And chewing. They said when he first came in to Frenchman’s Bend as Varner’s clerk it was tobacco. Then he found out about money. Oh, he had heard about money and had even seen a little of it now and then. But now he found out for the first time that there was more of it each day than you could eat up each day if you ate twice as much fried sowbelly and white gravy. Not only that, but that it was solid, harder than bones and heavy like gravel, and that if you could shut your hands on some of it, there was no power anywhere that could make you let go of more of it than you had to let go of, so he found out that he couldn’t afford to chew up ten cents’ worth of it every week because he had discovered chewing gum by then that a nickel’s worth of would last five weeks, a new stick every Sunday. Then he came to Jefferson and he really saw some money, I mean all at one time, and then he found out that the only limit to the amount of money you could shut your hands on and keep and hold, was just how much money there was, provided you had a good safe place to put that other handful down and fill your fists again. And then was when he found out he couldn’t afford to chew even one cent a week. When he had nothing, he could afford to chew tobacco; when he had a little, he could afford to chew gum; when he found out he could be rh provided he just didn’t die beforehand, he couldn’t afford to chew anything, just sitting there in that kitchen chair with the shadow of the cell bars crisscrossing him, chewing that and not looking at me or not any more anyway.
“Life,” I said. “That means twenty years, the way they figure it, unless something happens between now and then. How long has it been now? Nineteen eight, wasn’t it, when he hung all day long maybe in this same window here, watching the street for you to come on back from Texas and get him out, being as you were the only Snopes then that had enough money and influence to help him as he figured it, hollering down to anybody that passed to get word out to Varner’s store for you to come in and save him, then standing up there in that courtroom on that last day and giving you your last chance, and you never came then either? Nineteen eight to nineteen twenty-three from twenty years, and he’ll be out again. Hell fire, you’ve only got five more years to live, haven’t you? All right. What do you want me to do?”
He told me.
“All right,” I said. “What do I get for it?”
He told me that. I stood there for a while leaning against the wall, laughing down at him. Then I told him.
He didn’t even move. He just quit chewing long enough to say, “Ten thousand dollars.”
“So that’s too high,” I said. “All your life is worth to you is about five hundred, mostly in trade, on the installment plan.” He sat there in that cross-barred shadow, chewing his mouthful of nothing, watching me or at least looking toward me. “Even if it works, the best you can do is get his sentence doubled, get twenty more years added onto it. That means that in nineteen forty-three you’ll have to start all over again worrying about having only five years more to live. Quit sucking and smouching around for bargains. Buy the best: you can afford it. Take ten grand cash and have him killed. From what I hear, for that jack you could have all Chicago bidding against each other. Or ten grand, hell, and Chicago, hell too; for one you could stay right here in Mississippi and have a dozen trusties right there in Parchman drawing straws for him, for which one would shoot him first in the back.”
He didn’t even quit chewing this time.
“Well well,” I said. “So there’s something that even a Snopes wont do. No, that’s wrong; Uncle Mink never seemed to have any trouble reconciling Jack Houston up in front of that shotgun when the cheese begun to bind. Maybe what I mean is, every Snopes has one thing he wont do to you—provided you can find out what it is before he has ruined and wrecked you. Make it five then,” I said. “I wont haggle. What the hell, aint we cousins or something?”
This time he quit chewing long enough to say, “Five thousand dollars.”
“Okay, I know you haven’t got five grand cash either now,” I said. “You dont even need it now. That lawyer says you got two years to raise it in, hock or sell or steal whatever you’ll have to hock or sell or steal.”
That raihim—or so I thought then. I’m a pretty slow learner myself sometimes, now and then, mostly now in fact. Because he said something: “You wont have to stay two years. I can get you out.”
“When?” I said. “When you’re satisfied? When I have wrecked the rest of his life by getting twenty more years hung onto it? Not me, you wont. Because I wont come out. I wouldn’t even take the five grand; I was kidding you. This is how we’ll do it. I’ll go on down there and fix him, get him whatever additional time the traffic will bear. Only I wont come out then. I’ll finish out my two years first; give you a little more time of your own, see. Then I’ll come out and come on back home. You know: start a new life, live down that old bad past. Of course I wont have any job, business, but after all there’s my own father’s own first cousin every day and every way getting to be bigger and bigger in the bank and the church and local respectability and civic reputation and what the hell, aint blood thicker than just water even if some of it is just back from Parchman for bootlegging, not to mention at any minute now his pride might revolt at charity even from his respectable blood-kin banker cousin and he might decide to set up that old unrespectable but fairly damned popular business again. Because I can get plenty more stock-in-trade and the same old good will will still be here just waiting for me to tell them where to go and maybe this time there wont be any developer-fluid jugs sitting carelessly around. And suppose they are, what the hell? it’s just two years and I’ll be back again, already reaching to turn over that old new leaf—”
He put his hand inside his coat and he didn’t say “Yep” in that tone because he didn’t know how yet but if he had known he would. So he said, “Yep, that’s what I figgered,” and drew out the envelope. Oh sure, I recognised it. It was one of mine, with Atelier Monty Jefferson Miss in the left corner, all stamped and showing the cancellation clear as an etching and addressed to G. C. Winbush, City so I already knew what was in it before he even took it out: the photo that Winbush had insisted on buying for five bucks for his private files as they call it that I hadn’t wanted to let him have it because anybody associating with him in anything was already in jeopardy. But what the hell, he was the Law, or what passed for it in that alley at one or two in the morning anyway. And oh yes, it had been through the mail all right even though I never mailed it and it hadn’t been any further than through that damn cancelling machine inside the Jefferson post office. And with the trouble Winbush was already in from being in my back room instead of getting what he called his brains beaten out by old dope-eating Will Christian’s burglars, it wouldn’t have taken any Simon Legree to find out he had the picture and then to get it away from him; nor anything at all to make him swear or perjure to anything anybody suggested to him regarding it. Because he had a wife and all you’d need would be just to intimate to Winbush you were going to show it to her since she was the sort of wife that no power on earth would unconvince her that the girl in the photo—she happened to be alone in this one and happened not to be doing anything except just being buck-naked—was not only Winbush’s private playmate but that probably only some last desperate leap got Winbush himself out of the picture without his pants on. And it wouldn’t take any Sherlock Holmes to discern what that old sanctimonious lantern-jawed son of a bitch up there on that federal bench would do when he saw that cancelled envelope. So I said,
“So it looks like I’ve been raised. And it looks like I wont call. In fact, it looks like I’m going to pass. After I go down there and get him fixed, you get me out. Then what?”
“A railroad ticket to wherever you want, and a hundred dollars.”
“Make it five,” I said. Then I said, “All right. I wont haggle. Make it two-fifty.” And he didn’t haggle either.
“A hundred dollars,” he said.
“Only I’m going to cut the pot for the house kitty,” I said. “If I’ve got t
o spend at least a year locked up in a god-damned cotton farm—” No, he didn’t haggle; you could say that for him.
“I figgered that too,” he said. “It’s all arranged. You’ll be out on bond tomorrow. Clarence will pick you up on his way through town to Memphis. You can have two days.” And by God he had even thought of that too. “Clarence will have the money. It will be enough.”
Whether what he would call enough or what I would call enough. So nobody was laughing at anybody any more now. I just stood there looking down at him where he sat in that kitchen chair, chewing, not looking at anything and not even chewing anything, that everybody that knew him said he never took a drink in his life yet hadn’t hesitated to buy thirty or forty dollars’ worth of whiskey to get me into Parchman where I could wreck Mink, and evidently was getting ready to spend another hundred (or more likely two if he intended to pay for Clarence too) to reconcile me to staying in Parchman long enough to do the wrecking that would keep Mink from getting out in five years; and all of a sudden I knew what it was that had bothered me about him ever since I got big enough to understand about such and maybe draw a conclusion.
“So you’re a virgin,” I said. “You never had a lay in your life, did you? You even waited to get married until you found a woman who not only was already knocked up, she wouldn’t even have let you run your hand up her dress. Jesus, you do want to stay alive, don’t you? Only, why?” And still he said nothing: just sitting there chewing nothing. “But why put out money on Clarence too? Even if he does prefer nigger houses where the top price is a dollar, it’ll cost you something with Clarence as the operator. Give me all the money and let me go by myself.” But as soon as I said it I knew the answer to that too. He couldn’t risk letting me get one mile out of Jefferson without somebody along to see I came back, even with that cancelled envelope in his pocket. He knew better, but he couldn’t risk finding out he was right. He didn’t dare. He didn’t dare at his age to find out that all you need to handle nine people out of ten is just to trust them.
Tubbs knew about the bond so he was all for turning me out that night so he could put the cost of my supper in his pocket and hope that in the confusion it wouldn’t be noticed but I said Much obliged. I said: “Dont brag. I was in (on the edge of it anyway) the U.S. Army; if you think this dump is lousy, you should have seen some of the places I slept in,” with Tubbs standing there in the open cell door with the key ring in one hand and scratching his head with the other. “But what you x201C;D, go out and get me a decent supper; Mr Snopes will pay for it; my rich kinfolks have forgiven me now. And while you’re about it, bring me the Memphis paper.” So he started out until this time I hollered it: “Come back and lock the door! I dont want all Jefferson in here; one son of a bitch in this kennel is enough.”
So the next morning Clarence showed up and Flem gave him the money and that night we were in Memphis, at the Teaberry. That was me. Clarence knew a dump where he was a regular customer, where we could stay for a dollar a day even when it wasn’t even his money. Flem’s money, that you would have thought anybody else named Snopes would have slept on the bare ground provided it just cost Flem twice as much as anywhere else would.
“Now what?” Clarence said. It was what they call rhetorical. He already knew what, or thought he did. He had it all lined up. One thing about Clarence: he never let you down. He couldn’t; everybody that knew him knew he would have to be a son of a bitch, being my half-brother.
Last year Virgil (that’s right. Snopes. You guessed it: Uncle Wesley’s youngest boy—the revival song leader that they caught after church that day with the fourteen-year-old girl in the empty cotton house and tar-and-feathered him to Texas or anyway out of Yoknapatawpha County; Virgil’s gift was inherited) and Fonzo Winbush, my patient’s nephew I believe it is, came up to Memphis to enter a barbers’ college. Somebody—it would be Mrs Winbush; she wasn’t a Snopes—evidently told them never to rent a room to live in unless the woman of the house looked mature and Christian, but most of all motherly.
So they were probably still walking concentric circles around the railroad station, still carrying their suitcases, when they passed Reba Rivers’s at the time when every afternoon she would come out her front door to exercise those two damn nasty little soiled white dogs that she called Miss Reba and Mr Binford after Lucius Binford who had been her pimp until they both got too old and settled down and all the neighborhood—the cop, the boy that brought the milk and collected for the paper, and the people on the laundry truck—called him landlord until he finally died.
She looked mature all right in anything, let alone the wrappers she wore around that time in the afternoon, and she would probably sound Christian all right whether religious or not, to anybody near enough to hear what she would say to those dogs at times when she had had a little extra gin; and I suppose anybody weighing two hundred pounds in a wrapper fastened with safety pins would look motherly even while she was throwing out a drunk, let alone to two eighteen-year-old boys from Jefferson, Mississippi.
Maybe she was motherly and Virgil and Fonzo, in the simple innocence of children, saw what us old long-standing mere customers and friends missed. Or maybe they just walked impervious in that simple Yoknapatawpha juvenile rural innocence where even an angel would have left his pocketbook at the depot first. Anyway, they asked if she had an empty room and she rented them one; likely they had already unpacked those paper suitcases before she realised they didn’t even know they were in a whorehouse.
Anyhow, there she was, having to pay the rent and pay off the cops and the man that supplied the beer, and pay the laundry and Minnie, the maid, something on Saturday night, not to mention having to kehose big yellow diamonds shined and cleaned until they wouldn’t look too much like big chunks of a broken beer bottle; and that Yoknapatawpha innocence right in the middle of the girls running back and forth to the bathroom in nighties and negligees or maybe not even that, and the customers going and coming and Minnie running stacks of towels and slugs of gin up the stairs and the women screaming and fighting and pulling each other’s hair over their boys and clients and money, and Reba herself in the hall cursing a drunk while they tried to throw him out before the cops got there; until in less than a week she had that house as quiet and innocent as a girls’ school until she could get Virgil and Fonzo upstairs into their room and in bed and, she hoped, asleep.
Naturally it couldn’t last. To begin with, there was the barbers’ college where they would have to listen to barbers all day long when you have to listen to enough laying just spending thirty minutes getting your hair cut. Then to come back there and get a flash of a leg or a chemise or maybe a whole naked female behind running through a door, would be bound to give them ideas after a time even though Virgil and Fonzo still thought they were all Reba’s nieces or wards or something just in town maybe attending female equivalents of barbers’ colleges themselves. Not to mention that pure instinct which Virgil and Fonzo (did I say he was Grover Winbush’s nephew?) had inherited from the pure fountainheads themselves.
It didn’t last past the second month. And since the Memphis red-light district is not all that big, it was only the course of time until they and Clarence turned up at the same time in the same place, especially as Virgil and Fonzo, still forced to devote most of their time to learning yet and not earning, had to hunt for bargains. Where right away Virgil showed himself the owner of a really exceptional talent—a capacity to take care of two girls in succession to their satisfaction or at least until they hollered quit, that was enough for two dollars, in his youthful enthusiasm and innocence not only doing it for pleasure but even paying for the chance until Clarence discovered him and put him into the money.
He—Clarence—would loaf around the poolrooms and the sort of hotel lobbies he patronised himself, until he would find a sucker who refused to believe his bragging about his—what’s the word?— protege’s powers, and Clarence would bet him; the first time the victim would usually give odds. Of course Virgil
would fail now and then—
“And pay half the bet,” I said.
“What?” Clarence said. “Penalise the boy for doing his best? Besides, it dont happen once in ten times and he’s going to get better and better as time goes on. What a future that little sod’s got if the supply of two-dollar whores just holds out.”
Anyway, that’s what we were going to do tonight. “Much obliged,” I said. “You go ahead. I’m going to make a quiet family call on an old friend and then coming back to bed. Let me have twenty-five—make it thirty of the money.”
“Flem gave me a hundred.”
“Thirty will do,” I said.
“Be damned if that’s so,” he said. “You’ll take f it. I don’t aim to take you back to Jefferson and have you tell Flem a god-damn lie about me. Here.”
I took the money. “See you at the station tomorrow at train time.”
“What?” he said.
“I’m going home tomorrow. You dont have to.”
“I promised Flem I’d stay with you and bring you back.”
“Break it,” I said. “Haven’t you got fifty dollars of his money?”
“That’s it,” he said. “Damn a son of a bitch that’ll break his word after he’s been paid for it.”
Wednesday evenings were nearly always quiet unless there was a convention in town, maybe because so many of the women (clients too) came from little Tennessee and Arkansas and Mississippi country towns and Baptist and Methodist families, that they established among the joints and dives and cathouses themselves some … analogous? analogous rhythm to the midweek prayer-meeting night. Minnie answered the bell. She had her hat on. I mean her whole head was in it like a football helmet.
Snopes: The Hamlet, the Town, the Mansion Page 85