A Feast of Snakes by Harry Crews Page B

to the bathroom down the hall and the cook was supposed to empty it when she came in the morning and again before she left at night. Sometimes she did. But sometimes she didn’t. Joe Lon wondered if it was full now, and although it was something he had never done before, he bent and reached under the bed from where he sat and pulled it out. He knew the pot was not empty before he ever looked at it. It was full of water and on the surface floated three dark turds.
    He felt like howling. When he looked up she was watching him. Her mouth held a shy smile. “Beeder,” he said in a pleading voice, “Beeder, you got to do something about …”
    But he stopped because she was sitting up in her bed, pushing the covers back. She was wearing a dingy gown made of cotton. Her bones were insistent under the thin fabric and seemed as brittle as a bird’s. She moved out from under the covers and across the bed until she was sitting beside him.
    “I would kill it if I could,” she said, and reached down and lifted a piece of shit and put it in her hair.
    He had watched, unable to move, to believe either that she actually meant to do what he knew she meant to do. Putting shit in her hair was something he had never seen her do before. He had seen her do some pretty bad things but not that.
    He got up and backed toward the door, refusing to let himself turn his face from her, saying as he went: “Lord help us all. Sister Beeder, Lord help us all.” He had not called her Sister Beeder since they were children. She was already back in bed watching the snow, listening to the static before he got through the door.
    In the truck, under the pecan trees bare and black in the bright heavy moon, he sat without turning on the motor or lights and let half a bottle of whiskey down his throat. He gagged against the whiskey but he held the bottle to his mouth anyway, feeling his stomach tighten against the warm bourbon. He could not shake the image of his sister easing her befouled head back into the pillow. But gradually it did recede. As he sat there in the dark hurting himself more and more—as much as he could stand—with the whiskey the memory of the whole evening grew unsure and lost all significance whatsoever.
    Later—he wouldn’t remember how much later—he saw his daddy come through the door out onto the porch and come down the steps into the yard. He led Tuffy on a leash, the jagged lightning-bolt scars blacker in the bright moonlight. Big Joe walked slowly, waiting for the dog, whose brutal squared head hung nearly to the ground. Joe Lon watched them limp, the old man and the bloodied dog, across the wide bare yard toward the kennel, where the other pit bulls were growling and barking and snapping at the wire of their individual cages.
    The dim light from the television set still showed in his sister’s room when he made the turn in his pickup truck to drive toward home.
     
    ***
     
    It wasn’t even ten o’clock in the morning and the actual hunt was still nearly forty-eight hours away, but there were already at least a thousand people camped in and around Mystic. They had come in an unrelenting, noisy stream starting long before daylight. Some of them ended up in tents, some bedded down in the backs of pickups, some sat in the open doors of vans, and a great many were in campers of one kind or another. Joe Lon’s field was over half full, and spaced neatly along the orderly rows of snake hunters were the white chemical outhouses called Johnny-on-the-spots.
    Probably less than half of the people who had arrived were hunters. The rest were tourists of one kind or another, retirees stunned with boredom, people genuinely curious about snakes but who had never seen a live one outside a cage, young dopers who wondered about saying gentle, inscrutable things to one another about God, Karma, and Hermann Hesse.
    Almost everyone had brought pet snakes to the hunt. Mostly they were constrictors and black snakes and water snakes. They