Wise Blood - Flannery O'Connor [28]
CHAPTER 6
That evening Haze drove his car around the streets until he found the blind man and the child again. They were standing on a corner, waiting for the light to change. He drove the Essex at some distance behind them for about four blocks up the main street and then turned it after them down a side street. He followed them on into a dark section past the railroad yards and watched them go up on the porch of a box-like two-story house. When the blind man opened the door a shaft of light fell on him and Haze craned his neck to see him better. The child turned her head, slowly, as if it worked on a screw and watched his car pass. His face was so close to the glass that it looked like a paper face pasted there. He noted the number of the house and a sign on it that said, Rooms for Rent.
Then he drove back down town and parked the Essex in front of a movie house where he could catch the drain of people coming out from the picture show. The lights around the marquee were so bright that the moon, moving overhead with a small procession of clouds behind it, looked pale and insignificant. Haze got out of the Essex and climbed up on the nose of it.
A thin little man with a long upper lip was at the glass ticket box, buying tickets for three portly women who were behind him. "Gotta get these girls some refreshments too," he said to the woman in the ticket box. "Can't have 'em starve right before my eyes."
"Ain't he a card?" one of the women hollered. "He keeps me in stitches"
Three boys in red satin lumberjackets came out of the foyer. Haze raised his arms. "Where has the blood you think you been redeemed by touched you?" he cried.
The women all turned around at once and stared at him.
"A wise guy," the little thin man said, and glared as if someone were about to insult him.
The three boys moved up, pushing each other's shoulders.
Haze waited a second and then he cried again. "Where has the blood you think you been redeemed by touched you?"
"Rabble rouser," the little man said. "One thing I can't stand it's a rabble rouser."
"What church you belong to, you boy there?" Haze asked, pointing at the tallest boy in the red satin lumber-jacket.
The boy giggled.
"You then," he said impatiently, pointing at the next one. "What church you belong to?"
"Church of Christ," the boy said in a falsetto to hide the truth.
"Church of Christi" Haze repeated. "Well, I preach the Church Without Christ. I'm member and preacher to that church where the blind don't see and the lame don't walk and what's dead stays that way. Ask me about that church and I'll tell you it's the church that the blood of Jesus don't foul with redemption."
"He's a preacher," one of the women said. "Let's go."
"Listen, you people, I'm going to take the truth with me wherever I go," Haze called. "I'm going to preach it to whoever'll listen at whatever place. I'm going to preach there was no Fall because there was nothing to fall from and no Redemption because there was no Fall and no Judgment because there wasn't the first two. Nothing matters but that Jesus was a liar."
The little man herded his girls into the picture show quickly and the three boys left but more people came out and he began over and said the same thing again. They left and some more came and he said it a third time. Then they left and no one else came out; there was no one there but the woman in the glass box. She had been glaring at him all the time but he had not noticed her. She wore glasses with rhinestones in the bows and she had white hair stacked in sausages around her head. She stuck her mouth to a hole in the glass and shouted, "Listen if you don't have a church to do it in you don't have to do it in front of this show."
"My church is the Church Without Christ, lady," he said. "If there's no Christ, there's no reason to have a set place to do it in."
"Listen," she said, "if you don't get from in front of this show, I'll call the police."
"There's plenty of shows," he said and got down and got back in the Essex and drove off. That night he preached in front of