Harry Crews - A Feast of Snakes

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

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

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

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

“Don’t,” said Joe Lon.

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

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

“Don’t do that, Willard.”

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

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

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

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

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

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.