A Feast of Snakes by Harry Crews

rush of pity at his heart for Beeder, who almost never saw anybody but the cook, who almost never left her damp room that smelled sweetly of mildewed sheets, and who would almost certainly end up in some bare white place behind a locked door with her own shit smeared over her face. He leaned back against the wall and closed his eyes and felt the hot start of tears and at the same time saw clearly his sister again as she had been in the tenth grade when he had been a stud junior running back, how pretty she had been behind the yellow pompoms cheering for him and the team, doing complicated little maneuvers in the bright sun with the other girls, and even though he never actually decided to do it he was opening the door to her room where the familiar awful smell washed warmly over his face and he saw her propped in bed with the covers pulled up under her chin so that her shadowed face looked empty of eyes in the dim inconstant light from the television set.
    He stopped at the foot of the bed. She cut her eyes up at him briefly and then looked back at the television, where Johnny and his guests were in convulsions.
    “How you feeling, Beeder?” he said.
    “He killed Tuffy yet?” she said, not looking at him.
    “He ain’t gone kill Tuffy.”
    “I wish to God he would. I know Tuffy wishes to God he would.”
    “But he won’t.”
    “No,” she said, “he won’t kill us. If he’d just kill us all … But that’s more than anybody can ask for, I guess.” She pulled the blankets down from her chin. Her face was stark white and without expression in the light. “But you cain’t ask for death. Anything else, maybe. But not death. You’d think it’d be just the other way round, wouldn’t you? Joe Lon, wouldn’t you ?’
    “I reckon,” he said.
    “How was the game?” she said.
    “We won,” he said.
    “I know you won,” she said. “I didn’t ask for that. How did you win?”
    “We ran at them, Beeder. We stuck it down their throat.”
    She turned her face away from him so that half her thin mouth was buried in the yellowing pillow. “That hurts. God, it hurts, that everthing is eating everthing else.”
    He sat on the edge of the bed and watched the Muntz. There was a Mexican comic on now, explaining how much fun it had been to grow up in a ghetto in Los Angeles. He made starving, and rats, and broken plaster, and getting beat on the head by cops just funny as shit. The audience was falling out of their seats. Johnny was wiping tears of laughter out of his eyes.
    “They’re out there now, you know, eating each other.”
    “I magine,” he said without looking at her.
    On the other side of the wall now a sound had started like the coughing of a very old, very sick man. They both knew that it was Tuffy and that it was not a cough at all but, rather, all that was left of his bark. He was exhausted and bleeding and having the life scraped out of him by the electric treadmill and it was the best bark he had left.
    He turned from the television and looked at her. “Beeder,” he said, “what … what is it that … what do you think?”
    “Think,” she said. “Think?”
    “I mean, well, goddammit, Beeder, they ain’t gone let you stay in here with the fucking Muntz for the rest of you life. Is that what you think, that they’re gone let you stay in here,” he pointed to the television, “watching that jack-off?”
    “I’m not hurting nobody,” she said. And then, her eyes going darker, her lips paler: “They gone make me leave, are they?”
    “Christ almighty!” he said. He wished to hell he had the bottle of whiskey out of the truck. She watched him now instead of the television set, but her eyes were unsteady on him and kept sliding around the room as though she was looking for something she couldn’t find. Ever since she’d started acting this way—ever since she’d gone nuts—Joe Lon had had the feeling that if he just jerked her up by the shirtfront and demanded that she act normal she