A Feast of Snakes (21 page)
Joe Lon and Luther got out of the pickup and walked over the crest of the ridge. A chicken wire and plywood snake pen identical to the one in the school yard had been set up to receive the snakes. A pair of scales hung by the pen. Little blue tags that would register the weight and length of each snake sat waiting on the scales. The starting seniors on the Mystic Rattlers football team would weigh and measure the snakes. The cheerleaders, led by Novella Watkins, would record weight and length on the blue tags for the hunters.
“Wait,” said Joe Lon. “Wait a minute.”
Luther Peacock had taken out his red handkerchief.
“We got to do it,” said Luther.
From this high ridge of ground, Joe Lon could see the whole thing. Over there to the left was the campground and beyond it, his trailer, where Elfie was probably washing and feeding the babies. The senior football players were already bringing the cheerleaders up through the pine trees, getting a head start on the hunters, who always went a little berserk when the signal to start was given. Straight ahead and perhaps three hundred yards behind the cheerleaders, whose bright little uniforms flared like something growing in the dark woods, stood the hunters, their solid straining faces turned up watching for the signal. And on the farthest horizon, Joe Lon could see the hazy outline of his daddy’s twin-gabled roof. He wondered if Beeder would be watching. She said she would be watching, that she always watched the howling ascent of the hunters to the traditional snake ground of the Mystic Rattlesnake Roundup.
“We got to do it,” said Luther.
“Yeah,” said Joe Lon, “I guess we got to.”
Luther Peacock raised his red handkerchief over his head, and when he did the line of hunters broke, racing into the trees that led up to the oak ridge. The long snake sticks shook on the air like lances. A sustained squall of voices echoed out of the pine woods. As they watched, the senior football players and the cheerleaders sprinted out of the pine trees and started the last little climb up to the ridge.
Joe Lon went back to the pickup and opened the door. There was a bottle of whiskey in the glove compartment. He got into the cab and took it out. The sky had lowered since they had come up on the ridge. The weak sun could not burn off the fog still rising out of the ground. It was getting colder. Joe Lon strained to see the house below the twin gables on the far horizon. It was there. He could make it out but it was hazy. Beeder couldn’t possibly see the hunters who were just now breaking onto the ridge and dropping to their knees by the gopher holes. Indifferently, he watched them scramble at the holes, pulling the sand away with their hands, clawing, setting it up for the hose. A strange peace, heavy, even tiring, had settled in him. He almost dozed as he watched them, frantic, jerking and howling, every one of them intent on being the first to pull a snake out of the ground. He sipped the whiskey and wondered what it would be like over there where Beeder was. The hunters must look smaller than ants. Maybe they couldn’t even be seen. He thought they couldn’t. She had said otherwise.
“Oh, I can see them,” she said. “I can see just as much of them over there as I want to see.”
He’d just come back in the house with the shotgun. Outside trucks were starting up. Now and then dogs started barking.
“I’ve seen more of them than I want to see,” he said. “I wish we didn’t have to do this. I wish I’d never heard of a rattlesnake.”
“Daddy would say to wish in one hand and shit in the other, see which one fills up first.”
He said: “I know what daddy would say.” He turned toward the door. “I got to go.”
“What you gone do with him?”
“Take him out yonder where the buzzards roost.”
“Okay,” she said.
“I don’t think Tuffy felt anything much. He was already hurt pretty bad.”
“It don’t matter,” she said.
“No, I don’t reckon it does.”
Somebody had brought up some lightered knots and made a fire behind the snake pit. The black pine smoke rose with the fog into the lowering sky. Snakes were already being put into the pit. All across the barren ridge, the hunters stood in dark relief against the winter sky, pulling the snakes from the ground, stretching them at the ends of the long poles. Somebody had let Poncy on a team. He handled the gasoline. Joe Lon, sitting utterly still in the truck listening to his heart beat between sips of whiskey, watched as the team Poncy was on dropped by a fresh gopher hole. One man ran a ten-foot length of garden hose down the hole until he was sure it was all the way to the bottom. Then Poncy measured out a teaspoon of gasoline and poured it down the hose. If there was a snake in there, he’d be up in a minute, drunk and blinking from the gas fumes. Poncy and the two other hunters stepped back from the hole and waited. Presently, the blunt dry head of the snake appeared, the black forked tongue waving, testing the air. There was a smooth undulation and another foot of snake, thick as a man’s wrist, appeared. One of the hunters dropped the noose at the end of the stick over the snake’s head and pulled it tight. Slowly, a five-foot length of serpent was drawn out of the hole. Poncy was dancing around, making the wild excited cries a child might make.
“Hold him, hold him,” Poncy was begging. The man held the writhing snake up on the end of the stick. Poncy came closer and closer until he was looking right into the snake’s eyes. Poncy hissed. From less than a foot away, he shot spit into the snake’s gaping, fanged mouth. Just as he was about to do it again, he looked up and saw Joe Lon watching him. Almost shyly, he averted his eyes. But while the man with the stick took the snake to the pit, Poncy came over to the truck where Joe Lon was sitting with the door open. He was flushed, smiling, his eyes bright.
“Hi,” Poncy said.
Joe Lon took another careful sip of whiskey and did not speak. Poncy looked embarrassed. “I don’t care what you did in the bar,” he said. Joe Lon wanted to say something so the old man would go back and start pulling snakes out of the ground and leave him alone. But he didn’t think he could speak. So he carefully nodded his head. Poncy seemed to accept that as an answer.
Poncy leaned closer and for the first time held Joe Lon’s eyes. He said: “I know why you did it. It’s natural, and I don’t hold it against you.”
Joe Lon nodded. Poncy turned and started back to his team but he stopped and looked at Joe Lon before he’d gone very far. “I’d rather be here on this hill with these snakes and you,” he said, “than anywhere else in the world.”
Willard Miller, Duffy Deeter, and Coach Tump walked out of the pine trees and Joe Lon watched while they came up the crest of the hill to the truck. When they stopped by the open door, Joe Lon handed Coach Tump the whiskey bottle because he was afraid the coach was going to speak to him and Joe Lon was no longer sure that he could answer. But not being sure he could speak did not strike him as odd. It seemed normal enough, even good. They passed the bottle. The temperature had dropped twenty degrees since daylight. A light inconstant buzz of rattles floated out of the pit and hovered over the hill.
Luther Peacock, leaning against the fender of the truck, said in a quiet voice: “You know I never touched a goddam snake in my life. Sumbitch if I know how they do that.” Everywhere in front of them, the dark silhouettes of men were joined to the earth by the thick stretched bodies of snakes. The sky gave no light at all now except where the thin white disk of sun hung in the east.
Off and on all morning, Victor, his hair more wildly twisted than ever, appeared among the hunters, to urge them on to greater efforts. So Joe Lon was not surprised to see him come out from behind the snake pit. But he was surprised to see him suddenly stop and strip to the waist. The men and women nearest Victor turned just in time to see Victor bend to his heavy coat lying on the ground and open the pockets. When he straightened up he had a rattlesnake in each hand. He held the writhing snakes over his head. His voice boomed: “Ye shall take up …”
A rush of energy shocked through Joe Lon. He stiffened on the seat. All morning he had felt as though he was going to do it today. But he had not known what
it
was. Now, watching Victor stagger across the crest of the ridge, Joe Lon knew what it was he had planned to do all along, the thing that had lain rank and fascinating in his brain since last night at the pit. He’d waited for the moment to come, the right one, knowing he’d recognize it when it did. The hunters were scattering in front of Victor, his heavy lilting voice singing on about good and evil in a kind of mad howl. When the old man finally stepped between Joe Lon and the fog-shrouded, twin-gabled house on the far horizon, Joe Lon reached to the rack where the shotgun hung behind him and in a single movement came out of the cab and blew a hole the size of a doorknob out of Victor’s pale naked chest.
The hunters who had been scattering stopped. Nothing moved anywhere. Joe Lon jacked another round of double-ought buckshot into the twelve-gauge pump, let the gun drop slightly to the right, and blew the look of horror right off Luther Peacock’s head. A woman’s voice said a word, begging. A child cried. And Joe Lon strolled casually toward the hunters, pumping the shotgun. When he threw it to his shoulder, the bead swung right past Shep and held on Berenice. He shot away her neck. Joe Lon jacked in another shell. He felt better than he had ever felt in his life. Christ, it was good to be in control again. He shot the nearest hunter.
When he pumped the gun again, it was empty. Since the first shot, no more than seven or eight seconds had passed, during which time everybody on the hill stood in arrested motion. As he pulled down on the empty chamber for the second time, dozens of hunters scrambled for cover. But most of them did not. The man nearest him, his face twisted with fear and rage, screamed: “Git that crazy bastard!” And a whole wall of men and women, their mouths open, teeth bared, moved with a single raging voice upon Joe Lon. He never dropped the gun. He simply held it and waited as their hands came upon him and he was raised high in the air. The gun went into the snake pit with him. He fell into the boiling snakes, went under and came up, like a swimmer breaking water. For the briefest instant, he gained his feet. Snakes hung from his face.
As he was going down again, he saw, or thought he saw, his sister Beeder in her dirty white nightgown squatting off on the side of the hill with Lottie Mae, watching.
Harry Crews
Harry Crews was born and reared in Bacon County, Georgia. He teaches at the University of Florida in Gainesville, and is a contributing editor of
Southern
magazine. He is also a contributor to
Playboy, Esquire,
and many other magazines and newspapers.
A Feast of Snakes,
first published in 1976, was his eighth book.
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