“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 would. He had in fact done it, more than once, usually when he was drunk or drinking, saying: “Goddammit, Beeder, you better act normal. Come on, quit playing around and be right.” But it had not helped. He had never been able to shake the feeling though that if he caught her off guard and said just the right thing in just the right way, he would save her. He had the impulse to do it now. But instead he raised his eyes to the shelves behind her bed where all his trophies were. This had been his room once but she had taken it over when she went nuts. She had a room just like it across the hall and he had never known nor could she say why she had moved in here. He was already married to Elfie by then so it didn’t really matter. Except it did. He seldom let himself think about it but he didn’t like her in his goddam room, nuts or not, even though he no longer used or wanted the room. Even so, in every way that made any sense the room did not even belong to him anyway.
Maybe it was because of the trophies, the signed game balls that had been bronzed and mounted, the High School Back of the Year award for all of the state of Georgia, the certificate for playing in the High School All-American Game in Dallas, Texas, and two whole shelves of trophies and certificates from track. As a stranger might have, he watched them now above his sister’s nearly covered face with only the dark hair and frightened eyes showing. They seemed, those bronzed images of muscled young men caught in straining, static motion, they seemed in no way to have anything to do with him, nor ever to have had anything to do with him.
They seemed in fact to have been an accident. Like his sister’s madness. It had just happened. Nobody knew why or apparently would ever know. He was stronger and faster and meaner than other boys his age and for that he had been rewarded. He had even suspected that he was smarter, too. For whatever reason, though, the idea of studying, of sitting down and deliberately committing facts and relationships to memory was deeply repugnant to him. And always had been. Unless it had to do with violence. He liked violence. He liked blood and bruises, even when they were his own.
He always had his assignments when he went on the field. With no effort at all, he would memorize and run a dozen complicated pass patterns. And he not only knew his own assignment but he knew those of his teammates too. He learned not just the fundamentals of football but also the most delicate nuances, so that he was a vicious blocker, and ran probably the most awesome interference that his coach, Tump Walker, had ever seen. It had all been terribly satisfying while it had been going on, but now it lived in his memory like a dream. It had no significance and sometimes inexplicably he wished it had never happened.
He sighed and dropped his eyes to Beeder’s face. She was quietly and contentedly watching a picture of the American flag while a chorus of voices sang the National Anthem. Then, as he looked at her, the flag went off and a man said that concluded broadcast activities for the day and a screen of snow and static came on and Beeder watched the snow and listened to the static as though it had been just the most interesting show in the world. He didn’t know for sure, but he thought she sometimes watched the snow and static all night, right into the next morning when the Farm Report came on at six o’clock and then watched that. If he could believe his father she sometimes went on binges of television that lasted for days without stopping. “Just like a goddam drunk going on a spree,” Big Joe would say.
“Beeder, when’s the last time you been out of this room?”
She didn’t answer, but she did momentarily look away from the television.
“When’s the last time you bathed youself?” Now she did not look at him. “It stinks in here. You know it stinks in here?”
She had a chamber pot under her bed that she sat on instead of going 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.