The Complete Stories - Flannery O'Connor [220]
Calhoun put his hand on the girl’s back again and guided her into the waitng room where they sat down close together on a mammoth black leather sofa which faced an identical piece of furniture five feet away. There was nothing else in the room but a rickety table in lone corner with an empty white vase on it. A barred window cast squares of damp light on the floor at their feet. There seemed an intense stillness about them although the place was anything but quiet. From one end of the building came a continuous mourning sound as delicate as the fluttering wail of owls; at the other end they heard rocketing peals of laughter. Closer at hand, a steady monotonous cursing broke the silence around it with a machine-like regularity. Each noise seemed to exist isolated from every other.
The two sat together as if they were waiting for some momentous event in their lives—a marriage or instantaneous deaths. They seemed already joined in a predestined convergence. At the same instant each made an involuntary motion as if to run but it was too late. Heavy footsteps were almost at the door and the machine-like curses were bearing down.
Two burly attendants entered with Singleton spider-like between them. He was holding his feet high up off the floor so that the attendants had to carry him. It was from him the curses were coming. He had on a hospital gown of the type that opens and ties up the back and his feet were stuck in black shoes from which the laces had been removed. On his head was a black hat, not the kind countrymen wear, but a black derby hat such as might be worn by a gunman in the movies. The two attendants came up to the empty sofa from behind and swung him over the back of it, then still holding him, each passed around the sofa arms and sat down beside him, grinning. They might have been twins for though one was blond and the other bald, they had identical looks of goodnatured stupidity.
As for Singleton, he fixed Calhoun with his green slightly mismatched eyes. “Whadaya want with me?” he shrilled. “Speak up! My time is valuable.” They were almost exactly the eyes that Calhoun had seen in the paper, except that the penetrating gleam in them had a slight reptilian quality.
The boy sat mesmerized.
After a moment, Mary Elizabeth said in a slow, hoarse, barely audible voice, “We came to say we understand.”
The old man’s glare shifted to her and for one instant his eyes remained absolutely still like the eyes of a treetoad that has sighted its prey. His throat appeared to swell. “Ahhh,” he said as if he had just swallowed something pleasant, “eeeee.”
“Mind out now, dad,” one of the attendants said.
“Lemme sit with her,” Singleton said and jerked his arm away from the attendant, who caught it again at once. “She knows what she wants.”
“Let him sit with her,” the blond attendant said, “she’s his niece.”
“No,” the bald one said, “keep aholt to him. He’s liable to pull off his frock. You know him.”
But the other one had already let one of his wrists loose and Singleton was leaning outward toward Mary Elizabeth, straining away from the attendant who held him. The girl’s eyes were glazed. The old man began to make suggestive noises through his teeth.
“Now now, dad,” the idle attendant said.
“It’s not every girl gets a chance at me,” Singleton said. “Listen here, sister, I’m well-fixed. There’s nobody in Partridge I can’t skin. I own the place—as well as this hotel.” His hand grasped toward her knee.
The girl gave a small stifled cry.
“And I got others elsewhere,” he panted. “You and me are two of a kind. We ain’t in their class. You’re a queen. I’ll put you on a float!” and at that moment he got his wrist free and lunged toward her but both attendants sprang after him instantly. As Mary Elizabeth crouched against Calhoun, the old man jumped nimbly over the sofa and began to speed around the room. The attendants, their arms and legs held wide apart to catch him, tried to close in on him from either side. They almost had him when he kicked off his shoes and leaped between them onto the table,