The Heart is a Lonely Hunter - Carson McCullers [126]
‘How many out there?’ Jake roared. He banged an empty bottle on the windowsill. ‘Come on, everybody. Come one, come all. I’ll settle you three at a time.’
‘That’s right, Honey,’ a whore called.
The door was giving way. Jake jumped from the window and ran through a side alley. ‘Hee-haw! Hee-haw!’ he yelled drunkenly. He was barefooted and shirtless. An hour later he stumbled into Singer’s room. He sprawled on the floor and laughed himself to sleep.
On an April morning he found the body of a man who had been murdered. A young Negro. Jake found him in a ditch about thirty yards from the showgrounds. The Negro’s throat had been slashed so that the head was rolled back at a crazy angle. The sun shone hot on his open, glassy eyes and flies hovered over the dried blood that covered his chest. The dead man held a red-and-yellow cane with a tassel like the ones sold at the hamburger booth at the show. Jake stared gloomily down at the body for some time. Then he called the police. No clues were found. Two days later the family of the dead man claimed his body at the morgue.
At the Sunny Dixie there were frequent fights and quarrels.
Sometimes two friends would come to the show arm in arm, laughing and drinking--and before they left they would be struggling together in a panting rage. Jake was always alert.
Beneath the gaudy gaiety of the show, the bright lights, and the lazy laughter, he felt something sullen and dangerous.
Through these dazed, disjointed weeks Simms nagged his footsteps constantly. The old man liked to come with a soapbox and a Bible and take a stand in the middle of the crowd to preach. He talked of the second coming of Christ. He said that the Day of Judgment would be October 2, 1951. He would point out certain drunks and scream at them in his raw, worn voice. Excitement made his mouth fill with water so that his words had a wet, gurgling sound. Once he had slipped in and set up his stand no arguments could make him budge. He made Jake a present of a Gideon Bible, and told him to pray on his knees for one hour each night and to hurl away every glass of beer or cigarette that was offered him.
They quarreled over walls and fences. Jake had begun to carry chalk in his pockets, also. He wrote brief sentences.
He tried to word them so that a passerby would stop and ponder over the meaning. So that a man would wonder. So that a man would think. Also, he wrote short pamphlets and distributed them in the streets.
If it had not been for Singer, Jake knew that he would have left the town. Only on Sunday, when he was with his friend, did he feel at peace. Sometimes they would go for a walk together or play chess--but more often they spent the day quietly in Singer’s room. If he wished to talk Singer was always attentive. If he sat morosely through the day the mute understood his feelings and was not surprised. It seemed to him that only Singer could help him now.
Then one Sunday when he climbed the stairs he saw that Singer’s door was open. The room was empty. He sat alone for more than two hours. At last he heard Singer’s footsteps on the stairs.
‘I was wondering about you. Where you been?’ Singer smiled. He brushed off his hat with a handkerchief and put it away. Then deliberately he took his silver pencil from his pocket and leaned over the mantelpiece to write a note.
‘What you mean?’ Jake asked when he read what the mute had written. ‘Whose legs are cut off?’
Singer took back the note and wrote a few additional sentences.
‘Huh!’ Jake said. That don’t surprise me.’
He brooded over the piece of paper and then crumpled it in his hand. The listlessness of the past month was gone and he was tense and uneasy. ‘Huh!’ he said again.
Singer put on a pot of coffee and got out his chessboard. Jake tore the note to pieces and rolled the fragments between his sweating palms. ‘But something can be done about this,’ he said after a while. ‘You know it? ‘ Singer nodded uncertainly. ‘I want to see the boy and hear the whole story. When can you take me around there? ‘ Singer deliberated. Then he wrote on a pad