Harry Crews - A Feast of Snakes

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?”