A Feast of Snakes (12 page)

“You dogs,” he said. “You dogs stand easy.”

He wished he had thought to bring his whiskey. He didn’t particularly dislike this, but there was no pleasure in it either. It was simply necessary, like feeding a young savage boxer a lot of inferior opponents, opponents who had some skill but no chance, no real hope. It tuned the fighter, gave him a taste for blood and the killing blow, made him feel invincible. Big Joe had saved the old dog for this final sharpening of the son and future stud of the line. It never occurred to him to wish that it did not have to end this way. It always had to end this way and he had always known it.

He went carefully down the steps into the pit. Both dogs followed him down, but by now they were so excited that they closed at the top step and came into the pit locked together, their steel muzzles grinding. Big Joe watched dispassionately as the two dogs parted briefly, standing in the center of the pit now, heads together, their short wide bodies braced and waiting. Their eyes were locked and they balanced each other in a bright and ferociously insane stare.

Big Joe wondered, as he had more than once when dogs were about to stand to one another, what might be going on in their heads. Could dogs think? What were they thinking? Probably nothing. They weren’t men; they didn’t think; they fought.

There was a steel hook built into the wall on each side of the pit. He separated the dogs and fastened their leads to the hooks. Then he removed their muzzles, first slapping them hard twice with his heavy square-fingered hand to get their attention so they didn’t accidentally crush a finger or a wrist in their fighting frenzy. Once their muzzles were off Big Joe moved to release them, but Tuffy broke his lead and was across the pit and on his daddy in a blinding move full of slashing teeth and roiling dust and flying shards of bright slobber. The dog’s body, catapulting across the pit, had struck Big Joe on the shoulder where he had been kneeling beside Old Tuffy and knocked him halfway across the circle. He got up slowly and sat on the reinforced wall. Old Tuffy would not have had much of a chance anyway but fastened on the lead as he was made it a shorter fight than it otherwise would have been. It wasn’t more than forty-five seconds before Big Joe could see that he was already taking a killing. Tuffy was into his throat. The sound of blood was in his breathing as Tuffy settled in deeper and shook him now like a toy. Big Joe let Tuffy stay on as long as he liked, letting him chew his fill, until at last Tuffy backed off, gazed quietly and somberly at the slashed and bleeding body, and then trotted happily across the pit to his master.

Big Joe was deeply satisfied at the way Tuffy had peaked into condition. He’d feed him now, rest him good, and by fight time tomorrow night he would be as ready and savage as he had ever been. He led Tuffy back and put him in his cage. For a long time then he stood staring at the two grown bulls in the next cage. Finally, he chose one of them, put him on a leash, and led him back up to the house.

***

They had fought each other to an absolute draw on the bench, but they both knew that one of them would have lost if Duffy Deeter had not run out of weights. And neither of them was dead solid certain which of them it would have been. Duffy Deeter had gone with them up to an even three hundred pounds, which astounded them both and immediately changed their attitude toward him.

A hundred-and-fifty-pound guy who could get three hundred pounds on the bench was nobody to fuck with. It meant that somewhere there inside him was a little knot of craziness that made him pay the price. But it was not entirely enough to make them forgive him for weighing a hundred and fifty pounds. He was still a runty, second-string grunion. But a very
strong
grunion.

They’d left him at three hundred and then both got one final rep with three-twenty, which was all the weight Duffy had with him in the Winnebago. Joe Lon and Willard were fired up and when they found out there was no more weight they automatically faced off and almost went one on one against each other right there in the dirt and probably would have if it had not been for Susan Gender. Duffy Deeter had enjoyed it immensely and was hoping they might hurt each other, because while he admired them for turning out to
be
stud jocks instead of just looking like they might be, he could not forgive them for beating him. He wasn’t used to getting beat, even by men who outweighed him fifty or sixty pounds. So it was left for Susan Gender to stop them. She had been watching through the window with Hard Candy Sweet when Willard popped up off the bench and turned to face Joe Lon, whose response was to dip slightly, bring his elbows out from his body, and thrust out his thick corded neck.

“He’s gone strike a lick,” Hard Candy said happily.

“What? Which one?” said Susan Gender.

“Take you pick,” said Hard Candy. “They fixin to bust ass.”

But Susan got to the door first and cried: “Let’s go find us a tonk!”

Duffy and Poncy looked at her but Joe Lon and Willard only slightly shifted their bodies toward her, the smallest change in the position of their shoulders. But their eyes stayed locked on each other.

“Tonk,” said Willard quietly, not a question, just repeating the word.

“I want to dance!” cried Susan Gender. “I want to play the juke and eat a pickled pig’s foot. I want to drink beer and
shake my ass.”

Now they turned together to look at her and stared with hostility at her head majorette legs straddling across the door frame.

“Ain’t no tonk in this county,” Joe Lon said. “It’s damn nigh fifteen miles.”

“Shit, boy,” said Susan Gender. “We got wheels.” She spread her arms and looked back into the Winnebago. “Duffy Deeter ain’t got nothing if he ain’t got wheels.”

Poncy, suddenly alive again in their young contentious voices, said: “I got a Porsche my own sef,” and two things happened at once. First, Poncy was sorry he had opened his mouth about his sweet expensive Porsche car, and second everything got very quiet and still while they stared at him. He had not meant anything by imitating, or trying to imitate, their grit voices. He’d only been trying to be one of the group. But he could see in their faces they had heard what he said as mockery. He tried to explain what he really meant but they wouldn’t hear it. Joe Lon and Willard each got an arm and led him protesting down the dirt street to where his car was parked.

“Hard Candy,” Joe Lon called over his shoulder. “Go with them, show Deeter. Blue Pines.”

“But I spose we gone already be drunk a beer by the time you git there in that Winnebago,” called Willard, “cause this sucker’s got a Porschie and I hear them things won’t do nothing but fly.”

They put Poncy in the back seat of his own Porsche and Joe Lon drove. The country was flat but the road was winding and Joe Lon one-handed the car through one tight turn after another, not bothering to use the gears but keeping it flat out with Poncy first outraged and then terrified in the back seat. Halfway there, Willard puked out the window, not much but enough for some of it to blow into the back seat where Poncy was trying to duck. Willard did it as easily as spitting. The stream slipped from between his lips, he blinked twice, and wiped his mouth with his hand.

He looked over at Joe Lon. “Musta been that fucking meat we et at breakfast,” he said.

Joe Lon handed him the bourbon. He took a mouthful, gargled, spat it through the window, and then drank long from the bottle, his powerful throat pumping and pumping. When he finished he turned and tried to hand it to Poncy, who had been watching the whole thing from his place crouched in the back. “Want you own
sef
a drink a whiskey?” said Willard.

At that moment Joe Lon was taking the Porsche through a long slow curve in a power slide that was turning a hundred and ten. Joe Lon was screaming, not with joy, not with anger, just screaming, his thick fine hands locked on the steering wheel. Poncy saw a huge oak tree tilting into their line of vision at the top of the curve and smelled the raw bits of puke clinging to his Banlon shirt and saw the offered whiskey bottle sloshing just there in front of his eyes and although he knew what he was going to do—could not help doing—he bowed his head and puked onto his lap while Willard Miller sucked his teeth and watched dispassionately from the front seat.

Willard said: “This sumbitch in the back seat just thrown up on his self.”

But Joe Lon didn’t hear. He was on a long straight and he had the Porsche up to a hundred and twenty, which was apparently all it would do because he was stamping the accelerator and pumping the steering wheel with both hands. He glanced over at Willard and shouted: “Ain’t had a chance to drive nothing like this since Berenice went off to the U of Gee and given her Vette to Hard Candy!”

Joe Lon drew his lips back in what could have been great happiness, but it was not. Even in the middle of this frantic ride, with his best buddy sitting beside him screaming for him to
Screw it on!
he felt the weight of a great despair settling in him as solid as bone. It had started in the middle of the workout on the prone press bench and he was not even aware of it until it was on him like a fever. He had gotten up from the bench and, waiting for Duffy and Willard, found himself looking across the road at the old man who had come back and squatted by the end of his Airstream trailer. The twisting tufts of hair stood out like something driven into his skull and across his knees was an open book that he was reading, his finger tracing and tracing the page as he read.

It was a long time before Victor shifted the book and Joe Lon saw it was the Bible. Victor used to take a room on the second floor of their house back in the days when Big Joe used to let rooms to tourists and hunters for the Roundup. Victor never talked of anything but God and snakes and his voice and the look in his eyes always made Joe Lon’s heart jump. His daddy, who had been to meetings at Victor’s church, had told Joe Lon how it was.

“He strings diamondbacks in his hair like a lady strings ribbons. I seen’m kiss a snake and a snake kiss him. He’s been bit in the mouth. He’s been bit everwhere. It ain’t no more’n a kiss from his ma. He follers where God leads him.”

It was Joe Lon’s turn on the bench and he went under the weight in a sinking despair, thinking:
What am I doing here on my back? What is this I’m doing? I’m a grown man with two babies and a wife and I’m out here fucking around with weights. What the hell ails me?

When Joe Lon got off the bench the next time, Elizabeth Lilly Well—called Mother Well by the hunters, who gave her buttons from the tails of rattlers—was sitting on a stone beside Victor. She had brought her three-thousand-dollar mosaic called
Deer Plus Snake
with her. It gleamed in the sun and Victor traced its outline with one bony finger. It came to Joe Lon that she pinned rattles to a canvas relentlessly and with great joy and Victor followed God the same way. What did he, Joe Lon, do? What did he have? He had once had football to fill up his mind and his body and his days and so he had never thought about it. Then one day football was gone and it took everything with it. He kept thinking something else would surely take its place but nothing ever did. He stumbled from one thing to the next thing. From wife to babies to making a place for crazy campers bent on catching snakes. But nothing gave him anything back. So here he was lying under a dead weight doing what he’d done five years ago, when he was a boy. If it had meant anything then, he had forgotten what; and merciful God, it meant nothing now. His life had become a not very interesting movie that he seemed condemned to see over and over again.

“I feel like the end of the world,” Joe Lon screamed above the noise of the whining engine.

“We git up here,” Willard screamed back at him, “we’ll press a little beer to you face, you’ll feel better.”

But he would not feel any better and he knew it.

Poncy, sitting with the little green puddle in his lap, tried to say something authoritative to them about abusing his car, after all he
was
old enough to be their father and there was no reason for him to take all this and not let them know what they were in for if they wrecked his Porsche or hurt him. But they either did not hear him yelling up at them from the back seat or they simply did not care.

They roared into a clay parking lot and stopped. Joe Lon and Willard got out and closed their doors without ever looking at him. He sat where he was and watched them walk away. His bowels felt loose. He’d been having a lot of trouble with his bowels since he retired, and the ride had not helped. When he was sure he had everything under control, he got out. In the red clay parking lot he shifted quickly from foot to foot, testing the weight of his bowels. Everything seemed to be all right.

The Blue Pines was a wooden building with a tin roof. Various signs were stuck on the walls advertising Budweiser, the King of Beers, and Redman chewing tobacco, and Coca-Cola, pool table, and sandwiches. The hills sloped away in thin, second-growth pine trees. When Poncy opened the door it was so dark he had to stand a moment before he saw Willard and Joe Lon sitting at a round splintered wooden table and another man bringing a pitcher of beer with two glasses.

The man said: “You boys welcome here, but I don’t want no goddam trouble.” He set the pitcher on the table.

Neither Joe Lon nor Willard looked at the man. They poured beer into the glasses and drank. The man stood beside the table. Finally, Willard—still without looking up—said: “Pay’m, would you, Conty?”

“Poncy,” said Poncy, paying the bartender, “it’s
Poncy.”

The man stood beside the table with the money in his hand and said: “How’s you daddy’s Tuffy?”

“Tuffy’s good. Great shape,” said Joe Lon.

“He’s old, though,” said the man.

“You put anything down, better be on Tuff,” Joe Lon said.

“Knowing when to git off a dog is smart as when to git on.”

“Suit youself.”

There was only one other man in the Blue Pines, a farmer in overalls and felt hat, drinking whiskey out of a water glass and never looking up. Willard and Joe Lon managed to get through two pitchers of beer before the Winnebago pulled in. Duffy Deeter drank straight from the pitcher to catch up and then proceeded to take Joe Lon and Willard to the pool table in back and humiliate them. During one run he went through two consecutive racks, which did not improve Willard’s humor.