Tobacco Road - Erskine Caldwell [60]
“I reckon we’ll have to go hunt Sister Bessie,” he said. “Maybe she got lost and can’t find this room. It was dark out there last night, and things look different in the daytime up here in the city.”
They opened the door and walked to the end of the hall. All the doors were closed, and Jeeter did not know which one to open. The first two he opened were not occupied, but the next one was. He turned the knob and went inside. There were two people asleep in the bed, but the woman was not Bessie. Jeeter backed out of the room and closed the door. Dude tried the next room. The door of that one was unlocked, too, and Jeeter had to go across the room and look at the woman’s face before he was satisfied she was not Bessie. In the other rooms they entered they failed to find Bessie, and Jeeter did not know what to do. The last room they entered had only a single bed and he was about to close the door, when the girl opened her eyes and sat up. Jeeter stood looking at her, not knowing what else to do. When the girl was fully awake, she smiled and called Jeeter to her.
“What you want?” he said.
“Why did you come in here?” she said.
“I’m looking for Bessie, and I reckon I’d better go hunt for her some more. I’m liable to disgrace myself if I stay here looking at you.”
She called Jeeter again, but he turned his back and ran out of the room. Dude caught up with his father.
“By God and by Jesus, Dude,” Jeeter said. “I never saw so many pretty girls and women in all my days. This hotel is just jammed with them. I’d sure lose my religion if I stayed here much longer. I’ve got to get out in the street right now.”
At the foot of the stairway they saw the man who had rented them the room the night before. He was reading the morning paper.
“We’re ready to leave now,” Jeeter said, “but we can’t find Sister Bessie.”
“The woman who came in with you last night?”
“She’s the one. Sister Bessie, her name is.”
“I’ll get her,” he said, and started up the stairs. “What’s wrong with her nose? I didn’t notice it last night, but I saw it this morning. It gives me the creeps to look at it.”
“She was born like that,” Jeeter said. “Bessie ain’t much to look at in the face, but she’s a right smart piece to live with. Dude, here, he knows, because he’s married to her.”
“She’s got the ungodliest-looking nose I ever saw,” the man said, going up the stairs. “I hope I never get fooled like that again in the dark.”
In about five minutes both he and Bessie came down the stairs. The man was in front and Bessie behind.
Out in the street, where they had left the car, Jeeter found the bag of crackers and cheese, and he began eating them hungrily. Dude took a handful of crackers and put them into his mouth. A few doors away was a store with a Coca-Cola sign on it, and all of them went in and got a drink.
“You don’t look like you slept none too much last night,” Jeeter said. “Couldn’t you go to sleep, Bessie?”
She yawned and rubbed her face with the palms of her hands. She had dressed hurriedly, and had not combed her hair. It hung matted and stringy over her face.
“I reckon the hotel was pretty full last night,” she said. “Every once in a while somebody came and called me to another room. Every room I went to there was somebody sleeping in the bed. Looked like nobody knowed where my bed was. They was always telling me to sleep in a new one. I didn’t sleep none, except about an hour just a while ago. There sure is a lot of men staying there.”
Jeeter led them outside the store and they got into the automobile and drove off towards the residential part of the city. Bessie yawned, and tried to take a nap on the front seat.
Selling the load of blackjack was no easier than it had been the afternoon before. Nobody wanted to buy wood, at least not the kind Jeeter had for sale.
By three o’clock that afternoon all of them were thoroughly tired of trying to find somebody to take the wood.
Sister Bessie wanted to go back home, and so did Jeeter. Bessie was sleepy and tired. Jeeter began swearing every