Other Voices, Other Rooms (4 page)

“Here y’are,” said the woman, plunking down a dripping wet bottle of purple sodapop. “I declare, little one, you sure are hot and dusty-lookin.” She gave his head a merry pat. “Know somethin, you must be the boy Sam Radclif brung to town, say?”

Joel admitted this with a nod. He took a swallow of the drink, and it was lukewarm. “I want . . . that is, do you know how far it is from here to Skully’s Landing?” he said, realizing every ear in the place was tuned to him.

“Ummm,” the woman tinkered with her wart, and walled her eyes up into her head till they all but disappeared. “Hey, Romeo, how far you spec it is out to The Skulls,” she said, and grinned crazily. “I call it The Skulls on accounta . . .” but she did not finish, for at that moment the Negro boy of whom she’d asked the information, answered: “Two miles, more like three, maybe, ma’am.”

“Three miles,” she parroted. “But if I was you, babylove, I wouldn’t go traipsin over there.”

“Me neither,” whined a yellow-haired girl.

“Is there anyway I could get a ride out?”

Somebody said, “Ain’t Jesus Fever in town?”

Yeah, I saw Jesus—Jesus, he parked round by the Livery—What? Y’all mean old Jesus Fever? Christamighty, I thought he was way gone and buried!—Nah, man. He’s past a hundred but alive as you are.—Sure, I seen Jesus— Yeah, Jesus is here . . .

The woman grabbed a flyswatter and slammed it down with savage force. “Shut up that gab. I can’t hear a thing this boy says.”

Joel felt a little surge of pride, tinged with fright, at being the center of such a commotion. The woman fixed her zany eyes on a point somewhere above his head, and said: “What business you got with The Skulls, babylove?”

Now this again! He sketched the story briefly, omitting all except the simplest events, even to excluding a mention of the letters. He was trying to locate his father, that was the long and short of it. Could she help him?

Well, she didn’t know. She stood silent for some time, toying with her wart and staring off into space. “Hey, Romeo,” she said finally, “you say Jesus Fever’s in town?”

“Yes’m.” The boy she called Romeo was colored, and wore a puffy, stained chef ’s cap. He was stacking dishes in a sink behind the counter.

“Come here, Romeo,” she said, beckoning, “I got something to discuss.” Romeo joined her promptly in a rear corner. She began whispering excitedly, glancing over her shoulder now and then at Joel, who could not hear what they were saying. It was quiet in the room, and everyone was looking at him. He took out the bullet thefted from Sam Radclif and rolled it nervously in his hands.

Suddenly the door swung open. The skinny girl with fiery, chopped-off red hair swaggered inside, and stopped dead still, her hands cocked on her hips. Her face was flat, and rather impertinent; a network of big ugly freckles spanned her nose. Her eyes, squinty and bright green, moved swiftly from face to face, but showed none a sign of recognition; they paused a cool instant on Joel, then traveled elsewhere.

Hi, Idabel—Whatchasay, Idabel?

“I’m hunting sister,” she said. “Anybody seen her?” Her voice was boy-husky, sounding as though strained through some rough material: it made Joel clear his throat.

“Seen her sitting on the porch a while back,” said a chin-less young man.

The redhead leaned against the wall, and crossed her pencil-thin, bony-kneed legs. A ragged bandage stained with mercurochrome covered her left knee. She pulled out a blue yo-yo and let it unwind slowly to the floor and spin back. “Who’s that?” she asked, jerking her head towards Joel. When nobody answered, she looptylooped the yo-yo, shrugged and said: “Who cares, pray tell?” But she continued to watch him cagily from the corners of her eyes. “Hey, hows about a dope on credit, Roberta?” she called.

“
Miss
Roberta,” said the woman, momentarily interrupting her confab with Romeo. “I don’t need to tell you you have a right smart tongue, Idabel Thompkins, and always did have. And till such time as you learn a few ladylike manners, I’d be obliged if you’d keep outa my place, hear? Besides, since when have you got all this big credit? Ha! March now . . . and don’t come back till you put on some decent female clothes.”

“You know what you can do,” sassed the girl, stomping out the door. “This old dive’ll have a mighty long wait before I bring my trade here again, you betcha.” Once outside, her silhouette darkened the screen as she paused to peer in at Joel.

And now dusk was coming on. A sea of deepening green spread the sky like some queer wine, and across this vast green, shadowed clouds were pushed sluggishly by a mild breeze. Presently the trek homeward would commence, and afterwards the stillness of Noon City would be almost a sound itself: the sound a footfall might make among the mossy tombs on the dark ledge. Miss Roberta had lent Romeo as Joel’s guide. The two kept duplicate pace; the Negro boy carried Joel’s bag; wordlessly they turned the corner by the jail, and there was the stable, a barnlike structure of faded red which Joel had noticed earlier that day. A number of men who looked like a gang of desperadoes in a Western picture-show were congregated near the hitching post, passing a whiskey bottle from hand to hand; a second group, less boisterous, played a game with a jackknife under the dark area of an oak tree. Swarms of dragonflies quivered above a slime-coated water trough; and a scabby hound dog padded back and forth, sniffing the bellies of tied-up mules. One of the whiskey drinkers, an old man with long white hair and a long white beard, was feeling pretty good evidently, for he was clapping his hands and doing a little shuffle-dance to a tune that was probably singing in his head.

The colored boy escorted Joel round the side of the stable to a backlot where wagons and saddled horses were packed so close a swinging tail was certain to strike something. “That’s him,” said Romeo, pointing his finger, “there’s Jesus Fever.”

But Joel had seen at once the pygmy figure huddled atop the seatplank of a grey wagon parked on the lot’s further rim: a kind of gnomish little Negro whose primitive face was sharp against the drowning green sky. “Don’t less us be fraid,” said Romeo, leading Joel through the maze of wagons and animals with timid caution. “You best hold tight to my hand, white boy: Jesus Fever, he the oldest ol buzzard you ever put eyes on.”

Joel said, “But I’m not afraid,” and this was true.

“Shhh!”

As the boys approached, the little pygmy cocked his head at a wary angle; then slowly, with the staccato movements of a mechanical doll, he turned sideways till his eyes, yellow feeble eyes dotted with milky specks, looked down on them with dreamy detachment. He had a funny derby hat perched rakishly on his head, and in the candy-striped ribbon-band was jabbed a speckled turkey feather.

Romeo stood hesitantly waiting, as if expecting Joel to take the lead; but when the white child kept still, he said: “You lucky you come to town, Mister Fever. This here little gentman’s Skully kin, and he going out to the Landing for to live.”

“I’m Mister Sansom’s son,” said Joel, though suddenly, gazing up at the dark and fragile face, this didn’t seem to mean much. Mr Sansom. And who was he? A nothing, a nobody. A name that did not appear even to have particular significance for the old man whose sunken, blind-looking eyes studied him without expression.

Then Jesus Fever raised the derby a respectful inch. “Say I should find him here: Miss Amy say,” he whispered hoarsely. His face was like a black withered apple, and almost destroyed; his polished forehead shone as though a purple light gleamed under the skin; his sickle-curved posture made him look as though his back were broken: a sad little brokeback dwarf crippled with age. Yet, and this impressed Joel’s imagination, there was a touch of the wizard in his yellow, spotted eyes: it was a tricky quality that suggested, well, magic and things read in books. “I here yestiday, day fore, cause Miss Amy, she say wait,” and he trembled under the impact of a deep breath. “Now I can’t talk no whole lot: ain’t got the strenth. So up, child. Gettin towards night, and night’s misery on my bones.”

“Right with you, Mister Jesus,” said Joel without enthusiasm. Romeo gave him a boost into the wagon, and handed up the suitcase. It was an old wagon, wobbly and rather like an oversized peddler’s cart; the floor was strewn with dry cornhusks and croquer sacks which smelled sweetly sour.

“Git, John Brown,” urged Jesus Fever, gently slapping the reins against a tan mule’s back. “Lift them feet, John Brown, lift them feet. . . .”

Slowly the wagon pulled from the lot and groaned up a path onto the road. Romeo ran ahead, gave the mule’s rump a mighty whack and darted off; Joel felt a quick impulse to call him back, for it came to him all at once that he did not want to reach Skully’s Landing alone. But there was nothing to be done about it now. Out in front of the stable the bearded drunk had quit dancing, and the hound dog was squatting under the water trough scratching fleas. The wagon’s rickety wheels made dust clouds that hung in the green air like powdered bronze. A bend in the road: Noon City was gone.

It was night, and the wagon crept over an abandoned country road where the wheels ground softly through deep fine sand, muting John Brown’s forlorn hoofclops. Jesus Fever had so far spoken only twice, each time to threaten the mule with some outlandish torture: he was going to skin him raw or split his head with an axe, possibly both. Finally he’d given up and, still hunched upright on the seatplank, fallen asleep. “Much further?” Joel asked once, and there was no answer. The reins lay limply entwined round the old man’s wrists, but the mule skillfully guided the wagon unaided.

Relaxed as a rag doll, Joel was stretched on a croquer-sack mattress, his legs dangling over the wagon’s end. A vine-like latticework of stars frosted the southern sky, and with his eyes he interlinked these spangled vines till he could trace many ice-white resemblances: a steeple, fantastic flowers, a springing cat, the outline of a human head, and other curious designs like those made by snowflakes. There was a vivid, slightly red three-quarter moon; the evening wind eerily stirred shawls of Spanish moss which draped the branches of passing trees. Here and there in the mellow dark fireflies signaled one another as though messaging in code. He listened contented and untroubled to the remote, singing-saw noise of night insects.

Then presently the music of a childish duet came carrying over the sounds of the lonesome countryside: “What does the robin do then, poor thing . . .” Like specters he saw them hurrying in the moonshine along the road’s weedy edge. Two girls. One walked with easy grace, but the other moved as jerky and quick as a boy, and it was she that Joel recognized.

“Hello, there,” he said boldly when the wagon overtook them.

Both girls had watched the wagon’s approach, and slowed their step perceptibly; but the one who was unfamiliar, as if startled, cried, “Gee Jemima!” She had long, long hair that fell past her hips, and her face, the little he could see of it, smudged as it was in shadow, seemed very friendly, very pretty. “Why, isn’t it just grand of you to come along this way and want to give us a ride?”

“Help yourself,” he said, and slid over to make a seat.

“I’m Miss Florabel Thompkins,” she announced, after she’d hopped agilely up beside him, and pulled her dresshem below her knees. “This is the Skullys’ wagon? Sure, that’s Jesus Fever . . . is he asleep? Well, don’t that beat everything.” She talked rapidly in a flighty, too birdlike manner, as if mimicking a certain type of old lady. “Come on, sister, there’s oodles of room.”

The sister trudged on behind the wagon. “I’ve got two feet and I reckon I’m not such a flirt I can’t find the willpower to put one in front of the other, thanks all the same,” she said, and gave her shorts an emphatic hitch.

“You’re welcome to ride,” said Joel weakly, not knowing what else to do; for she was a funny kid, no doubt about it.

“Oh, folderol,” said Florabel Thompkins, “don’t you pay her no mind. That’s just what Mama calls Idabel Foolishness. Let her walk herself knock-kneed for what it means to the great wide world. No use trying to reason with her: she’s got willful ways, Idabel has. Ask anybody.”

“Huh,” was all Idabel said in her defense.

Joel looked from one to the other, and concluded he liked Florabel the best; she was so pretty, at least he imagined her to be, though he could not see her face well enough to judge fairly. Anyway, her sister was a tomboy, and he’d had a special hatred of tomboys ever since the days of Eileen Otis. This Eileen Otis was a beefy little roughneck who had lived on the same block in New Orleans, and she used to have a habit of waylaying him, stripping off his pants, and tossing them high into a tree. That was years gone by, but the memory of her could infuriate him still. He pictured Florabel’s redheaded sister as a regular Eileen Otis.

“We’ve got us a lovely car, you know,” said Florabel. “It’s a green Chevrolet that six persons can ride in without anybody sitting on anybody’s lap, and there are real window-shades you can pull up or down with darling toy babies. Papa won this lovely Chevrolet from a man at a cock-fight, which I think was real smart of him, only Mama says different. Mama’s as honest as the day is long, and she don’t hold with the cock-fights. But what I’m trying to say is: we don’t usually have to hitch rides, and with strangers, too . . . course we do know Jesus Fever . . . kinda. But what’s your name? Joel? Joel what? Knox . . . well, Joel Knox, what I’m trying to say is my Papa usually drives us to town in our lovely car. . . .” She jabbered on and on, and he was content to listen till, turning his head, he saw her sister, and thought she was looking at him peculiarly. As this exchange of stares continued, a smileless but amused look that passed between them was lighted by the moon; it was as if each were saying:
I don’t think so much of you, either.
“. . . but one time I just happened to slam the door on Idabel’s hand,” Florabel was still talking of the car, “and now her thumbnail won’t grow the least bit: it’s all lumpy and black. But she didn’t cry or take on, which was very brave on her part; now me, I couldn’t stand to have such a nasty old . . . show him your hand, sister.”