A Feast of Snakes Read online

  None of them saw the strike; rather, they saw the body of the rat lurch as though struck by some invisible force. It sat for a split second without moving and then leaped straight into the air and landed on its back. The rattlesnake had retreated to the corner, its body again knotted and seemingly coiled about itself with only the dry flat head clear.

  Almost immediately the snake came twisting out of the spot where it had withdrawn and very slowly approached the still rat. It touched the rat’s back, ran its blunt head along the hairy stomach and legs, seemed to be taking the rat’s measure. Finally, the snake opened its mouth, unhinged its lower jaw and, slow and gentle as a lover, seemed to suck the rat’s head in over the trembling, darting tongue. Just as the head disappeared, the door of the store slammed open and a voice bellowed: “I caught you fuckers being cruel to little animals agin!”

  They all turned together to see Buddy Matlow, wearing a cowboy hat and a wooden leg, standing in the doorway. When they looked back at the cage, there was nothing showing of the rat but the tail, long, pink, and hairless, sticking out of the snake’s mouth like an impossible tongue.

  “You degenerate sumbitches,” Buddy Matlow said, watching the thin hairless tail disappear into the snake. “Never could understand how anybody could stand doing things like that to little animals.”

  “Ain’t done nothing yet,” said Joe Lon. “Snake et supper. We just watched.”

  “I ain’t gone report you,” said Buddy Matlow. “I just fed that snake of mine over at the jail not more’n an hour ago. You can git me a tallboy and a glass a that shine.”

  Joe Lon said: “How many times I got to tell you I don’t sell nothing by the glass.”

  “I didn’t think to pay for it,” said Buddy.

  “Makes a lot of noise for a goddam cripple, don’t he,” said Willard Miller. “I didn’t have no more sense than to step on a stick with slopehead shit all over it, damned if I wouldn’t say please when I asked for something.” Willard’s thin mouth was smiling almost shyly over the rim of his beer can, but his dark eyes were flat and hard and without light.

  “You been running over too many grunions and reading about it in the Wire Grass Farmer,” Buddy said. He looked down and casually examined his stump. “One of these days I’m gone have to stick this piece a oak up you ass and examine you liver.”

  Sitting between them, Hard Candy took another pull at the whiskey bottle. She was flushed from the speed they’d eaten and a little lacquer of sweat beaded her upper lip. She was enjoying it all a lot and only wished it was real, wished they would suddenly lunge off the stools and lock up on the bare wooden floor one on one, wished she could smell a little blood. But she knew it wouldn’t come to anything. They might as well have been talking about the weather.

  “You want sompin back here, Willard?” Joe Lon stood in the door of the little room with a beer in one hand and a water glass full of moonshine in the other.

  Willard drained the beer in front of him and set it down. “Me’n and Hard Candy got to go.” He smiled and blew Joe Lon a kiss as he and Hard Candy slid off their stools.

  Joe Lon and Buddy Matlow watched Hard Candy leave. She might as well have been in front of the band with her baton. She was all high knees and elbows, her hard little body jerking rhythmically. When they were gone, Joe Lon brought the beer and the glass to Buddy.

  “You don’t reckon you could put this goddam snake up do you?” Buddy said. “I just soon do my drinking without it.”

  They both looked down at the cage at the place where the rat had stopped in a thick knot about four inches deep in the snake. Joe Lon stood listening to the Corvette go over the gravel and onto the highway in a great roar and squalling of tires, laying two hundred yards of rubber before it took second gear. Only then did Joe Lon take up the cage and put it in the back room. He brought another beer back for himself and sat on a stool across the counter from Buddy Matlow.

  “That boy’s sompin, ain’t he?” Buddy said.

  “Uh huh.”

  They drank in silence for a while, listening to the night tick against the screens.

  “I wish you’d drink and git the hell out of here. Ain’t no niggers gone come up here with you car parked out there.”

  But what he said was reflex. It was what he always said. He wasn’t studying the car with the sheriff’s star on the door or Buddy Matlow. He was thinking about that Corvette, the squalling rubber, squatting with power when you floored it. It had belonged to Berenice before she went off to college. He used to drive it, used to make it sing on all the highways of Lebeau County. He knew where Willard was headed right this moment. He used to go there himself. It was all part of the package, part of being the Boss Snake of all the Mystic Rattlers. Willard was headed for Doctor Sweet’s drug cabinet to which Hard Candy would have a key, just as Berenice had had one. They would get in there and Willard would eat whatever he felt like—a little something to take him up, or maybe bring him down a bit—and she would fill her little pockets full and off they would go over the dark countryside trying to decide what to do with the night.

  That was the only decision there was once upon a time: what to do with the night. But then Berenice had graduated and the doctor had bought her an Austin-Healy and given Hard Candy the Vette and Berenice had gone off to the University of Georgia and Joe Lon had taken over from his daddy dealing whiskey. He tried to turn loose the memory but couldn’t. He looked at Buddy, his cowboy hat pushed back on his head, quietly sipping out of the water glass, his eyes half closed and seeing nothing while Joe Lon saw for no particular reason—except perhaps because of the letter he had left in shreds under the stands—a night before a snake hunt in his senior year when he already knew he was never going to college and that Berenice was, saw himself sad, his heart hurt, leaning against the door of the white Corvette and Berenice inside smiling up at him. They were both wired tight on Dexedrine and the look in her face was a little off-center, a little crazy, as it often was. Many times it was like that when she was straight and had eaten nothing.

  “Let’s go look at the snake pit,” she had said.

  “I don’t care,” he said. He kept thinking he’d never tote the pigskin again, that he was destined to deal nigger whiskey. He dropped into the car and took it up in a single mounting roar to a hundred and twenty, had in fact wrung the needle off the speedometer. But it brought no pleasure. He saw his life too clearly, knew too well where it was going, and all the time Berenice sat on the other side, her crazy face oblivious to the speed, flashing her thighs and humming Dixie a little high and off-key. He had always loved her because she was crazy, didn’t seem to give a damn about anything. Tonight he hated her for precisely those reasons.

  The pit where all the snakes of the hunt would be kept was on the football field of Mystic High School, where it had always been since the hunt began. The Vette came onto the field in a growling power slide. The high rooster tail of sand thrown by the car was bright, glittering under a full moon. The shadows of the two enormous oak trees lay on the edge of the field like two dark lakes. It was in the shadow of one of the trees that they finally stopped, but not before Joe Lon had roared in three tight circles within yards of the trunk of the tree.

  He had been driving about two thirds unwrapped from the dope so he thumbed the top off a fresh bottle of Budweiser taken from a bucket of ice between Berenice’s feet. He was laughing but there was no humor in it. It didn’t even sound good-natured. “I like to run over that goddam tree.”

  “You should have,” she said. “Get us a ramp and jump the thing like Evel what’s-his-fucking-face.”

  He reached across and got another bottle of beer and opened it. “Here, press this to you face. It’ll help you feelings.”

  She took the beer. “Nothing’s gone help my feelings tonight,” she said.

  “I’ll think of something,” he said.

  “I hope so.”

  “Never doubt the Boss Snake,” he said. “I told you never to.”


  She said, “I forgot.”

  “Don’t forget,” he said.

  He opened the door and got out of the car. She got out too and came around to stand beside him. Without speaking, but as if on signal, they walked to the center of the field and stood together looking off toward the school. It was made of red brick with four white columns in front. Across the front, cut into a slab of cement, was the legend: LEBEAU COUNTY CONSOLIDATED HIGH SCHOOL OF MYSTIC, GEORGIA. It was as bright as day in the moonlight and they stood in the field of packed dirt equidistant between the wood-and-wire snake pit on their left and another structure built of fresh-cut raw lumber on their right. The structure on the right was a kind of stage with a painted sign stuck on each of its four sides. All the signs said the same thing: THE RATTLESNAKE QUEEN.

  “Take my dick out,” said Joe Lon. “I have to piss.” Without even looking, but with no fumbling, she reached over with her left hand and unzipped his Levis. She held him while he gave water, a great frothing stream into the moon-colored dirt at their feet.

  “Don’t seem like to me this goddam year will ever be over,” he said.

  She shook him good while he talked and put him back behind the zipper.

  He said: “Seem like I been in this town forever.”

  “It’ll be different,” she said, “at the university. Anyway, I hope it’ll be different for me. I could stand me something different for a while.”

  She was going to the University at Athens in the fall to be the meanest majorette the state of Georgia had ever seen. And they pretended he was going to the University of Alabama to break bones for Bear Bryant, although they both knew he wasn’t going anywhere but to the little store where his daddy kept the back room full of bootleg whiskey.

  “That’s nine months away,” he said. “Anything that long might as well be never.”

  “I’ll miss you,” she said.

  “Uh huh. I magine.”

  “Anybody that’s known a Boss Snake’ll never forget him.” As they talked they had wandered over to the snake pit.

  Sheets of plywood formed the sides of a square about twenty feet long and twenty feet wide. The plywood rose to four feet and then chicken wire had been stretched on top of that. Two feet of earth had been dug out of the bottom of the pit. This was where the snakes would be weighed, marked, and collected during the hunt.

  “I think I love you,” she said. “I think I’ll always love you.”

  He looked straight up toward the bright moon and started turning in slow circles. Finally he stopped and turned his unblinking, slightly drunken gaze on her. “You gone have to do sompin about this conversation. It’s just boring the shit out of me.”

  “We could go to the car and get another beer,” she said in a small sullen voice.

  “We already done that,” he said. “I don’t feel like doing what we already done before.”

  He reached out and picked her up and put her under his massive arm. Her full cheerleader’s legs dangled behind and she arched her back to look up at him. Her face was slack and without expression. He knew she was only mildly interested in what he might do. He was given to picking her up at odd moments and doing something with her.

  He walked around on the other side of the plywood and wire pen. There was a little gate there with two metal hinges and a hook latch. He opened the gate. He held her under his left arm and with his right pointed down into the dirt pit.

  “Look at them snakes,” he said.

  They stared down into hard-packed moon-colored dirt.

  “It’s enough poison in there to kill everthing in Mystic,” she said.

  “To kill everthing in the world,” he said.

  “Good,” she said. “Rattlesnake fangs hanging from all the throats of the world.”

  “From titties,” he said. “Them fanged mouths sucking them titties.”

  “Chewing dicks,” she said.

  “Being dicks,” he said and stepped down into the pit. “Snakes and dicks. Sweet slick dicks and snakes.”

  “Put me down in the snakes,” she said.

  He laid her down on the dirt floor of the pit on her back. She writhed gently looking up at him. His moon-struck hair splayed from his head.

  “Oh God, your snakes are cold.” She touched her belly. “They’re here. They’re filling me here.” She touched her breasts. “And here.” Her eyes were closed now. Her mouth a little way open. “A cold bath of snakes,” she said. “I’m freezing full of snakes. All in my blood. Crawling through my heart.” She opened her eyes and he still stood above her, beautiful and powerful with the moonlight splintering against his back, casting his face in solid shadow. “Lie down here, Joe Lon. Lie down in these snakes.”

  He drew back. “No.” She was a crazy bitch, had always been, and she sometimes scared him. She was always doing crazy shit and saying crazy shit, and sometimes it scared him. Sometimes out in the black dark when she started in on it, he felt something go soft and queasy in his stomach.

  “You scared,” she said. “You scared of these snakes?”

  Joe Lon said: “I ain’t scared of a goddam thing. Don’t matter if it walks or crawls or flies in the air.”

  “Then lie down. I’m cold. I’ll die in these freezing snakes.” He should have kicked her or stepped on her but he didn’t. He slowly sank to his knees and then lowered himself over her. They lay very still for a while. Then he moved and lay beside her on his back.

  “Feel’m?” she said. “Feel them snakes?”

  He made a sound, a kind of neutral grunt.

  “We’re buried to our goddam eyes in the thick good bodies of snakes,” she said. “And you’ll die too. You might as well go on, Joe Lon, go on and be afraid.”

  She was touching him now, with both hands, tentatively, squeezing and pressing, her fingers extended with the tips together, moving over his body like the twin heads of blind snakes, or so it seemed to him, lying there in a cold sweat.

  Her hands stopped and she crawled up over him, deliberately making her body twist and writhe in the supple windings of a snake. She started again touching him. She was moving all over now, her legs, her body, her hands. Then everything quieted, everything seeming to stop at once.

  “I found him,” she whispered. “The Boss Snake of all the snakes.”

  Joe Lon lay on his back, his eyes tightly closed, the skin on his wide face drawn and white. “You goddam right,” he whispered.

  “Look,” she said. “Oh look at him. That sumbitch strike you, you know you struck.”

  He opened his eyes and raised his head and looked down himself to the place where she had unzipped his Levis and his cock stood curved in front of her face. She hissed and he felt her hot breath. Her tongue, black in the shadow of her hair, darted in and out of her mouth.

  He put his head back and said: “Okay.”

  He closed his eyes and thought about the hand job she had given him under the east stands of the practice field when she was in the tenth grade and then the first time he had asked her for a date and they were in his Ford pickup, parked and kissing to the point of exploding there behind the A&W Rootbeer stand in Tifton where they had driven on a Friday night to first see a movie because there was no movie in Mystic and then go for a hamburger they never got because he reached over and dragged her in with him behind the steering wheel and they had started kissing and trembling and going at each other with both hands and it had been the same ever since. All the way through high school they had been at each other as though they were fighting a war.

  Lying there in the snakepit, they both heard the sound of a car motor a long time before they knew it was actually coming onto the football field with them, and they were being hit by the gravel and sand raining through the chicken wire before they knew the car was spinning around and around the place where they lay.

  Joe Lon straightened up and Berenice came up behind him and they saw Buddy Mallow’s patrol car at the same time. Buddy hung out the window grinning, and whooping at the top of his
lungs.

  “Goddammit,” he screamed at them as he one-handed the Plymouth around and around the pit where they sat hunkered, turning to follow him, “goddammit, ain’t life grand!”

  In the car beside him, a woman, small and dark, sat very still and did not turn her head.

  “Crazy bastard’s got another one,” Joe Lon said. But Berenice had already lowered herself upon him again and did not answer.

  “How’s at?”

  “What?” said Joe Lon. When he looked up from his beer, Buddy Matlow was watching him from across the counter.

  “You better go on home, son,” said Buddy Matlow, “you started talking to you beer.”

  “Just thinking out loud,” Joe Lon said.

  “Who was the crazy fucker answering you?” said Buddy.

  Joe Lon shrugged and looked at the ceiling. The night was beginning to get cool. Joe Lon got up and went over to the window and closed it. “You want another beer?”

  “I could drink another one, if it was give to me.”

  Joe Lon brought it out of the back room. Buddy still had half a glass of moonshine. He took a sip and chased it.

  Joe Lon said: “You wouldn’t want to let Lottie Mae go home, would you?”

  “What?”

  “Buddy, I’m too tired and hurt to talk about it.”

  “Don’t talk about it then,” Buddy said. “I don’t know as it’s any of you business.”

  “It bothers the niggers. If it bothers them, it bothers me.”

  “How’s at?”

  “They unload the shitters. They hep me. I told George I’d speak to you.”

  “You real worried about George, are you?”

  “He ain’t the only one in the family. I don’t even know how many connections they got and they all hep me out one way or the other. I said I’d speak to you.”

  “All right, you spoke to me.”

  “You wouldn’t want to let her go home, would you?”