A Feast of Snakes
1976
This book is for
Johnny Feiber:
in good times and bad
I’ve never raised a glass with a better friend
If I could only live at a pitch that is near madness
When everything is as it was in my childhood
Violent, vivid, and of infinite possibility:
That the sun and moon broke over my head.
Richard Eberhart
PART ONE
She felt the snake between her breasts, felt him there, and loved him there, coiled, the deep tumescent S held rigid, ready to strike. She loved the way the snake looked sewn onto her V-neck letter sweater, his hard diamondback pattern shining in the sun. It was unseasonably hot, almost sixty degrees, for early November in Mystic, Georgia, and she could smell the light musk of her own sweat. She liked the sweat, liked the way it felt, slick as oil, in all the joints of her body, her bones, in the firm sliding muscles, tensed and locked now, ready to spring—to
strike
—when the band behind her fired up the school song: “Fight On Deadly Rattlers of Old Mystic High.”
She felt a single drop of sweat slip from the small of her back, hang for an instant, and then slide into the mellow groove between the flexed jaws of her ass. When she felt the sweat touch her there, she automatically cut her eyes to see if she could pick out Willard Miller, the Boss Snake of all the Mystic Rattlers,
her
boss Snake, pick him out from the other helmeted and white-suited boys scrimmaging on the other side of the track. When they made contact, their soft, almost gentle grunts came to her across the green practice field.
She tried to distinguish the sound of him from the sound of the others, and she thought she could, thought how amazingly the sound was like the ragged snorts he made into her ear when he had her bent brutally back over the hood of her Vette. There was hardly any difference at all in the noise he made when he scored on the field or scored on her. In whatever he did, he was always noisy and violent and wet, tending as he did to slobber a little.
She saw the band director raise his baton and she tensed, rolled her weight forward to the balls of her feet, and then the music was crashing around her, the tubas pumping, the drums rattling, and she was strutting like it was the end of the world. From the sides of the field came the dry, awesome rattle of the diamondback. Some of the fans had come out and they had brought their gourds with them. The gourds were as big as cantaloupes, shaped like crooked-neck squash, and full of dried seed so that when they were shaken they vibrated the air with the genuine sound of a snake. During a game, the home stands of the Mystic Rattlers put everybody’s hair on end. You could hear those dried gourd seeds two miles away, buzzing like the biggest snake den God ever imagined. During football season, nobody in Mystic was very far from his gourd. Sometimes you could see people carrying them around with them in town, down at the grocery store, or inside Simpkin’s, the only dry goods store in Mystic.
The band was strung out now in the shape of a snake. The band members used the yard markers to position themselves, double timing in place, drawing their knees high and waving their instruments, so that the entire snake vibrated in the sun. The snare drums were under one goal post, rattling for all they were worth and she was under the other goal post, standing in the snake’s mouth, her arms rigid as fangs. She was at one with the music. She did not have to think to perform. Of all the majorettes—and there were five others—she marched in place with the highest knees, the biggest smile, the finest skin, the best teeth. She was a natural, and as a natural her one flaw—if she had one—was that her mind tended to wander. She didn’t have to think, didn’t have to concentrate like the other girls to get her moves right. Consequently she sometimes got bored with the drills and her mind wandered. Even now as she pranced in place, her back arched, her pelvis thrust forward, she was winking at Joe Lon Mackey where he stood under the end zone bleachers.
That was where he usually stood when he watched them practice and she was not surprised to see him there, glad rather, because it gave her something to think about. He wasn’t twenty feet from her, standing in the shadows, a burlap sack in one hand and a brown paper sipping sack in the other. From time to time he raised the sipping sack to his mouth. He’d winked at her when she first stopped under the goal post. She’d winked back. Turned her smile on him. She’d always liked him. Hell,
everybody
had always liked Joe Lon. But she didn’t really know him
that
well. Her sister, who was going to school at the University of Georgia in Athens, her sister, Berenice, knew him
that
well.
Her sister and Joe Lon had been a number in Mystic, Georgia, in all of Lebeau County for that matter, and Joe Lon could have been going to the University of Georgia in Athens or anywhere else in this country he wanted to except it turned out Joe Lon was not a good student. That’s the way they all put it there in Mystic: Joe Lon Mackey is not a good student. But it was worse than that and they all knew it. It had never been established exactly if Joe Lon could read. Most of the teachers at Mystic High who had been privileged to have him in their classrooms thought he probably couldn’t. But they liked him anyway, even loved him, loved tall, blond, high school All-American Joe Lon Mackey whose exceptional quietness off the playing field everybody chose to call courtesy. He had the name of being the most courteous boy in all of Lebeau County, although it was commonly known that he had done several pretty bad things, one of which was taking a traveling salesman out to July Creek and drowning him while nearly the entire first string watched from high up on the bank where they were sipping beer.
She missed the band director’s whistle signaling that the snake was about to strike and consequently the five other girls making up the snake’s head almost knocked her over. She’d been standing, her arms positioned as fangs, winking at Joe Lon where he raised his sack in the shadows and wondering if Berenice would come home for the roundup, when the girl right behind her, highstepping, hit her in the kidney with a knee and almost knocked her down. She caught herself just in time and hissed over her shoulder: “You want you ass kicked, do you?”
The girl said something back to her but it was lost in the pumping tubas. Under the stands Joe Lon Mackey took the last pull from a Jim Beam half pint and dropped the paper sack with the bottle in it into the weeds. He took out two pieces of Dentyne chewing gum and put them into his mouth. Then he lit a cigarette. He had been watching Candy— called Hard Candy by nearly everybody but her parents, Dr. and Mrs. Sweet—because she reminded him of Berenice and all the things that might have come true for him but had not. Two years ago Berenice had been a senior and head majorette and he, Joe Lon, had been Boss Rattler.
It was said that Joe Lon, on any given day of his senior year of high school, could have run through the best college defensive line in the country. But he had not. He had never set foot on a single college football field even though he had been invited to visit more than fifty colleges and universities. But that was all right. He’d had his. That’s what he told himself ten times a day:
That’s all right. By God, I had mine.
He reached into the back pocket of his Levis and pulled out a sheet of blue paper. It was almost worn through in the creases where it was folded. He shook it open and held it up to the light. It said: “I will see you at rattlesnake time. Love Berenice.” There were some X’s under the name. The letter had come to Joe Lon at the store three days ago. It had taken him most of the afternoon to be sure of the words and once he was sure of them, they had given him no pleasure. He had thought he was through with all that, had made his peace. He folded the letter and put it back in his pocket. But on the way to his pickup he took the letter out again and, using his teeth and his free hand, he carefully tore it into very small pieces and left them scattered behind him in the gloomy aisle underneath the stands.
He drove over to the little road that went by the practice field and watched Willard Miller run the ball. They were running him against the grunions, the smaller, second-string boys who came out for football for God knows what reason since they almost never got into a game and could only offer up their bodies as tackling dummies for the bigger, stronger boys. He watched Willard Miller fire three straight lines up the middle. It was important to run him against grunions now and then. It gave him a chance to practice his moves without running the risk of getting injured. It also gave him great opportunities to run over people and step on them, mash their heads and their hands, kick their ribs good.
Joe Lon felt his own thigh muscles tick, as he watched Willard fake a grunion out of his shoes and then, after he had the boy entirely turned around and beaten, run directly over him for no reason at all. Well, what the hell, all things had to end, both good and bad. There were other things in this world besides getting to step on somebody. The main thing was to hold on and not let it bother you. Joe Lon turned on his lights and drove off into the early November dusk.
He had been drinking most of the day, but he didn’t feel drunk. He drove out past the empty flag pole on the post office and past the jail, where he saw Buddy Matlow’s supercharged Plymouth with the big sheriff’s star painted on the door parked under a leafless Chinaberry tree, and on through town, where several people waved to him. He didn’t wave back. Finally, two people shook their gourds at him though and he did raise his hand and smile but he only half saw them. He was preoccupied by the thought of going home to Elfie and the babies, that trailer where he lived in a constant state of suffocating anger.
He had the trailer just outside of town on the edge of a ten-acre field he’d bought and turned into a combination trailer park and campground. He drove slowly down the narrow dirt road leading to it and passed finally under a big banner that he himself had strung from two tall telephone poles he had bought secondhand from the REA. The banner was neatly printed in letters about two feet high: WELCOME TO MYSTIC GEORGIA’S ANNUAL RATTLESNAKE ROUNDUP.
The lights were on in his trailer, a double-wide with a concrete patio, and he could see the shadow of his wife Elfie moving behind the window in the kitchen. He parked the truck, took the burlap sack from the back, and walked out to a little fenced-in pen that had a locked gate on it. He took out a key and opened it. In the back of the pen were several metal barrels. The tops of the barrels were covered with fine-mesh chicken wire. He kicked two of the barrels and immediately the little enclosure was filled with the dry constant rattle of diamondbacks. He took a stick with a wire hook on the end of it from the corner of the pen, set the burlap sack down, and waited.
The mouth of the sack moved and the blunt head of a rattlesnake appeared. It seemed to grin and waved its forked tongue testing, tasting the air. There was an undulation and another foot of snake, perhaps four inches thick, appeared behind the head. Joe Lon moved quickly and surely and the snake was twisting slowly on the end of the hooked stick.