A Feast of Snakes

PART TWO

Duffy Deeter in an effort of will was thinking of Treblinka. He had already finished with Dachau and Auschwitz. Images of death pumped in his head. Behind his pinched burning eyelids he saw a pile of frozen eyeglasses where they had been torn from the faces of long lines of men, women, and children before they had been led into the gassy showers.

“Daddy. Please, daddy, come. I love … love … But it hurts.”

Duffy allowed his eyes to slide open. He permitted himself one glance through the window of his modified Winnebago. Children raced over the dusting landscape with snakes wrapped about their arms. Directly across the road an old man with twists of gray hair screwed into his head waved his hands wildly at two heavily muscled young men who alternately hustled their balls and spat in the dirt.

Duffy’s gaze remained on the two young men for a long moment and then he clamped his eyes shut again. Oh Jesus Oh God. Think about those showerheads and the wonderful gas spewing out into the children. Think about the stunned and naked mothers and their gassed dying children.

Duffy felt her writhe beneath him as she whispered: “You’re killing me.”

Yes, and by God he would. He’d kill. He’d do anything.

“You … you …” She couldn’t say whatever it was she was trying to say.

He had her braced against the wall by the bed and he took a steady, resting stroke. He opened his glazing eyes to look through the window again. The old man raised himself from his haunches and walked to the door of his Airstream. He limped. Something was wrong in his hip. He stopped at the door and looked back briefly at the two heavy young men, only one of whom was laughing. A little girl came screaming by with a boy twice her size chasing her with a twisting black snake in his hands.

Duffy closed his eyes again. Under him, Susan Gender was trying to make him look at her. He knew that trick. She’d show him only the deep pink inside her mouth. Make her tongue stand and work like a snake. So he shut out her voice and her body by slipping the garrot around the neck of a fellow prisoner and stealing his half-eaten potato. The prisoner’s graspy choking breath mixed with Susan Gender’s breath, became her breath. And the prisoner’s starving body entered her thrusting thighs and magnificent ass. He killed her where he rode her, there on the high crest of his passion.

“I guess you’re too young to remember Pathe News,” he said.

They were through now. He was putting on a jockstrap. She lay exhausted on the bed. He had made her cry. But her eyes were dry now and she was staring out the window. He knew she was looking at the two boys across the road, that she had her eyes on the high thrust muscle of their young buttocks rolling under their tight Levis. And he did not care at all.

“Pathe News,” she said, her voice numb with exhaustion.

He sat on the edge of the bed and began lacing his blue leather Adidas shoes onto his feet. His eyes were still full of dying children and hopeless parents. “Before television. We used to get the news at the neighborhood movie,” he said. “They told us everything. I loved it. One disaster after another. Burning blimps. Collapsing buildings. Ships blowing up.”

“It must have been real interesting,” she said, getting off the bed. She took an apple from a dish by the window.

She had had gum in her mouth the whole time and her tongue brought it now wetly into her hand. Her white teeth shattered the apple. Little shards of juice flew brightly from her mouth. He watched her in a kind of ecstasy of loathing. He knew her addiction to soap operas on the afternoon TV. And she not only collected science fiction novels, but she also read them. She said they made her think, which meant she was dumb in the gravest kind of way.

“Why don’t you go outside,” he said, “where everything is going on.”

“I don’t like snakes,” she said.

“You’re in a hell of a place if you don’t like snakes. Why’d you come?”

“You brought me,” she said, getting another apple. “At least I go with you when you take me. That’s more than Tish’ll do.”

It was true. Tish, his wife, wouldn’t go anywhere with him. Tish wouldn’t go across the street with him if she could help it. Susan Gender, though, would go anywhere with him in his modified Winnebago because she was bored witless by her studies at the University of Florida, where she held a Woodrow Wilson Fellowship in the philosophy department. Even so, Duffy thought only something very dumb could eat apples like that. Only the most brutal kind of ignorance could talk the way she did. Duffy couldn’t prove it. He just knew it.

“Where you going?”

“A workout,” he said.

“Haven’t you had enough workout?”

He grinned at her from the door, but there was no humor in it. “I never get enough of anything,” he said.

When he went through the door, he and Willard Miller and Joe Lon Mackey came upon one another the way three male dogs might come upon one another at a favorite tree. The recognition was instant and profound. Their eyes met only for a moment, but they did not slide past in a casual glance. Their gazes locked and held for a tense, nearly hostile instant, before rather deliberately they turned their backs on one another.

“What’s into that little bowed-up fucker?” said Willard Miller.

“I ain’t studying him.”

“We both know what you studying,” said Willard.

“I think we already talked that to death.”

Duffy Deeter came down the steps of his Winnebago with a metal prone press bench in his hands. He went out and set the bench in the sun. He went back into the camper and came out with an Olympic bar and set it on the extended arms of the prone press bench. Joe Lon and Willard watched him casually, without interrupting their conversation about snake hunting and pussy and violence.

Duffy Deeter didn’t come back out of the Winnebago right away. Rather, two five-pound plates came flying out and landed in the dirt. Then two ten-pound plates. Then a set of twenty-fives. When the second set of fifty-pounders hit the dirt Willard and Joe Lon hustled their balls, spat, and scowled at each other.

Duffy Deeter came strolling out of the Winnebago wearing only a pair of elastic workout shorts that clung to his rocklike buttocks and swelling thighs like a second skin. Earlier when he’d carried the bar out he’d had on a light cotton sweatshirt and pants and looked like what he was: five-six and about a hundred and fifty-five pounds. Now he looked like he’d said SHAZAM inside the Winnebago, setting off an explosion in his little body so that it was not little any more but roped and strung with incredible muscle.

It was obvious he had warmed up inside. Sweat on his skin shined like oil. He quickly loaded the bar. Across the dusty aisle Joe Lon and Willard watched him. Duffy Deeter regarded the bar, stared at it as though he expected it to maybe attack him. He breathed four quick times, making his rib cage swell like a bellows. On the fourth deep breath he dropped onto his back on the bench, reached up and took the loaded bar out of the cradle, and did ten easy presses, after which he replaced the bar and popped up on his feet. He came up glowering at Joe Lon and Willard. He held them in his feisty little stare.

They ambled across the road toward Duffy Deeter, Willard kicking at little clumps of dirt. He had on his Puma sprinter’s shoes this morning. He was closing in on Joe Lon’s two-twenty state record and was expected to break it before he graduated. The only record of Joe Lon’s he actually owned, although everybody thought he would own them all before the season was over, was Times Carrying The Ball in a single game. Joe Lon’s old record had been forty-two. Willard had raised that to forty-five. He had carried the ball every play of the game except three. He told Coach Tump he wanted the record and Coach Tump let him go for it. He took it the first time he had the chance and the Mystic Rattlers still won the game by a margin of twenty-one zip.

Duffy was standing beside the bench breathing when he looked up and pretended to see them for the first time, which both of them accepted as pretense and took no exception to. They would have done the same thing.

“Hey,” said Duffy Deeter, grinning, “how you doing?”

Joe Lon smiled back, nodded. Willard said, “We gone be all right.”

Duffy Deeter loved young jocks like these who thought they were strong. They always looked as though they had an aluminum cup in their pants and a helmet on their heads. Their universal contempt for anything weaker than they were showed in their faces as a kind of stunned bemusement. And most of them talked as though they had just tackled the goal post with their heads.

“Gittin a little workout?” said Joe Lon.

“Trying to,” said Duffy Deeter. “Going to a little iron always makes me feel better.”

“Do seem to,” said Willard, smiling and winking at Joe Lon, taking no pains to hide the wink from Duffy.

Duffy said: “Jesus, I hate to come off from home like this and have to work out alone.” He shook his head. “Hate that.”

Willard nodded at the bar. “What you pushing on there anyhow?”

“Two-ten,” said Duffy.

Whatever the rush of blood meant that Willard had felt when he first saw Duffy Deeter and the Olympic bar had subsided and he was just about to walk away when the door to the Winnebago opened and a long-legged, blackhaired cream-colored piece of ass stood there eating an apple in what may have been the shortest dress Willard Miller had ever seen. Raised the way she was in the doorway, Willard and Joe Lon looked dead into the bulging eye of her pussy. She was wearing red panties.

Joe Lon kept looking at her and said: “I wouldn’t mind me a little iron this morning myself.”

Willard Miller’s eyes never wavered either when he said: “Ain’t nothing like iron in the morning.”

“You’re more than welcome to sit in here for a few sets,” said Duffy. He enjoyed them looking at the girl. He liked them to want her. They wanted her, but by God Duffy Deeter had her.

“It’s white of you to say so,” Willard said.

“That’s Susan Gender up there in the door. My name’s Deeter. Duffy Deeter. We came up from Gainesville, Florida.”

Both their heads swung slowly to see him grinning at them. They grinned back.

“I’m a graduate student at the University of Florida,” said Susan Gender.

Joe Lon thought: Is everbody in college but me? How the hell did I get left out here taking care of chemical shitters and dealing nigger whiskey?

Joe Lon and Willard slipped out of their shirts. Willard flipped over and walked around in the dirt on his hands. Joe Lon took the bottle of whiskey out of his back pocket, set it carefully on the step of the Winnebago, checking out Susan Gender’s red pants again as he did. Then he went into a steady handstand and did six dips, his nose just short of the dirt each time he went down. They both came off their hands and looked at Duffy.

“I’m impressed,” said Duffy, shortly. “What the hell are you, gymnasts?”

“Drunks,” said Joe Lon picking up the bottle.

“I’ve been known to take a drink myself,” said Duffy.

Joe Lon held out the bottle toward him.

“I don’t usually drink when I’m working out,” said Duffy.

“Why not?” said Willard, taking the bottle out of Joe Lon’s hand. “How come you don’t drink when you working out?”

“I didn’t say I didn’t. I said I didn’t usually.”

A man came running by with a two-foot black snake, trying to stuff it down the blouse of a screaming woman.

“Nothing much usual about today,” said Willard, offering him the bottle again.

“Not a goddam thing that I can see,” said Duffy, taking it. He took a long pull at’ it while he watched Joe Lon do the first set of warm-up presses on the bench. They talked and warmed up, casually adding weight between sets.

A little man came around the corner just as Duffy was getting off the bench. His hair was gray and he was color-coordinated in brown plaid slacks, a beige Banlon shirt with crossed golf clubs over the heart, and a ventilated golfing cap. A paunch, round and mobile as a ball, rode under his belt. He stopped and said almost shyly: “I’ve been looking everywhere for you.”

“You’ve been looking for me?” said Duffy Deeter.

The little man smiled and looked just over their heads at the distant horizon. “Well, you’re the only one I know here and …”

Joe Lon came over and laid his big square hand on the back of the little man’s neck and offered him the whiskey bottle. “Why don’t you have a drink and git out of the way? You fucking up the workout.”

“I’m sorry. I didn’t know …”

“It’s all right,” said Willard. “Now you know.” He turned a short hard glance toward Joe Lon and then back to the little man. “Say, you ain’t a salesman are you? A traveling salesman? You look like you might be one to me.”

Joe Lon closed his hand on the neck he was holding. Closed in hard. “What?” he said. “You cain’t be a fucking salesman. It ain’t allowed.”

They were both leaning in on him now, one on each side. The workout, the sweat, the whiskey, and the sight of Susan Gender’s red underwear had made them feel good. They were playing. But the little man didn’t know that. They looked as though they were set to go crazy mean.

“What you saying?” the little man cried, sucking desperately at the spit spinning between his lips. He stared wildly at Duffy Deeter. “Tell’m who I am. Tell’m I’m Enrique Gomez.” He glanced up at Willard, who regarded him with a kind of objective, passionless malevolency. “My friends call me Poncy. Poncy!”

Willard Miller looked at Joe Lon. “What kind of name is Eniquer Gomez?”

Joe Lon said: “It ain’t our kind of people, is it?”

Duffy Deeter was smiling. Up in the door, Susan Gender was smiling. Willard and Joe Lon each had one of Poncy’s arms. They were even smiling now, but to Poncy their smiles looked terrible.

Poncy said: “My friends call me Poncy. Honest to God they really do call me Poncy.”

Duffy Deeter said: “He told us that on the road, last night.”

“That’s what he told us,” said Susan Gender. “We met’tn at the Magnolia Truck and Rest Stop coming into town and that’s what he told us.”

Joe Lon seemed to grow hot, to burn all along his veins. He looked at Willard with genuine puzzlement. “I’m damned if I know what to do about this.”

Duffy Deeter sat down on the bench, smiling, gazing with great fondness upon the bulging mound of Susan Gender’s blender, as he called it in moments when he felt good. Listening to these country boys playing with the old man pleased him. It amused.

They kept Poncy lifted on his toes while he frantically explained that he was born in Cuba, brought to Tampa at the age of five, and educated at the University of Florida. Here he started an addled singing of the University of Florida’s Alma Mater, with Susan Gender screaming in the background that he fucking-A-well had the words right. That was it. He stopped singing and was rapidly talking about his life’s work in bananas when Hard Candy Sweet appeared between two tents across the road.

She came straight to them and. said, “What you two assholes doing to this little sapsucker?”

“We was gone kill him,” said Willard, smiling. “But I think we’ll just leave him alone and let him bore his goddam self to death.”

They let him down on his heels. Joe Lon straightened Poncy’s shirt, smoothed his collar. Then he raised Poncy’s chin with the end of his little finger and looked directly into Poncy’s eyes. “But you ain’t no traveling salesman, are you?”

“No. No sir! Retired. I’m re …”

“You didn’t retire from being no salesman neither, did you?”

That was precisely what Poncy’s specialty had been. And he had risen to Director of Sales for all of bananas before he was through.

But he saw that was not the right answer. “Engineering,” said Poncy. “I was an engineer.”

Joe Lon gave him a thin whiskey smile. “Got a uncle that was a railroad man.”

Willard had introduced Hard Candy to Susan Gender and it turned out Susan had been an undergraduate head majorette herself back at Auburn University in Alabama and they went down and lined up hip to hip on the grass at the end of the trailer working on a little routine.

“Now after the first kickout, you spin and do a split,” said Hard Candy Sweet. Her little eyes shined. “Can you still split?”

“Lord yes, honey,” said Susan Gender. “I’m still just limber as a dishrag.”

Willard was on his back on the bench pumping two hundred and fifty pounds. Poncy was whispering, “Are they crazy, or what?”

Duffy didn’t answer right away; he only looked at Poncy. Finally he said: “You better get over there out of the way.” Joe Lon and Willard slid a ten-pound plate on each end of the Olympic bar.

“You set,” said Joe Lon.

Poncy walked over and did not so much sit as collapse onto a little grassy bank of dirt.

The girls came high-kicking by and Susan Gender sang: “We’re going inside.” She stopped in the door and called: “You want anything, Duffy?”

Duffy, who was in the middle of a press, did not answer, but Joe Lon Mackey, beginning to buzz from the whiskey, feeling better than ever in the old familiar demand of muscle and sweat, said: “Got any bourbon whiskey up there in that trailer?”

Susan Gender gave a little kick and laid the full weight of her smile and single red eye upon him. “Duffy Deeter wouldn’t go anywhere without it.”

“You might just bring us out a bottle,” Joe Lon said.

“If you got any of them cold beers in there,” said Willard Miller, “bring a few. Damned if that straight corn ain’t beginning to burn my breakfast.”

“Pussy,” said Joe Lon.

“You better hope so,” Willard said. “Slip on that other ten.”

They were doing only three repetitions on the bench now, and they were no longer adding weight casually but slamming it on with little grunts of challenge and pleasure.

When they went through the door of the Winnebago, Hard Candy looked up and said: “Hey, those are great trophies.”

There were trophies mounted along three walls, bracketed and gleaming on specially constructed shelves.

“You oughta see them two guys’ football trophies out there. Knock you eyes out. They’re stars, you know.”

“Duff said he wouldn’t ever have anything to do with a team sport. He always said somebody else could just have the team sports.”

Although Hard Candy knew there were trophies for other sports — didn’t Willard have a shelf full from track? — nobody she knew thought a trophy was a real trophy unless it was from football.

“What are all them from?” said Hard Candy.

“Karate mostly. Some from handball. Duff was the state singles champion in handball for four years. That right there is something the ABA, you know, the American Bar Association, gave him for coming in fifteenth in the Boston Marathon.”

Hard Candy could only blink at the trophies. A lawyer that played handball? Willard was apt to kill him and eat him.

Susan Gender smiled at her. “I know what you’re thinking. That’s what I thought at first. But don’t be fooled, that little bastard out there is dangerous.”

Poncy came bursting through the door, his face ash-gray under his Cuban color. “They said I better get the whiskey and beer,” he said rapidly. “They said I better.”

“Jesus,” said Susan, “I forgot.”

She got the bottle out of a cabinet and the six-pack of tallboys out of the refrigerator. Poncy rushed outside with it in his arms.

“That old man ought to git away from them boys,” said Hard Candy, “him being like he is and all. One of’m git drunk enough and git to feeling mean, and I don’t know.”

They had gradually moved to a window while they talked and they stood now watching the three of them take turns pressing off their backs. Duffy was on the bench and Willard and Joe Lon were on either side, leaning forward yelling at him as he strained to finish the press, yelling in short, abrupt phrases. Veins stood in their necks and their heads jerked as if they might have been barking. Poncy sat on the little bank of dirt, alternately clapping his hands the way the boys were doing and looking afraid. Dust rose around the bench and clung to their sweating bodies. They didn’t seem to see it.

***

Big Joe Mackey limped through the hallway of his house toward the kitchen. It was only a little after noon but here inside the high-ceilinged old house the shadows were deep in the corners and along the warped walls. He stopped at his daughter’s door and leaned against it listening. He heard what he had been hearing all day, the mad babble of the television set. Lottie Mae had finished and left and he knew he could not depend on her to come back; he would probably end up having to cook his own dinner, but he didn’t mind too much because Lummy had brought over another bottle of whiskey and he’d do his cooking in a mild red drunken mist. Beeder wouldn’t get anything else to eat until tomorrow when the cook came.

He leaned his head against the door and called: “You all right in there, youngan?”

For answer he got a sudden booming of the television as the volume was turned up. He’d be damned if he would go in there. She was well enough to hop out of bed and turn up the sound. That was good enough for him. He hadn’t raised his daughter to be crazy, goddammit. But she’d always been a headstrong girl and if she wanted to be crazy the rest of her life, that was her little red wagon and she’d have to pull it. He wasn’t going in there to see her craziness and see … see…

There his mind stopped. He quit thinking, and his daughter’s face gradually emerged out of the red mist of his eyes, Beeder’s face, which was only the younger uncracked copy of his wife’s face. He stood, suddenly shaken, saying quietly: “Damn them all. Damn them all.” But try as he would to keep it from happening, he saw all over again his wife sitting in her favorite rocker with the bag over her head.

He went into the kitchen and got the dog bucket. It was a five-gallon bucket and he filled it nearly full with canned meat and double-yolk eggs. Then he stirred in ten ounces of a special vitamin mixture he made up himself. He limped awkwardly with the bucket down the back steps and out across the bare dirt yard to the kennel. The kennel was a long narrow concrete slab with individual wire cages fastened to the top of it. There were four puppies, not quite three months old. They were solid red and already broad-chested and thick-necked, standing on their hind legs barking happily at the sight of the bucket. The two dogs next to the puppies were grown but had not yet started their hard training. The only thing they did was a little game that all the pit bulls loved. He had an old rubber tire tied to the end of a rope hanging from an oak tree behind the kennel. These two young dogs, approaching fighting age, were allowed to swing from the tire an hour a day three days a week. He would rub the tire with a little blood — chicken blood — and take the dogs out one at a time to the tire, set it swinging, and turn them loose. They would leap and set their massive jaws to the tire and swing, their thick little bodies drawn up tight and tucked into a solid muscular ball. Big Joe thought that next month he would muzzle both of them and put them in together to see how they faced off. Sometimes a strain weakened and played out for no reason at all. The dog would look great but at the center of him would be a soft rotten spot of something that made him go bad.

He fed the puppies, who never stopped yelping until he dumped big hunks of meat and egg into their troughs. The dogs next to the puppies — their brothers — barked too, but it was a slower, deeper bark, and their steady red-eyed gaze was more serenely and savagely sullen. They stood in solid, slightly bowlegged dignity at their troughs swallowing heavy chunks of food each time their great heads jerked. Their bony skulls were insistent under their fine tight skin. Tuffy was next in the line of cages and he did not bark at all. He had rounded into condition beautifully. No matter how badly you hurt him, he came back steady and strong after a single day’s rest. His wounds had scabbed nicely. Tuffy turned slowly and looked down the row of cages at his noisy sons and seemed to see them and dismiss them at the same time with a fine contempt. Big Joe watered Tuffy but did not feed him.

In the end cage, which was slightly larger than the others, was Tuffy’s daddy, also named Tuffy. He’d won six fights before he was retired to stud and became the top of the line; his blood was in every fighting animal Big Joe owned, including the two ferocious bitches housed on the reverse side of the kennel where the males could not see them.

Old Tuffy, as he was called to distinguish him from Tuffy the Younger, had thickened in his old age. A coarse gray ruff grew round his neck and he was nearly blind. He had not mated in a long time. His fine razor teeth had been worn down to dull yellow stubs in his mouth, a mouth that once closed like a steel trap but that now was wet and a little slack, a little jowly like an old man’s. Like his son in the cage next to him he did not bark or even growl but stood with the magnificent balance he still had even in old age, watching Big Joe with solemn faded eyes held in a net of red veins as Big Joe limped by with the meat bucket. Big Joe watered him with the running garden hose lying on the edge of the concrete slab, but did not feed him. He clucked to the old dog and spoke to him in a soft, rough, but gentle voice. Then he went around on the other side of the kennel and fed and watered the bitches. When he was done with the bitches, he came back to the old dog’s cage, and with a key off a ring on his belt, he opened the padlock on the steel U-neck that formed the latch. He swung back the heavy wire gate.

The old pit bull walked out of his cage and stood blinking in the thin sunlight. He shook himself and bent his head to lick his muscled forepaw with a tongue wide as a man’s hands. Big Joe knelt stiffly beside him.

“You ole sumbitch,” said Big Joe in a whisper at the dog’s head. “You done got too old to fight. An you done got too old to fuck.” He scratched and rubbed the gray ruff at the dog’s thick neck. “You had you goddam day in the ring though. You done what you done as good as any dog that ever come down the pike. Wisht I had a nickel on the dollar for ever bet passed over you back.” Big Joe sighed and looked at the cage where Tuffy regarded them both, standing four square to his wire gate, a slow but insistent growl rattling wetly in his throat. “Yessir,” said the old man vaguely. “True, ever bit of it true. But you done got too old to fight. And you done got too old to fuck.”

He got slowly to his feet and took a steel muzzle off a rack hanging on the cage. The old dog did not resist the muzzle and when he had it securely in place, Big Joe put a steel choke collar on him and fastened the collar to a short leather strap that was in turn tied to a short metal post. Then he opened Tuffy’s gate and got down on his knees and muzzled him while he was still in the cage. He was trying to get a leather lead fastened to his choke collar when Tuffy burst past him and seemingly did not touch the ground again until he landed on his daddy still tied securely to the metal post. The growls coming from the two dogs as they rolled together on the ground was like an electric saw cutting through something soft but now and then hitting something hard and resistant. Big Joe got slowly to his feet cursing softly but good-naturedly and limped over carefully to the snarling, clawing dogs. He got Tuffy by the tail and dragged him clear of the reach of the leather lead fastened to the post. He hit him on the top of the skull with his fist to calm him down and then got a leather strap attached to his choke collar.

With a muzzled dog on a short lead in either hand he stared off toward a place about fifty yards away where wooden bleachers formed a square. The bleachers rose maybe twenty-five feet high and enclosed a square hole in the ground three feet deep and twelve feet across. The sides of the hole were reinforced with close-driven wooden stakes but the bottom was only hard-packed earth. A set of portable wooden steps led down into the hole. As Big Joe went through the gate of the fence and the dogs saw the hole, they immediately bowed, started walking stiff-legged. The hair rose along the indentation of their heavily muscled backs. They lunged against their short leads trying to square off to each other. Big Joe kicked them both in the ribs with his thick brogan shoe and spoke to them in a quiet, good-natured voice.

“You dogs,” he said. “You dogs stand easy.”

He wished he had thought to bring his whiskey. He didn’t particularly dislike this, but there was no pleasure in it either. It was simply necessary, like feeding a young savage boxer a lot of inferior opponents, opponents who had some skill but no chance, no real hope. It tuned the fighter, gave him a taste for blood and the killing blow, made him feel invincible. Big Joe had saved the old dog for this final sharpening of the son and future stud of the line. It never occurred to him to wish that it did not have to end this way. It always had to end this way and he had always known it.

He went carefully down the steps into the pit. Both dogs followed him down, but by now they were so excited that they closed at the top step and came into the pit locked together, their steel muzzles grinding. Big Joe watched dispassionately as the two dogs parted briefly, standing in the center of the pit now, heads together, their short wide bodies braced and waiting. Their eyes were locked and they balanced each other in a bright and ferociously insane stare.

Big Joe wondered, as he had more than once when dogs were about to stand to one another, what might be going on in their heads. Could dogs think? What were they thinking? Probably nothing. They weren’t men; they didn’t think; they fought.

There was a steel hook built into the wall on each side of the pit. He separated the dogs and fastened their leads to the hooks. Then he removed their muzzles, first slapping them hard twice with his heavy square-fingered hand to get their attention so they didn’t accidentally crush a finger or a wrist in their fighting frenzy. Once their muzzles were off Big Joe moved to release them, but Tuffy broke his lead and was across the pit and on his daddy in a blinding move full of slashing teeth and roiling dust and flying shards of bright slobber. The dog’s body, catapulting across the pit, had struck Big Joe on the shoulder where he had been kneeling beside Old Tuffy and knocked him halfway across the circle. He got up slowly and sat on the reinforced wall. Old Tuffy would not have had much of a chance anyway but fastened on the lead as he was made it a shorter fight than it otherwise would have been. It wasn’t more than forty-five seconds before Big Joe could see that he was already taking a killing. Tuffy was into his throat. The sound of blood was in his breathing as Tuffy settled in deeper and shook him now like a toy. Big Joe let Tuffy stay on as long as he liked, letting him chew his fill, until at last Tuffy backed off, gazed quietly and somberly at the slashed and bleeding body, and then trotted happily across the pit to his master.

Big Joe was deeply satisfied at the way Tuffy had peaked into condition. He’d feed him now, rest him good, and by fight time tomorrow night he would be as ready and savage as he had ever been. He led Tuffy back and put him in his cage. For a long time then he stood staring at the two grown bulls in the next cage. Finally, he chose one of them, put him on a leash, and led him back up to the house.

***

They had fought each other to an absolute draw on the bench, but they both knew that one of them would have lost if Duffy Deeter had not run out of weights. And neither of them was dead solid certain which of them it would have been. Duffy Deeter had gone with them up to an even three hundred pounds, which astounded them both and immediately changed their attitude toward him.

A hundred-and-fifty-pound guy who could get three hundred pounds on the bench was nobody to fuck with. It meant that somewhere there inside him was a little knot of craziness that made him pay the price. But it was not entirely enough to make them forgive him for weighing a hundred and fifty pounds. He was still a runty, second-string grunion. But a very strong grunion.

They’d left him at three hundred and then both got one final rep with three-twenty, which was all the weight Duffy had with him in the Winnebago. Joe Lon and Willard were fired up and when they found out there was no more weight they automatically faced off and almost went one on one against each other right there in the dirt and probably would have if it had not been for Susan Gender. Duffy Deeter had enjoyed it immensely and was hoping they might hurt each other, because while he admired them for turning out to be stud jocks instead of just looking like they might be, he could not forgive them for beating him. He wasn’t used to getting beat, even by men who outweighed him fifty or sixty pounds. So it was left for Susan Gender to stop them. She had been watching through the window with Hard Candy Sweet when Willard popped up off the bench and turned to face Joe Lon, whose response was to dip slightly, bring his elbows out from his body, and thrust out his thick corded neck.

“He’s gone strike a lick,” Hard Candy said happily.

“What? Which one?” said Susan Gender.

“Take you pick,” said Hard Candy. “They fixin to bust ass.”

But Susan got to the door first and cried: “Let’s go find us a tonk!”

Duffy and Poncy looked at her but Joe Lon and Willard only slightly shifted their bodies toward her, the smallest change in the position of their shoulders. But their eyes stayed locked on each other.

“Tonk,” said Willard quietly, not a question, just repeating the word.

“I want to dance!” cried Susan Gender. “I want to play the juke and eat a pickled pig’s foot. I want to drink beer and shake my ass.”

Now they turned together to look at her and stared with hostility at her head majorette legs straddling across the door frame.

“Ain’t no tonk in this county,” Joe Lon said. “It’s damn nigh fifteen miles.”

“Shit, boy,” said Susan Gender. “We got wheels.” She spread her arms and looked back into the Winnebago. “Duffy Deeter ain’t got nothing if he ain’t got wheels.”

Poncy, suddenly alive again in their young contentious voices, said: “I got a Porsche my own sef,” and two things happened at once. First, Poncy was sorry he had opened his mouth about his sweet expensive Porsche car, and second everything got very quiet and still while they stared at him. He had not meant anything by imitating, or trying to imitate, their grit voices. He’d only been trying to be one of the group. But he could see in their faces they had heard what he said as mockery. He tried to explain what he really meant but they wouldn’t hear it. Joe Lon and Willard each got an arm and led him protesting down the dirt street to where his car was parked.

“Hard Candy,” Joe Lon called over his shoulder. “Go with them, show Deeter. Blue Pines.”

“But I spose we gone already be drunk a beer by the time you git there in that Winnebago,” called Willard, “cause this sucker’s got a Porschie and I hear them things won’t do nothing but fly.”

They put Poncy in the back seat of his own Porsche and Joe Lon drove. The country was flat but the road was winding and Joe Lon one-handed the car through one tight turn after another, not bothering to use the gears but keeping it flat out with Poncy first outraged and then terrified in the back seat. Halfway there, Willard puked out the window, not much but enough for some of it to blow into the back seat where Poncy was trying to duck. Willard did it as easily as spitting. The stream slipped from between his lips, he blinked twice, and wiped his mouth with his hand.

He looked over at Joe Lon. “Musta been that fucking meat we et at breakfast,” he said.

Joe Lon handed him the bourbon. He took a mouthful, gargled, spat it through the window, and then drank long from the bottle, his powerful throat pumping and pumping. When he finished he turned and tried to hand it to Poncy, who had been watching the whole thing from his place crouched in the back. “Want you own sef a drink a whiskey?” said Willard.

At that moment Joe Lon was taking the Porsche through a long slow curve in a power slide that was turning a hundred and ten. Joe Lon was screaming, not with joy, not with anger, just screaming, his thick fine hands locked on the steering wheel. Poncy saw a huge oak tree tilting into their line of vision at the top of the curve and smelled the raw bits of puke clinging to his Banlon shirt and saw the offered whiskey bottle sloshing just there in front of his eyes and although he knew what he was going to do — could not help doing — he bowed his head and puked onto his lap while Willard Miller sucked his teeth and watched dispassionately from the front seat.

Willard said: “This sumbitch in the back seat just thrown up on his self.”

But Joe Lon didn’t hear. He was on a long straight and he had the Porsche up to a hundred and twenty, which was apparently all it would do because he was stamping the accelerator and pumping the steering wheel with both hands. He glanced over at Willard and shouted: “Ain’t had a chance to drive nothing like this since Berenice went off to the U of Gee and given her Vette to Hard Candy!”

Joe Lon drew his lips back in what could have been great happiness, but it was not. Even in the middle of this frantic ride, with his best buddy sitting beside him screaming for him to Screw it on! he felt the weight of a great despair settling in him as solid as bone. It had started in the middle of the workout on the prone press bench and he was not even aware of it until it was on him like a fever. He had gotten up from the bench and, waiting for Duffy and Willard, found himself looking across the road at the old man who had come back and squatted by the end of his Airstream trailer. The twisting tufts of hair stood out like something driven into his skull and across his knees was an open book that he was reading, his finger tracing and tracing the page as he read.

It was a long time before Victor shifted the book and Joe Lon saw it was the Bible. Victor used to take a room on the second floor of their house back in the days when Big Joe used to let rooms to tourists and hunters for the Roundup. Victor never talked of anything but God and snakes and his voice and the look in his eyes always made Joe Lon’s heart jump. His daddy, who had been to meetings at Victor’s church, had told Joe Lon how it was.

“He strings diamondbacks in his hair like a lady strings ribbons. I seen’m kiss a snake and a snake kiss him. He’s been bit in the mouth. He’s been bit everwhere. It ain’t no more’n a kiss from his ma. He follers where God leads him.”

It was Joe Lon’s turn on the bench and he went under the weight in a sinking despair, thinking: What am I doing here on my back? What is this I’m doing? I’m a grown man with two babies and a wife and I’m out here fucking around with weights. What the hell ails me?

When Joe Lon got off the bench the next time, Elizabeth Lilly Well — called Mother Well by the hunters, who gave her buttons from the tails of rattlers — was sitting on a stone beside Victor. She had brought her three-thousand-dollar mosaic called Deer Plus Snake with her. It gleamed in the sun and Victor traced its outline with one bony finger. It came to Joe Lon that she pinned rattles to a canvas relentlessly and with great joy and Victor followed God the same way. What did he, Joe Lon, do? What did he have? He had once had football to fill up his mind and his body and his days and so he had never thought about it. Then one day football was gone and it took everything with it. He kept thinking something else would surely take its place but nothing ever did. He stumbled from one thing to the next thing. From wife to babies to making a place for crazy campers bent on catching snakes. But nothing gave him anything back. So here he was lying under a dead weight doing what he’d done five years ago, when he was a boy. If it had meant anything then, he had forgotten what; and merciful God, it meant nothing now. His life had become a not very interesting movie that he seemed condemned to see over and over again.

“I feel like the end of the world,” Joe Lon screamed above the noise of the whining engine.

“We git up here,” Willard screamed back at him, “we’ll press a little beer to you face, you’ll feel better.”

But he would not feel any better and he knew it.

Poncy, sitting with the little green puddle in his lap, tried to say something authoritative to them about abusing his car, after all he was old enough to be their father and there was no reason for him to take all this and not let them know what they were in for if they wrecked his Porsche or hurt him. But they either did not hear him yelling up at them from the back seat or they simply did not care.

They roared into a clay parking lot and stopped. Joe Lon and Willard got out and closed their doors without ever looking at him. He sat where he was and watched them walk away. His bowels felt loose. He’d been having a lot of trouble with his bowels since he retired, and the ride had not helped. When he was sure he had everything under control, he got out. In the red clay parking lot he shifted quickly from foot to foot, testing the weight of his bowels. Everything seemed to be all right.

The Blue Pines was a wooden building with a tin roof. Various signs were stuck on the walls advertising Budweiser, the King of Beers, and Redman chewing tobacco, and Coca-Cola, pool table, and sandwiches. The hills sloped away in thin, second-growth pine trees. When Poncy opened the door it was so dark he had to stand a moment before he saw Willard and Joe Lon sitting at a round splintered wooden table and another man bringing a pitcher of beer with two glasses.

The man said: “You boys welcome here, but I don’t want no goddam trouble.” He set the pitcher on the table.

Neither Joe Lon nor Willard looked at the man. They poured beer into the glasses and drank. The man stood beside the table. Finally, Willard — still without looking up — said: “Pay’m, would you, Conty?”

“Poncy,” said Poncy, paying the bartender, “it’s Poncy.”

The man stood beside the table with the money in his hand and said: “How’s you daddy’s Tuffy?”

“Tuffy’s good. Great shape,” said Joe Lon.

“He’s old, though,” said the man.

“You put anything down, better be on Tuff,” Joe Lon said.

“Knowing when to git off a dog is smart as when to git on.”

“Suit youself.”

There was only one other man in the Blue Pines, a farmer in overalls and felt hat, drinking whiskey out of a water glass and never looking up. Willard and Joe Lon managed to get through two pitchers of beer before the Winnebago pulled in. Duffy Deeter drank straight from the pitcher to catch up and then proceeded to take Joe Lon and Willard to the pool table in back and humiliate them. During one run he went through two consecutive racks, which did not improve Willard’s humor.

Susan Gender put two quarters in the juke for six plays. She stood prancing on her toes in front of the jukebox for a moment and then cut her sly gaze at Poncy, where he stood trying to act as though he wasn’t watching her pumping hips and the fine vibrating flesh of her belly.

She smiled. “I guess you it,” she said, and came dancing toward him.

“No, wait!” he said, as she pulled him toward the floor. “I slept in the car last night, my back …”

“All the more reason to shake youself loose,” she said.

She held his hand and whipped her hard lean body through the Dog and the Frug and the Pony and the Swim. As Hard Candy crossed the dance floor for more beer, she pinched Poncy’s old flabby ass. He tried to turn around but Susan Gender held his hands tight.

“Please,” said Poncy, but a little jolt of pleasure had moved on his spine.

“I’m gone give you a goose ever time I catch you not shaking it,” yelled Hard Candy Sweet.

Poncy saw the farmer slowly lift his eyes under the brim of the felt hat and look at them steadily, with no expression at all on his face. His eyes looked like nailheads over his wind-burned cheeks. Poncy started moving his hips and shoulders and hands. He had no idea if what he was doing was right. There did not seem to be a right or wrong way, since Susan Gender wasn’t doing anything the same way twice.

Joe Lon and Willard came wandering over from the pool table to the dance floor. Behind them Duffy Deeter still leaned on the green velvet table under the swinging overhead light.

“Come on back over here,” he called.

“What did he win off you?” Hard Candy asked.

“Couple dollars,” said Joe Lon.

“You could train a goddam monkey to shoot pool,” Willard said.

They stood at the edge of the dance floor watching Poncy jump awkwardly about, hobbling after the spinning, stroking Susan Gender.

“Susan’s teaching Poncy to dance,” Hard Candy said. “Ain’t he just the ugliest fucking thing you ever seen?”

“Well, shit,” said Joe Lon, “if Enreeker wants to dance, we’ll hep’m. Git us another pitcher, Hard Candy.”

Joe Lon walked out onto the floor. Willard turned a chair around, sat down, and put his arms on the back of it. Hard Candy went to the bar for a pitcher and stood looking at Willard while it was drawn from the tap. Joe Lon stopped alongside Poncy and Susan. Poncy was concentrating on his broken little dance when Joe Lon picked him off his feet. He caught Poncy’s belt on each hip and lifted him as if he’d been a child. Poncy’s feet kept moving while Joe Lon turned him through the air and set him down in front of Willard’s chair.

“We don’t allow nothing half-ass around here, Enreeker,” said Joe Lon bitterly. “You gone dance, goddammit, you got to dance.”

Hard Candy came back with the beer. Duffy Deeter had strolled out onto the rough wooden floor in front of the jukebox and pumped in some more quarters. Susan Gender had sweated through her blouse and the farmer’s nailhead eyes watched her little hard-nosed titties plunge against the fabric as she jacked around to the music while James Brown screamed: “I don’t know karate but I know kaRAZOR.”

“I had to sleep in the car last night,” Poncy was trying to say. “My back hurts like a … like a …” But he couldn’t get it out because Joe Lon had him by the seat of the pants and Willard had him by the belt buckle and they were punching his hips back and forth between them.

“Basic move,” shouted Joe Lon right into Poncy’s face. “It’s you stroke. You cain’t stroke, you cain’t dance.”

“Oh, God, God,” said Poncy, his eyes round, his lips gray. They were hurting him. But if either of them knew it they didn’t show it. Their own faces were flushed, their lips peeled back in what was alternately snarl and laughter.

“Watch her,” cried Willard, still seated, still holding Poncy by his double knits, punching him in the ass counterpoint to the punch Joe Lon gave him in his old melon belly. Poncy was beginning to hunch and stroke as best he could to avoid being hurt but he couldn’t do it very well because there was a stick of pure fire standing in his lower back. He was terrified that he would either cry or shit on himself. The punches in the belly had made him flatulent but thank God, thank God the music was loud enough to cover him. “Watch her,” Willard was screaming in his ear.

“Wave you goddam hands, Enreeker,” said Joe Lon.

Poncy waved his hands.

“Watch’r feet,” said Joe Lon.

Poncy could only roll his eyes at them and wave his hands and arms.

Duffy had been leaning against the slot, where he was feeding quarters into the jukebox. His eyes and Willard’s happened to meet briefly and when they did Duffy came bucking across the floor to Hard Candy. His hands moved in one direction, his feet in another, his body in still another, all of it synchronized with the music and all of it at blinding speed. His head stayed rock still, his eyes fixed on Hard Candy. She’d stopped pouring beer and set the pitcher down. Her eyes were shiny, her lips swollen. Her body started to pulse, then pump, and they moved out onto the dance floor, separate, no longer even looking at each other, but absolutely together.

“Jesus,” said Willard to Joe Lon, “ain’t it nothing that little sucker cain’t do?”

They held Poncy tight between them, and since they had stopped making him hunch and flap his arms he thought they were through with him. He took a deep breath and just to keep things nice and easy and conversational so they wouldn’t think of punching him again, Poncy said: “He’s quite something, isn’t he?” He’d made it as formal as he could because he didn’t ever want them to think he was mocking the way they talked again, but Joe Lon turned on him anyway, jerking as if he had been burned. His nostrils flared. His head seemed to tremble, and his staring blue eyes were intense enough to look crossed.

“Quite something?” Joe Lon demanded. “Willard, is he gone stand around saying shit like quite something or not?”

Willard popped out of his chair, raising Poncy about six inches off the floor by the belt when he did. Poncy got one quick glimpse and closed his eyes. Willard looked completely nuts. Willard and Joe Lon, shouting quite something, quite quite something, dragged Poncy toward the center of the dance floor. Once they had him out in front of the jukebox, each of them took one of his hands and started going round and round him as if he was a maypole and each of his arms were streamers. They held tight and skipped in a little dance step to the music. Hard Candy stopped dancing and took hold of Poncy too. Hard Candy had him by the tail of his Banlon shirt and Susan Gender, unable to find anything better to hold on to, caught Poncy by a roll of fat on his hip. They were laughing and singing and Poncy was screaming but the music was so loud it sounded like they were all having just the best time. Poncy was very dizzy and very sick to his stomach and a thin stream of shit had slipped down his leg. He tried to fall down but Joe Lon and Willard wouldn’t let him. The farmer in the overalls slowly turned his back on them and sat staring down into his glass of whiskey.

Poncy was too weak to scream by the time the record finally ended. He was soaked with sweat and his nostrils were full of the thick smell of himself. They leaned inward on him, hanging to his arms and clothing, their hot beery breaths churning his stomach.

“Let’s go to your place and eat snake,” Willard finally yelled at Joe Lon.

“He got snake?” said Duffy Deeter.

“He ain’t got but about twenty,” said Willard.

They’d turned Poncy loose and left him where he stood in the middle of the dance floor, panting and sweating. It was almost as if they had forgotten he was there now that they had quit playing with him.

“I’ll get us a little beer to ride on,” said Duffy.

They were already heading for the door when Willard stopped and went back to where Poncy was. He took him by the shoulder and led him toward the door.

Joe Lon said: “Damn if I don’t believe Enreeker’s shit on his sef.”

“What?” said Hard Candy, crowding in to where he was. “Where bouts?”

Poncy was walking stiff-legged with his thighs pressed together. They got through the front door and out into the weak afternoon sunlight.

Willard slapped Poncy on the back and said: “Hell, don’t feel bad. I shit on myself before.”

“Me too,” Joe Lon said, “lots of times.”

Poncy turned his head uncertainly. “You have?”

“Sure, we …” said Willard. They had stopped in the parking lot. Willard Miller’s voice had trailed off and he held the unfinished sentence like a measure. Then he said: “Sure, we all shit on ourselves, but we weren’t but three months old.”

Laughing and shouting they raced for the Winnebago and left Poncy standing in the parking lot gripping his thighs together in front of his little Porsche.

Susan Gender drove the Winnebago and Hard Candy sat on the seat beside her. Duffy and Willard and Joe Lon lay on the floor behind the seats. Willard and Duffy were singing. Joe Lon lay very still on his back and looked at the ceiling and thought about Poncy back there in the parking lot of the Blue Pines. He felt like he felt when he screamed at Elfie or hit her. He hadn’t meant to hurt the old man, but he knew he had. He eased his hands down onto his flat hard stomach. Something in him was tearing loose. He felt it going more and more out of control. Duffy Deeter howled a song in his ear about a whore from Peoria. He wished to God he could escape. But he didn’t know where he could go or what he wanted to escape from.

When they got to his purple double-wide, Joe Lon skinned snakes in a frenzy. He picked up the snakes by the tails as he dipped them out of the metal drums and swung them around and around his head and then popped them like a cowwhip, which caused their heads to explode. Then he nailed them up on a board in the pen and skinned them out with a pair of wire pliers. Elfie was standing in the door of the trailer behind them with a baby on her hip. Full of beer and fascinated with what Joe Lon was doing, none of them saw her. But Joe Lon could feel — or thought he could— the weight of her gaze on his back while he popped and skinned the snakes. He finally turned and looked at her, pulling his lips back from his teeth in a smile that only shamed him.

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

Her face brightened in the door and she said: “Course we can, Joe Lon, honey.”

Elfie brought him a pan and Joe Lon cut the snakes into half-inch steaks. Duffy turned to Elfie and said: “My name’s Duffy Deeter and this is something fine. Want to tell me how you cook up snakes?”

Elfie smiled, trying not to show her teeth. “It’s lots a ways. Way I do mostly is I soak’m in vinegar about ten minutes, drain’m off good, and sprinkle me a little Looseanner redhot on’m, roll’m in flour, and fry’m is the way I mostly do.”

“God,” said Susan Gender.

Duffy Deeter slapped Joe Lon on the ass and said, “Where’d you get this little lady, boy? Damn if you haven’t got you some little lady here.”

Elfie blushed, and Joe Lon didn’t answer. They followed him into the trailer. Joe Lon put on a stack of Merle Haggard and Elfie took the snake into the kitchen, where she wouldn’t let the other two girls come, saying: “It ain’t but room for one in a trailer kitchen. I’ll cook it up in two shakes.” Joe Lon got some beer out of the icebox and they all sat in the little living room looking out onto the campground. The babies lay in their playpen where their mother had put them, screaming and refusing to suck their sugar-tits. Joe Lon pulled at his beer and then said something to Hard Candy he’d been thinking on and off most of the afternoon.

“Why don’t you call you house and tell that sister of yorn to come eat snake with us?” He was unable to make himself say the boy’s name. “Tell’r to bring him that plays debate too if she feels like it. We got enough snake here for everbody.”

Hard Candy got up and called her sister. Directly, she came back and sat down. “Berenice said she’d be sliding in here in a sec but not to wait the snake on her.”

They all sat now without talking, pulling easy on the beers, a little stunned with alcohol and exhausted with dancing. Susan Gender said she hoped they had not hurt the little Spic and that he’d get back to Mystic all right, but nobody wanted to talk about it, so they let it alone and watched the layering smoke over the campground above the open fires that were starting up now among the trailers and campers and tents. Although it was still about four hours until sundown, the afternoon was beginning to turn cool.

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

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

When neither Joe Lon nor Willard introduced them, Duffy said: “My name’s Duffy Deeter. That’s Miss Susan Gender. We’re both from Gainesville.” He gave her his own blinding smile. “Gainesville, Florida, not Georgia.” Duffy was wondering if his head could withstand a serious scissors grip from those powerful baton-twirling thighs.

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

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

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

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

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

Elfie blushed. “Thank you. Me and Joe Lon … Joe Lon and me, why, we think that… think that too.”

“You want a drink?” said Joe Lon.

Berenice shifted her beatdown magnificent haunches and turned to look at him. “A little light something might be nice before we eat,” she said.

“Oh, I’ll get it,” said Elfie quickly. “Let me get it.”

“Let me help you,” said Berenice.

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

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

“I got a little light something I’m gone give her,” said Joe Lon.

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

“You gone try to put wood to Berenice?” said Willard. “Right here in the trailer with the babies and the old lady standing around?”

“Shut up, Willard,” said Joe Lon bitterly. “It ain’t nothing funny.”

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

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

“I don’t understand,” said Duffy, but he already suspected he did. “Run it by me again.”

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

“She’s a fine-looking girl,” said Duffy Deeter.

“The world’s full of fine-looking girls,” Joe Lon said sourly.

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

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

“How the hell I’m sposed do that?” said Willard.

“You’ll think of something,” said Joe Lon. “You Boss Rattler now. It’s you goddam job to think of something.”

But he didn’t think of something. He was not the one. It was Susan Gender at the suggestion of Duffy Deeter who thought of something. After they had eaten the snakes and after Lummy had brought another bottle of whiskey and stood around at the back door long enough to tell them how Big Joe had called the store for somebody to come and bury Old Tuffy, and Duffy Deeter had found out that tomorrow night there was going to be a dog fight — champion dogs on which money could be bet — after all of that, during which time Berenice had talked excitedly and in detail about her trip to Europe to study French and Joe Lon had sat listening, choking on both snake and the thought that he had spent his time and life selling nigger whiskey and watching Elfie’s teeth fall out, they were once again cramped into the living room when Susan Gender said: “Hard Candy, let’s go outside and have us a twirl-off. Settle this snake down some.”

Susan Gender was excited. They were all excited, except Elfie, who sat feeding the babies Gerber’s strained food out of little green and yellow bottles. They were excited because they watched Berenice still compulsively talking unaware that they were setting her up to be, as Hard Candy said, ventilated by Joe Lon, who by this time had his game face on and was ready to work.

“We can settle the snake and you can all be judges,” said Susan Gender. “You feel up to a twirl-off, Hard Candy?”

“Always,” said Hard Candy.

“You’re up against a good one,” said Berenice. “My sister is a good one.” She crossed her strong baton-twirling thighs and Duffy Deeter thought Joe Lon would fall out of his chair. They were only waiting for Elfie to finish spooning the last jar of Gerber’s into the older baby. “We both went, you know, to the Dixie National Baton Twirling Institute for two summers. Two summers each, both of us.”

“Jesus,” Duffy said. “Really?” Besides liking the marvelously absurd ring of Dixie National Baton Twirling Institute, he loved the excited enthusiastic way Berenice had been babbling ever since she got there.

“Right,” she said. “It’s on the campus of Old Miss.”

“Dynamite,” said Duffy.

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

“When we were there the Director of the Institute was Don Sartell. He’s known as Mister Baton, you know.”

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

“I’m done,” said Elfie, turning her ruined smile on them. “This youngan ain’t eatin another bite.”

“Let’s get to that twirl-off,” said Duffy. He looked at Elfie. “Want to take the playpen outside for the babies?”

“Oh, they’ll sleep now they full,” she said. “We can leave’m right where they are.”

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

As the door closed Joe Lon took her arm and spun her to face him. “Don’t!” Berenice said. “God, we can’t, not here.”

“Oh, I magine we can,” he said.

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

“Git naked and take a four-point stance,” he said.

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

“You’ll make me holler,” Berenice said.

“Holler then,” said Joe Lon Mackey.

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

“Is that what you gone holler?” he demanded. “Is it Jesus honey!”

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

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

“I must tell you, darling,” she said, “I love Shep.”

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

“It doesn’t mean I didn’t love you,” she said.

“I don’t want to hear about it,” he said. “I don’t need that.”

“All right,” she said.

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

In a light conversational voice while they watched Susan Gender skip across the bare dirt yard outside, Berenice said: “You know, darling, baton twirling is the second biggest young girls’ movement in America. Did you know that? Uh huh, is though. Girl Scouts is Numero Uno. That means first. But baton twirling is the biggest if you don’t count Girl Scouts.” She turned to smile at him over her shoulder. “The reason is … well, there’s three of them.” She didn’t look back at him, but she braced herself with one hand and held up the other hand with three fingers for him to see. “Three. First you don’t have to go nowheres. You can do it in the living room or like them out in the yard — out in the yard. Second. No expensive equipment. Third. You can practice alone.”

“What good is it?” said Joe Lon.

“What?”

“I said what good is it?”

“Here, think about this. Did you know there’s a Who’s Who in Baton Twirling?”

Joe Lon said, “Studying them goddam foreign languages is done ruint you mind.”

“You honey,” she said, smiling back at him as she did. He made her grunt. She had to use two hands to keep from being punched through the window.

He watched Elfie glancing over her shoulder toward the trailer, ignoring the splits, the whirls, the twirling flashing batons. He did not know what love was. And he did not know what good it was. But he knew he carried it around with him, a scabrous spot of rot, of contagion, for which there was no cure. Rage would not cure it. Indulgence made it worse, inflamed it, made it grow like a cancer. And it had ruined his life. Not now, not in this moment. Long before. The world had seemed a good and livable place. Brutal, yes, but there was a certain joy in that. The brutality on the football field, in the tonks, was celebration. Men were maimed without malice, sometimes — often even — in friendship. Lonely, yes. Running was lonely. Sweat was lonely. The pain of preparation was lonely. There’s no way to share a pulled hamstring with somebody else. There’s no way to farm out part of a twisted knee. But who in God’s name ever assumed otherwise? Once you knew that it was all bearable.

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

The golden plain of Berenice’s back, gently indented along the spine by twin rolls of smooth muscle, was speckled with glittering drops of sweat. The musking odor of her came to his flared nostrils like something steaming off a stove. She was still talking, had never stopped talking.

“… see, it’s beginning solo, intermediate solo, advanced solo, strutting — beginning and military (I was always good at strutting) — two baton, fire baton, duet, trio and team …”

It was a wonder Big Joe had not killed his mother. Everybody thought it a miracle that he had not. In many ways, Joe Lon knew, it would have been better if he had. If Big Joe had simply and quickly blown her head off with a shotgun his little sister might not today be lying in a bed stinking of her own shit.

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

“… and they arguing right now because competition is exact. It’s exact, Joe Lon, in your twirl-off, it is. In each one it’s a judge and a scorekeeper. The scorekeeper …”

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

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

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

“… oh, it’s exact all right, the competition is. You take your advanced solo, for instance.” She moved her hips languidly against him as she talked. “Your advance solo has to last at least two minutes and twenty seconds and not more than two minutes and thirty seconds.”

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

“… and Ole Miss, the home of the Dixie National Baton Twirling Institute, is in Oxford, Mississippi, the home of William Faulkner.”

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

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

“… first met Shep I knew I’d marry him but I’d always love … love …”

“Take it,” he said softly.

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

Finally he said: “I want you ass.”

She withdrew her throat and mouth and said as she turned, “You honey you honey you can have my … easy darling be easy.” But he wasn’t easy at all because he knew she was about to talk of love and he had her bowed almost double, plunging deeply into her ass by the time she got to the place where she could say, “But I can love you too, love you with all my heart, love …”

“Love,” said Joe Lon, “is taking it out of you mouth and sticking in you ass.”

“Yes,” she said, “oh, yes, that’s …”

“But true love,” he said, “goddam true love is taking it out of you ass and sticking it in you mouth.” He flipped her like a doll and she — flushed and swooning — went down in a great spasm of joy, sucking like a baby before she ever got there.

***

Lottie Mae had been told to go back to Big Joe’s to cook again, but Brother Boy had not been sent with her this time and she did not go. She had meant to go, or rather she meant to do what her mother told her to do but she quickly forgot what that was or where she was going so she had been wandering about the streets of Mystic for more than an hour.

She carefully listened to the talk of snakes, knowing that if she listened closely enough she would find out what the snake had in mind for her and maybe avoid it. She walked and listened and watched terrified. The world had become dangerous. What she had always feared would happen had happened, although she did not know it was what she feared until it happened.

White people were dangerous and snakes were dangerous and now the two were working together, each doing what the other told it to. She was sure she had seen a snake in a weeded ditch with the head of a white man. Right after she came out of the house on the way to Big Joe’s, which she had immediately forgotten, she saw it, long and black and diamond-patterned in the ditch with a white man’s head. It had blue eyes. The bluest eyes any white man ever had. She was sure she had seen it. She thought she had seen it. Maybe it was only a dream or a memory of another time. Whatever it was, she still saw it every time she closed her eyes, coiled there on the back of her eyelids, blue-eyed and dangerous.

She went over to the school ground and was not surprised to find the idol they had made. She knew it was not a real snake, that it was made out of paper and glue to be bigger than any snake could ever be, but she also knew why they had made it, and the only thing that surprised her was that no one knelt there in worship. Instead of worship there was much laughter and drinking and eating and dancing about in an unseemly way. They were white people though and there was nothing they could have done that would have surprised her.

She kept careful watch for the snake with the man’s head and the clear blazing blue eyes. She watched the ditches and the weeds and even the limbs of trees. You never knew that it was not hanging there overhead waiting for you to come walking by. If it had blue eyes, might it not have anything, any ability or talent or evil design?

Lottie Mae watched and waited. She knew very well what was coming. There was nothing she could do about it. She was resigned to the risk, to the consequences, to the world and what it had brought her. Which didn’t mean she was not afraid. She walked about with an icy panic flooding her heart. But at last knowing there was no alternative, there was a kind of benumbed calmness rooted in her bones.

“Hey, girl, you want this?”

Lottie Mae turned slowly to the man who had spoken to her. He was white, deeply sun-burned with a black stubble of beard. His overalls were stuffed into high boots and around his neck was a snake, thin as a whip and clay-colored. The snake held its cat-eyed head aloft, its tongue waving and darting on the air. The man drew the snake from around his neck, and it immediately wrapped itself about his forearm. The slick and shining head lay in the palm of his hand like a plum. The man was smiling as he edged closer to where she stood.

“Ain’t nothing but a lil ole snake,” he said. “You ain’t scared of no snake are you, girl?”

Lottie Mae did not move. She stood ready. The snake, it seemed to her, knew she was ready. It lay in the open palm without lifting its head.

“You do wrong for a quarter, girl?” said the man.

She turned and started home. The man did not follow her but stood calling to her to come back and see his snake. She walked past the platform where the Rattlesnake Queen would be crowned. It had been covered in bright red cloth. It was very pretty. She wished, if things did not have to be the way they were, that she could have some cloth like that. It would make a pretty dress. Or maybe a shirt for Brother Boy. But there was no use thinking about that. The snake had seen her. She had seen the snake. She was as ready as she could make herself. There was no use in thinking about making dresses and shirts. And there was no use in hiding.

A man was sitting on the side of a ditch. She first saw him because she was keeping her eye on the ditches, watching for the snake. But she kept watching him because his hair reminded her of snakes, might have been snakes, the tufts of white hair rose in such wild twists. He was an old man, and as she got closer, she heard him talking, almost chanting. She did not take her eyes off him.

“Snakes, not sons, wreathing around the bones of Tiriel!” he cried, “God hath said ye shall not eat of it, neither shall ye touch it, lest ye die. And the serpent said unto the woman, ye shall not surely die!”

She went on by, drawing her mother’s cotton neck-wrapper closer under her chin. There was a little bit of a bite in the air now that it was getting on toward dark. She could no longer remember why she was walking out here among all these white people anyway. There was not another black man or woman anywhere and she could not imagine why she had decided to come out here and deliberately walk where none of her people — not her mother or her father or any of her uncles — ever came in these yearly roundups of snakes. Maybe it was only by showing herself, she thought, to the danger of the snake that she could show that she was not afraid of the snake. She knew, she had been told by her uncles, that snakes were cowards. They ran. They hid. They took advantage. The rattle was only a desperate effort not to be stepped upon, a frantic effort not to have to face anything that might want to fight, that might have a chance in a fight.

She was almost to the little road that led back through a pine thicket toward her mother’s house when she saw the blue light pulsing around her, lighting the trunks of trees and the dead brown grass on the sides of the little road. She didn’t even look back. She stopped and stood without moving. Even when she heard the engine of the car and the light got close enough so that she could feel it on the skin of her face she did not look. She knew before she heard his voice. And somehow she knew he had brought the snake she had been waiting for, or maybe the snake had brought him. It did not matter. She would have to deal with the snake. She was the one.

“Git in here. Lot, goddammit, I been looking everwhere for you,” said Buddy Matlow.

The door swung open and there he was on the far side, leaning toward her, gazing up at her from beneath the flat brim of his sheriff’s hat.

She stood looking at him.

“Git in here, I ain’t got all day!”

She got in.

“Well, close the door, you sweet thing.”

She closed the door and Buddy Matlow found a little open space in the wall of pine bordering the road and spun his Plymouth in a circle and roared back down the road. Lottie Mae waited, tense but still with the numb calmness running in her, preparing herself for what she knew she had to do.

“How you been, Lottie Mae?”

“I been all right, Mistuh Buddy.”

“Goddammit, Lottie Mae, how many times I got to tell you don’t call me Mister? How many times, huh?”

“Yessuh,” she said.

“That too, dammit.” He reached across and touched her hands where they lay stiff in her lap. “Don’t call me Mister. Don’t ever do that again.”

“All right,” she said.

“Ain’t I already told you I loved you?”

“Yessuh,” she said.

“Jesus,” he said, one-handing the Plymouth through a tight turn on a dirt road about a mile south of Mystic. “You do it again I’m gone have to slap the shit out of you. Now that’s the simple truth, Lottie Mae. One thing I cain’t stand it’s somebody I told I loved’m to keep on calling me Mister and like that.” He stopped talking, caught in a fit of coughing. “It ain’t seemly.”

“I won’t do it no more. Less I forgit. It be hard not to forgit.”

“You tell anybody about the snake?” he said.

“What it was?” she said quickly.

He sighed and rolled his eyes up toward the brim of his hat. “Lottie Mae, try not to talk nigger talk to me.”

“What snake it was?”

“Don’t be scared,” he said. “I ain’t talking about a snake, anyhow. I’m talking about me. About at the jail. You tell anybody about that?”

“Ain’t say nothing.”

“Good,” he said. “Be kind of stupid anyway wouldn’t it? Honey, you got fucked last night by a United States of America Veet Nam hero and former captain of the Ramlin Wrecks from Georgia Tech. Here, you want a drink of this?” He held out a bottle of whiskey toward her.

“Make me sick,” she said.

“This ain’t gone make you sick. It’s from Mr. Joe Lon’s place a bidness. Hell, it was George sold it to me. Go on and take youself a drink.”

“I hafta?” she said, not looking at him.

“You have to,” he said.

She didn’t really mind taking a drink of the whiskey. Unless it made her sick. She didn’t want to be sick when she had to face the snake. Her fight wasn’t with Mr. Buddy Matlow. Her fight was with the snake. She took the bottle out of his hand. It burned her throat a little but then settled in her stomach, warming it like one of her mother’s meal poultices. It was the first brown whiskey she had ever had, although she’d seen it. The few times she’d ever tasted white whiskey it had made her immediately sick. This brown whiskey was better.

“These goddam snakes already about run me crazy,” said Buddy Matlow, “and we still got tomorrow to go.”

“Snakes be bad,” she said.

“Damn truth,” he said. “Ever year, I say, no more snakes, and ever year I git right in the middle of it.” He glanced at her. “How that drink doing you?”

“Be doin fine,” she said.

“Good,” he said. Then: “Well, somebody got to keep these goddam fools from killing each other. Weren’t for me, these sumbitches would eat each other alive. It’s been times when they damn nigh done it spite of me.”

“I don’t misdoubt it,” she said.

“Want another drink?”

“No.”

He took a long pull at the bottle and then leaned across and flipped down the glove compartment and put the bottle in it. He fumbled there for a moment, and then flipped the door shut.

“I was looking for you this morning,” he said. “Where the hell you been?”

She told him about her mother having the miseries, about how she had to go cook for Mr. Big Joe and Beeder.

“Shit,” he said, “I was over there myself to see that dog of his’n. Musta just missed you over there. I’m gone put ever goddam thing I got in hock to go on his dog Tuff.” He laughed. “Might even mortgage this fuckin Plymouth car.” Then seriously: “Did you see that girl of his, Beeder?”

“Uh huh,” said Lottie Mae. She wondered why he kept squirming around over there in his seat. He was worse than Little Brother in church. But she didn’t look. She didn’t want to know. She stared straight ahead into the gathering darkness.

“You feeling good?” he said.

She still did not look at him. She spoke to the dark flashing trees beyond the headlights. “Where you taking me?”

“It’s all right,” he said.

“Where you taking me?”

“I ain’t seen Beeder Mackey in … what is it now? I was three years ahead of Joe Lon at Mystic High — none of the colored went there then — and he was two years ahead of Willard. Shit, I ain’t seen that girl in, it must be six years. What does she look like now, anyway?”

“Watch that TeeVee of hern,” she said. “An stay in her room.”

“Seem like to me she was gone grow into sompin real good,” he said. “That’s what I remember.”

They drove down a dirt road in silence. Finally he said: “But you feeling all right now, right? You feeling all right?” When she didn’t answer, he said, “All right. That’s fine with me. I don’t want to talk either. Look here what I got. Look at it. Right here. See.”

She knew without looking that this was what he had looked for her for and what he had brought her in the sheriff’s car for and that there was nothing else she could do but look. She turned her head and saw a snake standing in his lap. Right in his lap a snake rose straight as a plumb line, no striking coil in its body but arrow straight on its tail, and at the top of its body the mouth was stretched and she could see the needle fangs like tiny swords. It was the snake she had been waiting for, that she had been preparing for since that morning in Beeder’s room.

“How about that?” he said. “What do you think?”

She did not answer but in a movement she had been practicing in her mind all day she bent to her ankle where the straight razor was wedged inside her shoe and in a single fluid movement she struck his lap and came away with the snake in her hand, its softening head with the needle fangs still showing just above her thumb and forefinger.

She raised it aloft and was amazed that it did not struggle but hung limp from her hand utterly dead and beaten. She raised her eyes to Buddy Matlow’s and found him staring over the wheel of the Plymouth, his face leached of all color, his lips struggling to speak and pointing to his lap where now a fountain of blood shot into the air and ran over his legs and dripped down into the floorboard of the car.

“You … you … cut it off.” He finally managed to say.

She said: “I always known I could. I always known I would.”

She opened the door and got out. Buddy Matlow struggled behind the wheel. He looked at her and made a noise, not a word, just a noise. There was still no pain, but he had gone instantly light-headed with terror and loss of blood. He knew he was dying. He knew he ought to be doing something, but he did not know what it was. Lottie Mae bent and looked at him through the window.

“Wait,” said Buddy Matlow. “Wait.”

“Be through now,” she said and walked away from the car. She did not walk slow, but she did not walk fast either. She had done what she had waited all day to do. She remembered where she was going, that her mother had sent her to Big Joe’s, that she was supposed to help Miss Beeder.

She had to walk past the school and the open field where they did the football. There were more people there and more noise and more open fires than she had ever dreamed there could be in one place at one time in the whole world. In the middle of all the people was a snake, three stories tall standing against the darkening sky, coiled to strike. She kept to the edge of the crowd in the gathering dusk and was not afraid.

At Big Joe’s, she went directly to Beeder’s room and Beeder asked immediately: “Did they burn the snake yet?”

“What it was. You gone have to talk it up?”

Beeder watched Lottie Mae’s slow purple mouth move in the flickering light. But Lottie Mae was already turning to watch the television. Her eyes and teeth were now brilliant in her face. She licked her lips and squinted and did not answer. Tanks roared across the land. Airplanes dropped bombs. Geysers of sand and stone and bits of metal flew from the earth. A turbaned woman knelt beside a man and rocked and wept. She finally turned her face up toward the black sky where airplanes still dropped bombs. She screamed and looked as though she had no lips, as though the lips had been cut away from her dry broken teeth.

Lottie Mae recognized the man who talked when the guns and the planes and the bombs stopped. It was the NBC Nightly News. It was Lottie Mae’s favorite program. Much better than the detective stories where you had to put up with a lot of talking and fooling around before you got to the good parts. NBC Nightly News went straight to the robbing and killing, the crying and the blood, burning buildings and mashed cars. Them NBC Nightly News sumbitches was mean. Soon kill you as look at you. Killed somebody ever night. Sometimes drowned whole towns in the ocean. Or made babies grow together at the shoulder.

A man had come on now trying to sell Ford automobiles: “The closer you look, the better we look!”

Beeder and Lottie Mae’s eyes left the screen at the same time and their gaze joined across the soiled bed.

“I didn’t hear you,” shouted Beeder. “They burn the snake or not?” Then when Lottie Mae still did not answer: “Anybody hurt?”

“Not I’m a mind of.”

“Didn’t fall on anybody, nobody burned, no bones broke?”

“I ain’t seen it.”

They were shouting at each other. It was the only way they could be heard over the NBC Nightly News.

“Can we turn hit down?”

“What?”

“Turn hit down, the TeeVee!”

“What?” shouted Beeder.

Lottie Mae went over and turned the television all the way down. Beeder sat up in bed. “What did you do that for?”

“I wanted to tell you. I cut hit off.”

“You ain’t got no call to turn my TeeVee down. Now turn it back up.”

“I cut hit off at the ground. Shrunk hit up till hit wont no biggern you little finger.”

Beeder was beside herself. “This room’s mine! What I say goes.”

“Tetched it one time with this and hit come off in my hand just like a natural thing.”

Lottie Mae was holding a straight razor up in front of her. The blade was honed thin and bright and terrible. Beeder stopped shouting. She got quietly off the bed and adjusted the sound so she could hear it but not so loud they had to shout. She stood beside Beeder and they both watched the thin shiny steel razor for a long time.

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

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

“Yes,” said Beeder.

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

“Wore your skin like clothes,” Beeder said.

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

“You was scared?” Beeder asked.

“Scared to death,” said Lottie Mae.

“You cry?”

“All the time.”

“And was you afraid to go out?”

“Wouldn’t go out less I had to.”

“And was you afraid to come in?”

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

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

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

“All because of the razor.”

“That snake shrunk up and died like magic.”

“Listen,” said Beeder. “Hear it?”

“I tol you less turn it down.”

“Not the TeeVee. That!”

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

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

“Hear it now?”

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

“He s got another one tied in there.”

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

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

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

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

***

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

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

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

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

“It must be very rewarding,” said Shep.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Perhaps a crisis,” said Shep.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

***

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“What the hell ails her?” said Willard.

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

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

“I magine,” said Susan Gender.

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

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

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

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

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

“I never said you was a fool.”

“You sometimes got to act like I am.”

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

“I know that.”

“You don’t know nothing.”

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

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

“What?”

“I don’t want to be nasty,” he said.

“All right, Joe Lon, honey.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Who?” said Duffy Deeter.

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

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

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

“Florida,” said Duffy.

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

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

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

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

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

“Go on, Coach,” said Joe Lon, “I got another one ain’t been cracked in the pickup.”

“It do help on a chilly night,” said Coach Tump, finishing it.

Luther Peacock, Buddy Matlow’s deputy, burst suddenly through the people packed together near the right side of the stage and came toward them. Even though the temperature had dropped ten degrees in the last few hours, Luther was sweating. His khaki shirt was sticking to the center of his chest.

“You got to do something,” he said to nobody in particular, although he was looking at Susan Gender.

“What?” said Joe Lon.

“Where’s the Sheriff?” Luther said. “Nobody seen Buddy?”

Willard belched and said, “I ain’t been looking for him.”

“Well, I have. I looked everwhere and he ain’t nowhere.” Luther stopped and looked into the crowd surrounding them on all sides as though he might see Buddy Matlow. “Sumpin’s wrong,” he said. “Sumpin bad’s wrong.”

“Buddy’ll turn up,” said Coach Tump.

“It’s gone be trouble,” said Luther Peacock. “I cain’t handle it by myself.”

“Handle what?” said Hard Candy.

“You ain’t heard they turned two over?” said Luther.

“Turned two what over?” said Willard.

“Campers. It’s just too many of’m here and it ain’t enough water and it ain’t enough room. They more fights this year than I ever seen before and now on top of it, Buddy Matlow’s disappeared.”

“Buddy ain’t disappeared,” said Joe Lon. “Most likely layin off in the bushes with somebody he’s trapped.”

Coach Tump said: “Don’t talk like that about a teammate.”

Just then there was a scream, a loud squealing scream over by the papier mache snake that cut right through the music. They could see a tight little knot of people flying about over there, almost as if dancing, so rhythmic did the knot move. But they all knew they weren’t dancing.

“Better go see what that is, Luther.”

For the first time Luther seemed to calm down. Joe Lon was one of the organizers of the Rattlesnake Roundup and Coach Tump was Honorary Chairman. If they were going to take all of it so lightly, Luther decided he would too. “I know what it is over there,” he said, sucking his teeth reflectively, “and I ain’t going near it.”

Joe Lon took Elfie’s arm and guided her a step or two away. He put the keys of the pickup in her hand. “Take these keys and git back to the trailer.” She started to speak, but he shook his head. “I don’t like all this. I never seen’m so rank.”

Just as Elfie was leaving a tall, very thin man squeezed out of the crowd near the tree. He nearly cried he was so happy to see Coach Tump. He actually threw his skinny arms around Coach Tump’s enormous shoulders and pressed himself against the straining mobile belly swinging under the coach’s shirt. “Jesus, Jesus,” he was saying.

Coach Tump turned his head off to the side and looked at Joe Lon. “This one’s the one,” said Coach Tump. “Tainted.” Then he mouthed the word again: tainted.

The thin man seemed to see Luther Peacock for the first time. He turned loose Coach Tump, who had conspicuously kept his hands off him, enduring his embrace, and rushed over to Luther. He had to bend down to put his face in Luther’s. “Sheriff, am I glad to see … am I…”

“Not the Sheriff,” said Luther. “Deputy.”

“They going nuts over by my camper. They …”

“Going nuts everwhere,” said Luther, turning his hands up to examine his palms. Then he looked out over the crowd surging toward the stage where the band was beginning to falter. “I ain’t responsible.”

“They break open my camper, it’s enough snakes in there to kill half of Georgia.”

“I seen’m,” said Coach Tump. “Sumbitch’s got five hundred penned …”

“Cobras,” the man said, “Russell’s Viper, Mambas, Spotted rattlers, Mohave rattles, red diamonds, westerns …”

“Name Tommy Hugh,” said Coach Tump. “He brought five hundred snakes to the Roundup.”

“Tommy Hugh,” said Tommy Hugh, shouting to make himself heard above the crowd. “I got pygmys and corals, an anaconda even. You got to do something.”

“I believe, Gender,” said Duffy Deeter, “Mystic, Georgia, has done tore its ass this time.”

Willard Miller, his voice flat, laconic said: “It’s blood in the air. I can smell it. I can smell the goddam blood in the air.”

The band had quit now and the principal of the school was up on the stage trying to start the beauty contest. He was shouting into the microphone but every time he shouted the crowd roared back at him. He finally stopped, staring red-faced down into the surging men and women as he might have stared down at a crowd of unruly children in his auditorium. Except that his face was very red and he’d gone past just being scared. What showed in his eyes and on his trembling mouth looked like terror.

“What the hell we gone do?” said Joe Lon.

“We best go up there and git this straightened out,” said Coach Tump, pulling his pants high onto his belly and then turning them loose and letting them slip again to the place where they rode low on his hips. Without waiting for an answer he charged toward the stage, his tackle-busting belly leading the way, knocking men, women, and children off their feet. When they got to the stage, he and Willard Miller and Duffy Deeter turned to face the crowd, while Joe Lon vaulted lightly up beside the principal and took the microphone. The principal smiled but he looked on the verge of tears. He shouted, “Joe Lon, you … you …”

Joe Lon put his mouth to the principal’s ear: “Git over there and line up the girls. The girls …” He shoved the principal toward the end of the stage, toward a low wall of plywood that formed an L-shaped room with no top where the girls stood pressed tightly together.

Joe Lon leaned in close to the microphone and said: “If you’d just quiet youself down,” but he said it in a normal voice and even with the amplifier he couldn’t hear his own voice. The most noise was coming from the place where the snake rose thirty feet in the air. The line of dancers circling the snake had torches now. It looked as though they had all found torches and they weren’t so much singing, as they’d been doing before, but screaming. He stood watching, almost bemused by the whiskey running in his blood and the noise and the open fires. Then directly in front of him there was a high piercing cry like metal tearing, and when he looked down Joe Lon saw Duffy Deeter come straight up out of the crowd, lay out on the air as if he expected to do a halfgainer, but just as he was parallel to the ground the point of his heel caught a huge bearded man on the side of the head and his entire face splattered, some of the blood spotting the rough wooden boards of the stage. Willard Miller showing all his teeth in a great joyous scowl was on top of the man who had been kicked almost before he slipped to the ground.

Joe Lon waved to let the first girl come, and she did, wearing a bikini of some silver diaphanous material that had enough cloth in it to maybe make a glove. Her name was Novella and she was Hard Candy’s chief rival for head cheerleader, although Novella was still in the tenth grade, but everybody knew — including Joe Lon, who was watching not her but the crowd’s reaction to her — that it was only a matter of time before she took over from Hard Candy. She was favored tonight to take Miss Rattlesnake Queen and Joe Lon could tell by the way she pumped across the stage in her high-heeled shoes, all flashing legs and rounded arms over rounded breasts over rounded hips, her little matted, mounded beaver pulsing there where she kept her thighs peeled apart even as she pranced — Joe Lon could tell that she wasn’t about to let a little thing like blood and fights keep her from what she’d been after since she was old enough to hold a baton.

There was still noise but it was all coming from seventy yards away where the torch-lit dancers tirelessly circled the snake. The audience spilled away from the front of the stage; everybody who could see her, had gone silent. Cigarette smoke and wood smoke hung in layers over their heads as they watched Novella move around the stage, giving them first a front view, then a side, then a back.

The principal had come back to the microphone and, reading from a little card, introduced Novella Watkins, gave her measurements, “… a fine young lady who will someday make somebody a fine wife at thirty-six, twenty, thirty-four …,” and her credits, “… Miss Junior Future Farmers of America, Miss Peach, Miss …” While he talked, Joe Lon eased to the end of the stage and dropped off into the dirt. He looked for Hard Candy and Susan Gender, but they were gone, along with most of the other women in the audience.

The snake was not supposed to be burned until after Miss Rattlesnake had been chosen. She was supposed to set the fire. But just as Joe Lon landed in the dirt at the end of the stage somebody touched the snake with a torch and the thing exploded into fire, lighting the entire football field like a bomb bursting. As if on signal, the solid wall of men collapsed in front of the stage, kicking and cursing and gouging. The contestants on the stage, startled by the explosion of fire, lock-stepped round and round in a sort of daze, all of them brilliantly lit by the burning snake.

Joe Lon could see plain enough that his old coach and Willard and Duffy were in danger of being hurt bad. He deliberately turned and pushed his way out to the road. He picked his way through the parked cars and campers and finally turned into a dim woods road that would come out a quarter mile from his store. It felt good to be away from all those people, strangers and friends both. It felt good for the noise to diminish a little with each step that took him deeper in the woods.

When Joe Lon got to the store, Lummy was sitting on the stool behind the counter. He got off the stool when Joe Lon came in.

“How come it is folks hollering lak that?” said Lummy. A long sustained cheer floated back out of the pine trees. It might have been a football game they were hearing, except there were no rattles.

“How come it is?”

Joe Lon did not answer but only shrugged. Then: “George come in with that extra load of beer and whiskey?”

“He come in with that extree jus fine, Mr. Joe Lon.”

Joe Lon hooked his heels on a rung of the stool, shivered, and hugged himself with his arms across his chest. “You feed the snakes?”

“Everone but the bettin snake.”

“Feed him too,” said Joe Lon. “And bring me out a bottle of that bonded.”

Lummy went through the door into the little room at the back of the counter. He never picked up the rats with his hand. He wouldn’t touch them. He wouldn’t touch anything that was going to touch a snake, much less be inside a snake. He had a pair of long-handled needle-nosed pliers he used to lift the rats into the cages with the snakes. He used his pliers and did not wait to see the strike (he never did), but got the bottle of whiskey and took it to Joe Lon, where he sat waiting on a stool.

“How’d we do today?” he asked.

Lummy told him what they had sold, told him the store had done better than it had ever done at a Roundup. But Joe Lon didn’t listen and Lummy knew he wasn’t listening. But he went on explaining the little marks on his paper — how much beer, how much shine, how much bonded whiskey — just as he always did. He did what he was told to do, what it was his job to do, and he had absolutely no curiosity about why Mr. Joe Lon was mean tonight. He’d seen him mean often enough to know it when he saw it, but since he knew also that he had nothing to fear from Mr. Joe Lon, he didn’t think about it.

His job was to be the nigger. That’s the way he thought about it. I am the nigger. That is the white man. There is a tree. There is a road. This is Mystic.

That’s the way it had to be as long as he was around a white man. As soon as he was not around a white man, he quit being a nigger and thought about many, many things that he did not ordinarily think about. One of the things he thought about was killing Mr. Joe Lon. Of course, as long as he was near him, he couldn’t kill him, or even think about killing him. But when he was off by himself, or in the company of other black people, he not only thought about it, he often actually killed him.

Joe Lon turned his burned eyes on him. “Want a drink, Lummy?”

“Wouldn’t mind a taste,” Lummy said.

“Git youself a pint of that shine. No, shit, git a pint of that othern.”

“Shine be good enough for ole Lummy.”

“Git the othern, I said. You ain’t got to mark it on you ticket.”

“Go and git it,” Lummy said to himself. “You ain’t got to mark it on you ticket.”

When he came back in Joe Lon was dialing the telephone. When he was through dialing it, he held it for a long time.

“Mayhap he out with them dogs,” said Lummy licking the neck of the whiskey bottle.

Joe Lon said: “He ain’t out with no dogs.”

They both knew that the telephone was on a little wooden table beside the old man’s bed. It sat on a metal dishpan turned upside down. Big Joe believed that when he couldn’t hear it, he could feel it up on top of the metal pan vibrating. Said he could feel it right in the goddam air was what he said.

“It’s me, Joe Lon,” Joe Lon shouted into the telephone finally. “Joe Lon! How’s Beeder?” A little spit flecked Joe Lon’s lips and the lids of his ruined eyes seemed to work independently of one another. “I know I woke you up.”

The old man claimed that his hearing was worse at night than in the day, and that it was the worst of all when he was just awakened. It took, he said, several hours for his tubes to clear out and drain good.

“How’s Beeder?” he shouted again. And then, swinging to look at Lummy, “He says she’s fine, just like she always is.” He shouted back into the telephone: “Which is it? She fine? Or she like she always is?” He took a drink from his bottle, tilted on the stool, and winked at Lummy. He stiffened on the stool, a vein leapt in his thick neck. He screamed, “I don’t know. Haven’t seen a clock. Don’t own a clock. Don’t want a clock.”

Lummy sat drinking his free bourbon in the corner, wondering how much of this he’d have to listen to before he could go home and get his woman and go for some of Junior’s Real-Pit-Barbecue.

Joe Lon was screaming: “A family reunion! Right. All together again. I’ll git Elf and the babies and you git Mama …” His voice was growing thicker and even though his face remained stunned and without expression, as though he might have been sleepwalking, tears came from his eyes and ran down over his heavy square chin, blue now with a stubble of beard. “… you git Mama and Beeder and I’ll git Elf and the babies and you and me’ll git’m all in a room in the big house and we’ll just beat the shit out of them. Beat’m I said goddammit. Slap’m. Bust their faces.”

He was crying openly now, his shoulders shaking, and Lummy, who recognized this as something he was not meant to watch, got up quietly and headed for the door, thinking only how grateful he would be for a good plate of Real-Pit-Barbecue and then his woman’s warm thick back to sleep against. What was happening in there was none of his business.

Joe Lon was screaming: “We like that, don’t we? Me and you? Hem’m up in a room and beat’m good?”

But Lummy might as well have been hearing a woodpecker in a tree or rain on a tin roof. It was the natural sound of the world, too much like everything else, and he wouldn’t remember it.

***

The news that somebody had cut off Buddy Matlow’s dick threatened to ruin everything: the dog fight that night and the snake hunt the next morning. It spread among the hunters and tourists like fire. Nobody had talked of anything else much all morning. It even served to take their minds off the fact that there was not enough water and the Johnny-on-the-spots were full to overflowing and several trailers had been wrecked the night before, two actually turned over.

Joe Lon found out about it when they woke him up shortly before noon. Coach Tump stood down in the yard hustling his balls and spitting tobacco juice into the dirt. He looked up at Joe Lon in the doorway to the double-wide and told him that Buddy Matlow had been taken to the hospital in Tifton, at least that is what most people were saying they’d heard, but there were others who said it was Macon where he’d been taken, and at least two or three said they’d heard that it was as far away as Atlanta.

Coach Tump said it didn’t make much of a shit where they taken him if somebody’d gone and cut off his dick. “Wouldn’t surprise me if this don’t put a damper on the whole thing.”

The story Coach Tump had heard said they’d packed it in ice. They had packed Buddy Matlow’s dick in ice and salt and they meant to sew it back on and that was why they had gone all the way to Atlanta because they had better facilities for sewing dicks back on at the big hospital there.

“Damned if I’d want my dick sewed back on,” said Willard Miller.

“I believe I would if they could do it like it was on there before,” Coach Tump said.

Duffy Deeter said: “What goes around comes around.” They had all come inside to drink coffee while Joe Lon got dressed. Duffy regarded his knuckles, all of them skinned and scabbed. He sucked gently at his nose. It was filled with black blood. “Bad karma,” he said. “A guy that gets his dick cut off’s got bad karma.”

“He is also shit out of luck,” said Willard Miller.

Joe Lon came out of the back, dressed now, his eyes webbed in a net of veins, his face puffy, and they all got in Coach Tump’s Oldsmobile and drove out to Big Joe’s to prepare Tuffy for the fight that night.

“Looks a little like war out there, don’t it?” said Willard.

Joe Lon, who had been very quiet since they woke him up, only nodded. Out in the campground, a trailer was on its side. The road to Big Joe’s was littered with cups and hotdog wrappers and hamburger wrappers and even articles of clothing. They passed four wrecked cars before they got to the schoolhouse.

“What the hell happened to you last night, boy?” said Coach Tump.

“I never known much about nothing oncet I got off that stage,” Joe Lon said. “Them fuckers looked to eat me up.”

“I’ll drink to that,” said Willard, running his thumbnail around the neck of a bottle of bourbon.

Coach Tump frowned. “Boy, I want you to stay out of the bottle today.”

Willard said, “Coach, I just need a little something to smooth me out.”

Coach Tump eyed the bottle. He would have beat hell out of any other boy playing for him if the boy had even mentioned drinking whiskey, much less doing it. But this was the Boss Snake of the team. He ran over anybody, everybody. As long as he did that, he could do whatever else he wanted to. “I guess a little whiskey won’t hurt nothing.”

They all had a little sip, except Joe Lon, who bubbled it pretty good. Willard Miller, who was sitting in the middle, reached over and hugged Duffy Deeter, then he kissed him on the cheek, right on top of a ragged purple bruise. “Joe Lon, damn if I don’t think I’m in love with this little fucker right here. You see’m last night? Worsen a pit bull when you git’m down in the dirt.”

“I was too busy tryin to not get eat myself to see anything,” said Joe Lon.

While they drove on out to Big Joe’s, they talked about last night, how they’d kicked and stomped and gouged and by God made sure Novella Watkins was crowned just like everbody known she ought to be.

The dogs that were going to fight that night, fifteen of them, had already been groomed and walked and were resting in their cages on the backs of pickup trucks when they got to the pit. The men who had brought them sat in the bleacher seats passing a sipping sack and spitting tobacco juice while they talked dog fighting. Joe Lon brought his daddy’s Tuff out of the cage and took him into the pit to rub him down. It was the custom at Big Joe’s to show the favorite in the pit while he was being groomed before the fight. Willard Miller and Coach Tump and Duffy went up into the bleachers while Joe Lon went for the dog. When he got back his daddy was up there too. All the faces of the dog fighters were turned toward Big Joe, who was talking.

Joe Lon knelt in the dirt beside the dog and smoothed him down with a heavy brush. The other dogs were making a terrible racket now that he had brought out Tuff. Joe Lon’s head felt as if it might crack like bad glass and fall in pieces on the packed dirt where Tuff stood in his widelegged stance, leaning slightly against the leash, his torn and scarred ears struck forward on his head. For a long time Joe Lon brushed and talked to Tuff in a soft, sympathetic whisper, telling him he was about to get to do what he had been bred and trained to do, that it wouldn’t be long now before he could show everybody that he was the boss pit of all the bulls.

When he did look up for the first time, there in the bleachers on the opposite side from the dog fighters, sitting side by side, solemn and unsmiling, were Berenice and his wife, Elfie. He felt the sudden thrust of fear start in him. He couldn’t think what they might be doing together. Elfie had been sullen and unusually quiet that morning. She’d hardly spoken to Coach Tump when he came into the trailer. Joe Lon didn’t know what it was about and he didn’t want to know. He didn’t want anything except possibly to howl and he couldn’t do that with everybody there watching.

Willard Miller came down out of the bleachers and sat on his heels on the edge of the pit. “Buddy Matlow ain’t gitten his dick sewed back on; he’s dead.” He spoke in a hushed, careful voice. “Berenice’s daddy says he was dead before they got to the hospital.”

“Jesus,” said Joe Lon. He felt a little sick to his stomach. “The poor bastard did catch some shit in his life, didn’t he.”

“Nobody deserves to have his dick cut off. Listen, go up and bring the whiskey down here, would you?”

Willard got up and went into the bleachers. When he did, Elfie got up and came down to the pit. She didn’t come into it but stood on the edge, watching him.

“What you and Berenice doing?” he said finally.

“She come by.”

“What for?”

“Talk.”

“Talk about what?”

“You.”

“Me?”

“Us.”

Joe Lon wished to God Willard Miller would come back and stop her talking to him. He raised his eyes to the bleachers and saw Willard standing up beside his daddy, looking down upon them but making no move to bring the whiskey.

“She told me what you said.”

Joe Lon vigorously massaged Tuff’s haunches.

“She said you said you loved her true. True love.”

“Don’t,” said Joe Lon. “Christ, don’t.”

“Said you put it in her … and then stuck it in her … and then back again. Back again even after … after you … after the other.”

He could only stare up at her dumbly.

“You never done that to me, Joe Lon, honey.”

“No,” he finally managed to say, “I never did.”

“Does it mean you don’t love me with true love?”

“No,” he said. “For God’s sake, Elf, git back up there and shut up about this. You don’t know what the hell you’re saying.”

“I know what I know,” she said. “After she told me I looked. She showed me and I looked. It’s on the sheets. It’s all over the sheets in my own bed, you and her and everthing.”

“Elfie, goddammit, git away from me.”

“Joe Lon, honey.”

“What?”

“I cain’t look at the babies any more. I tried this morning after she showed me and I cain’t look at the babies any more. I’m too shamed. You shamed me so I cain’t look at my own babies.”

She turned and went back up the bleachers. Joe Lon called to Willard Miller and he started down the bleachers but then stopped. Joe Lon followed his gaze to the place Willard was looking and Berenice had started down the bleachers toward him.

Christ, they were taking turns. They were all going to take a turn at him. “You gone bring me the goddam drink, or what?” he shouted up at Willard Miller. But Willard didn’t move.

The first thing Berenice said was, “She knows.”

“Berenice,” he said. “I may have to kill you.”

“I made a clean breast of it,” she said.

Joe Lon savagely massaged Tuffy’s broad, muscled chest. “I told everybody. I even told Shep. It was something about poor Buddy getting his … that happening … the way it did and all. His blood is all over the living room. I couldn’t stand it. So I told just everybody. Shep said he understood and he’d always love me.”

“Love you,” he said.

She turned and went back up the bleachers. He watched her go and saw that Shep was sitting with Elfie now, talking earnestly, head to head.

Willard came down with the whiskey. “What’as you waiting for?” demanded Joe Lon.

“I didn’t think I ought to break in on that. What was it they’as saying to you anyway?”

“Nothing.”

“Well, here comes the fucker from the debate team to give you some more nothing.” Willard turned and went back up the bleachers to where the dog fighters had just cracked another bottle.

Sure enough, Shep was coming down into the pit with him. Joe Lon didn’t think he could stand it. There was a sudden blood lust on him. He was afraid he might fall upon Shep and tear his throat out.

“I come to tell you about Sheriff Matlow,” Shep said.

Joe Lon opened his mouth to say he didn’t want to know anything, that he couldn’t stand to have anything else told to him by anybody. But instead of speaking he simply croaked, a hoarse, cracked noise deep in his throat. He opened the whiskey Willard had brought down and took a drink.

“Listen,” said Shep in a shy, deeply embarrassed voice, “I know about you and Berenice. About how you were lovers. How in love you both were a long time ago here in Mystic. Love … Well, love … And then yesterday at your house …”

Joe Lon stood up and stretched his neck to breathe. He felt as though he had his head in a sack of cotton. The dog fighters had moved down a little closer to the pit. They sat now in the second row. They stared intently at his daddy’s Tuffy, who had not barked or even growled but still stood with his dark ears forward on his head, leaning in the direction of the other penned bulls where they barked and growled and howled in their cages.

“Walk him around, boy,” called Big Joe. “Take him around the pit.”

Joe Lon led Tuff through a tight little circle around and around the pit. They were betting up there, making the bets that would stand tonight between the owners. Shep had never stopped talking, saying he understood. Berenice had told him everything and he understood everything. Joe Lon wanted to tell him that he didn’t understand anything but he didn’t trust himself to try to speak.

Shep followed him around the pit, close at his shoulder on the opposite side from Tuff. “… and he actually handed me his … his penis. Put it right in my hand and the blood was everywhere. It was cut off clean, I mean smooth at his belly and the blood was pouring out of the place where it was cut like it was a spigot. A blood spigot.”

Joe Lon turned his pale, stricken face to Shep and managed to say: “Why you telling me this?”

“He said to,” said Shep. “I thought I told you. He said to.”

“Said to?”

“In the back seat, we got him in the back seat, and the doctor was driving and the last thing he said to me was, tell Joe Lon.”

Joe Lon walked faster. The murmuring voices of the dog fighters floated into the pit over the constant barking of the caged bulls. More people had come into the bleachers now. High on the east side. Mother Well sat beside Victor, the snake preacher. As he watched, they both stood up and started down the bleachers seats toward him.

“Joe Lon,” said Shep. “He said that. That’s what Sheriff Matlow said. He said: Tell Joe Lon. But…”

Victor, the tight tufts of twisted hair shining in the weak sunlight like screws driven into his skull, was coming directly toward him, and Mother Well was a step behind him. Joe Lon had stopped. They were staring right into his eyes and he couldn’t look away.

“… but I think he was trying to tell me something else. I mean I think Sheriff Matlow wanted me to tell you some thing. That’s the way it sounded. Tell Joe Lon … Then he died. Just quit breathing.”

Joe Lon stood in the pit and watched Victor and Mother Well come right up to the barrier and stop. Everything seemed to move at three quarter time and there was about it the quality of a nightmare. Mother Well had a handful of snake rattles. She rolled them through her fingers like beads. Joe Lon could see each of them separate and distinct as they moved against the marble-smooth skin of her hands.

Victor raised his arms and his voice boomed into the pit: “I heard Jehovah speak terrific from his holy place and saw the words of the mutual covenants divine chariots of gold and jewels with living creatures starry and flaming with every color lion tiger horse elephant eagle dove fly worm and the wondrous serpent. .”

Joe Lon started to howl. He let his head drop back on his shoulders and howled directly into the blue sunless sky.

“… clothed in gems and rich array human in the forgiveness of sins according the covenant Jehovah.”

Joe Lon didn’t stop howling and Willard Miller came over the barrier with a forearm flipper that struck Shep such a lick it carried him all the way out of the pit.

Big Joe and the other dog owners were on their feet and Big Joe was calling to Joe Lon not to go crazy like his sister did. “Don’t go crazy, Joe Lon! Don’t go crazy!”

Victor was still booming away above him there, saying now: “I want you snakes! I want all you snakes!” And the dogs had been so stirred up by all the howling and hollering they were going crazy in their cages. Even Tuffy was howling, his head back, looking into the same blue empty piece of sky with Joe Lon.

Joe Lon fainted, or passed out, or maybe he went crazy there for a while because when he woke up he was in a dark room in his daddy’s house. Elfie was there and so was Willard. Joe Lon first heard Beeder’s television on the other side of the wall and beyond that the slashing, abrupt sound of dogs fighting and over the sound of the dogs the awesome roar of people screaming.

“You awake, Joe Lon, honey?” He didn’t answer but let his eyes swing to Willard, where he stood on the other side of the bed. “You know what I said, Joe Lon, honey? Member? I didn’t mean that. Don’t you worry a minute. You hear? I love …”

“What time is it?” asked Joe Lon.

“Damned if you didn’t go down for the count, Biggun,” said Willard Miller.

“What time is it?” His head was splitting and his tongue felt swollen.

“It ain’t midnight yet. Ain’t far away though.”

“Midnight? It cain’t be.”

“We got over to Doctor Sweet’s, he given you a shot. He said it was most likely Buddy and everything caused you to do it. Jesus, it was a mess, too. I went over there and seen the car they hauled Buddy in. Looked like somebody’d butchered a hog in it.”

“They know who killed him?”

“No, and I don’t look for them ever to find out either. Weren’t but several hundred had reason to cut his dick off.”

“Who’s with the babies?”

“Sarah’s sleeping over. They fine, Joe Lon, honey.”

“How come I’m here? Why ain’t I home?”

Elfie opened her mouth to speak, then shut it and looked at Willard.

Willard said: “I think everbody’s afraid you’d go nuts over there and … Shit, I don’t know what you mighta done. What the hell did go wrong with you anyhow?”

“I don’t know,” he said. And he didn’t. But he knew he’d been scared there in the pit as he’d never been scared before. And it was not any one thing that scared him. It was everything. It was his life. His life terrified him. He didn’t see how he was going to get through the rest of it. He was miserable beyond measure. Everything seemed to be coming apart. He could see the frayed and ragged seams of everything slowly unraveling.

“Fuck it,” said Willard. “It don’t matter. Anybody’s subject to go a little nuts now and then.” Willard snorted an ugly little laugh through his nose. “I think I about broke three of the debate player’s ribs for him.”

“You probably shouldn’t a done that.”

“Nobody blamed me for it. You was hollering and he was the closest to you. I didn’t know what was happening. I hit the first thing I could see. It happened to be the debate player.”

“What ailed that goddam preacher?”

“Nothing. Shit, he was just putting in his order for you snakes. He wanted to buy’m that’s all. You didn’t burn a fuse over that, did you?”

“I don’t want to talk about it any more.”

“Good,” said Willard. “It’s beginning to bore the shit out of me, too. Next time you go nuts, I’d be obliged if you’d do it when I’m not around. You bout tore my goddam ear off.”

Joe Lon sat up on the side of the bed. He remembered it all now, the old man shouting about snakes, everybody coming to him in the pit, barking and barking at him, and the overwhelming feeling that he was going to be in there the rest of his life with everybody he’d ever known filing past to tell him how he’d failed. When he’d got started howling, Coach Tump and Duffy and Willard and his daddy had all fell on him and thrown him in the back seat of the Coach’s old Oldsmobile with his daddy screaming for him not to go crazy. He even remembered taking hold of Willard’s ear and refusing to let go on the ride to Doctor Sweet’s.

“Shit,” said Joe Lon. “You should a goddammit let me alone.”

One final ragged cheer went up from the dog fight behind the house and then there was silence except for the steady drone of the television on the other side of the wall.

“I got to get Tuffy and go,” said Willard. “It’s his up.”

“I’m coming,” said Joe Lon.

“Hon, do you think you ought to go out there?”

“Where’s my goddam shirt?”

“Coach Tump said he’d handle the dog with me.” Willard gave Joe Lon his quiet, savage smile. “You going semi-nuts and all.”

Tuffy was kept in a dark cool cage in the old man’s room for the final hours just before a fight. Joe Lon spoke to him while Willard leashed him. Tuffy stretched, yawned, shook himself, and then seemed to hear the noise of the crowd outside for the first time. The short wiry hair rose on his shoulders, his ears got up, and a little slobber slipped spinning from his mouth. They led him down the hall to the back door and then through the dark to the ring of light where the bleachers and the aisles and all the open spaces under the bleachers were packed with men, women, and children. Their faces under the lights looked flushed and damp even though it was nearly forty degrees. Novella Watkins, wearing her little gold-gilt crown of snakes, sat in her place of honor at the head of the pit as was the custom after the beauty contest. Her daddy, a pig farmer, sat on one side of her and Slimey, one of the leaders in the rock band, sat on the other. Slimey still had on his sequined suit. A space opened up for Willard, joined now by Coach Tump, to get through to the pit. Joe Lon went to sit with his daddy just behind the barrier on the right side, not because he particularly wanted to sit with him but because his daddy kept a place there for himself and his friends and it was the only spot left to sit down.

His daddy glanced at him briefly. “How you feeling?”

“I’m all right.”

“You feeling all right?”

“I told you.”

“I thought you’d gone crazy shore.” He spit a long stream of tobacco juice and passed Joe Lon the bottle he was sipping from. “What the hell ails you, anyway?”

Joe Lon sat, refusing to answer.

“It’s just Buddy’s dick cut off got you upset. Enough to upset anybody. Hope they catch the sumbitch done it. But they won’t. Never do. Anybody worth a shit gits killed, they never find out who done it.” He leaned forward and looked around his son. “Evening, Elf. Things been lively, ain’t they?” Without waiting for an answer, he looked back to his son. “You got anything on the fight?”

“I got a dollar or two down.”

“I hope you didn’t give no odds. Tuffy’s got all he can handle with this sumbitch.”

“I don’t give odds on nothing,” said Joe Lon.

The other dog had been brought into the pit. He was straining and slobbering and snapping before he ever got onto the sand, bloodied now from earlier fights. His name was Devil and everybody there who had the slightest interest in dog fighting knew him. He carried more scar tissue than even Tuffy did.

This particular fight was Louisiana rules, which meant that a dog didn’t have to die. There was nothing compulsory about one dog taking a killing, although he could take his killing if he wanted to. Any dog that would face could fight. If he wouldn’t face, he was retired from the pit and the other dog was declared the winner.

Only one handler for each dog was allowed in the pit. Willard came down with Tuffy. Coach Tump stayed directly behind him outside the pit. The coach handed Willard a towel and a bowl of water. That was all each handler was allowed to bring into the pit. If it had been hot weather, he would have been allowed a fan to cool the animal down with at pickups. The dogs, held on opposite sides of the pit by heavy leashes, were allowed to slowly come together on the hard, packed earth until their foreshortened blunt heads were only inches apart. They were both straining, their eyes shot with blood, their nostrils flared, in an utter frenzy. Most of the crowd was standing, shouting bets at one another and screaming at the dogs. Novella Watkins was hollering her little heart out, stamping her feet and shaking her dainty fist, but even in her excitement, one of her hands kept returning to her head to check her tiny crown of snakes. Joe Lon saw Duffy Deeter across the pit in the stands. Hard Candy and Susan Gender were with him. The old man they’d kicked around at the bar, Poncy, sat between the two girls. They all looked a little out of control, except Poncy, who sat quietly staring at the ends of his fingers. Down in the pit, the referee stepped onto the sand. He was an old man, a tobacco farmer from Tifton. He was wearing brand-new overalls and a black felt hat. He glanced up at Big Joe, who nodded, and then across to the man from east Tennessee.

He looked to the handlers and said, “Are we ready to let’m roll, gentlemen?” They both nodded. The referee’s call had a high joyous lilt: “Let’m roll!”

The handlers slipped the leashes and the dogs met in the center of the pit. The impact as they came together had the sound of an ax in wood, a deep solid joining. It was impossible to follow what was happening as they rolled in the dirt, but when at last they stopped, Tuffy had been cut along the back and across the top of the skull. But it was Devil who was caught. Tuffy had managed to close on the side of his neck, not far enough under to get the jugular, but it was a mean, wearing hold. He closed his eyes and rode the other dog down. Devil was strong enough to regain his feet at times and lift Tuffy nearly clear of the ground but he couldn’t shake him and eventually they were in the dirt again.

They lay there for two or three minutes and then Tuffy shook Devil so hard that he shook himself loose from the hold and went flying across the pit. They both scratched in the dirt in an effort to join again, and when their roll stopped Devil was into Tuffy’s belly and Tuffy was into Devil’s haunch. They shook each other where they lay. Both dogs were slick with blood, but neither was pumping. As long as they didn’t hit an artery or a heavy vein, the blood didn’t really matter. The dogs never seemed to notice it. When the referee called for the first pickup forty minutes later, it was not at all clear which was the better dog. The dogs’ jaws had to be pried open with a hickory wedge before they could be handled.

Willard Miller took Tuffy, who was so fiercely mad his eyes were crossed, to the bowl, gave him some water, and washed the blood out of his nose; then he put each of the dog’s feet into the bowl.

The referee said: “Are you ready to let’m roll, gentlemen?” And the two dogs were back in the dirt again.

The second pickup was not until an hour later and it had been a brutal standoff match. Bets had been made and remade and made yet again. There had been several fights in the stands. One had been going on for the last twenty minutes and had worked its way around to the side of the pit. Bets were starting to be laid off on the two men rolling around in the dirt while the dogs were being handled.

“He’s pumping,” Willard said to Coach Tump. Tuffy’s rear right leg was pumping blood. He turned and looked over to Big Joe, whose face was passive. He nodded. Let’m fight.

But this time when the referee called to let’m roll, and the heavy leashes were slipped, Tuffy turned. He’d lost a lot of blood and it was still spurting from his back leg. He staggered as the other dog came across the ring. The referee called for a pickup. Devil’s jaws were pried out of Tuffy’s back. The referee was not sure of the move Tuffy had made, whether he had truly refused to face or not. The crowd was going crazy and their stamping feet on the boards of the bleachers rolled over the pit like thunder. The fight between the two men was over. One of them lay face down in the dirt. The other man hung over the wall watching the bleeding dogs.

When the referee had them face again, there was no doubt. Tuffy turned, but before the referee could declare the winner and have Tuffy withdrawn, Big Joe, the tails of his enormous black coat flapping behind him, had leaped over the barrier into the pit. He caught Tuffy against the boards. He and the crowd howled with a single voice while he kicked the dog to death.

***

Coach Tump sat red-eyed and hunkered over a yellow tablet of paper, a bitten nub of a pencil caught in his fingers. The little cheerleaders brought him steaming coffee in relays. It was very early but the snake teams were already forming up. Men, women, and children wandered about in front of the registration table where Coach Tump sat. It had been a wild calamitous night, with dancing and drinking and fighting and cars racing around over the countryside. Three more campers had been wrecked. Luther Peacock tried to do something about it all, even put two men in jail, but then he just gave up on it. There were too many people to try to do anything with.

Coach Tump stretched his neck, trying to see Joe Lon or Willard. He asked Hard Candy if she had seen them.

“Not this morning. Coach,” she said, and gave him another cup of coffee. He laced this cup heavy with whiskey. It made him feel a little better. Fog lay curling among the far trees. The heavy pine smell of sap rising was everywhere on the air. It was damp and had grown colder during the night. A great day for hunting snakes. They’d all be in the ground. Coach Tump wished to God it was all over. The last thing in the world he wanted to do was sit here and register snake-hunting teams. But they’d gone too far with it to stop now. He’d talked with Willard and the doctor and Luther and even Big Joe — after Joe Lon had left in the truck with the bloody body of Tuffy thrown on the tailgate — Coach Tump had talked to them about the possibility of calling the hunt off. There seemed reason enough to do it: Buddy’s death, too many people, too little water, too few toilets. But they had decided together that calling off the hunt would probably drive the crowd over the final brink to madness. They’d torn down most of the bleachers around the pit while Big Joe was still kicking Tuffy, and they might have torn down the house too if Joe Lon hadn’t suddenly come out the back door with his daddy’s shotgun and let off four rounds in the air. The shotgun calmed them down enough to get them off the place. But they were still dangerous and there was nothing to do but go on with the hunt.

A man suddenly came running out of the woods, screaming, the fog swirling at his pumping knees. He was running and screaming and Coach Tump recognized him as the one who was tainted from keeping over five hundred snakes on his personal property.

“They killing him. Killing! Butchering … My friend. Oh, Jesus God, my only friend.”

Coach Tump got him calmed down, but never enough to find out exactly what was happening, only that somebody was getting killed. Since Buddy was dead and since Luther Peacock was nowhere about and since he. Coach Tump, was Honorary Chairman of the Roundup, he ran across the campground with Tommy Hugh and found five men, a woman, and two small children attacking a snake, a constrictor, eighteen feet long and more than two hundred pounds. The snake did not move; it didn’t even look alive.

Tommy Hugh was screaming that it was hurt already from the cold, that it had no place to hide last night and its body temperature was down in the forties, and that besides it was harmless. Harmless! But the men and women were screaming about skin and food and steaks and danger. Danger! And they were hitting the snake with hatchets. They all had hatchets. Even the children. The snake did writhe some before they got its back open, but not much and it didn’t last long.

Finally, all of them, even the children, were standing in the snake. There was an enormous amount of guts and blood and it didn’t smell good at all. The men and women got out of the snake and made the children get out of it and they stood for a moment regarding the two-hundred-pound mess of stinking guts and blood and mutilated skin and without saying anything walked out from under the trees where they found the snake. They stopped once to chop their hatchets into the dirt to clean off the blood and bits of whitish meat, but they never looked back.

Tommy Hugh actually knelt and lifted the anaconda’s head into his lap. The head had fared better than the rest of the snake. It only had two parallel hatchet marks in the skull between the eyes.

Tommy Hugh looked up at Coach Tump, tears streaming down his face, and said: “You would’ve stopped them if it’d been a dog they was chopping.”

Coach Tump stood for a moment and then said before he turned to go: “You tainted sumbitch.”

The coach walked back to the table, his stomach a little sick, and feeling very bad about the morning. Luther Peacock was there, with a cup of coffee, and Joe Lon was sitting in his pickup truck beside Willard. Duffy Deeter was leaning on the fender. Big Joe’s shotgun, the one Joe Lon had fired the evening before, was on a rack behind Willard’s head. The tailgate of the pickup was still down. Coach Tump came up to the table and took a mean swallow of his whiskeyed coffee and told them about the tainted sumbitch with the two-hundred-pound snake.

Joe Lon did not answer but sat regarding the far wall of dark pine where it started to rise to the scrub oak ridge above which the sun was a thin white disk in the cold fog rising out of the ground. That long oak ridge above the pines was where they would hunt the snakes. He’d taken Tuffy off last night behind the field to an old storm-blasted pine tree where the buzzards roosted and pulled him off the tailgate. Joe Lon watched him for a long moment lying there with the blood still damp ‘on his scarred body; then he’d driven home and had the first real night’s sleep in months. He had put himself carefully on the bed beside Elfie and carefully closed his eyes and listened to his heart beating. Elfie had taken his hand and he let her hold it. She lay very still on the bed. Finally she said: “Goodnight, Joe Lon, honey.”

“Goodnight,” he said.

“Things’ll be different tomorrow,” she said.

“All right,” he said.

Then he had gone carefully to sleep, a deep dreamless sleep, because he knew and accepted for the first time that things would not be different tomorrow. Or ever. Things got different for some people. But for some they did not. There were a lot of things you could do though. One of them was to go nuts trying to pretend things would someday be different. That was one of the things he did not intend to do.

“We gone have to git’m started,” said Coach Tump. “They nervous and ready to go.”

“We might as well,” said Luther Peacock.

There were three people on a team. Sometimes a man, his wife, and their child. Sometimes two men and a woman. Sometimes three men. One carried the stick, one the hose, and one the little bottle of gasoline. Coach Tump Walker’s pad showed that there were seventy-five officially registered teams, but a lot of people hadn’t bothered with signing up, because it was obvious that better than six hundred people — laughing, shouting, drinking, cursing — were strung out waiting for the race up the hill.

Luther Peacock got in the cab of the pickup beside Joe Lon. “Let’s go, boy,” he said.

They started them this way every year. Coach Tump and some of his boys — in this case, Willard Miller and Duffy Deeter — would stay down with the hunters, making sure they kept lined up and there were no false starts, while Joe Lon and Buddy Matlow (today Luther Peacock) would drive the pickup through the border of rising pines on a little dim road that finally rose to the sandy ridge of scrub oaks and palmetto. Joe Lon drove carefully, his eyes straight ahead, grunting now and again when Luther Peacock spoke to him. It was only about four hundred yards up through the pines to the long, slightly curving oak ridge where hundreds and hundreds of gophers had burrowed long slanting holes into the sand. That was where the rattlesnakes lived, in the gopher holes, never molesting their hard-shelled, lethargic hosts, but seeking shelter there in the warm holes when cold weather came. The snakes’ cold blood could not bear winter. If the temperature dropped below thirty-two degrees, they simply froze solid on the spot unless they could get themselves underground.

Joe Lon and Luther got out of the pickup and walked over the crest of the ridge. A chicken wire and plywood snake pen identical to the one in the school yard had been set up to receive the snakes. A pair of scales hung by the pen. Little blue tags that would register the weight and length of each snake sat waiting on the scales. The starting seniors on the Mystic Rattlers football team would weigh and measure the snakes. The cheerleaders, led by Novella Watkins, would record weight and length on the blue tags for the hunters.

“Wait,” said Joe Lon. “Wait a minute.”

Luther Peacock had taken out his red handkerchief.

“We got to do it,” said Luther.

From this high ridge of ground, Joe Lon could see the whole thing. Over there to the left was the campground and beyond it, his trailer, where Elfie was probably washing and feeding the babies. The senior football players were already bringing the cheerleaders up through the pine trees, getting a head start on the hunters, who always went a little berserk when the signal to start was given. Straight ahead and perhaps three hundred yards behind the cheerleaders, whose bright little uniforms flared like something growing in the dark woods, stood the hunters, their solid straining faces turned up watching for the signal. And on the farthest horizon, Joe Lon could see the hazy outline of his daddy’s twin-gabled roof. He wondered if Beeder would be watching. She said she would be watching, that she always watched the howling ascent of the hunters to the traditional snake ground of the Mystic Rattlesnake Roundup.

“We got to do it,” said Luther.

“Yeah,” said Joe Lon, “I guess we got to.”

Luther Peacock raised his red handkerchief over his head, and when he did the line of hunters broke, racing into the trees that led up to the oak ridge. The long snake sticks shook on the air like lances. A sustained squall of voices echoed out of the pine woods. As they watched, the senior football players and the cheerleaders sprinted out of the pine trees and started the last little climb up to the ridge.

Joe Lon went back to the pickup and opened the door. There was a bottle of whiskey in the glove compartment. He got into the cab and took it out. The sky had lowered since they had come up on the ridge. The weak sun could not burn off the fog still rising out of the ground. It was getting colder. Joe Lon strained to see the house below the twin gables on the far horizon. It was there. He could make it out but it was hazy. Beeder couldn’t possibly see the hunters who were just now breaking onto the ridge and dropping to their knees by the gopher holes. Indifferently, he watched them scramble at the holes, pulling the sand away with their hands, clawing, setting it up for the hose. A strange peace, heavy, even tiring, had settled in him. He almost dozed as he watched them, frantic, jerking and howling, every one of them intent on being the first to pull a snake out of the ground. He sipped the whiskey and wondered what it would be like over there where Beeder was. The hunters must look smaller than ants. Maybe they couldn’t even be seen. He thought they couldn’t. She had said otherwise.

“Oh, I can see them,” she said. “I can see just as much of them over there as I want to see.”

He’d just come back in the house with the shotgun. Outside trucks were starting up. Now and then dogs started barking.

“I’ve seen more of them than I want to see,” he said. “I wish we didn’t have to do this. I wish I’d never heard of a rattlesnake.”

“Daddy would say to wish in one hand and shit in the other, see which one fills up first.”

He said: “I know what daddy would say.” He turned toward the door. “I got to go.”

“What you gone do with him?”

“Take him out yonder where the buzzards roost.”

“Okay,” she said.

“I don’t think Tuffy felt anything much. He was already hurt pretty bad.”

“It don’t matter,” she said.

“No, I don’t reckon it does.”

Somebody had brought up some lightered knots and made a fire behind the snake pit. The black pine smoke rose with the fog into the lowering sky. Snakes were already being put into the pit. All across the barren ridge, the hunters stood in dark relief against the winter sky, pulling the snakes from the ground, stretching them at the ends of the long poles. Somebody had let Poncy on a team. He handled the gasoline. Joe Lon, sitting utterly still in the truck listening to his heart beat between sips of whiskey, watched as the team Poncy was on dropped by a fresh gopher hole. One man ran a ten-foot length of garden hose down the hole until he was sure it was all the way to the bottom. Then Poncy measured out a teaspoon of gasoline and poured it down the hose. If there was a snake in there, he’d be up in a minute, drunk and blinking from the gas fumes. Poncy and the two other hunters stepped back from the hole and waited. Presently, the blunt dry head of the snake appeared, the black forked tongue waving, testing the air. There was a smooth undulation and another foot of snake, thick as a man’s wrist, appeared. One of the hunters dropped the noose at the end of the stick over the snake’s head and pulled it tight. Slowly, a five-foot length of serpent was drawn out of the hole. Poncy was dancing around, making the wild excited cries a child might make.

“Hold him, hold him,” Poncy was begging. The man held the writhing snake up on the end of the stick. Poncy came closer and closer until he was looking right into the snake’s eyes. Poncy hissed. From less than a foot away, he shot spit into the snake’s gaping, fanged mouth. Just as he was about to do it again, he looked up and saw Joe Lon watching him. Almost shyly, he averted his eyes. But while the man with the stick took the snake to the pit, Poncy came over to the truck where Joe Lon was sitting with the door open. He was flushed, smiling, his eyes bright.

“Hi,” Poncy said.

Joe Lon took another careful sip of whiskey and did not speak. Poncy looked embarrassed. “I don’t care what you did in the bar,” he said. Joe Lon wanted to say something so the old man would go back and start pulling snakes out of the ground and leave him alone. But he didn’t think he could speak. So he carefully nodded his head. Poncy seemed to accept that as an answer.

Poncy leaned closer and for the first time held Joe Lon’s eyes. He said: “I know why you did it. It’s natural, and I don’t hold it against you.”

Joe Lon nodded. Poncy turned and started back to his team but he stopped and looked at Joe Lon before he’d gone very far. “I’d rather be here on this hill with these snakes and you,” he said, “than anywhere else in the world.”

Willard Miller, Duffy Deeter, and Coach Tump walked out of the pine trees and Joe Lon watched while they came up the crest of the hill to the truck. When they stopped by the open door, Joe Lon handed Coach Tump the whiskey bottle because he was afraid the coach was going to speak to him and Joe Lon was no longer sure that he could answer. But not being sure he could speak did not strike him as odd. It seemed normal enough, even good. They passed the bottle. The temperature had dropped twenty degrees since daylight. A light inconstant buzz of rattles floated out of the pit and hovered over the hill.

Luther Peacock, leaning against the fender of the truck, said in a quiet voice: “You know I never touched a goddam snake in my life. Sumbitch if I know how they do that.” Everywhere in front of them, the dark silhouettes of men were joined to the earth by the thick stretched bodies of snakes. The sky gave no light at all now except where the thin white disk of sun hung in the east.

Off and on all morning, Victor, his hair more wildly twisted than ever, appeared among the hunters, to urge them on to greater efforts. So Joe Lon was not surprised to see him come out from behind the snake pit. But he was surprised to see him suddenly stop and strip to the waist. The men and women nearest Victor turned just in time to see Victor bend to his heavy coat lying on the ground and open the pockets. When he straightened up he had a rattlesnake in each hand. He held the writhing snakes over his head. His voice boomed: “Ye shall take up …”

A rush of energy shocked through Joe Lon. He stiffened on the seat. All morning he had felt as though he was going to do it today. But he had not known what it was. Now, watching Victor stagger across the crest of the ridge, Joe Lon knew what it was he had planned to do all along, the thing that had lain rank and fascinating in his brain since last night at the pit. He’d waited for the moment to come, the right one, knowing he’d recognize it when it did. The hunters were scattering in front of Victor, his heavy lilting voice singing on about good and evil in a kind of mad howl. When the old man finally stepped between Joe Lon and the fog-shrouded, twin-gabled house on the far horizon, Joe Lon reached to the rack where the shotgun hung behind him and in a single movement came out of the cab and blew a hole the size of a doorknob out of Victor’s pale naked chest.

The hunters who had been scattering stopped. Nothing moved anywhere. Joe Lon jacked another round of double-ought buckshot into the twelve-gauge pump, let the gun drop slightly to the right, and blew the look of horror right off Luther Peacock’s head. A woman’s voice said a word, begging. A child cried. And Joe Lon strolled casually toward the hunters, pumping the shotgun. When he threw it to his shoulder, the bead swung right past Shep and held on Berenice. He shot away her neck. Joe Lon jacked in another shell. He felt better than he had ever felt in his life. Christ, it was good to be in control again. He shot the nearest hunter.

When he pumped the gun again, it was empty. Since the first shot, no more than seven or eight seconds had passed, during which time everybody on the hill stood in arrested motion. As he pulled down on the empty chamber for the second time, dozens of hunters scrambled for cover. But most of them did not. The man nearest him, his face twisted with fear and rage, screamed: “Git that crazy bastard!” And a whole wall of men and women, their mouths open, teeth bared, moved with a single raging voice upon Joe Lon. He never dropped the gun. He simply held it and waited as their hands came upon him and he was raised high in the air. The gun went into the snake pit with him. He fell into the boiling snakes, went under and came up, like a swimmer breaking water. For the briefest instant, he gained his feet. Snakes hung from his face.

As he was going down again, he saw, or thought he saw, his sister Beeder in her dirty white nightgown squatting off on the side of the hill with Lottie Mae, watching.