The Complete Stories - Flannery O'Connor [194]
She curled her feet up under her and said, “Alone at last,” and giggled.
Thomas swerved the car away from the house and drove fast toward the gate. Once on the highway, he shot forward as if he were being pursued.
“Jesusl” Sarah Ham said, swinging her feet off the seat, “where’s the fire?”
Thomas did not answer. In a fcw seconds he could feel her edging closer. She stretched, eased nearer, and finally hung her hand limply over his shoulder. “Tomsee doesn’t like me,” she said, “but I think he’s fabulously cute.”
Thomas covered the three and a half miles into town in a little over four minutes. The light at the first intersection was red but he ignored it. The old woman lived three blocks beyond. When the car screeched to a halt at the place, he jumped out and ran around to the girl’s door and opened it. She did not move from the car and Thomas was obliged to wait. After a moment one leg emerged, then her small white crooked face appeared and stared up at him. There was something about the look of it that suggested blindness but it was the blindness of those who don’t know that they cannot see. Thomas was curiously sickened. The empty eyes moved over him. “Nobody likes me,” she said in a sullen tone. “What if you were me and I couldn’t stand to ride you three miles?”
“My mother likes you,” he muttered.
“Her!” the girl said. “She’s just about seventy-five years behind the times!”
Breathlessly Thomas said, “If I find you bothering her again, I’ll have you put back in jail.” There was a dull force behind his voice though it came out barely above a whisper.
“You and who else?” she said and drew back in the car as if now she did not intend to get out at all. Thomas reached into it, blindly grasped the front of her coat, pulled her out by it and released her. Then he lunged back to the car and sped off. The other door was still hanging open and her laugh, bodiless but real, bounded up the street as if it were about to jump in the open side of the car and ride away with him. He reached over and slammed the door and then drove toward home, too angry to attend his meeting. He intended to make his mother well aware of his displeasure. He intended to leave no doubt in her mind. The voice of his father rasped in his head.
Numbskull, the old man said, put your foot down now. Show her who’s boss before she shows you.
But when Thomas reached home, his mother, wisely, had gone to bed.
The next morning he appeared at the breakfast table, his brow lowered and the thrust of his jaw indicating that he was in a dangerous humor. When he intended to be determined, Thomas began like a bull that, before charging, backs with his head lowered and paws the ground. “All right now listen,” he began, yanking out his chair and sitting down, “I have something to say to you about that girl and I don’t intend to say it but once.” He drew breath. “She’s nothing but a little slut. She makes fun of you behind your back. She means to get everything she can out of you and you are nothing to her.”
His mother looked as if she too had spent a restless night. She did not dress in the morning but wore her bathrobe and a grey turban around her head, which gave her face a disconcerting omniscient look. He might have been breakfasting with a sibyl.
“You’ll have to use canned cream this morning”, she said, pouring his coffee. “I forgot the other.”
“All right, did you hear me?” Thomas growled.
“I’m not deaf,” his mother said and put the pot back on the, trivet. “I know I’m nothing but an old bag of wind to her.
“Then why do you persist in this foolhardy…”
“Thomas,” she said, and put her hand to the side of her face, “it might be…”
“It is not me!” Thomas said, grasping the table leg at his knee.
She continued to hold her face, shaking her head slightly. “Think of all you have,” she began. “All the comforts of home. And morals, Thomas. No bad inclinations, nothing bad you were born with.”
Thomas began to breathe like some one who feels the onset of asthma. “You are