Harry Crews - A Feast of Snakes

“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.