Read Online A Feast of Snakes by Harry Crews - Free Book Online

carried the snakes around with them, passing them from hand to hand, comparing them, describing their habits and disclosing their names.
    A surprising number of craftsmen were setting up their wares all over Mystic. Some of the wares were in elaborate booths, pulled in separate trailers, but a lot of things were being sold right off the tailgates of pickup trucks. There were sketches and paintings of snakes, and every imaginable article made from the skin of diamondbacks: cigarette cases, purses, wallets, belts, shoes, and hats. One group of longhairs was featuring—hanging all over their Volkswagen van—various articles of underclothing, plus several well-crafted items that could only be dildoes of different shapes and sizes; all were marked with the unmistakable pattern of the snake. Several of the dildoes had reshaped and formed rattlesnake heads, complete with fangs. The longhairs had been reported earlier to Sheriff Buddy Matlow by several Senior Citizens, and Buddy, who had been through many of these roundups before and consequently knew that everybody had to be given considerable slack, even longhairs—came by and told them to try not to shock the older folk, that this was all good clean fun, well organized and controlled by himself and his staff and, besides, that it was sponsored by the Greater Mystic Chamber of Commerce, made up mostly of farmers, and therefore had to look after its good name.
    Then Buddy bought himself two snake-headed rubbers with diamondback patterns and put them in the glove compartment of his Plymouth patrol car.
    But the most spectacular craftsman of all, the one who had the largest audience watching her work and who commanded the biggest prices for the work she did, was an ancient little lady who sat under a white bonnet in a cane-bottom rocking chair making mosaics out of the individual rattles from the tails of diamondbacks. There were several on display; one of them—the largest—about a yard square was of a buck deer stamping a diamondback to death. It had taken the rattles from one thousand, one hundred and sixty-two snakes to complete and the little lady under the white bonnet who never raised her eyes from the stretched canvas she was working on in front of her was asking three thousand dollars for it.
    Joe Lon Mackey could see the lady from where he sat at the little white Formica table in his double-wide drinking coffee. The crowd around her stood silently in a little semicircle as she worked fastening the rattles to the stretched canvas. She’d been to every roundup as far back as Joe Lon could remember. And she had always had the three-thousand-dollar mosaic with her.
    He suspected she was asking so much because she actually didn’t want to sell it. It was a fantastic thing to see, though, unbelievable really, with the buck deer, his nostrils flared, reared onto his back legs, the razorlike front hooves poised to strike the already cut and mutilated snake on the ground. And because it was so spectacular, Joe Lon supposed some sonofabitch would come by sooner or later dumb enough to pay what she was asking. The world was in short supply of a lot of things but one of them was not dumb sonofabitches with more money than was good for them.
    Joe Lon had gotten up early that morning and gone out, partly to see if Lummy and his brother George were properly placing the chemical toilets and partly—mostly—to get out of the bed and out of the house before he had to face Elfie.
    When he woke up about daylight, the whole sorry business of the night before had risen before his eyes, the memory of his sister flooding back upon him and his daddy limping out behind the house with the battered half-ruined bulldog, and then worse, much worse, how it had been afterward when he had got drunker and drunker, remembering that Berenice was coming home, remembering how it used to be with her, thinking about everything the world had promised him and then snatched away until he was stone drunk on