This had postponed the call to the hospital. He put in another nickel.... There was nothing new about the guitar player.
"Like I told you," the doctor said, "we don't have the facilities for giving transfusions, and he's been moved plenty without you taking him to Memphis."
Walking over to the party, so as not to use his car, making the only sounds in the dark wet street, and only partly aware of the indeterminate shapes of houses with their soft-shining fanlights marking them off, there with the rain falling mistlike through the trees, he almost forgot what town he was in and which house he was bound for.
Ruth, in a long dark dress, leaned against an open door, laughing. From inside came the sounds of at least two people playing a duet on the piano.
"He would come like this and get all wet!" she cried over her shoulder into the room. She was leaning back on her hands. "What's the matter with your little blue car? I hope you brought us a present."
He went in with her and began shaking hands, and set the bottle wrapped in the paper sack on a table.
"He never forgets!" cried Ruth.
"Drinkin' whisky!" Everybody was noisy again.
"So this is the famous 'he' that everybody talks about all the time," pouted a girl in a white dress. "Is he one of your cousins, Ruth?"
"No kin of mine, he's nothing but a vagabond," said Ruth, and led Harris off to the kitchen by the hand.
I wish they'd call me "you" when I've got here, he thought tiredly.
"More has gone on than a little bit," she said, and told him the news while he poured fresh drinks into the glasses. When she accused him of nothing, of no carelessness or disregard of her feelings, he was fairly sure she had not heard about the assault in his car.
She was looking at him closely. "Where did you get that sunburn?"
"Well, I had to go to the Coast last week," he said.
"What did you do?"
"Same old thing." He laughed; he had started to tell her about something funny in Bay St. Louis, where an eloping couple had flagged him down in the residential section and threatened to break up if he would not carry them to the next town. Then he remembered how Ruth looked when he mentioned other places where he stopped on trips.
Somewhere in the house the phone rang and rang, and he caught himself jumping. Nobody was answering it.
"I thought you'd quit drinking," she said, picking up the bottle.
"I start and quit," he said, taking it from her and pouring his drink. "Where's my date?"
"Oh, she's in Leland," said Ruth.
They all drove over in two cars to get her.
She was a slight little thing, with her nightgown in some sort of little bag. She came out when they blew the horn, before he could go in after her....
"Let's go holler off the bridge," said somebody in the car ahead.
They drove over a little gravel road, miles through the misty fields, and came to the bridge out in the middle of nowhere.
"Let's dance," said one of the boys. He grabbed Carol around the waist, and they began to tango over the boards.
"Did you miss me?" asked Ruth. She stayed by him, standing in the road.
"Woo-hoo!" they cried.
"I wish I knew what makes it holler back," said one girl. "There's nothing anywhere. Some of my kinfolks can't even hear it."
"Yes, it's funny," said Harris, with a cigarette in his mouth.
"Some people say it's an old steamboat got lost once."
"Might be."
They drove around and waited to see if it would stop raining.
Back in the lighted rooms at Ruth's he saw Carol, his date, give him a strange little glance. At the moment he was serving her with a drink from the tray.
"Are you the one everybody's 'miratin' and gyratin' over?" she said, before she would put her hand out.
"Yes," he said. "I come from afar." He placed the strongest drink from the tray in her hand, with a little flourish.
"Hurry back!" called Ruth.
In the pantry Ruth came over and stood by him while he set more glasses on the tray and then followed him out to the kitchen. Was she at all curious about him? he wondered. For a moment, when they were simply close together, her lips parted, and she stared off at nothing; her jealousy seemed to let her go free. The rainy wind from the back porch stirred her hair.
As if under some illusion, he set the tray down and told her about the two hitch-hikers.
Her eyes flashed.
"What a—stupid thing!" Furiously she seized the tray when he reached for it.
The phone was ringing again. Ruth glared at him.
It was as though he had made a previous engagement with the hitch-hikers.
Everybody was meeting them at the kitchen door.
"Aha!" cried one of the men, Jackson. "He tried to put one over on you, girls. Somebody just called up, Ruth, about the murder in Tom's car."
"Did he die?" asked Harris, without moving.
"I knew all about it!" cried Ruth, her cheeks flaming. "He told me all about it. It practically ruined his car. Didn't it!"
"Wouldn't he get into something crazy like that?"
"It's because he's an angel," said the girl named Carol, his date, speaking in a hollow voice from her highball glass.
"Who phoned?" asked Harris.
"Old Mrs. Daggett, that old lady about a million years old that's always calling up. She was right there."
Harris phoned the doctor's home and woke the doctor's wife. The guitar player was still the same.
"This is so exciting, tell us all," said a fat boy. Harris knew he lived fifty miles up the river and had driven down under the impression that there would be a bridge game.
"It was just a fight."
"Oh, he wouldn't tell you, he never talks. I'll tell you," said Ruth. "Get your drinks, for goodness' sake."
So the incident became a story. Harris grew very tired of it.
"It's marvelous the way he always gets in with somebody and then something happens," said Ruth, her eyes completely black.
"Oh, he's my hero," said Carol, and she went out and stood on the back porch.
"Maybe you'll still be here tomorrow," Ruth said to Harris, taking his arm. "Will you be detained, maybe?"
"If he dies," said Harris.
He told them all good-bye.
"Let's all go to Greenville and get a Coke," said Ruth.
"No," he said. "Good night."
"'Aw river,'" said the girl in the white dress. "Isn't that what the little man said?"
"Yes," said Harris, the rain falling on him, and he refused to spend the night or to be taken in a car back to the hotel.
In the antlered lobby, Mr. Gene bent over asleep under a lamp by the desk phone. His freckles seemed to come out darker when he was asleep.
Harris woke him. "Go to bed," he said. "What was the idea? Anything happened?"
"I just wanted to tell you that little buzzard's up in 202. Locked and double-locked, handcuffed to the bed, but I wanted to tell you."
"Oh. Much obliged."
"All a gentleman could do," said Mr. Gene. He was drunk. "Warn you what's sleepin' under your roof."
"Thanks," said Harris. "It's almost morning. Look."
"Poor Mike can't sleep," said Mr. Gene. "He scrapes somethin' when he breathes. Did the other fella poop out?"
"Still unconscious. No change," said Harris. He took the bunch of keys which the proprietor was handing him.
"You keep 'em," said Mr. Gene.
In the next moment Harris saw his hand tremble and he took hold of it.
"A murderer!" whispered Mr. Gene. All his freckles stood out. "Here he came ... with not a word to say..."
"Not a murderer yet," said Harris, starting to grin.
When he passed 202 and heard no sound, he remembered what old Sobby had said, standing handcuffed in front of the hospital, with nobody listening to him. "I was jist tired of him always uppin' an' makin' a noise about ever'thing."
In his room, Harris
lay down on the bed without undressing or turning out the light. He was too tired to sleep. Half blinded by the unshaded bulb he stared at the bare plaster walls and the equally white surface of the mirror above the empty dresser. Presently he got up and turned on the ceiling fan, to create some motion and sound in the room. It was a defective fan which clicked with each revolution, on and on. He lay perfectly still beneath it, with his clothes on, unconsciously breathing in a rhythm related to the beat of the fan.
He shut his eyes suddenly. When they were closed, in the red darkness he felt all patience leave him. It was like the beginning of desire. He remembered the girl dropping money into her heart-shaped pocket, and remembered a disturbing possessiveness, which meant nothing, Ruth leaning on her hands. He knew he would not be held by any of it. It was for relief, almost, that his thoughts turned to pity, to wonder about the two tramps, their conflict, the sudden brutality when his back was turned. How would it turn out? It was in this suspense that it was more acceptable to him to feel the helplessness of his life.
He could forgive nothing in this evening. But it was too like other evenings, this town was too like other towns, for him to move out of this lying still clothed on the bed, even into comfort or despair. Even the rain—there was often rain, there was often a party, and there had been other violence not of his doing—other fights, not quite so pointless, but fights in his car; fights, unheralded confessions, sudden love-making—none of any of this his, not his to keep, but belonging to the people of these towns he passed through, coming out of their rooted pasts and their mock rambles, coming out of their time. He himself had no time. He was free; helpless. He wished he knew how the guitar player was, if he was still unconscious, if he felt pain.
He sat up on the bed and then got up and walked to the window.
"Tom!" said a voice outside in the dark.
Automatically he answered and listened. It was a girl. He could not see her, but she must have been standing on the little plot of grass that ran around the side of the hotel. Wet feet, pneumonia, he thought. And he was so tired he thought of a girl from the wrong town.
He went down and unlocked the door. She ran in as far as the middle of the lobby as though from impetus. It was Carol, from the party.
"You're wet," he said. He touched her.
"Always raining." She looked up at him, stepping back. "How are you?"
"O.K., fine," he said.
"I was wondering," she said nervously. "I knew the light would be you. I hope I didn't wake up anybody." Was old Sobby asleep? he wondered.
"Would you like a drink? Or do you want to go to the All-Nite and get a Coca-Cola?" he said.
"It's open," she said, making a gesture with her hand. "The All-Nite's open—I just passed it."
They went out into the mist, and she put his coat on with silent protest, in the dark street not drunken but womanly.
"You didn't remember me at the party," she said, and did not look up when he made his exclamation. "They say you never forget anybody, so I found out they were wrong about that anyway."
"They're often wrong," he said, and then hurriedly, "Who are you?"
"We used to stay at the Manning Hotel on the Coast every summer—I wasn't grown. Carol Thames. Just dances and all, but you had just started to travel then, it was on your trips, and you—you talked at intermission."
He laughed shortly, but she added:
"You talked about yourself."
They walked past the tall wet church, and their steps echoed.
"Oh, it wasn't so long ago—five years," she said. Under a magnolia tree she put her hand out and stopped him, looking up at him with her child's face. "But when I saw you again tonight I wanted to know how you were getting along."
He said nothing, and she went on.
"You used to play the piano."
They passed under a street light, and she glanced up as if to look for the little tic in his cheek.
"Out on the big porch where they danced," she said, walking on. "Paper lanterns..."
"I'd forgotten that, is one thing sure," he said. "Maybe you've got the wrong man. I've got cousins galore who all play the piano."
"You'd put your hands down on the keyboard like you'd say, 'Now this is how it really is!'" she cried, and turned her head away. "I guess I was crazy about you, though."
"Crazy about me then?" He struck a match and held a cigarette between his teeth.
"No—yes, and now too!" she cried sharply, as if driven to deny him.
They came to the little depot where a restless switch engine was hissing; and crossed the black street. The past and present joined like this, he thought, it never happened often to me, and it probably won't happen again. He took her arm and led her through the dirty screen door of the All-Nite.
He waited at the counter while she sat down by the wall table and wiped her face all over with her handkerchief. He carried the black coffees over to the table himself, smiling at her from a little distance. They sat under a calendar with some picture of giant trees being cut down.
They said little. A fly bothered her. When the coffee was all gone he put her into the old Cadillac taxi that always stood in front of the depot.
Before he shut the taxi door he said, frowning, "I appreciate it.... You're sweet."
Now she had torn her handkerchief. She held it up and began to cry. "What's sweet about me?" It was the look of bewilderment in her face that he would remember.
"To come out, like this—in the rain—to be here..." He shut the door, partly from weariness.
She was holding her breath. "I hope your friend doesn't die," she said. "All I hope is your friend gets well."
But when he woke up the next morning and phoned the hospital, the guitar player was dead. He had been dying while Harris was sitting in the AU-Nite.
"It was a murderer," said Mr. Gene, pulling Mike's ears. "That was just plain murder. No way anybody could call that an affair of honor."
The man called Sobby did not oppose an invitation to confess. He stood erect and turning his head about a little, and almost smiled at all the men who had come to see him. After one look at him Mr. Gene, who had come with Harris, went out and slammed the door behind him.
All the same, Sobby had found little in the night, asleep or awake, to say about it. "I done it, sure," he said. "Didn't ever'body see me, or was they blind?"
They asked him about the man he had killed.
"Name Sanford," he said, standing still, with his foot out, as if he were trying to recall something particular and minute. "But he didn't have nothing and he didn't have no folks. No more'n me. Him and me, we took up together two weeks back." He looked up at their faces as if for support. "He was uppity, though. He bragged. He carried a gittar around." He whimpered. "It was his notion to run off with the car."
Harris, fresh from the barbershop, was standing in the filling station where his car was being polished.
A ring of little boys in bright shirt-tails surrounded him and the car, with some colored boys waiting behind them.
"Could they git all the blood off the seat and the steerin' wheel, Mr. Harris?"
He nodded. They ran away.
"Mr. Harris," said a little colored boy who stayed. "Does you want the box?"
"The what?"
He pointed, to where it lay in the back seat with the sample cases. "The po' kilt man's gittar. Even the policemans didn't want it."
"No," said Harris, and handed it over.
A MEMORY
One summer morning when I was a child I lay on the sand after swimming in the small lake in the park. The sun beat down—it was almost noon. The water shone like steel, motionless except for the feathery curl behind a distant swimmer. From my position I was looking at a rectangle brightly lit, actually glaring at me, with sun, sand, water, a little pavilion, a few solitary people in fixed attitudes, and around it all a border of dark rounded oak trees, like the engraved thunderclouds surrounding illustrations in the Bible. Ever since I had begun takin
g painting lessons, I had made small frames with my fingers, to look out at everything.
Since this was a weekday morning, the only persons who were at liberty to be in the park were either children, who had nothing to occupy them, or those older people whose lives are obscure, irregular, and consciously of no worth to anything: this I put down as my observation at that time. I was at an age when I formed a judgment upon every person and every event which came under my eye, although I was easily frightened. When a person, or a happening, seemed to me not in keeping with my opinion, or even my hope or expectation, I was terrified by a vision of abandonment and wildness which tore my heart with a kind of sorrow. My father and mother, who believed that I saw nothing in the world which was not strictly coaxed into place like a vine on our garden trellis to be presented to my eyes, would have been badly concerned if they had guessed how frequently the weak and inferior and strangely turned examples of what was to come showed themselves to me.
I do not know even now what it was that I was waiting to see; but in those days I was convinced that I almost saw it at every turn. To watch everything about me I regarded grimly and possessively as a need. All through this summer I had lain on the sand beside the small lake, with my hands squared over my eyes, finger tips touching, looking out by this device to see everything: which appeared as a kind of projection. It did not matter to me what I looked at; from any observation I would conclude that a secret of life had been nearly revealed to me—for I was obsessed with notions about concealment, and from the smallest gesture of a stranger I would wrest what was to me a communication or a presentiment.
This state of exaltation was heightened, or even brought about, by the fact that I was in love then for the first time: I had identified love at once. The truth is that never since has any passion I have felt remained so hopelessly unexpressed within me or appeared so grotesquely altered in the outward world. It is strange that sometimes, even now, I remember unadulteratedly a certain morning when I touched my friend's wrist (as if by accident, and he pretended not to notice) as we passed on the stairs in school. I must add, and this is not so strange, that the child was not actually my friend. We had never exchanged a word or even a nod of recognition; but it was possible during that entire year for me to think endlessly on this minute and brief encounter which we endured on the stairs, until it would swell with a sudden and overwhelming beauty, like a rose forced into premature bloom for a great occasion.