A Feast of Snakes by Harry Crews Read Free Book Online

nobody ever went, where his daddy stored furniture and old clothes and newspapers—the Atlanta Constitution and the Albany Herald and the Macon Telegraph —all of which the old man subscribed to and which came in the mail a day late and took up his mornings until he began drinking whiskey at noon. Joe Lon could have moved into the big house with his father and his sister, the old man even asked him to, offering to clean out the second floor and let him and Elfie have it, but Joe Lon would be damned and in hell before he would do that, and even though he loved his father, admired him, and could tolerate his sister, he knew that it would never work to try to live in the same house with them.
    Among other reasons it wouldn’t work was he liked to beat Elfie occasionally, or didn’t like it, rather he couldn’t help it, and his father would have killed him if he had ever found out he punched Elfie. More than once they had had to tell the old man that Elfie had fallen out of the door of the trailer onto her head when she turned up with two black eyes, or had run into the closet door or closed her hand in the stove oven, which actually once was true but it was because Joe Lon was holding her fingers there with one hand while he slammed the oven with the other. The old man told people everywhere that his daughter-in-law. Elf, was a goddam fine woman, good mother, but she was probably the clumsiest human being God ever made.
    The old man was not a good man by anybody’s reckoning; he just didn’t hold with hurting women. He had once castrated a Macon pulpwood Negro who drove bootleg whiskey for him because the Negro had stolen a case off the truck. Another time he and one of his friends had scalped a white man for some reason that nobody ever knew and the old man had not disclosed. He also had probably the best pit bulldogs in all of Georgia, which were the pride of his life and which he loved deeply and which were the best fighting dogs because he treated them with a savage and unrelenting cruelty that even other pit bull owners could not bear to witness or emulate.
    Joe Lon drove his pickup down the narrow lane bordered on both sides with the skeletoned limbs of winter-naked pecan trees. The huge house was dark except for the front room where the old man lived and the thin wavering light of his sister’s television in a side room toward the back. Joe Lon didn’t know what time it was but he knew it might be after midnight. He was drunk, but not good and drunk the way he liked to be. The whiskey simply had refused to take hold beyond a certain point. On the seat beside him were two quarts of bonded bourbon. There were no labels on the bottles. There never were. It tasted like Early Times. He thought it probably was, and it was also probably hijacked stuff. He’d gotten it for two dollars a bottle, a whole goddam trailer of it. He hadn’t asked where it came from. He never did.
    Joe Lon let himself in and went down the short hall to the room where his daddy sat with his back to the door watching a dog strapped onto an electric inclined treadmill. It was a standard training device for fighting dogs. His daddy was nearly deaf and he did not look up even though Joe Lon slammed the door. His daddy was named Joe Lon too but was called Big Joe, partly to distinguish the father from the son and partly because the old man was nearly seven feet tall. There wasn’t a hair on his head but he had eyebrows that were thick and black and very long.
    When Joe Lon came up behind the chair and leaned down and said into Big Joe’s ear: “Here’s the goddam whiskey,” the bald head did not move at all but the eyebrows twitched, seemed actually to turn on his face.
    “Bout time,” said Big Joe. “I been sober since sundown.”
    “I magine,” said Joe Lon. He had to shout to make himself heard.
    He went over and sat in a ragged overstuffed chair. Big Joe broke the seal, raised the bottle, and took a tentative swallow. He brought the