A Feast of Snakes Read Online Free PDF Page A

blew Joe Lon a kiss as he and Hard Candy slid off their stools.
    Joe Lon and Buddy Matlow watched Hard Candy leave. She might as well have been in front of the band with her baton. She was all high knees and elbows, her hard little body jerking rhythmically. When they were gone, Joe Lon brought the beer and the glass to Buddy.
    “You don’t reckon you could put this goddam snake up do you?” Buddy said. “I just soon do my drinking without it.”
    They both looked down at the cage at the place where the rat had stopped in a thick knot about four inches deep in the snake. Joe Lon stood listening to the Corvette go over the gravel and onto the highway in a great roar and squalling of tires, laying two hundred yards of rubber before it took second gear. Only then did Joe Lon take up the cage and put it in the back room. He brought another beer back for himself and sat on a stool across the counter from Buddy Matlow.
    “That boy’s sompin, ain’t he?” Buddy said.
    “Uh huh.”
    They drank in silence for a while, listening to the night tick against the screens.
    “I wish you’d drink and git the hell out of here. Ain’t no niggers gone come up here with you car parked out there.”
    But what he said was reflex. It was what he always said. He wasn’t studying the car with the sheriff’s star on the door or Buddy Matlow. He was thinking about that Corvette, the squalling rubber, squatting with power when you floored it. It had belonged to Berenice before she went off to college. He used to drive it, used to make it sing on all the highways of Lebeau County. He knew where Willard was headed right this moment. He used to go there himself. It was all part of the package, part of being the Boss Snake of all the Mystic Rattlers. Willard was headed for Doctor Sweet’s drug cabinet to which Hard Candy would have a key, just as Berenice had had one. They would get in there and Willard would eat whatever he felt like—a little something to take him up, or maybe bring him down a bit—and she would fill her little pockets full and off they would go over the dark countryside trying to decide what to do with the night.
    That was the only decision there was once upon a time: what to do with the night. But then Berenice had graduated and the doctor had bought her an Austin-Healy and given Hard Candy the Vette and Berenice had gone off to the University of Georgia and Joe Lon had taken over from his daddy dealing whiskey. He tried to turn loose the memory but couldn’t. He looked at Buddy, his cowboy hat pushed back on his head, quietly sipping out of the water glass, his eyes half closed and seeing nothing while Joe Lon saw for no particular reason—except perhaps because of the letter he had left in shreds under the stands—a night before a snake hunt in his senior year when he already knew he was never going to college and that Berenice was, saw himself sad, his heart hurt, leaning against the door of the white Corvette and Berenice inside smiling up at him. They were both wired tight on Dexedrine and the look in her face was a little off-center, a little crazy, as it often was. Many times it was like that when she was straight and had eaten nothing.
    “Let’s go look at the snake pit,” she had said.
    “I don’t care,” he said. He kept thinking he’d never tote the pigskin again, that he was destined to deal nigger whiskey. He dropped into the car and took it up in a single mounting roar to a hundred and twenty, had in fact wrung the needle off the speedometer. But it brought no pleasure. He saw his life too clearly, knew too well where it was going, and all the time Berenice sat on the other side, her crazy face oblivious to the speed, flashing her thighs and humming Dixie a little high and off-key. He had always loved her because she was crazy, didn’t seem to give a damn about anything. Tonight he hated her for precisely those reasons.
    The pit where all the snakes of the hunt would be kept was on the football