The Yazoo Blues. John Pritchard

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СКАЧАТЬ it up, countin’ it out, and tryin’ to save some. They don’t realize time ain’t in no danger and that it’s them that’s runnin’ out and that they, themse’ves, is only a moment, kind of like a raindrop.

      My supervisor’s young, but I don’t think any amount of time, personal or otherwise, is going to improve him. Also, he’s one nem fly fishermen, if you know what I mean. But I don’t hold that against him too much. I don’t give a damn if he cornholes armadillos as long as he lets me take off when I need to, within reason naturally. All in all he’s not a bad guy, just a little silly.

      The thing is I’ve got to go over to Sledge. You remember I’ve told you about my girlfriend over there. Anyway, she’s having a big do for her daughters and her grandchildren, and she especially wants me there, so I can talk to her oldest daughter’s middle boy about a career in law enforcement. She says she thinks he’s got what it takes and that he’s a lot like me. I didn’t touch that.

      But I will say one thing: Being in law enforcement most of my life taught me a shit pot of a lot about what’s what. I guess I seen just about everything you could think of and then some you couldn, like the man with the snake up his ass.

That situation come about late one summer night out on the Cut-Off[1] when Voyd and me was patrollin’ that part of the county, and we heard there was a party out there. Other’n we just wanted to make sure hadn’t nothin’ got out of hand, we didn’t particularly think much about it because bunches of Meffis folks had parties out there all the fukkin time, and this was long before there was any casinos.

      Anyway, just as we topped the levee there at the Tippen place, here come the biggest, fattest sumbich you ever saw, nekkid as a porkchop, his hands clawin’ at the air in front of him, runnin’ up the levee on the road from the other side straight-ass into the headlights of the patrol car. I slammed on the brakes, cause I thought that coksukka was gonna dent up the grill, and I didn’t want no more of that kind of shit to deal with that month. But, he swerved off to his left and come hollerin’ like a muthafukka by Voyd on the passenger side.

      “Gotdam,” said Voyd.

      “Gotdam,” I said back. “We better turn around and see what the hell’s the matter with that sumbich.”

      We woulda radioed for some help, but in those days there wuddn nobody to radio to but us—well, we could’ve called up the highway patrolman on the phone, but there wuddn no phones, neither, where we was. Plus, Voyd and me was on his shit list for a number of reasons, and he said if we called him one more time, he was gon’ tell Sheriff Holston we didn’t know our butts from a soupbowl and get us fired. Well, get me fired—hell, Voyd was basically just ridin’ with me and, even though he’d been made a constable, wuddn, like me, a real full-time deputy on the county payroll.

      So we knew we had to handle the situation ourselves. But, you know, there’s just something about a six-foot nekkid fat man runnin’ around in the dark out in the middle of nowhere that turns your blood to Kool-Aid, especially when we saw he had a snake up his ass—we never did get to the bottom of that. That’s a joke, muthafukka. Well, it is and it iddn.

      Anyhow, there we was. And there he was, with a live snake wavin’ out of his butt. So I said, “Go apprehend the suspect, Voyd.”

      It didn’t make no difference that Voyd wuddn a real deputy. There wuddn nobody out there that time of night on the levee in the fukkin dark except him and me and that huge sumbich runnin’ up the road with the tail of a big snake whippin’ thissa way and that around his backside, either tryin’ to crawl in or crawl out; we couldn tell which. Plus, when we run up on this sumbich, or vice versa, we never did make it ’cross the levee to check whether there was any kind of party over there.

      “Go appre-fukkin-hend him yourse’f,” Voyd said. “I ain’t goin’ nowhere near that coksukka—what kinda suspect is he anyhow?”

      “I don’t know,” I said.

      “If he turns sideways,” said Voyd, “maybe we can shoot the gotdam thing.”

      And I said, “Voyd, you couldn hit your own dick with a brickbat, much less a gotdam snake flappin’ around outta somebody else’s butt, and I ain’t gettin’ nowhere near him neither.”

      “Well, I don’t reckon we can just go home and not do nothin’,” Voyd more or less suggested.

      “No, we gotta do somethin’,” I said. But right then I couldn for the life of me come up with what that might be, so Voyd and I just followed along behind the nekkid fat fellow with the snake stuck up his T-hiney, a-wavin’ back and forth like he had a long-ass tail.

      Fortunately, the sumbich stayed on the gravel and didn’t cut out across no fields. It looked to me like he was goin’ to run hollerin’ and carryin’ on, jibber-jabberin’ all the way back to St. Leo—which would have been an award-winning achievement that, for him or, I guess, for most other three-hunnuhd-pound white men dancin’ around in their birthday suits with snakes in their ass, I could not bring myself to feel overly optimistic about.

      The truth is I was kind of hoping he might just die with a heart attack, and then Voyd and me coulda come out the next day and discovered him. Maybe by that time the snake woulda been gone.

      Also, the snake wuddn no skinny blue racer. We decided it was a king snake—which was the good part, though it don’t speak well for that type of snake. Yet it was good for the suspect because, as you know, king snakes ain’t poisonous. But Holy Shit it seemed like the thing was big-around as a Mason jar and longer than Burl Ives’s belt, at least a third of which was hidin’ up inside that goggle-eyed sumbich who was busy tryin’ to outrun hissef, the snake, and his own ass-end after twelve o’clock at night on a country road. Speakin’ as a law-enforcement professional, I don’t know who had the most to worry about, him or the rep-tile.

      I wouldna never thought, at the time, things would turn out okay in the end—that’s a joke, too; wait a minute, I got to burp—but they did.

      Finally the nekkid fat man reached around and grabbed the snake and pulled it out of his ass. He stood there in the headlights of the patrol car for a second or two holdin’ the po’ snake up in the air in front of him while he was still screamin’ and sayin’ words neither Voyd nor me could understand, and then he th’owed the thing off into a bean field. Voyd said, “Thank you Jesus,” and I said, “Fuk yeah.” But I spect the snake was more relieved than me and Voyd was.

      We crammed the terrified Meffis sumbich in the back seat, and hauled his ass on in to the little hospital there in St. Leo. The next day, Doc McCandliss said he ain’t never seen anything like it. He said the fellow had some “rips” in his rectum, and that if Voyd and me hadn’t told him what had happened, he’da thought the sumbich had been captured by the Turkish army, whatever the fuk that means. Doc McCandliss further stated it took a long time to calm the man down, but that after he did stop shakin’ and started makin’ some sense, the sumbich swore to Doc that he did not know how the snake got up his butt.

      He was a Meffis fellow, natchaly, and claimed he had gone to sleep on a couch outchonda at his trailer, which was up on pilings like a buncha them others there by the Cut-Off, cause the water can rise awful high in the spring, and that before he lay down on the sofa-bed he had done took hissef a nice hot shower, and he thought he’d just lay there on top of the sheets and look at the TV for a while. But, because it was already late when he got to the Cut-Off from up in Meffis, and even though it was warm that night but not especially humid, he said he didn’t want to crank up the air conditioning till he really had to, and СКАЧАТЬ