The Complete Stories - Flannery O'Connor [262]
The artist took him roughly by the arm and propelled him between the two mirrors. “Now look,” he said, angry at having his work ignored.
Parker looked, turned white and moved away. The eyes in the reflected face continued to look at him—still, straight, all-demanding, enclosed in silence.
“It was your idea, remember,” the artist said. “I would have advised something else.”
Parker said nothing. He put on his shirt and went out the door while the artist shouted, “I’ll expect all of my money!”
Parker headed toward a package shop on the corner. He bought a pint of whiskey and took it into a nearby alley and drank it all in five minutes. Then he moved on to a pool hall nearby which he frequented when he came to the city. It was a well-lighted barnlike place with a bar up one side and gambling machines on the other and pool tables in the back. As soon as Parker entered, a large man in a red and black checkered shirt hailed him by slapping him on the back and yelling, “Yeyyyyyyboyl O. E. Parker!”
Parker was not yet ready to be struck on the back. “Lay off,” he said, “I got a fresh tattoo there.”
“What you got this time?” the man asked and then yelled to a few at the machines. “O. E.’s got him another tattoo.”
“Nothing special this time,” Parker said and slunk over to a machine that was not being used.
“Come on,” the big man said, “let’s have a look at O. E.’s tattoo,” and while Parker squirmed in their hands, they pulled up his shirt. Parker felt all the hands drop away instantly and his shirt fell again like a veil over the face. There was a silence in the pool room which seemed to Parker to grow from the circle around him until it extended to the foundations under the building and upward through the beams in the roof.
Finally some one said, “Christ!” Then they all broke into noise at once. Parker turned around, an uncertain grin on his face.
“Leave it to O. E.!” the man in the checkered shirt said. “That boy’s a real card!”
“Maybe he’s gone and got religion,” some one yelled.
“Not on your life,” Parker said.
“O. E.’s got religion and is witnessing for Jesus, ain’t you, O. E.?” a little man with a piece of cigar in his mouth said wryly. “An original way to do it if I ever saw one:’
“Leave it to Parker to think of a new one!” the fat man said.
“Yyeeeeeeyyyyyyyboy!” someone yelled and they all began to whistle and curse in compliment until Parker said, “Aaa shut up:’
“What’d you do it for?” somebody asked.
“For laughs,” Parker said. “What’s it to you?”
“Why ain’t you laughing then?” somebody yelled. Parker lunged into the midst of them and like a whirlwind on a summer’s day there began a fight that raged amid overturned tables and swinging fists until two of them grabbed him and ran to the door with him and threw him out. Then a calm descended on the pool hall as nerve shattering as if the long barnlike room were the ship from which Jonah had been cast into the sea.
Parker sat for a long time on the ground in the alley behind the pool hall, examining his soul. He saw it as a spider web of facts and lies that was not at all important to him but which appeared to be necessary in spite of his opinion. The eyes that were now forever on his back were eyes to be obeyed. He was as certain of it as he had ever been of anything. Throughout his life, grumbling and sometimes cursing, often afraid, once in rapture, Parker had obeyed whatever instinct of this kind had come to him—in rapture when his spirit had lifted at the sight of the tattooed man at the fair, afraid when he had joined the navy, grumbling when he had married Sarah Ruth.
The thought of her brought him slowly to his feet. She would know what he had to do. She would clear up the rest of it, and she would at least be pleased. It seemed to him that, all along, that was what he wanted, to please her. His truck was still parked in front of the building where the artist had his place, but it was not far away. He got in it and drove