“How’d we do today?” he asked.
Lummy told him what they had sold, told him the store had done better than it had ever done at a Roundup. But Joe Lon didn’t listen and Lummy knew he wasn’t listening. But he went on explaining the little marks on his paper — how much beer, how much shine, how much bonded whiskey — just as he always did. He did what he was told to do, what it was his job to do, and he had absolutely no curiosity about why Mr. Joe Lon was mean tonight. He’d seen him mean often enough to know it when he saw it, but since he knew also that he had nothing to fear from Mr. Joe Lon, he didn’t think about it.
His job was to be the nigger. That’s the way he thought about it. I am the nigger. That is the white man. There is a tree. There is a road. This is Mystic.
That’s the way it had to be as long as he was around a white man. As soon as he was not around a white man, he quit being a nigger and thought about many, many things that he did not ordinarily think about. One of the things he thought about was killing Mr. Joe Lon. Of course, as long as he was near him, he couldn’t kill him, or even think about killing him. But when he was off by himself, or in the company of other black people, he not only thought about it, he often actually killed him.
Joe Lon turned his burned eyes on him. “Want a drink, Lummy?”
“Wouldn’t mind a taste,” Lummy said.
“Git youself a pint of that shine. No, shit, git a pint of that othern.”
“Shine be good enough for ole Lummy.”
“Git the othern, I said. You ain’t got to mark it on you ticket.”
“Go and git it,” Lummy said to himself. “You ain’t got to mark it on you ticket.”
When he came back in Joe Lon was dialing the telephone. When he was through dialing it, he held it for a long time.
“Mayhap he out with them dogs,” said Lummy licking the neck of the whiskey bottle.
Joe Lon said: “He ain’t out with no dogs.”
They both knew that the telephone was on a little wooden table beside the old man’s bed. It sat on a metal dishpan turned upside down. Big Joe believed that when he couldn’t hear it, he could feel it up on top of the metal pan vibrating. Said he could feel it right in the goddam air was what he said.
“It’s me, Joe Lon,” Joe Lon shouted into the telephone finally. “Joe Lon! How’s Beeder?” A little spit flecked Joe Lon’s lips and the lids of his ruined eyes seemed to work independently of one another. “I know I woke you up.”
The old man claimed that his hearing was worse at night than in the day, and that it was the worst of all when he was just awakened. It took, he said, several hours for his tubes to clear out and drain good.
“How’s Beeder?” he shouted again. And then, swinging to look at Lummy, “He says she’s fine, just like she always is.” He shouted back into the telephone: “Which is it? She fine? Or she like she always is?” He took a drink from his bottle, tilted on the stool, and winked at Lummy. He stiffened on the stool, a vein leapt in his thick neck. He screamed, “I don’t know. Haven’t seen a clock. Don’t own a clock. Don’t want a clock.”
Lummy sat drinking his free bourbon in the corner, wondering how much of this he’d have to listen to before he could go home and get his woman and go for some of Junior’s Real-Pit-Barbecue.
Joe Lon was screaming: “A family reunion! Right. All together again. I’ll git Elf and the babies and you git Mama …” His voice was growing thicker and even though his face remained stunned and without expression, as though he might have been sleepwalking, tears came from his eyes and ran down over his heavy square chin, blue now with a stubble of beard. “… you git Mama and Beeder and I’ll git Elf and the babies and you and me’ll git’m all in a room in the big house and we’ll just beat the shit out of them. Beat’m I said goddammit. Slap’m. Bust their faces.”
He was crying openly now, his shoulders shaking, and Lummy, who recognized this as something he was not meant to watch, got up quietly and headed for the door, thinking only how grateful he would be for a good plate of Real-Pit-Barbecue and then his woman’s warm thick back to sleep against. What was happening in there was none of his business.
Joe Lon was screaming: “We like that, don’t we? Me and you? Hem’m up in a room and beat’m good?”
But Lummy might as well have been hearing a woodpecker in a tree or rain on a tin roof. It was the natural sound of the world, too much like everything else, and he wouldn’t remember it.
***
The news that somebody had cut off Buddy Matlow’s dick threatened to ruin everything: the dog fight that night and the snake hunt the next morning. It spread among the hunters and tourists like fire. Nobody had talked of anything else much all morning. It even served to take their minds off the fact that there was not enough water and the Johnny-on-the-spots were full to overflowing and several trailers had been wrecked the night before, two actually turned over.
Joe Lon found out about it when they woke him up shortly before noon. Coach Tump stood down in the yard hustling his balls and spitting tobacco juice into the dirt. He looked up at Joe Lon in the doorway to the double-wide and told him that Buddy Matlow had been taken to the hospital in Tifton, at least that is what most people were saying they’d heard, but there were others who said it was Macon where he’d been taken, and at least two or three said they’d heard that it was as far away as Atlanta.
Coach Tump said it didn’t make much of a shit where they taken him if somebody’d gone and cut off his dick. “Wouldn’t surprise me if this don’t put a damper on the whole thing.”
The story Coach Tump had heard said they’d packed it in ice. They had packed Buddy Matlow’s dick in ice and salt and they meant to sew it back on and that was why they had gone all the way to Atlanta because they had better facilities for sewing dicks back on at the big hospital there.
“Damned if I’d want my dick sewed back on,” said Willard Miller.
“I believe I would if they could do it like it was on there before,” Coach Tump said.
Duffy Deeter said: “What goes around comes around.” They had all come inside to drink coffee while Joe Lon got dressed. Duffy regarded his knuckles, all of them skinned and scabbed. He sucked gently at his nose. It was filled with black blood. “Bad karma,” he said. “A guy that gets his dick cut off’s got bad karma.”
“He is also shit out of luck,” said Willard Miller.
Joe Lon came out of the back, dressed now, his eyes webbed in a net of veins, his face puffy, and they all got in Coach Tump’s Oldsmobile and drove out to Big Joe’s to prepare Tuffy for the fight that night.
“Looks a little like war out there, don’t it?” said Willard.
Joe Lon, who had been very quiet since they woke him up, only nodded. Out in the campground, a trailer was on its side. The road to Big Joe’s was littered with cups and hotdog wrappers and hamburger wrappers and even articles of clothing. They passed four wrecked cars before they got to the schoolhouse.
“What the hell happened to you last night, boy?” said Coach Tump.
“I never known much about nothing oncet I got off that stage,” Joe Lon said. “Them fuckers looked to eat me up.”
“I’ll drink to that,” said Willard, running his thumbnail around the neck of a bottle of bourbon.
Coach Tump frowned. “Boy, I want you to stay out of the bottle today.”
Willard said, “Coach, I just need a little something to smooth me out.”
Coach Tump eyed the bottle. He would have beat hell out of any other boy playing for him if the boy had even mentioned drinking whiskey, much less doing it. But this was the Boss Snake of the team. He ran over anybody, everybody. As long as he did that, he could do whatever else he wanted to. “I guess a little whiskey won’t hurt nothing.”