Wise Blood (18 page)

He had not gone five miles on the highway before he heard a siren behind him. He looked
around and saw a black patrol car coming up. It drove alongside him and the patrolman
in it motioned for him to pull over to the edge of the road. The patrolman had a red
pleasant face and eyes the color of clear fresh ice.

“I wasn’t speeding,” Haze said.

“No,” the patrolman agreed, “you wasn’t.”

“I was on the right side of the road.”

“Yes you was, that’s right,” the cop said.

“What you want with me?”

“I just don’t like your face,” the patrolman said. “Where’s your license?”

“I don’t like your face either,” Haze said, “and I don’t have a license.”

“Well,” the patrolman said in a kindly voice, “I don’t reckon
you
need one.”

“Well I ain’t got one if I do,” Haze said.

“Listen,” the patrolman said, taking another tone, “would you mind driving your car
up to the top of the next hill? I want you to see the view from up there, puttiest
view you ever did see.”

Haze shrugged but he started the car up. He didn’t mind fighting the patrolman if
that was what he wanted. He drove to the top of the hill, with the patrol car following
close behind him. “Now you turn it facing the embankment,” the patrolman called. “You’ll
be able to see better thataway.” Haze turned it facing the embankment. “Now maybe
you better had get out,” the cop said. “I think you could see better if you was out.”

Haze got out and glanced at the view. The embankment dropped down for about thirty
feet, sheer washed-out red clay, into a partly burnt pasture where there was one scrub
cow lying near a puddle. Over in the middle distance there was a one-room shack with
a buzzard standing hunch-shouldered on the roof.

The patrolman got behind the Essex and pushed it over the embankment and the cow stumbled
up and galloped across the field and into the woods; the buzzard flapped off to a
tree at the edge of the clearing. The car landed on its top, with the three wheels
that stayed on, spinning. The motor bounced out and rolled some distance away and
various odd pieces scattered this way and that.

“Them that don’t have a car, don’t need a license,” the patrolman said, dusting his
hands on his pants.

Haze stood for a few minutes, looking over at the scene. His face seemed to reflect
the entire distance across the clearing and on beyond, the entire distance that extended
from his eyes to the blank gray sky that went on, depth after depth, into space. His
knees bent under him and he sat down on the edge of the embankment with his feet hanging
over.

The patrolman stood staring at him. “Could I give you a lift to where you was going?”
he asked.

After a minute he came a little closer and said, “Where was you going?”

He leaned on down with his hands on his knees and said in an anxious voice, “Was you
going anywheres?”

“No,” Haze said.

The patrolman squatted down and put his hand on Haze’s shoulder. “You hadn’t planned
to go anywheres?” he asked anxiously.

Haze shook his head. His face didn’t change and he didn’t turn it toward the patrolman.
It seemed to be concentrated on space.

The patrolman got up and went back to his car and stood at the door of it, staring
at the back of Haze’s hat and shoulder. Then he said, “Well, I’ll be seeing you,”
and got in and drove off.

After a while Haze got up and started walking back to town. It took him three hours
to get inside the city again. He stopped at a supply store and bought a tin bucket
and a sack of quicklime and then he went on to where he lived, carrying these. When
he reached the house, he stopped outside on the sidewalk and opened the sack of lime
and poured the bucket half full of it. Then he went to a water spigot by the front
steps and filled up the rest of the bucket with water and started up the steps. His
landlady was sitting on the porch, rocking a cat. “What you going to do with that,
Mr. Motes?” she asked.

“Blind myself,” he said and went on in the house.

The landlady sat there for a while longer. She was not a woman who felt more violence
in one word than in another; she took every word at its face value but all the faces
were the same. Still, instead of blinding herself, if she had felt that bad, she would
have killed herself and she wondered why anybody wouldn’t do that. She would simply
have put her head in an oven or maybe have given herself too many painless sleeping
pills and that would have been that. Perhaps Mr. Motes was only being ugly, for what
possible reason could a person have for wanting to destroy their sight? A woman like
her, who was so clear-sighted, could never stand to be blind. If she had to be blind
she would rather be dead. It occurred to her suddenly that when she was dead she would
be blind too. She stared in front of her intensely, facing this for the first time.
She recalled the phrase, “eternal death,” that preachers used, but she cleared it
out of her mind immediately, with no more change of expression than the cat. She was
not religious or morbid, for which every day she thanked her stars. She would credit
a person who had that streak with anything, though, and Mr. Motes had it or he wouldn’t
be a preacher. He might put lime in his eyes and she wouldn’t doubt it a bit, because
they were all, if the truth was only known, a little bit off in their heads. What
possible reason could a sane person have for wanting to not enjoy himself any more?

She certainly couldn’t say.

CHAPTER
14

But she kept it in mind because after he had done it, he continued to live in her
house and every day the sight of him presented her with the question. She first told
him he couldn’t stay because he wouldn’t wear dark glasses and she didn’t like to
look at the mess he had made in his eye sockets. At least she didn’t think she did.
If she didn’t keep her mind going on something else when he was near her, she would
find herself leaning forward, staring into his face as if she expected to see something
she hadn’t seen before. This irritated her with him and gave her the sense that he
was cheating her in some secret way. He sat on her porch a good part of every afternoon,
but sitting out there with him was like sitting by yourself; he didn’t talk except
when it suited him. You asked him a question in the morning and he might answer it
in the afternoon, or he might never. He offered to pay her extra to let him keep his
room because he knew his way in and out, and she decided to let him stay, at least
until she found out how she was being cheated.

He got money from the government every month for something the war had done to his
insides and so he was not obliged to work. The landlady had always been impressed
with the ability to pay. When she found a stream of wealth, she followed it to its
source and before long, it was not distinguishable from her own. She felt that the
money she paid out in taxes returned to all the worthless pockets in the world, that
the government not only sent it to foreign niggers and a-rabs, but wasted it at home
on blind fools and on every idiot who could sign his name on a card. She felt justified
in getting any of it back that she could. She felt justified in getting anything at
all back that she could, money or anything else, as if she had once owned the earth
and been dispossessed of it. She couldn’t look at anything steadily without wanting
it, and what provoked her most was the thought that there might be something valuable
hidden near her, something she couldn’t see.

To her, the blind man had the look of seeing something. His face had a peculiar pushing
look, as if it were going forward after something it could just distinguish in the
distance. Even when he was sitting motionless in a chair, his face had the look of
straining toward something. But she knew he was totally blind. She had satisfied herself
of that as soon as he took off the rag he used for a while as a bandage. She had got
one long good look and it had been enough to tell her he had done what he’d said he
was going to do. The other boarders, after he had taken off the rag, would pass him
slowly in the hall, tiptoeing, and looking as long as they could, but now they didn’t
pay any attention to him; some of the new ones didn’t know he had done it himself.
The Hawks girl had spread it over the house as soon as it happened. She had watched
him do it and then she had run to every room, yelling what he had done, and all the
boarders had come running. That girl was a harpy if one ever lived, the landlady felt.
She had hung around pestering him for a few days and then she had gone on off; she
said she hadn’t counted on no honest-to-Jesus blind man and she was homesick for her
papa; he had deserted her, gone off on a banana boat. The landlady hoped he was at
the bottom of the salt sea; he had been a month behind in his rent. In two weeks,
of course, she was back, ready to start pestering him again. She had the disposition
of a yellow jacket and you could hear her a block away, shouting and screaming at
him, and him never opening his mouth.

The landlady conducted an orderly house and she told him so. She told him that when
the girl lived with him, he would have to pay double; she said there were things she
didn’t mind and things she did. She left him to draw his own conclusions about what
she meant by that, but she waited, with her arms folded, until he had drawn them.
He didn’t say anything, he only counted out three more dollars and handed them to
her. “That girl, Mr. Motes,” she said, “is only after your money.”

“If that was what she wanted she could have it,” he said. “I’d pay her to stay away.”

The thought that her tax money would go to support such trash was more than the landlady
could bear. “Don’t do that,” she said quickly. “She’s got no right to it.” The next
day she called the Welfare people and made arrangements to have the girl sent to a
detention home; she was eligible.

She was curious to know how much he got every month from the government and with that
set of eyes removed, she felt at liberty to find out. She steamed open the government
envelope as soon as she found it in the mailbox the next time; in a few days she felt
obliged to raise his rent. He had made arrangements with her to give him his meals
and as the price of food went up, she was obliged to raise his board also; but she
didn’t get rid of the feeling that she was being cheated. Why had he destroyed his
eyes and saved himself unless he had some plan, unless he saw something that he couldn’t
get without being blind to everything else? She meant to find out everything she could
about him.

“Where were your people from, Mr. Motes?” she asked him one afternoon when they were
sitting on the porch. “I don’t suppose they’re alive?”

She supposed she might suppose what she pleased; he didn’t disturb his doing nothing
to answer her. “None of my people’s alive either,” she said. “All Mr. Flood’s people’s
alive but him.” She was a Mrs. Flood. “They all come here when they want a hand-out,”
she said, “but Mr. Flood had money. He died in the crack-up of an airplane.”

After a while he said, “My people are all dead.”

“Mr. Flood,” she said, “died in the crack-up of an airplane.”

She began to enjoy sitting on the porch with him, but she could never tell if he knew
she was there or not. Even when he answered her, she couldn’t tell if he knew it was
she. She herself. Mrs. Flood, the landlady. Not just anybody. They would sit, he only
sit, and she sit rocking, for half an afternoon and not two words seemed to pass between
them, though she might talk at length. If she didn’t talk and keep her mind going,
she would find herself sitting forward in her chair, looking at him with her mouth
not closed. Anyone who saw her from the sidewalk would think she was being courted
by a corpse.

She observed his habits carefully. He didn’t eat much or seem to mind anything she
gave him. If she had been blind, she would have sat by the radio all day, eating cake
and ice cream, and soaking her feet. He ate anything and never knew the difference.
He kept getting thinner and his cough deepened and he developed a limp. During the
first cold months, he took the virus, but he walked out every day in spite of that.
He walked about half of each day. He got up early in the morning and walked in his
room—she could hear him below in hers, up and down, up and down—and then he went out
and walked before breakfast and after breakfast, he went out again and walked until
midday. He knew the four or five blocks around the house and he didn’t go any farther
than those. He could have kept on one for all she saw. He could have stayed in his
room, in one spot, moving his feet up and down. He could have been dead and get all
he got out of life but the exercise. He might as well be one of them monks, she thought,
he might as well be in a monkery. She didn’t understand it. She didn’t like the thought
that something was being put over her head. She liked the clear light of day. She
liked to see things.

She could not make up her mind what would be inside his head and what out. She thought
of her own head as a switchbox where she controlled from; but with him, she could
only imagine the outside in, the whole black world in his head and his head bigger
than the world, his head big enough to include the sky and planets and whatever was
or had been or would be. How would he know if time was going backwards or forwards
or if he was going with it? She imagined it was like you were walking in a tunnel
and all you could see was a pin point of light. She had to imagine the pin point of
light; she couldn’t think of it at all without that. She saw it as some kind of a
star, like the star on Christmas cards. She saw him going backwards to Bethlehem and
she had to laugh.

She thought it would be a good thing if he had something to do with his hands, something
to bring him out of himself and get him in connection with the real world again. She
was certain he was out of connection with it; she was not certain at times that he
even knew she existed. She suggested he get himself a guitar and learn to strum it;
she had a picture of them sitting on the porch in the evening and him strumming it.
She had bought two rubber plants to make where they sat more private from the street,
and she thought that the sound of him strumming it from behind the rubber plant would
take away the dead look he had. She suggested it but he never answered the suggestion.