The Reivers (6 page)

"I'll have to fill the tank for the trip out to McCaslin after dinner. I thought Lucius could come along now and help me on the way back from the depot." You see, how easy it was going to be. It was too easy, making you a little ashamed. It was as if the very cards of virtue and rectitude were stacked against Grandfather and Grandmother and Mother and Father. All right then: against me too. Even the fact that automobiles were only two or three years old in Jefferson abetted Boon—all right, us. Mr Rouncewell, the oil company agent who supplied all the stores in Yoknapatawpha County from his tanks on the side track at the depot, for the last two years had also had a special tank of gasoline, with a pump and a Negro to pump it; all Boon or anyone else who wanted gasoline had to do was, simply drive up and stop and get out and the Negro would lift off the front seat and measure the tank with his special notched stick and fill the tank and collect the money or (if Mr Rouncewell himself wasn't there) let you yourself wiite down your name and how many gallons in a greasy ledger. But, although Grandfather had owned the car almost a year now, not one of them—Grandfather or Grandmother or Father or Mother—had either the knowledge about how cars operated or the temerity (or maybe it was just the curiosity) to question or challenge Boon.

So he and I stood on the platform; Mother waved to us through the window as the train drew away. Now it was his move. He would have to say something, have to begin. He had managed to get the decks cleared and me in his power, at least until Aunt Callie began to wonder where I was to eat my dinner. I mean, Boon didn't know he didn't have to say anything, other than perhaps to tell me where we were going, and even that—the destination—didn't matter. He had learned nothing since about human beings, and apparently had even forgot what he once must have known about boys.

And now Boon himself didn't know how to begin. He had prayed for luck, and immediately, by return post you might say, had been vouchsafed more than he knew what to do with. They have told you before this probably that Fortune is a fickle jade, who never withholds but gives, either good or bad: more of the former than you ever believe (perhaps with justice) that you deserve; more of the latter than you can handle. So with Boon. So all he said was, "Well."

Nor did I help him; I took that revenge. All right, revenge on whom? Not on Boon of course: on me, my shame; perhaps on Father and Mother, who had abandoned me to the shame; perhaps on Grandfather, whose automobile had made the shame available; who knows? perhaps on Mr Buftaloe himself—that rapt and divinely stricken somnambulist who had started the whole thing two innocent years ago. But I did feel sorry for Boon because he had so little time. It was after eleven now; Aunt Callie would be expecting me back in a matter of minutes, not because she knew it couldn't take more than ten minutes to get back home after she heard Twenty-three whistle for the lower crossing, but because she would already be in a driving impatience to get us all fed and on the way to McCaslin; she had been born in the country and still preferred it. Boon wasn't looking at me. He very carefully wasn't looking at me. "Three hundred miles," he said. "Good thing somebody invented trains. If they'd a had to go by mule wagon like folks used to, they couldn't even get there in ten days, let alone back in ten days too."

"Father said four days," I said.

"That's right," Boon said. "So he did. Maybe we got four days to get back to the house in, but that still dont give us forever." We went back to the car and got in it. But he didn't start it. "Maybe when Boss gets back in te— four days he'll let me learn you to run this thing. You're big enough. Besides, you already know how. Have you ever thought about that?"

"No," I said. "Because he aint going to let me."

"Well, you dont need to rush at it. You got four days for him to change his mind in. Though my guess is nearer ten." Still he didn't move to start the car. "Ten days." he said. "How far do you reckon this automobile could travel in ten days?"

"Father said four," I said. "All right," he said. "How far in four days?"

"I aint going to know that either," I said. "Because aint anybody around here going to find out to tell me."

"All right." he said. He started the car suddenly and backed and turned it, already going fast, neither toward the Square nor toward Mr Rouncewell's gasoline pump. "I thought we had to get gasoline," I said. We were going fast. "I changed my mind," Boon said. "Ill tend to that just before we leave for McCaslin after dinner. Then so much of it wont evaporate away just standing around." We were in a lane now. going fast between Negro cabins and vegetable patches and chicken yards, with chickens and mongrel dogs leaping frantically from the dust just in time, out of the lane and into a vacant field, a waste place marked faintly with tire tracks but no hooves; and now I recognised it: Mr Buffaloe's homemade motordrome where Colonel Sartoris's law had driven him two years ago and where he had taught Boon to operate an automobile. And still I didn't understand until Boon wrenched the car to a stop and said, "Move over here."

So I was late for dinner after all; Aunt Gallic was already standing on the front gallery, carrying Alexander and already yelling at Boon and me even before he stopped the car to let me out. Because Boon licked me in fair battle after all; evidently he hadn't quite forgot all he remembered from his own youth about boys. I know better now of course, and I even knew better then: that Boon's fall and mine were not only instantaneous but simultaneous too: back at the identical instant when Mother got the message that Grandfather Lessep was dead. But that's what I would have liked to believe: that Boon simply licked me. Anyway, that's what I told myself at the time: that, secure behind that inviolable and inescapable rectitude concomitant with the name I bore, patterned on the knightly shapes of my male ancestors as bequeathed —nay, compelled—to me by my father's word-of-mouth, further bolstered and made vulnerable to shame by my mother's doting conviction, I had been merely testing Boon; not trying my own virtue but simply testing Boon's capacity to undermine it; and, in my innocence, trusting too much in the armor and shield of innocence; expected, demanded, assumed more than that frail Milanese was capable of withstanding. I say "frail Milanese" not advisedly but explicitly: having noticed in my time how quite often the advocates and even the practitioners of virtue evidently have grave doubts of their own regarding the impregnability of virtue as a shield, putting their faith and trust not in virtue but rather in the god or goddess whose charge virtue is; by-passing virtue as it were in allegiance to the Over-goddess herself, in return for which the goddess will either divert temptation away or anyhow intercede between them. Which explains a lot, having likewise noticed in my time that the goddess in charge of virtue sems to be the same one in charge of luck, if not of folly also.

So Boon beat me in fair battle, using, as a gentleman should and would, gloves. When he stopped the car and said, "Move over," I thought I knew what he intended. We had done this before at four or five convenient and discreet times in Grandfather's lot, me sitting on Boon's lap holding the wheel and steering while he let the automobile move slowly in a low gear across the lot. So I was ready for him. I was already
en garde
and had even begun the counterthrust, opening my mouth to say
It's too hot to sit on anybody today. Besides we better get on back on home
when I saw that he was already out of the car on his side while he was still speaking, standing there with one hand on the wheel and the engine still running. For another second or two I still couldn't believe it. "Hurry up," he said. "Any minute now Callie will come running out of that lane toting that baby under one arm and already yelling."

So I moved under the wheel, and with Boon beside me, over me, across me, one hand on mine to shift the gears, one hand on mine to regulate the throttle, we moved back and forth across that vacant sun-glared waste, forward a while, backward a while, intent, timeless, Boon as much as I, immersed, rapt, steadying me (he was playing for such stakes, you see), out of time, beyond it, invulnerable to time until the courthouse clock striking noon a half-mile away restored us, hurled us back into the impending hard world of finagle and deception.

"All right," Boon said, "quick," not even waiting but lifting me bodily across him as he slid under the wheel, the car already rushing back across the field toward home, we talking man-to-man now, mutual in crime, confederate of course but not coeval yet because of my innocence; I already beginning to say
What do I do now? You'll have to tell me
when once again Boon spoke first and made us equal too: "Have you figgered how to do it? We aint got much time."

"All right," I said. "Go on. Get on back to the house before Aunt Gallic starts hollering." So you see what I mean about Virtue? You have heard—or anyway you will —people talk about evil times or an evil generation. There are no such things. No epoch of history nor generation of human beings either ever was or is or will be big enough to hold the un-virtue of any given moment, any more than they could contain all the air of any given moment; all they can do is hope to be as little soiled as possible during their passage through it. Because what pity that Virtue does not—possibly cannot—take care of its own as Non-virtue does. Probably it cannot: who to the dedicated to Virtue, offer in reward only cold and odorless and tasteless virtue: as compared not only to the bright rewards of sin and pleasure but to the ever watchful unflagging om-niprescient skill—that incredible matchless capacity for invention and imagination—with which even the tottering footsteps of infancy are steadily and firmly guided into the primrose path. Because oh yes, I had matured terrifyingly since that clock struck two minutes ago. It has been my observation that, except in a few scattered cases of what might be called malevolent hyper-prematurity, children, like poets, lie rather for pleasure than profit. Or so I thought I had until then, with a few negligible exceptions involving simple self-defense against creatures (my parents) bigger and stronger than me. But not any more. Or anyway, not now. I was as bent as Boon, and—during the next step anyway—even more culpable. Because (I realised; no: knew; it was obvious; Boon himself admitted it in so many words) I was smarter than Boon. I realised, felt suddenly that same exultant fever-flash which Faustus himself must have experienced: that of we two doomed and irrevocable, I was the leader, I was the boss, the master. Aunt Gallic was already standing on the front gallery, carrying Alexander and yelling.

"Dry up," I said. "Aint dinner ready? The automobile broke down. Boon fixed it. We never had time to get the gasoline and now I have to eat in a hurry and go back and help him fill the tank." I went back to the dining room. Dinner was already on the table. Lessep and Maury were already eating. Aunt Gallic had already dressed them (she had dressed them to go seventeen miles out to Cousin Zack's to spend four days as if they were going to Memphis; I dont know why, unless it was because she didn't have anything else to do between the time Mother and Father left and dinner. Because Maury and Alexander would both have to take a nap before we could leave) but by the front of his blouse, she would have to wash Maury off and dress him again.

Even then, I finished before they did and went back (Aunt Gallic was still yelling, not loud in the house of course. But what could she do, single-handed—and a Negro—against Non-virtue?) across the street to Grandfather's. Ned had probably left for town as soon as the automobile drove off. But he would probably come back for his dinner. He had. We stood in the back yard. He blinked at me. Quite often, most of the time in fact, his eyes had a reddish look, like a fox's. "Why dont you aim to stay out there?" he said.

"I promised some fellows we would slip off tomorrow and try a new fishing hole one of them knows about."

Ned blinked at me. "So you aims to ride out to Mc-Caslin with Boon Hogganbeck and then turn right around and come back with him. Only you got to have something to tell Miss Louisa so she'll let you come back and so you needs me to front for you."

"No," I said. "I don't need anything from you. I'm just telling you so you'll know where I am and they wont blame you. I aint even going to bother you. I'm going to stay with Cousin Ike." Before the rest of them came, I mean my brothers, when Mother and Father were out late at night and Grandfather and Grandmother were gone too, I used to stay with Ned and Delphine. Sometimes I would sleep in their house all night, just for fun. I could have done that now, if it would have worked. But Cousin Dee lived alone in a single room over his hardware store. Even if Ned (or somebody else concerned) asked him point-blank if I was with him Saturday night, it would be at least Monday by then, and I had already decided quick and hard not to think about Monday. You see, if only people didn't refuse quick and hard to think about next Monday, Virtue wouldn't have such a hard and thankless time of it.

"I see," Ned said. "You aint needing nothing from me. You just being big-hearted to save me bother and worry over you. Save everybody bother and worry that conies around wanting to know why you aint out at McCaslin where your paw told you to be." He bunked at me. "Hee hee hee," he said.

"All right," I said. "Tell Father I went fishing on Sunday while they were gone. See if I care."

"I aint fixing to tell nobody nothing about you," he said. "You aint none of my business. You's Callie's business unto your maw gets back. Unlessen you gonter transfer to Mr Ike's business for tonight, like you said." He blinked at me. "When is Boon Hogganbeck coming for yawl?"

"Pretty soon now," I said. "And you better not let Father or Boss hear you calling him Boon Hogganbeck."

"I calls him Mister in plenty of time for him to earn it," Ned said. "Let alone deserve it." He said, "Hee hee hee." You see? I was doing the best I could. My trouble was, the tools I had to use. The innocence and the ignorance: I not only didn't have strength and knowledge, I didn't even have time enough. When the fates, gods—all right, Non-virtue—give you opportunities, the least they can do is give you room. But at least Cousin Ike was easy to find on Saturday. "You bet," he said. "Come and stay with me tonight. Maybe we'll go fishing tomorrow—just dont tell your father."