“Look,” Haze said, “I’m going where I’m going—two doors from here. I got a woman. I got a woman, see? And that’s where I’m going—to visit her. I don’t need to go with you.”
“I could pay you back next week,” Enoch said. “I work at the city zoo. I guard a gate and I get paid ever’ week.”
“Get away from me,” Haze said.
“People ain’t friendly here. You ain’t from here but you ain’t friendly neither.”
Haze didn’t answer him. He went on with his neck drawn close to his shoulder blades as if he were cold.
“You don’t know nobody neither,” Enoch said. “You ain’t got no woman nor nothing to do. I knew when I first seen you you didn’t have nobody nor nothing but Jesus. I seen you and I knew it.”
“This is where I’m going in at,” Haze said, and he turned up the walk without looking back at Enoch.
Enoch stopped. “Yeah,” he cried, “oh yeah,” and he ran his sleeve under his nose to stop the snivel. “Yeah,” he cried, “go on where you goin’ but lookerhere.” He slapped at his pocket and ran up and caught Haze’s sleeve and rattled the peeler box at him. “She give me this. She give it to me and there ain’t nothing you can do about it. She told me where they lived and ast me to visit them and bring you—not you bring me, me bring you—and it was you follerin’ them.” His eyes glinted through his tears and his face stretched in an evil crooked grin. “You act like you think you got wiser blood than anybody else,” he said, “but you ain’t! I’m the one has it. Not you. Me”
Haze didn’t say anything. He stood there for an instant, small in the middle of the steps, and then he raised his arm and hurled the stack of tracts he had been carrying. It hit Enoch in the chest and knocked his mouth open. He stood looking, with his mouth hanging open, at where it had hit his front, and then he turned and tore off down the street; and Haze went into the house.
Since the night before was the first time he had slept with any woman, he had not been very successful with Mrs. Watts. When he finished, he was like something washed ashore on her, and she had made obscene comments about him, which he remembered off and on during the day. He was uneasy in the thought of going to her again. He didn’t know what she would say when he opened the door and she saw him there.
When he opened the door and she saw him thereť she said, “Ha ha.”
The black hat sat on his head squarely. He came in with it on and when it knocked the electric light bulb that hung down from the middle of the ceiling, he took it off. Mrs. Watts was in bed, applying a grease to her face. She rested her chin on her hand and watched him. He began to move around the room, examining this and that. His throat got dryer and his heart began to grip him like a little ape clutching the bars of its cage. He sat down on the edge of her bed, with his hat in his hand.
Mrs. Watts’s grin was as curved and sharp as the blade of a sickle. It was plain that she was so well-adjusted that she didn’t have to think any more. Her eyes took everything in whole, like quicksand. “That Jesus-seeing hat!” she said. She sat up and pulled her nightgown from under her and took it off. She reached for his hat and put it on her head and sat with her hands on her hips, walling her eyes in a comical way. Haze stared for a minute, then he made three quick noises that were laughs. He jumped for the electric light cord and took off his clothes in the dark.
Once when he was small, his father took him to a carnival that stopped in Melsy. There was one tent that cost more money a little off to one side. A dried-up man with a horn voice was barking it. He didn’t say what was inside. He said it was so SINsational that it would cost any man that wanted to see it thirty-five cents, and it was so Exclusive, only fifteen could get in at a time. His father sent him to a tent where two monkeys danced, and then he made for it, moving close to the walls of things like he moved. Haze left the monkeys and followed him, but he didn’t have thirty-five cents. He asked the barker what was inside.
“Beat it,” the man said. “There ain’t no pop and there ain’t no monkeys.”
“I already seen them,” he said.
“That’s fine,” the man said, “beat it.”
“I got fifteen cents,” he said. “Whyn’t you lemme in and I could see half of it?” It’s something about a privy, he was thinking. It’s some men in a privy. Then he thought, maybe it’s a man and a woman in a privy. She wouldn’t want me in there. “I got fifteen cents,” he said.
“It’s more than half over,” the man said, fanning with his straw hat. “You run along.”
“That’ll be fifteen cents worth then,” Haze said.
“Scram,” the man said.
“Is it a nigger?” Haze asked. “Are they doing something to a nigger?”
The man leaned off his platform and his dried-up face drew into a glare. “Where’d you get that idear?” he said.
“I don’t know,” Haze said.
“How old are you?” the man asked.
“Twelve,” Haze said. He was ten.
“Gimme that fifteen cents,” the man said, “and get in there.”
He slid the money on the platform and scrambled to get in before it was over. He went through the flap of the tent and inside there was another tent and he went through that. All he could see were the backs of the men. He climbed up*on a bench and looked over their heads. They were looking down into a lowered place where something white was lying, squirming a little, in a box lined with black cloth. For a second he thought it was a skinned animal and then he saw it was a woman. She was fat and she had a face like an ordinary woman except there was a mole on the corner of her lip, that moved when she grinned, and one on her side.
“Had one of themther built into ever’ casket/’ his father, up toward the front, said, “be a heap ready to go sooner/*
Haze recognized the voice without looking. He slid down off the bench and scrambled out of the tent. He crawled out under the side of the outside one because he didn’t want to pass the barker. He got in the back of a truck and sat down in the far corner of it. The carnival was making a tin roar outside.
His mother was standing by the washpot in the yard, looking at him, when he got home. She wore black all the time and her dresses were longer than other women’s. She was standing there straight, looking at him. He moved behind a tree and got out of her view, but in a few minutes, he could feel her watching him through the tree. He saw the lowered place and the casket again and a thin woman in the casket who was too long for it. Her head stuck up at one end and her knees were raised to make her fit. She had a cross-shaped face and hair pulled close to her head. He stood flat against the tree, waiting. She left the washpot and came toward him with a stick. She said, “What you seen?
“What you seen?” she said.
“What you seen,” she said, using the same tone of voice all the time. She hit him across the legs with the stick, but he was like part of the tree. “Jesus died to redeem you,” she said.
“I never ast him,” he muttered.
She didn’t hit him again but she stood looking at him, shut-mouthed, and he forgot the guilt of the tent for the nameless unplaced guilt that was in him. In a minute she threw the stick away from her and went back to the washpot, still shut-mouthed.
The next day he took his shoes in secret out into the woods. He didn’t wear them except for revivals and in the winter. He took them out of the box and filled the bottoms of them with stones and small rocks and then he put them on. He laced them up tight and walked in them through the woods for what he knew to be a mile, until he came to a creek, and then he sat down and took them off and eased his feet in the wet sand. He thought, that ought to satisfy Him. Nothing happened. If a stone had fallen he would have taken it as a sign. After a while he drew his feet out of the sand and let them dry, and then he put the shoes on again with the rocks still in them and he walked a half-mile back before he took them off.