Billy listened to it until it was like a piece of sandpaper rasping his exposed nerves, until the tack-tack-tack set his teeth on edge, until everything in the world narrowed down real tiny to a little circle around that eternal sound. It loosened his knees finally, and he could stand. The window was eight feet from the floor, and there was nothing in the cell to stand on. Billy grasped two bars and pulled himself up, wriggling. His arms shook. He was losing all his strength; when they first brought him in, he could hang from the ceiling of that little cage and not have shaky arms. But now it was an effort to chin himself.
Deep dusk outside now, and the fat moth still butting the glass. “Go “way,” Billy grunted, his face nine inches away from it. “Git!” He let go one of the bars to slap his hand against the wire-reinforced glass, and the effort made him slip. He hit hard on his feet, sending twinges through both ankles.
But when he stepped back, looking up at the window, the moth was gone. It was quiet.
Until, from behind him, she said, “Billy.”
5
He had not been back to work all week. Ludie came every day to clean up, but Ludie would not cook, and so he had his meals out of cans, often not even cooking the contents, just opening them at the sink and spooning the cold condensed soup or beans or meat into his mouth. Sometimes he finished a whole can, but more often he threw half-full ones into the trash. Ludie’s arthritic back pained her, making it impossible for her to empty the trash — that had always been one of Mollie’s jobs — and the trash can overflowed on Wednesday. He still threw the empties onto the growing pile.
His hand, under the bandages, itched maddeningly. He could feel the stitches in his flesh, pulling tight, clamped to the wound like the jaws of big ants, and his whole palm felt stiff. He had dressed himself in a suit once, on Tuesday, for the court appearance of Billy Resaca (since Mollie’s death, he had seen Billy a couple of times, but in the courtroom Billy gave no sign of recognizing him). After that he stayed in pajama tops and old slacks all day. He had not shaved since his accident, and his face felt greasy, prickly with the whiskers that glinted like iron filings on his jowls.
He saw a sick man in his bathroom mirror, eyes that had lost life, a face that seemed to be crumpling inward. He had Ludie turn callers away with the excuse that he was sick, that he was recuperating. He listened dully when subordinates at the bank called — pretended to listen, actually he heard nothing of their queries at all — before saying “Do what you think is best” and hanging up on them.
He waited for an altogether different kind of call — a call from Mollie Avery.
Mollie had something to tell him.
He had that feeling; Mollie had wanted him to know something, some great secret, before she died; and she had never revealed it to him. When he closed his eyes, he could see her face, as it was in life, but now with a slyly knowing expression in the slight slant of her deep brown eyes, in the self-contained placidity of her features. She knew the great secret, and she wanted to tell it to him.
He waited for it: waited in the bedroom, where she had shared his bed (he had burned the nylon stockings, had wrapped them in a couple of pages from the Advocate, had placed the crumpled ball in the downstairs fireplace and had touched a match to it); he waited in the kitchen, where he had watched her cook; he waited waking and sleeping for the message, for when she decided to tell it to him, to trust him with it. She had not come.
On Saturday evening, Ballew Jefferson suddenly became aware of his condition, as if he were seeing a stranger instead of himself in the bathroom mirror. He smelled his own sweat, saw the five years that the last week had put on his face. In a paroxysm of fear and determination, he tried to do something about it.
He took a steaming shower, standing under the needle spray for a quarter of an hour or more, scrubbing his hide with a washcloth and a cake of Lifebuoy. When he got out, he peeled the sodden dressing from his hand. The wet gauze unwrapped like the covering of a mummy. The skin at the base of his fingers puckered white and wrinkled when he uncovered it. Then he eased a final gauze pad away from the stitches. It had been marked with brown dried blood and crusty yellow patches of serum. The wound itself, and the stitches X-ing it, looked black to him. Still naked except for a towel around his waist, he adhesive-taped a fresh gauze pad to his palm, then awkwardly wrapped more gauze around his hand to hold it and cushion it. He fastened this with tape, too.
His right thumb and forefinger were sore and stiff, but he could grasp the razor with them. He worked lather up left-handed, brushed it onto his face, and began to reap the whiskers. They floated in gobs of lather, gray and spiky, in the sink. He nicked himself a couple of times and kept shaving, ignoring the tiny L-shaped cut below his right ear, the straight one an eighth of an inch long beneath his nose. At last he rinsed the razor and sink, splashed cold water on his face, and wielded the styptic pencil. The image staring back from the mirror still looked old.
Jefferson went back into his bedroom. He rummaged in his closet and found a soft pullover turtleneck sweater, pale blue. Trudy had bought it for him, oh, ages and ages ago, and though he rarely wore it, he kept it in the closet. He found a comfortable pair of blue corduroy trousers, pulled them out. He got into his underwear, then into the pants. He pulled the sweater over his head. Then he padded back to the bathroom.
He looked like an old man in a younger man’s clothing. He brushed his hair with his military hairbrush, backed in silver (tarnished, he noticed: tarnished with a black spot that was in the shape of a moth with wings outspread). He put in his partial plate and brushed his teeth.
He put on garters and socks, pulled on a worn pair of tennis shoes. Then, dressed at last, he had no idea what to do. He took Trudy’s picture off the wall and sat looking at it. Trudy, who were you? I see you now, and it’s as if I never looked at you, not once, all the time you were alive.
I wish you could have seen all your grandchildren, Trudy. I wish I could see them. We raised our children to be independent, Trudy, to be able to leave the nest and fly on their own. They’re all gone, Trudy. I wonder if they know the old man has had a little accident. Nobody called.
He set the photo down beside the bed. The alarm clock next to it had stopped ticking a day or so ago: he had not wound it since last Saturday night. The hands were stopped at 11:09. He got up, roamed into the hallway, looked into the empty bedrooms, and then went downstairs. In the living room he turned on the television.
He saw the very end of “The Charles Boyer Show” on Channel 5 before the evening news. He was a little startled to find that it was this late: he had not thought it anywhere close to eleven P.M. He watched, not absorbing, and at eleven-fifteen he switched off the set, making the opening credits of “The Big Picture” dwindle to a tiny white dot in a black screen.
He let himself out the side door of the house and took a deep breath. The night air, still warm, was redolent of pine and poplar. Stars shone through broken cloud overhead. Away east toward town there was a faint glow in the sky. Jefferson slapped his pockets for cigarettes, but he had neglected to bring any.
There was a pack of Chesterfields in the Lincoln. He opened the car, slid behind the wheel, and got the cigarettes from the glove compartment. He started the engine and revved it a couple of times. He pressed in the cigarette lighter, and when it popped out, he lit up. On impulse, he rolled down the window and backed out of the driveway. He headed for town.
In the back of Jefferson’s mind was the vague notion of finding Sheriff Quarles, of asking him what the investigation of Mollie Avery’s death had turned up. He did not stop to think that Quarles was unlikely to be available at this time of night.
Town was empty, except for the very occasional car. He reached the jail, thought better of his mission, and turned right instead, heading to the Square. He wondered idly if they had buried Mollie Avery yet. A relative had been found, Quarles had told him Tuesday, a sister fifteen years older, off in Atlanta or someplace. Probably the body had been given
to her.
Jefferson had finished his first cigarette on the way into town. He lit another, and after that another. He parked on the Square and sat for a little while, smoking and studying the dark profile of Private Parks against an even darker sky. Restless, he got out of the car and walked around the Square, in the dark, accompanied only by the glowing red ash of his cigarette.
The shop windows were dimly lighted. Through the front window of the pharmacy he could see a red-glowing Coca-Cola clock; Belk’s had small spotlights on their window mannequins (how harsh the light was, and how accusingly the painted eyes regarded him from their shadowed sockets). His own Trust Bank showed its night-lights as usual: one over each doorway, and dim, proper lights inside. Here and there in the dime store, the Bon Ton, the shoe stores, small night-lights burned.
A convertible car blatted by on the other side of the Square, full of teenagers and trailing music behind, some boy’s voice singing “That’ll Be the Day,” his tune nearly lost in the unmufflered snarl of the jalopy.
Jefferson dropped his cigarette, ground it out, and went on up Bridge Street, past the second dime store, past the Modiste shop, past Stark’s, the tailor’s where he bought most of his suits. Across Oglethorpe was the theater, dark and empty.
As he looked, though, the marquee border leaped to life with a sudden electric hum. The broken and dead bulbs had been replaced, and around the still-unlighted white background crawled a yellow endless snake, swallowing its own tail. The rest of the marquee, the fluorescents behind the panel, flickered on, and Jefferson read the legend: MIDNIGHT SHOW. He frowned. The side of the marquee, where the names of the starring actors generally appeared, was almost edge-on to him. Though he could not read the letters, he could tell that there was something on it. He took a few steps down Oglethorpe until he could clearly read the name: BALLEW JEFFERSON.
He shook his head, anger rising in him. If this was a joke, he did not appreciate it. He crossed Oglethorpe with a purposeful stride, stopped to peer into the darkened ticket booth. No one was there.
“Hello!” Jefferson shouted through the round hole cut in the glass. “Somebody!”
No one answered. And yet someone must have switched on the marquee. Impatiently, Jefferson went to the double doors to the left of the ticket booth, balled his good left hand, and pounded. The door nudged open, then swung back again.
When no one responded to his knock, Jefferson pushed the door open. He stepped into a lobby lighted by a hanging wall clock the diameter of an automobile tire (two minutes to midnight, he noted half-consciously). The candy counter was deserted, the soft-drink dispensers shrouded under oilcloth draping. “Is anyone here?” Jefferson yelled.
He thought he might have heard something from the auditorium. He pushed through a second set of doors and found himself at the head of the left aisle. The theater looked much as he remembered it (good God, he thought, the last time I was here was with Trudy, during the war): walls papered in gaudy ornate peacock colors, flambeaux light fixtures showing chevrons of different colored lights, blue, white, pink; sidelights of the rows of seats casting tiny pools of illumination on the wine-colored carpet. Jefferson took a deep breath, drawing into his nostrils the scent of stale popcorn and orange soda, of dusty curtains and mint candies, the aroma of dreams in the dark. He turned to leave.
The door in front of him suddenly was bathed in light. The screen had come to life. He looked back.
It was his own bedroom. He and Mollie, both naked, she on her stomach, he behind her, his hands spread on her thighs, pulling her back against him. Jefferson felt as if something cold had just pierced his skull, above and between his eyes. “Oh, my God,” he breathed, pressing the bandage on his palm against his mouth. He sank into the aisle seat.
Mollie faced him. From the screen she looked straight into his soul. Her face was reproachful, empty of pleasure. “You got to do it to me any way you wanted,” she said, her voice booming over the speakers in the theater. Jefferson glanced wildly around, but he was alone: the sole spectator. Behind Mollie, his head thrown back, the old white man bared his teeth in his lust. “Now we’re goin to do things my way for a while,” Mollie continued. “You will sit there and watch, Mr. Ballew Jefferson. And you’ll get the idea.” She laughed then, but her eyes had filmed over, had gone nearly opaque, like the eyes of a fish dead and dry. “You’ll know what to do.”
And for the rest of that dreadful midnight show, Mr. Jefferson sat and watched — and learned.
6
On Labor Day, Ann Lewis realized that she had to do some shopping. She needed clothes for the fall term, for one thing, and somehow she had never gotten around to buying them. September second was a general holiday in Gaither, though; and so, with a sigh, Ann climbed into her car and headed southeast, toward Atlanta, sixty miles away.
She left early, and she drove carefully: on the car radio, just as she passed through Buford, she heard a report that six people had already been killed in Labor Day traffic accidents scattered around the state. She hated driving in Atlanta, with its confusing maze of one-way streets and (inevitably) its Peachtree Street repairs. But she made it safely downtown, past the big triangular building with the red Coca-Cola sign on it (Ann maneuvered more by landmark than by street name) and to the Rich’s parking lot.
She spent much of the morning in the Rich’s clothing departments, finding good bargains and running up her account ruinously. She made two trips out to the parking lot to deposit her purchases in the trunk of her car, and finally, well after noon, she had a quick lunch in the café on the bridge going across to the home-furnishings store. By one o’clock, Ann was heading north again, toward home, in heavy traffic.
She saw him first at Spring and Peachtree, a tall, cadaverous man smiling at her. She shivered a little, passed him by, and gave him no more thought.
Until, twenty minutes later and fifteen miles north, she saw him again, the same man. He simply stood beside the road, not a foot away from the whizzing traffic, making no attempt to thumb a ride, just watching.
Watching for her. He nodded gravely as she passed.
He did it twice more before she got back home to Gaither, badly shaken. To get to Mrs. Maddons’s house, Ann had no need to drive past the Square at all, and yet she did.
And there she saw him for the last time that day.
A man stood outside the ShadowShow Theater, changing the title on the marquee. The horror-show double feature was down and scattered on the pavement. Going up was The Sun Also Rises. In the glass cases on either side of the front doors, posters promised A Hatful of Rain and Man of a Thousand Faces in the weeks to come. I haven’t given myself my present, Ann thought to herself. I haven’t seen my movie yet. I —
The man working the mechanical hand turned a familiar face toward her and gave her the same insinuating roadside smile as she passed.
But for some reason her fear had run dry, like a trickle of water seeping into desert sands: in the blistering heat of her great indignation, fear could not flow forever. Ann Lewis got out of her car angry, walked into her rooms angry, and picked up the telephone still angry. She dialed the operator, not able, in her wrath, to wait long enough to look up the number.
The operator came on the line. “I want the police,” Ann said.
“Yes, ma’am. Are you inside the city limits?”
“No, just outside in the country. But — ”
“I’ll give you the Frye County Sheriff’s Office.”
The line clicked, and then Ann heard the phone on the other end ringing. It rang four times before someone answered with a breathless, “Hello?”
“Is this the Sheriff’s Department?” Ann asked.
“Yes, it is, but — ”
“I want to report a man who’s been bothering me.”
“Ma’am, I can’t — ”
“Just tell me how to go about it. Do I come in there, or — ”
“Just a minute, please.” Ann had the impression that the man had put his ha
nd over the receiver and was speaking to someone else. After a few seconds, the line clicked again as someone picked up an extension. A different, younger voice, said, “Sheriff Quarles.”
“Mr. Quarles, my name is Ann Lewis. I teach school. All day today a man’s been bothering me — ”
“Is he there now?”
“No, I’m at home. But I want — ”
“You’re not in any danger or anything like that.”
“No, but I — ”
“Ma’am, uh, Miz Lewis, if you want to come in and make out a complaint, we’ll see what we can do. We’ve about got our hands full right now — ”
“Can I come in now?”
“Yes — no — Miz Lewis, I’ll tell you the truth, if it ain’t urgent, you might as well wait. We’ve had a killin’.”
“Not another one,” Ann said, realizing how petulant her voice was even as the words escaped.
“Yes, ma’am. And this one worse than before. This one was in the damn jail. Excuse my language, ma'am.”
Someone was knocking at the door. Ann hung up without a word of farewell, and, still angry, went to answer the knock. “Who is it?” she barked through the wood.
A startled young voice said, “It’s me, ma’am. Alan Kirby.”
“Oh.” She opened the door. “Alan, I’m busy right now, so — why, what’s wrong with you?”
Alan looked at her, his face screwed into a childish, miserable expression, tears standing in his eyes. He had the face of a second-grader who’s just fallen from the teeter-totter; and yet the man he would be was there, too, under the mask. “Miss Lewis, I’m scared,” he said.
“Scared of what?”
“I don’t know.”
Ann looked past him. Her car rested in the drive, badly parked, and in its trunk were all her new purchases, and she still wanted to get some help with her own problem, with the man who somehow had dogged her for sixty miles, and — Alan needed her.
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