A Feast of Snakes (18 page)

Joe Lon put his mouth to the principal’s ear: “Git over there and line up the girls. The girls …” He shoved the principal toward the end of the stage, toward a low wall of plywood that formed an L-shaped room with no top where the girls stood pressed tightly together.

Joe Lon leaned in close to the microphone and said: “If you’d just quiet youself down,” but he said it in a normal voice and even with the amplifier he couldn’t hear his own voice. The most noise was coming from the place where the snake rose thirty feet in the air. The line of dancers circling the snake had torches now. It looked as though they had all found torches and they weren’t so much singing, as they’d been doing before, but screaming. He stood watching, almost bemused by the whiskey running in his blood and the noise and the open fires. Then directly in front of him there was a high piercing cry like metal tearing, and when he looked down Joe Lon saw Duffy Deeter come straight up out of the crowd, lay out on the air as if he expected to do a halfgainer, but just as he was parallel to the ground the point of his heel caught a huge bearded man on the side of the head and his entire face splattered, some of the blood spotting the rough wooden boards of the stage. Willard Miller showing all his teeth in a great joyous scowl was on top of the man who had been kicked almost before he slipped to the ground.

Joe Lon waved to let the first girl come, and she did, wearing a bikini of some silver diaphanous material that had enough cloth in it to maybe make a glove. Her name was Novella and she was Hard Candy’s chief rival for head cheerleader, although Novella was still in the tenth grade, but everybody knew—including Joe Lon, who was watching not her but the crowd’s reaction to her—that it was only a matter of time before she took over from Hard Candy. She was favored tonight to take Miss Rattlesnake Queen and Joe Lon could tell by the way she pumped across the stage in her high-heeled shoes, all flashing legs and rounded arms over rounded breasts over rounded hips, her little matted, mounded beaver pulsing there where she kept her thighs peeled apart even as she pranced—Joe Lon could tell that she wasn’t about to let a little thing like blood and fights keep her from what she’d been after since she was old enough to hold a baton.

There was still noise but it was all coming from seventy yards away where the torch-lit dancers tirelessly circled the snake. The audience spilled away from the front of the stage; everybody who could see her, had gone silent. Cigarette smoke and wood smoke hung in layers over their heads as they watched Novella move around the stage, giving them first a front view, then a side, then a back.

The principal had come back to the microphone and, reading from a little card, introduced Novella Watkins, gave her measurements, “… a fine young lady who will someday make somebody a fine wife at thirty-six, twenty, thirty-four …,” and her credits, “… Miss Junior Future Farmers of America, Miss Peach, Miss …” While he talked, Joe Lon eased to the end of the stage and dropped off into the dirt. He looked for Hard Candy and Susan Gender, but they were gone, along with most of the other women in the audience.

The snake was not supposed to be burned until after Miss Rattlesnake had been chosen.
She
was supposed to set the fire. But just as Joe Lon landed in the dirt at the end of the stage somebody touched the snake with a torch and the thing exploded into fire, lighting the entire football field like a bomb bursting. As if on signal, the solid wall of men collapsed in front of the stage, kicking and cursing and gouging. The contestants on the stage, startled by the explosion of fire, lock-stepped round and round in a sort of daze, all of them brilliantly lit by the burning snake.

Joe Lon could see plain enough that his old coach and Willard and Duffy were in danger of being hurt bad. He deliberately turned and pushed his way out to the road. He picked his way through the parked cars and campers and finally turned into a dim woods road that would come out a quarter mile from his store. It felt good to be away from all those people, strangers and friends both. It felt good for the noise to diminish a little with each step that took him deeper in the woods.

When Joe Lon got to the store, Lummy was sitting on the stool behind the counter. He got off the stool when Joe Lon came in.

“How come it is folks hollering lak that?” said Lummy. A long sustained cheer floated back out of the pine trees. It might have been a football game they were hearing, except there were no rattles.

“How come it is?”

Joe Lon did not answer but only shrugged. Then: “George come in with that extra load of beer and whiskey?”

“He come in with that extree jus fine, Mr. Joe Lon.”

Joe Lon hooked his heels on a rung of the stool, shivered, and hugged himself with his arms across his chest. “You feed the snakes?”

“Everone but the bettin snake.”

“Feed him too,” said Joe Lon. “And bring me out a bottle of that bonded.”

Lummy went through the door into the little room at the back of the counter. He never picked up the rats with his hand. He wouldn’t touch them. He wouldn’t touch
anything
that was going to touch a snake, much less be
inside
a snake. He had a pair of long-handled needle-nosed pliers he used to lift the rats into the cages with the snakes. He used his pliers and did not wait to see the strike (he never did), but got the bottle of whiskey and took it to Joe Lon, where he sat waiting on a stool.

“How’d we do today?” he asked.

Lummy told him what they had sold, told him the store had done better than it had ever done at a Roundup. But Joe Lon didn’t listen and Lummy knew he wasn’t listening. But he went on explaining the little marks on his paper—how much beer, how much shine, how much bonded whiskey—just as he always did. He did what he was told to do, what it was his job to do, and he had absolutely no curiosity about why Mr. Joe Lon was mean tonight. He’d seen him mean often enough to know it when he saw it, but since he knew also that he had nothing to fear from Mr. Joe Lon, he didn’t think about it.

His job was to be the nigger. That’s the way he thought about it.
I am the nigger. That is the white man. There is a tree. There is a road. This is Mystic.

That’s the way it had to be as long as he was around a white man. As soon as he was
not
around a white man, he quit being a nigger and thought about many, many things that he did not ordinarily think about. One of the things he thought about was killing Mr. Joe Lon. Of course, as long as he was near him, he couldn’t kill him, or even
think
about killing him. But when he was off by himself, or in the company of other black people, he not only thought about it, he often actually killed him.

Joe Lon turned his burned eyes on him. “Want a drink, Lummy?”

“Wouldn’t mind a taste,” Lummy said.

“Git youself a pint of that shine. No, shit, git a pint of that othern.”

“Shine be good enough for ole Lummy.”

“Git the othern, I said. You ain’t got to mark it on you ticket.”

“Go and git it,” Lummy said to himself. “You ain’t got to mark it on you ticket.”

When he came back in Joe Lon was dialing the telephone. When he was through dialing it, he held it for a long time.

“Mayhap he out with them dogs,” said Lummy licking the neck of the whiskey bottle.

Joe Lon said: “He ain’t out with no dogs.”

They both knew that the telephone was on a little wooden table beside the old man’s bed. It sat on a metal dishpan turned upside down. Big Joe believed that when he couldn’t hear it, he could feel it up on top of the metal pan vibrating. Said he could feel it right in the goddam air was what he said.

“It’s me, Joe Lon,” Joe Lon shouted into the telephone finally.
“Joe Lon!
How’s Beeder?” A little spit flecked Joe Lon’s lips and the lids of his ruined eyes seemed to work independently of one another. “I
know
I woke you up.”

The old man claimed that his hearing was worse at night than in the day, and that it was the worst of all when he was just awakened. It took, he said, several hours for his tubes to clear out and drain good.

“How’s Beeder?” he shouted again. And then, swinging to look at Lummy, “He says she’s fine, just like she always is.” He shouted back into the telephone: “Which is it? She fine? Or she like she always is?” He took a drink from his bottle, tilted on the stool, and winked at Lummy. He stiffened on the stool, a vein leapt in his thick neck. He screamed, “I don’t know. Haven’t seen a clock. Don’t own a clock. Don’t want a clock.”

Lummy sat drinking his free bourbon in the corner, wondering how much of this he’d have to listen to before he could go home and get his woman and go for some of Junior’s Real-Pit-Barbecue.

Joe Lon was screaming: “A family reunion! Right. All together again. I’ll git Elf and the babies and you git Mama …” His voice was growing thicker and even though his face remained stunned and without expression, as though he might have been sleepwalking, tears came from his eyes and ran down over his heavy square chin, blue now with a stubble of beard. “… you git Mama and Beeder and I’ll git Elf and the babies and you and me’ll git’m all in a room in the big house and we’ll just beat the shit out of them. Beat’m I said goddammit. Slap’m. Bust their faces.”

He was crying openly now, his shoulders shaking, and Lummy, who recognized this as something he was not meant to watch, got up quietly and headed for the door, thinking only how grateful he would be for a good plate of Real-Pit-Barbecue and then his woman’s warm thick back to sleep against. What was happening in there was none of his business.

Joe Lon was screaming: “We like that, don’t we? Me and you? Hem’m up in a room and beat’m good?”

But Lummy might as well have been hearing a woodpecker in a tree or rain on a tin roof. It was the natural sound of the world, too much like everything else, and he wouldn’t remember it.

***

The news that somebody had cut off Buddy Matlow’s dick threatened to ruin everything: the dog fight that night and the snake hunt the next morning. It spread among the hunters and tourists like fire. Nobody had talked of anything else much all morning. It even served to take their minds off the fact that there was not enough water and the Johnny-on-the-spots were full to overflowing and several trailers had been wrecked the night before, two actually turned over.

Joe Lon found out about it when they woke him up shortly before noon. Coach Tump stood down in the yard hustling his balls and spitting tobacco juice into the dirt. He looked up at Joe Lon in the doorway to the double-wide and told him that Buddy Matlow had been taken to the hospital in Tifton, at least that is what most people were saying they’d heard, but there were others who said it was Macon where he’d been taken, and at least two or three said they’d heard that it was as far away as Atlanta.

Coach Tump said it didn’t make much of a shit where they taken him if somebody’d gone and cut off his dick. “Wouldn’t surprise me if this don’t put a damper on the whole thing.”

The story Coach Tump had heard said they’d packed it in ice. They had packed Buddy Matlow’s dick in ice and salt and they meant to sew it back on and that was why they had gone all the way to Atlanta because they had better facilities for sewing dicks back on at the big hospital there.

“Damned if I’d want my dick sewed back on,” said Willard Miller.

“I believe I would if they could do it like it was on there before,” Coach Tump said.

Duffy Deeter said: “What goes around comes around.” They had all come inside to drink coffee while Joe Lon got dressed. Duffy regarded his knuckles, all of them skinned and scabbed. He sucked gently at his nose. It was filled with black blood. “Bad karma,” he said. “A guy that gets his dick cut off’s got bad karma.”

“He is also shit out of luck,” said Willard Miller.

Joe Lon came out of the back, dressed now, his eyes webbed in a net of veins, his face puffy, and they all got in Coach Tump’s Oldsmobile and drove out to Big Joe’s to prepare Tuffy for the fight that night.

“Looks a little like war out there, don’t it?” said Willard.

Joe Lon, who had been very quiet since they woke him up, only nodded. Out in the campground, a trailer was on its side. The road to Big Joe’s was littered with cups and hotdog wrappers and hamburger wrappers and even articles of clothing. They passed four wrecked cars before they got to the schoolhouse.

“What the hell happened to you last night, boy?” said Coach Tump.

“I never known much about nothing oncet I got off that stage,” Joe Lon said. “Them fuckers looked to eat me up.” 

“I’ll drink to that,” said Willard, running his thumbnail around the neck of a bottle of bourbon.

Coach Tump frowned. “Boy, I want you to stay out of the bottle today.”

Willard said, “Coach, I just need a little something to smooth me out.”

Coach Tump eyed the bottle. He would have beat hell out of any other boy playing for him if the boy had even
mentioned
drinking whiskey, much less doing it. But this was the Boss Snake of the team. He ran over anybody, everybody. As long as he did that, he could do whatever else he wanted to. “I guess a little whiskey won’t hurt nothing.”

They all had a little sip, except Joe Lon, who bubbled it pretty good. Willard Miller, who was sitting in the middle, reached over and hugged Duffy Deeter, then he kissed him on the cheek, right on top of a ragged purple bruise. “Joe Lon, damn if I don’t think I’m in love with this little fucker right here. You see’m last night? Worsen a pit bull when you git’m down in the dirt.”

“I was too busy tryin to not get eat myself to see anything,” said Joe Lon.

While they drove on out to Big Joe’s, they talked about last night, how they’d kicked and stomped and gouged and by God made sure Novella Watkins was crowned just like everbody known she ought to be.

The dogs that were going to fight that night, fifteen of them, had already been groomed and walked and were resting in their cages on the backs of pickup trucks when they got to the pit. The men who had brought them sat in the bleacher seats passing a sipping sack and spitting tobacco juice while they talked dog fighting. Joe Lon brought his daddy’s Tuff out of the cage and took him into the pit to rub him down. It was the custom at Big Joe’s to show the favorite in the pit while he was being groomed before the fight. Willard Miller and Coach Tump and Duffy went up into the bleachers while Joe Lon went for the dog. When he got back his daddy was up there too. All the faces of the dog fighters were turned toward Big Joe, who was talking.