The Yazoo Blues. John Pritchard
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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 he thought he could catch a breeze comin’ through the screens. It seemed like a pretty good idea to him; plus, he was glad at last to be down there beside the peaceful waters of the Mississippi River Cut-Off outside St. Leo and not still up in the city with all the noise and dangerous robbin’ and rapin’ and carjackin’ and senseless-ass killin’ in addition to all the other everyday crappage that goes on there.
Anyway, he told Doc he went sound to sleep and was dreamin’ he had done found the love of his life. Doc says the fellow did not go into no detail about what that was, but that, after layin’ there for a while, the sumbich said he begun to wake up a little and to feel like somethin’ wuddn right, and it was at that point he discovered he had a snake up his butt.
After that, he said he didn’t remember a whole lot until Voyd and me picked him up in the patrol car. I believe the sumbich. I wouldna wanted to remember none of it neither. And now, he said to Doc, he seriously thought he might want to sell his trailer and not never come back down to the Cut-Off or anywhere in the whole fukkin Delta no more as long as he lived. And I wouldn neither if a snake had crawled up my ass.
Over the years I’ve thought about this more’n once, and, frankly, when you take into consideration where he was and what things are like down here, there ain’t no need not to give him credit for what all he said. You know, you get in them woods over there across the levee, and anything might happen to you. I don’t care if you are up in a trailer on twelve-foot pilings. I wouldn doubt nothin’ nobody said about stuff over in there. And even though now some of them woods is all done up like Lost-fukkin-Vegas, the real reality behind the bright lights is that them casinos are gamblin’ with somethin’ a lot wilder than a king snake on a couch; those muthafukkas is shootin’ craps with the Mississippi River.
That reminds me they was another time, way back before that, when Sheriff Holston telephoned and woke my ass up one morning about first light, on December 22nd, 1964.
Now, right here, hold your potatoes, and don’t fuk with me. I aint forgot about gettin’ to the part about how I became a historian and come to know all about the Yankee blue-suits’ Yazoo Pass Expedition, but there’s still some more important background information concerning my life in law enforcement that I have to tell you about before I can get to the real, old-timey historical part. Which is where I’m headed.
I guess what you don’t know—cause you’re not a historian—is that background is what is—it’s the onliest thing that is definitely set and done while the rest ain’t nothin’ more’n pure-dee speculation, or hope, or wish, and such diddlyass crap as that. But the past is it, sumbich. It’s the fukkin frontier. It ain’t what was, it’s what am. And without it, you and me and every page in this book wouldn be nothin’ but a blank.
So when I answered the phone, Sheriff Holston said: “Junior Ray, meet me out at Slab Town quick as you can.” Then he hung up. Sumpn bout it give me one nem feelings like you get when some muthafukka in a movie is hangin’ by his fingers off a window ledge on a tall building or if you was settin’ in a bathtub