Harry Crews - A Feast of Snakes

Joe Lon put his mouth to the principal’s ear: “Git over there and line up the girls. The girls …” He shoved the principal toward the end of the stage, toward a low wall of plywood that formed an L-shaped room with no top where the girls stood pressed tightly together.

Joe Lon leaned in close to the microphone and said: “If you’d just quiet youself down,” but he said it in a normal voice and even with the amplifier he couldn’t hear his own voice. The most noise was coming from the place where the snake rose thirty feet in the air. The line of dancers circling the snake had torches now. It looked as though they had all found torches and they weren’t so much singing, as they’d been doing before, but screaming. He stood watching, almost bemused by the whiskey running in his blood and the noise and the open fires. Then directly in front of him there was a high piercing cry like metal tearing, and when he looked down Joe Lon saw Duffy Deeter come straight up out of the crowd, lay out on the air as if he expected to do a halfgainer, but just as he was parallel to the ground the point of his heel caught a huge bearded man on the side of the head and his entire face splattered, some of the blood spotting the rough wooden boards of the stage. Willard Miller showing all his teeth in a great joyous scowl was on top of the man who had been kicked almost before he slipped to the ground.

Joe Lon waved to let the first girl come, and she did, wearing a bikini of some silver diaphanous material that had enough cloth in it to maybe make a glove. Her name was Novella and she was Hard Candy’s chief rival for head cheerleader, although Novella was still in the tenth grade, but everybody knew — including Joe Lon, who was watching not her but the crowd’s reaction to her — that it was only a matter of time before she took over from Hard Candy. She was favored tonight to take Miss Rattlesnake Queen and Joe Lon could tell by the way she pumped across the stage in her high-heeled shoes, all flashing legs and rounded arms over rounded breasts over rounded hips, her little matted, mounded beaver pulsing there where she kept her thighs peeled apart even as she pranced — Joe Lon could tell that she wasn’t about to let a little thing like blood and fights keep her from what she’d been after since she was old enough to hold a baton.

There was still noise but it was all coming from seventy yards away where the torch-lit dancers tirelessly circled the snake. The audience spilled away from the front of the stage; everybody who could see her, had gone silent. Cigarette smoke and wood smoke hung in layers over their heads as they watched Novella move around the stage, giving them first a front view, then a side, then a back.

The principal had come back to the microphone and, reading from a little card, introduced Novella Watkins, gave her measurements, “… a fine young lady who will someday make somebody a fine wife at thirty-six, twenty, thirty-four …,” and her credits, “… Miss Junior Future Farmers of America, Miss Peach, Miss …” While he talked, Joe Lon eased to the end of the stage and dropped off into the dirt. He looked for Hard Candy and Susan Gender, but they were gone, along with most of the other women in the audience.

The snake was not supposed to be burned until after Miss Rattlesnake had been chosen. She was supposed to set the fire. But just as Joe Lon landed in the dirt at the end of the stage somebody touched the snake with a torch and the thing exploded into fire, lighting the entire football field like a bomb bursting. As if on signal, the solid wall of men collapsed in front of the stage, kicking and cursing and gouging. The contestants on the stage, startled by the explosion of fire, lock-stepped round and round in a sort of daze, all of them brilliantly lit by the burning snake.

Joe Lon could see plain enough that his old coach and Willard and Duffy were in danger of being hurt bad. He deliberately turned and pushed his way out to the road. He picked his way through the parked cars and campers and finally turned into a dim woods road that would come out a quarter mile from his store. It felt good to be away from all those people, strangers and friends both. It felt good for the noise to diminish a little with each step that took him deeper in the woods.

When Joe Lon got to the store, Lummy was sitting on the stool behind the counter. He got off the stool when Joe Lon came in.

“How come it is folks hollering lak that?” said Lummy. A long sustained cheer floated back out of the pine trees. It might have been a football game they were hearing, except there were no rattles.

“How come it is?”

Joe Lon did not answer but only shrugged. Then: “George come in with that extra load of beer and whiskey?”

“He come in with that extree jus fine, Mr. Joe Lon.”

Joe Lon hooked his heels on a rung of the stool, shivered, and hugged himself with his arms across his chest. “You feed the snakes?”

“Everone but the bettin snake.”

“Feed him too,” said Joe Lon. “And bring me out a bottle of that bonded.”

Lummy went through the door into the little room at the back of the counter. He never picked up the rats with his hand. He wouldn’t touch them. He wouldn’t touch anything that was going to touch a snake, much less be inside a snake. He had a pair of long-handled needle-nosed pliers he used to lift the rats into the cages with the snakes. He used his pliers and did not wait to see the strike (he never did), but got the bottle of whiskey and took it to Joe Lon, where he sat waiting on a stool.

“How’d we do today?” he asked.

Lummy told him what they had sold, told him the store had done better than it had ever done at a Roundup. But Joe Lon didn’t listen and Lummy knew he wasn’t listening. But he went on explaining the little marks on his paper — how much beer, how much shine, how much bonded whiskey — just as he always did. He did what he was told to do, what it was his job to do, and he had absolutely no curiosity about why Mr. Joe Lon was mean tonight. He’d seen him mean often enough to know it when he saw it, but since he knew also that he had nothing to fear from Mr. Joe Lon, he didn’t think about it.

His job was to be the nigger. That’s the way he thought about it. I am the nigger. That is the white man. There is a tree. There is a road. This is Mystic.

That’s the way it had to be as long as he was around a white man. As soon as he was not around a white man, he quit being a nigger and thought about many, many things that he did not ordinarily think about. One of the things he thought about was killing Mr. Joe Lon. Of course, as long as he was near him, he couldn’t kill him, or even think about killing him. But when he was off by himself, or in the company of other black people, he not only thought about it, he often actually killed him.

Joe Lon turned his burned eyes on him. “Want a drink, Lummy?”

“Wouldn’t mind a taste,” Lummy said.

“Git youself a pint of that shine. No, shit, git a pint of that othern.”

“Shine be good enough for ole Lummy.”

“Git the othern, I said. You ain’t got to mark it on you ticket.”

“Go and git it,” Lummy said to himself. “You ain’t got to mark it on you ticket.”

When he came back in Joe Lon was dialing the telephone. When he was through dialing it, he held it for a long time.

“Mayhap he out with them dogs,” said Lummy licking the neck of the whiskey bottle.

Joe Lon said: “He ain’t out with no dogs.”

They both knew that the telephone was on a little wooden table beside the old man’s bed. It sat on a metal dishpan turned upside down. Big Joe believed that when he couldn’t hear it, he could feel it up on top of the metal pan vibrating. Said he could feel it right in the goddam air was what he said.