He drove over to the little road that went by the practice field and watched Willard Miller run the ball. They were running him against the grunions, the smaller, second-string boys who came out for football for God knows what reason since they almost never got into a game and could only offer up their bodies as tackling dummies for the bigger, stronger boys. He watched Willard Miller fire three straight lines up the middle. It was important to run him against grunions now and then. It gave him a chance to practice his moves without running the risk of getting injured. It also gave him great opportunities to run over people and step on them, mash their heads and their hands, kick their ribs good.
Joe Lon felt his own thigh muscles tick, as he watched Willard fake a grunion out of his shoes and then, after he had the boy entirely turned around and beaten, run directly over him for no reason at all. Well, what the hell, all things had to end, both good and bad. There were other things in this world besides getting to step on somebody. The main thing was to hold on and not let it bother you. Joe Lon turned on his lights and drove off into the early November dusk.
He had been drinking most of the day, but he didn’t feel drunk. He drove out past the empty flag pole on the post office and past the jail, where he saw Buddy Matlow’s supercharged Plymouth with the big sheriff’s star painted on the door parked under a leafless Chinaberry tree, and on through town, where several people waved to him. He didn’t wave back. Finally, two people shook their gourds at him though and he did raise his hand and smile but he only half saw them. He was preoccupied by the thought of going home to Elfie and the babies, that trailer where he lived in a constant state of suffocating anger.
He had the trailer just outside of town on the edge of a ten-acre field he’d bought and turned into a combination trailer park and campground. He drove slowly down the narrow dirt road leading to it and passed finally under a big banner that he himself had strung from two tall telephone poles he had bought secondhand from the REA. The banner was neatly printed in letters about two feet high: WELCOME TO MYSTIC GEORGIA’S ANNUAL RATTLESNAKE ROUNDUP.
The lights were on in his trailer, a double-wide with a concrete patio, and he could see the shadow of his wife Elfie moving behind the window in the kitchen. He parked the truck, took the burlap sack from the back, and walked out to a little fenced-in pen that had a locked gate on it. He took out a key and opened it. In the back of the pen were several metal barrels. The tops of the barrels were covered with fine-mesh chicken wire. He kicked two of the barrels and immediately the little enclosure was filled with the dry constant rattle of diamondbacks. He took a stick with a wire hook on the end of it from the corner of the pen, set the burlap sack down, and waited.
The mouth of the sack moved and the blunt head of a rattlesnake appeared. It seemed to grin and waved its forked tongue testing, tasting the air. There was an undulation and another foot of snake, perhaps four inches thick, appeared behind the head. Joe Lon moved quickly and surely and the snake was twisting slowly on the end of the hooked stick.
“Surprise, motherfucker,” said Joe Lon, and dropped it into one of the barrels.
For a long moment, he stared into the barrel after the snake but all that appeared there was a writhing of the darkness, an incessant boiling of something thick and slow-moving.
He put the chicken wire back in place, threw the hooked stick in the corner of the pen, and headed for the trailer.
Elfie was at the sink when he walked into the kitchen. From the back she still looked like the girl he’d married. Her hair was red and glowed like a light where it fell to the small of her back. Her hips were round and full without being heavy. Her calves were high, her ankles thin. But then she turned around and she was a disaster. Those beautiful ball-crushing breasts she’d had two years ago now hung like enormous flaps down the front of her body. And although she was not fat, she looked like she was carrying a basketball under her dress. Two inches below her navel her belly just leaped out in this absolutely unbelievable way. The kitchen smelled like she had been cooking baby shit.
“Smells like you been cooking baby shit in here, Elf,” he said.
There was a fat eighteen-month-old boy strapped into a highchair. Right beside him in a blue bassinet was a fat two-month-old boy.
Elfie turned from the sink and smiled. Her teeth had gone bad. The doctor said it had something to do with having two babies so close together.
“Joe Lon, honey, I been trying to keep your supper warm for you.”
“Goddammit, Elf,” he said. “You ever gone git them teeth fixed or not? I given you the money.”
She stopped smiling, pulling her lips down in a self-conscious way. “Joe Lon, honey, I just ain’t had the time, the babies and all.”
There was no dentist in Mystic. She would have to go over to Tifton, and the trip took the better part of a day.
“Leave them goddam younguns with somebody and git on over there and git you mouth looked after. I’m sick and tard of them teeth like that.”
“Aw right, Joe Lon, honey.” She started putting food on the table and he sat down across from the two babies. “Don’t you want to wash you hands or nothing?”
“I’m fine the way I am.”
She took some thin white biscuits out of the oven and put them in front of him. Along with everything else she was a terrible cook. He took one of the lardy biscuits off the plate, tore it open, and dipped some redeye gravy on it. She sat with her plate in front of her without eating, just staring at him, her lips held down tight in an unseemly way.
“Was it a bad day at the store, Joe Lon, honey?”
He had been all right when he came into the trailer, but he sat at the table now trembling with anger. He had no idea where the anger came from. He just felt like slapping somebody. He wasn’t looking at her but he knew she was still watching him, knew her plate was still empty, knew her mouth was trembling and trying to smile. It made him sick with shame and at the same time want to kill her.
“I left the nigger at the store,” he said. “I went snake hunting.”
The biscuit and gravy was sticking in his throat and a great gaseous bubble of whiskey rose to meet it. He wasn’t going to be able to finish it. He wasn’t going to be able to eat anything.
“What all did you git?” she said in a small voice. When he didn’t answer, she said: “Did you git anything?”
The baby strapped in the highchair had a tablespoon he was beating the tray in front of him with. Then he quit beating the tray and threw it into the bassinet and hit the other baby in the head, causing him to scream in great gasping sobs. It so startled the baby in the highchair that he started kicking and screaming and choking too. Joe Lon, who had felt himself on the edge of exploding anyway, shot straight out of his chair. He grabbed the greasy biscuit off his plate and leaned across the table. Elfie didn’t move. She left her hands in her lap. Her eyes didn’t even follow him up. She kept staring straight ahead while he stuffed the dripping biscuit down the front of her cotton dress, between her sore, hanging breasts. He put his face right in her face.
“I got sompin,” he shouted. “You want me to tell you what I got? I got goddammit filled up to here with you and these shitty younguns.”
She had never once looked at him and the only sign she made that she might have heard was the trembling in her mouth got faster. He kicked over a chair on the way out of the trailer, and before he even got through the door he heard her crying join the babies’. By the time he got to his truck the whole trailer was wailing. He leaned against the fender trembling, feeling he might puke. He almost never had an impulse to cry, but lately he often wanted to scream. Screaming was as near as he could get to crying usually, and now he had to gag to keep from howling like a moon-struck dog.