第 16 页

“You stop!” Miss Corrie said.

“Stop what?” Miss Reba said.

“You know. Talking like that in front of—”

“Oh,” Miss Reba said. “If he just dropped up here from Missippi with Boon on a friendly visit you might say, we might of could protected his ears. But using this place as headquarters while they steal automobiles and horses, he’s got to take his chances like anybody else. What were you saying about the train?”

“Yes. The passenger train that leaves for Washington at four A.M. will pick the boxcar up and we’ll all be in Possum before daylight.”

“Parsham, God damn it,” Miss Reba said. “We?”

“Aint you coming too?” Miss Corrie said.

7

That’s what we did. Though first Sam had to see the horse. He came in the back way, through the kitchen, carrying the horse blanket. He was in his uniform. He was almost as big as Boon.

So we—all of us again—stood once more in the back yard, Ned holding the lamp this time, to shine its light not on the horse but on Sam’s brass-buttoned coat and vest and the flat cap with the gold lettering across the front. In fact, I had expected trouble with Ned over Sam and the horse, but I was wrong. “Who, me?” Ned said. “What for? We couldn’t be no better off with a policeman himself leading that horse to Possum.” On the contrary, the trouble we were going to have about Sam would be with Boon. Sam looked at the horse.

“That’s a good horse,” Sam said. “He looks like a damn good horse to me.”

“Sure,” Boon said. “He aint got no whistle nor bell neither on him. He aint even got a headlight. I’m surprised you can see him a-tall.”

“What do you mean by that?” Sam said.

“I dont mean nothing,” Boon said. “Just what I said. You’re an iron-horse man. Maybe you better go on to the depot without waiting for us.”

“You bas—” Miss Reba said. Then she started over: “Cant you see, the man’s just trying to help you? going out of his way so that the minute you get back home, the first live animal you’ll see wont be the sheriff? He’s the one to be inviting you to get to hell back where you came from and take your goddamn horse along with you. Apologise.”

“All right,” Boon said. “Forget it.”

“You call that an apology?” Miss Reba said.

“What do you want?” Boon said. “Me to bend over and invite him to—”

“You hush! Right this minute!” Miss Corrie said.

“And you dont help none neither,” Boon said. “You already got me and Miss Reba both to where we’ll have to try to forget the whole English language before we can even pass the time of day.”

“That’s no lie,” Miss Reba said. “That one you brought here from Arkansas was bad enough, with one hand in the icebox after beer and the other one reaching for whatever was little and not nailed down whenever anybody wasn’t looking. And now Boon Hogganbeck’s got to bring another one that’s got me scared to even open my mouth.”

“He didn’t!” Miss Corrie said. “Otis dont take anything without asking first! Do you, Otis?”

“That’s right,” Miss Reba said. “Ask him. He certainly ought to know.”

“Ladies, ladies, ladies,” Sam said. “Does this horse want to go to Parsham tonight, or dont he?”

So we started. But at first Miss Corrie was still looking at Otis and me. “They ought to be in bed,” she said.

“Sure,” Miss Reba said. “Over in Arkansas or back down there in Missippi or even further than that, if I had my way. But it’s too late now. You cant send one to bed without the other, and that one of Boon’s owns part of the horse.” Only at the last, Miss Reba couldn’t go either. She and Minnie couldn’t be spared. The place was jumping indeed now, but still discreetly, with Sabbath decorum: Saturday night’s fading tide rip in one last spumy upfling against the arduous humdrum of day-by-day for mere bread and shelter.

So Ned and Boon put the blanket on the horse. Then from the sidewalk we—Ned and Otis and me—watched Boon and Sam in polyandrous … maybe not amity but at least armistice, Miss Corrie between them, leading the horse down the middle of the street from arc light to arc light through the Sunday evening quiet of Second and Third streets, toward the Union depot. It was after ten now; there were few lights, these only in the other boarding houses (I was experienced now; I was a sophisticate—not a connoisseur of course but at least cognizant; I recognised a place similar to Miss Reba’s when I saw one). The saloons though were all dark. That is, I didn’t know a saloon just by passing it; there were still a few degrees yet veiled to me; it was Ned who told us—Otis and me—they were saloons, and that they were closed. I had expected them to be neither one: neither closed nor open; remember, I had been in Memphis (or in Catalpa Street) less than six hours, without my mother or father either to instruct me; I was doing pretty well.

“They calls it the blue law,” Ned said.

“What’s a blue law?” I said.

“I dont know neither,” Ned said. “Lessen it means they blewed in all the money Saturday night and aint none of them got enough left now to make it worth burning the coal oil.”

“That’s just the saloons,” Otis said. “It dont hurt nobody that way. What they dont sell Sunday night they can just save it and sell it to somebody, maybe the same folks, Monday. But pugnuckling’s different. You can sell it tonight and turn right around again and sell the same pugnuckling again tomorrow. You aint lost nothing. Likely if they tried to put that blue law onto pugnuckling, the police would come in and stop them.”

“What’s pugnuckling?” I said.

“You knows a heap, dont you?” Ned said to Otis. “No wonder Arkansaw cant hold you. If the rest of the folks there knows as much as you do at your age, time they’s twenty-one even Texas wont be big enough.”

“——t,” Otis said.

“What’s pugnuckling?” I said.

“Try can you put your mind on knuckling up some feed for that horse,” Ned said to me, still louder. “To try to keep him quiet long enough to get him to Possum, let alone into that train in the first place. That there railroad-owning conductor, flinging boxcars around without even taking his hand out of his pocket, is somebody reminded him of that? Maybe even a bucket of soap and water too, so your aunt”—he was talking to Otis now—“can take you around behind something and wash your mouth out.”

“——t,” Otis said.

“Or maybe even the nearest handy stick,” Ned said.

“——t,” Otis said. And sure enough, we met a policeman. I mean, Otis saw the policeman even before the policeman saw the horse. “Twenty-three skiddoo,” Otis said. The policeman knew Miss Corrie. Then apparently he knew Sam too.

“Where you taking him?” he said. “Did you steal him?”

“Borrowed him,” Sam said. They didn’t stop. “We rode him to prayer meeting tonight and now we’re taking him back home.” We went on. Otis said Twenty-three skiddoo again.

“I never seen that before,” he said. “Every policeman I ever seen before speaking to anybody, they give him something. Like Minnie and Miss Reba already having a bottle of beer waiting for him before he could even get his foot inside, even if Miss Reba cussed him before he come and cussed him again after he left. And ever since I got here last summer and found out about it, every day I go up to Court Square where that I-talian wop has got that fruit and peanut stand and, sho enough, here the policeman comes and without even noticing it, takes a apple or a handful of peanuts.” He was almost trotting to keep up with us; he was that much smaller than me. I mean, he didn’t seem so much smaller until you saw him trotting to keep up. There was something wrong about him. When it’s you, you say to yourself Next year I’m going to be bigger than I am now simply because being bigger is not only natural, it’s inevitable; it doesn’t even matter that you cant imagine to yourself how or what you will look like then. And the same with other children; they cant help it either. But Otis looked like two or three years ago he had already reached where you wont be until next year, and since then he had been going backward. He was still talking. “So what I thought back then was that the only thing to be was a policeman. But I never taken long to get over that. It’s too limited.”

“Limited to what?” Ned said.

“To beer and apples and peanuts,” Otis said. “Who’s going to waste his time on beer and apples and peanuts?” He said Twenty-three skiddoo three times now. “This town is where the jack’s at.”

“Jacks?” Ned said. “In course they has jacks here. Dont Memphis need mules the same as anybody else?”

“Jack,” Otis said. “Spondulicks. Cash. When I think about all that time I wasted in Arkansas before anybody ever told me about Memphis. That tooth. How much do you reckon that tooth by itself is worth? if she just walked into the bank and taken it out and laid it on the counter and said, Gimme change for it?”

“Yes,” Ned said. “I mind a boy like you back there in Jefferson used to keep his mind on money all the time too. You know where he’s at now?”

“Here in Memphis, if he’s got any sense,” Otis said.

“He never got that far,” Ned said. “The most he could get was into the state penitentiary at Parchman. And at the rate you sounds like going, that’s where you’ll wind up too.”

“But not tomorrow,” Otis said. “Maybe not the next day neither. Twenty-three skiddoo, where even a durn policeman cant even pass by without a bottle of beer or a apple or a handful of peanuts put right in his hand before he can even ask for it. Them eighty-five cents them folks give me last night for pumping the pee a noler that that son of a bitch taken away from me this evening. That I might a even pumped that pee a noler free for nothing if I hadn’t found out by pure accident that they was aiming to pay me for it; if I had just happened to step out the door a minute, I might a missed it. And if I hadn’t even been there, they would still a give it to somebody, anybody that just happened to pass by. See what I mean? Sometime just thinking about it, I feel like just giving up, just quitting.”

“Quitting what?” Ned said. “Quitting for what?”

“Just quitting,” Otis said. “When I think of all them years I spent over there on a durn farm in Arkansas with Memphis right here across the river and I never even knowed it. How if I had just knowed when I was four or five years old, what I had to wait until just last year to find out about, sometimes I just want to give up and quit. But I reckon I wont. I reckon maybe I can make it up. How much you folks figger on making out of that horse?”

“Never you mind about that horse,” Ned said. “And the making up you needs to do is to make back up that street to wherever it is you gonter sleep tonight, and go to bed.” He even paused, half turning. “Do you know the way back?”

“There aint nothing there,” Otis said. “I already tried it. They watch too close. It aint like over in Arkansas, when Aunt Corrie was still at Aunt Fittie’s and I had that peephole. If you swapped that automobile for him, you must be figgering on at least two hundred—” This time Ned turned completely around. Otis sprang, leaped away, cursing Ned, calling him nigger—something Father and Grandfather must have been teaching me before I could remember because I dont know when it began, I just knew it was so: that no gentleman ever referred to anyone by his race or religion.

“Go on,” I said. “They’re leaving us.” They were: almost two blocks ahead now and already turning a corner; we ran, trotted, Ned too, to catch up and barely did so: the depot was in front of us and Sam was talking to another man, in greasy overalls, with a lantern—a switchman, a railroad man anyway.

“See what I mean?” Ned said. “Can you imagine police sending out a man with a lantern to show us the way?” And you see what I mean too: all the world (I mean about a stolen race horse); who serves Virtue works alone, unaided, in a chilly vacuum of reserved judgment; where, pledge yourself to Non-virtue and the whole countryside boils with volunteers to help you. It seems that Sam was trying to persuade Miss Corrie to wait in the depot with Otis and me while they located the boxcar and loaded the horse into it, even voluntarily suggesting that Boon attend us with the protection of his size and age and sex: proving that Sam’s half anyway of the polyandrous stalemate was amicable and trusting. But Miss Corrie would have no part of it, speaking for all of us. So we turned aside, following the lantern, through a gate into a maze of loading platforms and tracks; now Ned himself had to come forward and take the halter and quiet the horse to where we could move again in the aura now of the horse’s hot ammoniac reek (you never smelled a frightened horse, did you?) and the steady murmur of Ned’s voice talking to it, both of them—murmur and smell—thickened, dense, concentrated now between the loom of lightless baggage cars and passenger coaches among the green-and-ruby gleams of switch points; on until we were clear of the passenger yard and were now following a cinder path beside a spur track leading to a big dark warehouse with a loading platform in front of it. And there was the boxcar too, with a good twenty-five feet of moonlit (that’s right. We were in moonlight now. Free of the street- and depot-lights, we—I—could see it now) vacancy between it and the nearest point of the platform—a good big jump for even a jumping horse, let alone a three-year-old flat racer that (according to Ned) had a little trouble running anyway. Sam cursed quietly the entire depot establishment: switchmen, yard crews, ticket sellers and all.

“I’ll go get the goat,” the man with the lantern said.

“We dont need no goat,” Ned said. “No matter how far he can jump. What we needs is to either move that flat-form or that boxcar.”

“He means the switch engine,” Sam told Ned. “No,” he told the man with the lantern. “I expected this. For a switching crew to miss just twenty-five feet is practically zero. That’s why I told you to bring the key to the section house. Get the crowbars. Maybe Mr Boon wont mind helping you.”

“Why dont you go yourself?” Boon said. “It’s your railroad. I’m a stranger here.”

“Why dont you take these boys on back home to bed, if you’re all that timid around strangers?” Miss Corrie said.

“Why dont you take them back home yourself?” Boon said. “Your old buddy-boy there has already told you once you aint got no business here.”

“I’ll go with him to get the crowbars,” Miss Corrie told Sam. “Will you keep your eye on the boys?”

“All right, all right,” Boon said. “Let’s do something, for Christ’s sake. That train will be along in four or five hours while we’re still debating who’s first at the lick dog. Where’s that tool shed, Jack?” So he and the man with the lantern went on; we had only moonlight now. The horse hardly smelled at all now and I could see it nuzzling at Ned’s coat like a pet. And Sam was thinking what I had been thinking ever since I saw the platform.

“There’s a ramp around at the back,” he said. “Did he ever walk a ramp before? Why dont you take him on now and let him look at it. When we get the car placed, we can all help you carry him up if we have to—”