A Feast of Snakes (6 page)

Joe Lon didn’t answer and they watched the dog, which had fallen, struggle back up from his battered knees again. Since he had been in the room the steady insistent sound of the television had been coming through the wall. Laughter, sudden and joyous, burst in and among the dog’s breathing. His sister, Beatriz Dargan Mackey but called Beeder by anybody who had a chance to call her anything which was not often because she stayed pretty close to the Muntz, had on Johnny Carson. Johnny’s sly badgering voice mixed nicely with the pit bull’s bloody breathing because the dog had started hemorrhaging from the mouth now and it smoothed out the ragged edges of sound until it almost sounded like someone with a pleasant voice humming a sweet song a little off-key.

The old man whispered softly toward the dog now and Happed his batlike eyebrows: “Take it, you mean sumbitch. Do it! Work!” He crooned it in a little sing-song voice, the name words over and over again.

“How much longer you gone leave Tuff on the wheel?” asked Joe Lon.

“I don’t know, and Tuff don’t neither,” said Big Joe. “But we’ll both know when we git there.” The old man shifted, seemed to squirm in the chair where he sat. “Listen, I’m sorry I was so hateful on the telephone when I called you about the whiskey tonight.”

Joe Lon didn’t answer. The whiskey was beginning to work. He was going to be able to get drunk and the knowledge lifted his heart. Suddenly, he wanted everybody to feel good, to get a break. Even the dog.

“Listen,” said Joe Lon. “I think Tuff is taking a killing on that wheel.”

The old man who had been crooning to the dog again stopped and said: “No, he ain’t. He ain’t taken a killing yet.”

Tuff had survived four fights. He had long lightning-bolt scars, much darker than his brindle color, running back across his shoulders and back. One ear was split deeply and both ears had been chewed nubby. His broad forehead was a mass of grayish, welty scar tissue and his left eye, the one he was blind in, had no color demarcation in its solid milky surface. Tuffy was training for his fifth fight. They’d all been against the best stock in the South, and Big Joe had decided if he won to retire him to stud and a place of privilege in the kennel.

“Lummy and them git them bleacher seats fixed up at the pit?”

“I walked out there when I got up this morning,” said Big Joe. “Weren’t up then.”

“I’ll speak to George.”

“Leave’m alone,” said Big Joe. “I told him to do it. He said he’d do it. They’ll be there when we need’m.”

“I hope so.”

“George and Lummy’s puttin up them seats before you was born.”

“You told me.”

“Give me that whiskey bottle. You know why I git hateful, don’t you?”

“Yeah, I know.”

“If you had to listen to that goddam TeeVee going day in and day out, you’d be hateful too.” Big Joe lifted the whiskey bottle to the light. It was a little more than half empty. “You didn’t bring but one of these?”

“You drink too much. A man your age ought not drink like you do.”

“A man my age ain’t got a hell of a lot else to do.”

“You got the dogs.”

“Yeah, I got the dogs. And besides the dogs I got quiz shows and game shows and murder shows and funny shows and shit shows eighteen hours a day coming through ever wall in the house. I wish to God I could go the rest of the way deaf before she runs me the rest of the way crazy with the Muntz.”

Joe Lon belched, and felt better than he’d felt in days. He stood up and tested his legs. “Well,” he said, “it’s cheaper’n a hospital.”

“Yeah,” said Big Joe, “it’s that. But after you said that, it ain’t nothing else to say.” He was no longer passing the bottle. Now that it was half gone, he had put the cap back on it and put it under his chair. “I sometime think about seeing one more time if I cain’t git the state to take her.”

Joe Lon didn’t like to even let himself think about his sister, but he didn’t want her in a goddam state insane asylum either. “You’d feel funny going to a fight and ever-body knowing Big Joe Mackey’s given his only daughter up to the fucking state.”

The old man waved his big hand and did not look at his son. “I ain’t done it yet, have I? And God knows I been tried. I been tried severely and I ain’t been found wanting.” 

“Well, don’t feel too goddam good about it, it ain’t over yet. You still got time to ruin everthing.” His mood had shifted to something sour and mean, and he had felt it shift, like a load on a truck might shift, suddenly and with great force. He had always been given to such shifts in mood and temper but they had become more and more frequent and seemingly without cause the last year or so.

Big Joe said: “You started to church, you’d stop so much of that heavy cussing. And particular you’d stop using that word to cuss with. It ain’t a fittin word for a man to use.”

“I guess,” said Joe Lon. His daddy was a deacon in The Church of Jesus Christ With Signs Following and was forever trying to get Joe Lon to start going. “I got to git on home. Maybe I’ll see you tomorrow.”

“If you don’t, be sure and send the nigger over with something to drink.”

“All right.”

“You git them shitters?”

“I ain’t seen’m,” said Joe Lon, “but I been told they over by the grounds.”

“Good, good. Make all that shit a lot easier to handle.”

Joe Lon went through the door into the hall. He had had no intention of going in to see his sister, but once in the hall he turned to look in the direction of her room, where the thin light showed under the door. He felt a rush of pity at his heart for Beeder, who almost never saw anybody but the cook, who almost never left her damp room that smelled sweetly of mildewed sheets, and who would almost certainly end up in some bare white place behind a locked door with her own shit smeared over her face. He leaned back against the wall and closed his eyes and felt the hot start of tears and at the same time saw clearly his sister again as she had been in the tenth grade when he had been a stud junior running back, how pretty she had been behind the yellow pompoms cheering for him and the team, doing complicated little maneuvers in the bright sun with the other girls, and even though he never actually decided to do it he was opening the door to her room where the familiar awful smell washed warmly over his face and he saw her propped in bed with the covers pulled up under her chin so that her shadowed face looked empty of eyes in the dim inconstant light from the television set.

He stopped at the foot of the bed. She cut her eyes up at him briefly and then looked back at the television, where Johnny and his guests were in convulsions.

“How you feeling, Beeder?” he said.

“He killed Tuffy yet?” she said, not looking at him.

“He ain’t gone kill Tuffy.”

“I wish to God he would. I know Tuffy wishes to God he would.”

“But he won’t.”

“No,” she said, “he won’t kill us. If he’d just kill us all … But that’s more than anybody can ask for, I guess.” She pulled the blankets down from her chin. Her face was stark white and without expression in the light. “But you cain’t ask for death. Anything else, maybe. But not death. You’d think it’d be just the other way round, wouldn’t you? Joe Lon,
wouldn’t you
?’

“I reckon,” he said.

“How was the game?” she said.

“We won,” he said.

“I know you won,” she said. “I didn’t ask for that.
How
did you win?”

“We ran at them, Beeder. We stuck it down their throat.”

She turned her face away from him so that half her thin mouth was buried in the yellowing pillow. “That hurts. God, it hurts, that everthing is eating everthing else.”

He sat on the edge of the bed and watched the Muntz. There was a Mexican comic on now, explaining how much fun it had been to grow up in a ghetto in Los Angeles. He made starving, and rats, and broken plaster, and getting beat on the head by cops just funny as shit. The audience was falling out of their seats. Johnny was wiping tears of laughter out of his eyes.

“They’re out there now, you know, eating each other.”

“I magine,” he said without looking at her.

On the other side of the wall now a sound had started like the coughing of a very old, very sick man. They both knew that it was Tuffy and that it was not a cough at all but, rather, all that was left of his bark. He was exhausted and bleeding and having the life scraped out of him by the electric treadmill and it was the best bark he had left.

He turned from the television and looked at her. “Beeder,” he said, “what … what is it that … what do you think?”

“Think,” she said. “Think?”

“I mean, well, goddammit, Beeder, they ain’t gone let you stay in here with the fucking Muntz for the rest of you life. Is that what you think, that they’re gone let you stay in here,” he pointed to the television, “watching that jack-off?”

“I’m not hurting nobody,” she said. And then, her eyes going darker, her lips paler: “They gone make me leave, are they?”

“Christ almighty!” he said. He wished to hell he had the bottle of whiskey out of the truck. She watched him now instead of the television set, but her eyes were unsteady on him and kept sliding around the room as though she was looking for something she couldn’t find. Ever since she’d started acting this way—ever since she’d gone nuts—Joe Lon had had the feeling that if he just jerked her up by the shirtfront and demanded that she act normal she would. He had in fact done it, more than once, usually when he was drunk or drinking, saying: “Goddammit, Beeder, you better act normal. Come on, quit playing around and be right.” But it had not helped. He had never been able to shake the feeling though that if he caught her off guard and said just the right thing in just the right way, he would save her. He had the impulse to do it now. But instead he raised his eyes to the shelves behind her bed where all his trophies were. This had been his room once but she had taken it over when she went nuts. She had a room just like it across the hall and he had never known nor could she say why she had moved in here. He was already married to Elfie by then so it didn’t really matter. Except it did. He seldom let himself think about it but he didn’t like her in his goddam room, nuts or not, even though he no longer used or wanted the room. Even so, in every way that made any sense the room did not even belong to him anyway.

Maybe it was because of the trophies, the signed game balls that had been bronzed and mounted, the High School Back of the Year award for all of the state of Georgia, the certificate for playing in the High School All-American Game in Dallas, Texas, and two whole shelves of trophies and certificates from track. As a stranger might have, he watched them now above his sister’s nearly covered face with only the dark hair and frightened eyes showing. They seemed, those bronzed images of muscled young men caught in straining, static motion, they seemed in no way to have anything to do with him, nor ever to have had anything to do with him.

They seemed in fact to have been an accident. Like his sister’s madness. It had just happened. Nobody knew why or apparently would ever know. He was stronger and faster and meaner than other boys his age and for that he had been rewarded. He had even suspected that he was smarter, too. For whatever reason, though, the idea of
studying
, of sitting down and deliberately committing facts and relationships to memory was deeply repugnant to him. And always had been. Unless it had to do with violence. He liked violence. He liked blood and bruises, even when they were his own.

He always had his assignments when he went on the field. With no effort at all, he would memorize and run a dozen complicated pass patterns. And he not only knew his own assignment but he knew those of his teammates too. He learned not just the fundamentals of football but also the most delicate nuances, so that he was a vicious blocker, and ran probably the most awesome interference that his coach, Tump Walker, had ever seen. It had all been terribly satisfying while it had been going on, but now it lived in his memory like a dream. It had no significance and sometimes inexplicably he wished it had never happened.

He sighed and dropped his eyes to Beeder’s face. She was quietly and contentedly watching a picture of the American flag while a chorus of voices sang the National Anthem. Then, as he looked at her, the flag went off and a man said that concluded broadcast activities for the day and a screen of snow and static came on and Beeder watched the snow and listened to the static as though it had been just the most interesting show in the world. He didn’t know for sure, but he thought she sometimes watched the snow and static all night, right into the next morning when the Farm Report came on at six o’clock and then watched that. If he could believe his father she sometimes went on binges of television that lasted for days without stopping. “Just like a goddam drunk going on a spree,” Big Joe would say.

“Beeder, when’s the last time you been out of this room?”

She didn’t answer, but she did momentarily look away from the television.

“When’s the last time you bathed youself?” Now she did not look at him. “It stinks in here. You know it stinks in here?”

She had a chamber pot under her bed that she sat on instead of going to the bathroom down the hall and the cook was supposed to empty it when she came in the morning and again before she left at night. Sometimes she did. But sometimes she didn’t. Joe Lon wondered if it was full now, and although it was something he had never done before, he bent and reached under the bed from where he sat and pulled it out. He knew the pot was not empty before he ever looked at it. It was full of water and on the surface floated three dark turds.

He felt like howling. When he looked up she was watching him. Her mouth held a shy smile. “Beeder,” he said in a pleading voice, “Beeder, you got to do something about …”

But he stopped because she was sitting up in her bed, pushing the covers back. She was wearing a dingy gown made of cotton. Her bones were insistent under the thin fabric and seemed as brittle as a bird’s. She moved out from under the covers and across the bed until she was sitting beside him.

“I would kill it if I could,” she said, and reached down and lifted a piece of shit and put it in her hair.