‘Speak up,’ Jake said. ‘How much do I owe you?’
Brannon opened a drawer and put on the counter a public-school tablet. Slowly he turned over the pages and Jake watched him. The tablet looked more like a private notebook than the place where he kept his regular accounts. There were long lines of figures, added, divided, and subtracted, and little drawings. He stopped at a certain page and Jake saw his last name written at the corner. On the page there were no figures--only small checks and crosses. At random across the page were drawn little round, seated cats with long curved lines for tails. Jake stared. The faces of the little cats were human and female. The faces of the little cats were Mrs. Brannon.
‘I have checks here for the beers,’ Brannon said. ‘And crosses for dinners and straight lines for the whiskey. Let me see--’ Brannon rubbed his nose and his eyelids drooped down. Then he shut the tablet. ‘Approximately twenty dollars.’
‘It’ll take me a long time,’ Jake said. ‘But maybe you’ll get it’
‘There’s no big hurry.’
Jake leaned against the counter. ‘Say, what kind of a place is this town?’
‘Ordinary,’ Brannon said. ‘About like any other place the same size.’
‘What population?’
‘Around thirty thousand.’
Jake opened the package of tobacco and rolled himself a cigarette. His hands were shaking. ‘Mostly mills?’
That’s right. Four big cotton mills--those are the main ones. A hosiery factory. Some gins and sawmills.’
‘What kind of wages?’
‘I’d say around ten or eleven a week on the average--but then of course they get laid off now and then. What makes you ask all this? You mean to try to get a job in a mill?’
Jake dug his fist into his eye and rubbed it sleepily. ‘Don’t know. I might and I might not.’ He laid the newspaper on the counter and pointed out the advertisement he had just read. ‘I think I’ll go around and look into this.’
Brannon read and considered. ‘Yeah,’ he said finally. ‘I’ve seen that show. It’s not much--just a couple of contraptions such as a flying-jinny and swings. It corrals the colored people and mill hands and kids. They move around to different vacant lots in town.’
‘Show me how to get there.’
Brannon went with him to the door and pointed out the direction. ‘Did you go on home with Singer this morning?’
Jake nodded.
‘What do you think of him?’
Jake bit his lips. The mute’s face was in his mind very clearly.
It was like the face of a friend he had known for a long time.
He had been thinking of the man ever since he had left his room. ‘I didn’t even know he was a dummy,’ he said finally.
He began walking again down the hot, deserted street. He did not walk as a stranger in a strange town. He seemed to be looking for someone. Soon he entered one of the mill districts bordering the river. The streets became narrow and unpaved and they were not empty any longer. Groups of dingy, hungry-looking children called to each other and played games. The two-room shacks, each one like the other, were rotten and unpainted. The stink of food and sewage mingled with the dust in the air. The falls up the river made a faint rushing sound. People stood silently in doorways or lounged on steps.
They looked at Jake with yellow, expressionless faces. He stared back at them with wide, brown eyes. He walked jerkily, and now and then he wiped his mouth with the hairy back of his hand.
At the end of Weavers Lane there was a vacant block. It had once been used as a junk yard for old automobiles. Rusted pieces of machinery and torn inner tubes still littered the ground. A trailer was parked in one corner of the lot, and nearby was a flying-jinny partly covered with canvas.
Jake approached slowly. Two little younguns in overalls stood before the flying-jinny. Near them, seated on a box, a Negro man drowsed in the late sunshine, his knees collapsed against each other. In one hand he held a sack of melted chocolate.
Jake watched him stick his fingers in the miry candy and then lick them slowly.
‘Who’s the manager of this outfit?’
The Negro thrust his two sweet fingers between his lips and rolled over them with his tongue. ‘He a red-headed man,’ he said when he had finished. ‘That all I know, Cap’n.’
‘Where’s he now? ’
‘He over there behind that largest wagon.’ Jake slipped off his tie as he walked across the grass and staffed it into his pocket. The sun was beginning to set in the west. Above the black line of housetops the sky was warm crimson. The owner of the show stood smoking a cigarette by himself. His red hair sprang up like a sponge on the top of his head and he stared at Jake with gray, flabby eyes. ‘You the manager? ‘Uh-huh. Patterson’s my name.’
‘I come about the job in this morning’s paper.’
‘Yeah. I don’t want no greenhorn. I need a experienced mechanic.’
‘I got plenty of experience,’ Jake said. ‘What you ever done? ‘I’ve worked as a weaver and loom-fixer. I’ve worked in garages and an automobile assembly shop. All sorts of different things.’ Patterson guided him toward the partly covered flying-jinny.
The motionless wooden horses were fantastic in the late afternoon sun. They pranced up statically, pierced by their dull gilt bars. The horse nearest Jake had a splintery wooden crack in its dingy rump and the eyes walled blind and frantic, shreds of paint peeled from the sockets. The motionless merry-go-round seemed to Jake like something in a liquor dream.
‘I want a experienced mechanic to run this and keep the works in good shape,’ Patterson said.
‘I can do that all right.’
‘It’s a two-handed job,’ Patterson explained. ‘You’re in charge of the whole attraction. Besides looking after the machinery you got to keep the crowd in order. You got to be sure that everybody gets on has a ticket. You got to be sure that the tickets are O.K. and not some old dance-hall ticket. Everybody wants to ride them horses, and you’d be surprised what niggers will try to put over on you when they don’t have no money. You got to keep three eyes open all the time.’
Patterson led him to the machinery inside the circle of horses and pointed out the various parts. He adjusted a lever and the thin jangle of mechanical music began. The wooden cavalcade around them seemed to cut them off from the rest of the world. When the horses stopped, Jake asked a few questions and operated the mechanism himself.
‘The fellow I had quit on me,’ Patterson said when they had come out again into the lot. ‘I always hate to break in a new man.’
‘When do I start?’
Tomorrow afternoon. We run six days and nights a week--beginning at four and shutting up at twelve. You’re to come about three and help get things going. And it takes about a hour after the show to fold up for the night.’
‘What about pay?’
‘Twelve dollars.’
Jake nodded, and Patterson held out a dead-white, boneless hand with dirty fingernails.
It was late when he left the vacant lot. The hard, blue sky had blanched and in the east there was a white moon. Dusk softened the outline of the houses along the street. Jake did not return immediately through Weavers Lane, but wandered in the neighborhoods nearby. Certain smells, certain voices heard from a distance, made him stop short now and then by the side of the dusty street. He walked erratically, jerking from one direction to another for no purpose. His head felt very light, as though it were made of thin glass. A chemical change was taking place in him. The beers and whiskey he had stored so continuously in his system set in a reaction. He was sideswiped by drunkenness. The streets which had seemed so dead before were quick with life. There was a ragged strip of grass bordering the street, and as Jake walked along the ground seemed to rise nearer to his face. He sat down on the border of grass and leaned against a telephone pole. He settled himself comfortably, crossing his legs Turkish fashion and smoothing down the ends of his mustache. Words came to him and dreamily he spoke them aloud to himself.
Resentment is the most precious flower of poverty. Yeah.
It was good to talk. The sound of his voice gave him pleasure.