Wise Blood - Flannery O'Connor [7]
Finally he pushed open a door at one end of the station where a plain black and white sign said, Men's Toilet. White. He went into a narrow room lined on one side with washbasins and on the other with a row of wooden stalls. The walls of this room had once been a bright cheerful yellow but now they were more nearly green and were decorated with handwriting and with various detailed drawings of the parts of the body of both men and women. Some of the stalls had doors on them and on one of the doors, written with what must have been a crayon, was the large word, Welcome, followed by three exclamation points and something that looked like a snake. Haze entered this one.
He had been sitting in the narrow box for some time, studying the inscriptions on the sides and door, before he noticed one that was to the left over the toilet paper. It was written in a drunken-looking hand. It said, Mrs. Leora Watts! 60 Buckley Road The friendliest bed in town! Brother.
After a while he took a pencil out of his pocket and wrote down the address on the back of an envelope.
Outside he got in a yellow taxi and told the driver where he wanted to go. The driver was a small man with a big leather cap on his head and the tip of a cigar coming out from the center of his mouth. They had driven a few blocks before Haze noticed him squinting at him through the rear-view mirror. "You ain't no friend of hers, are you?" the driver asked.
"I never saw her before," Haze said.
"Where'd you hear about her? She don't usually have no preachers for company." He did not disturb the position of the cigar when he spoke; he was able to speak on either side of it.
"I ain't any preacher," Haze said, frowning. "I only seen her name in the toilet."
"You look like a preacher," the driver said. "That hat looks like a preacher's hat."
"It ain't," Haze said, and leaned forward and gripped the back of the front seat. "It's just a hat."
They stopped in front of a small one-story house between a filling station and a vacant lot. Haze got out and paid his fare through the window.
"It ain't only the hat," the driver said. "It's a look in your face somewheres."
"Listen," Haze said, tilting the hat over one eye, "I'm not a preacher."
"I understand," the driver said. "It ain't anybody perfect on this green earth of God's preachers nor nobody else. And you can tell people better how terrible sin is if you know from your own personal experience."
Haze put his head in at the window, knocking the hat accidentally straight again. He seemed to have knocked his face straight too for it became completely expressionless. "Listen," he said, "get this: I don't believe in anything."
The driver took the stump of cigar out of his mouth. "Not in nothing at all?" he asked, leaving his mouth open after the question.
"I don't have to say it but once to nobody," Haze said.
The driver closed his mouth and after a second he returned the piece of cigar to it. "That's the trouble with you preachers," he said. "You've all got too good to believe in anything," and he drove off with a look of disgust and righteousness.
Haze turned and looked at the house he was going into. It was little more than a shack but there was a warm glow in one front window. He went up on the front porch and put his eye to a convenient crack in the shade, and found himself looking directly at a large white knee. After some time he moved away from the crack and tried the front door. It was not locked and he went into a small dark hall with a door on either side of it. The door to the left was cracked and let out a narrow shaft of light. He moved into the light and looked through the crack.
Mrs. Watts was sitting alone in a white iron bed, cutting her toenails with a large pair of scissors. She was a big woman with very yellow hair and white skin