Wise Blood (16 page)

“Lay-overs to catch meddlers,” he said. “You just give it to him and he’ll know what
it is and you can tell him I’m glad to get shut of it.” He started down the stairs
and halfway he turned and gave her another special look. “I see why he has to put
theter washrag over his eyes,” he said.

“You keep your beeswax in your ears,” she said. “Nobody asked you.” When she heard
the front door slam behind him, she turned the bundle over and began to examine it.
There was no telling from the outside what was in it; it was too hard to be clothes
and too soft to be a machine. She tore a hole in the paper at one end and saw what
looked like five dried peas in a row but the hall was too dark for her to see clearly
what they were. She decided to take the package to the bathroom, where there was a
good light, and open it up before she gave it to Haze. If he was so sick as he said
he was, he wouldn’t want to be bothered with any bundle.

Early that morning he had claimed to have a terrible pain in his chest. He had begun
to cough during the night—a hard hollow cough that sounded as if he were making it
up as he went along. She was certain he was only trying to drive her off by letting
her think he had a catching disease.

He’s not really sick, she said to herself going down the hall, he just ain’t used
to me yet. She went in and sat down on the edge of a large green claw-footed tub and
ripped the string off the package. “But he’ll get used to me,” she muttered. She pulled
off the wet paper and let it fall on the floor; then she sat with a stunned look,
staring at what was in her lap.

Two days out of the glass case had not improved the new jesus’ condition. One side
of his face had been partly mashed in and on the other side, his eyelid had split
and a pale dust was seeping out of it. For a while her face had an empty look, as
if she didn’t know what she thought about him or didn’t think anything. She might
have sat there for ten minutes, without a thought, held by whatever it was that was
familiar about him. She had never known anyone who looked like him before, but there
was something in him of everyone she had ever known, as if they had all been rolled
into one person and killed and shrunk and dried.

She held him up and began to examine him and after a minute her hands grew accustomed
to the feel of his skin. Some of his hair had come undone and she brushed it back
where it belonged, holding him in the crook of her arm and looking down into his squinched
face. His mouth had been knocked a little to one side so that there was just a trace
of a grin covering his terrified look. She began to rock him a little in her arm and
a slight reflection of the same grin appeared on her own face. “Well I declare,” she
murmured, “you’re right cute, ain’t you?”

His head fitted exactly into the hollow of her shoulder. “Who’s your momma and daddy?”
she asked.

An answer came into her mind at once and she let out a short little bark and sat grinning,
with a pleased expression in her eyes. “Well, let’s go give him a jolt,” she said
after a while.

Haze had already been jolted awake when the front door slammed behind Enoch Emery.
He had sat up and seeing she was not in the room, he had jumped up and begun to put
on his clothes. He had one thought in mind and it had come to him, like his decision
to buy a car, out of his sleep and without any indication of it beforehand: he was
going to move immediately to some other city and preach the Church Without Christ
where they had never heard of it. He would get another room there and another woman
and make a new start with nothing on his mind. The entire possibility of this came
from the advantage of having a car—of having something that moved fast, in privacy,
to the place you wanted to be. He looked out the window at the Essex. It sat high
and square in the pouring rain. He didn’t notice the rain, only the car; if asked
he would not have been able to say that it was raining. He was charged with energy
and he left the window and finished putting on his clothes. Earlier that morning,
when he had waked up for the first time, he had felt as if he were about to be caught
by a complete consumption in his chest; it had seemed to be growing hollow all night
and yawning underneath him, and he had kept hearing his coughs as if they came from
a distance. After a while he had been sucked down into a strengthless sleep, but he
had waked up with this plan, and with the energy to carry it out right away.

He snatched his duffel bag from under the table and began plunging his extra belongings
into it. He didn’t have much and a quarter of what he had was already in. His hand
managed the packing so that it never touched the Bible that had sat like a rock in
the bottom of the bag for the last few years, but as he rooted out a place for his
second shoes, his fingers clutched around a small oblong object and he pulled it out.
It was the case with his mother’s glasses in it. He had forgotten that he had a pair
of glasses. He put them on and the wall that he was facing moved up closer and wavered.
There was a small white-framed mirror hung on the back of the door and he made his
way to it and looked at himself. His blurred face was dark with excitement and the
lines in it were deep and crooked. The little silver-rimmed glasses gave him a look
of deflected sharpness, as if they were hiding some dishonest plan that would show
in his naked eyes. His fingers began to snap nervously and he forgot what he had been
going to do. He saw his mother’s face in his, looking at the face in the mirror. He
moved back quickly and raised his hand to take off the glasses but the door opened
and two more faces floated into his line of vision; one of them said, “Call me Momma
now.”

The smaller dark one, just under the other, only squinted as if it were trying to
identify an old friend who was going to kill it.

Haze stood motionless with one hand still on the bow of the glasses and the other
arrested in the air at the level of his chest; his head was thrust forward as if he
had to use his whole face to see with. He was about four feet from them but they seemed
just under his eyes.

“Ask your daddy yonder where he was running off to—sick as he is?” Sabbath said. “Ask
him isn’t he going to take you and me with him?”

The hand that had been arrested in the air moved forward and plucked at the squinting
face but without touching it; it reached again, slowly, and plucked at nothing and
then it lunged and snatched the shriveled body and threw it against the wall. The
head popped and the trash inside sprayed out in a little cloud of dust.

“You’ve broken him!” Sabbath shouted, “and he was mine!”

Haze snatched the skin off the floor. He opened the outside door where the landlady
thought there had once been a fire-escape, and flung out what he had in his hand.
The rain blew in his face and he jumped back and stood, with a cautious look, as if
he were bracing himself for a blow.

“You didn’t have to throw him out,” she yelled. “I might have fixed him!”

He moved up closer and hung out the door, staring into the gray blur around him. The
rain fell on his hat with loud splatters as if it were falling on tin.

“I knew when I first seen you you were mean and evil,” a furious voice behind him
said. “I seen you wouldn’t let nobody have nothing. I seen you were mean enough to
slam a baby against a wall. I seen you wouldn’t never have no fun or let anybody else
because you didn’t want nothing but Jesus!”

He turned and raised his arm in a vicious gesture, almost losing his balance in the
door. Drops of rain water were splattered over the front of the glasses and on his
red face and here and there they hung sparkling from the brim of his hat. “I don’t
want nothing but the truth!” he shouted, “and what you see is the truth and I’ve seen
it!”

“Preacher talk,” she said. “Where were you going to run off to?”

“I’ve seen the only truth there is!” he shouted.

“Where were you going to run off to?”

“To some other city,” he said in a loud hoarse voice, “to preach the truth. The Church
Without Christ! And I got a car to get there in, I got…” but he was stopped by a cough.
It was not much of a cough—it sounded like a little yell for help at the bottom of
a canyon—but the color and the expression drained out of his face until it was as
straight and blank as the rain falling down behind him.

“And when were you going?” she asked.

“After I get some more sleep,” he said, and pulled off the glasses and threw them
out the door.

“You ain’t going to get none,” she said.

CHAPTER
12

In spite of himself, Enoch couldn’t get over the expectation that the new jesus was
going to do something for him in return for his services. This was the virtue of Hope,
which was made up, in Enoch, of two parts suspicion and one part lust. It operated
on him all the rest of the day after he left Sabbath Hawks. He had only a vague idea
how he wanted to be rewarded, but he was not a boy without ambition: he wanted to
become something. He wanted to better his condition until it was the best. He wanted
to be THE young man of the future, like the ones in the insurance ads. He wanted,
some day, to see a line of people waiting to shake his hand.

All afternoon, he fidgeted and fooled in his room, biting his nails and shredding
what was left of the silk off the landlady’s umbrella. Finally he denuded it entirely
and broke off the spokes. What was left was a black stick with a sharp steel point
at one end and a dog’s head at the other. It might have been an instrument for some
specialized kind of torture that had gone out of fashion. Enoch walked up and down
his room with it under his arm and realized that it would distinguish him on the sidewalk.

About seven o’clock in the evening, he put on his coat and took the stick and headed
for a little restaurant two blocks away. He had the sense that he was setting off
to get some honor, but he was very nervous, as if he were afraid he might have to
snatch it instead of receive it.

He never set out for anything without eating first. The restaurant was called the
Paris Diner; it was a tunnel about six feet wide, located between a shoe shine parlor
and a dry-cleaning establishment. Enoch slid in and climbed up on the far stool at
the counter and said he would have a bowl of split-pea soup and a chocolate malted
milkshake.

The waitress was a tall woman with a big yellow dental plate and the same color hair
done up in a black hairnet. One hand never left her hip; she filled orders with the
other one. Although Enoch came in every night, she had never learned to like him.

Instead of filling his order, she began to fry bacon; there was only one other customer
in the place and he had finished his meal and was reading a newspaper; there was no
one to eat the bacon but her. Enoch reached over the counter and prodded her hip with
his stick. “Listenhere,” he said, “I got to go. I’m in a hurry.”

“Go then,” she said. Her jaw began to work and she stared into the skillet with a
fixed attention.

“Lemme just have a piece of theter cake yonder,” he said, pointing to a half of pink
and yellow cake on a round glass stand. “I think I got something to do. I got to be
going. Set it up there next to him,” he said, indicating the customer reading the
newspaper. He slid over the stools and began reading the outside sheet of the man’s
paper.

The man lowered the paper and looked at him. Enoch smiled. The man raised the paper
again. “Could I borrow some part of your paper that you ain’t studying?” Enoch asked.
The man lowered it again and stared at him; he had muddy unflinching eyes. He leafed
deliberately through the paper and shook out the sheet with the comic strips and handed
it to Enoch. It was Enoch’s favorite part. He read it every evening like an office.
While he ate the cake that the waitress had torpedoed down the counter at him, he
read and felt himself surge with kindness and courage and strength.

When he finished one side, he turned the sheet over and began to scan the advertisements
for movies, that filled the other side. His eye went over three columns without stopping;
then it came to a box that advertised Gonga, Giant Jungle Monarch, and listed the
theaters he would visit on his tour and the hours he would be at each one. In thirty
minutes he would arrive at the Victory on 57th Street and that would be his last appearance
in the city.

If anyone had watched Enoch read this, he would have seen a certain transformation
in his countenance. It still shone with the inspiration he had absorbed from the comic
strips, but something else had come over it: a look of awakening.

The waitress happened to turn around to see if he hadn’t gone. “What’s the matter
with you?” she said. “Did you swallow a seed?”

“I know what I want,” Enoch murmured.

“I know what I want too,” she said with a dark look.

Enoch felt for his stick and laid his change on the counter. “I got to be going.”

“Don’t let me keep you,” she said.

“You may not see me again,” he said, “—the way I am.”

“Any way I don’t see you will be all right with me,” she said.

Enoch left. It was a pleasant damp evening. The puddles on the sidewalk shone and
the store windows were steamy and bright with junk. He disappeared down a side street
and made his way rapidly along the darker passages of the city, pausing only once
or twice at the end of an alley to dart a glance in each direction before he ran on.
The Victory was a small theater, suited to the needs of the family, in one of the
closer subdivisions; he passed through a succession of lighted areas and then on through
more alleys and back streets until he came to the business section that surrounded
it. Then he slowed up. He saw it about a block away, glittering in its darker setting.
He didn’t cross the street to the side it was on but kept on the far side, moving
forward with his squint fixed on the glary spot. He stopped when he was directly across
from it and hid himself in a narrow stair cavity that divided a building.