Reivers, The - William Faulkner [20]
"I aint going to know that either," I said. "Because aint anybody around here going to find out to tell me."
"All right." he said. He started the car suddenly and backed and turned it, already going fast, neither toward the Square nor toward Mr Rouncewell's gasoline pump. "I thought we had to get gasoline," I said. We were going fast. "I changed my mind," Boon said. "Ill tend to that just before we leave for McCaslin after dinner. Then so much of it wont evaporate away just standing around." We were in a lane now. going fast between Negro cabins and vegetable patches and chicken yards, with chickens and mongrel dogs leaping frantically from the dust just in time, out of the lane and into a vacant field, a waste place marked faintly with tire tracks but no hooves; and now I recognised it: Mr Buffaloe's homemade motordrome where Colonel Sartoris's law had driven him two years ago and where he had taught Boon to operate an automobile. And still I didn't understand until Boon wrenched the car to a stop and said, "Move over here."
So I was late for dinner after all; Aunt Gallic was already standing on the front gallery, carrying Alexander and already yelling at Boon and me even before he stopped the car to let me out. Because Boon licked me in fair battle after all; evidently he hadn't quite forgot all he remembered from his own youth about boys. I know better now of course, and I even knew better then: that Boon's fall and mine were not only instantaneous but simultaneous too: back at the identical instant when Mother got the message that Grandfather Lessep was dead. But that's what I would have liked to believe: that Boon simply licked me. Anyway, that's what I told myself at the time: that, secure behind that inviolable and inescapable rectitude concomitant with the name I bore, patterned on the knightly shapes of my male ancestors as bequeathed —nay, compelled—to me by my father's word-of-mouth, further bolstered and made vulnerable to shame by my mother's doting conviction, I had been merely testing Boon; not trying my own virtue but simply testing Boon's capacity to undermine it; and, in my innocence, trusting too much in the armor and shield of innocence; expected, demanded, assumed more than that frail Milanese was capable of withstanding. I say "frail Milanese" not advisedly but explicitly: having noticed in my time how quite often the advocates and even the practitioners of virtue evidently have grave doubts of their own regarding the impregnability of virtue as a shield, putting their faith and trust not in virtue but rather in the god or goddess whose charge virtue is; by-passing virtue as it were in allegiance to the Over-goddess herself, in return for which the goddess will either divert temptation away or anyhow intercede between them. Which explains a lot, having likewise noticed in my time that the goddess in charge of virtue sems to be the same one in charge of luck, if not of folly also.
So Boon beat me in fair battle, using, as a gentleman should and would, gloves. When he stopped the car and said, "Move over," I thought I knew what he intended. We had done this before at four or five convenient and discreet times in Grandfather's lot, me sitting on Boon's lap holding the wheel and steering while he let the automobile move slowly in a low gear across the lot. So I was ready for him. I was already en garde and had even begun the counterthrust, opening my mouth to say It's too hot to sit on anybody today. Besides we better get on back on home when I saw that he was already out of the car on his side while he was still speaking, standing there with one hand on the wheel and the engine still running. For another second or two I still couldn't believe it. "Hurry up," he said. "Any minute now Callie will come running out of that lane toting that baby under one arm and already yelling."
So I moved under the wheel, and with Boon beside me, over me, across me, one hand on mine to shift the gears, one hand on mine to regulate the throttle, we moved back and forth across that vacant sun-glared waste, forward a while,