Harry Crews - A Feast of Snakes

“… 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.