“Not the Sheriff,” said Luther. “Deputy.”
“They going nuts over by my camper. They …”
“Going nuts everwhere,” said Luther, turning his hands up to examine his palms. Then he looked out over the crowd surging toward the stage where the band was beginning to falter. “I ain’t responsible.”
“They break open my camper, it’s enough snakes in there to kill half of Georgia.”
“I seen’m,” said Coach Tump. “Sumbitch’s got five hundred penned …”
“Cobras,” the man said, “Russell’s Viper, Mambas, Spotted rattlers, Mohave rattles, red diamonds, westerns …”
“Name Tommy Hugh,” said Coach Tump. “He brought five hundred snakes to the Roundup.”
“Tommy Hugh,” said Tommy Hugh, shouting to make himself heard above the crowd. “I got pygmys and corals, an anaconda even. You got to do something.”
“I believe, Gender,” said Duffy Deeter, “Mystic, Georgia, has done tore its ass this time.”
Willard Miller, his voice flat, laconic said: “It’s blood in the air. I can smell it. I can smell the goddam blood in the air.”
The band had quit now and the principal of the school was up on the stage trying to start the beauty contest. He was shouting into the microphone but every time he shouted the crowd roared back at him. He finally stopped, staring red-faced down into the surging men and women as he might have stared down at a crowd of unruly children in his auditorium. Except that his face was very red and he’d gone past just being scared. What showed in his eyes and on his trembling mouth looked like terror.
“What the hell we gone do?” said Joe Lon.
“We best go up there and git this straightened out,” said Coach Tump, pulling his pants high onto his belly and then turning them loose and letting them slip again to the place where they rode low on his hips. Without waiting for an answer he charged toward the stage, his tackle-busting belly leading the way, knocking men, women, and children off their feet. When they got to the stage, he and Willard Miller and Duffy Deeter turned to face the crowd, while Joe Lon vaulted lightly up beside the principal and took the microphone. The principal smiled but he looked on the verge of tears. He shouted, “Joe Lon, you … you …”
Joe Lon put his mouth to the principal’s ear: “Git over there and line up the girls. The girls …” He shoved the principal toward the end of the stage, toward a low wall of plywood that formed an L-shaped room with no top where the girls stood pressed tightly together.
Joe Lon leaned in close to the microphone and said: “If you’d just quiet youself down,” but he said it in a normal voice and even with the amplifier he couldn’t hear his own voice. The most noise was coming from the place where the snake rose thirty feet in the air. The line of dancers circling the snake had torches now. It looked as though they had all found torches and they weren’t so much singing, as they’d been doing before, but screaming. He stood watching, almost bemused by the whiskey running in his blood and the noise and the open fires. Then directly in front of him there was a high piercing cry like metal tearing, and when he looked down Joe Lon saw Duffy Deeter come straight up out of the crowd, lay out on the air as if he expected to do a halfgainer, but just as he was parallel to the ground the point of his heel caught a huge bearded man on the side of the head and his entire face splattered, some of the blood spotting the rough wooden boards of the stage. Willard Miller showing all his teeth in a great joyous scowl was on top of the man who had been kicked almost before he slipped to the ground.
Joe Lon waved to let the first girl come, and she did, wearing a bikini of some silver diaphanous material that had enough cloth in it to maybe make a glove. Her name was Novella and she was Hard Candy’s chief rival for head cheerleader, although Novella was still in the tenth grade, but everybody knew — including Joe Lon, who was watching not her but the crowd’s reaction to her — that it was only a matter of time before she took over from Hard Candy. She was favored tonight to take Miss Rattlesnake Queen and Joe Lon could tell by the way she pumped across the stage in her high-heeled shoes, all flashing legs and rounded arms over rounded breasts over rounded hips, her little matted, mounded beaver pulsing there where she kept her thighs peeled apart even as she pranced — Joe Lon could tell that she wasn’t about to let a little thing like blood and fights keep her from what she’d been after since she was old enough to hold a baton.
There was still noise but it was all coming from seventy yards away where the torch-lit dancers tirelessly circled the snake. The audience spilled away from the front of the stage; everybody who could see her, had gone silent. Cigarette smoke and wood smoke hung in layers over their heads as they watched Novella move around the stage, giving them first a front view, then a side, then a back.
The principal had come back to the microphone and, reading from a little card, introduced Novella Watkins, gave her measurements, “… a fine young lady who will someday make somebody a fine wife at thirty-six, twenty, thirty-four …,” and her credits, “… Miss Junior Future Farmers of America, Miss Peach, Miss …” While he talked, Joe Lon eased to the end of the stage and dropped off into the dirt. He looked for Hard Candy and Susan Gender, but they were gone, along with most of the other women in the audience.
The snake was not supposed to be burned until after Miss Rattlesnake had been chosen. She was supposed to set the fire. But just as Joe Lon landed in the dirt at the end of the stage somebody touched the snake with a torch and the thing exploded into fire, lighting the entire football field like a bomb bursting. As if on signal, the solid wall of men collapsed in front of the stage, kicking and cursing and gouging. The contestants on the stage, startled by the explosion of fire, lock-stepped round and round in a sort of daze, all of them brilliantly lit by the burning snake.
Joe Lon could see plain enough that his old coach and Willard and Duffy were in danger of being hurt bad. He deliberately turned and pushed his way out to the road. He picked his way through the parked cars and campers and finally turned into a dim woods road that would come out a quarter mile from his store. It felt good to be away from all those people, strangers and friends both. It felt good for the noise to diminish a little with each step that took him deeper in the woods.
When Joe Lon got to the store, Lummy was sitting on the stool behind the counter. He got off the stool when Joe Lon came in.
“How come it is folks hollering lak that?” said Lummy. A long sustained cheer floated back out of the pine trees. It might have been a football game they were hearing, except there were no rattles.
“How come it is?”
Joe Lon did not answer but only shrugged. Then: “George come in with that extra load of beer and whiskey?”
“He come in with that extree jus fine, Mr. Joe Lon.”
Joe Lon hooked his heels on a rung of the stool, shivered, and hugged himself with his arms across his chest. “You feed the snakes?”
“Everone but the bettin snake.”
“Feed him too,” said Joe Lon. “And bring me out a bottle of that bonded.”
Lummy went through the door into the little room at the back of the counter. He never picked up the rats with his hand. He wouldn’t touch them. He wouldn’t touch anything that was going to touch a snake, much less be inside a snake. He had a pair of long-handled needle-nosed pliers he used to lift the rats into the cages with the snakes. He used his pliers and did not wait to see the strike (he never did), but got the bottle of whiskey and took it to Joe Lon, where he sat waiting on a stool.