Читать книгу The Mansion - William Faulkner - Страница 8

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“So the son of a bitch fooled you,” I said. “You thought they were going to hang him, but all he got was life.”

He didn’t answer. He just sat there in the kitchen chair—he had toted it up himself from Tubbs’s kitchen. For me, there wasn’t anything in the cell but the cot—for me and the bedbugs that is. He just sat there with the shadow of the window bars crisscrossing that white shirt and that damn little ten-cent snap-on bow tie; they said the same one he had worn in from Frenchman’s Bend sixteen years ago. No: they said not the same one he took out of Varner’s stock and put on the day he came in from that tenant farm and went to work as Varner’s clerk and married Varner’s whore of a daughter in and wore to Texas while the bastard kid was getting born and then wore back again; that was when he wore the cloth cap about the size for a fourteen-year-old child. And the black felt hat somebody told him was the kind of hat bankers wore, that he didn’t throw away the cap: he sold it to a nigger boy for a dime that he took out in work and put the hat on for the first time three years ago and they said had never taken it off since, not even in the house, except in church, and still looked new. No, it didn’t look like it belonged to anybody, even after day and night for three years, not even sweated, which would include while he was laying his wife too which would be all right with her probably since the sort of laying she was used to they probably didn’t even take off their gloves, let alone their hats and shoes and overcoats.

And chewing. They said when he first came in to Frenchman’s Bend as Varner’s clerk it was tobacco. Then he found out about money. Oh, he had heard about money and had even seen a little of it now and then. But now he found out for the first time that there was more of it each day than you could eat up each day if you ate twice as much fried sowbelly and white gravy. Not only that, but that it was solid, harder than bones and heavy like gravel, and that if you could shut your hands on some of it, there was no power anywhere that could make you let go of more of it than you had to let go of, so he found out that he couldn’t afford to chew up ten cents’ worth of it every week because he had discovered chewing gum by then that a nickel’s worth of would last five weeks, a new stick every Sunday. Then he came to Jefferson and he really saw some money, I mean all at one time, and then he found out that the only limit to the amount of money you could shut your hands on and keep and hold, was just how much money there was, provided you had a good safe place to put that other handful down and fill your fists again. And then was when he found out he couldn’t afford to chew even one cent a week. When he had nothing, he could afford to chew tobacco; when he had a little, he could afford to chew gum; when he found out he could be rich provided he just didn’t die beforehand, he couldn’t afford to chew anything, just sitting there in that kitchen chair with the shadow of the cell bars crisscrossing him, chewing that and not looking at me or not any more anyway.

“Life,” I said. “That means twenty years, the way they figure it, unless something happens between now and then. How long has it been now? Nineteen eight, wasn’t it, when he hung all day long maybe in this same window here, watching the street for you to come on back from Texas and get him out, being as you were the only Snopes then that had enough money and influence to help him as he figured it, hollering down to anybody that passed to get word out to Varner’s store for you to come in and save him, then standing up there in that courtroom on that last day and giving you your last chance, and you never came then either? Nineteen eight to nineteen twenty-three from twenty years, and he’ll be out again. Hell fire, you’ve only got five more years to live, haven’t you? All right. What do you want me to do?”

He told me.

“All right,” I said. “What do I get for it?”

He told me that. I stood there for a while leaning against the wall, laughing down at him. Then I told him.

He didn’t even move. He just quit chewing long enough to say, “Ten thousand dollars.”

“So that’s too high,” I said. “All your life is worth to you is about five hundred, mostly in trade, on the installment plan.” He sat there in that cross-barred shadow, chewing his mouthful of nothing, watching me or at least looking toward me. “Even if it works, the best you can do is get his sentence doubled, get twenty more years added on to it. That means that in nineteen forty-three you’ll have to start all over again worrying about having only five years more to live. Quit sucking and smouching around for bargains. Buy the best: you can afford it. Take ten grand cash and have him killed. From what I hear, for that jack you could have all Chicago bidding against each other. Or ten grand, hell, and Chicago, hell too; for one you could stay right here in Mississippi and have a dozen trusties right there in Parchman drawing straws for him, for which one would shoot him first in the back.”

He didn’t even quit chewing this time.

“Well well,” I said. “So there’s something that even a Snopes won’t do. No, that’s wrong; Uncle Mink never seemed to have any trouble reconciling Jack Houston up in front of that shotgun when the cheese began to bind. Maybe what I mean is, every Snopes has one thing he won’t do to you—provided you can find out what it is before he has ruined and wrecked you. Make it five then,” I said. “I won’t haggle. What the hell, ain’t we cousins or something?”

This time he quit chewing long enough to say, “Five thousand dollars.”

“Okay, I know you haven’t got five grand cash either now,” I said. “You don’t even need it now. That lawyer says you got two years to raise it in, hock or sell or steal whatever you’ll have to hock or sell or steal.”

That got to him—or so I thought then. I’m a pretty slow learner myself sometimes, now and then, mostly now in fact. Because he said something: “You won’t have to stay two years. I can get you out.”

“When?” I said. “When you’re satisfied? When I have wrecked the rest of his life by getting twenty more years hung on to it? Not me, you won’t. Because I won’t come out. I wouldn’t even take the five grand; I was kidding you. This is how we’ll do it. I’ll go on down there and fix him, get him whatever additional time the traffic will bear. Only I won’t come out then. I’ll finish out my two years first; give you a little more time of your own, see. Then I’ll come out and come on back home. You know: start a new life, live down that old bad past. Of course I won’t have any job, business, but after all there’s my own father’s own first cousin every day and every way getting to be bigger and bigger in the bank and the church and local respectability and civic reputation and what the hell, ain’t blood thicker than just water even if some of it is just back from Parchman for bootlegging, not to mention at any minute now his pride might revolt at charity even from his respectable blood-kin banker cousin and he might decide to set up that old unrespectable but fairly damned popular business again. Because I can get plenty more stock in trade and the same old good will will still be here just waiting for me to tell them where to go and maybe this time there won’t be any developer-fluid jugs sitting carelessly around. And suppose they are, what the hell? it’s just two years and I’ll be back again, already reaching to turn over that old new leaf—”

He put his hand inside his coat and he didn’t say “Yep” in that tone because he didn’t know how yet, but if he had known he would. So he said, “Yep, that’s what I figgered,” and drew out the envelope. Oh sure, I recognised it. It was one of mine, the Atelier Monty Jefferson Miss in the left corner, all stamped and showing the cancellation clear as an etching and addressed to G. C. Winbush, City so I already knew what was in it before he even took it out: the photo that Winbush had insisted on buying for five bucks for his private files as they call it that I hadn’t wanted to let him have it because anybody associating with him in anything was already in jeopardy. But what the hell, he was the Law, or what passed for it in that alley at one or two in the morning anyway. And oh yes, it had been through the mail all right even though I never mailed it and it hadn’t been any further than through that damn cancelling machine inside the Jefferson post=office. And with the trouble Winbush was already in from being in my back room instead of getting what he called his brains beaten out by old dope-eating Will Christian’s burglars, it wouldn’t have taken any Simon Legree to find out he had the picture and then to get it away from him; nor anything at all to make him swear or perjure to anything anybody suggested to him regarding it. Because he had a wife and all you’d need would be just to intimate to Winbush you were going to show it to her since she was the sort of wife that no power on earth would unconvince her that the girl in the photo—she happened to be alone in this one and happened not to be doing anything except just being buck-naked—was not only Winbush’s private playmate but that probably only some last desperate leap got Winbush himself out of the picture without his pants on. And it wouldn’t take any Sherlock Holmes to discern what that old sanctimonious lantern-jawed son of a bitch up there on that federal bench would do when he saw that cancelled envelope. So I said,

“So it looks like I’ve been raised. And it looks like I won’t call. In fact, it looks like I’m going to pass. After I go down there and get him fixed, you get me out. Then what?”

“A railroad ticket to wherever you want, and a hundred dollars.”

“Make it five,” I said. Then I said, “All right. I won’t haggle. Make it two-fifty.” And he didn’t haggle either.

“A hundred dollars,” he said.

“Only I’m going to cut the pot for the house kitty,” I said. “If I’ve got to spend at least a year locked up in a god-damned cotton farm—” No, he didn’t haggle; you could say that for him.

“I figgered that too,” he said. “It’s all arranged. You’ll be out on bond tomorrow. Clarence will pick you up on his way through town to Memphis. You can have two days.” And by God he had even thought of that too. “Clarence will have the money. It will be enough.”

Whether what he would call enough or what I would call enough. So nobody was laughing at anybody any more now. I just stood there looking down at him where he sat in that kitchen chair, chewing, not looking at anything and not even chewing anything, that everybody that knew him said he never took a drink in his life yet hadn’t hesitated to buy thirty or forty dollars’ worth of whiskey to get me into Parchman where I could wreck Mink, and evidently was getting ready to spend another hundred (or more likely two if he intended to pay for Clarence too) to reconcile me to staying in Parchman long enough to do the wrecking that would keep Mink from getting out in five years; and all of a sudden I knew what it was that had bothered me about him ever since I got big enough to understand about such and maybe draw a conclusion.

“So you’re a virgin,” I said. “You never had a lay in your life, did you? You even waited to get married until you found a woman who not only was already knocked up, she wouldn’t even have let you run your hand up her dress. Jesus, you do want to stay alive, don’t you? Only, why?” And still he said nothing: just sitting there chewing nothing. “But why put out money on Clarence too? Even if he does prefer nigger houses where the top price is a dollar, it’ll cost you something with Clarence as the operator. Give me all the money and let me go by myself.” But as soon as I said it I knew the answer to that too. He couldn’t risk letting me get one mile out of Jefferson without somebody along to see I came back, even with that cancelled envelope in his pocket. He knew better, but he couldn’t risk finding out he was right. He didn’t dare. He didn’t dare at his age to find out that all you need to handle nine people out of ten is just to trust them.

Tubbs knew about the bond so he was all for turning me out that night so he could put the cost of my supper in his pocket and hope that in the confusion it wouldn’t be noticed but I said Much obliged. I said: “Don’t brag. I was in (on the edge of it anyway) the U.S. Army; if you think this dump is lousy, you should have seen some of the places I slept in,” with Tubbs standing there in the open cell door with the key ring in one hand and scratching his head with the other. “But what you can do, go out and get me a decent supper; Mr Snopes will pay for it; my rich kinfolks have forgiven me now. And while you’re about it, bring me the Memphis paper.” So he started out until this time I hollered it: “Come back and lock the door! I don’t want all Jefferson in here; one son of a bitch in this kennel is enough.”

So the next morning Clarence showed up and Flem gave him the money and that night we were in Memphis, at the Teaberry. That was me. Clarence knew a dump where he was a regular customer, where we could stay for a dollar a day even when it wasn’t even his money. Flem’s money, that you would have thought anybody else named Snopes would have slept on the bare ground provided it just cost Flem twice as much as anywhere else would.

“Now what?” Clarence said. It was what they call rhetorical. He already knew what, or thought he did. He had it all lined up. One thing about Clarence: he never let you down. He couldn’t; everybody that knew him knew he would have to be a son of a bitch, being my half-brother.

Last year Virgil (that’s right. Snopes. You guessed it: Uncle Wesley’s youngest boy—the revival song leader that they caught after church that day with the fourteen-year-old girl in the empty cotton house and tar-and-feathered him to Texas or anyway out of Yoknapatawpha County; Virgil’s gift was inherited) and Fonzo Winbush, my patient’s nephew I believe it is, came up to Memphis to enter a barbers’ college. Somebody—it would be Mrs Winbush; she wasn’t a Snopes—evidently told them never to rent a room to live in unless the woman of the house looked mature and Christian, but most of all motherly.

So they were probably still walking concentric circles around the railroad station, still carrying their suitcases, when they passed Reba Rivers’s at the time when every afternoon she would come out her front door to exercise those two damn nasty little soiled white dogs that she called Miss Reba and Mr Binford after Lucius Binford who had been her pimp until they both got too old and settled down and all the neighbourhood—the cop, the boy that brought the milk and collected for the paper, and the people on the laundry truck—called him landlord until he finally died.

She looked mature all right in anything, let alone the wrappers she wore around that time in the afternoon, and she would probably sound Christian all right whether religious or not, to anybody near enough to hear what she would say to those dogs at times when she had had a little extra gin; and I suppose anybody weighing two hundred pounds in a wrapper fastened with safety pins would look motherly even while she was throwing out a drunk, let alone to two eighteen-year-old boys from Jefferson, Mississippi.

Maybe she was motherly and Virgil and Fonzo, in the simple innocence of children, saw what us old long-standing mere customers and friends missed. Or maybe they just walked impervious in that simple Yoknapatawpha juvenile rural innocence where even an angel would have left his pocketbook at the depot first. Anyway, they asked if she had an empty room and she rented them one; likely they had already unpacked those paper suitcases before she realised they didn’t even know they were in a whorehouse.

Anyhow, there she was, having to pay the rent and pay off the cops and the man that supplied the beer, and pay the laundry and Minnie, the maid, something on Sunday night, not to mention having to keep those big yellow diamonds shined and cleaned until they wouldn’t look too much like big chunks of a broken beer bottle; and that Yoknapatawpha innocence right in the middle of the girls running back and forth to the bathroom in nighties and negligees or maybe not even that, and the customers going and coming and Minnie running stacks of towels and slugs of gin up the stairs and the women screaming and fighting and pulling each other’s hair over their boys and clients and money, and Reba herself in the hall cursing a drunk while they tried to throw him out before the cops got there; until in less than a week she had that house as quiet and innocent as a girls’ school until she could get Virgil and Fonzo upstairs into their room and in bed and, she hoped, asleep.

Naturally it couldn’t last. To begin with, there was the barbers’ college where they would have to listen to barbers all day long when you have to listen to enough laying just spending thirty minutes getting your hair cut. Then to come back there and get a flash of a leg or a chemise or maybe a whole naked female behind running through a door, would be bound to give them ideas after a time even though Virgil and Fonzo still thought they were all Reba’s nieces or wards or something just in town maybe attending female equivalents of barbers’ colleges themselves. Not to mention that pure instinct which Virgil and Fonzo (did I say he was Grover Winbush’s nephew?) had inherited from the pure fountainheads themselves.

It didn’t last past the second month. And since the Memphis red-light district is not all that big, it was only the course of time until they and Clarence turned up at the same time in the same place, especially as Virgil and Fonzo, still forced to devote most of their time to learning yet and not earning, had to hunt for bargains. Where right away Virgil showed himself the owner of a really exceptional talent—a capacity to take care of two girls in succession to their satisfaction or at least until they hollered quit, that was enough for two dollars, in his youthful enthusiasm and innocence not only doing it for pleasure but even paying for the chance until Clarence discovered him and put him into the money.

He—Clarence—would loaf around the poolrooms and the sort of hotel lobbies he patronised himself, until he would find a sucker who refused to believe his bragging about his—what’s the word?—protégé’s powers, and Clarence would bet him; the first victim would usually give odds. Of course Virgil would fail now and then—

“And pay half the bet,” I said.

“What?” Clarence said. “Penalise the boy for doing his best? Besides, it don’t happen once in ten times and he’s going to get better as time goes on. What a future that little sod’s got if the supply of two-dollar whores just holds out.”

Anyway, that’s what we were going to do tonight. “Much obliged,” I said. “You go ahead, I’m going to make a quiet family call on an old friend and then coming back to bed. Let me have twenty-five—make it thirty of the money.”

“Flem gave me a hundred.”

“Thirty will do,” I said.

“Be damned if that’s so,” he said. “You’ll take half of it. I don’t aim to take you back to Jefferson and have you tell Flem a god-damn lie about me. Here.”

I took the money. “See you at the station tomorrow at train time.”

“What?” he said.

“I’m going home tomorrow. You don’t have to.”

“I promised Flem I’d stay with you and bring you back.”

“Break it,” I said. “Haven’t you got fifty dollars of his money?”

“That’s it,” he said. “Damn a son of a bitch that’ll break his word after he’s been paid for it.”

Wednesday evenings were nearly always quiet unless there was a convention in town, maybe because so many of the women (clients too) came from little Tennessee and Arkansas and Mississippi country towns and Baptist and Methodist families, that they established among the joints and dives and cathouses themselves some ... analogous? analogous rhythm to the midweek prayer meeting night. Minnie answered the bell. She had her hat on. I mean her whole head was in it like a football helmet.

“Evening, Minnie,” I said. “You going out?”

“No sir,” she said. “You been away? We ain’t seen you in a long time.”

“Just busy,” I answered. That was what Reba said too. The place was quiet: nobody in the dining-room but Reba and a new girl and one customer, drinking beer, Reba in all her big yellow diamonds but wearing a wrapper instead of the evening-gown she would have had on if it had been Saturday night. It was a new wrapper, but it was already fastened with safety pins. I answered the same thing too. “Just busy,” I said.

“I wish I could return the compliment,” she said. “I might as well be running a Sunday-school. Meet Captain Strutterbuck,” she said. He was tall, pretty big, with a kind of roustabout’s face; I mean, that tried to look tough but wasn’t sure yet how you were going to take it, and hard pale eyes that looked at you hard enough, only he couldn’t seem to look at you with both of them at the same time. He was about fifty. “Captain Strutterbuck was in both wars,” Reba said. “That Spanish one about twenty-five years ago, and the last one too. He was just telling us about the last one. And this is Thelma. She just came in last week.”

“Howdy,” Strutterbuck said. “Were you a buddy too?”

“More or less,” I said.

“What outfit?”

“Lafayette Escadrille,” I said.

“Laughing what?” he said. “Oh, La-Fayette Esker-Drill. Flying boys. Don’t know anything about flying, myself. I was cavalry, in Cuba in ’98 and on the Border in ’16, not commissioned any longer, out of the army in fact: just sort of a private citizen aide to Black Jack because I knew the country. So when they decided to send him to France to run the show over there, he told me if I ever got across to look him up, he would try to find something for me. So when I heard that Rick—Eddie Rickenbacker, the Ace,” he told Reba and the new girl, “the General’s driver—that Rick had left him for the air corps, I decided that was my chance and I managed to get over all right but he already had another driver, a Sergeant Somebody, I forgot his name. So there I was, with no status. But I still managed to see a little of it, from the back seat you might say—Argonne, Showmont, Vymy Ridge, Shatter Theory; you probably saw most of the hot places yourself. Where you were stationed?”

“Y.M.C.A.,” I said.

“What?” he said. He got up, slow. He was tall, pretty big; this probably wasn’t the first time both his eyes had failed to look at the same thing at the same time. Maybe he depended on it. By that time Reba was up too. “You wouldn’t be trying to kid me, would you?” he said.

“Why?” I said. “Don’t it work?”

“All right, all right,” Reba said. “Are you going upstairs with Thelma, or ain’t you? If you ain’t, and you usually ain’t, tell her so.”

“I don’t know whether I am or not,” he said. “What I think right now is—”

“Folks don’t come in here to think,” Reba said. “They come in here to do business and then get out. Do you aim to do any business or don’t you?”

“Okay, okay,” he said. “Let’s go,” he told Thelma. “Maybe I’ll see you again,” he told me.

“After the next war,” I said. He and Thelma went out. “Are you going to let him?” I said.

“He gets a pension from that Spanish war,” Reba said. “It came today. I saw it. I watched him sign his name on the back of it so I can cash it.”

“How much?” I said.

“I didn’t bother with the front of it. I just made damn sure he signed his name where the notice said sign. It was a United States Government post office money order. You don’t fool around with the United States Government.”

“A post office money order can be for one cent provided you can afford the carrying charges,” I said. She looked at me. “He wrote his name on the back of a piece of blue paper and put it back in his pocket. I suppose he borrowed the pen from you. Was that it?”

“All right, all right,” she said. “What do you want me to do: lean over the foot of the bed and say, Just a second there, Buster?”—Minnie came in with another bottle of beer. It was for me.

“I didn’t order it,” I said. “Maybe I should have told you right off. I’m not going to spend any money tonight.”

“It’s on me then. Why did you come here then? Just to try to pick a fight with somebody?”

“Not with him,” I said. “He even got his name out a book. I don’t remember what book right now, but it was a better book than the one he got his war out of.”

“All right, all right,” she said. “Why in hell did you tell him where you were staying? Come to think of it, why are you staying there?”

“Staying where?” I said.

“At the Y.M.C.A. I have some little squirts in here now and then that ought to be at the Y.M.C.A. whether they are or not. But I never had one of them bragging about it before.”

“I’m at the Teaberry,” I said. “I belonged to the Y.M.C.A. in the war.”

“The Y.M.C.A.? In the war? They don’t fight. Are you trying to kid me too?”

“I know they don’t,” I said. “That’s why I was in it. That’s right. That’s where I was. Gavin Stevens, a lawyer down in Jefferson, can tell you. The next time he’s in here ask him.”

Minnie appeared in the door with a tray with two glasses of gin on it. She didn’t say anything: she just stood in the door there where Reba could see her. She still wore the hat.

“All right,” Reba said. “But no more. He never paid for that beer yet. But Miss Thelma’s new in Memphis and we want to make her feel at home.” Minnie went away. “So you’re not going to unbutton your pocket tonight.”

“I came to ask you a favour,” I said. But she wasn’t even listening.

“You never did spend much. Oh, you were free enough buying beer and drinks around. But you never done any jazzing. Not with any of my girls, anyway.” She was looking at me. “Me neither. I’ve done outgrowed that too. We could get along.” She was looking at me. “I heard about that little business of yours down there in the country. A lot of folks in business here don’t like it. They figure you are cutting into trade un—un— What’s that word? Lawyers and doctors are always throwing it at you.”

“Unethical,” I said. “It means dry.”

“Dry?” she said.

“That’s right. You might call my branch of your business the arid or waterproof branch. The desert-outpost branch.”

“Yes, sure, I see what you mean. That’s it exactly. That’s what I would tell them: that just looking at pictures might do all right for a while down there in the country where there wasn’t no other available handy outlet but that sooner or later somebody was going to run up enough temperature to where he would have to run to the nearest well for a bucket of real water, and maybe it would be mine.” She was looking at me. “Sell it out and come on up here.”

“Is this a proposition?” I said.

“All right. Come on up here and be the landlord. The beer and drinks is already on the house and you wouldn’t need much but cigarettes and clothes and a little jack to rattle in your pocket and I can afford that and I wouldn’t have to be always watching you about the girls, just like Mr Binford because I could always trust him too, always—” She was looking at me. There was something in her eyes or somewhere I never had seen before or expected either for that matter. “I nee— A man can do what a woman can’t. You know: paying off protection, handling drunks, checking up on the son-a-bitching beer and whiskey peddlers that mark up prices and miscount bottles if you ain’t watching day and night like a god-damn hawk.” Sitting there looking at me, one fat hand with that diamond the size of a piece of gravel holding the beer glass. “I need ... I ... not jazzing; I done outgrowed that too long a time ago. It’s—it’s ... Three years ago he died, yet even now I still can’t quite believe it.” It shouldn’t have been there: the fat raddled face and body that had worn themselves out with the simple hard physical work of being a whore and making a living at it like an old prize fighter or football player or maybe an old horse until they didn’t look like a man’s or a woman’s either in spite of the cheap rouge and too much of it and the big diamonds that were real enough even if you just did not believe that colour, and the eyes with something in or behind them that shouldn’t have been there; that, as they say, shouldn’t happen to a dog. Minnie passed the door going back down the hall. The tray was empty now. “For fourteen years we was like two doves.” She looked at me. Yes, not even to a dog. “Like two doves,” she roared and lifted the glass of beer then banged it down hard and shouted at the door: “Minnie!” Minnie came back to the door. “Bring the gin,” Reba said.

“Now, Miss Reba, you don’t want to start that,” Minnie said. “Don’t you remember, last time you started grieving about Mr Binford we had po-lice in here until four o’clock in the morning. Drink your beer and forget about gin.”

“Yes,” Reba said. She even drank some of the beer. Then she set the glass down. “You said something about a favour. It can’t be money—I ain’t talking about your nerve: I mean your good sense. So it might be interesting—”

“Expect it is money,” I said. I took out the fifty dollars and separated ten from it and pushed the ten across to her. “I’m going away for a couple of years. That’s for you to remember me by.” She didn’t touch it. She wasn’t even looking at it, though Minnie was. She just looked at me. “Maybe Minnie can help too,” I said. “I want to make a present of forty dollars to the poorest son of a bitch I can find. Who is the poorest son of a bitch anywhere at this second that you and Minnie know?”

They were both looking at me, Minnie too from under the hat. “How do you mean, poor?” Reba said.

“That’s in trouble or jail or somewhere that maybe wasn’t his fault.”

“Minnie’s husband is a son of a bitch and he’s in jail all right,” Reba said. “But I wouldn’t call him poor. Would you, Minnie?”

“Nome,” Minnie said.

“But at least he’s out of woman trouble for a while,” Reba told Minnie. “That ought to make you feel a little better.”

“You don’t know Ludus,” Minnie said. “I like to see any place, chain gang or not, where Ludus can’t find some fool woman to believe him.”

“What did he do?” I said.

“He quit his job last winter and laid around here ever since, eating out of my kitchen and robbing Minnie’s pocketbook every night after she went to sleep, until she caught him actually giving the money to the other woman, and when she tried to ask him to stop he snatched the flatiron out of her hand and damn near tore her ear off with it. That’s why she has to wear a hat all the time even in the house. So I’d say if any—if anybody deserved them forty dollars it would be Minnie—”

A woman began screaming at the top of the stairs in the upper hall. Minnie and Reba ran out. I picked up the money and followed. The woman screaming the curses was the new girl, Thelma, standing at the head of the stairs in a flimsy kimono, or more or less of it. Captain Strutterbuck was halfway down the stairs, wearing his hat and carrying his coat in one hand and trying to button his fly with the other. Minnie was at the foot of the stairs. She didn’t outshout Thelma nor even shout her silent: Minnie just had more volume, maybe more practice:

“Course he never had no money. He ain’t never had more than two dollars at one time since he been coming here. Why you ever let him get on the bed without the money in your hand first, I don’t know. I bet he never even took his britches off. A man won’t take his britches off, don’t never have no truck with him a-tall; he done already shook his foot, no matter what his mouth still saying.”

“All right,” Reba told Minnie. “That’ll do.” Minnie stepped back; even Thelma hushed; she saw me or something and even pulled the kimono back together in front. Strutterbuck came on down the stairs, still fumbling at the front of his pants; maybe the last thing he did want was for both his eyes to look at the same thing at the same time. But I don’t know; according to Minnie he had no more reason to be alarmed and surprised now at where he was than a man walking a tightrope. Concerned of course and damned careful, but not really alarmed and last of all surprised. He reached the downstairs floor. But he was not done yet. There were still eight or ten feet to the front door.

But Reba was a lady. She just held her hand out until he quit fumbling at his fly and took the folded money order out of whatever pocket it was in and handed it to her. A lady. She never raised her hand at him. She never even cursed him. She just went to the front door and took hold of the knob and turned and said, “Button yourself up. Ain’t no man going to walk out of my house at just eleven o’clock at night with his pants still hanging open.” Then she closed the door after him and locked it. Then she unfolded the money order. Minnie was right. It was for two dollars, issued at Lonoke, Arkansas. The sender’s name was spelled Q’Milla Strutterbuck. “His sister or his daughter?” Reba said. “What’s your guess?”

Minnie was looking too. “It’s his wife,” she said. “His sister or mama or grandma would sent five. His woman would sent fifty—if she had it and felt like sending it. His daughter would sent fifty cents. Wouldn’t nobody but his wife sent two dollars.”

She brought two more bottles of beer to the dining-room table. “All right,” Reba said. “You want a favour. What favour?”

I took out the money again and shoved the ten across to her again, still holding the other forty. “This is for you and Minnie, to remember me until I come back in two years. I want you to send the other to my great-uncle in the Mississippi penitentiary at Parchman.”

“Will you come back in two years?”

“Yes,” I said. “You can look for me. Two years. The man I’m going to be working for says I’ll be back in one, but I don’t believe him.”

“All right. Now what do I do with the forty?”

“Send it to my great-uncle Mink Snopes in Parchman.”

“What’s he in for?”

“He killed a man named Jack Houston back in 1908.”

“Did Houston deserve killing?”

“I don’t know. But from what I hear, he sure worked to earn it.”

“The poor son of a bitch. How long is your uncle in for?”

“Life,” I said.

“All right,” she said. “I know about that too. When will he get out?”

“About 1948 if he lives and nothing else happens to him.”

“All right. How do I do it?” I told her, the address and all.

“You could send it From another prisoner.”

“I doubt it,” she said. “I ain’t never been in jail. I don’t aim to be.”

“Send it From a friend then.”

“All right,” she said. She took the money and folded it. “The poor son of a bitch,” she said.

“Which one are you talking about now?”

“Both of them,” she said. “All of us. Every one of us. The poor son of a bitches.”

I hadn’t expected to see Clarence at all until tomorrow morning. But there he was, a handful of crumpled bills scattered on the top of the dresser like the edge of a crap game and Clarence undressed down to his trousers standing looking at them and yawning and rooting in the pelt on his chest. This time they—Clarence—had found a big operator, a hot sport who, Virgil having taken on the customary two successfully, bet them he couldn’t handle a third one without stopping, offering them the odds this time, which Clarence covered with Flem’s other fifty since this really would be a risk; he said how he even gave Virgil a chance to quit and not hold it against him: “ ‘We’re ahead now, you know; you done already proved yourself.’ And do you know, the little sod never even turned a hair. ‘Sure,’ he says, ‘Send her in.’ And now my conscience hurts me,” he said, yawning again. “It was Flem’s money. My conscience says don’t tell him a durn thing about it: the money just got spent like he thinks it was. But shucks, a man don’t want to be a hog.”

So we went back home. “Why do you want to go back to the jail?” Flem said. “It’ll be three weeks yet.”

“Call it for practice,” I said. “Call it a dry run against my conscience.” So now I had a set of steel bars between; now I was safe from the free world, safe and secure for a little while from the free Snopes world where Flem was parlaying his wife into the presidency of a bank and Clarence even drawing per diem as a state senator between Jackson and Gayoso Street to take the wraps off Virgil whenever he could find another Arkansas sport who refused to believe what he was looking at, and Byron in Mexico or wherever he was with whatever was still left of the bank’s money, and mine and Clarence’s father I.O. and all of our Uncle Wesley leading a hymn with one hand and fumbling the skirt of an eleven-year-old infant with the other; I don’t count Wallstreet and Admiral Dewey and their father Eck, because they don’t belong to us: they are only our shame.

Not to mention Uncle Murdering Mink six or seven weeks later (I had to wait a little while you see not to spook him too quick). “Flem?” he said. “I wouldn’t a thought Flem wanted me out. I’d a thought he’d been the one wanted to keep me here longest.”

“He must have changed,” I said. He stood there in his barred overalls, blinking a little—a damn little worn-out dried-up shrimp of a man not as big as a fourteen-year-old boy. Until you wondered how in hell anything as small and frail could have held enough mad, let alone steadied and aimed a ten-gauge shotgun, to kill anybody.

“I’m obliged to him,” he said. “Only, if I got out tomorrow, maybe I won’t done changed. I been here a long time now. I ain’t had much to do for a right smart while now but jest work in the field and think. I wonder if he knows to risk that? A man wants to be fair, you know.”

“He knows that,” I said. “He don’t expect you to change inside here because he knows you can’t. He expects you to change when you get out. Because he knows that as soon as the free air and sun shine on you again, you can’t help but be a changed man even if you don’t want to.”

“But jest suppose I don’t—” He didn’t add change in time because he stopped himself.

“He’s going to take that risk,” I said. “He’s got to. I mean, he’s got to now. He couldn’t have stopped them from sending you here. But he knows you think he didn’t try. He’s got to help you get out not only to prove to you he never put you here but so he can quit thinking and remembering that you believe he did. You see?”

He was completely still, just blinking a little, his hands hanging empty but even now shaped inside the palms like the handles of a plow and even his neck braced a little as though still braced against the loop of the ploughlines. “I just got five more years, then I’ll get out by myself. Then won’t nobody have no right to hold expectations against me. I won’t owe nobody no help then.”

“That’s right,” I said. “Just five more years. That’s practically nothing to a man that has already put in fifteen years with a man with a shotgun watching him plow cotton that ain’t his whether he feels like plowing that day or not, and another man with a shotgun standing over him while he eats grub that he either ate it or not whether he felt like eating or not, and another man with a shotgun to lock him up at night so he could either go to sleep or stay awake whether he felt like doing it or not. Just five years more, then you’ll be out where the free sun and air can shine on you without any man with a shotgun’s shadow to cut it off. Because you’ll be free.”

“Free,” he said, not loud: just like that: “Free.” That was all. It was that easy. Of course the guard I welshed to cursed me; I had expected that: it was a free country; every convict had a right to try to escape just as every guard and trusty had the right to shoot him in the back the first time he didn’t halt. But no unprintable stool pigeon had the right to warn the guard in advance.

I had to watch it too. That was on the bill too: the promissory note of breathing in a world that had Snopeses in it. I wanted to turn my head or anyway shut my eyes. But refusing to not look was all I had left now: the last sorry lousy almost worthless penny—the damn little thing looking like a little girl playing mama in the calico dress and sunbonnet that he believed was Flem’s idea (that had been difficult; he still wanted to believe that a man should be permitted to run at his fate, even if that fate was doom, in the decency and dignity of pants; it took a little doing to persuade him that a petticoat and a woman’s sunbonnet was all Flem could get). Walking; I had impressed that on him: not to run, but walk; as forlorn and lonely and fragile and alien in that empty penitentiary compound as a paper doll blowing across a rolling-mill; still walking even after he had passed the point where he couldn’t come back and knew it; even still walking on past the moment when he knew that he had been sold and that he should have known all along he was being sold, not blaming anybody for selling him nor even needing to sell him because hadn’t he signed—he couldn’t read but he could sign his name—that same promissory note too to breathe a little while, since his name was Snopes?

So he even ran before he had to. He ran right at them before I even saw them, before they stepped out of the ambush. I was proud, not just to be kin to him but of belonging to what Reba called all of us poor son of a bitches. Because it took five of them striking and slashing at his head with pistol barrels and even then it finally took the blackjack to stop him, knock him out.

The Warden sent for me. “Don’t tell me anything,” he said. “I wish I didn’t even know as much already as I suspect. In fact, if it was left to me, I’d like to lock you and him both in a cell and leave you, you for choice in handcuffs. But I’m under a bond too so I’m going to move you into solitary for a week or so, for your own protection. And not from him.”

“Don’t brag or grieve,” I said. “You had to sign one of them too.”

“What?” he said. “What did you say?”

“I said you don’t need to worry. He hasn’t got anything against me. If you don’t believe me, send for him.”

So he came in. The bruises and slashes from the butts and the blades of the sights were healing fine. The blackjack of course never had showed. “Hidy,” he said. To me. “I reckon you’ll see Flem before I will now.”

“Yes,” I said.

“Tell him he hadn’t ought to used that dress. But it don’t matter. If I had made it out then, maybe I would a changed. But I reckon I won’t now. I reckon I’ll jest wait.”

So Flem should have taken that suggestion about the ten grand. He could still do it. I could write him a letter: Sure you can raise ten thousand. All you need to do is swap Manfred de Spain a good jump at your wife. No: that won’t do: trying to peddle Eula Varner to Manfred de Spain is like trying to sell a horse to a man that’s already been feeding and riding it for ten or twelve years. But you got that girl, Linda. She ain’t but eleven or twelve but what the hell, put smoked glasses and high heels on her and rush her in quick and maybe De Spain won’t notice it.

Except that I wasn’t going to. But it wasn’t that that worried me. It was knowing that I wasn’t, knowing I was going to throw it away—I mean my commission of the ten grand for contacting the Chi syndicate for him. I don’t remember just when it was, I was probably pretty young, when I realised that I had come from what you might call a family, a clan, a race, maybe even a species, of pure sons of bitches. So I said, Okay, okay, if that’s the way it is, we’ll just show them. They call the best of lawyers, lawyers’ lawyers and the best of actors an actor’s actor and the best of athletes a ballplayer’s ballplayer. All right, that’s what we’ll do: every Snopes will make it his private and personal aim to have the whole world recognise him as THE son of a bitch’s son of a bitch.

But we never do it. We never make it. The best we ever do is to be just another Snopes son of a bitch. All of us, every one of us—Flem, and old Ab that I don’t even know exactly what kin he is, and Uncle Wes and mine and Clarence’s father I.O., then right on down the line: Clarence and me by what you might call simultaneous bigamy, and Virgil and Vardaman and Bilbo and Byron and Mink. I don’t even mention Eck and Wallstreet and Admiral Dewey because they don’t belong to us. I have always believed that Eck’s mother took some extracurricular night work nine months before he was born. So the one true bitch we had was not a bitch at all but a saint and martyr, the one technically true pristine immaculate unchallengeable son of a bitch we ever produced wasn’t even a Snopes.