by Harry Crews
“Hold him, hold him,” Poncy was begging. The man held the writhing snake up on the end of the stick. Poncy came closer and closer until he was looking right into the snake’s eyes. Poncy hissed. From less than a foot away, he shot spit into the snake’s gaping, fanged mouth. Just as he was about to do it again, he looked up and saw Joe Lon watching him. Almost shyly, he averted his eyes. But while the man with the stick took the snake to the pit, Poncy came over to the truck where Joe Lon was sitting with the door open. He was flushed, smiling, his eyes bright.
“Hi,” Poncy said.
Joe Lon took another careful sip of whiskey and did not speak. Poncy looked embarrassed. “I don’t care what you did in the bar,” he said. Joe Lon wanted to say something so the old man would go back and start pulling snakes out of the ground and leave him alone. But he didn’t think he could speak. So he carefully nodded his head. Poncy seemed to accept that as an answer.
Poncy leaned closer and for the first time held Joe Lon’s eyes. He said: “I know why you did it. It’s natural, and I don’t hold it against you.”
Joe Lon nodded. Poncy turned and started back to his team but he stopped and looked at Joe Lon before he’d gone very far. “I’d rather be here on this hill with these snakes and you,” he said, “than anywhere else in the world.”
Willard Miller, Duffy Deeter, and Coach Tump walked out of the pine trees and Joe Lon watched while they came up the crest of the hill to the truck. When they stopped by the open door, Joe Lon handed Coach Tump the whiskey bottle because he was afraid the coach was going to speak to him and Joe Lon was no longer sure that he could answer. But not being sure he could speak did not strike him as odd. It seemed normal enough, even good. They passed the bottle. The temperature had dropped twenty degrees since daylight. A light inconstant buzz of rattles floated out of the pit and hovered over the hill.
Luther Peacock, leaning against the fender of the truck, said in a quiet voice: “You know I never touched a goddam snake in my life. Sumbitch if I know how they do that.” Everywhere in front of them, the dark silhouettes of men were joined to the earth by the thick stretched bodies of snakes. The sky gave no light at all now except where the thin white disk of sun hung in the east.
Off and on all morning, Victor, his hair more wildly twisted than ever, appeared among the hunters, to urge them on to greater efforts. So Joe Lon was not surprised to see him come out from behind the snake pit. But he was surprised to see him suddenly stop and strip to the waist. The men and women nearest Victor turned just in time to see Victor bend to his heavy coat lying on the ground and open the pockets. When he straightened up he had a rattlesnake in each hand. He held the writhing snakes over his head. His voice boomed: “Ye shall take up …”
A rush of energy shocked through Joe Lon. He stiffened on the seat. All morning he had felt as though he was going to do it today. But he had not known what it was. Now, watching Victor stagger across the crest of the ridge, Joe Lon knew what it was he had planned to do all along, the thing that had lain rank and fascinating in his brain since last night at the pit. He’d waited for the moment to come, the right one, knowing he’d recognize it when it did. The hunters were scattering in front of Victor, his heavy lilting voice singing on about good and evil in a kind of mad howl. When the old man finally stepped between Joe Lon and the fog-shrouded, twin-gabled house on the far horizon, Joe Lon reached to the rack where the shotgun hung behind him and in a single movement came out of the cab and blew a hole the size of a doorknob out of Victor’s pale naked chest.
The hunters who had been scattering stopped. Nothing moved anywhere. Joe Lon jacked another round of double-ought buckshot into the twelve-gauge pump, let the gun drop slightly to the right, and blew the look of horror right off Luther Peacock’s head. A woman’s voice said a word, begging. A child cried. And Joe Lon strolled casually toward the hunters, pumping the shotgun. When he threw it to his shoulder, the bead swung right past Shep and held on Berenice. He shot away her neck. Joe Lon jacked in another shell. He felt better than he had ever felt in his life. Christ, it was good to be in control again. He shot the nearest hunter.
When he pumped the gun again, it was empty. Since the first shot, no more than seven or eight seconds had passed, during which time everybody on the hill stood in arrested motion. As he pulled down on the empty chamber for the second time, dozens of hunters scrambled for cover. But most of them did not. The man nearest him, his face twisted with fear and rage, screamed: “Git that crazy bastard!” And a whole wall of men and women, their mouths open, teeth bared, moved with a single raging voice upon Joe Lon. He never dropped the gun. He simply held it and waited as their hands came upon him and he was raised high in the air. The gun went into the snake pit with him. He fell into the boiling snakes, went under and came up, like a swimmer breaking water. For the briefest instant, he gained his feet. Snakes hung from his face.
As he was going down again, he saw, or thought he saw, his sister Beeder in her dirty white nightgown squatting off on the side of the hill with Lottie Mae, watching.
Harry Crews
Harry Crews was born and reared in Bacon County, Georgia. He teaches at the University of Florida in Gainesville, and is a contributing editor of Southern magazine. He is also a contributor to Playboy, Esquire, and many other magazines and newspapers. A Feast of Snakes, first published in 1976, was his eighth book.
Table of Contents
PART ONE
PART TWO