Uncollected Stories of William Faulkner (74 page)

“You already had it.”

“You said you would give me one when I brought her back.”

“No I didn’t. I said to wait until then to take the one I said this afternoon I would give you. But you wouldn’t wait.”

“No you didn’t. I said this afternoon if you would give me a drink I would go and get her and you said, all right, and then tonight you said you would give me a drink when I brought her back and so here she is and so where is it?” Again Skeet grasped at the bottle inside his shirt; again he struck Skeet’s hand away. “All right,” Skeet said. “If you aint going to give me one, I aint going to leave.” So once more he squatted, bringing Skeet’s blunt swallowing profile and the tilted bottle into relief against the sky; once more he snatched the bottle away: this time with actual anger.

“Do you want to drink it all?” he cried, hissed, in a thin desperate voice.

“Sure,” Skeet said. “Why not? She dont want none of it. And you dont like it.”

“That’s all right about that,” he said, trembling. “It’s mine, aint it? Aint it mine? What?”

“All right, all right, keep your shirt on.” He looked at them. “You coming to town now?”

“No.”

“Why, I told Aunt Etta I was going to the show,” Susan said.

“No,” he said again. “We aint coming to town. Go on, now. Go on.”

For a moment longer Skeet looked at them. “Oke,” he said at last. They watched him go on across the lawn.

“I guess we better go to the show,” she said. “I told Aunt Etta I was, and somebody might—” He turned toward her; he was trembling now; his hands felt queer and clumsy as they touched her.

“Susan,” he said; “Susan—” Now he held her, his hands numb: it was not his hands which told him that she was strained back a little, looking at him curiously.

“What’s the matter with you tonight?” she said.

“Nothing,” he said. He released her and tried to put the bottle into her hand. “Here,” he said. “There’s some water over there, in the hydrant; you can drink out of the hydrant—”

“I dont want it,” she said. “I dont like it.”

“Please, Susan,” he said; “please.” He held her, recoiled and now motionless, her body arched and tense. Then she took the bottle. For an instant he believed that she was going to drink; a fierce hot wave of triumph rushed over him. Then he heard the faint dull sound of the flask when it struck the earth and then he was embracing her—the reed-thin familiar body, the mouth, the cool comfortable unlustful kissing of adolescence, to which he succumbed as usual, floated, swimming without effort on into a cool dark water smelling of spring; for the moment betrayed, Delilah-sheared, though not for long; perhaps it was her voice, what she said:

“Now come on. Let’s go to the show.”

“No. Not the show.” Now he felt her pause in sheer amazement.

“You mean, you wont take me?”

“No,” he said. He was on hands and knees now, hunting the
bottle. But there was the need for haste again and he could not find the bottle at once; besides, it did not matter. He rose; his arm about her was trembling; he had a flashing conviction that, because of its numbness and trembling, he might lose her here, at the brink.

“Oh,” she said, “you’re hurting me!”

“All right,” he said. “Come on.”

“Where are we going?”

“Just there,” he said. “Just yonder.” He led her on to the steps and onto the dark veranda. She was holding back and even tugging at his arm and fingers but he did not know it because there was no feeling in his arm. He just went on, stumbling a little at the steps, half dragging her up, saying, “I thought I was going to die and then I got the letter. I thought I would have to die and then the letter came” and something else deeper than that, voiceless even:
Susan! Susan! Susan! Susan!
There was a porch swing in the angle. She tried to stop there; she evidently thought that that was where he was going. When she saw it she even stopped holding back, and when they passed it she came obediently, as though passive now not with amazement but with sheer curiosity as he led her to the french door and pushed it inward. Then she stopped; she began to struggle.

“No,” she said. “No. No. No. No.”

“Yes. They are gone. It will be just—” He said, struggling with her, dragging her toward the door. Then she began to cry—a loud wail of shocked amazement like a struck child.

“Hush!” he cried. “Jesus, hush!” She stood backed into the wall beside the open window, wailing with the loud obliviousness of five or six. “Please, Susan!” he said. “Stop bawling! They will hear us! Stop!” He grasped her, trying to close her mouth with his hand.

“Take your nasty hands off of me!” [she] cried, struggling.

“All right, all right.” He held her. He began to lead her away. He led her to the swing and drew her into it, holding her. “Hush, hush! Jesus, hush!”

“You let me alone!” she wailed. “You stop!” But she was not shrieking now, though she still wept with that terrific abandon, not struggling, fighting him now as he held her, trying to hold her quiet.

“I didn’t mean anything,” he said. “It was just what your note said. I thought that—”

“I didn’t!” she cried. “I didn’t!”

“All right, all right,” he said. He held her. He held her clumsily; he realised that she was clinging to him now. He felt like wood—the carcass from which sense, sensibility, sentience, had fled along with the sweet wild fires of hope; he thought in quiet amazement:
I wouldn’t have hurt her. All I wanted was just to seduce somebody
.

“You sc-scared me so bad,” she said, clinging to him.

“Yes, all right. I’m sorry. I never meant to. Shhhhh, now.”

“Maybe I will tomorrow night. But you scared me so.”

“All right, all right.” He held her. He felt nothing at all now, no despair, no regret, not even surprise. He was thinking of himself and Skeet in the country, lying on a hill somewhere under the moon with the bottle between them, not even talking.

When Don Reeves was on the
Sentinel
he used to spend six nights a week playing checkers at the Police Station. The seventh night they played poker. He told me this story:

   Martin is sitting in the chair. Govelli sits on the desk, his thigh hung over the edge, his hat on and his thumbs in his vest, the cigarette on his lower lip bobbing up and down while he tells Martin about Popeye running over the red light with a car full of whiskey, barely missing a pedestrian. They—the onlookers, the other pedestrians—ran the car into the curb by a sheer outraged weight of over-tried civic virtue as personified by long-suffering and vulnerable bone and flesh, and held Popeye there, the women shrieking and screaming and the pedestrian on the running board waving his puny fist in Popeye’s face; and then Popeye drew a pistol—a slight man with a dead face and dead black hair and eyes and a delicate hooked little nose and no chin, crouching snarling behind the neat blue automatic. He was a little, dead-looking bird in a tight black suit like a vaudeville actor of twenty years ago, with a savage falsetto voice like a choir-boy, and he was considered quite a personage in his own social and professional circles. I understand he left more than one palpitant heart among the night-blooming sisterhood of DeSoto street when he cleared these parts. There was nothing he could do with his money save give it away, you see. That’s our American tragedy: we have to give away so much of our money, and there’s nobody to give it to save the poets and painters. And if we gave it to them, they would probably stop being poets
and painters. And that little flat ubiquitous pistol had caused more than one masculine gland to function overtime, and at least one to stop altogether; in this case the heart also. But his principal bid for interest and admiration among them was the fact that he went each summer to Pensacola to visit his aged mother, telling her that he was a hotel clerk. Have you noticed how people whose lives are equivocal, not to say chaotic, are always moved by the homely virtues. Go to the brothel or the convict camp if you would hear the songs about sonny boy and about mother.

So the cop took them all in—the car full of liquor, the hysterical and outraged pedestrian, and Popeye and the pistol—followed by an augmenting cloud of public opinion noisy as blackbirds, and including two casual reporters.

It may have been the two reporters that tipped the scales with Martin. It couldn’t have been the mere presence of liquor in the car nor the fact that Popeye was on his way to Martin’s house with it when he ran past the light; the cops themselves would have seen to that, Popeye being better known to them by sight than Martin, even. It had not been ten days since Martin extricated Popeye from a similar predicament, and doubtless the cops had already got the car out of the picture as soon as they reached the station. It must have been the presence of the two reporters, those symbols of the vox pop which even this Volstead Napoleon, this little corporal of polling-booths, dared not flout and outrage beyond a certain point.

So he sits in the single chair behind the desk. I am a good mind,” he says. “I am a good mind. How many times have I told you not to let that durn little rat tote a pistol? Have you and him both forgot about that business last year?”

That was when they had Popeye in jail without bond for that killing. They had him dead to rights; a cold-blooded job if there ever was one, even though Popeye had done a public service (as Martin himself said when he heard it; “If he’d just go on now and commit suicide, I’ll put them both up a monument”) when he did it. But anyway they had him, lying in jail there with that strange—but maybe all hop-heads are crazy—strange conviction of his invulnerability. He had a certain code like he had a certain code in his clothing, his tight black suits, limited but positive. He used to get hopped up and deliver long diatribes on the liquor traffic, using the pistol for emphasis. He wouldn’t—or couldn’t—drink
himself, and he hated liquor worse than a Baptist deacon.

As near as anybody could discover, he never even took a child’s precautions to conceal or mitigate the deed or his part in it. He wouldn’t say one way or the other, wouldn’t even talk about it or read the papers about himself. He just lay there on his back in the cell all day long, telling anybody—the lawyers Govelli got to save his neck, the reporters and all—that came along how, as soon as he was out, he was going to put the bee on one of the turnkeys for calling him a hop-head; telling it in the same tone he’d tell about a base ball game—if he ever went to one. All I ever heard of him doing was getting pinched by traffic cops with a car full of Govelli’s liquor, and going to Pensacola to see his mother; the lawyer came down heavy on that fact at his trial. He was smart, that lawyer. The trial began as to whether or not Popeye had killed a man; it ended as to whether or not Popeye really went to Pensacola, and if he had an actual mother there. But the witness they produced may have been his mother, after all. He must have had one once—a little, cold, still, quiet man that looked like he might have had ink in his veins—something cold and defunctive, anyway. “I am a good mind,” Martin says. “I am, for a fact.”

Govelli sits motionless above his hooked thumbs, the cigarette wreathing slow across his face, across the neat cicatrice of his scar. It slanted down across the corner of his mouth like a white thread. “They never hung it on him,” he says sullenly.

“Because why not? Because I kept them from it. Not you, not him. I did it.”

“Sure,” Govelli says, “you do it for nothing. Just because you are big-hearted. I’m paying for it. Paying high. And when I dont get what I pay for, I know what I can do.”

They look at one another, the cigarette wreathing slow across Govelli’s face. He had not moved it since he lit it there. “Are you threatening me?” Martin says.

“I dont threaten,” Govelli says. “I’m telling you.”

Martin drums on the desk. He is not looking at Govelli; he is not looking at anything: a thick man, not tall, sitting behind the desk with that dynamic immobility of a motionless locomotive, his fingers musing in slow taps on the desk. “Durn little rat,” he says. “If he even got drunk. You can count on what a man that drinks will do. But a durn hop-head.”

“Sure,” Govelli says. “It’s his fault you can buy snow in this town. It was him lets them sell it here.”

Still Martin does not look at him, his fingers musing on the desk top. “A durn rat. And why you dont get shut of them wops and hop-heads and get some decent American boys that a man can count on.… Here it’s not ten days since I sprung him and now he’s got to wave a pistol right in the face of a crowd on the street. I’m a good mind; be durn if I aint.” He drummed on the desk, looking across the room and out the window, above the tall buildings; his town. For he had built some of it, letting the contracts for a price, taking his natural cut, yet insisting on a good contract, good work—our virtues are usually by-products of our vices, you know. That’s why any sort of an egoist is good to have in the civic blood system—and he ran all of it from that barren office, that cheap yellow desk and patent chair. It was his town, and those who were not glad were not anything. They were just those eternal optimists, suzerains of rented rooms and little lost jobs on stools or behind counters, waiting for that mythical flood tide of outraged humanities that never makes.

After a minute, Govelli watching him, he moved. He drew the telephone across the desk and gave a number. The telephone answered. “They’ve got Popeye down at the station,” he said into the mouthpiece. “See to it.… Popeye; yes. And let me know at once.” He pushed the telephone away and looked at Govelli. “I told you before it was the last time. And I mean it now. If he gets in trouble once more, you will have to get shut of him. And if they find a pistol on him, I’m going to send him to the penitentiary myself. You understand?”

“Oh, I’ll tell him,” Govelli said. “I’ve told him before he aint got any need for that rod. But this is a free country. If he wants to carry a gun, that’s his business.”

“You tell him I’ll make it mine. You go down there and get that car and send that stuff on out to my house and then you tell him. I mean it.”

“You tell them broken-down flatties to lay off of him,” Govelli said. “He’d be all right if they’ll just leave him be.”