A Feast of Snakes (20 page)

His daddy glanced at him briefly. “How you feeling?”

“I’m all right.”

“You feeling all right?”

“I told you.”

“I thought you’d gone crazy shore.” He spit a long stream of tobacco juice and passed Joe Lon the bottle he was sipping from. “What the hell ails you, anyway?”

Joe Lon sat, refusing to answer.

“It’s just Buddy’s dick cut off got you upset. Enough to upset anybody. Hope they catch the sumbitch done it. But they won’t. Never do. Anybody worth a shit gits killed, they never find out who done it.” He leaned forward and looked around his son. “Evening, Elf. Things been lively, ain’t they?” Without waiting for an answer, he looked back to his son. “You got anything on the fight?”

“I got a dollar or two down.”

“I hope you didn’t give no odds. Tuffy’s got all he can handle with this sumbitch.”

“I don’t give odds on nothing,” said Joe Lon.

The other dog had been brought into the pit. He was straining and slobbering and snapping before he ever got onto the sand, bloodied now from earlier fights. His name was Devil and everybody there who had the slightest interest in dog fighting knew him. He carried more scar tissue than even Tuffy did.

This particular fight was Louisiana rules, which meant that a dog didn’t have to die. There was nothing compulsory about one dog taking a killing, although he could take his killing if he wanted to. Any dog that would face could fight. If he wouldn’t face, he was retired from the pit and the other dog was declared the winner.

Only one handler for each dog was allowed in the pit. Willard came down with Tuffy. Coach Tump stayed directly behind him outside the pit. The coach handed Willard a towel and a bowl of water. That was all each handler was allowed to bring into the pit. If it had been hot weather, he would have been allowed a fan to cool the animal down with at pickups. The dogs, held on opposite sides of the pit by heavy leashes, were allowed to slowly come together on the hard, packed earth until their foreshortened blunt heads were only inches apart. They were both straining, their eyes shot with blood, their nostrils flared, in an utter frenzy. Most of the crowd was standing, shouting bets at one another and screaming at the dogs. Novella Watkins was hollering her little heart out, stamping her feet and shaking her dainty fist, but even in her excitement, one of her hands kept returning to her head to check her tiny crown of snakes. Joe Lon saw Duffy Deeter across the pit in the stands. Hard Candy and Susan Gender were with him. The old man they’d kicked around at the bar, Poncy, sat between the two girls. They all looked a little out of control, except Poncy, who sat quietly staring at the ends of his fingers. Down in the pit, the referee stepped onto the sand. He was an old man, a tobacco farmer from Tifton. He was wearing brand-new overalls and a black felt hat. He glanced up at Big Joe, who nodded, and then across to the man from east Tennessee.

He looked to the handlers and said, “Are we ready to let’m roll, gentlemen?” They both nodded. The referee’s call had a high joyous lilt: “Let’m roll!”

The handlers slipped the leashes and the dogs met in the center of the pit. The impact as they came together had the sound of an ax in wood, a deep solid joining. It was impossible to follow what was happening as they rolled in the dirt, but when at last they stopped, Tuffy had been cut along the back and across the top of the skull. But it was Devil who was caught. Tuffy had managed to close on the side of his neck, not far enough under to get the jugular, but it was a mean, wearing hold. He closed his eyes and rode the other dog down. Devil was strong enough to regain his feet at times and lift Tuffy nearly clear of the ground but he couldn’t shake him and eventually they were in the dirt again.

They lay there for two or three minutes and then Tuffy shook Devil so hard that he shook himself loose from the hold and went flying across the pit. They both scratched in the dirt in an effort to join again, and when their roll stopped Devil was into Tuffy’s belly and Tuffy was into Devil’s haunch. They shook each other where they lay. Both dogs were slick with blood, but neither was pumping. As long as they didn’t hit an artery or a heavy vein, the blood didn’t really matter. The dogs never seemed to notice it. When the referee called for the first pickup forty minutes later, it was not at all clear which was the better dog. The dogs’ jaws had to be pried open with a hickory wedge before they could be handled.

Willard Miller took Tuffy, who was so fiercely mad his eyes were crossed, to the bowl, gave him some water, and washed the blood out of his nose; then he put each of the dog’s feet into the bowl.

The referee said: “Are you ready to let’m roll, gentlemen?” And the two dogs were back in the dirt again.

The second pickup was not until an hour later and it had been a brutal standoff match. Bets had been made and remade and made yet again. There had been several fights in the stands. One had been going on for the last twenty minutes and had worked its way around to the side of the pit. Bets were starting to be laid off on the two men rolling around in the dirt while the dogs were being handled.

“He’s pumping,” Willard said to Coach Tump. Tuffy’s rear right leg was pumping blood. He turned and looked over to Big Joe, whose face was passive. He nodded. Let’m fight.

But this time when the referee called to let’m roll, and the heavy leashes were slipped, Tuffy turned. He’d lost a lot of blood and it was still spurting from his back leg. He staggered as the other dog came across the ring. The referee called for a pickup. Devil’s jaws were pried out of Tuffy’s back. The referee was not sure of the move Tuffy had made, whether he had truly refused to face or not. The crowd was going crazy and their stamping feet on the boards of the bleachers rolled over the pit like thunder. The fight between the two men was over. One of them lay face down in the dirt. The other man hung over the wall watching the bleeding dogs.

When the referee had them face again, there was no doubt. Tuffy turned, but before the referee could declare the winner and have Tuffy withdrawn, Big Joe, the tails of his enormous black coat flapping behind him, had leaped over the barrier into the pit. He caught Tuffy against the boards. He and the crowd howled with a single voice while he kicked the dog to death.

***

Coach Tump sat red-eyed and hunkered over a yellow tablet of paper, a bitten nub of a pencil caught in his fingers. The little cheerleaders brought him steaming coffee in relays. It was very early but the snake teams were already forming up. Men, women, and children wandered about in front of the registration table where Coach Tump sat. It had been a wild calamitous night, with dancing and drinking and fighting and cars racing around over the countryside. Three more campers had been wrecked. Luther Peacock tried to do something about it all, even put two men in jail, but then he just gave up on it. There were too many people to try to do anything with.

Coach Tump stretched his neck, trying to see Joe Lon or Willard. He asked Hard Candy if she had seen them.

“Not this morning. Coach,” she said, and gave him another cup of coffee. He laced this cup heavy with whiskey. It made him feel a little better. Fog lay curling among the far trees. The heavy pine smell of sap rising was everywhere on the air. It was damp and had grown colder during the night. A great day for hunting snakes. They’d all be in the ground. Coach Tump wished to God it was all over. The last thing in the world he wanted to do was sit here and register snake-hunting teams. But they’d gone too far with it to stop now. He’d talked with Willard and the doctor and Luther and even Big Joe—after Joe Lon had left in the truck with the bloody body of Tuffy thrown on the tailgate —Coach Tump had talked to them about the possibility of calling the hunt off. There seemed reason enough to do it: Buddy’s death, too many people, too little water, too few toilets. But they had decided together that calling off the hunt would probably drive the crowd over the final brink to madness. They’d torn down most of the bleachers around the pit while Big Joe was still kicking Tuffy, and they might have torn down the house too if Joe Lon hadn’t suddenly come out the back door with his daddy’s shotgun and let off four rounds in the air. The shotgun calmed them down enough to get them off the place. But they were still dangerous and there was nothing to do but go on with the hunt.

A man suddenly came running out of the woods, screaming, the fog swirling at his pumping knees. He was running and screaming and Coach Tump recognized him as the one who was tainted from keeping over five hundred snakes on his personal property.

“They killing him.
Killing!
Butchering … My friend. Oh, Jesus God, my
only
friend.”

Coach Tump got him calmed down, but never enough to find out exactly what was happening, only that somebody was getting killed. Since Buddy was dead and since Luther Peacock was nowhere about and since he. Coach Tump,
was
Honorary Chairman of the Roundup, he ran across the campground with Tommy Hugh and found five men, a woman, and two small children attacking a snake, a constrictor, eighteen feet long and more than two hundred pounds. The snake did not move; it didn’t even look alive.

Tommy Hugh was screaming that it was hurt already from the cold, that it had no place to hide last night and its body temperature was down in the forties, and that besides it was harmless. Harmless! But the men and women were screaming about skin and food and steaks and danger. Danger! And they were hitting the snake with hatchets. They all had hatchets. Even the children. The snake did writhe some before they got its back open, but not much and it didn’t last long.

Finally, all of them, even the children, were standing in the snake. There was an enormous amount of guts and blood and it didn’t smell good at all. The men and women got out of the snake and made the children get out of it and they stood for a moment regarding the two-hundred-pound mess of stinking guts and blood and mutilated skin and without saying anything walked out from under the trees where they found the snake. They stopped once to chop their hatchets into the dirt to clean off the blood and bits of whitish meat, but they never looked back.

Tommy Hugh actually knelt and lifted the anaconda’s head into his lap. The head had fared better than the rest of the snake. It only had two parallel hatchet marks in the skull between the eyes.

Tommy Hugh looked up at Coach Tump, tears streaming down his face, and said: “You would’ve stopped them if it’d been a dog they was chopping.”

Coach Tump stood for a moment and then said before he turned to go: “You tainted sumbitch.”

The coach walked back to the table, his stomach a little sick, and feeling very bad about the morning. Luther Peacock was there, with a cup of coffee, and Joe Lon was sitting in his pickup truck beside Willard. Duffy Deeter was leaning on the fender. Big Joe’s shotgun, the one Joe Lon had fired the evening before, was on a rack behind Willard’s head. The tailgate of the pickup was still down. Coach Tump came up to the table and took a mean swallow of his whiskeyed coffee and told them about the tainted sumbitch with the two-hundred-pound snake.

Joe Lon did not answer but sat regarding the far wall of dark pine where it started to rise to the scrub oak ridge above which the sun was a thin white disk in the cold fog rising out of the ground. That long oak ridge above the pines was where they would hunt the snakes. He’d taken Tuffy off last night behind the field to an old storm-blasted pine tree where the buzzards roosted and pulled him off the tailgate. Joe Lon watched him for a long moment lying there with the blood still damp ‘on his scarred body; then he’d driven home and had the first real night’s sleep in months. He had put himself carefully on the bed beside Elfie and carefully closed his eyes and listened to his heart beating. Elfie had taken his hand and he let her hold it. She lay very still on the bed. Finally she said: “Goodnight, Joe Lon, honey.”

“Goodnight,” he said.

“Things’ll be different tomorrow,” she said.

“All right,” he said.

Then he had gone carefully to sleep, a deep dreamless sleep, because he knew and accepted for the first time that things would not be different tomorrow. Or ever. Things got different for some people. But for some they did not. There were a lot of things you could do though. One of them was to go nuts trying to pretend things would someday be different. That was one of the things he did not intend to do.

“We gone have to git’m started,” said Coach Tump. “They nervous and ready to go.”

“We might as well,” said Luther Peacock.

There were three people on a team. Sometimes a man, his wife, and their child. Sometimes two men and a woman. Sometimes three men. One carried the stick, one the hose, and one the little bottle of gasoline. Coach Tump Walker’s pad showed that there were seventy-five officially registered teams, but a lot of people hadn’t bothered with signing up, because it was obvious that better than six hundred people—laughing, shouting, drinking, cursing—were strung out waiting for the race up the hill.

Luther Peacock got in the cab of the pickup beside Joe Lon. “Let’s go, boy,” he said.

They started them this way every year. Coach Tump and some of his boys—in this case, Willard Miller and Duffy Deeter—would stay down with the hunters, making sure they kept lined up and there were no false starts, while Joe Lon and Buddy Matlow (today Luther Peacock) would drive the pickup through the border of rising pines on a little dim road that finally rose to the sandy ridge of scrub oaks and palmetto. Joe Lon drove carefully, his eyes straight ahead, grunting now and again when Luther Peacock spoke to him. It was only about four hundred yards up through the pines to the long, slightly curving oak ridge where hundreds and hundreds of gophers had burrowed long slanting holes into the sand. That was where the rattlesnakes lived, in the gopher holes, never molesting their hard-shelled, lethargic hosts, but seeking shelter there in the warm holes when cold weather came. The snakes’ cold blood could not bear winter. If the temperature dropped below thirty-two degrees, they simply froze solid on the spot unless they could get themselves underground.