A Feast of Snakes

by Harry Crews

  “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.

  He had watched, unable to move, to believe either that she actually meant to do what he knew she meant to do. Putting shit in her hair was something he had never seen her do before. He had seen her do some pretty bad things but not that.

  He got up and backed toward the door, refusing to let himself turn his face from her, saying as he went: “Lord help us all. Sister Beeder, Lord help us all.” He had not called her Sister Beeder since they were children. She was already back in bed watching the snow, listening to the static before he got through the door.

  In the truck, under the pecan trees bare and black in the bright heavy moon, he sat without turning on the motor or lights and let half a bottle of whiskey down his throat. He gagged against the whiskey but he held the bottle to his mouth anyway, feeling his stomach tighten against the warm bourbon. He could not shake the image of his sister easing her befouled head back into the pillow. But gradually it did recede. As he sat there in the dark hurting himself more and more—as much as he could stand—with the whiskey the memory of the whole evening grew unsure and lost all significance whatsoever.

  Later—he wouldn’t remember how much later—he saw his daddy come through the door out onto the porch and come down the steps into the yard. He led Tuffy on a leash, the jagged lightning-bolt scars blacker in the bright moonlight. Big Joe walked slowly, waiting for the dog, whose brutal squared head hung nearly to the ground. Joe Lon watched them limp, the old man and the bloodied dog, across the wide bare yard toward the kennel, where the other pit bulls were growling and barking and snapping at the wire of their individual cages.

  The dim light from the television set still showed in his sister’s room when he made the turn in his pickup truck to drive toward home.

  ***

  It wasn’t even ten o’clock in the morning and the actual hunt was still nearly forty-eight hours away, but there were already at least a thousand people camped in and around Mystic. They had come in an unrelenting, noisy stream starting long before daylight. Some of them ended up in tents, some bedded down in the backs of pickups, some sat in the open doors of vans, and a great many were in campers of one kind or another. Joe Lon’s field was over half full, and spaced neatly along the orderly rows of snake hunters were the white chemical outhouses called Johnny-on-the-spots.

  Probably less than half of the people who had arrived were hunters. The rest were tourists of one kind or another, retirees stunned with boredom, people genuinely curious about snakes but who had never seen a live one outside a cage, young dopers who wondered about saying gentle, inscrutable things to one another about God, Karma, and Hermann Hesse.

  Almost everyone had brought pet snakes to the hunt. Mostly they were constrictors and black snakes and water snakes. They carried the snakes around with them, passing them from hand to hand, comparing them, describing their habits and disclosing their names.

  A surprising number of craftsmen were setting up their wares all over Mystic. Some of the wares were in elaborate booths, pulled in separate trailers, but a lot of things were being sold right off the tailgates of pickup trucks. There were sketches and paintings of snakes, and every imaginable article made from the skin of diamondbacks: cigarette cases, purses, wallets, belts, shoes, and hats. One group of longhairs was featuring—hanging all over their Volkswagen van—various articles of underclothing, plus several well-crafted items that could only be dildoes of different shapes and sizes; all were marked with the unmistakable pattern of the snake. Several of the dildoes had reshaped and formed rattlesnake heads, complete with fangs. The longhairs had been reported earlier to Sheriff Buddy Matlow by several Senior Citizens, and Buddy, who had been through many of these roundups before and consequently knew that everybody had to be given considerable slack, even longhairs—came by and told them to try not to shock the older folk, that this was all good clean fun, well organized and controlled by himself and his staff and, besides, that it was sponsored by the Greater Mystic Chamber of Commerce, made up mostly of farmers, and therefore had to look after its good name.

  Then Buddy bought himself two snake-headed rubbers with diamondback patterns and put them in the glove compartment of his Plymouth patrol car.

  But the most spectacular craftsman of all, the one who had the largest audience watching her work and who commanded the biggest prices for the work she did, was an ancient little lady who sat under a white bonnet in a cane-bottom rocking chair making mosaics out of the individual rattles from the tails of diamondbacks. There were several on display; one of them—the largest—about a yard square was of a buck deer stamping a diamondback to death. It had taken the rattles from one thousand, one hundred and sixty-two snakes to complete and the little lady under the white bonnet who never raised her eyes from the stretched canvas she was working on in front of her was asking three thousand dollars for it.

  Joe Lon Mackey could see the lady from where he sat at the little white Formica table in his double-wide drinking coffee. The crowd around her stood silently in a little semicircle as she worked fastening the rattles to the stretched canvas. She’d been to every roundup as far back as Joe Lon could remember. And she had always had the three-thousand-dollar mosaic with her.

  He suspected she was asking so much because she actually didn’t want to sell it. It was a fantastic thing to see, though, unbelievable really, with the buck deer, his nostrils flared, reared onto his bac
k legs, the razorlike front hooves poised to strike the already cut and mutilated snake on the ground. And because it was so spectacular, Joe Lon supposed some sonofabitch would come by sooner or later dumb enough to pay what she was asking. The world was in short supply of a lot of things but one of them was not dumb sonofabitches with more money than was good for them.

  Joe Lon had gotten up early that morning and gone out, partly to see if Lummy and his brother George were properly placing the chemical toilets and partly—mostly—to get out of the bed and out of the house before he had to face Elfie.

  When he woke up about daylight, the whole sorry business of the night before had risen before his eyes, the memory of his sister flooding back upon him and his daddy limping out behind the house with the battered half-ruined bulldog, and then worse, much worse, how it had been afterward when he had got drunker and drunker, remembering that Berenice was coming home, remembering how it used to be with her, thinking about everything the world had promised him and then snatched away until he was stone drunk on the scalding bourbon and drunk on the honeylegged memory of Berenice.

  He somehow managed to get what he wished was true confused with the facts of his own life. It wasn’t the first time it had ever happened. It was a little quirk his head had of working when he was lost in the sour mist of bourbon whiskey. He had gotten out of his pickup truck in the dark—the moon had gone now, setting behind a black cloud—and gone through the dark, narrow little passageways of the double-wide, stripping his clothes as he went, and fallen finally, savagely, in the bed, not upon his child-ruined wife Elfie but upon the heaving flesh of the University of Georgia’s golden head cheerleader, Berenice, or so he thought in the addled disorientation of his alcohol-splattered brain.

  But of course it had been poor old Elf, caught unawares and sleeping, her sore flapping breasts vulnerable to his hard square hands. She had come awake with a little muffled cry, protesting, her thin arms trying to push him away, but he had her pinned, driving her against the headboard of the bed. It was a God’s wonder he hadn’t broken her neck. And when he woke up the next morning he saw her pale face turned off toward the window, her lips partly open, showing her discolored tongue and teeth, the blue smear of a bruise running up from the corner of her mouth, and he knew as the sorry night came back to him in painfully clear memory that he had called her Berenice again and again while he had taken her through the whole routine of enthusiastic sexual gymnastics he and his old high-school sweetheart used to work upon each other’s bodies when the world was still a place where such things were not only possible but also a great singing joy in his heart.