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head. Only its bright lidless eyes showed that it was alive. There was a knot in the snake’s body, a swelling about a foot back from the head, like a tumor growing there.
    “You ain’t got a thing to be scared of, Lottie Mae, darling. This snake just et. Had’m a rat.”
    He touched the swelling in the snake’s body with his wooden leg. The snake lifted its head, the tongue darting and quivering on the air. But there was no striking curve in its body and presently the head dropped back to the floor.
    “The snake or me, one is coming in there with you. Which you reckon?”
    Lottie Mae did not answer. Her gaze had locked on the snake and had not once lifted from it. With his peg leg Buddy turned the snake’s head between the bars. Slowly he pressed the thick body into the cell.
    The first time she spoke Buddy couldn’t make out what she said and had to tell her to say it again and when she said it loud enough for him to hear he made her say it again.
    “I ruther you,” she said, still looking at the snake. Her hand lifted to the top button of her cotton dress. “I ruther you.”
    Buddy said: “Ain’t it a God’s wonder what a snake can do for love?”
    He had to go up to the desk for the key. When he got back she had her dress off and was lying on the narrow cot looking at the snake, which had not moved. Buddy took off his gun and his cartridge belt, took the steel-sprung blackjack out of his back pocket, all the time watching her while she watched the snake. He got naked but did not take off his peg leg.
    “You a purty thing,” he said softly and then fell on her with the kind of grunt he might have made if somebody had hit him.
    He was quick and—for the rest of it—silent, his great weight lunging against her. The only parts of her that showed from under him were her hands, her raised knees, and her face turned off under the edge of his heaving chest, staring with glazed eyes at the snake, which looked back at her and did not blink.
    “All right,” he said, finally, “you can go now.”
    He banged his wooden leg steadily against the wall by the bed while he watched her slip the thin cotton dress over her head.
    He called after her as she was going down the hall: “And don’t let it happen again.”
    She walked out into the night and down the road toward the house where she lived with her mother. But she would remember none of it, not Buddy Matlow’s smothering weight, or her bare feet on the stony road, or anything else. The snake had supplanted it all. Her head was filled with its diamond pattern and lidless eyes, and a terror was growing in her that was beyond screaming or even crying.
    She went blindly down the single paved street of Mystic. The only light that was on was at Big Joe’s Confections. It went off as if on signal as she was passing. Joe Lon saw her as he turned from locking the door. She was no more than twenty feet from him.
    “Well,” he said to himself, “ever now and then something goes right in this fucking world.” He walked over to her and she stopped. “You all right, Lottie Mae?”
    She said nothing and her face showed nothing and she did not look at him but straight ahead. There was nothing strange in that. They were very nearly the same age, and he had known her, more or less, all of his life. She had always been a shy, quiet girl. When she came with her mother to the house to work for his daddy, he could never remember her saying anything.
    “I’m just going myself,” he said. “You want a ride?” The place where she lived was almost a mile away. It was late but he was in no hurry to get home to Elfie. She glanced briefly at him and walked away. “No skin off my ass,” he said.
    He got into the truck with a bottle of whiskey. He knew the old man would be waiting for it, but he took his time anyway. The house where his daddy lived was old and tilted slightly to the left, with a wide porch running around three sides. It was two stories, with a second floor where