A Feast of Snakes (2 page)

“Surprise, motherfucker,” said Joe Lon, and dropped it into one of the barrels.

For a long moment, he stared into the barrel after the snake but all that appeared there was a writhing of the darkness, an incessant boiling of something thick and slow-moving.

He put the chicken wire back in place, threw the hooked stick in the corner of the pen, and headed for the trailer.

Elfie was at the sink when he walked into the kitchen. From the back she still looked like the girl he’d married. Her hair was red and glowed like a light where it fell to the small of her back. Her hips were round and full without being heavy. Her calves were high, her ankles thin. But then she turned around and she was a disaster. Those beautiful ball-crushing breasts she’d had two years ago now hung like enormous flaps down the front of her body. And although she was not fat, she looked like she was carrying a basketball under her dress. Two inches below her navel her belly just leaped out in this absolutely unbelievable way. The kitchen smelled like she had been cooking baby shit.

“Smells like you been cooking baby shit in here, Elf,” he said.

There was a fat eighteen-month-old boy strapped into a highchair. Right beside him in a blue bassinet was a fat two-month-old boy.

Elfie turned from the sink and smiled. Her teeth had gone bad. The doctor said it had something to do with having two babies so close together.

“Joe Lon, honey, I been trying to keep your supper warm for you.”

“Goddammit, Elf,” he said. “You ever gone git them teeth fixed or not? I given you the money.”

She stopped smiling, pulling her lips down in a self-conscious way. “Joe Lon, honey, I just ain’t had the time, the babies and all.”

There was no dentist in Mystic. She would have to go over to Tifton, and the trip took the better part of a day.

“Leave them goddam younguns with somebody and git on over there and git you mouth looked after. I’m sick and tard of them teeth like that.”

“Aw right, Joe Lon, honey.” She started putting food on the table and he sat down across from the two babies. “Don’t you want to wash you hands or nothing?”

“I’m fine the way I am.”

She took some thin white biscuits out of the oven and put them in front of him. Along with everything else she was a terrible cook. He took one of the lardy biscuits off the plate, tore it open, and dipped some redeye gravy on it. She sat with her plate in front of her without eating, just staring at him, her lips held down tight in an unseemly way.

“Was it a bad day at the store, Joe Lon, honey?”

He had been all right when he came into the trailer, but he sat at the table now trembling with anger. He had no idea where the anger came from. He just felt like slapping somebody. He wasn’t looking at her but he knew she was still watching him, knew her plate was still empty, knew her mouth was trembling and trying to smile. It made him sick with shame and at the same time want to kill her.

“I left the nigger at the store,” he said. “I went snake hunting.”

The biscuit and gravy was sticking in his throat and a great gaseous bubble of whiskey rose to meet it. He wasn’t going to be able to finish it. He wasn’t going to be able to eat anything.

“What all did you git?” she said in a small voice. When he didn’t answer, she said: “Did you git anything?”

The baby strapped in the highchair had a tablespoon he was beating the tray in front of him with. Then he quit beating the tray and threw it into the bassinet and hit the other baby in the head, causing him to scream in great gasping sobs. It so startled the baby in the highchair that he started kicking and screaming and choking too. Joe Lon, who had felt himself on the edge of exploding anyway, shot straight out of his chair. He grabbed the greasy biscuit off his plate and leaned across the table. Elfie didn’t move. She left her hands in her lap. Her eyes didn’t even follow him up. She kept staring straight ahead while he stuffed the dripping biscuit down the front of her cotton dress, between her sore, hanging breasts. He put his face right in her face.

“I got sompin,” he shouted. “You want me to tell you what I got? I got goddammit filled up to here with you and these shitty younguns.”

She had never once looked at him and the only sign she made that she might have heard was the trembling in her mouth got faster. He kicked over a chair on the way out of the trailer, and before he even got through the door he heard her crying join the babies’. By the time he got to his truck the whole trailer was wailing. He leaned against the fender trembling, feeling he might puke. He almost never had an impulse to cry, but lately he often wanted to scream. Screaming was as near as he could get to crying usually, and now he had to gag to keep from howling like a moon-struck dog.

Jesus, he wished he wasn’t such a sonofabitch. Elf was about as good a woman as a man ever laid dick to, that’s the way he felt about it. Of course getting married with her three months gone and then putting another baby to her before the first one was hardly six months old didn’t do her body any good. And it ruined his nerves completely. Hell, he guessed that was to be expected. But it didn’t mean he ought to treat her like a dog. Christ, he treated her just like a goddam dog. He just couldn’t seem to help it. He didn’t know why she stayed with him.

He stood watching the ten-acre campground, knowing tomorrow it would fill up with snakehunters and blaring radios and noise of every possible kind and wondered if his nerves would hold together. He took a deep breath and held it a long time and then slowly let it out. There was no use thinking about it. It didn’t matter one way or the other. The hunt was coming—the noise and the people—and whether he could stand it or not wouldn’t change a thing. What he needed was a drink. He glanced once at the trailer, where the shadowy figure of his lumpy wife moved in the lighted window, and jumped into the truck and roared off down the road as though something might have been chasing him.

By the time he got to the store he had gone to howling. Through the open front door, he could see George sitting behind the counter on a high stool. There were no cars or trucks out front. Joe Lon sat next to the little store that was hardly more than a shed and howled. He knew George would hear him and it bothered him but George had heard him before. George would not say anything. That was the good thing about a nigger. He never let on that he saw anything or heard anything.

Finally Joe Lon got out of the truck and went inside. He didn’t look directly at George because howling made him look just like he’d been crying, made his eyes red and his nose red and his face flushed. He was wishing now he had not torn up Berenice’s letter. He wished he had it to look at while he drank a beer.

“Git me a beer, George,” he said.

George got off the stool and went through a door behind the counter into a tiny room not much bigger than a clothes closet. Joe Lon sat on the high stool and hooked the heels of his cowboy boots over the bottom rung. He took out some Dentyne and lit a Camel. Directly, George came back with a Budweiser tallboy.

“What’d you sell today?” Joe Lon said.

“Ain’t sell much,” said George

“How much?” he said. “Where’s you marks?”

George took a piece of ruled tablet paper out of the bib of his overalls. The paper had a row of little marks at the top and two rows of little marks at the bottom. It meant George had sold twenty bottles of beer, five half pints, fourteen pints, and one fifth, all bonded. He had also sold ten Mason fruit jars of moonshine.

“Hell, that ain’t bad for a Thursday,” said Joe Lon. 

“Nosuh, it ain’t bad for a Thursday,” George said.

“I got it now,” said Joe Lon. “You go on home.”

George stood where he was. His gaze shifted away from Joe Lon’s face until he was almost looking at the ceiling. “Reckon I could take me a little taste of sompin? Howsomever, it be true I ain’t got no cash money.”

Joe Lon said: “Take yourself one of them half pints a shine. I’ll put it on you ticket. Bring the one of them bonded whiskeys while you in there.”

George brought the whiskey and set it on the counter in front of Joe Lon, dropping as he did the half pint of moonshine into the deep back pocket of his overalls.

Joe Lon had brought another ruled piece of tablet paper out of a drawer in front of him. “Damned if you ain’t drinking it up bout fast as you making it, George.”

“I know I is,” George said.

“You already behind on the week and it ain’t nothing but Thursday,” said Joe Lon.

“It ain’t nothing but Thursday an I already be behind on the week,” said George, shaking his head.

George hadn’t moved so Joe Lon said: “You don’t want to borrow money too, do you? You already behind.”

“Nosuh, I don’t want no money. I already behind.”

“What is it then?”

“Mistuh Buddy. He done locked up Lottie Mae again.” 

“Jesus.”

“Yessuh.”

“For what?”

“Say she a sportin lady.”

“Jesus.”

“Yessuh.”

Buddy Matlow would take a liking to a woman and if she would not come across he would lock her up for a while, if he could. As soon as he had been elected Sheriff and Public Safety Director for Lebeau County he started locking up ladies who would not come across. They were usually black but not always. Sometimes they were white. Especially if they were transients just passing through, and a little down on their luck. If he got to honing for one like that and she wouldn’t come across, he’d lock her up no matter what color she was, sometimes even if she had a man with her. He had been called to accounts twice already by an investigator from the governor’s office, but as he kept telling Joe Lon, they’d never touch him with anything but a little lecture full of bullshit about how he ought to do better. Hadn’t he been the best defensive end Georgia Tech ever had? Hadn’t he been consensus All-American two years back-to-back and wouldn’t he have been a hell of a pro if he hadn’t blown his right knee? And hadn’t he gone straight to Veet Nam, stepped on a pungy stick that had been dipped in Veet Nam Ease shit? Hadn’t they had to cut his All-American leg off? Goddammit he’d paid his dues, and now it was his turn.

“I’ll see about it,” Joe Lon said.

“Would you do that, Mistuh Joe Lon? Would you see about it?”

“I’ll talk to him tonight or first thing in the morning.”

“I wisht you could axe him about Lottie Mae tonight.”

“Tonight or first thing in the morning.”

He cut the seal on the whiskey with his thumbnail and took a pull at it. George started for the door. Joe Lon waved the bottle in the air and gasped a little. He’d taken a bigger swallow than he meant to. He followed the whiskey with a little beer while George waited, watching him patiently from the door.

“Lummy git them Johnny-on-the-spots?”

Lummy was George’s brother. They both worked for Joe Lon Mackey. They’d worked for Joe Lon’s daddy before they worked for Joe Lon. They’d never been told what they made in wages. And they had never thought to ask. They only knew at any given moment in the week whether they were ahead or behind on what they’d drawn on account. Ahead was good; behind was bad. Everybody was usually behind on everything though and nobody worried about it much.

When George didn’t answer, Joe Lon said: “The Johnny-on-the-spots, did Lummy git’m?”

Nothing showed in George’s face. He said: “Them Johnny-on-the-spot.” It wasn’t a question. He’d just repeated it.

“Hunters’ll start coming in tomorrow,” said Joe Lon. “If the Johnny-on-the-spots ain’t in the campground we in trouble.”

“Be in trouble,” said George.

“What?” said Joe Lon.

George said: “What it was?”

“The shitters, George!” said Joe Lon. “Did Lummy git the goddam shitters or not?”

George’s face opened briefly, relaxed in a smile. He did a little shuffle with his feet, took the moonshine out of his back pocket, looked at it, felt of it, and put it back. “Sho now, Lummy come wif the shitters on the truck all the way from Cordele.”

“I didn’t see’m on the campground,” Joe Lon said. “I should’ve seen’m.”

“He ain’t taken them shitters offen the truck, but he have’m everone. I seen’m mysef. Mistuh Joe Lon, them shitters be fine.”

“Just so you got’m, and they out there when the hunters start rolling in.”

“You drink you whiskey, Mistuh Joe Lon. Don’t think twice. Lummy and me is put our minds on the whole thing.” The screen door banged shut behind him, and Joe Lon poured another dollop of whiskey down. It wasn’t doing any good much, didn’t seem to be taking hold. He knew nothing was going to help a whole lot until he saw Berenice and either made a fool of himself or did not. He had the overwhelming feeling that he was going to make a fool of himself. Tear something up. Maybe his life. Well, at least he got the Johnny-on-the-spots. Last year it had taken two weeks to clean the human shit up in Mystic. There’d been about three times as many people as there had ever been before.

The rattlesnake roundup had been going on now as long as anybody in town could remember, but until about twelve years ago it had been a local thing, a few townspeople, a few farmers. They’d have a picnic, maybe a sack race or a horse-pulling contest and then everybody would go out into the woods and see how many diamondbacks they could pull out of the ground. They would eat the snakes and drink a little corn whiskey and that would do it for another year.

But at some time back there, the snake hunt had started causing outsiders to come in. Word got out and people started to come, at first just a few from Tifton or Cordele and sometimes as far away as Macon. From there on it had just grown. Last year they had two people from Canada and five from Texas.

Mystic, Georgia, turned out to be the best rattlesnake hunting ground in the world. There were prizes now for the heaviest snake, the longest snake, the most snakes, the first one caught, the last one caught. Plus there would be a beauty contest. Miss Mystic Rattler. And shit. Human shit in quantities that nobody could believe. This year, though, they had the Johnny-on-the-spots. Chemical shitters.

The telephone rang. It was his daddy. He wanted Joe Lon to send over a bottle with George.