Jigger woke up with a painful erection. Before he remembered that she was no longer there, he rolled over and reached for Gayla. Instead of warm, wonderful woman, he came up with a handful of grubby sheets.
Cursing her for not being available when he wanted her, he stumbled into the bathroom and relieved himself. Glancing in the mirror over the chipped, stained sink, he hooted in laughter at his reflection. “You’d make a vulture puke.” He was uglier than sin. His beard stubble showed up white on his loose, flabby jaw.
Too much whiskey last night, he thought. He released a vile-tasting belch. His eyes were rivered with red streams. There was a large hole in his dingy tank T-shirt. It was a miracle that his voluminous boxer shorts kept their grip on his skinny ass.
He was hobbling back to bed, when he abruptly stopped and stood still. He had just realized what had woken him.
“What the hell?” he mumbled. He had never heard anything like that sound. He shoved aside the tacky curtains and peered through the grimy glass. A ray of sunlight pierced his red eyes, stinging him as if he had been speared through the back of his skull. He cursed viciously.
Once his eyes adjusted to the light, he blinked the yard into focus. Nothing unusual was going on. The puppies were yapping at their dam, demanding breakfast. Everything was normal.
Everything but that sound.
Jigger’s gut knotted with foreboding. He had razor-sharp instincts about these things. He could smell trouble a mile away. That sound meant bad news. Menace. But where the hell was it coming from?
Compelled to find out, he didn’t bother with dressing. Knobby knees aiming in opposite directions, he walked through his shabby house. It had really gone to seed since Gayla’s defection. Mice scattered like a sack of spilled marbles across the linoleum floor when he entered the kitchen. Jigger cursed them, but otherwise ignored them. He pulled open the back door and pushed through the screen. The dogs in the backyard pens began barking.
“Shut up, you sons of bitches.” Couldn’t they tell his head was splitting? He raised a hand to his thudding temple. “Jesus.” The blasphemy was still fresh on his lips when he spotted the oil drum.
It was a fifty-five gallon drum, silver and rusty in a few spots, but otherwise in good condition. It was ordinary.
Except for the sound it emitted.
Jigger recognized it now. It was a rattler. A hell of a one if the racket it was making was any indication of its size.
The drum had been left square in the middle of his yard between the back door and the toolshed. But by whom, Jigger wondered as he stood there with his hands propped on his nonexistent hips, staring at the drum in perplexity. Whoever it was had been a cagey bastard because his dogs hadn’t made a racket. Either it was somebody who was used to handling dogs or it was somebody, or something spooky. Whatever it was, it was fuckin’ weird. Goose bumps rose on his arms.
“Shit!”
It was just a snake. He wasn’t afraid of snakes. When he was younger he’d traveled all the way to West Texas several times to go on rattlesnake roundups. That had been a helluva good time. There had been lots of smooth booze and coarse broads, lots of snake handling and one-upmanship. He’d lost count of the rattlers he’d milked of their venom.
No, it wasn’t the snake that bothered him. What was giving Jigger the shivers was the manner in which the snake had been delivered. If somebody wanted to give him a present, why didn’t he just come up and hand it to him outright? Why leave it as a surprise for him to discover while he still had a bitchin’ hangover and before his morning coffee?
Coffee. That’s what he needed, coffee dark as Egypt and strong as hell. He needed a woman here every morning to get his coffee. Yes, sir. He’d look into that today. He’d find a new woman. He had put up with that black bitch far too long. He needed one who didn’t sass, one who kept her mouth shut and her thighs open. He was coming into some money soon, a goddamn fair amount, too. Nothing to sneeze at. With that, he could buy the best pussy in the parish.
This mental monologue had given Jigger time to walk all the way around the drum, inspecting it from all angles. Thoughtfully, he scratched his nose. He scratched his crotch. The lid of the drum was anchored down with a large rock. He reckoned he ought to open it and look inside to see just how monstrous this rattler was.
But damned if that sound wasn’t getting to him. It was playing with his nerves something fierce. That snake was good and pissed off for being confined to that drum. He tried to remember just how far rattlers could strike.
He recalled one guy who was a fanatic about rattlers. He’d told Jigger that one could strike as far as he was long. Jigger hadn’t believed him at the time. He was a born liar, and a Texan to boot. Besides, he’d been drunk as a fiddler’s bitch and his tales had been nearly as tall as the blond broad who’d been straddling his lap and licking his ear.
But now, when such information was critical, Jigger wondered if the fellow knew what he was talking about. Yet it could be that it only sounded noisy because it was in the bottom of that hollow drum.
“Hell yeah, that’s it, don’tcha know. It just sounds big.”
He approached the drum with garnered bravery, but as a precaution, he carried a long stick of firewood with him. His nerves were jangling as energetically as the rattler’s tail when he knocked the rock to the ground, using the piece of firewood.
He moved the stick from one hand to the other, while alternately wiping his palms on the saggy seat of his boxers. Then, reaching far out in front of him, he eased the end of the stick under the rim of the drum’s lid and carefully levered it up.
A bluejay squawked raucously from the tree directly overhead. Jigger nearly jumped out of his boxer shorts. He dropped the stick of firewood on his bare big toe.
“Goddammit to hell!” he bellowed. His cursing sent the pit bull bitch into a frenzy. Snarling and slavering, she repeatedly threw herself against the kennel’s fence. It took several minutes for Jigger to quiet her and the litter and to scare off the territorially possessive bluejay.
Scraping together his courage again, Jigger picked up the stick and wedged it under the rim of the lid. He prized it up no more than an inch, but the volume of the sinister sound increased ten times. Jigger approached the drum on tiptoes, trying to see into it, but he could see only the opposite inside wall.
Taking a deep breath and checking to see that nothing was behind him, he flipped the lid to the ground. At the same time, he leaped backward like an uncoordinated acrobat. His heart was beating so quickly it reverberated in his eardrums, but nothing drowned out that deafening, nerve-racking, bloodcurdling sound.
No snake came striking out. He crept closer to the drum and peered over the edge, leaning forward as far as he dared.
“Jesus H. Christ.”
He couldn’t see all of it. He could see only a portion of a body that was as thick as a muscle builder’s bicep. Quickly he scouted the yard for something to stand on. Spotting a bucket in a pile of junk, he brought it back to the drum at a run and uprighted it. Then he stood on it, still a safe distance away, and got his first full look at his snake.
It was a monster, all right. Coiled several times around the bottom of the drum, he estimated it to be eight feet long. Six minimum. It filled up a good third of the drum. Sticking up out of the center of that deadly concentric coil was a rattling tail that looked like it would never stop. It shook so rapidly, it was impossible to count the individual rattles. But it was a great-granddaddy of a rattlesnake; it was mad as hell, and it was his.
Jigger clapped his hands in glee. With childlike delight, he clasped them together beneath his chin. He stared in wonder and awe at his marvelous gift. Eve’s serpent couldn’t have had any more sinister allure. It was entrancing to watch something so consummately evil, so gloriously wicked.
Everything about it was corruptly beautiful—the geometric pattern of its skin, the obsidian eyes, the forked tongue that flicked in and out of the flat lips, and that incessant rattle that was ominous and deadly.
Quickly, but cautiously, Jigger replaced the lid of the drum and weighted it down with the rock. He wasn’t really worried that the snake could get out. If it was capable of striking over the rim of the drum, it would have by now. That snake was mean, diabolically so. Jigger instantly developed an attachment to it.
He loved his snake.
He ran for the house, full of plans on how to capitalize on the gift. It was a gift. He was sure of that now. Whoever had left it meant him no harm. He reasoned that it had been left by somebody who owed him money. That could be just about anybody in southwestern Louisiana. He wasn’t going to worry about that now. His head was too full of commercial plans.
First, he’d have a flyer printed up advertising it. By nightfall his yard would be crawling with customers who wanted to see his rattler. What should he charge? A buck a peek. That was a neat, round figure he figured.
He entered his house through the back. The squeaky screen door slammed shut behind him, but he didn’t hear anything over the clacking noise that his fabulous rattler made. In Jigger’s opinion, it was music.