A Feast of Snakes

by Harry Crews

  Finally he said: “I want you ass.”

  She withdrew her throat and mouth and said as she turned, “You honey you honey you can have my … easy darling be easy.” But he wasn’t easy at all because he knew she was about to talk of love and he had her bowed almost double, plunging deeply into her ass by the time she got to the place where she could say, “But I can love you too, love you with all my heart, love …”

  “Love,” said Joe Lon, “is taking it out of you mouth and sticking in you ass.”

  “Yes,” she said, “oh, yes, that’s …”

  “But true love,” he said, “goddam true love is taking it out of you ass and sticking it in you mouth.” He flipped her like a doll and she—flushed and swooning—went down in a great spasm of joy, sucking like a baby before she ever got there.

  ***

  Lottie Mae had been told to go back to Big Joe’s to cook again, but Brother Boy had not been sent with her this time and she did not go. She had meant to go, or rather she meant to do what her mother told her to do but she quickly forgot what that was or where she was going so she had been wandering about the streets of Mystic for more than an hour.

  She carefully listened to the talk of snakes, knowing that if she listened closely enough she would find out what the snake had in mind for her and maybe avoid it. She walked and listened and watched terrified. The world had become dangerous. What she had always feared would happen had happened, although she did not know it was what she feared until it happened.

  White people were dangerous and snakes were dangerous and now the two were working together, each doing what the other told it to. She was sure she had seen a snake in a weeded ditch with the head of a white man. Right after she came out of the house on the way to Big Joe’s, which she had immediately forgotten, she saw it, long and black and diamond-patterned in the ditch with a white man’s head. It had blue eyes. The bluest eyes any white man ever had. She was sure she had seen it. She thought she had seen it. Maybe it was only a dream or a memory of another time. Whatever it was, she still saw it every time she closed her eyes, coiled there on the back of her eyelids, blue-eyed and dangerous.

  She went over to the school ground and was not surprised to find the idol they had made. She knew it was not a real snake, that it was made out of paper and glue to be bigger than any snake could ever be, but she also knew why they had made it, and the only thing that surprised her was that no one knelt there in worship. Instead of worship there was much laughter and drinking and eating and dancing about in an unseemly way. They were white people though and there was nothing they could have done that would have surprised her.

  She kept careful watch for the snake with the man’s head and the clear blazing blue eyes. She watched the ditches and the weeds and even the limbs of trees. You never knew that it was not hanging there overhead waiting for you to come walking by. If it had blue eyes, might it not have anything, any ability or talent or evil design?

  Lottie Mae watched and waited. She knew very well what was coming. There was nothing she could do about it. She was resigned to the risk, to the consequences, to the world and what it had brought her. Which didn’t mean she was not afraid. She walked about with an icy panic flooding her heart. But at last knowing there was no alternative, there was a kind of benumbed calmness rooted in her bones.

  “Hey, girl, you want this?”

  Lottie Mae turned slowly to the man who had spoken to her. He was white, deeply sun-burned with a black stubble of beard. His overalls were stuffed into high boots and around his neck was a snake, thin as a whip and clay-colored. The snake held its cat-eyed head aloft, its tongue waving and darting on the air. The man drew the snake from around his neck, and it immediately wrapped itself about his forearm. The slick and shining head lay in the palm of his hand like a plum. The man was smiling as he edged closer to where she stood.

  “Ain’t nothing but a lil ole snake,” he said. “You ain’t scared of no snake are you, girl?”

  Lottie Mae did not move. She stood ready. The snake, it seemed to her, knew she was ready. It lay in the open palm without lifting its head.

  “You do wrong for a quarter, girl?” said the man.

  She turned and started home. The man did not follow her but stood calling to her to come back and see his snake. She walked past the platform where the Rattlesnake Queen would be crowned. It had been covered in bright red cloth. It was very pretty. She wished, if things did not have to be the way they were, that she could have some cloth like that. It would make a pretty dress. Or maybe a shirt for Brother Boy. But there was no use thinking about that. The snake had seen her. She had seen the snake. She was as ready as she could make herself. There was no use in thinking about making dresses and shirts. And there was no use in hiding.

  A man was sitting on the side of a ditch. She first saw him because she was keeping her eye on the ditches, watching for the snake. But she kept watching him because his hair reminded her of snakes, might have been snakes, the tufts of white hair rose in such wild twists. He was an old man, and as she got closer, she heard him talking, almost chanting. She did not take her eyes off him.

  “Snakes, not sons, wreathing around the bones of Tiriel!” he cried, “God hath said ye shall not eat of it, neither shall ye touch it, lest ye die. And the serpent said unto the woman, ye shall not surely die!”

  She went on by, drawing her mother’s cotton neck-wrapper closer under her chin. There was a little bit of a bite in the air now that it was getting on toward dark. She could no longer remember why she was walking out here among all these white people anyway. There was not another black man or woman anywhere and she could not imagine why she had decided to come out here and deliberately walk where none of her people—not her mother or her father or any of her uncles—ever came in these yearly roundups of snakes. Maybe it was only by showing herself, she thought, to the danger of the snake that she could show that she was not afraid of the snake. She knew, she had been told by her uncles, that snakes were cowards. They ran. They hid. They took advantage. The rattle was only a desperate effort not to be stepped upon, a frantic effort not to have to face anything that might want to fight, that might have a chance in a fight.

  She was almost to the little road that led back through a pine thicket toward her mother’s house when she saw the blue light pulsing around her, lighting the trunks of trees and the dead brown grass on the sides of the little road. She didn’t even look back. She stopped and stood without moving. Even when she heard the engine of the car and the light got close enough so that she could feel it on the skin of her face she did not look. She knew before she heard his voice. And somehow she knew he had brought the snake she had been waiting for, or maybe the snake had brought him. It did not matter. She would have to deal with the snake. She was the one.

  “Git in here. Lot, goddammit, I been looking everwhere for you,” said Buddy Matlow.

  The door swung open and there he was on the far side, leaning toward her, gazing up at her from beneath the flat brim of his sheriff’s hat.

  She stood looking at him.

  “Git in here, I ain’t got all day!”

  She got in.

  “Well, close the door, you sweet thing.”

  She closed the door and Buddy Matlow found a little open space in the wall of pine bordering the road and spun his Plymouth in a circle and roared back down the road. Lottie Mae waited, tense but still with the numb calmness running in her, preparing herself for what she knew she had to do.

  “How you been, Lottie Mae?”

  “I been all right, Mistuh Buddy.”

  “Goddammit, Lottie Mae, how many times I got to tell you don’t call me Mister? How many times, huh?”

  “Yessuh,” she said.

  “That too, dammit.” He reached across and touched her hands where they lay stiff in her lap. “Don’t call me Mister. Don’t ever do that again.”

  “All right,” she said.

  “Ain’t I already told you I loved you?”


  “Yessuh,” she said.

  “Jesus,” he said, one-handing the Plymouth through a tight turn on a dirt road about a mile south of Mystic. “You do it again I’m gone have to slap the shit out of you. Now that’s the simple truth, Lottie Mae. One thing I cain’t stand it’s somebody I told I loved’m to keep on calling me Mister and like that.” He stopped talking, caught in a fit of coughing. “It ain’t seemly.”

  “I won’t do it no more. Less I forgit. It be hard not to forgit.”

  “You tell anybody about the snake?” he said.

  “What it was?” she said quickly.

  He sighed and rolled his eyes up toward the brim of his hat. “Lottie Mae, try not to talk nigger talk to me.”

  “What snake it was?”

  “Don’t be scared,” he said. “I ain’t talking about a snake, anyhow. I’m talking about me. About at the jail. You tell anybody about that?”

  “Ain’t say nothing.”

  “Good,” he said. “Be kind of stupid anyway wouldn’t it? Honey, you got fucked last night by a United States of America Veet Nam hero and former captain of the Ramlin Wrecks from Georgia Tech. Here, you want a drink of this?” He held out a bottle of whiskey toward her.

  “Make me sick,” she said.

  “This ain’t gone make you sick. It’s from Mr. Joe Lon’s place a bidness. Hell, it was George sold it to me. Go on and take youself a drink.”

  “I hafta?” she said, not looking at him.

  “You have to,” he said.

  She didn’t really mind taking a drink of the whiskey. Unless it made her sick. She didn’t want to be sick when she had to face the snake. Her fight wasn’t with Mr. Buddy Matlow. Her fight was with the snake. She took the bottle out of his hand. It burned her throat a little but then settled in her stomach, warming it like one of her mother’s meal poultices. It was the first brown whiskey she had ever had, although she’d seen it. The few times she’d ever tasted white whiskey it had made her immediately sick. This brown whiskey was better.

  “These goddam snakes already about run me crazy,” said Buddy Matlow, “and we still got tomorrow to go.”

  “Snakes be bad,” she said.

  “Damn truth,” he said. “Ever year, I say, no more snakes, and ever year I git right in the middle of it.” He glanced at her. “How that drink doing you?”

  “Be doin fine,” she said.

  “Good,” he said. Then: “Well, somebody got to keep these goddam fools from killing each other. Weren’t for me, these sumbitches would eat each other alive. It’s been times when they damn nigh done it spite of me.”

  “I don’t misdoubt it,” she said.

  “Want another drink?”

  “No.”

  He took a long pull at the bottle and then leaned across and flipped down the glove compartment and put the bottle in it. He fumbled there for a moment, and then flipped the door shut.

  “I was looking for you this morning,” he said. “Where the hell you been?”

  She told him about her mother having the miseries, about how she had to go cook for Mr. Big Joe and Beeder.

  “Shit,” he said, “I was over there myself to see that dog of his’n. Musta just missed you over there. I’m gone put ever goddam thing I got in hock to go on his dog Tuff.” He laughed. “Might even mortgage this fuckin Plymouth car.” Then seriously: “Did you see that girl of his, Beeder?”

  “Uh huh,” said Lottie Mae. She wondered why he kept squirming around over there in his seat. He was worse than Little Brother in church. But she didn’t look. She didn’t want to know. She stared straight ahead into the gathering darkness.

  “You feeling good?” he said.

  She still did not look at him. She spoke to the dark flashing trees beyond the headlights. “Where you taking me?”

  “It’s all right,” he said.

  “Where you taking me?”

  “I ain’t seen Beeder Mackey in … what is it now? I was three years ahead of Joe Lon at Mystic High—none of the colored went there then—and he was two years ahead of Willard. Shit, I ain’t seen that girl in, it must be six years. What does she look like now, anyway?”

  “Watch that TeeVee of hern,” she said. “An stay in her room.”

  “Seem like to me she was gone grow into sompin real good,” he said. “That’s what I remember.”

  They drove down a dirt road in silence. Finally he said: “But you feeling all right now, right? You feeling all right?” When she didn’t answer, he said, “All right. That’s fine with me. I don’t want to talk either. Look here what I got. Look at it. Right here. See.”

  She knew without looking that this was what he had looked for her for and what he had brought her in the sheriff’s car for and that there was nothing else she could do but look. She turned her head and saw a snake standing in his lap. Right in his lap a snake rose straight as a plumb line, no striking coil in its body but arrow straight on its tail, and at the top of its body the mouth was stretched and she could see the needle fangs like tiny swords. It was the snake she had been waiting for, that she had been preparing for since that morning in Beeder’s room.

  “How about that?” he said. “What do you think?”

  She did not answer but in a movement she had been practicing in her mind all day she bent to her ankle where the straight razor was wedged inside her shoe and in a single fluid movement she struck his lap and came away with the snake in her hand, its softening head with the needle fangs still showing just above her thumb and forefinger.

  She raised it aloft and was amazed that it did not struggle but hung limp from her hand utterly dead and beaten. She raised her eyes to Buddy Matlow’s and found him staring over the wheel of the Plymouth, his face leached of all color, his lips struggling to speak and pointing to his lap where now a fountain of blood shot into the air and ran over his legs and dripped down into the floorboard of the car.

  “You … you … cut it off.” He finally managed to say.

  She said: “I always known I could. I always known I would.”

  She opened the door and got out. Buddy Matlow struggled behind the wheel. He looked at her and made a noise, not a word, just a noise. There was still no pain, but he had gone instantly light-headed with terror and loss of blood. He knew he was dying. He knew he ought to be doing something, but he did not know what it was. Lottie Mae bent and looked at him through the window.

  “Wait,” said Buddy Matlow. “Wait.”

  “Be through now,” she said and walked away from the car. She did not walk slow, but she did not walk fast either. She had done what she had waited all day to do. She remembered where she was going, that her mother had sent her to Big Joe’s, that she was supposed to help Miss Beeder.

  She had to walk past the school and the open field where they did the football. There were more people there and more noise and more open fires than she had ever dreamed there could be in one place at one time in the whole world. In the middle of all the people was a snake, three stories tall standing against the darkening sky, coiled to strike. She kept to the edge of the crowd in the gathering dusk and was not afraid.

  At Big Joe’s, she went directly to Beeder’s room and Beeder asked immediately: “Did they burn the snake yet?”

  “What it was. You gone have to talk it up?”

  Beeder watched Lottie Mae’s slow purple mouth move in the flickering light. But Lottie Mae was already turning to watch the television. Her eyes and teeth were now brilliant in her face. She licked her lips and squinted and did not answer. Tanks roared across the land. Airplanes dropped bombs. Geysers of sand and stone and bits of metal flew from the earth. A turbaned woman knelt beside a man and rocked and wept. She finally turned her face up toward the black sky where airplanes still dropped bombs. She screamed and looked as though she had no lips, as though the lips had been cut away from her dry broken teeth.

  Lottie Mae recognized the man who talked when the guns and the planes and the bombs stopped. It was the NBC Nightly News.
It was Lottie Mae’s favorite program. Much better than the detective stories where you had to put up with a lot of talking and fooling around before you got to the good parts. NBC Nightly News went straight to the robbing and killing, the crying and the blood, burning buildings and mashed cars. Them NBC Nightly News sumbitches was mean. Soon kill you as look at you. Killed somebody ever night. Sometimes drowned whole towns in the ocean. Or made babies grow together at the shoulder.

  A man had come on now trying to sell Ford automobiles: “The closer you look, the better we look!”

  Beeder and Lottie Mae’s eyes left the screen at the same time and their gaze joined across the soiled bed.

  “I didn’t hear you,” shouted Beeder. “They burn the snake or not?” Then when Lottie Mae still did not answer: “Anybody hurt?”

  “Not I’m a mind of.”

  “Didn’t fall on anybody, nobody burned, no bones broke?”

  “I ain’t seen it.”

  They were shouting at each other. It was the only way they could be heard over the NBC Nightly News.

  “Can we turn hit down?”

  “What?”

  “Turn hit down, the TeeVee!”

  “What?” shouted Beeder.

  Lottie Mae went over and turned the television all the way down. Beeder sat up in bed. “What did you do that for?”

  “I wanted to tell you. I cut hit off.”

  “You ain’t got no call to turn my TeeVee down. Now turn it back up.”

  “I cut hit off at the ground. Shrunk hit up till hit wont no biggern you little finger.”

  Beeder was beside herself. “This room’s mine! What I say goes.”

  “Tetched it one time with this and hit come off in my hand just like a natural thing.”

  Lottie Mae was holding a straight razor up in front of her. The blade was honed thin and bright and terrible. Beeder stopped shouting. She got quietly off the bed and adjusted the sound so she could hear it but not so loud they had to shout. She stood beside Beeder and they both watched the thin shiny steel razor for a long time.