Sweet. Her little eyes shined. “Can you still split?”

“Lord yes, honey,” said Susan Gender. “I’m still just limber as a dishrag.”

Willard was on his back on the bench pumping two hundred and fifty pounds. Poncy was whispering, “Are they crazy, or what?”

Duffy didn’t answer right away; he only looked at Poncy. Finally he said: “You better get over there out of the way.” Joe Lon and Willard slid a ten-pound plate on each end of the Olympic bar.

“You set,” said Joe Lon.

Poncy walked over and did not so much sit as collapse onto a little grassy bank of dirt.

The girls came high-kicking by and Susan Gender sang: “We’re going inside.” She stopped in the door and called: “You want anything, Duffy?”

Duffy, who was in the middle of a press, did not answer, but Joe Lon Mackey, beginning to buzz from the whiskey, feeling better than ever in the old familiar demand of muscle and sweat, said: “Got any bourbon whiskey up there in that trailer?”

Susan Gender gave a little kick and laid the full weight of her smile and single red eye upon him. “Duffy Deeter wouldn’t go anywhere without it.”

“You might just bring us out a bottle,” Joe Lon said.

“If you got any of them cold beers in there,” said Willard Miller, “bring a few. Damned if that straight corn ain’t beginning to burn my breakfast.”

“Pussy,” said Joe Lon.

“You better hope so,” Willard said. “Slip on that other ten.”

They were doing only three repetitions on the bench now, and they were no longer adding weight casually but slamming it on with little grunts of challenge and pleasure.

When they went through the door of the Winnebago, Hard Candy looked up and said: “Hey, those are great trophies.”

There were trophies mounted along three walls, bracketed and gleaming on specially constructed shelves.

“You oughta see them two guys’ football trophies out there. Knock you eyes out. They’re stars, you know.”

“Duff said he wouldn’t ever have anything to do with a team sport. He always said somebody else could just have the team sports.”

Although Hard Candy knew there were trophies for other sports—didn’t Willard have a shelf full from track?—nobody she knew thought a trophy was a real trophy unless it was from football.

“What are all them from?” said Hard Candy.

“Karate mostly. Some from handball. Duff was the state singles champion in handball for four years. That right there is something the ABA, you know, the American Bar Association, gave him for coming in fifteenth in the Boston Marathon.”

Hard Candy could only blink at the trophies. A lawyer that played handball? Willard was apt to kill him and eat him.

Susan Gender smiled at her. “I know what you’re thinking. That’s what I thought at first. But don’t be fooled, that little bastard out there is dangerous.”

Poncy came bursting through the door, his face ash-gray under his Cuban color. “They said I better get the whiskey and beer,” he said rapidly. “They said I better.”

“Jesus,” said Susan, “I forgot.”

She got the bottle out of a cabinet and the six-pack of tallboys out of the refrigerator. Poncy rushed outside with it in his arms.

“That old man ought to git away from them boys,” said Hard Candy, “him being like he is and all. One of’m git drunk enough and git to feeling mean, and I don’t know.”

They had gradually moved to a window while they talked and they stood now watching the three of them take turns pressing off their backs. Duffy was on the bench and Willard and Joe Lon were on either side, leaning forward yelling at him as he strained to finish the press, yelling in short, abrupt phrases. Veins stood in their necks and their heads jerked as if they might have been barking. Poncy sat on the little bank of dirt, alternately clapping his hands the way the boys were doing and looking afraid. Dust rose around the bench and clung to their sweating bodies. They didn’t seem to see it.

***

Big Joe Mackey limped through the hallway of his house toward the kitchen. It was only a little after noon but here inside the high-ceilinged old house the shadows were deep in the corners and along the warped walls. He stopped at his daughter’s door and leaned against it listening. He heard what he had been hearing all day, the mad babble of the television set. Lottie Mae had finished and left and he knew he could not depend on her to come back; he would probably end up having to cook his own dinner, but he didn’t mind too much because Lummy had brought over another bottle of whiskey and he’d do his cooking in a mild red drunken mist. Beeder wouldn’t get anything else to eat until tomorrow when the cook came.

He leaned his head against the door and called: “You all right in there, youngan?”

For answer he got a sudden booming of the television as the volume was turned up. He’d be damned if he would go in there. She was well enough to hop out of bed and turn up the sound. That was good enough for him. He hadn’t raised his daughter to be crazy, goddammit. But she’d always been a headstrong girl and if she wanted to be crazy the rest of her life, that was her little red wagon and she’d have to pull it. He wasn’t going in there to see her craziness and see … see…

There his mind stopped. He quit thinking, and his daughter’s face gradually emerged out of the red mist of his eyes, Beeder’s face, which was only the younger uncracked copy of his wife’s face. He stood, suddenly shaken, saying quietly: “Damn them all. Damn them all.” But try as he would to keep it from happening, he saw all over again his wife sitting in her favorite rocker with the bag over her head.

He went into the kitchen and got the dog bucket. It was a five-gallon bucket and he filled it nearly full with canned meat and double-yolk eggs. Then he stirred in ten ounces of a special vitamin mixture he made up himself. He limped awkwardly with the bucket down the back steps and out across the bare dirt yard to the kennel. The kennel was a long narrow concrete slab with individual wire cages fastened to the top of it. There were four puppies, not quite three months old. They were solid red and already broad-chested and thick-necked, standing on their hind legs barking happily at the sight of the bucket. The two dogs next to the puppies were grown but had not yet started their hard training. The only thing they did was a little game that all the pit bulls loved. He had an old rubber tire tied to the end of a rope hanging from an oak tree behind the kennel. These two young dogs, approaching fighting age, were allowed to swing from the tire an hour a day three days a week. He would rub the tire with a little blood—chicken blood—and take the dogs out one at a time to the tire, set it swinging, and turn them loose. They would leap and set their massive jaws to the tire and swing, their thick little bodies drawn up tight and tucked into a solid muscular ball. Big Joe thought that next month he would muzzle both of them and put them in together to see how they faced off. Sometimes a strain weakened and played out for no reason at all. The dog would look great but at the center of him would be a soft rotten spot of something that made him go bad.

He fed the puppies, who never stopped yelping until he dumped big hunks of meat and egg into their troughs. The dogs next to the puppies—their brothers—barked too, but it was a slower, deeper bark, and their steady red-eyed gaze was more serenely and savagely sullen. They stood in solid, slightly bowlegged dignity at their troughs swallowing heavy chunks of food each time their great heads jerked. Their bony skulls were insistent under their fine tight skin. Tuffy was next in the line of cages and he did not bark at all. He had rounded into condition beautifully. No matter how badly you hurt him, he came back steady and strong after a single day’s rest. His wounds had scabbed nicely. Tuffy turned slowly and looked down the row of cages at his noisy sons and seemed to see them and dismiss them at the same time with a fine contempt. Big Joe watered Tuffy but did not feed him.

In the end cage, which was slightly larger than the others, was Tuffy’s daddy, also named Tuffy. He’d won six fights before he was retired to stud and became the top of the line; his blood was in every fighting animal Big Joe owned, including the two ferocious bitches housed on the reverse side of the kennel where the males could not see them.

Old Tuffy, as he was called to distinguish him from Tuffy the Younger, had thickened in his old age. A coarse gray ruff grew round his neck and he was nearly blind. He had not mated in a long time. His fine razor teeth had been worn down to dull yellow stubs in his mouth, a mouth that once closed like a steel trap but that now was wet and a little slack, a little jowly like an old man’s. Like his son in the cage next to him he did not bark or even growl but stood with the magnificent balance he still had even in old age, watching Big Joe with solemn faded eyes held in a net of red veins as Big Joe limped by with the meat bucket. Big Joe watered him with the running garden hose lying on the edge of the concrete slab, but did not feed him. He clucked to the old dog and spoke to him in a soft, rough, but gentle voice. Then he went around on the other side of the kennel and fed and watered the bitches. When he was done with the bitches, he came back to the old dog’s cage, and with a key off a ring on his belt, he opened the padlock on the steel U-neck that formed the latch. He swung back the heavy wire gate.

The old pit bull walked out of his cage and stood blinking in the thin sunlight. He shook himself and bent his head to lick his muscled forepaw with a tongue wide as a man’s hands. Big Joe knelt stiffly beside him.

“You ole sumbitch,” said Big Joe in a whisper at the dog’s head. “You done got too old to fight. An you done got too old to fuck.” He scratched and rubbed the gray ruff at the dog’s thick neck. “You had you goddam day in the ring though. You done what you done as good as any dog that ever come down the pike. Wisht I had a nickel on the dollar for ever bet passed over you back.” Big Joe sighed and looked at the cage where Tuffy regarded them both, standing four square to his wire gate, a slow but insistent growl rattling wetly in his throat. “Yessir,” said the old man vaguely. “True, ever bit of it true. But you done got too old to fight. And you done got too old to fuck.”

He got slowly to his feet and took a steel muzzle off a rack hanging on the cage. The old dog did not resist the muzzle and when he had it securely in place, Big Joe put a steel choke collar on him and fastened the collar to a short leather strap that was in turn tied to a short metal post. Then he opened Tuffy’s gate and got down on his knees and muzzled him while he was still in the cage. He was trying to get a leather lead fastened to his choke collar when Tuffy burst past him and seemingly did not touch the ground again until he landed on his daddy still tied securely to the metal post. The growls coming from the two dogs as they rolled together on the ground was like an electric saw cutting through something soft but now and then hitting something hard and resistant. Big Joe got slowly to his feet cursing softly but good-naturedly and limped over carefully to the snarling, clawing dogs. He got Tuffy by the tail and dragged him clear of the reach of the leather lead fastened to the post. He hit him on the top of the skull with his fist to calm him down and then got a leather strap attached to his choke collar.

With a muzzled dog on a short lead in either hand he stared off toward a place about fifty yards away where wooden bleachers formed a square. The bleachers rose maybe twenty-five feet high and enclosed a square hole in the ground three feet deep and twelve feet across. The sides of the hole were reinforced with close-driven wooden stakes but the bottom was only hard-packed earth. A set of portable wooden steps led down into the hole. As Big Joe went through the gate of the fence and the dogs saw the hole, they immediately bowed, started walking stiff-legged. The hair rose along the indentation of their heavily muscled backs. They lunged against their short leads trying to square off to each other. Big Joe kicked them both in the ribs with his thick brogan shoe and spoke to them in a quiet, good-natured voice.