The Reivers (22 page)

"What do you know? Sugar Boy wont take a drink no more. All boys together, give and take, never snatch without whistling first, and now he insults me." He stood grinning at Boon, triumphant, daring. Boon looked really dangerous now. Like Ned (all of us) he was worn out for sleep too. But all the load Ned had to carry was the horse; Everbe and Butch's badge were not his burden. "Huh, boy?" Butch said; now he was going to slap Boon on the back again with that jovial force which was just a little too hard but not quite.

"Dont do it again," Boon said. Butch stopped. He didn't retract the motion: he just stopped it, grinning at Boon.

"My name's Mister Lovemaiden," he said. "But call me Butch."

After a while Boon said, "Lovemaiden."

"Butch," Butch said.

After a while Boon said, "Butch."

"That's a boy," Butch said. He said to Everbe: "Doc fix you up all right? Maybe I ought to warned you about Doc. They claim when he was a young squirt fifty-sixty years ago, he would a had one snatch at your drawers before he even tipped his hat."

"Come on," Boon said. "You paid him?"

"Yes," Everbe said. We went outside. And that was when somebody said, Where is Otis? No, it was Everbe of course; she just looked once and said, "Otis!" quite loud, strong, not to say urgent, not to say alarmed and desperate.

"Dont tell me he's scared of horses even tied to a gatepost," Butch said.

"Come on," Boon said. "He's just gone on ahead; he 'aint got nowhere else to go. We'll pick him up."

"But why?" Everbe said. "Why didn't he—"

"How do I know?" Boon said. "Maybe he's right." He meant Butch. Then he meant Otis: "For all he's as knowing a little son of a bitch as ever come out of Arkansas or Missippi either for that matter, he's still a arrant coward. Come on." So we got in the surrey and went on to town. Except that I was on Everbe's side about Otis; when you couldn't see him was a good time to be already wondering where he was and why. I never saw anybody lose public confidence as fast as he could; he would have had a hard time now finding anybody in this surrey to take him to another zoo or anywhere else. And it wasn't going to be much longer before he couldn't have found anybody in Parsham either.

Only we didn't overtake him. He wasn't on the road all the way to the hotel. And Ned was wrong. I mean about the increasing swarm of horse-race devotees we would be running into from now on. Maybe I had expected to mid the entire hotel veranda lined with them, waiting for us and watching us arrive. If so, I was wrong; there was nobody there at all. In the winter of course, during the quail season and especially during the two weeks of the National Trials, it would be different. But in those days, unlike London, Parsham had no summer season; people went elsewhere: to water or mountains: Raleigh, near Memphis, or luka not far away in Mississippi, or to the Ozarks or Cumberlands. (Nor, for that matter, does it have one now, nor indeed does any place else, either winter or summer season; there are no seasons at all any more, with interiors artificially contrived at sixty degrees in summer and ninety degrees in winter, so that mossbacked recidivists like me must go outside in summer to escape cold and in winter to escape heat; including the automobiles also which once were mere economic necessities but are now social ones, the moment already here when, if all the human race ever stops moving at the same instant, the surface of the earth will seize, solidify: there are too many of us; humanity will destroy itself not by fission but by another beginning with f which is a verb-active also as well as a conditional state; I wont see it but you may: a law compelled and enforced by dire and frantic social—not Economic: social—desperation permitting a woman but one child as she is now permitted but one husband.)

But in winter of course (as now), it was different, with the quail season and the Grand National Trials, with the rich money of oil and wheat barons from Wall Street and Chicago and Saskatchewan, and the fine dogs with pedigrees more jealous than princes, and the fine breeding and training kennels only minutes away now by automobile —Red Banks and Michigan City and La Grange and Ger-mantown, and the names—Colonel Linscomb, whose horse (we assumed) we were going to race against tomorrow, and Horace Lytle and George Peyton as magical among bird-dog people as Babe Ruth and Ty Cobb among baseball aficionados, and Mr Jim Avant from Hickory Flat and Mr Paul Rainey just a few miles down Colonel Sartoris's railroad toward Jefferson—hound men both, who (I suppose) among these mere pedigreed pointers and setters, called themselves slumming; the vast rambling hotel booming then, staffed and elegant, the very air itself suave and murmurous with money, littered with colored ribbons and cluttered with silver cups.

But there was nobody there now, the quiet street empty with May dust (it was after six now; Parsham would be at home eating—or preparing to eat—supper), vacant even of Otis, though he could be, probably was, inside. And what was even more surprising, to me anyway, vacant also of Butch. He simply drove us up to the door and put us out and drove away, pausing only long enough to give Ev-erbe one hard jeering leer and Boon one hard leering jeer, if anything a little harder than Everbe's, saying, "Dont worry, boy, I'll be back. If you got any business still hanging, better get it unhung before I get back or something might get tore," and drove away. So apparently he also had somewhere he had to be occasionally: a home; I was still ignorant and innocent (not as much as I was twenty-four hours ago, but still tainted) but I was on Boon's side, my loyalty was to him, not to mention to Everbe, and I had assimilated enough (whether I had digested all of it yet or not) since yesterday, to know exactly what I meant when I hoped that maybe he had a wife in it—some innocent ravished out of a convent whose friendless avengeless betrayal would add another charge to the final accounting of his natural ruthless baseness; or better: an ambidextrous harridan who could cope with him by at least recording into his face each one of his countermarital victories. Because probably half the pleasure he got out of fornication was having it known who the victim was. But I wronged him. He was a bachelor.

But Otis was not inside either: only the single temporary clerk
in
the half-shrouded lobby and the single temporary waiter flapping his napkin in the door of the completely shrouded dining room save for a single table set out for such anonymous passers-by as we were—so far were, that is. But Otis had not been seen. "I aint wondering so much where he's at," Boon said, "as I am about what the hell he has done this time that we aint found out about yet."

"Nothing!" Everbe said. "He's just a child!"

"Sure," Boon said. "Just a little armed child. When he gets big enough to steal—"

"Stop!" Everbe said. "I wont—"

"All right, all right," Boon said. "Find, then. Find enough money to buy a knife with a six-inch blade in place of that two-inch pocketknife, anybody that turns his back on him had sho enough better be wearing one of them old-time iron union suits like you see in museums. I got to talk to you," he told her. "Supper'll be soon, and then we got to meet the train. And that tin-badge stallion will be neighing and prancing back here any time now." He took her arm. "Come on."

That was when I had to begin to listen to Boon. I mean, I had to. Everbe compelled it. She wouldn't even go with him unless I came too. We—they—went to the ladies' parlor; there wasn't much time now; we would have to eat supper and then go to the depot to meet Miss Reba. In those days females didn't run in and out of gentlemen's rooms in hotels as, I am told, they do now, even wearing, I am told, what the advertisements call the shorts or scan-ties capable of giving women the freedom they need in their fight for freedom; in fact, I had never seen a woman alone in a hotel before (Mother would not have been here without Father) and I remember how I wondered how Everbe without a wedding ring even could have got in. They—the hotels—had what were known as ladies' parlors, like this one where we now were—a smaller though still more elegant room, most of it likewise shrouded in holland bags. But I was still on Boon's side; I didn't pass the doorway but stopped outside, where Everbe could know where I was, within call, even if she couldn't actually see me. So I heard. Oh yes, listened. I would have listened anyway; I had gone too far by now in sophistication and the facts of life to stop now, just as I had gone too far in stealing automobiles and race horses to quit now. So I could hear them: Everbe; and almost at once she was crying again:

"No! I wont! Let me alone!" Then Boon:

"But why? You said you loved me. Was that just lying too?" Then Everbe:

"I do love you. That's why. Let me alone! Turn me loose! Lucius! Lucius!" Then Boon:

"Shut up. Stop now." Then nothing for a minute. I didn't look, peep, I just listened. No: just heard: "If I thought you were just two-timing me with that God damned tin-badged—" Then Everbe:

"No! No! I'm not!" Then something I couldn't hear, until Boon said:

"What? Quit? What do you mean, quit?" Then Everbe:

"Yes! I've quit! Not any more. Never!" Then Boon:

"How're you going to live? What will you eat? Where you going to sleep?" And Everbe:

"I'm going to get a job. I can work."

"What can you do? You aint got no more education than me. What can you do to make a living?"

"I can wash dishes. I can wash and iron. I can learn to cook. I can do something, I can even hoe and pick cotton. Let me go, Boon. Please. Please. I've got to. Cant you see I've got to?" Then her feet running, even on the thick carpet; she was gone. So Boon caught me this time. His face was pretty bad now. Ned was lucky; all he had to frazzle over was just a horse race.

"Look at me," Boon said. "Look at me good. What's wrong with me? What the hell's wrong with me? It used to be that I ..." His face looked like it was going to burst. He started again: "And why me? Why the hell me? Why the hell has she got to pick out me to reform on? God damn it, she's a whore, cant she understand that? She's in the paid business of belonging to me exclusive the minute she sets her foot where I'm at like I'm in the paid business of belonging to Boss and Mr Maury exclusive the minute I set my foot where they're at. But now she's done quit. For private reasons. She cant no more. She aint got no more private rights to quit without my say-so too than I got to quit without Boss's and Mr Maury's say-so too—" He stopped, furious and baffled, raging and helpless; and more: terrified. It was the Negro waiter, flapping his napkin in this doorway now. Boon made a tremendous effort; Ned with nothing but a horse race to win didn't even know what trouble was. "Go tell her to come on to supper. We got to meet that train. Her room is Number Five."

But she wouldn't come out. So Boon and I ate alone. His face still didn't look much better. He ate like you put meat into a grinder: not like he either wanted it or didn't want it, but it was just time to eat. After a while I said, "Maybe he started walking back to Arkansas. He said two or three times this afternoon that that's where he would have been by now if folks hadn't kept on interfering with him."

"Sure," Boon said. "Maybe he just went on ahead to locate that dish-washing job for her. Or maybe he reformed too and they're both going right straight to heaven without stopping off at Arkansas or nowhere else, and he just went ahead to find out how to pass Memphis without nobody seeing them." Then it was time to go. I had been watching the edge of her dress beyond the dining-room door for about two minutes, but now the waiter himself came.

"Two-O-Eight, sir," he said. "Just blowed for One Mile Crossing." So we went across to the depot, not far, the three of us walking together, mutual overnight hotel guests. I mean we—they—were not fighting now; we— they—could even have talked, conversed, equable and inconsequential. Everbe would have, only Boon would need to speak first. Not far: merely to cross the tracks to reach the platform, the train already in sight now, the two of them (Boon and Everbe) shackled yet estranged, alien yet indissoluble, confounded yet untwainable by no more than what Boon thought was a whim: who (Boon) for all his years was barely older than me and didn't even know that women no more have whims than they have doubts or illusions or prostate troubles; the train, the engine passing us in hissing thunder, sparks flying from the brake shoes; it was the long one, the big one, the cannonball, the Special: the baggage cars, the half Jim Crow smoker, then the day coaches and the endless pullmans, the dining car at the end, slowing; it was Sam Caldwell's train and if Everbe and Otis had travelled to Parsham in the caboose of a scheduled through freight, Miss Reba would be in a drawing room, if indeed she was not in the president's private car; the train stopping at last though still no vestibule opened, no white-jacketed porter nor conductor, though certainly Sam would have been watching for us; until Boon said, "Hell. The smoker," and began to run. Then we all saw them, far ahead: Sam Caldwell in his uniform on the cinders helping Miss Reba down, someone—another woman—following her, and not from the smoking car at all but from the Jim Crow half of it where Negroes travelled; the train—it was the Special for Washington and New York, the cannonball wafting the rich women in diamonds and the men with dollar cigars in suave and insulate transmigration across the earth—already moving again so that Sam had only time to wave back at us from the step, diminishing eastward behind the short staccato puffs and the long whistle blasts and at last the red diminishing twin lamps, and the two women standing among the grips and bags on the vacant cinders, Miss Reba bold and handsome and chic and Minnie beside her looking like death.

"We've had trouble," Miss Reba said. "Where's the hotel?" We went there. Now, in the lighted lobby, we could see Minnie. Her face was not like death. Death is peaceful. What Minnie's fixed close-lipped brooding face boded was not peaceful and it wasn't boded at her either.

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"Yes, Mrs Binford," the clerk said. "We have special quarters for servants, with their own dining room—"