A rush of energy shocked through Joe Lon. He stiffened on the seat. All morning he had felt as though he was going to do it today. But he had not known what it was. Now, watching Victor stagger across the crest of the ridge, Joe Lon knew what it was he had planned to do all along, the thing that had lain rank and fascinating in his brain since last night at the pit. He’d waited for the moment to come, the right one, knowing he’d recognize it when it did. The hunters were scattering in front of Victor, his heavy lilting voice singing on about good and evil in a kind of mad howl. When the old man finally stepped between Joe Lon and the fog-shrouded, twin-gabled house on the far horizon, Joe Lon reached to the rack where the shotgun hung behind him and in a single movement came out of the cab and blew a hole the size of a doorknob out of Victor’s pale naked chest.
The hunters who had been scattering stopped. Nothing moved anywhere. Joe Lon jacked another round of double-ought buckshot into the twelve-gauge pump, let the gun drop slightly to the right, and blew the look of horror right off Luther Peacock’s head. A woman’s voice said a word, begging. A child cried. And Joe Lon strolled casually toward the hunters, pumping the shotgun. When he threw it to his shoulder, the bead swung right past Shep and held on Berenice. He shot away her neck. Joe Lon jacked in another shell. He felt better than he had ever felt in his life. Christ, it was good to be in control again. He shot the nearest hunter.
When he pumped the gun again, it was empty. Since the first shot, no more than seven or eight seconds had passed, during which time everybody on the hill stood in arrested motion. As he pulled down on the empty chamber for the second time, dozens of hunters scrambled for cover. But most of them did not. The man nearest him, his face twisted with fear and rage, screamed: “Git that crazy bastard!” And a whole wall of men and women, their mouths open, teeth bared, moved with a single raging voice upon Joe Lon. He never dropped the gun. He simply held it and waited as their hands came upon him and he was raised high in the air. The gun went into the snake pit with him. He fell into the boiling snakes, went under and came up, like a swimmer breaking water. For the briefest instant, he gained his feet. Snakes hung from his face.
As he was going down again, he saw, or thought he saw, his sister Beeder in her dirty white nightgown squatting off on the side of the hill with Lottie Mae, watching.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Harry Crews was born and reared in Bacon County, Georgia. He teaches at the University of Florida in Gainesville, and is a contributing editor of Southern magazine. He is also a contributor to Playboy, Esquire, and many other magazines and newspapers. A Feast of Snakes, first published in 1976, was his eighth book.