Coach Tump stretched his neck, trying to see Joe Lon or Willard. He asked Hard Candy if she had seen them.
“Not this morning. Coach,” she said, and gave him another cup of coffee. He laced this cup heavy with whiskey. It made him feel a little better. Fog lay curling among the far trees. The heavy pine smell of sap rising was everywhere on the air. It was damp and had grown colder during the night. A great day for hunting snakes. They’d all be in the ground. Coach Tump wished to God it was all over. The last thing in the world he wanted to do was sit here and register snake-hunting teams. But they’d gone too far with it to stop now. He’d talked with Willard and the doctor and Luther and even Big Joe — after Joe Lon had left in the truck with the bloody body of Tuffy thrown on the tailgate — Coach Tump had talked to them about the possibility of calling the hunt off. There seemed reason enough to do it: Buddy’s death, too many people, too little water, too few toilets. But they had decided together that calling off the hunt would probably drive the crowd over the final brink to madness. They’d torn down most of the bleachers around the pit while Big Joe was still kicking Tuffy, and they might have torn down the house too if Joe Lon hadn’t suddenly come out the back door with his daddy’s shotgun and let off four rounds in the air. The shotgun calmed them down enough to get them off the place. But they were still dangerous and there was nothing to do but go on with the hunt.
A man suddenly came running out of the woods, screaming, the fog swirling at his pumping knees. He was running and screaming and Coach Tump recognized him as the one who was tainted from keeping over five hundred snakes on his personal property.
“They killing him. Killing! Butchering … My friend. Oh, Jesus God, my only friend.”
Coach Tump got him calmed down, but never enough to find out exactly what was happening, only that somebody was getting killed. Since Buddy was dead and since Luther Peacock was nowhere about and since he. Coach Tump, was Honorary Chairman of the Roundup, he ran across the campground with Tommy Hugh and found five men, a woman, and two small children attacking a snake, a constrictor, eighteen feet long and more than two hundred pounds. The snake did not move; it didn’t even look alive.
Tommy Hugh was screaming that it was hurt already from the cold, that it had no place to hide last night and its body temperature was down in the forties, and that besides it was harmless. Harmless! But the men and women were screaming about skin and food and steaks and danger. Danger! And they were hitting the snake with hatchets. They all had hatchets. Even the children. The snake did writhe some before they got its back open, but not much and it didn’t last long.
Finally, all of them, even the children, were standing in the snake. There was an enormous amount of guts and blood and it didn’t smell good at all. The men and women got out of the snake and made the children get out of it and they stood for a moment regarding the two-hundred-pound mess of stinking guts and blood and mutilated skin and without saying anything walked out from under the trees where they found the snake. They stopped once to chop their hatchets into the dirt to clean off the blood and bits of whitish meat, but they never looked back.
Tommy Hugh actually knelt and lifted the anaconda’s head into his lap. The head had fared better than the rest of the snake. It only had two parallel hatchet marks in the skull between the eyes.
Tommy Hugh looked up at Coach Tump, tears streaming down his face, and said: “You would’ve stopped them if it’d been a dog they was chopping.”
Coach Tump stood for a moment and then said before he turned to go: “You tainted sumbitch.”
The coach walked back to the table, his stomach a little sick, and feeling very bad about the morning. Luther Peacock was there, with a cup of coffee, and Joe Lon was sitting in his pickup truck beside Willard. Duffy Deeter was leaning on the fender. Big Joe’s shotgun, the one Joe Lon had fired the evening before, was on a rack behind Willard’s head. The tailgate of the pickup was still down. Coach Tump came up to the table and took a mean swallow of his whiskeyed coffee and told them about the tainted sumbitch with the two-hundred-pound snake.
Joe Lon did not answer but sat regarding the far wall of dark pine where it started to rise to the scrub oak ridge above which the sun was a thin white disk in the cold fog rising out of the ground. That long oak ridge above the pines was where they would hunt the snakes. He’d taken Tuffy off last night behind the field to an old storm-blasted pine tree where the buzzards roosted and pulled him off the tailgate. Joe Lon watched him for a long moment lying there with the blood still damp ‘on his scarred body; then he’d driven home and had the first real night’s sleep in months. He had put himself carefully on the bed beside Elfie and carefully closed his eyes and listened to his heart beating. Elfie had taken his hand and he let her hold it. She lay very still on the bed. Finally she said: “Goodnight, Joe Lon, honey.”
“Goodnight,” he said.
“Things’ll be different tomorrow,” she said.
“All right,” he said.
Then he had gone carefully to sleep, a deep dreamless sleep, because he knew and accepted for the first time that things would not be different tomorrow. Or ever. Things got different for some people. But for some they did not. There were a lot of things you could do though. One of them was to go nuts trying to pretend things would someday be different. That was one of the things he did not intend to do.
“We gone have to git’m started,” said Coach Tump. “They nervous and ready to go.”
“We might as well,” said Luther Peacock.
There were three people on a team. Sometimes a man, his wife, and their child. Sometimes two men and a woman. Sometimes three men. One carried the stick, one the hose, and one the little bottle of gasoline. Coach Tump Walker’s pad showed that there were seventy-five officially registered teams, but a lot of people hadn’t bothered with signing up, because it was obvious that better than six hundred people — laughing, shouting, drinking, cursing — were strung out waiting for the race up the hill.
Luther Peacock got in the cab of the pickup beside Joe Lon. “Let’s go, boy,” he said.
They started them this way every year. Coach Tump and some of his boys — in this case, Willard Miller and Duffy Deeter — would stay down with the hunters, making sure they kept lined up and there were no false starts, while Joe Lon and Buddy Matlow (today Luther Peacock) would drive the pickup through the border of rising pines on a little dim road that finally rose to the sandy ridge of scrub oaks and palmetto. Joe Lon drove carefully, his eyes straight ahead, grunting now and again when Luther Peacock spoke to him. It was only about four hundred yards up through the pines to the long, slightly curving oak ridge where hundreds and hundreds of gophers had burrowed long slanting holes into the sand. That was where the rattlesnakes lived, in the gopher holes, never molesting their hard-shelled, lethargic hosts, but seeking shelter there in the warm holes when cold weather came. The snakes’ cold blood could not bear winter. If the temperature dropped below thirty-two degrees, they simply froze solid on the spot unless they could get themselves underground.
Joe Lon and Luther got out of the pickup and walked over the crest of the ridge. A chicken wire and plywood snake pen identical to the one in the school yard had been set up to receive the snakes. A pair of scales hung by the pen. Little blue tags that would register the weight and length of each snake sat waiting on the scales. The starting seniors on the Mystic Rattlers football team would weigh and measure the snakes. The cheerleaders, led by Novella Watkins, would record weight and length on the blue tags for the hunters.