Harry Crews: A Feast of Snakes

“You drink you whiskey, Mistuh Joe Lon. Don’t think twice. Lummy and me is put our minds on the whole thing.” The screen door banged shut behind him, and Joe Lon poured another dollop of whiskey down. It wasn’t doing any good much, didn’t seem to be taking hold. He knew nothing was going to help a whole lot until he saw Berenice and either made a fool of himself or did not. He had the overwhelming feeling that he was going to make a fool of himself. Tear something up. Maybe his life. Well, at least he got the Johnny-on-the-spots. Last year it had taken two weeks to clean the human shit up in Mystic. There’d been about three times as many people as there had ever been before.

The rattlesnake roundup had been going on now as long as anybody in town could remember, but until about twelve years ago it had been a local thing, a few townspeople, a few farmers. They’d have a picnic, maybe a sack race or a horse-pulling contest and then everybody would go out into the woods and see how many diamondbacks they could pull out of the ground. They would eat the snakes and drink a little corn whiskey and that would do it for another year.

But at some time back there, the snake hunt had started causing outsiders to come in. Word got out and people started to come, at first just a few from Tifton or Cordele and sometimes as far away as Macon. From there on it had just grown. Last year they had two people from Canada and five from Texas.

Mystic, Georgia, turned out to be the best rattlesnake hunting ground in the world. There were prizes now for the heaviest snake, the longest snake, the most snakes, the first one caught, the last one caught. Plus there would be a beauty contest. Miss Mystic Rattler. And shit. Human shit in quantities that nobody could believe. This year, though, they had the Johnny-on-the-spots. Chemical shitters.

The telephone rang. It was his daddy. He wanted Joe Lon to send over a bottle with George.

“Ain’t here,” he shouted into the phone. “He already gone.”

“Send somebody else then. Damn it all anyhow, I want a drink.”

“Ain’t nobody here but me. What happened to that bottle I left by this morning?”

“I drapped it and broke it.”

“Bullshit.”

“Joe Lon, I’m gone have to shoot you with a gun someday, talking to you daddy like that.”

“Who’d run the store if you done that? Maybe Beeder could run the goddam store. Tote you goddam whiskey. Maybe she’d quit with the TeeVee and act normal. Send her over here right now and I’ll give her a bottle for you.”

“You a hard man, son, making such talk about you only sister. Lord Christ Jehovah God might see fit to strike you.” Joe Lon wanted to scream into the telephone that it was not Lord Christ Jehovah God that struck his sister. But he did not. It would do no good. They’d been over that too many times already.

“All right,” he said finally, “never mind. I’ll bring the whiskey myself. Later.”

“How later?”

“When I git a chance.”

“Hurry, son, my old legs is a hurtin.”

“All right.”

Just as he put the telephone down, a car drove up. It stopped but nobody got out. Carload of niggers. He sighed. Joe Lon Mackey carrying shine for a carload of niggers. Who would have thought it? He looked down at his legs as he was going into the little room behind the counter. Who would have thought them wheels, wheels with four-five speed for forty yards, would have come to this in the world. Well, anything was apt to come to anything in this goddam world. That’s the way the world was. He spat as he took down the half pints of shine from the shelf.

During the next hour he sold more than had been sold all day, most of it to blacks who drove up and stopped under the single little light hanging from a pole in front of the store. He wished to God they were allowed to come inside so he wouldn’t have to cart it out front to them. Of course, they were allowed to come inside. Except they were not allowed to come inside. It had been that way for the twenty years his daddy had run the store and it had been that way ever since Joe Lon had taken it over. He hadn’t really kept it that way. It had just stayed that way. Nobody ever complained about it because if you wanted to drink in Mystic, Georgia, you had to stay on the good side of Joe Lon Mackey. Lebeau County was dry except for beer, and since Joe Lon had an agreement with the bootlegger, his was the only place within forty miles you could buy you a drink.

He worked steadily at the whiskey in front of him, chasing it with beer, and by the time Hard Candy’s white Corvette car pulled up out front, he was feeling a little better about the whole thing. The Corvette was Berenice’s old car and it reminded Joe Lon of everything he had been trying not to think about. Willard came in ahead of Hard Candy. He was an inch taller than Joe Lon and looked heavier. He had a direct lidless stare and tiny ears. His hair was cut short and his round blunt head did not so much sit on his huge neck as it seemed buried in it. He was wearing Levis and a school T-shirt with a tiny snake printed over his heart. His worn-out tennis shoes didn’t have any laces in them. He sat on a stool across the counter from Joe Lon and they both watched Hard Candy come through the door stepping in her particular, high-kneed walk that always seemed to make her prance. She took a stool next to Willard. Nobody had spoken. They all sat, unsmiling, looking at one another.

Finally Willard said: “Me’n Hard Candy’s just bored as shit.”

Joe Lon said: “I got a fair case of the cain’t-help-its mysef.”

“I don’t guess a man could git a goddam beer here,” said Willard.

“I guess,” said Joe Lon.

“Two,” said Hard Candy.

Joe Lon said: “Hard Candy, if you don’t quit walking like that somebody’s gone foller you out in the woods and do sompin nasty to you.”

“I wish to God somebody would,” she said.

“ Somebody already has,” said Willard.

Joe Lon got up to get the beer. When he came back he said: “You want to hold this whiskey bottle I got?”

“We et us some drugs to steady us,” Willard said. “I don’t guess I ought to drink nothing harder’n beer.”

“Okay.”

“But I will,” Willard said.

“I thought you might,” Joe Lon said.

“You shouldn’t do that,” Hard Candy said.

Willard bubbled it four times and set it on the counter. Hard Candy took it up.

“We’ll probably die,” she said, a little breathless when she put it down.

“Probably.”

They sat watching the door for a while, listening to the screenwire tick as bugs flew against it.

“I think it’s gone be a shitty roundup,” said Joe Lon.

“Will if this hot weather holds,” Willard said. “Must be fifty degrees out there right now. Shit, it’s like summer. Won’t be a snake nowhere in the hole stays this warm.”

They sat and watched the door again. A car passed on the road beyond the light now and then. Hard Candy turned and looked at Joe Lon.

“You reckon we could feed one?” she said.

“Let’s wait a little while,” Joe Lon said. “Maybe somebody’ll come in we can take some money off.”

“You got one back there that’ll eat you think?” asked Willard.

“I try to keep one,” Joe Lon said.

They watched the door some more.

“Hell, it ain’t nobody coming,” said Willard. “Git that rascal out here and let’m do his trick.”

“I’ll bet with you,” said Hard Candy. She opened the little clutch purse she was carrying and bills folded out of the top of it.

“I don’t take money from my friends,” said Joe Lon.

“If you gone bet with him on the snake,” said Willard, “you might as well go ahead and give him the goddam money anyway. You sure as hell ain’t gone beat him.”