A Feast of Snakes

PART ONE

She felt the snake between her breasts, felt him there, and loved him there, coiled, the deep tumescent S held rigid, ready to strike. She loved the way the snake looked sewn onto her V-neck letter sweater, his hard diamondback pattern shining in the sun. It was unseasonably hot, almost sixty degrees, for early November in Mystic, Georgia, and she could smell the light musk of her own sweat. She liked the sweat, liked the way it felt, slick as oil, in all the joints of her body, her bones, in the firm sliding muscles, tensed and locked now, ready to spring — to strike—when the band behind her fired up the school song: “Fight On Deadly Rattlers of Old Mystic High.”

She felt a single drop of sweat slip from the small of her back, hang for an instant, and then slide into the mellow groove between the flexed jaws of her ass. When she felt the sweat touch her there, she automatically cut her eyes to see if she could pick out Willard Miller, the Boss Snake of all the Mystic Rattlers, her boss Snake, pick him out from the other helmeted and white-suited boys scrimmaging on the other side of the track. When they made contact, their soft, almost gentle grunts came to her across the green practice field.

She tried to distinguish the sound of him from the sound of the others, and she thought she could, thought how amazingly the sound was like the ragged snorts he made into her ear when he had her bent brutally back over the hood of her Vette. There was hardly any difference at all in the noise he made when he scored on the field or scored on her. In whatever he did, he was always noisy and violent and wet, tending as he did to slobber a little.

She saw the band director raise his baton and she tensed, rolled her weight forward to the balls of her feet, and then the music was crashing around her, the tubas pumping, the drums rattling, and she was strutting like it was the end of the world. From the sides of the field came the dry, awesome rattle of the diamondback. Some of the fans had come out and they had brought their gourds with them. The gourds were as big as cantaloupes, shaped like crooked-neck squash, and full of dried seed so that when they were shaken they vibrated the air with the genuine sound of a snake. During a game, the home stands of the Mystic Rattlers put everybody’s hair on end. You could hear those dried gourd seeds two miles away, buzzing like the biggest snake den God ever imagined. During football season, nobody in Mystic was very far from his gourd. Sometimes you could see people carrying them around with them in town, down at the grocery store, or inside Simpkin’s, the only dry goods store in Mystic.

The band was strung out now in the shape of a snake. The band members used the yard markers to position themselves, double timing in place, drawing their knees high and waving their instruments, so that the entire snake vibrated in the sun. The snare drums were under one goal post, rattling for all they were worth and she was under the other goal post, standing in the snake’s mouth, her arms rigid as fangs. She was at one with the music. She did not have to think to perform. Of all the majorettes — and there were five others — she marched in place with the highest knees, the biggest smile, the finest skin, the best teeth. She was a natural, and as a natural her one flaw — if she had one — was that her mind tended to wander. She didn’t have to think, didn’t have to concentrate like the other girls to get her moves right. Consequently she sometimes got bored with the drills and her mind wandered. Even now as she pranced in place, her back arched, her pelvis thrust forward, she was winking at Joe Lon Mackey where he stood under the end zone bleachers.

That was where he usually stood when he watched them practice and she was not surprised to see him there, glad rather, because it gave her something to think about. He wasn’t twenty feet from her, standing in the shadows, a burlap sack in one hand and a brown paper sipping sack in the other. From time to time he raised the sipping sack to his mouth. He’d winked at her when she first stopped under the goal post. She’d winked back. Turned her smile on him. She’d always liked him. Hell, everybody had always liked Joe Lon. But she didn’t really know him that well. Her sister, who was going to school at the University of Georgia in Athens, her sister, Berenice, knew him that well.

Her sister and Joe Lon had been a number in Mystic, Georgia, in all of Lebeau County for that matter, and Joe Lon could have been going to the University of Georgia in Athens or anywhere else in this country he wanted to except it turned out Joe Lon was not a good student. That’s the way they all put it there in Mystic: Joe Lon Mackey is not a good student. But it was worse than that and they all knew it. It had never been established exactly if Joe Lon could read. Most of the teachers at Mystic High who had been privileged to have him in their classrooms thought he probably couldn’t. But they liked him anyway, even loved him, loved tall, blond, high school All-American Joe Lon Mackey whose exceptional quietness off the playing field everybody chose to call courtesy. He had the name of being the most courteous boy in all of Lebeau County, although it was commonly known that he had done several pretty bad things, one of which was taking a traveling salesman out to July Creek and drowning him while nearly the entire first string watched from high up on the bank where they were sipping beer.

She missed the band director’s whistle signaling that the snake was about to strike and consequently the five other girls making up the snake’s head almost knocked her over. She’d been standing, her arms positioned as fangs, winking at Joe Lon where he raised his sack in the shadows and wondering if Berenice would come home for the roundup, when the girl right behind her, highstepping, hit her in the kidney with a knee and almost knocked her down. She caught herself just in time and hissed over her shoulder: “You want you ass kicked, do you?”

The girl said something back to her but it was lost in the pumping tubas. Under the stands Joe Lon Mackey took the last pull from a Jim Beam half pint and dropped the paper sack with the bottle in it into the weeds. He took out two pieces of Dentyne chewing gum and put them into his mouth. Then he lit a cigarette. He had been watching Candy— called Hard Candy by nearly everybody but her parents, Dr. and Mrs. Sweet — because she reminded him of Berenice and all the things that might have come true for him but had not. Two years ago Berenice had been a senior and head majorette and he, Joe Lon, had been Boss Rattler.

It was said that Joe Lon, on any given day of his senior year of high school, could have run through the best college defensive line in the country. But he had not. He had never set foot on a single college football field even though he had been invited to visit more than fifty colleges and universities. But that was all right. He’d had his. That’s what he told himself ten times a day: That’s all right. By God, I had mine.

He reached into the back pocket of his Levis and pulled out a sheet of blue paper. It was almost worn through in the creases where it was folded. He shook it open and held it up to the light. It said: “I will see you at rattlesnake time. Love Berenice.” There were some X’s under the name. The letter had come to Joe Lon at the store three days ago. It had taken him most of the afternoon to be sure of the words and once he was sure of them, they had given him no pleasure. He had thought he was through with all that, had made his peace. He folded the letter and put it back in his pocket. But on the way to his pickup he took the letter out again and, using his teeth and his free hand, he carefully tore it into very small pieces and left them scattered behind him in the gloomy aisle underneath the stands.

He drove over to the little road that went by the practice field and watched Willard Miller run the ball. They were running him against the grunions, the smaller, second-string boys who came out for football for God knows what reason since they almost never got into a game and could only offer up their bodies as tackling dummies for the bigger, stronger boys. He watched Willard Miller fire three straight lines up the middle. It was important to run him against grunions now and then. It gave him a chance to practice his moves without running the risk of getting injured. It also gave him great opportunities to run over people and step on them, mash their heads and their hands, kick their ribs good.

Joe Lon felt his own thigh muscles tick, as he watched Willard fake a grunion out of his shoes and then, after he had the boy entirely turned around and beaten, run directly over him for no reason at all. Well, what the hell, all things had to end, both good and bad. There were other things in this world besides getting to step on somebody. The main thing was to hold on and not let it bother you. Joe Lon turned on his lights and drove off into the early November dusk.

He had been drinking most of the day, but he didn’t feel drunk. He drove out past the empty flag pole on the post office and past the jail, where he saw Buddy Matlow’s supercharged Plymouth with the big sheriff’s star painted on the door parked under a leafless Chinaberry tree, and on through town, where several people waved to him. He didn’t wave back. Finally, two people shook their gourds at him though and he did raise his hand and smile but he only half saw them. He was preoccupied by the thought of going home to Elfie and the babies, that trailer where he lived in a constant state of suffocating anger.

He had the trailer just outside of town on the edge of a ten-acre field he’d bought and turned into a combination trailer park and campground. He drove slowly down the narrow dirt road leading to it and passed finally under a big banner that he himself had strung from two tall telephone poles he had bought secondhand from the REA. The banner was neatly printed in letters about two feet high: WELCOME TO MYSTIC GEORGIA’S ANNUAL RATTLESNAKE ROUNDUP.

The lights were on in his trailer, a double-wide with a concrete patio, and he could see the shadow of his wife Elfie moving behind the window in the kitchen. He parked the truck, took the burlap sack from the back, and walked out to a little fenced-in pen that had a locked gate on it. He took out a key and opened it. In the back of the pen were several metal barrels. The tops of the barrels were covered with fine-mesh chicken wire. He kicked two of the barrels and immediately the little enclosure was filled with the dry constant rattle of diamondbacks. He took a stick with a wire hook on the end of it from the corner of the pen, set the burlap sack down, and waited.

The mouth of the sack moved and the blunt head of a rattlesnake appeared. It seemed to grin and waved its forked tongue testing, tasting the air. There was an undulation and another foot of snake, perhaps four inches thick, appeared behind the head. Joe Lon moved quickly and surely and the snake was twisting slowly on the end of the hooked stick.

“Surprise, motherfucker,” said Joe Lon, and dropped it into one of the barrels.

For a long moment, he stared into the barrel after the snake but all that appeared there was a writhing of the darkness, an incessant boiling of something thick and slow-moving.

He put the chicken wire back in place, threw the hooked stick in the corner of the pen, and headed for the trailer.

Elfie was at the sink when he walked into the kitchen. From the back she still looked like the girl he’d married. Her hair was red and glowed like a light where it fell to the small of her back. Her hips were round and full without being heavy. Her calves were high, her ankles thin. But then she turned around and she was a disaster. Those beautiful ball-crushing breasts she’d had two years ago now hung like enormous flaps down the front of her body. And although she was not fat, she looked like she was carrying a basketball under her dress. Two inches below her navel her belly just leaped out in this absolutely unbelievable way. The kitchen smelled like she had been cooking baby shit.

“Smells like you been cooking baby shit in here, Elf,” he said.

There was a fat eighteen-month-old boy strapped into a highchair. Right beside him in a blue bassinet was a fat two-month-old boy.

Elfie turned from the sink and smiled. Her teeth had gone bad. The doctor said it had something to do with having two babies so close together.

“Joe Lon, honey, I been trying to keep your supper warm for you.”

“Goddammit, Elf,” he said. “You ever gone git them teeth fixed or not? I given you the money.”

She stopped smiling, pulling her lips down in a self-conscious way. “Joe Lon, honey, I just ain’t had the time, the babies and all.”

There was no dentist in Mystic. She would have to go over to Tifton, and the trip took the better part of a day.

“Leave them goddam younguns with somebody and git on over there and git you mouth looked after. I’m sick and tard of them teeth like that.”

“Aw right, Joe Lon, honey.” She started putting food on the table and he sat down across from the two babies. “Don’t you want to wash you hands or nothing?”

“I’m fine the way I am.”

She took some thin white biscuits out of the oven and put them in front of him. Along with everything else she was a terrible cook. He took one of the lardy biscuits off the plate, tore it open, and dipped some redeye gravy on it. She sat with her plate in front of her without eating, just staring at him, her lips held down tight in an unseemly way.

“Was it a bad day at the store, Joe Lon, honey?”

He had been all right when he came into the trailer, but he sat at the table now trembling with anger. He had no idea where the anger came from. He just felt like slapping somebody. He wasn’t looking at her but he knew she was still watching him, knew her plate was still empty, knew her mouth was trembling and trying to smile. It made him sick with shame and at the same time want to kill her.

“I left the nigger at the store,” he said. “I went snake hunting.”

The biscuit and gravy was sticking in his throat and a great gaseous bubble of whiskey rose to meet it. He wasn’t going to be able to finish it. He wasn’t going to be able to eat anything.

“What all did you git?” she said in a small voice. When he didn’t answer, she said: “Did you git anything?”

The baby strapped in the highchair had a tablespoon he was beating the tray in front of him with. Then he quit beating the tray and threw it into the bassinet and hit the other baby in the head, causing him to scream in great gasping sobs. It so startled the baby in the highchair that he started kicking and screaming and choking too. Joe Lon, who had felt himself on the edge of exploding anyway, shot straight out of his chair. He grabbed the greasy biscuit off his plate and leaned across the table. Elfie didn’t move. She left her hands in her lap. Her eyes didn’t even follow him up. She kept staring straight ahead while he stuffed the dripping biscuit down the front of her cotton dress, between her sore, hanging breasts. He put his face right in her face.

“I got sompin,” he shouted. “You want me to tell you what I got? I got goddammit filled up to here with you and these shitty younguns.”

She had never once looked at him and the only sign she made that she might have heard was the trembling in her mouth got faster. He kicked over a chair on the way out of the trailer, and before he even got through the door he heard her crying join the babies’. By the time he got to his truck the whole trailer was wailing. He leaned against the fender trembling, feeling he might puke. He almost never had an impulse to cry, but lately he often wanted to scream. Screaming was as near as he could get to crying usually, and now he had to gag to keep from howling like a moon-struck dog.

Jesus, he wished he wasn’t such a sonofabitch. Elf was about as good a woman as a man ever laid dick to, that’s the way he felt about it. Of course getting married with her three months gone and then putting another baby to her before the first one was hardly six months old didn’t do her body any good. And it ruined his nerves completely. Hell, he guessed that was to be expected. But it didn’t mean he ought to treat her like a dog. Christ, he treated her just like a goddam dog. He just couldn’t seem to help it. He didn’t know why she stayed with him.

He stood watching the ten-acre campground, knowing tomorrow it would fill up with snakehunters and blaring radios and noise of every possible kind and wondered if his nerves would hold together. He took a deep breath and held it a long time and then slowly let it out. There was no use thinking about it. It didn’t matter one way or the other. The hunt was coming — the noise and the people — and whether he could stand it or not wouldn’t change a thing. What he needed was a drink. He glanced once at the trailer, where the shadowy figure of his lumpy wife moved in the lighted window, and jumped into the truck and roared off down the road as though something might have been chasing him.

By the time he got to the store he had gone to howling. Through the open front door, he could see George sitting behind the counter on a high stool. There were no cars or trucks out front. Joe Lon sat next to the little store that was hardly more than a shed and howled. He knew George would hear him and it bothered him but George had heard him before. George would not say anything. That was the good thing about a nigger. He never let on that he saw anything or heard anything.

Finally Joe Lon got out of the truck and went inside. He didn’t look directly at George because howling made him look just like he’d been crying, made his eyes red and his nose red and his face flushed. He was wishing now he had not torn up Berenice’s letter. He wished he had it to look at while he drank a beer.

“Git me a beer, George,” he said.

George got off the stool and went through a door behind the counter into a tiny room not much bigger than a clothes closet. Joe Lon sat on the high stool and hooked the heels of his cowboy boots over the bottom rung. He took out some Dentyne and lit a Camel. Directly, George came back with a Budweiser tallboy.

“What’d you sell today?” Joe Lon said.

“Ain’t sell much,” said George

“How much?” he said. “Where’s you marks?”

George took a piece of ruled tablet paper out of the bib of his overalls. The paper had a row of little marks at the top and two rows of little marks at the bottom. It meant George had sold twenty bottles of beer, five half pints, fourteen pints, and one fifth, all bonded. He had also sold ten Mason fruit jars of moonshine.

“Hell, that ain’t bad for a Thursday,” said Joe Lon.

“Nosuh, it ain’t bad for a Thursday,” George said.

“I got it now,” said Joe Lon. “You go on home.”

George stood where he was. His gaze shifted away from Joe Lon’s face until he was almost looking at the ceiling. “Reckon I could take me a little taste of sompin? Howsomever, it be true I ain’t got no cash money.”

Joe Lon said: “Take yourself one of them half pints a shine. I’ll put it on you ticket. Bring the one of them bonded whiskeys while you in there.”

George brought the whiskey and set it on the counter in front of Joe Lon, dropping as he did the half pint of moonshine into the deep back pocket of his overalls.

Joe Lon had brought another ruled piece of tablet paper out of a drawer in front of him. “Damned if you ain’t drinking it up bout fast as you making it, George.”

“I know I is,” George said.

“You already behind on the week and it ain’t nothing but Thursday,” said Joe Lon.

“It ain’t nothing but Thursday an I already be behind on the week,” said George, shaking his head.

George hadn’t moved so Joe Lon said: “You don’t want to borrow money too, do you? You already behind.”

“Nosuh, I don’t want no money. I already behind.”

“What is it then?”

“Mistuh Buddy. He done locked up Lottie Mae again.”

“Jesus.”

“Yessuh.”

“For what?”

“Say she a sportin lady.”

“Jesus.”

“Yessuh.”

Buddy Matlow would take a liking to a woman and if she would not come across he would lock her up for a while, if he could. As soon as he had been elected Sheriff and Public Safety Director for Lebeau County he started locking up ladies who would not come across. They were usually black but not always. Sometimes they were white. Especially if they were transients just passing through, and a little down on their luck. If he got to honing for one like that and she wouldn’t come across, he’d lock her up no matter what color she was, sometimes even if she had a man with her. He had been called to accounts twice already by an investigator from the governor’s office, but as he kept telling Joe Lon, they’d never touch him with anything but a little lecture full of bullshit about how he ought to do better. Hadn’t he been the best defensive end Georgia Tech ever had? Hadn’t he been consensus All-American two years back-to-back and wouldn’t he have been a hell of a pro if he hadn’t blown his right knee? And hadn’t he gone straight to Veet Nam, stepped on a pungy stick that had been dipped in Veet Nam Ease shit? Hadn’t they had to cut his All-American leg off? Goddammit he’d paid his dues, and now it was his turn.

“I’ll see about it,” Joe Lon said.

“Would you do that, Mistuh Joe Lon? Would you see about it?”

“I’ll talk to him tonight or first thing in the morning.”

“I wisht you could axe him about Lottie Mae tonight.”

“Tonight or first thing in the morning.”

He cut the seal on the whiskey with his thumbnail and took a pull at it. George started for the door. Joe Lon waved the bottle in the air and gasped a little. He’d taken a bigger swallow than he meant to. He followed the whiskey with a little beer while George waited, watching him patiently from the door.

“Lummy git them Johnny-on-the-spots?”

Lummy was George’s brother. They both worked for Joe Lon Mackey. They’d worked for Joe Lon’s daddy before they worked for Joe Lon. They’d never been told what they made in wages. And they had never thought to ask. They only knew at any given moment in the week whether they were ahead or behind on what they’d drawn on account. Ahead was good; behind was bad. Everybody was usually behind on everything though and nobody worried about it much.

When George didn’t answer, Joe Lon said: “The Johnny-on-the-spots, did Lummy git’m?”

Nothing showed in George’s face. He said: “Them Johnny-on-the-spot.” It wasn’t a question. He’d just repeated it.

“Hunters’ll start coming in tomorrow,” said Joe Lon. “If the Johnny-on-the-spots ain’t in the campground we in trouble.”

“Be in trouble,” said George.

“What?” said Joe Lon.

George said: “What it was?”

“The shitters, George!” said Joe Lon. “Did Lummy git the goddam shitters or not?”

George’s face opened briefly, relaxed in a smile. He did a little shuffle with his feet, took the moonshine out of his back pocket, looked at it, felt of it, and put it back. “Sho now, Lummy come wif the shitters on the truck all the way from Cordele.”

“I didn’t see’m on the campground,” Joe Lon said. “I should’ve seen’m.”

“He ain’t taken them shitters offen the truck, but he have’m everone. I seen’m mysef. Mistuh Joe Lon, them shitters be fine.”

“Just so you got’m, and they out there when the hunters start rolling in.”

“You drink you whiskey, Mistuh Joe Lon. Don’t think twice. Lummy and me is put our minds on the whole thing.” The screen door banged shut behind him, and Joe Lon poured another dollop of whiskey down. It wasn’t doing any good much, didn’t seem to be taking hold. He knew nothing was going to help a whole lot until he saw Berenice and either made a fool of himself or did not. He had the overwhelming feeling that he was going to make a fool of himself. Tear something up. Maybe his life. Well, at least he got the Johnny-on-the-spots. Last year it had taken two weeks to clean the human shit up in Mystic. There’d been about three times as many people as there had ever been before.

The rattlesnake roundup had been going on now as long as anybody in town could remember, but until about twelve years ago it had been a local thing, a few townspeople, a few farmers. They’d have a picnic, maybe a sack race or a horse-pulling contest and then everybody would go out into the woods and see how many diamondbacks they could pull out of the ground. They would eat the snakes and drink a little corn whiskey and that would do it for another year.

But at some time back there, the snake hunt had started causing outsiders to come in. Word got out and people started to come, at first just a few from Tifton or Cordele and sometimes as far away as Macon. From there on it had just grown. Last year they had two people from Canada and five from Texas.

Mystic, Georgia, turned out to be the best rattlesnake hunting ground in the world. There were prizes now for the heaviest snake, the longest snake, the most snakes, the first one caught, the last one caught. Plus there would be a beauty contest. Miss Mystic Rattler. And shit. Human shit in quantities that nobody could believe. This year, though, they had the Johnny-on-the-spots. Chemical shitters.

The telephone rang. It was his daddy. He wanted Joe Lon to send over a bottle with George.

“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.

“That boy’s sompin, ain’t he?” Buddy said.

“Uh huh.”

They drank in silence for a while, listening to the night tick against the screens.

“I wish you’d drink and git the hell out of here. Ain’t no niggers gone come up here with you car parked out there.”

But what he said was reflex. It was what he always said. He wasn’t studying the car with the sheriff’s star on the door or Buddy Matlow. He was thinking about that Corvette, the squalling rubber, squatting with power when you floored it. It had belonged to Berenice before she went off to college. He used to drive it, used to make it sing on all the highways of Lebeau County. He knew where Willard was headed right this moment. He used to go there himself. It was all part of the package, part of being the Boss Snake of all the Mystic Rattlers. Willard was headed for Doctor Sweet’s drug cabinet to which Hard Candy would have a key, just as Berenice had had one. They would get in there and Willard would eat whatever he felt like — a little something to take him up, or maybe bring him down a bit — and she would fill her little pockets full and off they would go over the dark countryside trying to decide what to do with the night.

That was the only decision there was once upon a time: what to do with the night. But then Berenice had graduated and the doctor had bought her an Austin-Healy and given Hard Candy the Vette and Berenice had gone off to the University of Georgia and Joe Lon had taken over from his daddy dealing whiskey. He tried to turn loose the memory but couldn’t. He looked at Buddy, his cowboy hat pushed back on his head, quietly sipping out of the water glass, his eyes half closed and seeing nothing while Joe Lon saw for no particular reason — except perhaps because of the letter he had left in shreds under the stands — a night before a snake hunt in his senior year when he already knew he was never going to college and that Berenice was, saw himself sad, his heart hurt, leaning against the door of the white Corvette and Berenice inside smiling up at him. They were both wired tight on Dexedrine and the look in her face was a little off-center, a little crazy, as it often was. Many times it was like that when she was straight and had eaten nothing.

“Let’s go look at the snake pit,” she had said.

“I don’t care,” he said. He kept thinking he’d never tote the pigskin again, that he was destined to deal nigger whiskey. He dropped into the car and took it up in a single mounting roar to a hundred and twenty, had in fact wrung the needle off the speedometer. But it brought no pleasure. He saw his life too clearly, knew too well where it was going, and all the time Berenice sat on the other side, her crazy face oblivious to the speed, flashing her thighs and humming Dixie a little high and off-key. He had always loved her because she was crazy, didn’t seem to give a damn about anything. Tonight he hated her for precisely those reasons.

The pit where all the snakes of the hunt would be kept was on the football field of Mystic High School, where it had always been since the hunt began. The Vette came onto the field in a growling power slide. The high rooster tail of sand thrown by the car was bright, glittering under a full moon. The shadows of the two enormous oak trees lay on the edge of the field like two dark lakes. It was in the shadow of one of the trees that they finally stopped, but not before Joe Lon had roared in three tight circles within yards of the trunk of the tree.

He had been driving about two thirds unwrapped from the dope so he thumbed the top off a fresh bottle of Budweiser taken from a bucket of ice between Berenice’s feet. He was laughing but there was no humor in it. It didn’t even sound good-natured. “I like to run over that goddam tree.”

“You should have,” she said. “Get us a ramp and jump the thing like Evel what’s-his-fucking-face.”

He reached across and got another bottle of beer and opened it. “Here, press this to you face. It’ll help you feelings.”

She took the beer. “Nothing’s gone help my feelings tonight,” she said.

“I’ll think of something,” he said.

“I hope so.”

“Never doubt the Boss Snake,” he said. “I told you never to.”

She said, “I forgot.”

“Don’t forget,” he said.

He opened the door and got out of the car. She got out too and came around to stand beside him. Without speaking, but as if on signal, they walked to the center of the field and stood together looking off toward the school. It was made of red brick with four white columns in front. Across the front, cut into a slab of cement, was the legend: LEBEAU COUNTY CONSOLIDATED HIGH SCHOOL OF MYSTIC, GEORGIA. It was as bright as day in the moonlight and they stood in the field of packed dirt equidistant between the wood-and-wire snake pit on their left and another structure built of fresh-cut raw lumber on their right. The structure on the right was a kind of stage with a painted sign stuck on each of its four sides. All the signs said the same thing: THE RATTLESNAKE QUEEN.

“Take my dick out,” said Joe Lon. “I have to piss.” Without even looking, but with no fumbling, she reached over with her left hand and unzipped his Levis. She held him while he gave water, a great frothing stream into the moon-colored dirt at their feet.

“Don’t seem like to me this goddam year will ever be over,” he said.

She shook him good while he talked and put him back behind the zipper.

He said: “Seem like I been in this town forever.”

“It’ll be different,” she said, “at the university. Anyway, I hope it’ll be different for me. I could stand me something different for a while.”

She was going to the University at Athens in the fall to be the meanest majorette the state of Georgia had ever seen. And they pretended he was going to the University of Alabama to break bones for Bear Bryant, although they both knew he wasn’t going anywhere but to the little store where his daddy kept the back room full of bootleg whiskey.

“That’s nine months away,” he said. “Anything that long might as well be never.”

“I’ll miss you,” she said.

“Uh huh. I magine.”

“Anybody that’s known a Boss Snake’ll never forget him.” As they talked they had wandered over to the snake pit.

Sheets of plywood formed the sides of a square about twenty feet long and twenty feet wide. The plywood rose to four feet and then chicken wire had been stretched on top of that. Two feet of earth had been dug out of the bottom of the pit. This was where the snakes would be weighed, marked, and collected during the hunt.

“I think I love you,” she said. “I think I’ll always love you.”

He looked straight up toward the bright moon and started turning in slow circles. Finally he stopped and turned his unblinking, slightly drunken gaze on her. “You gone have to do sompin about this conversation. It’s just boring the shit out of me.”

“We could go to the car and get another beer,” she said in a small sullen voice.

“We already done that,” he said. “I don’t feel like doing what we already done before.”

He reached out and picked her up and put her under his massive arm. Her full cheerleader’s legs dangled behind and she arched her back to look up at him. Her face was slack and without expression. He knew she was only mildly interested in what he might do. He was given to picking her up at odd moments and doing something with her.

He walked around on the other side of the plywood and wire pen. There was a little gate there with two metal hinges and a hook latch. He opened the gate. He held her under his left arm and with his right pointed down into the dirt pit.

“Look at them snakes,” he said.

They stared down into hard-packed moon-colored dirt.

“It’s enough poison in there to kill everthing in Mystic,” she said.

“To kill everthing in the world,” he said.

“Good,” she said. “Rattlesnake fangs hanging from all the throats of the world.”

“From titties,” he said. “Them fanged mouths sucking them titties.”

“Chewing dicks,” she said.

“Being dicks,” he said and stepped down into the pit. “Snakes and dicks. Sweet slick dicks and snakes.”

“Put me down in the snakes,” she said.

He laid her down on the dirt floor of the pit on her back. She writhed gently looking up at him. His moon-struck hair splayed from his head.

“Oh God, your snakes are cold.” She touched her belly. “They’re here. They’re filling me here.” She touched her breasts. “And here.” Her eyes were closed now. Her mouth a little way open. “A cold bath of snakes,” she said. “I’m freezing full of snakes. All in my blood. Crawling through my heart.” She opened her eyes and he still stood above her, beautiful and powerful with the moonlight splintering against his back, casting his face in solid shadow. “Lie down here, Joe Lon. Lie down in these snakes.”

He drew back. “No.” She was a crazy bitch, had always been, and she sometimes scared him. She was always doing crazy shit and saying crazy shit, and sometimes it scared him. Sometimes out in the black dark when she started in on it, he felt something go soft and queasy in his stomach.

“You scared,” she said. “You scared of these snakes?”

Joe Lon said: “I ain’t scared of a goddam thing. Don’t matter if it walks or crawls or flies in the air.”

“Then lie down. I’m cold. I’ll die in these freezing snakes.” He should have kicked her or stepped on her but he didn’t. He slowly sank to his knees and then lowered himself over her. They lay very still for a while. Then he moved and lay beside her on his back.

“Feel’m?” she said. “Feel them snakes?”

He made a sound, a kind of neutral grunt.

“We’re buried to our goddam eyes in the thick good bodies of snakes,” she said. “And you’ll die too. You might as well go on, Joe Lon, go on and be afraid.”

She was touching him now, with both hands, tentatively, squeezing and pressing, her fingers extended with the tips together, moving over his body like the twin heads of blind snakes, or so it seemed to him, lying there in a cold sweat.

Her hands stopped and she crawled up over him, deliberately making her body twist and writhe in the supple windings of a snake. She started again touching him. She was moving all over now, her legs, her body, her hands. Then everything quieted, everything seeming to stop at once.

“I found him,” she whispered. “The Boss Snake of all the snakes.”

Joe Lon lay on his back, his eyes tightly closed, the skin on his wide face drawn and white. “You goddam right,” he whispered.

“Look,” she said. “Oh look at him. That sumbitch strike you, you know you struck.”

He opened his eyes and raised his head and looked down himself to the place where she had unzipped his Levis and his cock stood curved in front of her face. She hissed and he felt her hot breath. Her tongue, black in the shadow of her hair, darted in and out of her mouth.

He put his head back and said: “Okay.”

He closed his eyes and thought about the hand job she had given him under the east stands of the practice field when she was in the tenth grade and then the first time he had asked her for a date and they were in his Ford pickup, parked and kissing to the point of exploding there behind the A&W Rootbeer stand in Tifton where they had driven on a Friday night to first see a movie because there was no movie in Mystic and then go for a hamburger they never got because he reached over and dragged her in with him behind the steering wheel and they had started kissing and trembling and going at each other with both hands and it had been the same ever since. All the way through high school they had been at each other as though they were fighting a war.

Lying there in the snakepit, they both heard the sound of a car motor a long time before they knew it was actually coming onto the football field with them, and they were being hit by the gravel and sand raining through the chicken wire before they knew the car was spinning around and around the place where they lay.

Joe Lon straightened up and Berenice came up behind him and they saw Buddy Mallow’s patrol car at the same time. Buddy hung out the window grinning, and whooping at the top of his lungs.

“Goddammit,” he screamed at them as he one-handed the Plymouth around and around the pit where they sat hunkered, turning to follow him, “goddammit, ain’t life grand!”

In the car beside him, a woman, small and dark, sat very still and did not turn her head.

“Crazy bastard’s got another one,” Joe Lon said. But Berenice had already lowered herself upon him again and did not answer.

“How’s at?”

“What?” said Joe Lon. When he looked up from his beer, Buddy Matlow was watching him from across the counter.

“You better go on home, son,” said Buddy Matlow, “you started talking to you beer.”

“Just thinking out loud,” Joe Lon said.

“Who was the crazy fucker answering you?” said Buddy.

Joe Lon shrugged and looked at the ceiling. The night was beginning to get cool. Joe Lon got up and went over to the window and closed it. “You want another beer?”

“I could drink another one, if it was give to me.”

Joe Lon brought it out of the back room. Buddy still had half a glass of moonshine. He took a sip and chased it.

Joe Lon said: “You wouldn’t want to let Lottie Mae go home, would you?”

“What?”

“Buddy, I’m too tired and hurt to talk about it.”

“Don’t talk about it then,” Buddy said. “I don’t know as it’s any of you business.”

“It bothers the niggers. If it bothers them, it bothers me.”

“How’s at?”

“They unload the shitters. They hep me. I told George I’d speak to you.”

“You real worried about George, are you?”

“He ain’t the only one in the family. I don’t even know how many connections they got and they all hep me out one way or the other. I said I’d speak to you.”

“All right, you spoke to me.”

“You wouldn’t want to let her go home, would you?”

Buddy Matlow watched him steadily for a long moment, then he drained the water glass. “Sure,” he said. “Okay. I’ll send her home tonight.”

“I prechate it,” said Joe Lon.

Buddy Matlow reached for his back pocket where he had his wallet chained to his cartridge belt.

“On me,” Joe Lon said. “I owe you.”

“Decent of you,” Buddy said. He turned and went out to his Plymouth Cruiser, where he sat behind the wheel smoking. His face was mottled and every now and then he spat out the window. He couldn’t seem to cut any slack anywhere. He’d earned it. Goddammit, he knew he’d earned it but nobody would own up to it. If you couldn’t cut a little slack behind a ruined All-American wheel — ruined in defense of the fucking U S of A, where could you cut it? He thumped the cigarette in a high sparking arch and pulled away from the store and drove slowly in a controlled rage to the jail. His deputy, Luther Peacock, was sitting at the desk when he got there.

“Go eat supper, Luther.”

“How long you want me to eat?” Luther said.

“Eat till after midnight, Luther. You take you a good slow supper.”

“I’m hongry anyhow,” Luther said, reaching for his hat.

Buddy Matlow walked across the room and down a hall to a cell. He stopped without looking in it. “You know if you tell anybody I love you, I’ll kill you. You know that, don’t you?”

Lottie Mae did not answer. She sat on a low chair in the center of the cell as still and quiet as a rock. There was only one cell in the large bare room and she was the only prisoner. There were two windows but they were both closed. Sweat stood on Lottie Mae’s face like drops of oil. Buddy Matlow walked up and down in front of the cell. There was no other sound but the steady knock of his peg leg against the floor.

“I ain’t tellin nobody nothin,” she finally said.

“You told George,” he said. “You told George and he told Joe Lon and now I guess ever sumbitch in Mystic is laughing at old Buddy Matlow. An I’m gone tell you one goddam thing. Buddy Matlow don’t like to be laughed at. He don’t take to it one damn bit.”

“I ain’t tol George,” she said.

“Well, what is it? Can he read goddam minds or what?”

“Ain’t nobody in Mystic don’t know where I is,” she said.

Buddy Madow quit walking. He took hold of the bars and stared at her. Her thin cotton dress stuck to her back and sweat ran on her bare legs.

“It won’t make a difference whether they know or not,” he said.

She got off the stool and came to stand in front of him. “Please, Mister Buddy, let me go on …”

“Goddam you, quit calling me Mister! Ain’t I already told you I loved you?”

She went back to sit on the stool, walking backwards, never taking her eyes off him, her body shaking as if with cold.

When she had stopped shaking she said in a low sullen voice: “I ain’t studying love. It’s gone be trouble account all this. You be in trouble already now.”

Buddy Matlow gripped the bars and stared at her. “Be in trouble? Why, bless your sweet nigger heart, I was born in trouble. It’s been trouble ever since.” He slapped his right thigh. “That’s trouble right there. That fucking stick leg is trouble.” He had been shouting, but his voice suddenly lowered. “But what the hell, I try not to whine about it too much. Everybody’s got their load of shit to haul. Look at you. Ever time you show that black face in the world you got trouble. You think I don’t know that? I do. I appreciate what it is to be a nigger. I got ever sympathy in the world for it. But the minute I laid eyes on that little jacked-up ass of yours I known I was in love again.”

“Talking crazy,” she said.

“I may be crazy,” he said.

“Might as well let me out. I ain’t doing nothing nasty. Didn’t las time. Ain’t this time.”

“This time is different,” Buddy Matlow said.

“Ain’t never gone be different,” she said. “My ma ain’t raised no youngan of hern to do nothin nasty.”

Buddy Matlow smiled. “Last time you was locked up we weren’t having us a roundup.”

“Roundup,” she said.

“Snakes,” he said.

“Snakes?” she said.

“Rattlesnakes.”

“Lordy.”

Buddy Matlow went over to one corner and bent down behind a splintered wooden desk. When he straightened up he had a metal bucket in his hand. A piece of screen wire was bent to cover the top of the bucket. He brought the bucket to the cell door and set it down.

“You know what’s in that bucket?”

“Lordy Lordy Lordy Lordy Lordy.” She sang the word in a little breathless whisper.

He turned the bucket over with his wooden leg and a diamondback as thick as a man’s wrist and nearly four feet long spilled out onto the floor. It neither rattled nor lifted its head. Only its bright lidless eyes showed that it was alive. There was a knot in the snake’s body, a swelling about a foot back from the head, like a tumor growing there.

“You ain’t got a thing to be scared of, Lottie Mae, darling. This snake just et. Had’m a rat.”

He touched the swelling in the snake’s body with his wooden leg. The snake lifted its head, the tongue darting and quivering on the air. But there was no striking curve in its body and presently the head dropped back to the floor.

“The snake or me, one is coming in there with you. Which you reckon?”

Lottie Mae did not answer. Her gaze had locked on the snake and had not once lifted from it. With his peg leg Buddy turned the snake’s head between the bars. Slowly he pressed the thick body into the cell.

The first time she spoke Buddy couldn’t make out what she said and had to tell her to say it again and when she said it loud enough for him to hear he made her say it again.

“I ruther you,” she said, still looking at the snake. Her hand lifted to the top button of her cotton dress. “I ruther you.”

Buddy said: “Ain’t it a God’s wonder what a snake can do for love?”

He had to go up to the desk for the key. When he got back she had her dress off and was lying on the narrow cot looking at the snake, which had not moved. Buddy took off his gun and his cartridge belt, took the steel-sprung blackjack out of his back pocket, all the time watching her while she watched the snake. He got naked but did not take off his peg leg.

“You a purty thing,” he said softly and then fell on her with the kind of grunt he might have made if somebody had hit him.

He was quick and — for the rest of it — silent, his great weight lunging against her. The only parts of her that showed from under him were her hands, her raised knees, and her face turned off under the edge of his heaving chest, staring with glazed eyes at the snake, which looked back at her and did not blink.

“All right,” he said, finally, “you can go now.”

He banged his wooden leg steadily against the wall by the bed while he watched her slip the thin cotton dress over her head.

He called after her as she was going down the hall: “And don’t let it happen again.”

She walked out into the night and down the road toward the house where she lived with her mother. But she would remember none of it, not Buddy Matlow’s smothering weight, or her bare feet on the stony road, or anything else. The snake had supplanted it all. Her head was filled with its diamond pattern and lidless eyes, and a terror was growing in her that was beyond screaming or even crying.

She went blindly down the single paved street of Mystic. The only light that was on was at Big Joe’s Confections. It went off as if on signal as she was passing. Joe Lon saw her as he turned from locking the door. She was no more than twenty feet from him.

“Well,” he said to himself, “ever now and then something goes right in this fucking world.” He walked over to her and she stopped. “You all right, Lottie Mae?”

She said nothing and her face showed nothing and she did not look at him but straight ahead. There was nothing strange in that. They were very nearly the same age, and he had known her, more or less, all of his life. She had always been a shy, quiet girl. When she came with her mother to the house to work for his daddy, he could never remember her saying anything.

“I’m just going myself,” he said. “You want a ride?” The place where she lived was almost a mile away. It was late but he was in no hurry to get home to Elfie. She glanced briefly at him and walked away. “No skin off my ass,” he said.

He got into the truck with a bottle of whiskey. He knew the old man would be waiting for it, but he took his time anyway. The house where his daddy lived was old and tilted slightly to the left, with a wide porch running around three sides. It was two stories, with a second floor where nobody ever went, where his daddy stored furniture and old clothes and newspapers — the Atlanta Constitution and the Albany Herald and the Macon Telegraph—all of which the old man subscribed to and which came in the mail a day late and took up his mornings until he began drinking whiskey at noon. Joe Lon could have moved into the big house with his father and his sister, the old man even asked him to, offering to clean out the second floor and let him and Elfie have it, but Joe Lon would be damned and in hell before he would do that, and even though he loved his father, admired him, and could tolerate his sister, he knew that it would never work to try to live in the same house with them.

Among other reasons it wouldn’t work was he liked to beat Elfie occasionally, or didn’t like it, rather he couldn’t help it, and his father would have killed him if he had ever found out he punched Elfie. More than once they had had to tell the old man that Elfie had fallen out of the door of the trailer onto her head when she turned up with two black eyes, or had run into the closet door or closed her hand in the stove oven, which actually once was true but it was because Joe Lon was holding her fingers there with one hand while he slammed the oven with the other. The old man told people everywhere that his daughter-in-law. Elf, was a goddam fine woman, good mother, but she was probably the clumsiest human being God ever made.

The old man was not a good man by anybody’s reckoning; he just didn’t hold with hurting women. He had once castrated a Macon pulpwood Negro who drove bootleg whiskey for him because the Negro had stolen a case off the truck. Another time he and one of his friends had scalped a white man for some reason that nobody ever knew and the old man had not disclosed. He also had probably the best pit bulldogs in all of Georgia, which were the pride of his life and which he loved deeply and which were the best fighting dogs because he treated them with a savage and unrelenting cruelty that even other pit bull owners could not bear to witness or emulate.

Joe Lon drove his pickup down the narrow lane bordered on both sides with the skeletoned limbs of winter-naked pecan trees. The huge house was dark except for the front room where the old man lived and the thin wavering light of his sister’s television in a side room toward the back. Joe Lon didn’t know what time it was but he knew it might be after midnight. He was drunk, but not good and drunk the way he liked to be. The whiskey simply had refused to take hold beyond a certain point. On the seat beside him were two quarts of bonded bourbon. There were no labels on the bottles. There never were. It tasted like Early Times. He thought it probably was, and it was also probably hijacked stuff. He’d gotten it for two dollars a bottle, a whole goddam trailer of it. He hadn’t asked where it came from. He never did.

Joe Lon let himself in and went down the short hall to the room where his daddy sat with his back to the door watching a dog strapped onto an electric inclined treadmill. It was a standard training device for fighting dogs. His daddy was nearly deaf and he did not look up even though Joe Lon slammed the door. His daddy was named Joe Lon too but was called Big Joe, partly to distinguish the father from the son and partly because the old man was nearly seven feet tall. There wasn’t a hair on his head but he had eyebrows that were thick and black and very long.

When Joe Lon came up behind the chair and leaned down and said into Big Joe’s ear: “Here’s the goddam whiskey,” the bald head did not move at all but the eyebrows twitched, seemed actually to turn on his face.

“Bout time,” said Big Joe. “I been sober since sundown.”

“I magine,” said Joe Lon. He had to shout to make himself heard.

He went over and sat in a ragged overstuffed chair. Big Joe broke the seal, raised the bottle, and took a tentative swallow. He brought the bottle down, looked at it, shook it gently, then handed it to his son.

“Git us that pitcher,” said Big Joe, but Joe Lon had already gone to the sideboard, where there was a white crock pitcher beside a wash basin. He brought two short glasses and the pitcher of water. He poured a glass and gave it to his daddy. He had brought a glass for himself but he never did get around to pouring any water in it. He set the glasses on the floor beside the chair and did not look at it again.

“You ought to have a little water with that whiskey,” said Big Joe.

“I been trying to git drunk,” said Joe Lon, his voice flat and disinterested. “It don’t seem to be working though.” They watched the dog on the treadmill. The sound of his breathing, wet and ragged and irregular, filled the room. There was no alternative for the dog but to run even though he had obviously gone as far as he could go, further even, because now and then his front legs collapsed and the treadmill kept turning and the dog’s knees were scraped and ground against the electrical tread until somehow he regained his feet. The front of his legs was raw and bleeding. But the dog made no sound except for the irregular gasping gulps of air he managed to suck in over his lolling tongue. Part of the reason he made no sound was a weighted device strapped onto his lower jaw. It was to strengthen the snapping and chewing muscles and it had been hooked onto the animal’s jaw most of the afternoon so that now the dog could no longer support the weight and his mouth was splayed as though ripped, as though it were a raw and bleeding wound.

“How’s Elf?” said Big Joe.

“She ain’t doing bad,” said Joe Lon.

“She ain’t run in to nothing else has she?”

“Not yet,” Joe Lon said, “but shit you never can tell, she’s apt to fuck herself up any time.”

“She’s a good woman, Elf is,” said Big Joe, “and you a lucky man. You one lucky man and don’t you ever forgit that, Joe Lon.”

“Shit no,” said Joe Lon, “I ain’t gone forgit just how fucking lucky I am.”

“You cuss too much for a boy,” said Big Joe. He passed the bottle. “I never liked that word for cussing. Fucking is no kind of word for a man to use to cuss with.”

Joe Lon didn’t answer and they watched the dog, which had fallen, struggle back up from his battered knees again. Since he had been in the room the steady insistent sound of the television had been coming through the wall. Laughter, sudden and joyous, burst in and among the dog’s breathing. His sister, Beatriz Dargan Mackey but called Beeder by anybody who had a chance to call her anything which was not often because she stayed pretty close to the Muntz, had on Johnny Carson. Johnny’s sly badgering voice mixed nicely with the pit bull’s bloody breathing because the dog had started hemorrhaging from the mouth now and it smoothed out the ragged edges of sound until it almost sounded like someone with a pleasant voice humming a sweet song a little off-key.

The old man whispered softly toward the dog now and Happed his batlike eyebrows: “Take it, you mean sumbitch. Do it! Work!” He crooned it in a little sing-song voice, the name words over and over again.

“How much longer you gone leave Tuff on the wheel?” asked Joe Lon.

“I don’t know, and Tuff don’t neither,” said Big Joe. “But we’ll both know when we git there.” The old man shifted, seemed to squirm in the chair where he sat. “Listen, I’m sorry I was so hateful on the telephone when I called you about the whiskey tonight.”

Joe Lon didn’t answer. The whiskey was beginning to work. He was going to be able to get drunk and the knowledge lifted his heart. Suddenly, he wanted everybody to feel good, to get a break. Even the dog.

“Listen,” said Joe Lon. “I think Tuff is taking a killing on that wheel.”

The old man who had been crooning to the dog again stopped and said: “No, he ain’t. He ain’t taken a killing yet.”

Tuff had survived four fights. He had long lightning-bolt scars, much darker than his brindle color, running back across his shoulders and back. One ear was split deeply and both ears had been chewed nubby. His broad forehead was a mass of grayish, welty scar tissue and his left eye, the one he was blind in, had no color demarcation in its solid milky surface. Tuffy was training for his fifth fight. They’d all been against the best stock in the South, and Big Joe had decided if he won to retire him to stud and a place of privilege in the kennel.

“Lummy and them git them bleacher seats fixed up at the pit?”

“I walked out there when I got up this morning,” said Big Joe. “Weren’t up then.”

“I’ll speak to George.”

“Leave’m alone,” said Big Joe. “I told him to do it. He said he’d do it. They’ll be there when we need’m.”

“I hope so.”

“George and Lummy’s puttin up them seats before you was born.”

“You told me.”

“Give me that whiskey bottle. You know why I git hateful, don’t you?”

“Yeah, I know.”

“If you had to listen to that goddam TeeVee going day in and day out, you’d be hateful too.” Big Joe lifted the whiskey bottle to the light. It was a little more than half empty. “You didn’t bring but one of these?”

“You drink too much. A man your age ought not drink like you do.”

“A man my age ain’t got a hell of a lot else to do.”

“You got the dogs.”

“Yeah, I got the dogs. And besides the dogs I got quiz shows and game shows and murder shows and funny shows and shit shows eighteen hours a day coming through ever wall in the house. I wish to God I could go the rest of the way deaf before she runs me the rest of the way crazy with the Muntz.”

Joe Lon belched, and felt better than he’d felt in days. He stood up and tested his legs. “Well,” he said, “it’s cheaper’n a hospital.”

“Yeah,” said Big Joe, “it’s that. But after you said that, it ain’t nothing else to say.” He was no longer passing the bottle. Now that it was half gone, he had put the cap back on it and put it under his chair. “I sometime think about seeing one more time if I cain’t git the state to take her.”

Joe Lon didn’t like to even let himself think about his sister, but he didn’t want her in a goddam state insane asylum either. “You’d feel funny going to a fight and ever-body knowing Big Joe Mackey’s given his only daughter up to the fucking state.”

The old man waved his big hand and did not look at his son. “I ain’t done it yet, have I? And God knows I been tried. I been tried severely and I ain’t been found wanting.”

“Well, don’t feel too goddam good about it, it ain’t over yet. You still got time to ruin everthing.” His mood had shifted to something sour and mean, and he had felt it shift, like a load on a truck might shift, suddenly and with great force. He had always been given to such shifts in mood and temper but they had become more and more frequent and seemingly without cause the last year or so.

Big Joe said: “You started to church, you’d stop so much of that heavy cussing. And particular you’d stop using that word to cuss with. It ain’t a fittin word for a man to use.”

“I guess,” said Joe Lon. His daddy was a deacon in The Church of Jesus Christ With Signs Following and was forever trying to get Joe Lon to start going. “I got to git on home. Maybe I’ll see you tomorrow.”

“If you don’t, be sure and send the nigger over with something to drink.”

“All right.”

“You git them shitters?”

“I ain’t seen’m,” said Joe Lon, “but I been told they over by the grounds.”

“Good, good. Make all that shit a lot easier to handle.”

Joe Lon went through the door into the hall. He had had no intention of going in to see his sister, but once in the hall he turned to look in the direction of her room, where the thin light showed under the door. He felt a rush of pity at his heart for Beeder, who almost never saw anybody but the cook, who almost never left her damp room that smelled sweetly of mildewed sheets, and who would almost certainly end up in some bare white place behind a locked door with her own shit smeared over her face. He leaned back against the wall and closed his eyes and felt the hot start of tears and at the same time saw clearly his sister again as she had been in the tenth grade when he had been a stud junior running back, how pretty she had been behind the yellow pompoms cheering for him and the team, doing complicated little maneuvers in the bright sun with the other girls, and even though he never actually decided to do it he was opening the door to her room where the familiar awful smell washed warmly over his face and he saw her propped in bed with the covers pulled up under her chin so that her shadowed face looked empty of eyes in the dim inconstant light from the television set.

He stopped at the foot of the bed. She cut her eyes up at him briefly and then looked back at the television, where Johnny and his guests were in convulsions.

“How you feeling, Beeder?” he said.

“He killed Tuffy yet?” she said, not looking at him.

“He ain’t gone kill Tuffy.”

“I wish to God he would. I know Tuffy wishes to God he would.”

“But he won’t.”

“No,” she said, “he won’t kill us. If he’d just kill us all … But that’s more than anybody can ask for, I guess.” She pulled the blankets down from her chin. Her face was stark white and without expression in the light. “But you cain’t ask for death. Anything else, maybe. But not death. You’d think it’d be just the other way round, wouldn’t you? Joe Lon, wouldn’t you?’

“I reckon,” he said.

“How was the game?” she said.

“We won,” he said.

“I know you won,” she said. “I didn’t ask for that. How did you win?”

“We ran at them, Beeder. We stuck it down their throat.”

She turned her face away from him so that half her thin mouth was buried in the yellowing pillow. “That hurts. God, it hurts, that everthing is eating everthing else.”

He sat on the edge of the bed and watched the Muntz. There was a Mexican comic on now, explaining how much fun it had been to grow up in a ghetto in Los Angeles. He made starving, and rats, and broken plaster, and getting beat on the head by cops just funny as shit. The audience was falling out of their seats. Johnny was wiping tears of laughter out of his eyes.

“They’re out there now, you know, eating each other.”

“I magine,” he said without looking at her.

On the other side of the wall now a sound had started like the coughing of a very old, very sick man. They both knew that it was Tuffy and that it was not a cough at all but, rather, all that was left of his bark. He was exhausted and bleeding and having the life scraped out of him by the electric treadmill and it was the best bark he had left.

He turned from the television and looked at her. “Beeder,” he said, “what … what is it that … what do you think?”

“Think,” she said. “Think?”

“I mean, well, goddammit, Beeder, they ain’t gone let you stay in here with the fucking Muntz for the rest of you life. Is that what you think, that they’re gone let you stay in here,” he pointed to the television, “watching that jack-off?”

“I’m not hurting nobody,” she said. And then, her eyes going darker, her lips paler: “They gone make me leave, are they?”

“Christ almighty!” he said. He wished to hell he had the bottle of whiskey out of the truck. She watched him now instead of the television set, but her eyes were unsteady on him and kept sliding around the room as though she was looking for something she couldn’t find. Ever since she’d started acting this way — ever since she’d gone nuts — Joe Lon had had the feeling that if he just jerked her up by the shirtfront and demanded that she act normal she would. He had in fact done it, more than once, usually when he was drunk or drinking, saying: “Goddammit, Beeder, you better act normal. Come on, quit playing around and be right.” But it had not helped. He had never been able to shake the feeling though that if he caught her off guard and said just the right thing in just the right way, he would save her. He had the impulse to do it now. But instead he raised his eyes to the shelves behind her bed where all his trophies were. This had been his room once but she had taken it over when she went nuts. She had a room just like it across the hall and he had never known nor could she say why she had moved in here. He was already married to Elfie by then so it didn’t really matter. Except it did. He seldom let himself think about it but he didn’t like her in his goddam room, nuts or not, even though he no longer used or wanted the room. Even so, in every way that made any sense the room did not even belong to him anyway.

Maybe it was because of the trophies, the signed game balls that had been bronzed and mounted, the High School Back of the Year award for all of the state of Georgia, the certificate for playing in the High School All-American Game in Dallas, Texas, and two whole shelves of trophies and certificates from track. As a stranger might have, he watched them now above his sister’s nearly covered face with only the dark hair and frightened eyes showing. They seemed, those bronzed images of muscled young men caught in straining, static motion, they seemed in no way to have anything to do with him, nor ever to have had anything to do with him.

They seemed in fact to have been an accident. Like his sister’s madness. It had just happened. Nobody knew why or apparently would ever know. He was stronger and faster and meaner than other boys his age and for that he had been rewarded. He had even suspected that he was smarter, too. For whatever reason, though, the idea of studying, of sitting down and deliberately committing facts and relationships to memory was deeply repugnant to him. And always had been. Unless it had to do with violence. He liked violence. He liked blood and bruises, even when they were his own.

He always had his assignments when he went on the field. With no effort at all, he would memorize and run a dozen complicated pass patterns. And he not only knew his own assignment but he knew those of his teammates too. He learned not just the fundamentals of football but also the most delicate nuances, so that he was a vicious blocker, and ran probably the most awesome interference that his coach, Tump Walker, had ever seen. It had all been terribly satisfying while it had been going on, but now it lived in his memory like a dream. It had no significance and sometimes inexplicably he wished it had never happened.

He sighed and dropped his eyes to Beeder’s face. She was quietly and contentedly watching a picture of the American flag while a chorus of voices sang the National Anthem. Then, as he looked at her, the flag went off and a man said that concluded broadcast activities for the day and a screen of snow and static came on and Beeder watched the snow and listened to the static as though it had been just the most interesting show in the world. He didn’t know for sure, but he thought she sometimes watched the snow and static all night, right into the next morning when the Farm Report came on at six o’clock and then watched that. If he could believe his father she sometimes went on binges of television that lasted for days without stopping. “Just like a goddam drunk going on a spree,” Big Joe would say.

“Beeder, when’s the last time you been out of this room?”

She didn’t answer, but she did momentarily look away from the television.

“When’s the last time you bathed youself?” Now she did not look at him. “It stinks in here. You know it stinks in here?”

She had a chamber pot under her bed that she sat on instead of going to the bathroom down the hall and the cook was supposed to empty it when she came in the morning and again before she left at night. Sometimes she did. But sometimes she didn’t. Joe Lon wondered if it was full now, and although it was something he had never done before, he bent and reached under the bed from where he sat and pulled it out. He knew the pot was not empty before he ever looked at it. It was full of water and on the surface floated three dark turds.

He felt like howling. When he looked up she was watching him. Her mouth held a shy smile. “Beeder,” he said in a pleading voice, “Beeder, you got to do something about …”

But he stopped because she was sitting up in her bed, pushing the covers back. She was wearing a dingy gown made of cotton. Her bones were insistent under the thin fabric and seemed as brittle as a bird’s. She moved out from under the covers and across the bed until she was sitting beside him.

“I would kill it if I could,” she said, and reached down and lifted a piece of shit and put it in her hair.

He had watched, unable to move, to believe either that she actually meant to do what he knew she meant to do. Putting shit in her hair was something he had never seen her do before. He had seen her do some pretty bad things but not that.

He got up and backed toward the door, refusing to let himself turn his face from her, saying as he went: “Lord help us all. Sister Beeder, Lord help us all.” He had not called her Sister Beeder since they were children. She was already back in bed watching the snow, listening to the static before he got through the door.

In the truck, under the pecan trees bare and black in the bright heavy moon, he sat without turning on the motor or lights and let half a bottle of whiskey down his throat. He gagged against the whiskey but he held the bottle to his mouth anyway, feeling his stomach tighten against the warm bourbon. He could not shake the image of his sister easing her befouled head back into the pillow. But gradually it did recede. As he sat there in the dark hurting himself more and more — as much as he could stand — with the whiskey the memory of the whole evening grew unsure and lost all significance whatsoever.

Later — he wouldn’t remember how much later — he saw his daddy come through the door out onto the porch and come down the steps into the yard. He led Tuffy on a leash, the jagged lightning-bolt scars blacker in the bright moonlight. Big Joe walked slowly, waiting for the dog, whose brutal squared head hung nearly to the ground. Joe Lon watched them limp, the old man and the bloodied dog, across the wide bare yard toward the kennel, where the other pit bulls were growling and barking and snapping at the wire of their individual cages.

The dim light from the television set still showed in his sister’s room when he made the turn in his pickup truck to drive toward home.

***

It wasn’t even ten o’clock in the morning and the actual hunt was still nearly forty-eight hours away, but there were already at least a thousand people camped in and around Mystic. They had come in an unrelenting, noisy stream starting long before daylight. Some of them ended up in tents, some bedded down in the backs of pickups, some sat in the open doors of vans, and a great many were in campers of one kind or another. Joe Lon’s field was over half full, and spaced neatly along the orderly rows of snake hunters were the white chemical outhouses called Johnny-on-the-spots.

Probably less than half of the people who had arrived were hunters. The rest were tourists of one kind or another, retirees stunned with boredom, people genuinely curious about snakes but who had never seen a live one outside a cage, young dopers who wondered about saying gentle, inscrutable things to one another about God, Karma, and Hermann Hesse.

Almost everyone had brought pet snakes to the hunt. Mostly they were constrictors and black snakes and water snakes. They carried the snakes around with them, passing them from hand to hand, comparing them, describing their habits and disclosing their names.

A surprising number of craftsmen were setting up their wares all over Mystic. Some of the wares were in elaborate booths, pulled in separate trailers, but a lot of things were being sold right off the tailgates of pickup trucks. There were sketches and paintings of snakes, and every imaginable article made from the skin of diamondbacks: cigarette cases, purses, wallets, belts, shoes, and hats. One group of longhairs was featuring — hanging all over their Volkswagen van — various articles of underclothing, plus several well-crafted items that could only be dildoes of different shapes and sizes; all were marked with the unmistakable pattern of the snake. Several of the dildoes had reshaped and formed rattlesnake heads, complete with fangs. The longhairs had been reported earlier to Sheriff Buddy Matlow by several Senior Citizens, and Buddy, who had been through many of these roundups before and consequently knew that everybody had to be given considerable slack, even longhairs — came by and told them to try not to shock the older folk, that this was all good clean fun, well organized and controlled by himself and his staff and, besides, that it was sponsored by the Greater Mystic Chamber of Commerce, made up mostly of farmers, and therefore had to look after its good name.

Then Buddy bought himself two snake-headed rubbers with diamondback patterns and put them in the glove compartment of his Plymouth patrol car.

But the most spectacular craftsman of all, the one who had the largest audience watching her work and who commanded the biggest prices for the work she did, was an ancient little lady who sat under a white bonnet in a cane-bottom rocking chair making mosaics out of the individual rattles from the tails of diamondbacks. There were several on display; one of them — the largest — about a yard square was of a buck deer stamping a diamondback to death. It had taken the rattles from one thousand, one hundred and sixty-two snakes to complete and the little lady under the white bonnet who never raised her eyes from the stretched canvas she was working on in front of her was asking three thousand dollars for it.

Joe Lon Mackey could see the lady from where he sat at the little white Formica table in his double-wide drinking coffee. The crowd around her stood silently in a little semicircle as she worked fastening the rattles to the stretched canvas. She’d been to every roundup as far back as Joe Lon could remember. And she had always had the three-thousand-dollar mosaic with her.

He suspected she was asking so much because she actually didn’t want to sell it. It was a fantastic thing to see, though, unbelievable really, with the buck deer, his nostrils flared, reared onto his back legs, the razorlike front hooves poised to strike the already cut and mutilated snake on the ground. And because it was so spectacular, Joe Lon supposed some sonofabitch would come by sooner or later dumb enough to pay what she was asking. The world was in short supply of a lot of things but one of them was not dumb sonofabitches with more money than was good for them.

Joe Lon had gotten up early that morning and gone out, partly to see if Lummy and his brother George were properly placing the chemical toilets and partly — mostly — to get out of the bed and out of the house before he had to face Elfie.

When he woke up about daylight, the whole sorry business of the night before had risen before his eyes, the memory of his sister flooding back upon him and his daddy limping out behind the house with the battered half-ruined bulldog, and then worse, much worse, how it had been afterward when he had got drunker and drunker, remembering that Berenice was coming home, remembering how it used to be with her, thinking about everything the world had promised him and then snatched away until he was stone drunk on the scalding bourbon and drunk on the honeylegged memory of Berenice.

He somehow managed to get what he wished was true confused with the facts of his own life. It wasn’t the first time it had ever happened. It was a little quirk his head had of working when he was lost in the sour mist of bourbon whiskey. He had gotten out of his pickup truck in the dark — the moon had gone now, setting behind a black cloud — and gone through the dark, narrow little passageways of the double-wide, stripping his clothes as he went, and fallen finally, savagely, in the bed, not upon his child-ruined wife Elfie but upon the heaving flesh of the University of Georgia’s golden head cheerleader, Berenice, or so he thought in the addled disorientation of his alcohol-splattered brain.

But of course it had been poor old Elf, caught unawares and sleeping, her sore flapping breasts vulnerable to his hard square hands. She had come awake with a little muffled cry, protesting, her thin arms trying to push him away, but he had her pinned, driving her against the headboard of the bed. It was a God’s wonder he hadn’t broken her neck. And when he woke up the next morning he saw her pale face turned off toward the window, her lips partly open, showing her discolored tongue and teeth, the blue smear of a bruise running up from the corner of her mouth, and he knew as the sorry night came back to him in painfully clear memory that he had called her Berenice again and again while he had taken her through the whole routine of enthusiastic sexual gymnastics he and his old high-school sweetheart used to work upon each other’s bodies when the world was still a place where such things were not only possible but also a great singing joy in his heart.

There was no joy singing in his heart though when he woke up and realized what he had done, so he had slipped quickly into his Levis, a T-shirt, and a denim jacket, and left the trailer. When he fired up his pickup, he heard both baby boys scream simultaneously. He wondered if something might not ail them younguns, crying the way they did all through the day with such fantastic stamina.

He drove over to the high school first, where they were already building the snake. The cheerleaders, led by Hard Candy Sweet, had sorted out their materials and were starting now to stretch the chicken wire over the frame that eventually would be a papier mache rattlesnake standing thirty feet high and coiled to strike. That night after the dancing it would explode in one sudden bursting bonfire. Hard Candy was up on a piece of scaffolding and turned to wave to him, but apparently wasn’t going to come down to talk to him. He wanted to ask her about Berenice, to ask if she had gotten in from the university yet. Eventually though, watching her bend and stretch there inside her tight red-hot little short shorts (the weather was still holding warm), moving her firm round arms, making her little titties lift and soar, made him impossibly anxious to see Berenice, so he left and drove back to his ten-acre campground, where sure enough Lummy and his brother George had set out the Johnny-on-the-spots in just the neatest and best way, so that he could hardly believe it.

He was standing by the little lady under the white bonnet looking at her thousand-snake masterpiece, admiring the way the deer’s hooves showed sharp as razors there above the snake, when Lummy appeared out of the crowd at his elbow.

“Mistuh Joe Lon?”

Joe Lon did not turn to look at him; rather he recognized his voice and kept staring at the fine sharp detail of the rearing deer’s hooves. “Everthing’s fine,” he said. “You and George done a good job gitten them shitters ready.”

“Say we done good,” said Lummy. “Howsomever, it don be whatall I come to axe you bout.”

Joe Lon looked at him for the first time.

“It be Lottie Mae.”

“What about her?”

“I want to thanks you for gittin Mistuh Buddy to letter loose.”

Joe Lon said: “It’s all right. I’as glad to do it.”

“Sompin bad wrong with Lottie Mae,” said Lummy.

“What ails her?” said Joe Lon, only half listening.

“She be hexed I thinks,” said Lummy.

“Hexed?” said Joe Lon, thinking: Just nigger talk. I spend half my goddam life listening to nigger talk and the other half of it totin whiskey to them. God knows what I did to deserve it. Believing as he did, though, in the total mystery, power, and majesty of God, Joe Lon assumed he had done something, and that he would never find out what it was.

“Mama say she been acting powerful strange since she come in las night,” said Lummy.

Joe Lon waved his hand as though brushing away flies. “Look,” he said. “You or George one got to stay at the store all day today. I want it kept open to midnight and I want it opened up right now. I ain’t gone have no time for the store today.”

“I know no Sherf ain’t gone hex no gul. Special no nigger gul. Sherf got sompin else to do cept go roun hexin on nigger guls.”

Joe Lon blinked. It was as though Lummy had not heard him. And he knew Lummy would go on like that until he took care of Lottie Mae’s hex.

“Okay. Right,” said Joe Lon. “I’m gone ask Buddy first chance I git. But you right. He ain’t hexed nobody, much less Lottie Mae. I’ll tell him that being the sheriff, he better see who done it. Is that okay?”

“He ain’t gone do that.”

“He will if I tell him to…”

Lummy gave Joe Lon his blue-gummed smile. “Don think twice. George and me is put our minds on it. Go on and don think twice.” He slipped back into the crowd and was gone.

Joe Lon walked around awhile, looking at the booths and speaking to a few people, assuring some of the visitors that, yes, the store would be open tonight, right on until midnight. He saw his old coach, Tump Walker, who was one of the great high-school coaches in the country, and who was Honorary Chairman of the rattlesnake roundup. He was scowling and dripping tobacco juice.

“I tell you, son, they crazier ever year, they are. It’s one tourist here that’s tainted. If he ain’t tainted, I never shit behind two heels. You know what he’s got?”

“Whatever it is wouldn’t surprise me.”

“Surprised me, by God. Sumbitch’s got five hundred snakes over there in cages in his trailer. Ever kind of snake you could think of’s what he’s got.”

“Why you reckon he’s got’m?”

“Beats the shit out of me,” Coach Tump said. “Just loves goddam snakes enough, I guess, to go around the countryside in a camper packed with’m.”

They stood watching each other, thinking about the tainted tourist. Finally, Coach Tump said: “Seen you daddy lately, son?”

“Yes sir. Coach, I seen’m lately. He’s fine. How you been?”

Coach Tump sent a long solid stream of tobacco juice into the dirt, shifted the cud in his mouth, hustled his balls and said: “I been real good. But what I thought to ask you was, how’s you daddy’s Tuff?”

“Trainin real hard, Coach Tump, trainin real hard.”

“By the good Lord, I alius said, they’d never beat one of you daddy’s dogs in the fourth quarter. Aye God, they come to fight.”

“Daddy’s lookin to retire Tuff. He knows he’s gone retire Tuff, and then ole Tuff’s gone be boss stud of all the pits.”

“We all know he will, son.”

Joe Lon, always diffident in the face of his old coach and teacher, said: “Listen, Coach, you go on by the store and tell Lummy to give you whatever it is you want. Tell’m to mark it down to me.”

Coach Tump said, “You alius was a good boy, son,” slapped Joe Lon on the back, sent another stream of juice on the air, and walked away in his rolling bowlegged stride.

Joe Lon was just about to go back to his truck when he saw Berenice all the way across the campground and instantly wanted to run, not sure whether toward her or away from her. He ended by casually strolling in an oblique angle toward the place where she stood with her back half turned to him. But before he was halfway there she tossed her long yellow hair and in the gesture caught sight of him. She went into that high-kneed run, her arms out and smiling, that reminded him of the way she used to run toward him after a game, when he was sweating and bruised and full of victory. He walked a little faster, very self-conscious of the fact that many people there would know who both of them were and how it had been with them before he got down with Elf and the babies and she went on to the University of Georgia, where she was still distinguishing herself with cheerleading and the football team and other achievements.

She threw her arms around his neck and squealed and everything was as it was, the familiar body pressing against him, except that now she seemed fuller, stronger, surer of herself. It was just something he sensed the moment he touched her, something richer and deeper and more complicated. Whatever it was did not make him feel good.

“Joe Lon Mackey! Are you a sight? My, you’re just as handsome as ever. My strong handsome beau, and the best football player that ever put on a helmet!”

She kissed his cheek, and he couldn’t help thinking that in the old days she would have said: The best football player that ever put on a jockstrap. But these by God weren’t the good old days and he hadn’t seen her in over a year, because her father, Dr. Sweet, had given her a trip to Paris the previous summer to study French. French! The very notion of somebody studying French threw Joe Lon into a rage.

“You looking good, Berenice. Real good. I got you letter and …”

He quit talking because he had gradually become aware of a boy about his own age who had strolled up and was now standing at Berenice’s shoulder. The boy leaned forward to look at Joe Lon. Joe Lon disliked him immediately, disliked the soft look of his face, the way his lower lip seemed to pout, and disliked the eyes that would have been beautiful had they belonged to a girl. But it wasn’t just the boy’s face or the slight, slope-chested way he stood. Joe Lon could have spat on him for the way he was dressed. He’d seen guys dressed like that before and he had never liked one of them: double-knit tangerine trousers, fuzzy bright-yellow sweater, white shoes, and a goddam matching white belt. His hair was neatly cut and looked as though he had slept with his head in a can of Crisco.

Berenice saw him watching the boy and introduced them. “Joe Lon Mackey, this is Shep Martin, from the University of Georgia.”

“Shep?” said Joe Lon. Shep was a fucking dog’s name, wasn’t it?

“Actually, it’s Shepherd,” said the boy, in a voice that sounded like a radio announcer. “Many men in my family are named Shepherd, my father, an uncle, my grandfather— like that.”

“No kidding?” said Joe Lon.

“Shep is on the debating team up at Georgia,” said Berenice Sweet.

“Oh,” said Joe Lon.

He had never been introduced to anyone on a debating team before and he wasn’t sure what to say because he wasn’t real sure what it was. Probably some fag foreign game like soccer. Anybody that’d play soccer would suck a dick, that’s what Joe Lon thought.

“I’ve heard a lot about you,” said Shep, “what a great athlete you were.”

“I played a little football,” said Joe Lon shortly, looking off toward the dark fortress-like wall of trees that surrounded his little campground.

“I told you he was modest,” said Berenice. “Didn’t I tell you he was modest?”

“You sure did,” said Shep, “and I just want to shake your hand.” He thrust out his hand.

Joe Lon reluctantly took it. “I ain’t been on a football field in two years,” he said.

For some reason he couldn’t meet the boy’s eyes. Or even Berenice’s. It was all too embarrassing, and that infuriated him. He kept wondering why she had sent him that letter. Why had she sent it?

“How’s Elf?” said Berenice.

Joe Lon felt his face get hot. “Okay,” he said. “She’s okay.” He was remembering the pale weak way her thin face looked in the light that morning and the blue smear of a bruise running up from her mouth.

“And the kids? What is it now? Two boys?”

“Yeah, two,” said Joe Lon.

“Both of them running backs. I’ll wager,” said Shep. He leaned forward and actually punched Joe Lon in the shoulder. “Must be great,” he said, “just great.”

Joe Lon took a step back. He was afraid he was going to snap and coldcock both of them right there. He didn’t know what he had been expecting or hoping for from Berenice but it sure as hell was not this.

“Look,” he said, “I gotta go.”

“Aw,” said Berenice, “really? I was hoping you could come over to the house and have a cup of coffee with us.”

“Sure, man,” said Shep, “I’d like to …”—here a little deep-throated radio announcer chuckle—“… talk some football with you.” Now a sudden seriousness about the beautiful girl’s eyes. “What do you think about Broadway Joe, anyway?”

“I’d like to talk, but,” Joe Lon said, waving his hand to include the campground, the people milling about, the booths where the crafts were being shown, “there’s a lot of things I have to take care of.”

“But we will get together?” said Berenice, taking his arm and squeezing it.

Joe Lon gritted his teeth. “Yeah, we’ll get together.”

He was turning to go when Shep caught his hand again and pumped it. “It certainly was a pleasure,” he said.

Joe Lon mumbled something and walked away between the rows of campers. He walked looking at the ground, feeling that he had somehow just been humiliated. By the time he got to the trailer his jaws were aching from his clamped teeth. Elfie was up and in the kitchen. She was wearing a pretty yellow apron upon which she had embroidered little flowers.

He remembered her working on it when she was pregnant with the second baby. It had ruffles across the top and tended to disguise her ballooning lower belly, for which he was thankful. She had her hair pulled back and tied with a ribbon. And even with the bruise that face powder had not quite been able to cover she looked very cheerful, even happy. He was glad for that because he had not welcomed the thought of facing her after last night.

“You ready for you some breakfast, Joe Lon, honey?” she asked from where she stood doing something at the sink.

“Just coffee,” he said.

“Joe Lon, you got to eat, honey.”

“Come on, Elf,” he said, “I got a little bit of a headache.”

“Really?” she said. “You want some aspern?” She hadn’t moved from the sink. “I got me some aspern yesterday at the store if you want some.”

He held on to the edge of the table and would not let himself say anything. She had already straightened up the trailer and washed and fed the babies. They were both in a playpen by the door in the living room where the sun came through the window. She had done all that and now she was only trying to help him and he knew that and knew also that she could not help it if everything she said drove him wild, nor could she help what had just happened out there to him at the campground. So he just sat at the little white Formica table, holding on to the edge of his chair, and looking out the window. She was watching him and he could feel the weight of her gaze.

“I’ll git the coffee, Joe Lon, honey,” she finally said.

He nodded but did not answer. His thoughts had already turned back to Berenice and the postcard and the Crisco Kid she had brought home with her. The Crisco Kid, yeah, that’s what he was. Second-string lardass on the debate team. Well, Mr. Crisco Kid, it may be you go one on one with Joe Lon Mackey before you get out of Mystic, Georgia. It may be you just-got yourself in more shit than you can stir with a stick.

“Honey, here’s some fresh hot.”

She set the coffee on the table and waited for him to taste it. He bent his head to the raised cup.

“Is it good?”

“Yeah,” he said, “it’s good, Elf.”

She stood where she was, smiling now, but with her mouth conspicuously closed. “You know what, Joe Lon, honey?”

“No, Elf.”

“I made me a phone call this morning first thing.”

“Okay, Elf.”

Through the window he watched the little lady under the white bonnet where she sat unmoving in the bright November sunlight sticking rattles onto a stretched canvas. To the right and in front of her the three-thousand-dollar, thousand-snake deer with the razor hooves kept killing and killing the already mutilated diamondback.

“You know who it was to?” said Elfie.

“No,” he said, “I don’t know who it was to.”

“To the dentist in Tifton.” Her voice was rising and lilting, full of surprised triumph. “I called the dentist, and I’m gone git these old sorry teeth of mine fixed.”

He turned his eyes from the window to look at her where she had retreated to the sink. He could see now what she was doing. She was washing out baby diapers. Although he had not before, he now smelled the ammonia from his son’s piss and he wished he didn’t. He forced himself to smile at her as she still watched him over her shoulder.

“That’s real good, Elf,” he said. “You done real good to do that for youself.” His throat felt very tight. “It’ll make you feel better.”

She left the sink and came to stand behind him. “I done it for you, Joe Lon, honey. I coulda done without it for myself.” She moved closer to the back of his chair. Her thin soft hands touched him, one on each shoulder. “Me’n the babies love you, Joe Lon, honey.”

He could only nod. He turned loose his coffee and took hold again of the table. He desperately wanted to howl.

***

Lottie Mae had dreamed of snakes. Snakes that were lumpy with rats. In a dream she killed one of them with a stick and the moment it stopped writhing and was dead, the stick in her hand was a snake. When she tried to turn it loose she saw that she could not because the snake was part of her. Her arm was a snake. And then the other arm was a snake. And her two arms that were snakes crawled about her neck, cold as ice and slick with snake slime.

There were other dreams, but when her mother, Maude, woke her, she could not remember them. But because she could not remember the dreams did not mean she had gotten rid of the snakes. Her mother’s hand where it touched her shoulder and gently shook her seemed snaky, the fingers cold with snake skin, and alive with a boneless writhing. She lay as still as stone under the snakes; all that moved was her eyes, which she cut toward her mother bending over her bed only to find the snakes had twisted themselves into the black braids of her mother’s hair.

“Chile, I got the miseries,” her mother said.

Lottie Mae said nothing but watched the snakes carefully.

“You got to go to Mistuh Big Joe’s and do for me.”

Lottie Mae drew back the light cover that was over her and got up. Her cotton dress was on the bedpost. She slipped it on and buttoned it up the front.

“Chile,” her mother said softly. “Take it off. It got blood on it. I git you sompin else.”

But Lottie Mae went into the kitchen instead, where she drank two glasses of water taken with a dipper out of a metal bucket sitting on a shelf. Her mother limped in behind her. The sockets of her mother’s hips sometimes fused with the miseries and when this happened the girl had to go to the big house to cook for Big Joe and empty his daughter’s slop jar. Her mother came to the water bucket and took her arm. Lottie Mae turned her vacant eyes on her mother. The expression on her face did not change at all.

Her mother smiled but her lips were trembling. “You know chile, Mistuh Big Joe ain’t needin you. I spect he be just fine today lak he is. You gone back to bed. I’m gone git Brother Boy to go to the stow and git you some ice cream.” The smile jerked on her face and the lips still trembled. “Now how you lak that, chile?”

Lottie Mae seemed to know quite clearly that she could not mention the snakes in her mother’s hair or any of the other snakes. She knew it would upset her mother and her mother would not see the snakes and not seeing the snakes would only give her great pain.

“Miss Beeder,” said Lottie Mae. She meant to say more and thought that she had, thought that by simply saying the name she had explained what there was to explain about Beeder Mackey.

Her mother took her hand away and said: “Good Lord knows it true. I’m gone git Brother Boy to go with you. You tell Mustuh Big Joe I got the miseries an you gots to come right back home here and hep me. Tell’m you come to do quick an go, cause you cain’t stay. Brother Boy can wait right there on the back steps for you.”

Brother Boy was her seven-year-old cousin by her Uncle Lummy but the child lived with them because Uncle Lummy and Aunt Lily were bad to fight, fought all the time, had both been cut by razors, each by the other, and drank moonshine whiskey, sometimes separately and sometimes together in the bed, where they were not careful with their nakedness. Maude thought it was sinful and corrupt behavior and had asked for the child. They said she couldn’t have him but that she could keep him for a while. James Booker, whom Maude immediately started to call Brother Boy, had walked to their house with a little pasteboard box full of his things to stay awhile. He had been there two years and nobody ever mentioned anything about him going back home.

It took her and Brother Boy, he holding her hand just as Maude had told him to, thirty minutes to walk to Big Joe’s house. On the way Lottie Mae saw a long metal truck with rattlesnakes nailed to the sides, she saw a whole parade of people — women, men, and children — carrying pictures of snakes—signs—nailed to the tops of wooden standards; then she saw a man get out of the back of a pickup truck with two dead snakes, held by the tail and hanging from each hand like pieces of thick rope. The man was smiling and after he got out of the truck he stood very still while a woman, shrieking with laughter, took his picture.

A boy stood in front of the Mystic grocery store with a snake as big around as her leg and as red as blood draped around his neck. The snake was so long its tail and head both reached the ground. There were people everywhere: in the road, on the side of the road, in the ditches even, beside pickups and cars and buses. They were laughing and talking and shouting to one another and what came to her ears again and again and again from mouths on every side, shouted, said, whispered, sung, was the word: snake snake SNAKE SNAKE SNAKE SNAKE. They were all talking about snakes. She half expected the heavens to open up and start sending down snakes. She could feel their thick bodies dropping on her head.

Brother Boy said: “Soda crackers sho am crazy bout snakes, ain’t they?”

Her shoulders jerked. “What?” she said.

That word had just come from Brother Boy’s mouth and exploded against the side of her head.

Brother Boy said it all again.

She shaded her eyes with her free hand and pretended to squint up the road. “We gots to hurry,” she said.

“I wouldn’t touch me no snake,” Brother Boy said.

“Mistuh Big Joe don’t lak it to be late,” she said.

“You know they eat them snakes,” he said.

“Brother Boy, don’t,” she said.

He grinned slyly up at her fright and revulsion.

“Every year them soda crackers eat ever snake which they cotch.”

She lengthened her stride and turned loose his hand.

“Go in the woods and cotch them snakes,” he sang. “Skin them snakes! Skin the skin off and put’m in the fry pan!”

Lottie Mae stopped and turned on him. “Brother Boy!” she screamed. “You got… got to … got to …” She uttered the words until her tongue was hard in her mouth like a single enormous tooth growing out of her throat, because Brother Boy’s neck had grown serpentine, undulant under his enormous grinning head.

She turned and ran and Brother Boy chased her all the way to the big house choking on laughter and talking about the white folks’ mouths full of squirmy snakes, chewing snakes, swallowing snakes. Right up through the big barren yard to the back porch and up the steps where she slammed the door in his face.

Brother Boy abruptly stopped laughing, went down into the yard, and started throwing stones at a few dusty dirt-scratching chickens under a chinaberry tree that grew out beside the kennel where the killing dogs were kept.

Lottie Mae went to the kitchen and made Big Joe’s breakfast: four eggs up, cornbread muffins, ham, and grits. She look it in to him where he was still in bed, propped up in a dirt-colored gown, with a rolled-up woman’s stocking pulled onto his head to cover his ears. Propped on the pillow beside him where his wife used to sleep was a bottle of whiskey. When she came in he started shouting.

“Goddammit Maudy, how many times …” And then he stopped, staring at her. “Oh, Lottie Mae,” he said finally and then repeated several times, “Lottie Mae,” in a quiet voice.

Lottie Mae said: “She got the miseries.”

While she set the tray beside him on the bed, he rolled the stocking up until his ears were clear.

“What say?” he demanded.

“Miseries,” shouted Lottie Mae.

“Lord yes,” the old man said. “I guess we all do, ever mother’s son of us.” He pointed to his bottle and then to his breakfast. “You got to put a bottom on whiskey,” he screamed. “Keep a bottom on whiskey and it won’t eat you guts out. What daddy used to say. What daddy used to say. Aye God, he’as right too. Food! Food!” he cried and rolled his eyes.

She shouted twice in his good bad ear that she had to go pretty soon, that she didn’t mean to stay the whole day, because her mother had the miseries.

“Miseries?” he shouted back. “Lord yes, I guess we all do.” As she was leaving he pointed to the wall at the side of his bed where the thumping sound of the television had been shaking an old Currier and Ives print of a bulldog fight. “Don’t forgit!” he shouted, his long bony finger trembled at the wall. “Don’t forgit! Food, slop jar! Food, slop jar!”

“I’ll give her snakes,” said Lottie Mae in a quiet voice the old man didn’t hear.

“And teller I hope she turns the goddam thing so loud she busts it. Teller that!”

Lottie Mae went out of the room and down the long dark hall to the kitchen. She made up some flapjack batter because Beeder Mackey would not eat eggs or meat. She took the flapjacks and butter and cane syrup and a cup of black coffee into the room where the girl was watching a show on television. A man was trying to give two squealing white ladies a new car, except the two white ladies could not get the answer and it was driving everybody crazy. Lottie Mae put the tray on the bed and Beeder immediately sat up, threw off the blanket, and ate rapidly of the flapjacks and syrup, using her hands and making little grunts of pleasure as she swallowed. Lottie Mae stood at the window while Beeder ate, watching the silvered limbs of the leaf-stripped chinaberry tree under the bright winter sun. Two frightened ruffled chickens came running by, Brother Boy right behind them with a long stick in his hand. He swung the stick rapidly as he ran, narrowly missing the chickens’ heads.

Lottie Mae could tell from the sounds behind her that Beeder Mackey had finished.

She turned around and said: “I be afraid it rain snakes.”

“Might,” said Beeder. “Wouldn’t surprise me whatever it was.” She pulled the covers tighter around her throat.

“I don’t know what to do,” said Lottie Mae.

“You know what to do,” said Beeder Mackey.

Lottie Mae looked out the window for a long moment, watching Brother Boy race madly about the yard, hot behind the screaming chickens.

Finally Lottie Mae said: “I misdoubt it.”

“Kill it,” said Beeder.

“Kill it?”

Beeder smiled her sly sweet smile. “The only way,” she said.

“I couldn’t kill nothing.”

The smile left Beeder’s face. “Then find a place to hide.”

“Ain’t no place to hide.”

“No place?” said Beeder. “No place at all?”

Lottie Mae said: “It be the onlyest thing I know. It ain’t no place to hide.”

“You in trouble,” said Beeder. “Bad trouble. It’s one thing I can tell you though. Can you shoot a gun?”

“Cain’t shoot no gun. Ain’t got no gun.”

“Knife?” asked Beeder Mackey.

“Razor,” said Lottie Mae.

Beeder said: “Don’t be without you razor.”

“I couldn’t kill it,” said Lottie Mae.

“Just in case you can, be handy to you razor.”

Lottie Mae took the tray and left. She came back shortly and got the slop jar. Beeder watched her carry it carefully out of the room. Directly she brought it back and slipped it under the bed. Neither of them looked at each other and nothing was said. The wild sound of the television filled the room. When Lottie Mae had finally gone Beeder lay very still and watched the little flickering screen where the Wedding Show Game was taking place. The woman wore a white bridal gown and the man at her side a dark suit. The man facing them had an open book in his hand. He was asking them questions. Every time they gave a right answer the audience screamed and another prize — a washer, a radio, a set of silver — was brought in to them.

Beeder lifted her head about an inch off the pillow and strained to hear over the Wedding Show Game, or rather to see if she could hear over the Wedding Show Game. A sound came to her that she thought was the sharp deep barking of the pit bulls or maybe it was the mechanical thumping of the electric treadmill on the other side of the wall in her father’s room. Whatever it was, it seemed something was coming over the sound of the television, so she got off the bed and turned the volume higher, filling her room with the joyous sound of the wedding couple who had just been pronounced man and wife.

Beeder lay back on the pillow, thinking how peaceful everything was, how peaceful she was even though they were always trying to trick her. How did they think they could trick her with poor silly Lottie Mae? But they never quit trying and never would quit. She knew that now. But the main thing was that she had found a place every bit as good as her mother’s. Sometimes she thought it might be better than her mother’s. But most times she did not.

***

Willard Miller had come by while Joe Lon was still sitting at the little white Formica table in the kitchen. Joe Lon was on about his tenth cup of black coffee, which had revved him up so he had brought out the whiskey and set it beside his cup. Elf was humming contentedly at the baby-smelling sink because after his fourth drink of whiskey he had told her the apron she was wearing was pretty and he wished she’d wear it more.

Willard came in and sat at the table with him and Elf asked if he was hungry and he said yes and Joe Lon said he was ready to eat something now himself so she cooked them both steak and eggs and biscuits. When she had it on the table she asked if she could use the pickup to go to the grocery store. Joe Lon said she could if she took the babies. “Of course I’m gone take them babies, Joe Lon, honey.” Willard watched the pickup pull away from the trailer and through a mouthful of blood-rare steak he jabbed at the window with his fork and said: “Great little woman,” said Willard.

Joe Lon slowly raised his eyes, which were about the color of the egg yolks in his plate and in a dispirited voice said, “You sumbitch.”

Willard laughed and wagged his thick blunt head, stopping only long enough to plunge another ragged chunk of beef into his mouth: “I seen Berenice too.” He stopped between words to chew and shift the meat with his tongue. “So I… goddam know … what you studying. Ain’t she turned into a world-beatin … piece of ass? I wonder if Hard Candy is gonna git super-star titties like Berenice gone off and done?” He winked. “Hard Candy’s already gradin out to a eighty-five.”

Joe Lon took an egg yolk into his mouth and followed it with a drink of whiskey. “You meet the fag debate player?”

“What?”

“Debate player,” Joe Lon said.

Willard smiled and sucked his teeth. “Yeah. Guy on the debate team. I met him. Sweet, ain’t he? Looks like a dirt track specialist to me.”

The whiskey had now put Joe Lon in a sour mood. At least he guessed it was the whiskey. He belched and regarded Willard. “How the hell you play debate anyhow?” Willard stopped smiling, looked first serious and then angry. “It’d make you sick just to see it, Joe Lon. They play it with a little rubber ring.”

“Rubber ring?” said Joe Lon, feeling an immediate bilious outrage start to pump from his heart.

“That’s what it’s played with,” said Willard. “These two guys wear little white slippers and …”

His voice loud with disbelief and shock, Joe Lon said, “White slippers.”

“Little pointy fuckers,” said Willard. “And they throw the rubber rings to each other and try to catch the rubber ring in their mouth.”

Joe Lon stood abruptly from the table. “Mouth?” he yelled. “Mouth!”

“Right’n the teeth,” Willard said.

Joe Lon lifted his palm, thick square fingers spread, and stared at it. “Berenice brought that sumbitch all the way to Mystic to shake my hand.”

“Looks like it,” said Willard.

“Goddam girl’s crazy.”

“As I remember,” said Willard, “she’s crazy when she left.”

Joe Lon wiped his plate good with a piece of bread. “I wonder what it is she wants?”

“Wouldn’t surprise me if it weren’t nothing more pressing than a good fucking.”

“She’s subject to git that,” said Joe Lon. “Hell, I’m apt to fuck Shep before it’s over.”

Beyond the window where they sat, through a haze of dust, campers and pickups roared by and children raced about screaming at one another. Lummy’s first cousin, RC, stood at the head of the dim road leading into the campsites, collecting ten dollars a vehicle. He’d grown up with Joe Lon and was going to a junior college over in Tifton. He kept good records, deposited the money in the bank, and never stole more than ten percent, which Joe Lon thought was fair. Besides, they just passed the cost on to the customer. “Daddy wants you and me to handle Tuffy Saturday night,” said Joe Lon.

“I never thought he’d come to that,” Willard said.

“Hearing’s got so bad the last few months he ain’t got much choice. He don’t want to, but he ain’t got much choice.”

“Hell, I’d be proud to do it.”

Joe Lon said: “I’ll tell’m.”

Willard stood up. “Let’s walk out and see what we can see.”

Joe Lon followed him to the door. “Just a bunch of crazy people cranking up to git crazier. But that’s all right. Feel on the edge of doing something outstanding myself.”

“Bring the whiskey.”

“I wouldn’t leave it.”

The campers and tents were arranged in rows on the campground with narrow dusty aisles between them. Willard and Joe Lon walked across the road, stepped over a little dry ditch, and cut up toward the place where RC was taking money and telling people where they could find room to camp.

“It’s about twenty more slots and we be full,” RC called as they passed.

Joe Lon didn’t answer, only nodded. He couldn’t get his mind off Berenice bringing Shep all the way from Athens to shake his hand and couldn’t keep from wondering if that was all she had done. They walked slowly on between the rows of women starting charcoal fires in grills for hamburgers and men sitting in folding chairs sipping beer, yelling at children who raced mindlessly about with pet snakes. They finally paused in front of a small, badly dented Airstream trailer pulled by a Hudson oar. There was a man squatting in the dust at the back of the trailer. They both knew him, or didn’t know him really, knew rather only that his name was Victor and that he was a preacher in a snakehandling church somewhere in Virginia. He came to the roundup every year to buy diamondbacks for his church. The congregation of the church never caught its own snakes, but would handle only those caught by strangers. Victor did not look at them when they stopped in front of him. He was wearing overalls and a denim shirt that looked as though he might have slept in them for a long time. His hair was white and full and twisted in tight coils all over his head and down his neck. It was actually Willard Miller who stopped at the Airstream. Joe Lon wanted to go on but Willard stopped and bent to stare into Victor’s face.

“Fucked any snakes lately, old man?” The first rush of whiskey always made Willard meaner than usual.

“Don’t,” said Joe Lon.

Victor cut his eyes at Willard. He looked angry. He always looked angry. Joe Lon had never seen him any other way, like he knew something other people didn’t know, and whatever it was he knew was too terrible to say.

“He ain’t nothing but a snake fucker,” Willard said.

“Don’t do that, Willard.”

Victor said: “The great dragon was cast out. The old serpent called the devil and satan which deceiveth the whole world. He was cast out into the earth and his angels were cast out with him.”

Willard said: “It’s not enough shit in the world, we got to have this too.”

“Leave him alone,” said Joe Lon. “Christ, he’s speckled as a guinea hen from rattlesnake bites.”

“That’s no reason to leave him alone,” Willard said.

“Yeah it is. He … he … Willard, he believes all that stuff about the snake and God.”