Reivers, The - William Faulkner [24]
We got in and started, me in front with Boon and the rest of them in the back. We crossed the Square crowded with Saturday afternoon, and then we were out of town. But there we were, I mean, we were no forrader. We would come presently to the fork of the road which led to Cousin Zack's, and we would even be going in the wrong direction. And even if it had been the right direction, we still would not be free; as long as we still had Aunt Callie and Lessep and Maury and Alexander in the back seat, we were only free of Ned 1>eing where nobody in the world had expected him to be, saying Hee hee hee and Are you coming back to town before. Boon had never once looked at me, not I at him. Nor had he spoken to me either; possibly he sensed that he had frightened me with his clean shirt and collar and necktie and the shave in the middle of the day and all the rest of the give-away aura of travel, departure, separation, severance; sensed that I was not only frightened but angry that I had been vulnerable to fright; going on, the sunny early afternoon road stretching on ahead for the seventeen miles during which something would have to be decided, agreed upon; on across the bright May land, our dust spurting and coiling behind us unless we had to slow down for a bridge or a sandy stretch which required the low gears; the seventeen miles which would not last forever even though there were seventeen of them, the mileposts diminishing much too rapidly while something had to be done, decided sooner and sooner and nearer and nearer and I didn't know what yet; or maybe just something said, a voice, noise, a human sound, since no matter what bitter forfeit Non-virtue may afterward wrench and wring from you, loneliness, solitude, silence should not be part of it. But at least Boon tried. Or maybe with him it was just the silence too and any un-silence were better, no matter how foolish nor long-ago pre-doomed. No, it was more than that; we had less than half the distance left now and something had to be done, started, fused-off:
"The roads are sure fine now, everywhere, even further than Yoknapatawpha County. A man couldn't want better roads for a long trip like a automobile funeral or something than they are now. How far do you reckon this car could go between now and sundown?" You see? addressed to nobody, like the drowning man thrusting one desperate hand above the surface hoping there might be a straw there. He found none:
"I dont know," Aunt Callie said from the back seat, holding Alexander, who had been asleep since we left town and didn't deserve a car ride of one mile, let alone seventeen. "And you aint gonter know neither, unlessen you studies it out setting in that front seat locked up in that shed in Boss's back yard tonight."
Now we were almost there. "So you want—" Boon said, out of the side of his mouth, just exactly loud enough for me to hear, aimed exactly at my right ear like a gun or an arrow or maybe a handful of sand at a closed window.
"Shut up," I said, exactly like him. The simple and cowardly thing would be to tell him suddenly to stop and as he did so, leap from the car, already running, presenting to Aunt Callie the split-second alternative either to abandon Alexander to Boon and try to run me down in the bushes, or stick with Alexander and pursue me with simple yelling. I mean, have Boon drive on and leave them at the house and I to spring out from the roadside and leap back aboard as he passed going back to town or any direction opposite from all who would miss me and have authority over me; the cowardly way, so why didn't I take it, who was already a lost liar, already damned by deceit; why didn't I go the whole hog and be a coward too; be irrevocable and irremediable like Faustus became? glory in baseness, make, compel my new Master to respect me for my completeness even if he did scorn my size? Only I didn't. It wouldn't have worked, one of us anyway had to be practical; granted that Boon and I would be well on