The Collected Stories of Eudora Welty - Eudora Welty [37]
"My! gittin' night agin," said the man with the guitar in a voice that could assume any social surprise.
"Anything to eat?" asked Harris.
The man gave a pluck to a low string and glanced at him.
"Dewberries," said the other man. It was his only remark, and it was delivered in a slow and pondering voice.
"Some nice little rabbit come skinnin' by," said the man with the guitar, nudging Harris with a slight punch to his side, "but it run off the way it come."
The other man was so bogged in inarticulate anger that Harris could imagine him running down a cotton row after the rabbit. He smiled but did not look around.
"Now to look out for a place to sleep—is that it?" he remarked doggedly.
A pluck of the strings again, and the man yawned.
There was a little town coming up; the lights showed for twenty miles in the flat land.
"Is that Dulcie?" Harris yawned too.
"I bet you ain't got no idea where all I've slep'," the man said, turning around in his seat and speaking directly to Harris, with laughter in his face that in the light of a road sign appeared strangely teasing.
"I could eat a hamburger," said Harris, swinging out of the road under the sign in some automatic gesture of evasion. He looked out of the window, and a girl in red pants leaped onto the running board.
"Three and three beers?" she asked, smiling, with her head poked in. "Hi," she said to Harris.
"How are you?" said Harris. "That's right."
"My," said the man with the guitar. "Red sailor-boy britches." Harris listened for the guitar note, but it did not come. "But not purty," he said.
The screen door of the joint whined, and a man's voice called, "Come on in, boys, we got girls."
Harris cut off the radio, and they listened to the nickelodeon which was playing inside the joint and turning the window blue, red and green in turn.
"Hi," said the car-hop again as she came out with the tray. "Looks like rain."
They ate the hamburgers rapidly, without talking. A girl came and looked out of the window of the joint, leaning on her hand. The same couple kept dancing by behind her. There was something brassy playing, a swing record of "Love, Oh Love, Oh Careless Love."
"Same songs ever'where," said the man with the guitar softly. "I come down from the hills.... We had us owls for chickens and fox for yard dogs but we sung true."
Nearly every time the man spoke Harris's cheek twitched. He was easily amused. Also, he recognized at once any sort of attempt to confide, and then its certain and hasty retreat. And the more anyone said, the further he was drawn into a willingness to listen. I'll hear him play his guitar yet, he thought. It had got to be a pattern in his days and nights, it was almost automatic, his listening, like the way his hand went to his pocket for money.
"That'n's most the same as a ballat," said the man, licking mustard off his finger, "My ma, she was the one for ballats. Little in the waist as a dirt-dauber, but her voice carried. Had her a whole lot of tunes. Long ago dead an' gone. Pa'd come home from the courthouse drunk as a wheelbarrow, and she'd just pick up an' go sit on the front step facin' the hill an' sing. Ever'thing she knowed, she'd sing. Dead an' gone, an' the house burned down." He gulped at his beer. His foot was patting.
"This," said Harris, touching one of the keys on the guitar. "Couldn't you stop somewhere along here and make money playing this?"
Of course it was by the guitar that he had known at once that they were not mere hitch-hikers. They were tramps. They were full blown, abandoned to this. Both of them were. But when he touched it he knew obscurely that it was the yellow guitar, that bold and gay burden in the tramp's arms, that had caused him to stop and pick them up.
The man hit it flat with the palm of his hand.
"This