A Feast of Snakes by Harry Crews Page B

ain’t our kind of people, is it?”
    Duffy Deeter was smiling. Up in the door, Susan Gender was smiling. Willard and Joe Lon each had one of Poncy’s arms. They were even smiling now, but to Poncy their smiles looked terrible.
    Poncy said: “My friends call me Poncy. Honest to God they really do call me Poncy.”
    Duffy Deeter said: “He told us that on the road, last night.”
    “That’s what he told us,” said Susan Gender. “We met’tn at the Magnolia Truck and Rest Stop coming into town and that’s what he told us.”
    Joe Lon seemed to grow hot, to burn all along his veins. He looked at Willard with genuine puzzlement. “I’m damned if I know what to do about this.”
    Duffy Deeter sat down on the bench, smiling, gazing with great fondness upon the bulging mound of Susan Gender’s blender, as he called it in moments when he felt good. Listening to these country boys playing with the old man pleased him. It amused.
    They kept Poncy lifted on his toes while he frantically explained that he was born in Cuba, brought to Tampa at the age of five, and educated at the University of Florida. Here he started an addled singing of the University of Florida’s Alma Mater, with Susan Gender screaming in the background that he fucking-A-well had the words right. That was it. He stopped singing and was rapidly talking about his life’s work in bananas when Hard Candy Sweet appeared between two tents across the road.
    She came straight to them and. said, “What you two assholes doing to this little sapsucker?”
    “We was gone kill him,” said Willard, smiling. “But I think we’ll just leave him alone and let him bore his goddam self to death.”
    They let him down on his heels. Joe Lon straightened Poncy’s shirt, smoothed his collar. Then he raised Poncy’s chin with the end of his little finger and looked directly into Poncy’s eyes. “But you ain’t no traveling salesman, are you?”
    “No. No sir! Retired. I’m re …”
    “You didn’t retire from being no salesman neither, did you?”
    That was precisely what Poncy’s specialty had been. And he had risen to Director of Sales for all of bananas before he was through.
    But he saw that was not the right answer. “Engineering,” said Poncy. “I was an engineer.”
    Joe Lon gave him a thin whiskey smile. “Got a uncle that was a railroad man.”
    Willard had introduced Hard Candy to Susan Gender and it turned out Susan had been an undergraduate head majorette herself back at Auburn University in Alabama and they went down and lined up hip to hip on the grass at the end of the trailer working on a little routine.
    “Now after the first kickout, you spin and do a split,” said Hard Candy Sweet. Her little eyes shined. “Can you still split?”
    “Lord yes, honey,” said Susan Gender. “I’m still just limber as a dishrag.”
    Willard was on his back on the bench pumping two hundred and fifty pounds. Poncy was whispering, “Are they crazy, or what?”
    Duffy didn’t answer right away; he only looked at Poncy. Finally he said: “You better get over there out of the way.” Joe Lon and Willard slid a ten-pound plate on each end of the Olympic bar.
    “You set,” said Joe Lon.
    Poncy walked over and did not so much sit as collapse onto a little grassy bank of dirt.
    The girls came high-kicking by and Susan Gender sang: “We’re going inside.” She stopped in the door and called: “You want anything, Duffy?”
    Duffy, who was in the middle of a press, did not answer, but Joe Lon Mackey, beginning to buzz from the whiskey, feeling better than ever in the old familiar demand of muscle and sweat, said: “Got any bourbon whiskey up there in that trailer?”
    Susan Gender gave a little kick and laid the full weight of her smile and single red eye upon him. “Duffy Deeter wouldn’t go anywhere without it.”
    “You might just bring us out a bottle,” Joe Lon said.
    “If you got any of them cold beers in there,” said Willard Miller, “bring