“Wait!” cried Shep. “Wait a minute!” He knew the man was about to show him what was under the coat and he knew he did not want to see it.
They saw the blood before the coat was all the way open. Buddy was slick with blood. The doctor did not move. From Buddy’s shoulders to his knees he was smooth and slick with creamy gouts of blood. And it was obvious that it was coming from between his legs. Doctor Sweet was numb. His mind had simply quit. The worst he had ever seen was a man whose tongue had been deliberately split in two by a knife, and another man who had been scalped. But they had both been dead when he saw them. And they had both been black. But this. He knew from the blood, from the nature of the bleeding, what had happened and so he could not make himself move from where he stood as Buddy slowly reached out and put the toy snake in Shep’s outstretched hand. Shep accepted the snake because he was unable to do anything else. It was bloody on the end and tiny and as he watched unbelieving the whole inside of the snake slipped out into his palm and it was a dick.
In a little voice that was cracked and whining, Shep said: “Somebody’s cut his dick off.” He turned to the doctor for his statement to be denied but the doctor was already sliding to the floor in a faint.
***
They could not get her father on the phone, and of course it was not her father they wanted, but Shep. Berenice, red-faced, her cheeks brittle with exhaustion, had insisted that she would not go if Shep could not be raised on the phone and brought to her side to go with her. They were all standing in Joe Lon’s living room waiting to go see the thirty-foot snake burned and find out who was going to be crowned Miss Rattlesnake of the 1975 Roundup.
Duffy Deeter said: “Gender here’s got more goddam trophies’n I have.” He waved vaguely at her. “Beauty,” he said. Since he had gotten good and drunk, Duffy had called Susan by her last name.
“I was in one or two contests back in Alabama,” said Susan.
“Shit, we had Miss Rattlesnake in the family two years back to back,” said Hard Candy.
“I won my senior year,” said Berenice. Now that the talk had turned to contests, she didn’t seem quite as tired as before.
“I took it my sophomore,” Hard Candy said.
“I… I…” They all turned to see Elfie in the door coming from the hallway. “I best git them babies ready for the sitter.” She had forgotten not to smile — and it wasn’t a smile anyway, a deep painful-looking grin rather — but she remembered as soon as they turned to her that she was showing her bad teeth and so she clamped shut her lips as deliberately as she might close a door. Joe Lon saw it all, saw how hurt and intimidated she was, and could have killed her, or killed them for making him want to kill her.
“I think we ought to stand here and see if we cain’t talk it to death,” said Willard Miller.
“Gender can talk anything to death,” Duffy Deeter said, directing his thousand-yard stare at the near wall.
A girl of about eleven with hair the color of corn and a running nose had come to stay with the babies. She sat quietly in the corner, sucking at her nose.
“For Christ’s sake let’s get out of here,” said Joe Lon, “before they burn the snake without us.”
“I’ll goddam drink to that,” said Susan Gender. They’d called the twirl-off a draw and she wasn’t happy with it. Both she and Hard Candy had promptly forgotten they had gone out there to start with to get Elfie out of the house. As soon as they got to twirling they forgot all about Joe Lon ventilating Hard Candy’s sister and would have gotten into a fight with the batons if Duffy and Willard had not separated them, which Duffy had to convince Willard to help him do because Willard wanted to see them fight.
They all followed Joe Lon out into the yard, where it was already dark enough so they could see the light of an enormous fire on the school ground..
“Shit,” said Willard, “they already burning the snake.”
“That’s a bonfire,” said Hard Candy. “That’s not the snake.”
Saying she had to find Shep before she did anything else, Berenice got in her car and roared out of the yard, the rear end fishtailing and sending clay and gravel back in a steady arching line.
“What the hell ails her?” said Willard.
“She do seem a little edgy, don’t she,” said Hard Candy.
“She oughta calm down now some,” said Joe Lon.
“I magine,” said Susan Gender.
Elfie took Joe Lon’s arm. “Let’s go, honey.”
She and Joe Lon got in the pickup. Willard left Hard Candy’s car in the yard and drove over with Duffy and Susan Gender in the Winnebago. The Winnebago followed the pickup and they went slow because cars and campers and trucks were parked everywhere, on the sides of the road, in the ditches, and people — many of them children lost off from their parents — wandered in and among the parked vehicles.
“I wisht you wouldn’t treat me like a fool, Joe Lon, honey,” said Elfie.
“What?” said Joe Lon, narrowly missing a man carrying a snake.
“I ain’t a fool,” she said. “It’s some might think I am, but I ain’t a fool. You oughten to treat me like I was. Particular in front of strangers.”
“I never said you was a fool.”
“You sometimes got to act like I am.”
“I do the best I can. I cain’t do but one thing at the time.”
“I know that.”
“You don’t know nothing.”
“I might know more’n you think I know.”
“This don’t get us nowheres,” said Joe Lon. “I don’t want nothing nasty with you.”
“What?”
“I don’t want to be nasty,” he said.
“All right, Joe Lon, honey.”
They had to walk the last quarter mile because the road was choked full of parked cars and campers and pickups parked in every possible attitude, on the shoulder of the road and even in the ditches. They moved slowly, sometimes having to climb on bumpers and over hoods, Duffy Deeter cursing more or less steadily and threatening to make Susan carry him.
“Goddammit, Gender, you liable to have to care me the rest of the way.”
“I’d known it was gone be like this,” said Elfie, “I’d stayed with the youngans, what I’d done.”
They finally stopped in the dark shadow of the oak trees. There was a band up on the stage where the Queen would be crowned. A wide piece of cloth tilted through the space over their heads saying they were called SLICK, SLIMEY AND THE SNAKES. Slick and Slimey were the stage names of twin boys who lived four miles out of town on a peanut farm. They both played guitar and all of the members of the Snakes were also members of the Mystic Rattlers Marching High School Band. They wore skin-tight jumpsuits with little sequins sewn into them.
Men and women were packed in under the oak trees and around the stage. As far as Joe Lon could see, heads — close together and seemingly solid as the ground — bobbed and pulsed in an undulating wave to the rhythm of the music. On the little rise of ground where the papier mache snake was built, a circling line of dancers had formed.
“It ain’t no room to do nothing,” said Elfie. “What we gone do with all these people?”
Duffy Deeter had already said something in the way of answering that, but only a word or two when a deep guttural sound came out of the shadows behind them and an enormous form moved solidly out of the darkness and stopped in a three-point stance shouting: “dowwwn!” Both Willard and Joe Lon spun and dropped in a crouch. “Seeetttt!” They took a three-point stance, head up, back flat, the rear foot digging in. “On twwwoooo!” Then: “Hut one! Hut two!” And they both fired out and were caught, one on each shoulder, and straightened up. The man who caught them was growling and slobbering and they were growling and slobbering and Duffy and the rest of them jumped out of the way because they thought Joe Lon and Willard were about to be driven back but they dug in after they had been straightened up and fought off the man by giving him several shots to the short ribs with their elbows and a few butts with their heads so that finally they had him all the way back and falling, with them on top. They rolled about in the dirt under the oak tree, growling no longer but all three of them laughing.