Flags in the Dust (34 page)

“What were you whuppin’ that boy, for?” the cashier asked curiously, when Snopes returned to his desk.

“For not minding his own business,” he snapped, opening his ledger again.

During the hour the cashier was out to lunch Snopes was his outward usual self—uncommunicative but efficient, a little covertly sullen, with his mean, close-set eyes and his stubby
features; patrons remarked nothing unusual in his bearing. Nor did the cashier when he returned, sucking a toothpick and belching at intervals. But instead of going home to dinner, Snopes repaired to a street occupied by negro stores and barber shops and inquired from door to door. After a half hour search he found the negro he sought, held a few minutes’ conversation with him, then returned across town to his cousin’s restaurant and had a platter of hamburger steak and a cup of coffee. At two oclock he was back at his desk.

The afternoon passed. Three oclock came; he went around and touched old Bayard’s shoulder and he rose and dragged his chair inside and Snopes closed the doors and drew the green shades upon the windows. Then he totaled his ledgers while the cashier counted the cash. In the meantime Simon drove up to the door and presently old Bayard stalked forth and got in the carriage and was driven off. Snopes and the cashier compared notes and struck a balance, and while the other stacked the money away in receptacles he carried his ledgers one by one into the vault. The cashier followed with the cash and put it away and they emerged as the cashier was about to close the vault, when Snopes stopped him. “Forgot that cash-book,” he explained. The cashier returned to his window and Snopes carried the book into the vault and put it away and emerged and clashed the door to, and hiding the dial with his body, he rattled the knob briskly. The cashier had his back turned, rolling a cigarette.

“See it’s throwed good,” he said. Snopes rattled the knob again, then shook the door.

“That’s got it.” They took their hats and emerged from the cage and locked it behind them, and passed through the front door, which the cashier closed and shook also. He struck a match to his cigarette.

“See you tomorrow,” he said.

“All right,” Snopes agreed, and he stood looking after the other’s shapeless back in its shabby alpaca coat. He produced his soiled handkerchief and wiped his mouth again.

That evening about eight oclock he was back downtown. He stood for a time with the group that sat nightly in front of the drug store on the corner; stood quietly among them, listening but saying nothing, as was his way. Then he moved on, without being missed, and walked slowly up the street and stopped at the bank door. One or two passers spoke to him while he was finding his key and opening the door; he responded in his flat country idiom and entered and closed the door behind him. A single bulb burned above the vault. He raised the shade on the window beside it and entered the grilled cage and turned on the light above his desk. Here passers could see him, could have watched him for several minutes as he bent over his desk, writing slowly. It was his final letter, in which he poured out his lust and his hatred and his jealousy, and the language was the obscenity which his jealousy and desire had hoarded away in his temporarily half-crazed mind and which the past night and day had liberated. When it was finished he blotted it carefully and folded it and put it in his pocket, and snapped his light off. He entered the directors’ room and in the darkness he unlocked the door which gave onto the vacant lot, closed it and left it unlocked.

He returned to the front and drew the shade on the window, and drew the other shades to their full extent, until no crack of light showed at their edges, emerged and locked the door behind him. On the street he looked casually back at the windows. The shades were drawn close; the interior of the bank was invisible from the street.

The group still talked in front of the drug store and he stopped again on the outskirts of it. People passed back and
forth along the street and in or out of the drug store; one or two of the group drifted away, and newcomers took their places. An automobile drew up to the curb, was served by a negro lad; drove away. The clock on the courthouse struck nine measured strokes.

Soon, with a noise of starting engines, motor cars began to stream out of a side street and onto the square, and presently a flux of pedestrians appeared. It was the exodus from the picture show, and cars one after another drew up to the curb with young men and girls in them, and other youths and girls in pairs turned into the drug store with talk and shrill laughter and cries one to another, with slender bodies in delicate colored dresses, shrill as apes and awkward, divinely young. Then the more sedate groups—a man with a child or so gazing longingly into the scented and gleaming interior of the store, followed by three or four women—his wife and a neighbor or so—talking sedately among themselves; more children—little girls in prim and sibilant clots, and boys scuffling and darting with changing adolescent shouts. A few of the sitters rose and joined passing groups.

More belated couples came up the street and entered the drug store, and other cars; other couples emerged and strolled on. The night watchman came along presently, with his star on his open vest and a pistol and a flash light in his hip pockets; he too stopped and joined in the slow, unhurried talk. The last couple emerged from the drug store, and the last car drove away. And presently the lights behind them flashed off and the proprietor jingled his keys in the door and rattled it, and stood for a moment among them, then went on. Ten oclock. Snopes rose to his feet.

“Well, I reckon I’ll turn in,” he said generally.

“Time we all did,” another said, and they rose also. “Good night, Buck.”

“Good night, gentlemen,” the night watchman replied.

As he crossed the now empty square he looked up at the lighted face of the clock. It was ten minutes past eleven. There was no sign of life save the lonely figure of the night marshal in the door of the lighted postoffice lobby.

He left the square and entered a street and went steadily beneath the arc lights, having the street to himself and the regular recapitulation of his striding shadow dogging him out of the darkness, through the pool of the light and into darkness again. He turned a corner and followed a yet quieter street and turned presently from it into a lane between massed banks of honeysuckle higher than his head and sweet on the night air. The lane was dark and he increased his pace. On either hand the upper stories of houses rose above the honeysuckle, with now and then a lighted window among the dark trees. He kept close to the wall and went swiftly on, passing now between back premises. After a while another house loomed, and a serried row of cedars against the paler sky, and he stole beside a stone wall and so came opposite the garage. He stopped here and sought in the lush grass beneath the wall and stooped and picked up a pole, which he leaned against the wall. With the aid of the pole he mounted on to the wall and thence to the garage roof.

But the house was dark, and presently he slid to the ground and stole across the lawn and stopped beneath a window. There was a light somewhere toward the front, but no sound, no movement, and he stood for a time listening, darting his eyes this way and that, covert and ceaseless as a cornered animal.

The screen responded easily to his knife and he raised it and listened again. Then with a single scrambling motion he was in the room, crouching. Still no sound save the thudding of his heart, and the whole house gave off that unmistakable
emanation of temporary desertion. He drew out his handkerchief and wiped his mouth.

The light was in the next room, and he went on. The stairs rose from the end of this room and he scuttled silently across it and mounted swiftly into the upper darkness and groped forward until he touched a wall, then a door. The knob turned under his fingers.

It was the right room; he knew that at once: her presence was all about him, and for a time his heart thudded and thudded in his throat and fury and lust and despair shook him. He pulled himself together; he must get out quickly, and he groped his way across to the bed and lay face down upon it, his head buried in the pillows, writhing and making smothered, animal-like moanings. But he must get out, and he got up and groped across the room again. What little light there was was behind him now, and instead of finding the door he blundered into a chest of drawers, and stood there a moment, learning its shape with his hands. Then he opened one of the drawers and fumbled in it. It was filled with a faintly scented fragility of garments, but he could not distinguish one from another with his hands.

He found a match in his pocket and struck it beneath the shelter of his palm, and by its light he chose one of the soft garments, discovering as the match died a packet of letters in the corner of the drawer. He recognised them at once, dropped the dead match to the floor and took the packet from the drawer and put it in his pocket, and placed the letter he had just written in the drawer, and he stood for a time with the garment crushed against his face; remained so for some time, until a sound caused him to jerk his head up, listening. A car was coming up the drive, and as he sprang to the window, its lights swept beneath him and fell full upon the open garage, and he crouched at the window in a panic. Then he sped to the door
and stopped again crouching, panting and snarling with indecision.

He ran back to the window. The garage was dark, and two dark figures were approaching the house and he crouched beside the window until they had passed from sight. Then, still clutching the garment, he climbed out the window and swung from the sill a moment by his hands, and closed his eyes and dropped.

A crash of glass and he sprawled numbed by shock amid lesser crashes and a burst of stale, dry dust. He had fallen into a shallow flower pit and he scrambled out and tried to stand and fell again, while nausea swirled in him. It was his knee, and he lay sick and with drawn, gasping lips while his trouser leg sopped slowly and warmly, clutching the garment and staring at the dark sky with wide, mad eyes. He heard voices in the house, and a light came on behind the window above him and he turned crawling, and at a scrambling hobble he crossed the lawn and plunged into the shadow of the cedars beside the garage, where he lay watching the window in which a man leaned, peering out; and he moaned a little while his blood ran between his clasped fingers. He drove himself onward again and dragged his bleeding leg on up to the wall and dropped into the lane and cast the pole down. A hundred yards further he stopped and drew his torn trousers aside and tried to bandage the gash in his leg. But the handkerchief stained over almost at once, and still blood ran and ran down his leg and into his shoe.

Once in the back room of the bank, he rolled his trouser leg up and removed the handkerchief and bathed the gash at the lavatory. It still bled, and the sight of his own blood sickened him, and he swayed against the wall, watching his blood. Then he removed his shirt and bound it as tightly as he could about his leg. He still felt nausea, and he drank long of the
tepid water from the tap. Immediately it welled salinely within him and he clung to the lavatory, sweating, trying not to vomit, until the spell passed. His leg felt numb and dead, and he was weak and he wished to lie down but he dared not.

He entered the grille, his left heel showing yet a red print at each step. The vault door opened soundlessly; without a light he found the key to the cash box and opened it. He took only banknotes, but he took all he could find. Then he closed the vault and locked it, returned to the lavatory and wetted a towel and removed his heel prints from the linoleum floor. Then he passed out the back door, threw the latch so it would lock behind him. The clock on the courthouse rang midnight.

In an alley between two negro stores a man sat in a battered ford, waiting. He gave the negro a bill and the negro cranked the engine and came and stared curiously at the bloody cloth beneath his torn trousers. “Whut happened, boss? Y’aint hurt, is you?”

“Run into some wire,” he answered shortly. “She’s got plenty gas, aint she?” The negro said yes, and he drove on. As he crossed the square the night marshal, Buck, stood beneath the light before the postoffice, and Snopes cursed him with silent and bitter derision. He drove on and entered another street and passed from view, and presently the sound of his going had died away.

He drove through Frenchman’s Bend at two oclock, without stopping. The village was dark; Varner’s store, the blacksmith shop (now a garage too, with a gasoline pump), Mrs Littlejohn’s huge, unpainted boarding house—all the remembered scenes of his boyhood—were without life; he went on. He drove now along a rutted wagon road, between swampy jungle, at a snail’s pace. After a half hour the road mounted a
small knoll wooded with scrub oak and indiscriminate saplings, and faded into a barren, sun-baked surface in the middle of which squatted a low, broken backed log house. His lights swept across its gaping front, and a huge gaunt hound descended from the porch and bellowed at him. He stopped and switched the lights off.

His leg was stiff and dead, and when he descended he was forced to cling to the car for a time, moving it back and forth until it would bear his weight. The hound stood ten feet away and thundered at him in a sober conscientious fury until he spoke to it, whereupon it ceased its clamor but stood yet in an attitude of watchful belligerence. He limped toward it, and it recognised him, and together they crossed the barren plot in the soundless dust and mounted the veranda. “Turpin,” he called in a guarded voice.

The dog had followed him onto the porch, and it flopped noisily and scratched itself. The house consisted of two wings joined by an open hall; through the hall he could see sky, and another warped roof tree on the slope behind the house. His leg tingled and throbbed as with pins of fire. I got that ’ere bandage too tight, he thought. “Turpin.”

A movement from the wing at his left, and into the lesser obscurity of the hall a shape emerged and stood in vague relief against the sky, in a knee-length night-shirt and a shot gun. “Who’s thar?” the shape demanded.