The Collected Stories of Eudora Welty - Eudora Welty [78]
"Come on!" roars Powerhouse. He is already at the back door, he has pulled it wide open, and with a wild, gathered-up face is smelling the terrible night.
Powerhouse, Valentine, Scoot and Little Brother step outside into the drenching rain.
"Well, they emptying buckets," says Powerhouse in a mollified voice. On the street he holds his hands out and turns up the blanched palms like sieves.
A hundred dark, ragged, silent, delighted Negroes have come around from under the eaves of the hall, and follow wherever they go.
"Watch out Little Brother don't shrink," says Powerhouse. "You just the right size now, clarinet don't suck you in. You got a dry throat, Little Brother, you in the desert?" He reaches into the pocket and pulls out a paper of mints. "Now hold 'em in your mouth—don't chew 'em. I don't carry around nothing without limit."
"Go in that joint and have beer," says Scoot, who walks ahead.
"Beer? Beer? You know what beer is? What do they say is beer? What's beer? Where I been?"
"Down yonder where it say World Café—that do?" They are in Negrotown now.
Valentine patters over and holds open a screen door warped like a sea shell, bitter in the wet, and they walk in, stained darker with the rain and leaving footprints. Inside, sheltered dry smells stand like screens around a table covered with a red-checkered cloth, in the center of which flies hang on to an obelisk-shaped ketchup bottle. The midnight walls are checkered again with admonishing "Not Responsible" signs and black-figured, smoky calendars. It is a waiting, silent, limp room. There is a burned-out-looking nickelodeon and right beside it a long-necked wall instrument labeled "Business Phone, Don't Keep Talking." Circled phone numbers are written up everywhere. There is a worn-out peacock feather hanging by a thread to an old, thin, pink, exposed light bulb, where it slowly turns around and around, whoever breathes.
A waitress watches.
"Come here, living statue, and get all this big order of beer we fixing to give."
"Never seen you before anywhere." The waitress moves and comes forward and slowly shows little gold leaves and tendrils over her teeth. She shoves up her shoulders and breasts. "How I going to know who you might be? Robbers? Coming in out of the black of night right at midnight, setting down so big at my table?"
"Boogers," says Powerhouse, his eyes opening lazily as in a cave.
The girl screams delicately with pleasure. O Lord, she likes talk and scares.
"Where you going to find enough beer to put out on this here table?"
She runs to the kitchen with bent elbows and sliding steps.
"Here's a million nickels," says Powerhouse, pulling his hand out of his pocket and sprinkling coins out, all but the last one, which he makes vanish like a magician.
Valentine and Scoot take the money over to the nickelodeon, which looks as battered as a slot machine, and read all the names of the records out loud.
"Whose 'Tuxedo Junction'?" asks Powerhouse.
"You know whose."
"Nickelodeon, I request you please to play 'Empty Bed Blues' and let Bessie Smith sing."
Silence: they hold it like a measure.
"Bring me all those nickels on back here," says Powerhouse. "Look at that! What you tell me the name of this place?"
"White dance, week night, raining, Alligator, Mississippi, long ways from home."
"Uh-huh."
"Sent for You Yesterday and Here You Come Today" plays.
The waitress, setting the tray of beer down on a back table, comes up taut and apprehensive as a hen. "Says in the kitchen, back there putting their eyes to little hole peeping out, that you is Mr. Powerhouse."...
"They seeing right tonight, that is him," says Little Brother.
"You him?"
"That is him in the flesh," says Scoot.
"Does you wish to touch him?" asks Valentine. "Because he don't bite."
"You passing through?"
"Now you got everything right."
She waits like a drop, hands languishing together in front.
"Little-Bit, ain't you going to bring the beer?"
She brings it, and goes behind the cash register and smiles, turning