A Feast of Snakes

by Harry Crews

  PART TWO

  Duffy Deeter in an effort of will was thinking of Treblinka. He had already finished with Dachau and Auschwitz. Images of death pumped in his head. Behind his pinched burning eyelids he saw a pile of frozen eyeglasses where they had been torn from the faces of long lines of men, women, and children before they had been led into the gassy showers.

  “Daddy. Please, daddy, come. I love … love … But it hurts.”

  Duffy allowed his eyes to slide open. He permitted himself one glance through the window of his modified Winnebago. Children raced over the dusting landscape with snakes wrapped about their arms. Directly across the road an old man with twists of gray hair screwed into his head waved his hands wildly at two heavily muscled young men who alternately hustled their balls and spat in the dirt.

  Duffy’s gaze remained on the two young men for a long moment and then he clamped his eyes shut again. Oh Jesus Oh God. Think about those showerheads and the wonderful gas spewing out into the children. Think about the stunned and naked mothers and their gassed dying children.

  Duffy felt her writhe beneath him as she whispered: “You’re killing me.”

  Yes, and by God he would. He’d kill. He’d do anything.

  “You … you …” She couldn’t say whatever it was she was trying to say.

  He had her braced against the wall by the bed and he took a steady, resting stroke. He opened his glazing eyes to look through the window again. The old man raised himself from his haunches and walked to the door of his Airstream. He limped. Something was wrong in his hip. He stopped at the door and looked back briefly at the two heavy young men, only one of whom was laughing. A little girl came screaming by with a boy twice her size chasing her with a twisting black snake in his hands.

  Duffy closed his eyes again. Under him, Susan Gender was trying to make him look at her. He knew that trick. She’d show him only the deep pink inside her mouth. Make her tongue stand and work like a snake. So he shut out her voice and her body by slipping the garrot around the neck of a fellow prisoner and stealing his half-eaten potato. The prisoner’s graspy choking breath mixed with Susan Gender’s breath, became her breath. And the prisoner’s starving body entered her thrusting thighs and magnificent ass. He killed her where he rode her, there on the high crest of his passion.

  “I guess you’re too young to remember Pathe News,” he said.

  They were through now. He was putting on a jockstrap. She lay exhausted on the bed. He had made her cry. But her eyes were dry now and she was staring out the window. He knew she was looking at the two boys across the road, that she had her eyes on the high thrust muscle of their young buttocks rolling under their tight Levis. And he did not care at all.

  “Pathe News,” she said, her voice numb with exhaustion.

  He sat on the edge of the bed and began lacing his blue leather Adidas shoes onto his feet. His eyes were still full of dying children and hopeless parents. “Before television. We used to get the news at the neighborhood movie,” he said. “They told us everything. I loved it. One disaster after another. Burning blimps. Collapsing buildings. Ships blowing up.”

  “It must have been real interesting,” she said, getting off the bed. She took an apple from a dish by the window.

  She had had gum in her mouth the whole time and her tongue brought it now wetly into her hand. Her white teeth shattered the apple. Little shards of juice flew brightly from her mouth. He watched her in a kind of ecstasy of loathing. He knew her addiction to soap operas on the afternoon TV. And she not only collected science fiction novels, but she also read them. She said they made her think, which meant she was dumb in the gravest kind of way.

  “Why don’t you go outside,” he said, “where everything is going on.”

  “I don’t like snakes,” she said.

  “You’re in a hell of a place if you don’t like snakes. Why’d you come?”

  “You brought me,” she said, getting another apple. “At least I go with you when you take me. That’s more than Tish’ll do.”

  It was true. Tish, his wife, wouldn’t go anywhere with him. Tish wouldn’t go across the street with him if she could help it. Susan Gender, though, would go anywhere with him in his modified Winnebago because she was bored witless by her studies at the University of Florida, where she held a Woodrow Wilson Fellowship in the philosophy department. Even so, Duffy thought only something very dumb could eat apples like that. Only the most brutal kind of ignorance could talk the way she did. Duffy couldn’t prove it. He just knew it.

  “Where you going?”

  “A workout,” he said.

  “Haven’t you had enough workout?”

  He grinned at her from the door, but there was no humor in it. “I never get enough of anything,” he said.

  When he went through the door, he and Willard Miller and Joe Lon Mackey came upon one another the way three male dogs might come upon one another at a favorite tree. The recognition was instant and profound. Their eyes met only for a moment, but they did not slide past in a casual glance. Their gazes locked and held for a tense, nearly hostile instant, before rather deliberately they turned their backs on one another.

  “What’s into that little bowed-up fucker?” said Willard Miller.

  “I ain’t studying him.”

  “We both know what you studying,” said Willard.

  “I think we already talked that to death.”

  Duffy Deeter came down the steps of his Winnebago with a metal prone press bench in his hands. He went out and set the bench in the sun. He went back into the camper and came out with an Olympic bar and set it on the extended arms of the prone press bench. Joe Lon and Willard watched him casually, without interrupting their conversation about snake hunting and pussy and violence.

  Duffy Deeter didn’t come back out of the Winnebago right away. Rather, two five-pound plates came flying out and landed in the dirt. Then two ten-pound plates. Then a set of twenty-fives. When the second set of fifty-pounders hit the dirt Willard and Joe Lon hustled their balls, spat, and scowled at each other.

  Duffy Deeter came strolling out of the Winnebago wearing only a pair of elastic workout shorts that clung to his rocklike buttocks and swelling thighs like a second skin. Earlier when he’d carried the bar out he’d had on a light cotton sweatshirt and pants and looked like what he was: five-six and about a hundred and fifty-five pounds. Now he looked like he’d said SHAZAM inside the Winnebago, setting off an explosion in his little body so that it was not little any more but roped and strung with incredible muscle.

  It was obvious he had warmed up inside. Sweat on his skin shined like oil. He quickly loaded the bar. Across the dusty aisle Joe Lon and Willard watched him. Duffy Deeter regarded the bar, stared at it as though he expected it to maybe attack him. He breathed four quick times, making his rib cage swell like a bellows. On the fourth deep breath he dropped onto his back on the bench, reached up and took the loaded bar out of the cradle, and did ten easy presses, after which he replaced the bar and popped up on his feet. He came up glowering at Joe Lon and Willard. He held them in his feisty little stare.

  They ambled across the road toward Duffy Deeter, Willard kicking at little clumps of dirt. He had on his Puma sprinter’s shoes this morning. He was closing in on Joe Lon’s two-twenty state record and was expected to break it before he graduated. The only record of Joe Lon’s he actually owned, although everybody thought he would own them all before the season was over, was Times Carrying The Ball in a single game. Joe Lon’s old record had been forty-two. Willard had raised that to forty-five. He had carried the ball every play of the game except three. He told Coach Tump he wanted the record and Coach Tump let him go for it. He took it the first time he had the chance and the Mystic Rattlers still won the game by a margin of twenty-one zip.

  Duffy was standing beside the bench breathing when he looked up and pretended to see them for the first time, which both of them accepted as pretense and took no exception to. They would have done the same
thing.

  “Hey,” said Duffy Deeter, grinning, “how you doing?”

  Joe Lon smiled back, nodded. Willard said, “We gone be all right.”

  Duffy Deeter loved young jocks like these who thought they were strong. They always looked as though they had an aluminum cup in their pants and a helmet on their heads. Their universal contempt for anything weaker than they were showed in their faces as a kind of stunned bemusement. And most of them talked as though they had just tackled the goal post with their heads.

  “Gittin a little workout?” said Joe Lon.

  “Trying to,” said Duffy Deeter. “Going to a little iron always makes me feel better.”

  “Do seem to,” said Willard, smiling and winking at Joe Lon, taking no pains to hide the wink from Duffy.

  Duffy said: “Jesus, I hate to come off from home like this and have to work out alone.” He shook his head. “Hate that.”

  Willard nodded at the bar. “What you pushing on there anyhow?”

  “Two-ten,” said Duffy.

  Whatever the rush of blood meant that Willard had felt when he first saw Duffy Deeter and the Olympic bar had subsided and he was just about to walk away when the door to the Winnebago opened and a long-legged, blackhaired cream-colored piece of ass stood there eating an apple in what may have been the shortest dress Willard Miller had ever seen. Raised the way she was in the doorway, Willard and Joe Lon looked dead into the bulging eye of her pussy. She was wearing red panties.

  Joe Lon kept looking at her and said: “I wouldn’t mind me a little iron this morning myself.”

  Willard Miller’s eyes never wavered either when he said: “Ain’t nothing like iron in the morning.”

  “You’re more than welcome to sit in here for a few sets,” said Duffy. He enjoyed them looking at the girl. He liked them to want her. They wanted her, but by God Duffy Deeter had her.

  “It’s white of you to say so,” Willard said.

  “That’s Susan Gender up there in the door. My name’s Deeter. Duffy Deeter. We came up from Gainesville, Florida.”

  Both their heads swung slowly to see him grinning at them. They grinned back.

  “I’m a graduate student at the University of Florida,” said Susan Gender.

  Joe Lon thought: Is everbody in college but me? How the hell did I get left out here taking care of chemical shitters and dealing nigger whiskey?

  Joe Lon and Willard slipped out of their shirts. Willard flipped over and walked around in the dirt on his hands. Joe Lon took the bottle of whiskey out of his back pocket, set it carefully on the step of the Winnebago, checking out Susan Gender’s red pants again as he did. Then he went into a steady handstand and did six dips, his nose just short of the dirt each time he went down. They both came off their hands and looked at Duffy.

  “I’m impressed,” said Duffy, shortly. “What the hell are you, gymnasts?”

  “Drunks,” said Joe Lon picking up the bottle.

  “I’ve been known to take a drink myself,” said Duffy.

  Joe Lon held out the bottle toward him.

  “I don’t usually drink when I’m working out,” said Duffy.

  “Why not?” said Willard, taking the bottle out of Joe Lon’s hand. “How come you don’t drink when you working out?”

  “I didn’t say I didn’t. I said I didn’t usually.”

  A man came running by with a two-foot black snake, trying to stuff it down the blouse of a screaming woman.

  “Nothing much usual about today,” said Willard, offering him the bottle again.

  “Not a goddam thing that I can see,” said Duffy, taking it. He took a long pull at’ it while he watched Joe Lon do the first set of warm-up presses on the bench. They talked and warmed up, casually adding weight between sets.

  A little man came around the corner just as Duffy was getting off the bench. His hair was gray and he was color-coordinated in brown plaid slacks, a beige Banlon shirt with crossed golf clubs over the heart, and a ventilated golfing cap. A paunch, round and mobile as a ball, rode under his belt. He stopped and said almost shyly: “I’ve been looking everywhere for you.”

  “You’ve been looking for me?” said Duffy Deeter.

  The little man smiled and looked just over their heads at the distant horizon. “Well, you’re the only one I know here and …”

  Joe Lon came over and laid his big square hand on the back of the little man’s neck and offered him the whiskey bottle. “Why don’t you have a drink and git out of the way? You fucking up the workout.”

  “I’m sorry. I didn’t know …”

  “It’s all right,” said Willard. “Now you know.” He turned a short hard glance toward Joe Lon and then back to the little man. “Say, you ain’t a salesman are you? A traveling salesman? You look like you might be one to me.”

  Joe Lon closed his hand on the neck he was holding. Closed in hard. “What?” he said. “You cain’t be a fucking salesman. It ain’t allowed.”

  They were both leaning in on him now, one on each side. The workout, the sweat, the whiskey, and the sight of Susan Gender’s red underwear had made them feel good. They were playing. But the little man didn’t know that. They looked as though they were set to go crazy mean.

  “What you saying?” the little man cried, sucking desperately at the spit spinning between his lips. He stared wildly at Duffy Deeter. “Tell’m who I am. Tell’m I’m Enrique Gomez.” He glanced up at Willard, who regarded him with a kind of objective, passionless malevolency. “My friends call me Poncy. Poncy!”

  Willard Miller looked at Joe Lon. “What kind of name is Eniquer Gomez?”

  Joe Lon said: “It ain’t our kind of people, is it?”

  Duffy Deeter was smiling. Up in the door, Susan Gender was smiling. Willard and Joe Lon each had one of Poncy’s arms. They were even smiling now, but to Poncy their smiles looked terrible.

  Poncy said: “My friends call me Poncy. Honest to God they really do call me Poncy.”

  Duffy Deeter said: “He told us that on the road, last night.”

  “That’s what he told us,” said Susan Gender. “We met’tn at the Magnolia Truck and Rest Stop coming into town and that’s what he told us.”

  Joe Lon seemed to grow hot, to burn all along his veins. He looked at Willard with genuine puzzlement. “I’m damned if I know what to do about this.”

  Duffy Deeter sat down on the bench, smiling, gazing with great fondness upon the bulging mound of Susan Gender’s blender, as he called it in moments when he felt good. Listening to these country boys playing with the old man pleased him. It amused.

  They kept Poncy lifted on his toes while he frantically explained that he was born in Cuba, brought to Tampa at the age of five, and educated at the University of Florida. Here he started an addled singing of the University of Florida’s Alma Mater, with Susan Gender screaming in the background that he fucking-A-well had the words right. That was it. He stopped singing and was rapidly talking about his life’s work in bananas when Hard Candy Sweet appeared between two tents across the road.

  She came straight to them and. said, “What you two assholes doing to this little sapsucker?”

  “We was gone kill him,” said Willard, smiling. “But I think we’ll just leave him alone and let him bore his goddam self to death.”

  They let him down on his heels. Joe Lon straightened Poncy’s shirt, smoothed his collar. Then he raised Poncy’s chin with the end of his little finger and looked directly into Poncy’s eyes. “But you ain’t no traveling salesman, are you?”

  “No. No sir! Retired. I’m re …”

  “You didn’t retire from being no salesman neither, did you?”

  That was precisely what Poncy’s specialty had been. And he had risen to Director of Sales for all of bananas before he was through.

  But he saw that was not the right answer. “Engineering,” said Poncy. “I was an engineer.”

  Joe Lon gave him a thin whiskey smile. “Got a uncle that was a railroad man.”

&nb
sp; Willard had introduced Hard Candy to Susan Gender and it turned out Susan had been an undergraduate head majorette herself back at Auburn University in Alabama and they went down and lined up hip to hip on the grass at the end of the trailer working on a little routine.

  “Now after the first kickout, you spin and do a split,” said Hard Candy Sweet. Her little eyes shined. “Can you still split?”

  “Lord yes, honey,” said Susan Gender. “I’m still just limber as a dishrag.”

  Willard was on his back on the bench pumping two hundred and fifty pounds. Poncy was whispering, “Are they crazy, or what?”

  Duffy didn’t answer right away; he only looked at Poncy. Finally he said: “You better get over there out of the way.” Joe Lon and Willard slid a ten-pound plate on each end of the Olympic bar.

  “You set,” said Joe Lon.

  Poncy walked over and did not so much sit as collapse onto a little grassy bank of dirt.

  The girls came high-kicking by and Susan Gender sang: “We’re going inside.” She stopped in the door and called: “You want anything, Duffy?”

  Duffy, who was in the middle of a press, did not answer, but Joe Lon Mackey, beginning to buzz from the whiskey, feeling better than ever in the old familiar demand of muscle and sweat, said: “Got any bourbon whiskey up there in that trailer?”

  Susan Gender gave a little kick and laid the full weight of her smile and single red eye upon him. “Duffy Deeter wouldn’t go anywhere without it.”

  “You might just bring us out a bottle,” Joe Lon said.

  “If you got any of them cold beers in there,” said Willard Miller, “bring a few. Damned if that straight corn ain’t beginning to burn my breakfast.”

  “Pussy,” said Joe Lon.

  “You better hope so,” Willard said. “Slip on that other ten.”

  They were doing only three repetitions on the bench now, and they were no longer adding weight casually but slamming it on with little grunts of challenge and pleasure.

  When they went through the door of the Winnebago, Hard Candy looked up and said: “Hey, those are great trophies.”