A Feast of Snakes

by Harry Crews

  “Tell me,” said Beeder glancing apprehensively at the far wall.

  “See,” said Lottie Mae with enormous satisfaction. “Hit were this snake.”

  “Yes,” said Beeder.

  “Hit fetched me all the living while. Went to sleep with me, snake did. Woke up with me. Eat my food. Come in the front door with me, went out the back. Wore my skin like clothes.”

  “Wore your skin like clothes,” Beeder said.

  “Close as breathing,” said Lottie Mae. “Looked into my eyes. Breathed into my nose. Put his taste on my tongue—all up in my mouth—and made me swaller him. Felt him grow in my hair, move in my stomach. When I went on my knees to pray, snake had the ear of the lord.”

  “You was scared?” Beeder asked.

  “Scared to death,” said Lottie Mae.

  “You cry?”

  “All the time.”

  “And was you afraid to go out?”

  “Wouldn’t go out less I had to.”

  “And was you afraid to come in?”

  “Wouldn’t come in neither less I had to.”

  “It had you covered all around,” said Beeder.

  “All around. In the air and on my plate. Everthing that moved say snake. Snake! It was you say what I might do. It’s why I come back to tell you. You was right. Just hit that snake with a razor. Tetch hit. One time. Gone forever. Outta my air. Outta my plate. Don’t tetch my skin like clothes.”

  “All because of the razor.”

  “That snake shrunk up and died like magic.”

  “Listen,” said Beeder. “Hear it?”

  “I tol you less turn it down.”

  “Not the TeeVee. That!”

  Lottie Mae folded her razor and put it in her shoe. “Cain’t hear nothin but the TeeVee.”

  “Here then,” said Beeder. She reached over and turned the sound all the way off, and rising out of the silence it left—coming from behind the far wall—was a ragged thumping like the beating of an enormous erratic heart.

  “Hear it now?”

  Lottie Mae cocked her head and regarded the wall. “I do hear.”

  “He s got another one tied in there.”

  “I don’t misdoubt it,” Lottie Mae said. “Be one tied everwhere you look these days.”

  “He’ll tie another one on it before he’s through,” said Beeder.

  They stood for a long time watching the place beyond the wall where the thing was thumping.

  Finally Lottie Mae said: “Before he’s through, he gone tie everone on it.”

  ***

  “Well,” said Shep Martin, “I thought law.”

  Dr. Sweet drew on his pipe and slowly wagged his huge white head. His skin and eyes and hair and even the suit he was wearing was the color of damp chalk. He looked as though he had not been in the sun for a year, which was true, since he actively cultivated a bleached look. He thought it made him look scholarly.

  “I myself,” said Dr. Sweet, “once seriously thought of the law.” He enjoyed these young men his daughters brought home, all of them on the edge of beginning to live their lives, all of them so full of hope and the higher virtues. “But, alas, it was to be medicine that I finally chose. I’ve not regretted it either.”

  They were sitting in Dr. Sweet’s living room in front of a large fire, roaring in a fieldstone fireplace. Mrs. Sweet was upstairs asleep and the doctor had let his black maid go for the evening.

  “It must be very rewarding,” said Shep.

  “A doctor is able to do much very decent work out here in the …” He chuckled deeply in his good gray throat. “… in the provinces, so to speak.”

  “You ought to think of writing, Doctor Sweet,” said Shep. “You certainly can …” Here he gave his own radio announcer’s chuckle. “Certainly can turn a phrase.”

  The doctor waved his hand. “When I retire I plan to devote my life to belles lettres.” He smiled. “But for now, I have to keep this county as healthy and wholesome as modern medicine will allow.”

  “There must be great satisfaction in that,” said Shep.

  “No more than you’ll find in the practice of law, young man. Law is an admirable calling.”

  “I haven’t actually decided,” said Shep. “But you see, sir. I’m on the debate team and doing extremely …”

  The doorbell, a three-chimed gong, floated through the house. The doctor raised his eyes to the ceiling and wagged his head. “Probably not a patient,” he said, “but it would not surprise me if it was. Nobody thinks a doctor sleeps or needs time for reflection.” He sighed and got to his feet.

  “Perhaps a crisis,” said Shep.

  The doctor, walking toward the door, said: “You soon find in medicine that to a patient everything is a crisis. Everything from a rash to a …”

  He did not finish but opened the door and found Buddy Matlow, pale, his mouth like a razor-cut in his face, looking down upon him. “Well, Sheriff,” said the doctor, looking past Buddy toward the night sky because he had not heard the rain start and certainly it had not looked like rain and yet here was the sheriff standing in his raincoat, a yellow rubber slicker that fell well below his knees so that you could see only the point of one cowboy boot and about two and a half inches of a peg leg. It did not seem to be raining. “Come in. Come in.”

  Buddy Matlow’s thin mouth stretched as though he would speak but he did not. It was almost a kind of yawn and then the lips came weakly back together. The doctor thought maybe Buddy was coming down with a cold. Colds seemed to do these big fellows worse than it did ordinary folk. Buddy had been leaning, holding to the door jamb with one of his wide square hands. Now he turned loose and leaned in toward the living room. His eyes wandered slowly from Dr. Sweet to the fireplace to the boy whom he had not met.

  Shep stood up and came toward him with his hand out. Buddy Matlow came over the door sill, his wooden leg thumping on the floor. It was the thumping of the wooden leg that made Shep look down and see that the peg leg was leaving a wide round puddle of blood every time it stopped. Shep stood amazed with his hand out. When he raised his eyes he saw that the sheriff was holding what looked like a toy snake tenderly between the thumb and forefinger of his right hand. With his other hand, the sheriff was fumbling with the snaps on the yellow raincoat.

  “Wait!” cried Shep. “Wait a minute!” He knew the man was about to show him what was under the coat and he knew he did not want to see it.

  They saw the blood before the coat was all the way open. Buddy was slick with blood. The doctor did not move. From Buddy’s shoulders to his knees he was smooth and slick with creamy gouts of blood. And it was obvious that it was coming from between his legs. Doctor Sweet was numb. His mind had simply quit. The worst he had ever seen was a man whose tongue had been deliberately split in two by a knife, and another man who had been scalped. But they had both been dead when he saw them. And they had both been black. But this. He knew from the blood, from the nature of the bleeding, what had happened and so he could not make himself move from where he stood as Buddy slowly reached out and put the toy snake in Shep’s outstretched hand. Shep accepted the snake because he was unable to do anything else. It was bloody on the end and tiny and as he watched unbelieving the whole inside of the snake slipped out into his palm and it was a dick.

  In a little voice that was cracked and whining, Shep said: “Somebody’s cut his dick off.” He turned to the doctor for his statement to be denied but the doctor was already sliding to the floor in a faint.

  ***

  They could not get her father on the phone, and of course it was not her father they wanted, but Shep. Berenice, red-faced, her cheeks brittle with exhaustion, had insisted that she would not go if Shep could not be raised on the phone and brought to her side to go with her. They were all standing in Joe Lon’s living room waiting to go see the thirty-foot snake burned and find out who was going to be crowned Miss Rattlesnake of the 1975 Roundup.

  Duffy Deeter said: “Gender here’s got more goddam trophie
s’n I have.” He waved vaguely at her. “Beauty,” he said. Since he had gotten good and drunk, Duffy had called Susan by her last name.

  “I was in one or two contests back in Alabama,” said Susan.

  “Shit, we had Miss Rattlesnake in the family two years back to back,” said Hard Candy.

  “I won my senior year,” said Berenice. Now that the talk had turned to contests, she didn’t seem quite as tired as before.

  “I took it my sophomore,” Hard Candy said.

  “I… I…” They all turned to see Elfie in the door coming from the hallway. “I best git them babies ready for the sitter.” She had forgotten not to smile—and it wasn’t a smile anyway, a deep painful-looking grin rather—but she remembered as soon as they turned to her that she was showing her bad teeth and so she clamped shut her lips as deliberately as she might close a door. Joe Lon saw it all, saw how hurt and intimidated she was, and could have killed her, or killed them for making him want to kill her.

  “I think we ought to stand here and see if we cain’t talk it to death,” said Willard Miller.

  “Gender can talk anything to death,” Duffy Deeter said, directing his thousand-yard stare at the near wall.

  A girl of about eleven with hair the color of corn and a running nose had come to stay with the babies. She sat quietly in the corner, sucking at her nose.

  “For Christ’s sake let’s get out of here,” said Joe Lon, “before they burn the snake without us.”

  “I’ll goddam drink to that,” said Susan Gender. They’d called the twirl-off a draw and she wasn’t happy with it. Both she and Hard Candy had promptly forgotten they had gone out there to start with to get Elfie out of the house. As soon as they got to twirling they forgot all about Joe Lon ventilating Hard Candy’s sister and would have gotten into a fight with the batons if Duffy and Willard had not separated them, which Duffy had to convince Willard to help him do because Willard wanted to see them fight.

  They all followed Joe Lon out into the yard, where it was already dark enough so they could see the light of an enormous fire on the school ground..

  “Shit,” said Willard, “they already burning the snake.”

  “That’s a bonfire,” said Hard Candy. “That’s not the snake.”

  Saying she had to find Shep before she did anything else, Berenice got in her car and roared out of the yard, the rear end fishtailing and sending clay and gravel back in a steady arching line.

  “What the hell ails her?” said Willard.

  “She do seem a little edgy, don’t she,” said Hard Candy.

  “She oughta calm down now some,” said Joe Lon.

  “I magine,” said Susan Gender.

  Elfie took Joe Lon’s arm. “Let’s go, honey.”

  She and Joe Lon got in the pickup. Willard left Hard Candy’s car in the yard and drove over with Duffy and Susan Gender in the Winnebago. The Winnebago followed the pickup and they went slow because cars and campers and trucks were parked everywhere, on the sides of the road, in the ditches, and people—many of them children lost off from their parents—wandered in and among the parked vehicles.

  “I wisht you wouldn’t treat me like a fool, Joe Lon, honey,” said Elfie.

  “What?” said Joe Lon, narrowly missing a man carrying a snake.

  “I ain’t a fool,” she said. “It’s some might think I am, but I ain’t a fool. You oughten to treat me like I was. Particular in front of strangers.”

  “I never said you was a fool.”

  “You sometimes got to act like I am.”

  “I do the best I can. I cain’t do but one thing at the time.”

  “I know that.”

  “You don’t know nothing.”

  “I might know more’n you think I know.”

  “This don’t get us nowheres,” said Joe Lon. “I don’t want nothing nasty with you.”

  “What?”

  “I don’t want to be nasty,” he said.

  “All right, Joe Lon, honey.”

  They had to walk the last quarter mile because the road was choked full of parked cars and campers and pickups parked in every possible attitude, on the shoulder of the road and even in the ditches. They moved slowly, sometimes having to climb on bumpers and over hoods, Duffy Deeter cursing more or less steadily and threatening to make Susan carry him.

  “Goddammit, Gender, you liable to have to care me the rest of the way.”

  “I’d known it was gone be like this,” said Elfie, “I’d stayed with the youngans, what I’d done.”

  They finally stopped in the dark shadow of the oak trees. There was a band up on the stage where the Queen would be crowned. A wide piece of cloth tilted through the space over their heads saying they were called SLICK, SLIMEY AND THE SNAKES. Slick and Slimey were the stage names of twin boys who lived four miles out of town on a peanut farm. They both played guitar and all of the members of the Snakes were also members of the Mystic Rattlers Marching High School Band. They wore skin-tight jumpsuits with little sequins sewn into them.

  Men and women were packed in under the oak trees and around the stage. As far as Joe Lon could see, heads—close together and seemingly solid as the ground—bobbed and pulsed in an undulating wave to the rhythm of the music. On the little rise of ground where the papier mache snake was built, a circling line of dancers had formed.

  “It ain’t no room to do nothing,” said Elfie. “What we gone do with all these people?”

  Duffy Deeter had already said something in the way of answering that, but only a word or two when a deep guttural sound came out of the shadows behind them and an enormous form moved solidly out of the darkness and stopped in a three-point stance shouting: “dowwwn!” Both Willard and Joe Lon spun and dropped in a crouch. “Seeetttt!” They took a three-point stance, head up, back flat, the rear foot digging in. “On twwwoooo!” Then: “Hut one! Hut two!” And they both fired out and were caught, one on each shoulder, and straightened up. The man who caught them was growling and slobbering and they were growling and slobbering and Duffy and the rest of them jumped out of the way because they thought Joe Lon and Willard were about to be driven back but they dug in after they had been straightened up and fought off the man by giving him several shots to the short ribs with their elbows and a few butts with their heads so that finally they had him all the way back and falling, with them on top. They rolled about in the dirt under the oak tree, growling no longer but all three of them laughing.

  “You boys git up!” said the snarling voice in the dark of the oak tree where they were rolling around. “By damn, two on one and me a old man!”

  Willard and Joe Lon came out of the shadows followed by the man who had caught them as they fired out of their three-point stance and straightened them up. He was a half inch taller than either of the boys and maybe sixty pounds heavier, with a great swinging gut under his shirt. He walked bowlegged and slightly pigeon-toed, rolling on the balls of his feet. His face was very red and he was chewing tobacco.

  He looked at Elf, then at Susan. “Ladies,” he said, touching the bill of his baseball cap. The smell of sweat and whiskey came off him in a palpable mist. But he moved on his massive legs as steadily and smoothly as a ballet dancer.

  Duffy again felt he had to introduce himself, since it looked like nobody else was going to. He held out his hand. “Sir,” he said. And when the big man swung his huge bony head to look at him: “My name’s Duffy Deeter. This is Susan Gender. We here for the hunt. Come up from Florida.”

  “You in good company, Duffy Deeter.” He took his hand. “Miss Susan, my pleasure.” He put his arms around Willard and Joe Lon. “These’er my boys here. Finest damn boys I ever coached. Good men on and off the field. Coach Tump Walker’s my name. I got boys all over this country. Playing on six pro teams, coaching two. You met Buddy Matlow since you been here?”

  “No, I don’t believe I’ve had the pleasure.”

  “Damn right,” said Coach Tump. “Well, he’s one of mine too. All I got’s my boys
. I don’t like to brag. I don’t brag.” His face got redder as he talked. “Ever goddam one of’m eat bullets. One of my boys is George ‘Big Freight’ Lester!”

  “Who?” said Duffy Deeter.

  Coach Tump lifted one of his heavy legs and hustled his balls. “You don’t know who Big Freight Lester is?”

  “Don’t believe I do,” said Duffy. He did, of course, know who he was but he didn’t want to sound as though he followed football. Besides, he was jetting a tight feeling, claustrophobic, standing walled in on three sides by Willard and Joe Lon and their coach, and it was making him nervous. He always got mean when he got nervous.

  “Big Freight ain’t been nothing but all-pro ever year since he left Alabama is all he’s been. He was one of mine too. Mean as a snake.” He leaned down in Duffy’s face, who didn’t give an inch but pushed back and up with his own hard little face until their noses were practically touching. “Where’d you say you was from?”

  “Florida,” said Duffy.

  “Went to Florida once,” said Coach Tump. “Coaching clinic. Never went back, never expect to. Cain’t trust any country where ever tree’s got a light in it and a stick propping it up.”

  Willard put his hand on Duffy’s shoulder. “He’s all right, Coach. This’n right here is all right.”

  Coach Tump Walker hacked up a lunger, spit, and hustled his balls again. “He all right?”

  “He is all right, Coach,” said Willard.

  He looked at Willard. “Boy, I want you to stay out of the bottle tonight.” Then to the ladies: “You don’t mind if a old man has a drink, do you? Chill’s coming up now that good dark’s here.” He didn’t wait for an answer, but reached a bottle from his baggy hip pocket and raised it. In the flashing light from the beauty contest stand where the musicians were sweating and screaming his thick throat pulsed in four quick, heavy spasms. He held the bottle out and looked at it. “It’s one last drink in here, if anybody’s …”