“I think I love you,” she said. “I think I’ll always love you.”
He looked straight up toward the bright moon and started turning in slow circles. Finally he stopped and turned his unblinking, slightly drunken gaze on her. “You gone have to do sompin about this conversation. It’s just boring the shit out of me.”
“We could go to the car and get another beer,” she said in a small sullen voice.
“We already done that,” he said. “I don’t feel like doing what we already done before.”
He reached out and picked her up and put her under his massive arm. Her full cheerleader’s legs dangled behind and she arched her back to look up at him. Her face was slack and without expression. He knew she was only mildly interested in what he might do. He was given to picking her up at odd moments and doing something with her.
He walked around on the other side of the plywood and wire pen. There was a little gate there with two metal hinges and a hook latch. He opened the gate. He held her under his left arm and with his right pointed down into the dirt pit.
“Look at them snakes,” he said.
They stared down into hard-packed moon-colored dirt.
“It’s enough poison in there to kill everthing in Mystic,” she said.
“To kill everthing in the world,” he said.
“Good,” she said. “Rattlesnake fangs hanging from all the throats of the world.”
“From titties,” he said. “Them fanged mouths sucking them titties.”
“Chewing dicks,” she said.
“Being dicks,” he said and stepped down into the pit. “Snakes and dicks. Sweet slick dicks and snakes.”
“Put me down in the snakes,” she said.
He laid her down on the dirt floor of the pit on her back. She writhed gently looking up at him. His moon-struck hair splayed from his head.
“Oh God, your snakes are cold.” She touched her belly. “They’re here. They’re filling me here.” She touched her breasts. “And here.” Her eyes were closed now. Her mouth a little way open. “A cold bath of snakes,” she said. “I’m freezing full of snakes. All in my blood. Crawling through my heart.” She opened her eyes and he still stood above her, beautiful and powerful with the moonlight splintering against his back, casting his face in solid shadow. “Lie down here, Joe Lon. Lie down in these snakes.”
He drew back. “No.” She was a crazy bitch, had always been, and she sometimes scared him. She was always doing crazy shit and saying crazy shit, and sometimes it scared him. Sometimes out in the black dark when she started in on it, he felt something go soft and queasy in his stomach.
“You scared,” she said. “You scared of these snakes?”
Joe Lon said: “I ain’t scared of a goddam thing. Don’t matter if it walks or crawls or flies in the air.”
“Then lie down. I’m cold. I’ll die in these freezing snakes.” He should have kicked her or stepped on her but he didn’t. He slowly sank to his knees and then lowered himself over her. They lay very still for a while. Then he moved and lay beside her on his back.
“Feel’m?” she said. “Feel them snakes?”
He made a sound, a kind of neutral grunt.
“We’re buried to our goddam eyes in the thick good bodies of snakes,” she said. “And you’ll die too. You might as well go on, Joe Lon, go on and be afraid.”
She was touching him now, with both hands, tentatively, squeezing and pressing, her fingers extended with the tips together, moving over his body like the twin heads of blind snakes, or so it seemed to him, lying there in a cold sweat.
Her hands stopped and she crawled up over him, deliberately making her body twist and writhe in the supple windings of a snake. She started again touching him. She was moving all over now, her legs, her body, her hands. Then everything quieted, everything seeming to stop at once.
“I found him,” she whispered. “The Boss Snake of all the snakes.”
Joe Lon lay on his back, his eyes tightly closed, the skin on his wide face drawn and white. “You goddam right,” he whispered.
“Look,” she said. “Oh look at him. That sumbitch strike you, you know you struck.”
He opened his eyes and raised his head and looked down himself to the place where she had unzipped his Levis and his cock stood curved in front of her face. She hissed and he felt her hot breath. Her tongue, black in the shadow of her hair, darted in and out of her mouth.
He put his head back and said: “Okay.”
He closed his eyes and thought about the hand job she had given him under the east stands of the practice field when she was in the tenth grade and then the first time he had asked her for a date and they were in his Ford pickup, parked and kissing to the point of exploding there behind the A&W Rootbeer stand in Tifton where they had driven on a Friday night to first see a movie because there was no movie in Mystic and then go for a hamburger they never got because he reached over and dragged her in with him behind the steering wheel and they had started kissing and trembling and going at each other with both hands and it had been the same ever since. All the way through high school they had been at each other as though they were fighting a war.
Lying there in the snakepit, they both heard the sound of a car motor a long time before they knew it was actually coming onto the football field with them, and they were being hit by the gravel and sand raining through the chicken wire before they knew the car was spinning around and around the place where they lay.
Joe Lon straightened up and Berenice came up behind him and they saw Buddy Mallow’s patrol car at the same time. Buddy hung out the window grinning, and whooping at the top of his lungs.
“Goddammit,” he screamed at them as he one-handed the Plymouth around and around the pit where they sat hunkered, turning to follow him, “goddammit, ain’t life grand!”
In the car beside him, a woman, small and dark, sat very still and did not turn her head.
“Crazy bastard’s got another one,” Joe Lon said. But Berenice had already lowered herself upon him again and did not answer.
“How’s at?”
“What?” said Joe Lon. When he looked up from his beer, Buddy Matlow was watching him from across the counter.
“You better go on home, son,” said Buddy Matlow, “you started talking to you beer.”
“Just thinking out loud,” Joe Lon said.
“Who was the crazy fucker answering you?” said Buddy.
Joe Lon shrugged and looked at the ceiling. The night was beginning to get cool. Joe Lon got up and went over to the window and closed it. “You want another beer?”
“I could drink another one, if it was give to me.”
Joe Lon brought it out of the back room. Buddy still had half a glass of moonshine. He took a sip and chased it.
Joe Lon said: “You wouldn’t want to let Lottie Mae go home, would you?”
“What?”
“Buddy, I’m too tired and hurt to talk about it.”
“Don’t talk about it then,” Buddy said. “I don’t know as it’s any of you business.”
“It bothers the niggers. If it bothers them, it bothers me.”
“How’s at?”
“They unload the shitters. They hep me. I told George I’d speak to you.”
“You real worried about George, are you?”
“He ain’t the only one in the family. I don’t even know how many connections they got and they all hep me out one way or the other. I said I’d speak to you.”
“All right, you spoke to me.”
“You wouldn’t want to let her go home, would you?”
Buddy Matlow watched him steadily for a long moment, then he drained the water glass. “Sure,” he said. “Okay. I’ll send her home tonight.”