A Feast of Snakes

Dr. and Mrs. Sweet's daughter Candy--known to her friends as Hard Candy--felt the snake between her breasts, felt him there and loved him there, coiled, tumescent, ready to strike. They were roaring along in Duffy Deeter's Winnebago and the slanting light through the window caught the little snake--sign and mascot of the Mystic, Georgia, high school football team--where it was sewn onto her letter sweater. She particularly loved the snake because slumped against the wall directly across from her was Willard Miller, an enormous boy with a blunt head and small ears: Boss Snake of all the Mystic Rattlers. Her Boss Snake. The best running back in the state, the best back coach Tump Walker--who had four of his boys playing in the N.F.L.--had ever coached. With one exception. The exception was sitting across from her slumped just as drunkenly against the other wall of the Winnebago. Two years ago, in his senior year, he'd been Boss Snake not just of the Mystic Rattlers but of everything. He had offers from 50 colleges. But it all went sour when they discovered he couldn't read very well. Hardly at all, really.

Joe Lon Mackey was staring at Hard Candy's little snake and also at her titties, but mostly at the snake, because at this time of year, during Mystic, Georgia's Annual Rattlesnake Roundup, it was impossible for a rage not to start building in him over what had happened to his life. One day he'd had everything and the next day he'd had nothing. He'd been left to deal nigger whiskey and rent out his ten-acre campground to half-crazy snake hunters who came from as far away as Texas and Canada. They'd drink and they'd hunt snakes and they'd have a dance around a burning, 30-foot-tall, papier-mâché diamondback rattler and finally, while they munched on barbecued snake steaks, they'd have a beauty contest to choose Miss Mystic Rattler.

And he, Joe Lon, had been left here to suffer it all because of that reading thing. When he was in high school, from what everybody said to him, and about him, and wrote about him in every newspaper in the state, he had thought his job was to play football. It had honestly never occurred to him he'd have to read, too. Then when Hard Candy's sister, who had been head baton twirler and whom he'd fucked the last two years of high school, had left to become a champion twirler at the University of Georgia and he'd been left here to bootleg whiskey because his daddy was now too old to do anything but raise pit bulldogs and curse Joe Lou's crazy, bedridden sister--when that happened, he'd married Elfy Carter for reasons he still woke up in the night trying to remember.

Elf hadn't even been pregnant. But it didn't take her long to get that way. And she showed with the second boy before the first one was a year old. Having the babies so close together caused her teeth to rot and begin to fall out. And now Joe Lon was stuck with two football-shaped babies who would not stop screaming for a minute if they didn't have a bottle in their mouths and a wife who had breasts like flaps and teeth so bad she couldn't smile.

Well, it could have been worse, he often thought, he could've been born with a harelip or he could've been born without the fastest pair of wheels in the state. Which he still owned. His 220 record still stood. Hadn't even been threatened. But what was he doing with these possibly world-beating legs? Totin' half pints of moonshine to pulpwood niggers was what he was doing.

"Slow this goddamn thing down, Duffy," roared Willard Miller. They seemed to be going about 110 in the top-heavy, wind-whipped Winnebago.

Duffy Deeter took both hands off the steering wheel and shook his fists in front of him. "Bring me giants!" he screamed.

They'd only known Duffy Deeter and the girl he was with, Susan Gender, about six hours. Duffy Deeter had made the trip to the Mystic Annual Rattlesnake Roundup not to hunt snakes but to bring along young Susan Gender, who was in graduate school at the University of Florida in Gainesville, where Duffy Deeter had a large law practice and a small, unhappy family. It had been Susan Gender who had suggested they all go across the county line to a bar. She'd stood wide-legged in the Winnebago and shouted: "I wanta go to a tonk. I wanta eat a pickled pig's foot and shake my ass!"

They had immediately wheeled out of Mystic, headed north, in Duffy Deeter's camper. Susan Gender always came up with good things to do. They loved her. Hard Candy, particularly, had found a sister of the blood when she found out Susan Gender had been a baton twirler at the University of Alabama back in her undergraduate days.

Now, full of beer and a kind of belligerent joy, they were on their way to Joe Lon Mackey's trailer to eat an enormous meal of snake. But Joe Lon wasn't looking forward to it. He wasn't looking forward to anything. Everything that could go wrong seemed to be going wrong. More snake hunters had come this year than ever before. There were not enough Johnny on the Spots and the hunters' wives were lined up in front of the little chemical shitters day and night. It even looked as though there might not be enough drinking water. Everybody in the world seemed to be there.

Even Hard Candy's sister, Berenice, had come home from the university. She had brought a boy with her. Joe Lon had met them briefly out on the campground. The boy she was with was polyestered, double-knitted and color-coordinated. He had on a white belt and white shoes. Joe Lon could have cut off both the boy's hands just for wearing clothes like that. Berenice introduced them.

"Joe Lon, I'd like you to meet Shepherd Brown."

The boy wanted to take Joe Lou's hand. "Call me Shep," he said. "Everybody calls me Shep."

Shep? Joe Lon thought. That's a fucking dog's name, ain't it? But they'd shaken hands anyway and promised to meet later.

If that had been all there was to it, Joe Lon would not have chewed the side of his mouth bloody. Six days before the hunt was scheduled to begin, he'd gotten a letter from Berenice. It had come to the little store he sold the whiskey from and it said:

Dear Joe Lon, I will see you at rattlesnake time.

XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX

Love, Berenice

It took him most of the afternoon to figure out what it said and when he did, it did not please him. Didn't them goddamn Xs mean kisses? He seemed to remember that Xs in a goddamn letter like that meant kisses. What the hell was she trying to do to him? And bringing a fucking boy with her, too. He could taste the bile in his throat and the pressure of his blood was pumping in his ears just like he used to like it to do when he was about to get the ball in a game.

When they got to Joe Lon's purple double-wide, he skinned the snakes with a vengeance. He led everybody to a little wire pen that had several metal drums inside it. He struck one of the drums hard with a hooked stick and the air was suddenly shaken with the thickly rising yet strangely sharp rattle of diamondbacks. Then, with the rattle still reverberating, Joe Lon dipped the snakes out of the drum one at a time. He caught the slowly writhing rattler by the tail and swung it around and around his head and popped it like a cow whip, which caused the snake's head to explode.

When he'd popped 12 good-sized ones, he nailed them up on a board in the pen and skinned them out with a pair of wire pliers. Elfy was standing in the door of the trailer behind them with a baby on her hip. Full of beer and fascinated with what Joe Lon was doing, none of them saw her. But Joe Lon could feel--or thought he could--the weight of her gaze on his back while he popped and skinned the snakes. He finally turned and looked at her, pulling his lips back from his teeth in a smile that only shamed him.

He called across the yard to her. "Thought we'd cook up some snake and stuff, darlin', have ourselves a feast."

Her face brightened in the door and she said, " 'Course we can, Joe Lon, honey."

Elfy brought him a pan and Joe Lon cut the snakes into half-inch steaks. When Duffy finally saw that Joe Lon wasn't going to introduce him, he turned to Elfy. "My name's Duffy Deeter and this is something fine. Want to tell me how you cook up snakes?"

Elfy smiled, trying not to show her teeth. "It's lots a ways. Way I do mostly is I soak 'm in vinegar about ten minutes, drain 'm off good and sprinkle me a little Loosianner red-hot on 'm, roll 'm in flour and fry 'm is the way I mostly do."

"God," said Susan Gender.

Duffy slapped Joe Lon on the ass and said, "Where'd you get this little lady, boy? You've got yourself some little lady here."

Elfy blushed and tried not to show her teeth. Joe Lon didn't answer and they followed him into the trailer. Joe Lon put on a stack of Haggard and Elfy took the snake into the kitchen, where she wouldn't let the two other girls come, saying, "It ain't but real room for one in a trailer kitchen. I'll have this cooked up in two shakes."

Joe Lon got some beer out of the (continued on page 198)A Feast of Snakes(continued from page 140) icebox and they all sat in the little living room looking out through the picture window onto the campground. The babies lay in their playpen, where their mother had put them, screaming and refusing to suck their sugar-tits. Joe Lon pulled at his beer and then said something to Hard Candy that'd been on his mind ever since they decided to come back to his place and eat snake.

"Why don't you call you house and tell that sister of yorn to come eat snake?" Joe Lon was unable to make himself say the boy's name. "Tell 'er to bring him she brought from school, too, if she feels like it. We got enough snake for everybody."

Hard Candy got up and called her sister. Directly, she was back. "Berenice said she'd be sliding in here in a sec but not to wait the snake."

They all sat now without talking, sipping easy on the beer, a little stunned with alcohol and exhausted with dancing. Behind them through the window, smoke was layering in the windless afternoon over the campground above the open fires starting up now among the pickup trucks and trailers and campers and tents. Men, women and children wandered through the barren clay field in the failing November light with their hands full of snakes. Almost everyone brought pet snakes of one kind or another to the hunt. Mostly they were constrictors and black snakes and water snakes. The hunters spent hours passing them from hand to hand, comparing them, describing their habits and disclosing their names.

Joe Lon had just come back from the icebox with more beer when Berenice came sliding into the yard beside his pickup in her Austin-Healy. She had two batons with her and she came through the door, turning her brilliant smile on all of them and explaining that Shep had stayed to talk with her daddy, because he was seriously considering becoming a brain surgeon.

"Besides," she said, a little breathless, beaming still, "the notion of a snake-steak supper just made 'm want to throw up. Shep's got delicate digestion." While she talked, the batons slipped through her long, slender hands in slow revolutions.

Duffy said: "My name's Duffy Deeter. That's Miss Susan Gender. We're both from Gainesville." He gave her his own blinding smile. "Gainesville, Florida, not Georgia." Duffy wondered if his head could withstand a serious scissor from those powerful baton-twirling thighs.

"Why, that's the University of Florida, isn't it?" said Berenice, whose fine-grit voice education had turned to Cream of Wheat.

"I'm in philosophy and theater arts, "said Susan. "Duffy's not connected with the university. He's a lawyer."

"Oh, I do wish Shep had come. He's so interested in philosophy and theater arts and law. A mind like a sponge, just like a big old sponge." Susan and Duffy and Berenice beamed one upon the other. Joe Lon and Willard and Hard Candy sat bored and unsmiling along one wall.

Elfy came out of the kitchen wiping flour on her pretty apron. "We can eat any----" Elfy stopped and looked at Berenice. "Any time we want to we can eat," she said, a sad, tentative smile fading on her mouth. "Hi, Berenice. I didn't know you was here."

Berenice high-stepped across the linoleum rug and hugged Elfy like a sister. "Just got here," she said. "Come through the door this minute. How you been, honey?" And without waiting for an answer: "You looking good. You looking one hundred percent." She turned and pointed to the two babies lying now curled in exhausted sleep in their playpen in the middle of the room. "You got two handsome little man-babies, honey. I was just looking and thinking how handsome them little darlings were."

Elfy blushed. "Thank you. Me and Joe Lon ... Joe Lon and me, why, we think that ... think that, too."

"You want a drink?" said Joe Lon.

Berenice shifted her beat-down magnificent haunches and turned to look at him. "A little light something might be nice before we eat," she said.

"Oh, I'll get it," said Elfy quickly. "Let me get it."

"Let me help you," said Berenice.

"No, I can.... " But the two of them were gone through the door together before she could finish.

When they were gone, Willard said: "She used to bubble a bottle like a goddamn sawmill nigger. Now she wants a little light something. Jesus!"

"I got a little light something I'm gone give her right here this afternoon," said Joe Lon.

"She needs to be opened up some so she can breathe," said Hard Candy, "that sister of mine does."

Willard said: "You gone stick 'er right here in the trailer with the babies and the old lady and everthing?" Laughter rolled in his heavy throat.

"Shut up, Willard," said Joe Lon bitterly. "It ain't nothing funny here."

"Don't tell me to shut up," said Willard Miller. "I'll come over there and let you smell you daddy's fist."

They sat glaring at each other, but Joe Lon was bored with the little game. Seemed it was one game after another.

"Run that by me again," said Duffy.

"Them two used to be a case here in Lebeau County," said Willard evenly without ever taking his eyes off Joe Lon. "They used to be a case when Joe Lon here was Boss Snake."

"She's a fine-looking girl," said Duffy Deeter.

"The world's full of fine-looking girls," Joe Lon said sourly.

"It ain't full of Berenices," said Willard. "Was, she couldn't strike a lick on you like she does."

"Then it must be my turn," said Joe Lon. "Git everbody out of the trailer after we eat them snakes."

"How the hell I'm s'posed do that?" said Willard.

"You'll think of something," said Joe Lon. "You Boss Rattler now. It's you goddamn job to think of something."

But he didn't think of something. He was not the one. It was Susan Gender at the suggestion of Duffy Deeter who thought of something. After they had eaten the snakes and Duffy Deeter had found out that the next night there was going to be a dogfight--champion dogs on which money could be bet--after all of that, during which time Berenice had talked excitedly and in detail about her trip to Europe to study French the previous summer and Joe Lon had sat listening, choking on both snake and the thought that he had spent his time and life carrying whiskey and watching Elfy's teeth fall out, they were once again cramped into the little living room when Susan Gender said, "Hard Candy, let's go outside and have us a twirl-off. Settle this snake down some. You feel up to a twirl-off?"

"Always." said Hard Candy. "I always do."

"You're up against a good one," said Berenice. "My sister is a good one." She crossed her strong baton-twirling thighs and Duffy Deeter felt his stomach shift behind his belt. They were only waiting for Elfy to finish spooning the last jar of Gerber's into the older baby. "We both went, you know, to the Dixie National Baton Twirling Institute for two summers. Two summers each, both of us."

"Jesus," Duffy said. "Really?" Besides liking the marvelously absurd ring of Dixie National Baton Twirling Institute, he loved the excited, enthusiastic way Berenice had been babbling ever since she got there, as though she might have been eating speed of some sort.

"Right," she said. "It's on the campus of Ole Miss. Held every summer."

"Dynamite," said Duffy.

She talked on, a little breathlessly, waving her hands, her eyes turning now and again to check Elfy's progress with the baby food.

"When we were there, the director of the institute was Don Sartell. He's known as Mr. Baton, you know."

"I didn't know that," said Duffy Deeter. He was wishing he and Joe Lon could double-team her little ass and thereby force her to give up all her secrets.

"I'm done," said Elfy, turning her ruined smile on them. "This young'un ain't eatin' another bite."

"Let's get to that twirl-off," said Duffy. He looked at Elfy. "Want to take the playpen outside for the babies?"

"Oh, they'll sleep now they full," she said. "We can leave 'm right where they are."

They let Elfy pass first through the door, followed by Willard, Susan Gender, Hard Candy and finally Duffy, who cast one lingering look over his shoulder toward Berenice just passing in front of Joe Lon. Joe Lon's face was gray and tight. He looked a little out of control. Duffy closed the door.

As the door closed, Joe Lon took her arm and spun her to face him. "Don't!" she said. "God, we can't, not here."

"Oh, I 'magine we can. I don't know what you think you doing, reminding ... reminding me...."

She wasn't listening, anyway. She'd already broken one of her nails tearing at his belt. He took her by the wrist and led her down the short narrow hallway to a little room and threw her onto the bed.

"Git naked and take a four-point stance," he said. His teeth were clamped so tight his jaws hurt.

The bed was right next to a wall and she braced herself firmly against the window ledge. He struck her from behind like she'd been a tackling dummy.

"You'll make the holler," Berenice said.

"Holler, then," said Joe Lon Mackey.

"You know how I always holler," she said quickly. And then: "Oh, Jesus, honey, honey, honey, Jesus."

"Is that what you gone holler?" he demanded. "Is that, goddamn it, what you gone holler? Jesus, honey? Is it Jesus, honey?"

She could no longer talk. He had driven her close against the window. The blinds were drawn, but around the edge, through a half inch of warped glass, he could see Hard Candy and Susan where they were twirling off while Willard and Dully and Elfy squatted on the hard-packed dirt, watching. Elfy kept turning back to stare at the trailer, sometimes right at the window where they were locked together looking out. On the campground, men, women and children endlessly passed the snakes from hand to hand. Berenice's hair lay in a damp tangle on her neck. Sweat ran on their bodies, darkening the sheet under them.

Joe Lon held the sharp blades of her hipbones, one in each hand, while he looked absently through the window. Berenice slowly turned her head to gaze fondly back at him over her shoulder. Joe Lon felt inexpressibly awful.

"I must tell you, darling," she said, "I love Shep."

He told himself that he didn't care one way or the other if she loved Shep but that talk of love was the last thing in the world he wanted to hear from her. From anybody. He refused to meet her eyes and finally she turned to gaze with him through the warped glass at Elfy where she still squatted outside the trailer with Willard Miller and Duffy Deeter.

"It doesn't mean I didn't love you," she was saying. "It's not even that I don't love you now."

"I don't want to hear about it," he said.

"All right," she said.

Outside, Elf turned to look quickly back toward the trailer, but then she didn't look anymore, because Willard put his hand on her shoulder and started talking to her, pointing at the girls, who were taking turns testing each other in complicated little dance routines, their silver batons flashing like swords in the sun. In the other room, the babies slowly started crying, almost like singing, a chorus of something sad and interminable.

In a light conversational voice, while they watched Susan Gender skip across the bare dirt yard outside, Berenice said, "You know, darling, baton twirling is the second biggest young girls' movement in America. Did you know that? Uh-huh, is, though. Girl Scouts is numero uno. That means first. But baton twirling is the biggest if you don't count Girl Scouts, and who counts Girl Scouts?" She turned to smile at him over her shoulder. He gave her a single savage but unsatisfying thrust that made her grunt. "The reason is ... well, there's three of them." She didn't look back at him, but she braced herself with one hand and held up the other hand with three fingers for him to see. "Three. First, you don't have to go nowheres. You can do it in the living room or, like them, out in the yard--out in the yard. Second. No expensive equipment. Third. You can practice alone, right by yourself. You can become very tremendous right by yourself."

"What good is it?" said Joe Lon Mackey.

"What?"

"I said, goddamn it, what good is it?"

"Well, now listen. All right. Here, think about this. Did you know it's a Who's Who in Baton Twirling?"

"What the hell you talking about, Berenice Sweet? I believe studying them goddamn foreign languages is done ruint you mind."

She said, "You honey," smiling at him as she did. He made her grunt. She had to use two hands to keep from being punched through the window. "Who's Who in Baton Twirling's a book giving all our names. You know how many pages it's got? Well," she asked, "do you?"

"Berenice, I don't know shit like that."

"Six hundred pages is what it's got.

And costs twelve dollars a copy. Gives all our names and's got six hundred pages. Now what you think?"

He watched Elfy glancing over her shoulder toward the trailer, ignoring the splits, the whirls, the twirling, flashing batons. He did not know what love was. And he did not know what good it was. But he knew he carried it around with him, a scabrous spot of rot, of contagion, for which there was no cure. Rage would not cure it. Indulgence made it worse, inflamed it, made it grow like a cancer. And it had ruined his life. Not now, not in this moment. Long before.

The world had seemed a good and livable place. Brutal, yes, but there was a certain joy in that. The brutality on the football field, in the tonks, was celebration. Men were maimed without malice, sometimes--often, even--in friendship. Lonely, yes. Running was lonely. Sweat was lonely. The pain of preparation was lonely. There's no way to share a pulled hamstring with somebody else. There's no way to farm out part of a twisted knee. But who in God's name ever assumed otherwise? Once you knew that, it was bearable.

But love, love seemed to mess up everything. It had messed up everything. He was as absurd as everything he had witnessed. He could not have said it, but he knew it. It was knowledge that he carried in his blood like a disease. Elfy was watching the window through which he was looking. He felt her eyes on his eyes. And the wavering window glass made her face softer, more vulnerable and afflicted with the pain of childbearing than he could stand to look at.

The golden plain of Berenice's back, gently indented along the spine by twin rolls of smooth muscle, was speckled with glittering drops of drying sweat. The musking odor of her flared into his nostrils like something steaming off a stove. It made the juices of his mouth run and caused an overwhelming desire to eat, to suck onto his tongue all the flavors of her, to make her disappear in an orgy of chewing. But she was still talking, had never stopped talking.

"See, it's beginning solo, intermediate solo, advanced solo, strutting, beginning and military--I was always good at strutting--two-baton, fire-baton, duet, trio and team...."

The babies were screaming now. The older boy was banging the barred playpen in a rage with his rattle. Out in the yard, Elfy sat with her eyes steadily on the room where he held Berenice, she still compulsively talking, in her four-point stance. Susan Gender and Hard Candy Sweet were no longer twirling. They seemed to be in an argument about something, their fists balled on their hips, their legs straddling.

"And they arguing right now because competition is exact. It's exact, Joe Lon, in your twirl-off, it is. In each one, it's a judge and a scorekeeper. The score-keeper doesn't look. The judge looks. He never takes his eyes off the twirl-off. He calls out the points, what he sees, mistakes, good moves, things like that. And the scorekeeper writes it down. That's----"

His mother had left for reasons of love. Deserted them all: Big Joe, himself, his sister, Beeder, the big house. And in deserting them had left an enormous ragged hole in their lives.

The note she left had said: I have gone with Billy. Forgive me. But I love him and I have gone with him.

They knew who Billy was well enough. He was a traveling shoe salesman and Mystic was one of his stops. It had been for years. He was short and nearly bald, a soft, almost feminine-looking man who always wore the same shiny, wrinkled suit and drove a rusting Corvair. And the bitterest, most painful thing Joe Lon ever had to do was admit to himself that his mother had been fucking that little shoe salesman for reasons of love when she had a house and a husband and children and a flower garden and friends and a home town and a son famous through the whole South and meals to cook and clothes to wash, a woman like that--no, not a woman, his mother--lying down on her back with a little man who walked always leaning slightly to the right from carrying a heavy suitcase full of shoe samples.

"Oh, it's exact, all right, the competition is. You take your advanced solo, for instance." She moved her hips languidly against him as she talked. "Your advanced solo has to last at least two minutes and twenty seconds and not more than two minutes and thirty seconds. That's ten seconds to play with and when you're playing----"

Big Joe had gone and got her. Billy lived in Atlanta and Big Joe had gone there and found his wife sitting in a little ratty flat on the edge of a neighborhood full of niggers (Big Joe had given all the details day in and day out for a year after it happened), found his wife sitting alone because Billy was out on his sales route with his suitcase full of shoes and Big Joe had picked her up like a sack of grain and brought her home. It was morning when they got back to Mystic and Joe Lon and Beeder were in school. Beeder came home that afternoon still wearing her little tassled uniform from her cheerleading practice and found her mother sitting dead in her favorite rocker wearing Big Joe's tie. She was wearing her husband's tie and had a one-sentence note pinned to her cotton dress. Beeder had never been the same since.

"And Ole Miss, the home of the Dixie National Baton Twirling Institute, is in Oxford, Missippi, the home of William Faulkner." She had developed an active regular stroke against him now and her breathing was getting in the way of her voice. "I don't know which it's famouser for, Faulkner or----"

His daddy didn't own but one suit of clothes, a black thing made out of heavy wool cloth that he almost never wore except to certain championship dogfights. The cuffs and sleeves were spotted with old blood. And since he didn't own but one suit, he didn't find it necessary to own but one tie, which was black, too. He never untied it but simply loosened it until it would slide over his head and then hung it in the closet like a noose. When Beeder opened the door, she had found her mother sitting in the rocker with a plastic bag over her head and the tie cinched tightly at her throat. Her starting eyes were open under the plastic and her face was blue. The note pinned over her breast was not addressed to anyone. It said: Bring me back now, you son of a bitch.

Through the window it looked as though Susan Gender and Hard Candy would fight. It looked as if they might start swinging their batons any minute. It was an old movie and he had seen it too many times to find it anything but boring. It no longer entertained. He pulled Berenice away from the window and turned her over. She moved to his easiest touch, smiling fondly upon him, but insisting upon talking of love.

"First met Shep, I knew I'd marry him but I'd always love ... love----"

"Take it," he said softly.

He held her by her perfectly formed pink ears and drove his cock into her mouth; she took it willingly and deeply, her eyes still turned up, watching him where he was propped on Elf's pillow. She sucked like a calf at its mother and he never released her ears, forcing himself so deep she could only make little humming noises.

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 it in you ass."

"Yes," she said, "oh, yes, that's----"

"But true love," he said, "goddamn 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.