The Sound and the Fury - William Faulkner [116]
“Have a seat and tell me what the trouble is.”
“I told you over the phone,” Jason said, standing. “I did that to save time. Am I going to have to go to law to compel you to do your sworn duty?”
“You sit down and tell me about it,” the sheriff said. “I’ll take care of you all right.”
“Care, hell,” Jason said. “Is this what you call taking care of me?”
“You’re the one that’s holding us up,” the sheriff said. “You sit down and tell me about it.”
Jason told him, his sense of injury and impotence feeding upon its own sound, so that after a time he forgot his haste in the violent cumulation of his self justification and his outrage. The sheriff watched him steadily with his cold shiny eyes.
“But you dont know they done it,” he said. “You just think so.”
“Dont know?” Jason said. “When I spent two damn days chasing her through alleys, trying to keep her away from him, after I told her what I’d do to her if I ever caught her with him, and you say I dont know that that little b——”
“Now, then,” the sheriff said. “That’ll do. That’s enough of that.” He looked out across the street, his hands in his pockets.
“And when I come to you, a commissioned officer of the law,” Jason said.
“That show’s in Mottson this week,” the sheriff said.
“Yes,” Jason said. “And if I could find a law officer that gave a solitary damn about protecting the people that elected him to office, I’d be there too by now.” He repeated his story, harshly recapitulant, seeming to get an actual pleasure out of his outrage and impotence. The sheriff did not appear to be listening at all.
“Jason,” he said. “What were you doing with three thousand dollars hid in the house?”
“What?” Jason said. “That’s my business where I keep my money. Your business is to help me get it back.”
“Did your mother know you had that much on the place?”
“Look here,” Jason said. “My house has been robbed. I know who did it and I know where they are. I come to you as the commissioned officer of the law, and I ask you once more, are you going to make any effort to recover my property, or not?”
“What do you aim to do with that girl, if you catch them?”
“Nothing,” Jason said. “Not anything. I wouldn’t lay my hand on her. The bitch that cost me a job, the one chance I ever had to get ahead, that killed my father and is shortening my mother’s life every day and made my name a laughing stock in the town. I wont do anything to her,” he said. “Not anything.”
“You drove that girl into running off, Jason,” the sheriff said.
“How I conduct my family is no business of yours,” Jason said. “Are you going to help me or not?”
“You drove her away from home,” the sheriff said. “And I have some suspicions about who that money belongs to that I dont reckon I’ll ever know for certain.”
Jason stood, slowly wringing the brim of his hat in his hands. He said quietly: “You’re not going to make any effort to catch them for me?”
“That’s not any of my business, Jason. If you had any actual proof, I’d have to act. But without that I dont figger it’s any of my business.”
“That’s your answer, is it?” Jason said. “Think well, now.”
“That’s it, Jason.”
“All right,” Jason said. He put his hat on. “You’ll regret this. I wont be helpless. This is not Russia, where just because he wears a little metal badge, a man is immune to law.” He went down the steps and got in his car and started the engine. The sheriff watched him drive away, turn, and rush past the house toward town.
The bells were ringing again, high in the scudding sunlight in bright disorderly tatters of sound. He stopped at a filling station and had his tires examined and the tank filled.
“Gwine on a trip, is you?” the negro asked him. He didn’t answer. “Look like hit gwine fair off, after all,” the negro said.
“Fair off, hell,” Jason said. “It’ll be raining like hell by twelve oclock.” He looked at the sky, thinking about rain, about the slick clay roads, himself stalled somewhere