A Feast of Snakes (3 page)

“Ain’t here,” he shouted into the phone. “He already gone.”

“Send somebody else then. Damn it all anyhow, I want a drink.”

“Ain’t nobody here but me. What happened to that bottle I left by this morning?”

“I drapped it and broke it.”

“Bullshit.”

“Joe Lon, I’m gone have to shoot you with a gun someday, talking to you daddy like that.”

“Who’d run the store if you done that? Maybe Beeder could run the goddam store. Tote you goddam whiskey. Maybe she’d quit with the TeeVee and act normal. Send her over here right now and I’ll give her a bottle for you.”

“You a hard man, son, making such talk about you only sister. Lord Christ Jehovah God might see fit to strike you.” Joe Lon wanted to scream into the telephone that it was not Lord Christ Jehovah God that struck his sister. But he did not. It would do no good. They’d been over that too many times already.

“All right,” he said finally, “never mind. I’ll bring the whiskey myself. Later.”

“How later?”

“When I git a chance.”

“Hurry, son, my old legs is a hurtin.”

“All right.”

Just as he put the telephone down, a car drove up. It stopped but nobody got out. Carload of niggers. He sighed. Joe Lon Mackey carrying shine for a carload of niggers. Who would have thought it? He looked down at his legs as he was going into the little room behind the counter. Who would have thought them wheels, wheels with four-five speed for forty yards, would have come to this in the world. Well, anything was apt to come to anything in this goddam world. That’s the way the world was. He spat as he took down the half pints of shine from the shelf.

During the next hour he sold more than had been sold all day, most of it to blacks who drove up and stopped under the single little light hanging from a pole in front of the store. He wished to God they were allowed to come inside so he wouldn’t have to cart it out front to them. Of course, they were allowed to come inside. Except they were not allowed to come inside. It had been that way for the twenty years his daddy had run the store and it had been that way ever since Joe Lon had taken it over. He hadn’t really kept it that way. It had just stayed that way. Nobody ever complained about it because if you wanted to drink in Mystic, Georgia, you had to stay on the good side of Joe Lon Mackey. Lebeau County was dry except for beer, and since Joe Lon had an agreement with the bootlegger, his was the only place within forty miles you could buy you a drink.

He worked steadily at the whiskey in front of him, chasing it with beer, and by the time Hard Candy’s white Corvette car pulled up out front, he was feeling a little better about the whole thing. The Corvette was Berenice’s old car and it reminded Joe Lon of everything he had been trying not to think about. Willard came in ahead of Hard Candy. He was an inch taller than Joe Lon and looked heavier. He had a direct lidless stare and tiny ears. His hair was cut short and his round blunt head did not so much sit on his huge neck as it seemed buried in it. He was wearing Levis and a school T-shirt with a tiny snake printed over his heart. His worn-out tennis shoes didn’t have any laces in them. He sat on a stool across the counter from Joe Lon and they both watched Hard Candy come through the door stepping in her particular, high-kneed walk that always seemed to make her prance. She took a stool next to Willard. Nobody had spoken. They all sat, unsmiling, looking at one another.

Finally Willard said: “Me’n Hard Candy’s just bored as shit.”

Joe Lon said: “I got a fair case of the cain’t-help-its mysef.”

“I don’t guess a man could git a goddam beer here,” said Willard.

“I guess,” said Joe Lon.

“Two,” said Hard Candy.

Joe Lon said: “Hard Candy, if you don’t quit walking like that somebody’s gone foller you out in the woods and do sompin nasty to you.”

“I wish to God somebody would,” she said.

“
Somebody
already has,” said Willard.

Joe Lon got up to get the beer. When he came back he said: “You want to hold this whiskey bottle I got?”

“We et us some drugs to steady us,” Willard said. “I don’t guess I ought to drink nothing harder’n beer.”

“Okay.”

“But I will,” Willard said.

“I thought you might,” Joe Lon said.

“You shouldn’t do that,” Hard Candy said.

Willard bubbled it four times and set it on the counter. Hard Candy took it up.

“We’ll probably die,” she said, a little breathless when she put it down.

“Probably.”

They sat watching the door for a while, listening to the screenwire tick as bugs flew against it.

“I think it’s gone be a shitty roundup,” said Joe Lon.

“Will if this hot weather holds,” Willard said. “Must be fifty degrees out there right now. Shit, it’s like summer. Won’t be a snake nowhere in the hole stays this warm.”

They sat and watched the door again. A car passed on the road beyond the light now and then. Hard Candy turned and looked at Joe Lon.

“You reckon we could feed one?” she said.

“Let’s wait a little while,” Joe Lon said. “Maybe somebody’ll come in we can take some money off.”

“You got one back there that’ll eat you think?” asked Willard.

“I try to keep one,” Joe Lon said.

They watched the door some more.

“Hell, it ain’t nobody coming,” said Willard. “Git that rascal out here and let’m do his trick.”

“I’ll bet with you,” said Hard Candy. She opened the little clutch purse she was carrying and bills folded out of the top of it.

“I don’t take money from my friends,” said Joe Lon.

“If you gone bet with him on the snake,” said Willard, “you might as well go ahead and give him the goddam money anyway. You sure as hell ain’t gone beat him.”

“I lose sometimes,” said Joe Lon, smiling.

“Git the goddam snake,” said Willard. “Shit, I’ll bet with you.”

“You ain’t bettin with me,” said Joe Lon.

“I’ll make you bet with me,” said Willard.

They were both off their stools now, kind of leaning toward each other across the counter. They were both smiling, but there was an obvious tension in the attitude of their bodies.

“You ever come to make me do something,” said Joe Lon, “you bring you lunch. You’ll be staying awhile.”

“Maybe I can think of something you’ll want to bet on,” said Willard.

“Maybe,” said Joe Lon.

He went into the small room at the back of the counter and they followed him. There was a dim light burning. It took a moment for their eyes to adjust. Bottles of various sizes lined the shelves of both sides of the room. One middle shelf toward the back had no bottles on it. It held, instead, five wire cages that were about two feet square and about that high. Four of the cages held a rattlesnake. The fifth cage had several white rats in it. Joe Lon slapped the side of one of the cages with his hand. The snake made no move or sound. Nor did any of the other snakes.

“I’ve had these so long I probably could handle’m,” said Joe Lon.

“Why don’t you,” said Willard Miller, showing his even, perfect teeth.

“Would if I wanted to,” said Joe Lon.

“Hell, let’s make that the bet then,” said Willard. “The loser has to kiss the snake.”

Joe Lon looked at him for a long moment. “You couldn’t beat me at that either.”

Willard Miller said: “I can beat you at anything.” He was still smiling but something about the way he said it had no smile in it at all.

“You better back you ass out of here before you git it overloaded,” said Joe Lon.

“If we don’t never bet on nothing, how you know I cain’t beat you?” said Willard.

“I know,” said Joe Lon.

Hard Candy said: “I’ll git the rat.”

She went to the cage, opened the top, and reached in. When her hand came out she had a white rat by its long smooth pink tail. It hung head down without moving, its little legs splayed and rigid in the air. They followed Joe Lon out of the room to the counter, where he set the caged snake down.

“Ain’t he a beautiful sumbitch?” said Joe Lon.

“Ain’t nothing as pretty as a goddam snake,” Willard said.

“I’m pretty as a snake,” said Hard Candy.

They both looked at her. She was playing with the rat on the counter, holding its tail and letting it scratch for all it was worth. With her free hand she thumped the rat good-naturedly on top of its head.

“You almost are,” said Willard, taking a pull at Joe Lon’s whiskey bottle, “but you ain’t quite.”

Joe Lon took the bottle. “He’s right, you ain’t quite pretty as a snake.”

“What would you two shitheads know about it anyway?” she said.

Joe Lon took a stopwatch from under the counter. It was the watch his coach had given him when he broke the state record for the two-twenty.

“Just for the fun what would you say?” asked Joe Lon.

“He’ll hit the rat in a hundred and four seconds. He’ll have it swallered in three and a half minutes.”

“That’s three and a half minutes
after
he hits it?”

“Right,” said Willard.

Joe Lon bent down until his nose was only a half inch from the wire cage. The snake was in a corner, tightly knotted, with only its head and tail free. Its waving tongue constantly stroked in and out of its mouth. Its lidless eyes looked directly back at Joe Lon. The head was wide, wider than the body, and flat with a kind of sheen to it that suggested dampness. The tail was rigid now but still not rattling.

“This sucker’ll hit right away, maybe twenty seconds. Yeah, I say twenty seconds. That rat’ll be gone, tail and all, in two and a half minutes. That’s total time. So I’m saying two minutes ten seconds after the hit.” He had been staring into the cage while he talked. Now he straightened and backed off. “Drop that little fucker in.”

“I’m playing,” said Hard Candy.

“You already got the rat messed up and confused from thumpin him on the head,” said Willard. “Stop thumpin him and do like Joe Lon says.”

She held the rat up in the palm of her hand. She stroked its head with her thumb, gently. She pursed her lips and whispered to the rat: “Nobody’s gone hurt you, little rat. We just gone let the snake kill you a little.”

There was a spring-hinged door at the top of the cage that opened only one way. She set the rat on top of the door. It opened inward and the rat dropped through. The door immediately swung shut again. Joe Lon started the stopwatch. The rat landed on its feet, turned, and sniffed its pink tail. It looked at the snake in the corner, sat up on its hind legs, and started licking its front paws. The thick body of the snake moved and a high striking curve appeared below its wide blunt head.

None of them saw the strike; rather, they saw the body of the rat lurch as though struck by some invisible force. It sat for a split second without moving and then leaped straight into the air and landed on its back. The rattlesnake had retreated to the corner, its body again knotted and seemingly coiled about itself with only the dry flat head clear.

Almost immediately the snake came twisting out of the spot where it had withdrawn and very slowly approached the still rat. It touched the rat’s back, ran its blunt head along the hairy stomach and legs, seemed to be taking the rat’s measure. Finally, the snake opened its mouth, unhinged its lower jaw and, slow and gentle as a lover, seemed to suck the rat’s head in over the trembling, darting tongue. Just as the head disappeared, the door of the store slammed open and a voice bellowed: “I caught you fuckers being cruel to little animals agin!”

They all turned together to see Buddy Matlow, wearing a cowboy hat and a wooden leg, standing in the doorway. When they looked back at the cage, there was nothing showing of the rat but the tail, long, pink, and hairless, sticking out of the snake’s mouth like an impossible tongue.

“You degenerate sumbitches,” Buddy Matlow said, watching the thin hairless tail disappear into the snake. “Never could understand how anybody could stand doing things like that to little animals.”

“Ain’t done nothing yet,” said Joe Lon. “Snake et supper. We just watched.”

“I ain’t gone report you,” said Buddy Matlow. “I just fed that snake of mine over at the jail not more’n an hour ago. You can git me a tallboy and a glass a that shine.”

Joe Lon said: “How many times I got to tell you I don’t sell nothing by the glass.”

“I didn’t think to pay for it,” said Buddy.

“Makes a lot of noise for a goddam cripple, don’t he,” said Willard Miller. “I didn’t have no more sense than to step on a stick with slopehead shit all over it, damned if I wouldn’t say please when I asked for something.” Willard’s thin mouth was smiling almost shyly over the rim of his beer can, but his dark eyes were flat and hard and without light.

“You been running over too many grunions and reading about it in the
Wire Grass Farmer,”
Buddy said. He looked down and casually examined his stump. “One of these days I’m gone have to stick this piece a oak up you ass and examine you liver.”

Sitting between them, Hard Candy took another pull at the whiskey bottle. She was flushed from the speed they’d eaten and a little lacquer of sweat beaded her upper lip. She was enjoying it all a lot and only wished it was real, wished they would suddenly lunge off the stools and lock up on the bare wooden floor one on one, wished she could smell a little blood. But she knew it wouldn’t come to anything. They might as well have been talking about the weather.

“You want sompin back here, Willard?” Joe Lon stood in the door of the little room with a beer in one hand and a water glass full of moonshine in the other.

Willard drained the beer in front of him and set it down. “Me’n and Hard Candy got to go.” He smiled and blew Joe Lon a kiss as he and Hard Candy slid off their stools.

Joe Lon and Buddy Matlow watched Hard Candy leave. She might as well have been in front of the band with her baton. She was all high knees and elbows, her hard little body jerking rhythmically. When they were gone, Joe Lon brought the beer and the glass to Buddy.

“You don’t reckon you could put this goddam snake up do you?” Buddy said. “I just soon do my drinking without it.”

They both looked down at the cage at the place where the rat had stopped in a thick knot about four inches deep in the snake. Joe Lon stood listening to the Corvette go over the gravel and onto the highway in a great roar and squalling of tires, laying two hundred yards of rubber before it took second gear. Only then did Joe Lon take up the cage and put it in the back room. He brought another beer back for himself and sat on a stool across the counter from Buddy Matlow.