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until he got all the way back to the trailer -- usually around three or four in the morning. But today -- hell, he just wasn’t up to it.
           Feeling sad like this, he raced his truck back to Lizard World, screeched into the parking lot, slammed the door and moped back to the snake house -- where it was cool, dark, quiet and a man could think. Behind their panes a glass the rattlers, copperheads, vipers, coral snakes and pythons -- including Beelzebub, who was moving a lump a bunny down his middle -- were all quietly digesting. Lemuel Lee sighed, then took in a deep, cool breath of reptile. The fact was that he loved the snakes, loved the way they always seemed to be sleepin’ but could lash out like lightnin’ the moment their prey got near. In high school he’d put one in his math teacher’s mailbox. One a the things you had to remember was that you shouldn’t never let anyone get away with anything: because your honor was at stake and nothin’ was more important than a Frobey’s honor. This was what his daddy had taught him and Lemuel Lee had never forgotten it. “Love’s a fine thing, boy,” his daddy had told him, “but a good hate will warm your belly on a cold night. If someone fucks with you, you pay him back ten times worse -- not just so that he knows it but so that everyone he knows knows it. That way they’re gonna know what kind of man you are and they’re gonna show you respect.”
           Fact was, there was a lot a people at Lizard World who was beginnin’ to bug him. Take Uncle Earl’s secretary, for example: that big fat skank Lily listened in to all their phone calls and, chewin’ gum, always sat with her legs spread when Lemuel Lee came into the office, so that he was obliged either to look away or to study the obscenity of her crotch in bulgin’ blue jeans. Lemuel Lee didn’t think a woman had a right to look like Lily, especially the way she put her finger in her ear and inspected the wax and then looked at him as if he was givin’ her the eye. If a girl was a looker, that was one thing. But a dog like Lily, in Lemuel Lee’s opinion, was an affront to his ideal of womanhood.
           He clenched his jaw and smirked. He looked through the glass at two rattlers entwined on a slab of sandstone, a cactus, a photograph of sunset over the Grand Canyon, and three white eggs baskin’ beneath an infrared bulb. Yep, them babies would be out real soon. Little tongues dartin’ out like hellfire. Born with enough juice to kill a elephant. A baby rattler don’t have to take no shit.
           Lemuel Lee let out a deep sigh. He tapped twice on the glass of the horned viper’s cage, trying to get its attention. No such luck: the little critter just lay there coiled up on the sand as if it was too damned important to be bothered. He sighed again, held back his tears, then bit his lip: people didn’t take him seriously neither. Oh yeah, yeah, he’d seen the way they looked at him -- here at Lizard World, in the post office, even Crater and the guys at the gas station. They had taken him for a loser, down for the count, a zero. Lemuel Lee figured he was gonna show them, and every day the thought of his comeback, the revenge he would exact for the world’s blindness and ingratitude, grew warmer and dizzier like whiskey in his belly.
           Course he knew that first he had to build up a head a steam, or else there wouldn’t be enough power in the engine when the Day a Judgement finally came. Now that he was a soldier, Lemuel Lee understood that. But it used to be he’d blow off at just about anything. One day, for example, after a whole busload a tourists had walked out on one a his gator shows and Lemuel Lee had started to holler and break things like he was a crazy man, his Uncle Earl told him he was gonna have to “shape up or ship out.” That was the first time Lemuel got himself a six-pack a beer and went off into the woods to shoot deer. “When I’m