A Feast of Snakes Read Online Free PDF

field of Mystic High School, where it had always been since the hunt began. The Vette came onto the field in a growling power slide. The high rooster tail of sand thrown by the car was bright, glittering under a full moon. The shadows of the two enormous oak trees lay on the edge of the field like two dark lakes. It was in the shadow of one of the trees that they finally stopped, but not before Joe Lon had roared in three tight circles within yards of the trunk of the tree.
    He had been driving about two thirds unwrapped from the dope so he thumbed the top off a fresh bottle of Budweiser taken from a bucket of ice between Berenice’s feet. He was laughing but there was no humor in it. It didn’t even sound good-natured. “I like to run over that goddam tree.”
    “You should have,” she said. “Get us a ramp and jump the thing like Evel what’s-his-fucking-face.”
    He reached across and got another bottle of beer and opened it. “Here, press this to you face. It’ll help you feelings.”
    She took the beer. “Nothing’s gone help my feelings tonight,” she said.
    “I’ll think of something,” he said.
    “I hope so.”
    “Never doubt the Boss Snake,” he said. “I told you never to.”
    She said, “I forgot.”
    “Don’t forget,” he said.
    He opened the door and got out of the car. She got out too and came around to stand beside him. Without speaking, but as if on signal, they walked to the center of the field and stood together looking off toward the school. It was made of red brick with four white columns in front. Across the front, cut into a slab of cement, was the legend: LEBEAU COUNTY CONSOLIDATED HIGH SCHOOL OF MYSTIC , GEORGIA . It was as bright as day in the moonlight and they stood in the field of packed dirt equidistant between the wood-and-wire snake pit on their left and another structure built of fresh-cut raw lumber on their right. The structure on the right was a kind of stage with a painted sign stuck on each of its four sides. All the signs said the same thing: THE RATTLESNAKE QUEEN .
    “Take my dick out,” said Joe Lon. “I have to piss.” Without even looking, but with no fumbling, she reached over with her left hand and unzipped his Levis. She held him while he gave water, a great frothing stream into the moon-colored dirt at their feet.
    “Don’t seem like to me this goddam year will ever be over,” he said.
    She shook him good while he talked and put him back behind the zipper.
    He said: “Seem like I been in this town forever.”
    “It’ll be different,” she said, “at the university. Anyway, I hope it’ll be different for me. I could stand me something different for a while.”
    She was going to the University at Athens in the fall to be the meanest majorette the state of Georgia had ever seen. And they pretended he was going to the University of Alabama to break bones for Bear Bryant, although they both knew he wasn’t going anywhere but to the little store where his daddy kept the back room full of bootleg whiskey.
    “That’s nine months away,” he said. “Anything that long might as well be never.”
    “I’ll miss you,” she said.
    “Uh huh. I magine.”
    “Anybody that’s known a Boss Snake’ll never forget him.” As they talked they had wandered over to the snake pit.
    Sheets of plywood formed the sides of a square about twenty feet long and twenty feet wide. The plywood rose to four feet and then chicken wire had been stretched on top of that. Two feet of earth had been dug out of the bottom of the pit. This was where the snakes would be weighed, marked, and collected during the hunt.
    “I think I love you,” she said. “I think I’ll always love you.”
    He looked straight up toward the bright moon and started turning in slow circles. Finally he stopped and turned his unblinking, slightly drunken gaze on her. “You gone have to do sompin about this conversation. It’s just boring the shit out of me.”
    “We could go to the car and get