A Feast of Snakes Read online

  1976

  This book is for Johnny Feiber: in good times and bad

  I’ve never raised a glass with a better friend

  If I could only live at a pitch that is near madness

  When everything is as it was in my childhood

  Violent, vivid, and of infinite possibility:

  That the sun and moon broke over my head.

  Richard Eberhart

  PART ONE

  PART TWO

  PART ONE

  She felt the snake between her breasts, felt him there, and loved him there, coiled, the deep tumescent S held rigid, ready to strike. She loved the way the snake looked sewn onto her V-neck letter sweater, his hard diamondback pattern shining in the sun. It was unseasonably hot, almost sixty degrees, for early November in Mystic, Georgia, and she could smell the light musk of her own sweat. She liked the sweat, liked the way it felt, slick as oil, in all the joints of her body, her bones, in the firm sliding muscles, tensed and locked now, ready to spring—to strike—when the band behind her fired up the school song: “Fight On Deadly Rattlers of Old Mystic High.”

  She felt a single drop of sweat slip from the small of her back, hang for an instant, and then slide into the mellow groove between the flexed jaws of her ass. When she felt the sweat touch her there, she automatically cut her eyes to see if she could pick out Willard Miller, the Boss Snake of all the Mystic Rattlers, her boss Snake, pick him out from the other helmeted and white-suited boys scrimmaging on the other side of the track. When they made contact, their soft, almost gentle grunts came to her across the green practice field.

  She tried to distinguish the sound of him from the sound of the others, and she thought she could, thought how amazingly the sound was like the ragged snorts he made into her ear when he had her bent brutally back over the hood of her Vette. There was hardly any difference at all in the noise he made when he scored on the field or scored on her. In whatever he did, he was always noisy and violent and wet, tending as he did to slobber a little.

  She saw the band director raise his baton and she tensed, rolled her weight forward to the balls of her feet, and then the music was crashing around her, the tubas pumping, the drums rattling, and she was strutting like it was the end of the world. From the sides of the field came the dry, awesome rattle of the diamondback. Some of the fans had come out and they had brought their gourds with them. The gourds were as big as cantaloupes, shaped like crooked-neck squash, and full of dried seed so that when they were shaken they vibrated the air with the genuine sound of a snake. During a game, the home stands of the Mystic Rattlers put everybody’s hair on end. You could hear those dried gourd seeds two miles away, buzzing like the biggest snake den God ever imagined. During football season, nobody in Mystic was very far from his gourd. Sometimes you could see people carrying them around with them in town, down at the grocery store, or inside Simpkin’s, the only dry goods store in Mystic.

  The band was strung out now in the shape of a snake. The band members used the yard markers to position themselves, double timing in place, drawing their knees high and waving their instruments, so that the entire snake vibrated in the sun. The snare drums were under one goal post, rattling for all they were worth and she was under the other goal post, standing in the snake’s mouth, her arms rigid as fangs. She was at one with the music. She did not have to think to perform. Of all the majorettes—and there were five others—she marched in place with the highest knees, the biggest smile, the finest skin, the best teeth. She was a natural, and as a natural her one flaw—if she had one—was that her mind tended to wander. She didn’t have to think, didn’t have to concentrate like the other girls to get her moves right. Consequently she sometimes got bored with the drills and her mind wandered. Even now as she pranced in place, her back arched, her pelvis thrust forward, she was winking at Joe Lon Mackey where he stood under the end zone bleachers.

  That was where he usually stood when he watched them practice and she was not surprised to see him there, glad rather, because it gave her something to think about. He wasn’t twenty feet from her, standing in the shadows, a burlap sack in one hand and a brown paper sipping sack in the other. From time to time he raised the sipping sack to his mouth. He’d winked at her when she first stopped under the goal post. She’d winked back. Turned her smile on him. She’d always liked him. Hell, everybody had always liked Joe Lon. But she didn’t really know him that well. Her sister, who was going to school at the University of Georgia in Athens, her sister, Berenice, knew him that well.

  Her sister and Joe Lon had been a number in Mystic, Georgia, in all of Lebeau County for that matter, and Joe Lon could have been going to the University of Georgia in Athens or anywhere else in this country he wanted to except it turned out Joe Lon was not a good student. That’s the way they all put it there in Mystic: Joe Lon Mackey is not a good student. But it was worse than that and they all knew it. It had never been established exactly if Joe Lon could read. Most of the teachers at Mystic High who had been privileged to have him in their classrooms thought he probably couldn’t. But they liked him anyway, even loved him, loved tall, blond, high school All-American Joe Lon Mackey whose exceptional quietness off the playing field everybody chose to call courtesy. He had the name of being the most courteous boy in all of Lebeau County, although it was commonly known that he had done several pretty bad things, one of which was taking a traveling salesman out to July Creek and drowning him while nearly the entire first string watched from high up on the bank where they were sipping beer.

  She missed the band director’s whistle signaling that the snake was about to strike and consequently the five other girls making up the snake’s head almost knocked her over. She’d been standing, her arms positioned as fangs, winking at Joe Lon where he raised his sack in the shadows and wondering if Berenice would come home for the roundup, when the girl right behind her, highstepping, hit her in the kidney with a knee and almost knocked her down. She caught herself just in time and hissed over her shoulder: “You want you ass kicked, do you?”

  The girl said something back to her but it was lost in the pumping tubas. Under the stands Joe Lon Mackey took the last pull from a Jim Beam half pint and dropped the paper sack with the bottle in it into the weeds. He took out two pieces of Dentyne chewing gum and put them into his mouth. Then he lit a cigarette. He had been watching Candy— called Hard Candy by nearly everybody but her parents, Dr. and Mrs. Sweet—because she reminded him of Berenice and all the things that might have come true for him but had not. Two years ago Berenice had been a senior and head majorette and he, Joe Lon, had been Boss Rattler.

  It was said that Joe Lon, on any given day of his senior year of high school, could have run through the best college defensive line in the country. But he had not. He had never set foot on a single college football field even though he had been invited to visit more than fifty colleges and universities. But that was all right. He’d had his. That’s what he told himself ten times a day: That’s all right. By God, I had mine.

  He reached into the back pocket of his Levis and pulled out a sheet of blue paper. It was almost worn through in the creases where it was folded. He shook it open and held it up to the light. It said: “I will see you at rattlesnake time. Love Berenice.” There were some X’s under the name. The letter had come to Joe Lon at the store three days ago. It had taken him most of the afternoon to be sure of the words and once he was sure of them, they had given him no pleasure. He had thought he was through with all that, had made his peace. He folded the letter and put it back in his pocket. But on the way to his pickup he took the letter out again and, using his teeth and his free hand, he carefully tore it into very small pieces and left them scattered behind him in the gloomy aisle underneath the s
tands.

  He drove over to the little road that went by the practice field and watched Willard Miller run the ball. They were running him against the grunions, the smaller, second-string boys who came out for football for God knows what reason since they almost never got into a game and could only offer up their bodies as tackling dummies for the bigger, stronger boys. He watched Willard Miller fire three straight lines up the middle. It was important to run him against grunions now and then. It gave him a chance to practice his moves without running the risk of getting injured. It also gave him great opportunities to run over people and step on them, mash their heads and their hands, kick their ribs good.

  Joe Lon felt his own thigh muscles tick, as he watched Willard fake a grunion out of his shoes and then, after he had the boy entirely turned around and beaten, run directly over him for no reason at all. Well, what the hell, all things had to end, both good and bad. There were other things in this world besides getting to step on somebody. The main thing was to hold on and not let it bother you. Joe Lon turned on his lights and drove off into the early November dusk.

  He had been drinking most of the day, but he didn’t feel drunk. He drove out past the empty flag pole on the post office and past the jail, where he saw Buddy Matlow’s supercharged Plymouth with the big sheriff’s star painted on the door parked under a leafless Chinaberry tree, and on through town, where several people waved to him. He didn’t wave back. Finally, two people shook their gourds at him though and he did raise his hand and smile but he only half saw them. He was preoccupied by the thought of going home to Elfie and the babies, that trailer where he lived in a constant state of suffocating anger.

  He had the trailer just outside of town on the edge of a ten-acre field he’d bought and turned into a combination trailer park and campground. He drove slowly down the narrow dirt road leading to it and passed finally under a big banner that he himself had strung from two tall telephone poles he had bought secondhand from the REA. The banner was neatly printed in letters about two feet high: WELCOME TO MYSTIC GEORGIA’S ANNUAL RATTLESNAKE ROUNDUP.

  The lights were on in his trailer, a double-wide with a concrete patio, and he could see the shadow of his wife Elfie moving behind the window in the kitchen. He parked the truck, took the burlap sack from the back, and walked out to a little fenced-in pen that had a locked gate on it. He took out a key and opened it. In the back of the pen were several metal barrels. The tops of the barrels were covered with fine-mesh chicken wire. He kicked two of the barrels and immediately the little enclosure was filled with the dry constant rattle of diamondbacks. He took a stick with a wire hook on the end of it from the corner of the pen, set the burlap sack down, and waited.

  The mouth of the sack moved and the blunt head of a rattlesnake appeared. It seemed to grin and waved its forked tongue testing, tasting the air. There was an undulation and another foot of snake, perhaps four inches thick, appeared behind the head. Joe Lon moved quickly and surely and the snake was twisting slowly on the end of the hooked stick.

  “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 har
dly 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.