Harry Crews - A Feast of Snakes

“It’s me, Joe Lon,” Joe Lon shouted into the telephone finally. “Joe Lon! How’s Beeder?” A little spit flecked Joe Lon’s lips and the lids of his ruined eyes seemed to work independently of one another. “I know I woke you up.”

The old man claimed that his hearing was worse at night than in the day, and that it was the worst of all when he was just awakened. It took, he said, several hours for his tubes to clear out and drain good.

“How’s Beeder?” he shouted again. And then, swinging to look at Lummy, “He says she’s fine, just like she always is.” He shouted back into the telephone: “Which is it? She fine? Or she like she always is?” He took a drink from his bottle, tilted on the stool, and winked at Lummy. He stiffened on the stool, a vein leapt in his thick neck. He screamed, “I don’t know. Haven’t seen a clock. Don’t own a clock. Don’t want a clock.”

Lummy sat drinking his free bourbon in the corner, wondering how much of this he’d have to listen to before he could go home and get his woman and go for some of Junior’s Real-Pit-Barbecue.

Joe Lon was screaming: “A family reunion! Right. All together again. I’ll git Elf and the babies and you git Mama …” His voice was growing thicker and even though his face remained stunned and without expression, as though he might have been sleepwalking, tears came from his eyes and ran down over his heavy square chin, blue now with a stubble of beard. “… you git Mama and Beeder and I’ll git Elf and the babies and you and me’ll git’m all in a room in the big house and we’ll just beat the shit out of them. Beat’m I said goddammit. Slap’m. Bust their faces.”

He was crying openly now, his shoulders shaking, and Lummy, who recognized this as something he was not meant to watch, got up quietly and headed for the door, thinking only how grateful he would be for a good plate of Real-Pit-Barbecue and then his woman’s warm thick back to sleep against. What was happening in there was none of his business.

Joe Lon was screaming: “We like that, don’t we? Me and you? Hem’m up in a room and beat’m good?”

But Lummy might as well have been hearing a woodpecker in a tree or rain on a tin roof. It was the natural sound of the world, too much like everything else, and he wouldn’t remember it.

***

The news that somebody had cut off Buddy Matlow’s dick threatened to ruin everything: the dog fight that night and the snake hunt the next morning. It spread among the hunters and tourists like fire. Nobody had talked of anything else much all morning. It even served to take their minds off the fact that there was not enough water and the Johnny-on-the-spots were full to overflowing and several trailers had been wrecked the night before, two actually turned over.

Joe Lon found out about it when they woke him up shortly before noon. Coach Tump stood down in the yard hustling his balls and spitting tobacco juice into the dirt. He looked up at Joe Lon in the doorway to the double-wide and told him that Buddy Matlow had been taken to the hospital in Tifton, at least that is what most people were saying they’d heard, but there were others who said it was Macon where he’d been taken, and at least two or three said they’d heard that it was as far away as Atlanta.

Coach Tump said it didn’t make much of a shit where they taken him if somebody’d gone and cut off his dick. “Wouldn’t surprise me if this don’t put a damper on the whole thing.”

The story Coach Tump had heard said they’d packed it in ice. They had packed Buddy Matlow’s dick in ice and salt and they meant to sew it back on and that was why they had gone all the way to Atlanta because they had better facilities for sewing dicks back on at the big hospital there.

“Damned if I’d want my dick sewed back on,” said Willard Miller.

“I believe I would if they could do it like it was on there before,” Coach Tump said.

Duffy Deeter said: “What goes around comes around.” They had all come inside to drink coffee while Joe Lon got dressed. Duffy regarded his knuckles, all of them skinned and scabbed. He sucked gently at his nose. It was filled with black blood. “Bad karma,” he said. “A guy that gets his dick cut off’s got bad karma.”

“He is also shit out of luck,” said Willard Miller.

Joe Lon came out of the back, dressed now, his eyes webbed in a net of veins, his face puffy, and they all got in Coach Tump’s Oldsmobile and drove out to Big Joe’s to prepare Tuffy for the fight that night.

“Looks a little like war out there, don’t it?” said Willard.

Joe Lon, who had been very quiet since they woke him up, only nodded. Out in the campground, a trailer was on its side. The road to Big Joe’s was littered with cups and hotdog wrappers and hamburger wrappers and even articles of clothing. They passed four wrecked cars before they got to the schoolhouse.

“What the hell happened to you last night, boy?” said Coach Tump.

“I never known much about nothing oncet I got off that stage,” Joe Lon said. “Them fuckers looked to eat me up.”

“I’ll drink to that,” said Willard, running his thumbnail around the neck of a bottle of bourbon.

Coach Tump frowned. “Boy, I want you to stay out of the bottle today.”

Willard said, “Coach, I just need a little something to smooth me out.”

Coach Tump eyed the bottle. He would have beat hell out of any other boy playing for him if the boy had even mentioned drinking whiskey, much less doing it. But this was the Boss Snake of the team. He ran over anybody, everybody. As long as he did that, he could do whatever else he wanted to. “I guess a little whiskey won’t hurt nothing.”

They all had a little sip, except Joe Lon, who bubbled it pretty good. Willard Miller, who was sitting in the middle, reached over and hugged Duffy Deeter, then he kissed him on the cheek, right on top of a ragged purple bruise. “Joe Lon, damn if I don’t think I’m in love with this little fucker right here. You see’m last night? Worsen a pit bull when you git’m down in the dirt.”

“I was too busy tryin to not get eat myself to see anything,” said Joe Lon.

While they drove on out to Big Joe’s, they talked about last night, how they’d kicked and stomped and gouged and by God made sure Novella Watkins was crowned just like everbody known she ought to be.

The dogs that were going to fight that night, fifteen of them, had already been groomed and walked and were resting in their cages on the backs of pickup trucks when they got to the pit. The men who had brought them sat in the bleacher seats passing a sipping sack and spitting tobacco juice while they talked dog fighting. Joe Lon brought his daddy’s Tuff out of the cage and took him into the pit to rub him down. It was the custom at Big Joe’s to show the favorite in the pit while he was being groomed before the fight. Willard Miller and Coach Tump and Duffy went up into the bleachers while Joe Lon went for the dog. When he got back his daddy was up there too. All the faces of the dog fighters were turned toward Big Joe, who was talking.

Joe Lon knelt in the dirt beside the dog and smoothed him down with a heavy brush. The other dogs were making a terrible racket now that he had brought out Tuff. Joe Lon’s head felt as if it might crack like bad glass and fall in pieces on the packed dirt where Tuff stood in his widelegged stance, leaning slightly against the leash, his torn and scarred ears struck forward on his head. For a long time Joe Lon brushed and talked to Tuff in a soft, sympathetic whisper, telling him he was about to get to do what he had been bred and trained to do, that it wouldn’t be long now before he could show everybody that he was the boss pit of all the bulls.