A Feast of Snakes

by Harry Crews

  There were trophies mounted along three walls, bracketed and gleaming on specially constructed shelves.

  “You oughta see them two guys’ football trophies out there. Knock you eyes out. They’re stars, you know.”

  “Duff said he wouldn’t ever have anything to do with a team sport. He always said somebody else could just have the team sports.”

  Although Hard Candy knew there were trophies for other sports—didn’t Willard have a shelf full from track?—nobody she knew thought a trophy was a real trophy unless it was from football.

  “What are all them from?” said Hard Candy.

  “Karate mostly. Some from handball. Duff was the state singles champion in handball for four years. That right there is something the ABA, you know, the American Bar Association, gave him for coming in fifteenth in the Boston Marathon.”

  Hard Candy could only blink at the trophies. A lawyer that played handball? Willard was apt to kill him and eat him.

  Susan Gender smiled at her. “I know what you’re thinking. That’s what I thought at first. But don’t be fooled, that little bastard out there is dangerous.”

  Poncy came bursting through the door, his face ash-gray under his Cuban color. “They said I better get the whiskey and beer,” he said rapidly. “They said I better.”

  “Jesus,” said Susan, “I forgot.”

  She got the bottle out of a cabinet and the six-pack of tallboys out of the refrigerator. Poncy rushed outside with it in his arms.

  “That old man ought to git away from them boys,” said Hard Candy, “him being like he is and all. One of’m git drunk enough and git to feeling mean, and I don’t know.”

  They had gradually moved to a window while they talked and they stood now watching the three of them take turns pressing off their backs. Duffy was on the bench and Willard and Joe Lon were on either side, leaning forward yelling at him as he strained to finish the press, yelling in short, abrupt phrases. Veins stood in their necks and their heads jerked as if they might have been barking. Poncy sat on the little bank of dirt, alternately clapping his hands the way the boys were doing and looking afraid. Dust rose around the bench and clung to their sweating bodies. They didn’t seem to see it.

  ***

  Big Joe Mackey limped through the hallway of his house toward the kitchen. It was only a little after noon but here inside the high-ceilinged old house the shadows were deep in the corners and along the warped walls. He stopped at his daughter’s door and leaned against it listening. He heard what he had been hearing all day, the mad babble of the television set. Lottie Mae had finished and left and he knew he could not depend on her to come back; he would probably end up having to cook his own dinner, but he didn’t mind too much because Lummy had brought over another bottle of whiskey and he’d do his cooking in a mild red drunken mist. Beeder wouldn’t get anything else to eat until tomorrow when the cook came.

  He leaned his head against the door and called: “You all right in there, youngan?”

  For answer he got a sudden booming of the television as the volume was turned up. He’d be damned if he would go in there. She was well enough to hop out of bed and turn up the sound. That was good enough for him. He hadn’t raised his daughter to be crazy, goddammit. But she’d always been a headstrong girl and if she wanted to be crazy the rest of her life, that was her little red wagon and she’d have to pull it. He wasn’t going in there to see her craziness and see … see…

  There his mind stopped. He quit thinking, and his daughter’s face gradually emerged out of the red mist of his eyes, Beeder’s face, which was only the younger uncracked copy of his wife’s face. He stood, suddenly shaken, saying quietly: “Damn them all. Damn them all.” But try as he would to keep it from happening, he saw all over again his wife sitting in her favorite rocker with the bag over her head.

  He went into the kitchen and got the dog bucket. It was a five-gallon bucket and he filled it nearly full with canned meat and double-yolk eggs. Then he stirred in ten ounces of a special vitamin mixture he made up himself. He limped awkwardly with the bucket down the back steps and out across the bare dirt yard to the kennel. The kennel was a long narrow concrete slab with individual wire cages fastened to the top of it. There were four puppies, not quite three months old. They were solid red and already broad-chested and thick-necked, standing on their hind legs barking happily at the sight of the bucket. The two dogs next to the puppies were grown but had not yet started their hard training. The only thing they did was a little game that all the pit bulls loved. He had an old rubber tire tied to the end of a rope hanging from an oak tree behind the kennel. These two young dogs, approaching fighting age, were allowed to swing from the tire an hour a day three days a week. He would rub the tire with a little blood—chicken blood—and take the dogs out one at a time to the tire, set it swinging, and turn them loose. They would leap and set their massive jaws to the tire and swing, their thick little bodies drawn up tight and tucked into a solid muscular ball. Big Joe thought that next month he would muzzle both of them and put them in together to see how they faced off. Sometimes a strain weakened and played out for no reason at all. The dog would look great but at the center of him would be a soft rotten spot of something that made him go bad.

  He fed the puppies, who never stopped yelping until he dumped big hunks of meat and egg into their troughs. The dogs next to the puppies—their brothers—barked too, but it was a slower, deeper bark, and their steady red-eyed gaze was more serenely and savagely sullen. They stood in solid, slightly bowlegged dignity at their troughs swallowing heavy chunks of food each time their great heads jerked. Their bony skulls were insistent under their fine tight skin. Tuffy was next in the line of cages and he did not bark at all. He had rounded into condition beautifully. No matter how badly you hurt him, he came back steady and strong after a single day’s rest. His wounds had scabbed nicely. Tuffy turned slowly and looked down the row of cages at his noisy sons and seemed to see them and dismiss them at the same time with a fine contempt. Big Joe watered Tuffy but did not feed him.

  In the end cage, which was slightly larger than the others, was Tuffy’s daddy, also named Tuffy. He’d won six fights before he was retired to stud and became the top of the line; his blood was in every fighting animal Big Joe owned, including the two ferocious bitches housed on the reverse side of the kennel where the males could not see them.

  Old Tuffy, as he was called to distinguish him from Tuffy the Younger, had thickened in his old age. A coarse gray ruff grew round his neck and he was nearly blind. He had not mated in a long time. His fine razor teeth had been worn down to dull yellow stubs in his mouth, a mouth that once closed like a steel trap but that now was wet and a little slack, a little jowly like an old man’s. Like his son in the cage next to him he did not bark or even growl but stood with the magnificent balance he still had even in old age, watching Big Joe with solemn faded eyes held in a net of red veins as Big Joe limped by with the meat bucket. Big Joe watered him with the running garden hose lying on the edge of the concrete slab, but did not feed him. He clucked to the old dog and spoke to him in a soft, rough, but gentle voice. Then he went around on the other side of the kennel and fed and watered the bitches. When he was done with the bitches, he came back to the old dog’s cage, and with a key off a ring on his belt, he opened the padlock on the steel U-neck that formed the latch. He swung back the heavy wire gate.

  The old pit bull walked out of his cage and stood blinking in the thin sunlight. He shook himself and bent his head to lick his muscled forepaw with a tongue wide as a man’s hands. Big Joe knelt stiffly beside him.

  “You ole sumbitch,” said Big Joe in a whisper at the dog’s head. “You done got too old to fight. An you done got too old to fuck.” He scratched and rubbed the gray ruff at the dog’s thick neck. “You had you goddam day in the ring though. You done what you done as good as any dog that ever come down the pike. Wisht I had a nickel on the dollar for ever bet passed over you back.” Big Joe sighed
and looked at the cage where Tuffy regarded them both, standing four square to his wire gate, a slow but insistent growl rattling wetly in his throat. “Yessir,” said the old man vaguely. “True, ever bit of it true. But you done got too old to fight. And you done got too old to fuck.”

  He got slowly to his feet and took a steel muzzle off a rack hanging on the cage. The old dog did not resist the muzzle and when he had it securely in place, Big Joe put a steel choke collar on him and fastened the collar to a short leather strap that was in turn tied to a short metal post. Then he opened Tuffy’s gate and got down on his knees and muzzled him while he was still in the cage. He was trying to get a leather lead fastened to his choke collar when Tuffy burst past him and seemingly did not touch the ground again until he landed on his daddy still tied securely to the metal post. The growls coming from the two dogs as they rolled together on the ground was like an electric saw cutting through something soft but now and then hitting something hard and resistant. Big Joe got slowly to his feet cursing softly but good-naturedly and limped over carefully to the snarling, clawing dogs. He got Tuffy by the tail and dragged him clear of the reach of the leather lead fastened to the post. He hit him on the top of the skull with his fist to calm him down and then got a leather strap attached to his choke collar.

  With a muzzled dog on a short lead in either hand he stared off toward a place about fifty yards away where wooden bleachers formed a square. The bleachers rose maybe twenty-five feet high and enclosed a square hole in the ground three feet deep and twelve feet across. The sides of the hole were reinforced with close-driven wooden stakes but the bottom was only hard-packed earth. A set of portable wooden steps led down into the hole. As Big Joe went through the gate of the fence and the dogs saw the hole, they immediately bowed, started walking stiff-legged. The hair rose along the indentation of their heavily muscled backs. They lunged against their short leads trying to square off to each other. Big Joe kicked them both in the ribs with his thick brogan shoe and spoke to them in a quiet, good-natured voice.

  “You dogs,” he said. “You dogs stand easy.”

  He wished he had thought to bring his whiskey. He didn’t particularly dislike this, but there was no pleasure in it either. It was simply necessary, like feeding a young savage boxer a lot of inferior opponents, opponents who had some skill but no chance, no real hope. It tuned the fighter, gave him a taste for blood and the killing blow, made him feel invincible. Big Joe had saved the old dog for this final sharpening of the son and future stud of the line. It never occurred to him to wish that it did not have to end this way. It always had to end this way and he had always known it.

  He went carefully down the steps into the pit. Both dogs followed him down, but by now they were so excited that they closed at the top step and came into the pit locked together, their steel muzzles grinding. Big Joe watched dispassionately as the two dogs parted briefly, standing in the center of the pit now, heads together, their short wide bodies braced and waiting. Their eyes were locked and they balanced each other in a bright and ferociously insane stare.

  Big Joe wondered, as he had more than once when dogs were about to stand to one another, what might be going on in their heads. Could dogs think? What were they thinking? Probably nothing. They weren’t men; they didn’t think; they fought.

  There was a steel hook built into the wall on each side of the pit. He separated the dogs and fastened their leads to the hooks. Then he removed their muzzles, first slapping them hard twice with his heavy square-fingered hand to get their attention so they didn’t accidentally crush a finger or a wrist in their fighting frenzy. Once their muzzles were off Big Joe moved to release them, but Tuffy broke his lead and was across the pit and on his daddy in a blinding move full of slashing teeth and roiling dust and flying shards of bright slobber. The dog’s body, catapulting across the pit, had struck Big Joe on the shoulder where he had been kneeling beside Old Tuffy and knocked him halfway across the circle. He got up slowly and sat on the reinforced wall. Old Tuffy would not have had much of a chance anyway but fastened on the lead as he was made it a shorter fight than it otherwise would have been. It wasn’t more than forty-five seconds before Big Joe could see that he was already taking a killing. Tuffy was into his throat. The sound of blood was in his breathing as Tuffy settled in deeper and shook him now like a toy. Big Joe let Tuffy stay on as long as he liked, letting him chew his fill, until at last Tuffy backed off, gazed quietly and somberly at the slashed and bleeding body, and then trotted happily across the pit to his master.

  Big Joe was deeply satisfied at the way Tuffy had peaked into condition. He’d feed him now, rest him good, and by fight time tomorrow night he would be as ready and savage as he had ever been. He led Tuffy back and put him in his cage. For a long time then he stood staring at the two grown bulls in the next cage. Finally, he chose one of them, put him on a leash, and led him back up to the house.

  ***

  They had fought each other to an absolute draw on the bench, but they both knew that one of them would have lost if Duffy Deeter had not run out of weights. And neither of them was dead solid certain which of them it would have been. Duffy Deeter had gone with them up to an even three hundred pounds, which astounded them both and immediately changed their attitude toward him.

  A hundred-and-fifty-pound guy who could get three hundred pounds on the bench was nobody to fuck with. It meant that somewhere there inside him was a little knot of craziness that made him pay the price. But it was not entirely enough to make them forgive him for weighing a hundred and fifty pounds. He was still a runty, second-string grunion. But a very strong grunion.

  They’d left him at three hundred and then both got one final rep with three-twenty, which was all the weight Duffy had with him in the Winnebago. Joe Lon and Willard were fired up and when they found out there was no more weight they automatically faced off and almost went one on one against each other right there in the dirt and probably would have if it had not been for Susan Gender. Duffy Deeter had enjoyed it immensely and was hoping they might hurt each other, because while he admired them for turning out to be stud jocks instead of just looking like they might be, he could not forgive them for beating him. He wasn’t used to getting beat, even by men who outweighed him fifty or sixty pounds. So it was left for Susan Gender to stop them. She had been watching through the window with Hard Candy Sweet when Willard popped up off the bench and turned to face Joe Lon, whose response was to dip slightly, bring his elbows out from his body, and thrust out his thick corded neck.

  “He’s gone strike a lick,” Hard Candy said happily.

  “What? Which one?” said Susan Gender.

  “Take you pick,” said Hard Candy. “They fixin to bust ass.”

  But Susan got to the door first and cried: “Let’s go find us a tonk!”

  Duffy and Poncy looked at her but Joe Lon and Willard only slightly shifted their bodies toward her, the smallest change in the position of their shoulders. But their eyes stayed locked on each other.

  “Tonk,” said Willard quietly, not a question, just repeating the word.

  “I want to dance!” cried Susan Gender. “I want to play the juke and eat a pickled pig’s foot. I want to drink beer and shake my ass.”

  Now they turned together to look at her and stared with hostility at her head majorette legs straddling across the door frame.

  “Ain’t no tonk in this county,” Joe Lon said. “It’s damn nigh fifteen miles.”

  “Shit, boy,” said Susan Gender. “We got wheels.” She spread her arms and looked back into the Winnebago. “Duffy Deeter ain’t got nothing if he ain’t got wheels.”

  Poncy, suddenly alive again in their young contentious voices, said: “I got a Porsche my own sef,” and two things happened at once. First, Poncy was sorry he had opened his mouth about his sweet expensive Porsche car, and second everything got very quiet and still while they stared at him. He had not meant anything by imitating, or trying to imitate, their grit voices. He’d
only been trying to be one of the group. But he could see in their faces they had heard what he said as mockery. He tried to explain what he really meant but they wouldn’t hear it. Joe Lon and Willard each got an arm and led him protesting down the dirt street to where his car was parked.

  “Hard Candy,” Joe Lon called over his shoulder. “Go with them, show Deeter. Blue Pines.”

  “But I spose we gone already be drunk a beer by the time you git there in that Winnebago,” called Willard, “cause this sucker’s got a Porschie and I hear them things won’t do nothing but fly.”

  They put Poncy in the back seat of his own Porsche and Joe Lon drove. The country was flat but the road was winding and Joe Lon one-handed the car through one tight turn after another, not bothering to use the gears but keeping it flat out with Poncy first outraged and then terrified in the back seat. Halfway there, Willard puked out the window, not much but enough for some of it to blow into the back seat where Poncy was trying to duck. Willard did it as easily as spitting. The stream slipped from between his lips, he blinked twice, and wiped his mouth with his hand.

  He looked over at Joe Lon. “Musta been that fucking meat we et at breakfast,” he said.

  Joe Lon handed him the bourbon. He took a mouthful, gargled, spat it through the window, and then drank long from the bottle, his powerful throat pumping and pumping. When he finished he turned and tried to hand it to Poncy, who had been watching the whole thing from his place crouched in the back. “Want you own sef a drink a whiskey?” said Willard.

  At that moment Joe Lon was taking the Porsche through a long slow curve in a power slide that was turning a hundred and ten. Joe Lon was screaming, not with joy, not with anger, just screaming, his thick fine hands locked on the steering wheel. Poncy saw a huge oak tree tilting into their line of vision at the top of the curve and smelled the raw bits of puke clinging to his Banlon shirt and saw the offered whiskey bottle sloshing just there in front of his eyes and although he knew what he was going to do—could not help doing—he bowed his head and puked onto his lap while Willard Miller sucked his teeth and watched dispassionately from the front seat.