Reivers, The - William Faulkner [39]
Then the country itself was gone. There were no longer intervals between the houses and shops and stores; suddenly before us was a wide tree-bordered and ordered boulevard with car tracks in the middle; and sure enough, there was the streetcar itself, the conductor and motorman just lowering the back trolley and raising the front one to turn it around and go back to Main Street. "Two minutes to five oclock," Boon said. "Twenty-three and a half hours ago we were in Jefferson, Missippi, eighty miles away. A record." I had been in Memphis before (so had Ned. This morning he had told us so; thirty minutes from now he would prove it) but always by train, never like this: to watch Memphis grow, increase; to assimilate it deliberately like a spoonful of ice cream in the mouth. I had never thought about it other than to assume we would go to the Gayoso Hotel as we—I anyway—always had. So I dont know what mind Boon read this time. "We're going to a kind a boarding house I know," he said. "You'll like it. I had a letter last week from one of the g— ladies staying there that she's got her nephew visiting her so you'll even have somebody to play with. The cook can locate a place for Ned to sleep too."
"Hee hee hee," Ned said. Besides the streetcars there were buggies and surreys—phaetons, traps, stanhopes, at least one victoria, the horses a little white-eyed at us but still collected; evidently Memphis horses were already used to automobiles—so Boon couldn't turn his head to look at Ned. But he could turn one eye.
"Just what do you mean by that?" he said. "Nothing," Ned said. "Mind where you're going and nemmine me. Nemmine me nohow. I got friends here too. You just show me where this automobile gonter be at to-! morrow morning and I'll be there too."
"And you damn well better be," Boon said. "If you aim to go back to Jefferson in it. Me and Lucius never invited you on this trip so you aint none of mine and his responsibility. As far as me and Jefferson are concerned, I dont give a damn whether you come back or not."
"When we gets this automobile back in Jefferson and has to try to look Boss Priest and Mr Maury in the eye, aint none of us gonter have time to give a damn who is back and who aint," Ned said. But it was too late now, far too late to keep on bringing that up. So Boon just said,
"All right, all right. All I said was, if you want to be back in Jefferson when you start doing your not having time to give a damn, you better be where I can see you when I start back." We were getting close to Main Street now—the tall buildings, the stores, the hotels: the Gaston (gone now) and the Peabody (they have moved it since) and the Gayoso, to which all us McCaslins-Edmondses-Priests devoted our allegiance as to a family shrine because our remote uncle and cousin, Theophilus McCaslin, Cousin Ike's father, had been a member of the party of horsemen which legend said (that is, legend to some people maybe. To us it was historical fact) General Forrest's brother led at a gallop into the lobby itself and almost captured a Yankee general. We didn't go that far though. Boon turned into a side street, almost a back alley, with two saloons at the corner and lined with houses that didn't look old or new either, all very quiet, as quiet as Jefferson itself on Sunday afternoon. Boon in fact said so. "You ought to seen it last night, I bet. On any Saturday night. Or even on a week night when there's a fireman's or policeman's or a Elk or something convention in town."
"Maybe they've all gone to early prayer meeting," I said.
"No," Boon said. "I dont think so. Likely they're just resting."
"From what?" I said.
"Hee hee hee," Ned said in the back seat. Obviously, we were learning, Ned had been in Memphis before. Though probably even Grandfather, though he might have known when, didn't know how often. And you see, I was only eleven. This time, the street being empty, Boon did turn his head.
"Just one more out of you," he told Ned.
"One more