“I prechate it,” said Joe Lon.
Buddy Matlow reached for his back pocket where he had his wallet chained to his cartridge belt.
“On me,” Joe Lon said. “I owe you.”
“Decent of you,” Buddy said. He turned and went out to his Plymouth Cruiser, where he sat behind the wheel smoking. His face was mottled and every now and then he spat out the window. He couldn’t seem to cut any slack anywhere. He’d earned it. Goddammit, he knew he’d earned it but nobody would own up to it. If you couldn’t cut a little slack behind a ruined All-American wheel — ruined in defense of the fucking U S of A, where could you cut it? He thumped the cigarette in a high sparking arch and pulled away from the store and drove slowly in a controlled rage to the jail. His deputy, Luther Peacock, was sitting at the desk when he got there.
“Go eat supper, Luther.”
“How long you want me to eat?” Luther said.
“Eat till after midnight, Luther. You take you a good slow supper.”
“I’m hongry anyhow,” Luther said, reaching for his hat.
Buddy Matlow walked across the room and down a hall to a cell. He stopped without looking in it. “You know if you tell anybody I love you, I’ll kill you. You know that, don’t you?”
Lottie Mae did not answer. She sat on a low chair in the center of the cell as still and quiet as a rock. There was only one cell in the large bare room and she was the only prisoner. There were two windows but they were both closed. Sweat stood on Lottie Mae’s face like drops of oil. Buddy Matlow walked up and down in front of the cell. There was no other sound but the steady knock of his peg leg against the floor.
“I ain’t tellin nobody nothin,” she finally said.
“You told George,” he said. “You told George and he told Joe Lon and now I guess ever sumbitch in Mystic is laughing at old Buddy Matlow. An I’m gone tell you one goddam thing. Buddy Matlow don’t like to be laughed at. He don’t take to it one damn bit.”
“I ain’t tol George,” she said.
“Well, what is it? Can he read goddam minds or what?”
“Ain’t nobody in Mystic don’t know where I is,” she said.
Buddy Madow quit walking. He took hold of the bars and stared at her. Her thin cotton dress stuck to her back and sweat ran on her bare legs.
“It won’t make a difference whether they know or not,” he said.
She got off the stool and came to stand in front of him. “Please, Mister Buddy, let me go on …”
“Goddam you, quit calling me Mister! Ain’t I already told you I loved you?”
She went back to sit on the stool, walking backwards, never taking her eyes off him, her body shaking as if with cold.
When she had stopped shaking she said in a low sullen voice: “I ain’t studying love. It’s gone be trouble account all this. You be in trouble already now.”
Buddy Matlow gripped the bars and stared at her. “Be in trouble? Why, bless your sweet nigger heart, I was born in trouble. It’s been trouble ever since.” He slapped his right thigh. “That’s trouble right there. That fucking stick leg is trouble.” He had been shouting, but his voice suddenly lowered. “But what the hell, I try not to whine about it too much. Everybody’s got their load of shit to haul. Look at you. Ever time you show that black face in the world you got trouble. You think I don’t know that? I do. I appreciate what it is to be a nigger. I got ever sympathy in the world for it. But the minute I laid eyes on that little jacked-up ass of yours I known I was in love again.”
“Talking crazy,” she said.
“I may be crazy,” he said.
“Might as well let me out. I ain’t doing nothing nasty. Didn’t las time. Ain’t this time.”
“This time is different,” Buddy Matlow said.
“Ain’t never gone be different,” she said. “My ma ain’t raised no youngan of hern to do nothin nasty.”
Buddy Matlow smiled. “Last time you was locked up we weren’t having us a roundup.”
“Roundup,” she said.
“Snakes,” he said.
“Snakes?” she said.
“Rattlesnakes.”
“Lordy.”
Buddy Matlow went over to one corner and bent down behind a splintered wooden desk. When he straightened up he had a metal bucket in his hand. A piece of screen wire was bent to cover the top of the bucket. He brought the bucket to the cell door and set it down.
“You know what’s in that bucket?”
“Lordy Lordy Lordy Lordy Lordy.” She sang the word in a little breathless whisper.
He turned the bucket over with his wooden leg and a diamondback as thick as a man’s wrist and nearly four feet long spilled out onto the floor. It neither rattled nor lifted its head. Only its bright lidless eyes showed that it was alive. There was a knot in the snake’s body, a swelling about a foot back from the head, like a tumor growing there.
“You ain’t got a thing to be scared of, Lottie Mae, darling. This snake just et. Had’m a rat.”
He touched the swelling in the snake’s body with his wooden leg. The snake lifted its head, the tongue darting and quivering on the air. But there was no striking curve in its body and presently the head dropped back to the floor.
“The snake or me, one is coming in there with you. Which you reckon?”
Lottie Mae did not answer. Her gaze had locked on the snake and had not once lifted from it. With his peg leg Buddy turned the snake’s head between the bars. Slowly he pressed the thick body into the cell.
The first time she spoke Buddy couldn’t make out what she said and had to tell her to say it again and when she said it loud enough for him to hear he made her say it again.
“I ruther you,” she said, still looking at the snake. Her hand lifted to the top button of her cotton dress. “I ruther you.”
Buddy said: “Ain’t it a God’s wonder what a snake can do for love?”
He had to go up to the desk for the key. When he got back she had her dress off and was lying on the narrow cot looking at the snake, which had not moved. Buddy took off his gun and his cartridge belt, took the steel-sprung blackjack out of his back pocket, all the time watching her while she watched the snake. He got naked but did not take off his peg leg.
“You a purty thing,” he said softly and then fell on her with the kind of grunt he might have made if somebody had hit him.
He was quick and — for the rest of it — silent, his great weight lunging against her. The only parts of her that showed from under him were her hands, her raised knees, and her face turned off under the edge of his heaving chest, staring with glazed eyes at the snake, which looked back at her and did not blink.
“All right,” he said, finally, “you can go now.”
He banged his wooden leg steadily against the wall by the bed while he watched her slip the thin cotton dress over her head.
He called after her as she was going down the halclass="underline" “And don’t let it happen again.”
She walked out into the night and down the road toward the house where she lived with her mother. But she would remember none of it, not Buddy Matlow’s smothering weight, or her bare feet on the stony road, or anything else. The snake had supplanted it all. Her head was filled with its diamond pattern and lidless eyes, and a terror was growing in her that was beyond screaming or even crying.
She went blindly down the single paved street of Mystic. The only light that was on was at Big Joe’s Confections. It went off as if on signal as she was passing. Joe Lon saw her as he turned from locking the door. She was no more than twenty feet from him.
“Well,” he said to himself, “ever now and then something goes right in this fucking world.” He walked over to her and she stopped. “You all right, Lottie Mae?”