Wise Blood (11 page)

He trained his eyes into her neck. Gradually she lowered her head until the tips of
their noses almost touched but still he didn’t look at her. “I see you,” she said
in a playful voice.

“Git away!” he said, jumping violently.

She scrambled up and ran around behind the tree. Haze put his hat back on and stood
up, shaken. He wanted to get back in the Essex. He realized suddenly that it was parked
on a country road, unlocked, and that the first person passing would drive off in
it.

“I see you,” a voice said from behind the tree.

He walked off quickly in the opposite direction toward the car. The jubilant expression
on the face that looked from around the tree, flattened.

He got in his car and went through the motions of starting it but it only made a noise
like water lost somewhere in the pipes. A panic took him and he began to pound the
starter. There were two instruments on the dashboard with needles that pointed dizzily
in first one direction and then another, but they worked on a private system, independent
of the whole car. He couldn’t tell if it was out of gas or not. Sabbath Hawks came
running up to the fence. She got down on the ground and rolled under the barbed wire
and then stood at the window of the car, looking in at him. He turned his head at
her fiercely and said, “What did you do to my car?” Then he got out and started walking
down the road, without waiting for her to answer. After a second, she followed him,
keeping her distance.

Where the highway had forked off onto the dirt road, there had been a store with a
gas pump in front of it. It was about a half-mile back; Haze kept up a steady fast
pace until he reached it. It had a deserted look, but after a few minutes a man appeared
from out of the woods behind it, and Haze told him what he wanted. While the man got
out his pick-up truck to drive them back to the Essex, Sabbath Hawks arrived and went
over to a cage about six feet high that was at the side of the shack. Haze had not
noticed it until she came up. He saw that there was something alive in it, and went
near enough to read a sign that said, Two
DEADLY ENEMIES.
H
AVE A LOOK FREE.

There was a black bear about four feet long and very thin, resting on the floor of
the cage; his back was spotted with bird lime that had been shot down on him by a
small chicken hawk that was sitting on a perch in the upper part of the same apartment.
Most of the hawk’s tail was gone; the bear had only one eye.

“Come on here if you don’t want to get left,” Haze said roughly, grabbing her by the
arm. The man had his truck ready and the three of them drove back in it to the Essex.
On the way Haze told him about the Church Without Christ; he explained its principles
and said there was no such thing as a bastard in it. The man didn’t comment. When
they got out at the Essex, he put a can of gas in the tank and Haze got in and tried
to start it but nothing happened. The man opened up the hood and studied the inside
for a while. He was a one-armed man with two sandy-colored teeth and eyes that were
slate-blue and thoughtful. He had not spoken more than two words yet. He looked for
a long time under the hood while Haze stood by, but he didn’t touch anything. After
a while he shut it and blew his nose.

“What’s wrong in there?” Haze asked in an agitated voice. “It’s a good car, ain’t
it?”

The man didn’t answer him. He sat down on the ground and eased under the Essex. He
wore hightop shoes and gray socks. He stayed under the car a long time. Haze got down
on his hands and knees and looked under to see what he was doing but he wasn’t doing
anything. He was just lying there, looking up, as if he were contemplating; his good
arm was folded on his chest. After a while, he eased himself out and wiped his face
and neck with a piece of flannel rag he had in his pocket.

“Listenhere,” Haze said, “that’s a good car. You just give me a push, that’s all.
That car’ll get me anywhere I want to go.”

The man didn’t say anything but he got back in the truck and Haze and Sabbath Hawks
got in the Essex and he pushed them. After a few hundred yards the Essex began to
belch and gasp and jiggle. Haze stuck his head out the window and motioned for the
truck to come alongside. “Ha!” he said. “I told you, didn’t I? This car’ll get me
anywhere I want to go. It may stop here and there but it won’t stop permanent. What
do I owe you?”

“Nothing,” the man said, “not a thing.”

“But the gas,” Haze said, “how much for the gas?”

“Nothing,” the man said with the same level look. “Not a thing.”

“All right, I thank you,” Haze said and drove on. “I don’t need no favors from him,”
he said.

“It’s a grand auto,” Sabbath Hawks said. “It goes as smooth as honey.”

“It ain’t been built by a bunch of foreigners or niggers or one-arm men,” Haze said.
“It was built by people with their eyes open that knew where they were at.”

When they came to the end of the dirt road and were facing the paved one, the pick-up
truck pulled alongside again and while the two cars paused side by side, Haze and
the slate-eyed man looked at each other out of their two windows. “I told you this
car would get me anywhere I wanted to go,” Haze said sourly.

“Some things,” the man said, “’Il get some folks somewheres,” and he turned the truck
up the highway.

Haze drove on. The blinding white cloud had turned into a bird with long thin wings
and was disappearing in the opposite direction.

CHAPTER
8

Enoch Emery knew now that his life would never be the same again, because the thing
that was going to happen to him had started to happen. He had always known that something
was going to happen but he hadn’t known what. If he had been much given to thought,
he might have thought that now was the time for him to justify his daddy’s blood,
but he didn’t think in broad sweeps like that, he thought what he would do next. Sometimes
he didn’t think, he only wondered; then before long he would find himself doing this
or that, like a bird finds itself building a nest when it hasn’t actually been planning
to.

What was going to happen to him had started to happen when he showed what was in the
glass case to Haze Motes. That was a mystery beyond his understanding, but he knew
that what was going to be expected of him was something awful. His blood was more
sensitive than any other part of him; it wrote doom all through him, except possibly
in his brain, and the result was that his tongue, which edged out every few minutes
to test his fever blister, knew more than he did.

The first thing that he found himself doing that was not normal was saving his pay.
He was saving all of it, except what his landlady came to collect every week and what
he had to use to buy something to eat with. Then to his surprise, he found he wasn’t
eating very much and he was saving that money too. He had a fondness for Supermarkets;
it was his custom to spend an hour or so in one every afternoon after he left the
city park, browsing around among the canned goods and reading the cereal stories.
Lately he had been compelled to pick up a few things here and there that would not
be bulky in his pockets, and he wondered if this could be the reason he was saving
so much money on food. It could have been, but he had the suspicion that saving the
money was connected with some larger thing. He had always been given to stealing but
he had never saved before.

At the same time, he began cleaning up his room. It was a little green room, or it
had once been green, in the attic of an elderly rooming house. There was a mummified
look and feel to this residence, but Enoch had never thought before of brightening
the part (corresponding to the head) that he lived in. Then he simply found himself
doing it.

First, he removed the rug from the floor and hung it out the window. This was a mistake
because when he went to pull it back in, there were only a few long strings left with
a carpet tack caught in one of them. He imagined that it must have been a very old
rug and he decided to handle the rest of the furniture with more care. He washed the
bed frame with soap and water and found that under the second layer of dirt, it was
pure gold, and this affected him so strongly that he washed the chair. It was a low
round chair that bulged around the legs so that it seemed to be in the act of squatting.
The gold began to appear with the first touch of water but it disappeared with the
second and with a little more, the chair sat down as if this were the end of long
years of inner struggle. Enoch didn’t know if it was for him or against him. He had
a nasty impulse to kick it to pieces, but he let it stay there, exactly in the position
it had sat down in, because for the time anyway, he was not a foolhardy boy who took
chances on the meanings of things. For the time, he knew that what he didn’t know
was what mattered.

The only other piece of furniture in the room was a washstand. This was built in three
parts and stood on bird legs six inches high. The legs had clawed feet that were each
one gripped around a small cannon ball. The lowest part was a tabernacle-like cabinet
which was meant to contain a slop-jar. Enoch didn’t own a slop-jar but he had a certain
reverence for the purpose of things and since he didn’t have the right thing to put
in it, he left it empty. Directly over this place for the treasure, there was a gray
marble slab and coming up from behind it was a wooden trellis-work of hearts, scrolls
and flowers, extending into a hunched eagle wing on either side, and containing in
the middle, just at the level of Enoch’s face when he stood in front of it, a small
oval mirror. The wooden frame continued again over the mirror and ended in a crowned,
horned headpiece, showing that the artist had not lost faith in his work.

As far as Enoch was concerned, this piece had always been the center of the room and
the one that most connected him with what he didn’t know. More than once after a big
supper, he had dreamed of unlocking the cabinet and getting in it and then proceeding
to certain rites and mysteries that he had a very vague idea about in the morning.
In his cleaning up, his mind was on the washstand from the first, but as was usual
with him, he began with the least important thing and worked around and in toward
the center where the meaning was. So before he tackled the washstand, he took care
of the pictures in the room.

These were three, one belonging to his landlady (who was almost totally blind but
moved about by an acute sense of smell) and two of his own. Hers was a brown portrait
of a moose standing in a small lake. The look of superiority on this animal’s face
was so insufferable to Enoch that, if he hadn’t been afraid of him, he would have
done something about it a long time ago. As it was, he couldn’t do anything in his
room but what the smug face was watching, not shocked because nothing better could
be expected and not amused because nothing was funny. If he had looked all over for
one, he couldn’t have found a roommate that irritated him more. He kept up a constant
stream of inner comment, uncomplimentary to the moose, though when he said anything
aloud, he was more guarded. The moose was in a heavy brown frame with leaf designs
on it and this added to his weight and his self-satisfied look. Enoch knew the time
had come when something had to be done; he didn’t know what was going to happen in
his room, but when it happened, he didn’t want to have the feeling that the moose
was running it. The answer came to him fully prepared: he realized with a sudden intuition
that taking the frame off him would be equal to taking the clothes off him (although
he didn’t have on any) and he was right because when he had done it, the animal looked
so reduced that Enoch could only snicker and look at him out the corner of his eye.

After this success he turned his attention to the other two pictures. They were over
calendars and had been sent him by the Hilltop Funeral Home and the American Rubber
Tire Company. One showed a small boy in a pair of blue Doctor Denton sleepers, kneeling
at his bed, saying, “And bless daddy,” while the moon looked in at the window. This
was Enoch’s favorite painting and it hung directly over his bed. The other pictured
a lady wearing a rubber tire and it hung directly across from the moose on the opposite
wall. He left it where it was, pretty certain that the moose only pretended not to
see it. Immediately after he finished with the pictures, he went out and bought chintz
curtains, a bottle of gilt, and a paint brush with all the money he had saved.

This was a disappointment to him because he had hoped that the money would be for
some new clothes for him, and here he saw it going into a set of drapes. He didn’t
know what the gilt was for until he got home with it; when he got home with it, he
sat down in front of the slop-jar cabinet in the washstand, unlocked it, and painted
the inside of it with the gilt. Then he realized that the cabinet was to be used FOR
something.

Enoch never nagged his blood to tell him a thing until it was ready. He wasn’t the
kind of a boy who grabs at any possibility and runs off, proposing this or that preposterous
thing. In a large matter like this, he was always willing to wait for a certainty,
and he waited for this one, certain at least that he would know in a few days. Then
for about a week his blood was in secret conference with itself every day, only stopping
now and then to shout some order at him.

On the following Monday, he was certain when he woke up that today was the day he
was going to know on. His blood was rushing around like a woman who cleans up the
house after the company has come, and he was surly and rebellious. When he realized
that today was the day, he decided not to get up. He didn’t want to justify his daddy’s
blood, he didn’t want to be always having to do something that something else wanted
him to do, that he didn’t know what it was and that was always dangerous.