A Feast of Snakes (5 page)

“Decent of you,” Buddy said. He turned and went out to his Plymouth Cruiser, where he sat behind the wheel smoking. His face was mottled and every now and then he spat out the window. He couldn’t seem to cut any slack anywhere. He’d earned it. Goddammit, he knew he’d earned it but nobody would own up to it. If you couldn’t cut a little slack behind a ruined All-American wheel—ruined in defense of the fucking U S of A, where could you cut it? He thumped the cigarette in a high sparking arch and pulled away from the store and drove slowly in a controlled rage to the jail. His deputy, Luther Peacock, was sitting at the desk when he got there.

“Go eat supper, Luther.”

“How long you want me to eat?” Luther said.

“Eat till after midnight, Luther. You take you a good slow supper.”

“I’m hongry anyhow,” Luther said, reaching for his hat.

Buddy Matlow walked across the room and down a hall to a cell. He stopped without looking in it. “You know if you tell anybody I love you, I’ll kill you. You know that, don’t you?”

Lottie Mae did not answer. She sat on a low chair in the center of the cell as still and quiet as a rock. There was only one cell in the large bare room and she was the only prisoner. There were two windows but they were both closed. Sweat stood on Lottie Mae’s face like drops of oil. Buddy Matlow walked up and down in front of the cell. There was no other sound but the steady knock of his peg leg against the floor.

“I ain’t tellin nobody nothin,” she finally said.

“You told George,” he said. “You told George and he told Joe Lon and now I guess ever sumbitch in Mystic is laughing at old Buddy Matlow. An I’m gone tell you one goddam thing. Buddy Matlow don’t like to be laughed at. He don’t take to it one damn bit.”

“I ain’t tol George,” she said.

“Well, what is it? Can he read goddam minds or what?”

“Ain’t nobody in Mystic don’t know where I is,” she said.

Buddy Madow quit walking. He took hold of the bars and stared at her. Her thin cotton dress stuck to her back and sweat ran on her bare legs.

“It won’t make a difference whether they know or not,” he said.

She got off the stool and came to stand in front of him. “Please, Mister Buddy, let me go on …”

“Goddam you, quit calling me Mister! Ain’t I already told you I loved you?”

She went back to sit on the stool, walking backwards, never taking her eyes off him, her body shaking as if with cold.

When she had stopped shaking she said in a low sullen voice: “I ain’t studying love. It’s gone be trouble account all this. You be in trouble already now.”

Buddy Matlow gripped the bars and stared at her. “Be in trouble? Why, bless your sweet nigger heart, I was born in trouble. It’s been trouble ever since.” He slapped his right thigh. “That’s trouble right there. That fucking stick leg is trouble.” He had been shouting, but his voice suddenly lowered. “But what the hell, I try not to whine about it too much. Everybody’s got their load of shit to haul. Look at you. Ever time you show that black face in the world you got trouble. You think I don’t know that? I do. I appreciate what it is to be a nigger. I got ever sympathy in the world for it. But the minute I laid eyes on that little jacked-up ass of yours I known I was in love again.” 

“Talking crazy,” she said.

“I may
be
crazy,” he said.

“Might as well let me out. I ain’t doing nothing nasty. Didn’t las time. Ain’t this time.”

“This time is different,” Buddy Matlow said.

“Ain’t never gone be different,” she said. “My ma ain’t raised no youngan of hern to do nothin nasty.”

Buddy Matlow smiled. “Last time you was locked up we weren’t having us a roundup.”

“Roundup,” she said.

“Snakes,” he said.

“Snakes?” she said.

“Rattlesnakes.”

“Lordy.”

Buddy Matlow went over to one corner and bent down behind a splintered wooden desk. When he straightened up he had a metal bucket in his hand. A piece of screen wire was bent to cover the top of the bucket. He brought the bucket to the cell door and set it down.

“You know what’s in that bucket?”

“Lordy Lordy Lordy Lordy Lordy.” She sang the word in a little breathless whisper.

He turned the bucket over with his wooden leg and a diamondback as thick as a man’s wrist and nearly four feet long spilled out onto the floor. It neither rattled nor lifted its head. Only its bright lidless eyes showed that it was alive. There was a knot in the snake’s body, a swelling about a foot back from the head, like a tumor growing there.

“You ain’t got a thing to be scared of, Lottie Mae, darling. This snake just et. Had’m a rat.”

He touched the swelling in the snake’s body with his wooden leg. The snake lifted its head, the tongue darting and quivering on the air. But there was no striking curve in its body and presently the head dropped back to the floor.

“The snake or me, one is coming in there with you. Which you reckon?”

Lottie Mae did not answer. Her gaze had locked on the snake and had not once lifted from it. With his peg leg Buddy turned the snake’s head between the bars. Slowly he pressed the thick body into the cell.

The first time she spoke Buddy couldn’t make out what she said and had to tell her to say it again and when she said it loud enough for him to hear he made her say it again.

“I ruther you,” she said, still looking at the snake. Her hand lifted to the top button of her cotton dress. “I ruther you.”

Buddy said: “Ain’t it a God’s wonder what a snake can do for love?”

He had to go up to the desk for the key. When he got back she had her dress off and was lying on the narrow cot looking at the snake, which had not moved. Buddy took off his gun and his cartridge belt, took the steel-sprung blackjack out of his back pocket, all the time watching her while she watched the snake. He got naked but did not take off his peg leg.

“You a purty thing,” he said softly and then fell on her with the kind of grunt he might have made if somebody had hit him.

He was quick and—for the rest of it—silent, his great weight lunging against her. The only parts of her that showed from under him were her hands, her raised knees, and her face turned off under the edge of his heaving chest, staring with glazed eyes at the snake, which looked back at her and did not blink.

“All right,” he said, finally, “you can go now.”

He banged his wooden leg steadily against the wall by the bed while he watched her slip the thin cotton dress over her head.

He called after her as she was going down the hall: “And don’t let it happen again.”

She walked out into the night and down the road toward the house where she lived with her mother. But she would remember none of it, not Buddy Matlow’s smothering weight, or her bare feet on the stony road, or anything else. The snake had supplanted it all. Her head was filled with its diamond pattern and lidless eyes, and a terror was growing in her that was beyond screaming or even crying.

She went blindly down the single paved street of Mystic. The only light that was on was at Big Joe’s Confections. It went off as if on signal as she was passing. Joe Lon saw her as he turned from locking the door. She was no more than twenty feet from him.

“Well,” he said to himself, “ever now and then something goes right in this fucking world.” He walked over to her and she stopped. “You all right, Lottie Mae?”

She said nothing and her face showed nothing and she did not look at him but straight ahead. There was nothing strange in that. They were very nearly the same age, and he had known her, more or less, all of his life. She had always been a shy, quiet girl. When she came with her mother to the house to work for his daddy, he could never remember her saying anything.

“I’m just going myself,” he said. “You want a ride?” The place where she lived was almost a mile away. It was late but he was in no hurry to get home to Elfie. She glanced briefly at him and walked away. “No skin off my ass,” he said.

He got into the truck with a bottle of whiskey. He knew the old man would be waiting for it, but he took his time anyway. The house where his daddy lived was old and tilted slightly to the left, with a wide porch running around three sides. It was two stories, with a second floor where nobody ever went, where his daddy stored furniture and old clothes and newspapers—the Atlanta
Constitution
and the Albany
Herald
and the Macon
Telegraph
—all of which the old man subscribed to and which came in the mail a day late and took up his mornings until he began drinking whiskey at noon. Joe Lon could have moved into the big house with his father and his sister, the old man even asked him to, offering to clean out the second floor and let him and Elfie have it, but Joe Lon would be damned and in hell before he would do that, and even though he loved his father, admired him, and could tolerate his sister, he knew that it would never work to try to live in the same house with them.

Among other reasons it wouldn’t work was he liked to beat Elfie occasionally, or didn’t like it, rather he couldn’t help it, and his father would have killed him if he had ever found out he punched Elfie. More than once they had had to tell the old man that Elfie had fallen out of the door of the trailer onto her head when she turned up with two black eyes, or had run into the closet door or closed her hand in the stove oven, which actually once was true but it was because Joe Lon was holding her fingers there with one hand while he slammed the oven with the other. The old man told people everywhere that his daughter-in-law. Elf, was a goddam fine woman, good mother, but she was probably the clumsiest human being God ever made.

The old man was not a good man by anybody’s reckoning; he just didn’t hold with hurting women. He had once castrated a Macon pulpwood Negro who drove bootleg whiskey for him because the Negro had stolen a case off the truck. Another time he and one of his friends had scalped a white man for some reason that nobody ever knew and the old man had not disclosed. He also had probably the best pit bulldogs in all of Georgia, which were the pride of his life and which he loved deeply and which were the best fighting dogs because he treated them with a savage and unrelenting cruelty that even other pit bull owners could not bear to witness or emulate.

Joe Lon drove his pickup down the narrow lane bordered on both sides with the skeletoned limbs of winter-naked pecan trees. The huge house was dark except for the front room where the old man lived and the thin wavering light of his sister’s television in a side room toward the back. Joe Lon didn’t know what time it was but he knew it might be after midnight. He was drunk, but not good and drunk the way he liked to be. The whiskey simply had refused to take hold beyond a certain point. On the seat beside him were two quarts of bonded bourbon. There were no labels on the bottles. There never were. It tasted like Early Times. He thought it probably was, and it was also probably hijacked stuff. He’d gotten it for two dollars a bottle, a whole goddam trailer of it. He hadn’t asked where it came from. He never did.

Joe Lon let himself in and went down the short hall to the room where his daddy sat with his back to the door watching a dog strapped onto an electric inclined treadmill. It was a standard training device for fighting dogs. His daddy was nearly deaf and he did not look up even though Joe Lon slammed the door. His daddy was named Joe Lon too but was called Big Joe, partly to distinguish the father from the son and partly because the old man was nearly seven feet tall. There wasn’t a hair on his head but he had eyebrows that were thick and black and very long.

When Joe Lon came up behind the chair and leaned down and said into Big Joe’s ear: “Here’s the goddam whiskey,” the bald head did not move at all but the eyebrows twitched, seemed actually to turn on his face.

“Bout time,” said Big Joe. “I been sober since sundown.”

“I magine,” said Joe Lon. He had to shout to make himself heard.

He went over and sat in a ragged overstuffed chair. Big Joe broke the seal, raised the bottle, and took a tentative swallow. He brought the bottle down, looked at it, shook it gently, then handed it to his son.

“Git us that pitcher,” said Big Joe, but Joe Lon had already gone to the sideboard, where there was a white crock pitcher beside a wash basin. He brought two short glasses and the pitcher of water. He poured a glass and gave it to his daddy. He had brought a glass for himself but he never did get around to pouring any water in it. He set the glasses on the floor beside the chair and did not look at it again.

“You ought to have a little water with that whiskey,” said Big Joe.

“I been trying to git drunk,” said Joe Lon, his voice flat and disinterested. “It don’t seem to be working though.” They watched the dog on the treadmill. The sound of his breathing, wet and ragged and irregular, filled the room. There was no alternative for the dog but to run even though he had obviously gone as far as he could go, further even, because now and then his front legs collapsed and the treadmill kept turning and the dog’s knees were scraped and ground against the electrical tread until somehow he regained his feet. The front of his legs was raw and bleeding. But the dog made no sound except for the irregular gasping gulps of air he managed to suck in over his lolling tongue. Part of the reason he made no sound was a weighted device strapped onto his lower jaw. It was to strengthen the snapping and chewing muscles and it had been hooked onto the animal’s jaw most of the afternoon so that now the dog could no longer support the weight and his mouth was splayed as though ripped, as though it were a raw and bleeding wound.

“How’s Elf?” said Big Joe.

“She ain’t doing bad,” said Joe Lon.

“She ain’t run in to nothing else has she?”

“Not yet,” Joe Lon said, “but shit you never can tell, she’s apt to fuck herself up any time.”

“She’s a good woman, Elf is,” said Big Joe, “and you a lucky man. You one lucky man and don’t you ever forgit that, Joe Lon.”

“Shit no,” said Joe Lon, “I ain’t gone forgit just how fucking lucky I am.”

“You cuss too much for a boy,” said Big Joe. He passed the bottle. “I never liked that word for cussing. Fucking is no kind of word for a man to use to cuss with.”