“If you croaked the guy, say so.
It can’t be any secret long.
They are bound to hear about it by next month at the outside.”
“I don’t know, I tell you!” Joe said.
He looked from one to the other, fretted but not yet glaring. “I hit him.
He fell down.
I told him I was going to do it someday.” He looked from one to the other of the still, almost identical faces.
He began to jerk his shoulder under the stranger’s hand.
Max spoke.
“What did you come here for, then?”
“What did—” Joe said. “What did I ...” he said, in a tone of fainting amazement, glaring from face to face with a sort of outraged yet still patient exasperation. “What did I come for?
I came to get Bobbie.
Do you think that I—when I went all the way home to get the money to get married—” Again he completely forgot, dismissed them.
He jerked free and turned to the woman with once more that expression oblivious, exalted, and proud.
Very likely at that moment the two men were blown as completely out of his life as two scraps of paper.
Very likely he was not even aware when Max went to the door and called and a moment later the blonde woman entered.
He was bending above the bed upon which sat the immobile and downlooking waitress, stooping above her, dragging the wadded mass of coins and bills from his pocket, onto her lap and onto the bed beside her. “Here!
Look at it.
Look.
I’ve got.
See?”
Then the wind blew upon him again, like in the school house three hours ago among the gaped faces there of which he had for the time been oblivious.
He stood in a quiet, dreamlike state, erect now where the upward spring of the sitting waitress had knocked him, and saw her, on her feet, gather up the wadded and scattered money and fling it; he saw quietly her face strained, the mouth screaming, the eyes screaming too.
He alone of them all seemed to himself quiet, calm; his voice alone quiet enough to register upon the ear:
“You mean you won’t?” he said. “You mean, you won’t?”
It was very much like it had been in the school house: someone holding her as she struggled and shrieked, her hair wild with the jerking and tossing of her head; her face, even her mouth, in contrast to the hair as still as a dead mouth in a dead face.
“Bastard!
Son of a bitch!
Getting me into a jam, that always treated you like you were a white man.
A white man!”
But very likely to him even yet it was just noise, not registering at all: just a part of the long wind.
He just stared at her, at the face which he had never seen before, saying quietly (whether aloud or not, he could not have said) in a slow amazement: Why, I committed murder for her.
I even stole for her, as if he had just heard of it, thought of it, been told that he had done it.
Then she too seemed to blow out of his life on the long wind like a third scrap of paper.
He began to swing his arm as if the hand still clutched the shattered chair.
The blonde woman had been in the room some time.
He saw her for the first time, without surprise, having apparently materialised out of thin air, motionless, with that diamondsurfaced tranquillity which invested her with a respectability as implacable and calm as the white lifted glove of a policeman, not a hair out of place.
She now wore the pale blue kimono over the dark garment for travelling.
She said quietly:
“Take him.
Let’s get out of here.
There’ll be a cop out here soon.
They’ll know where to look for him.”
Perhaps Joe did not hear her at all, nor the screaming waitress:
“He told me himself he was a nigger!
The son of a bitch!
Me f—ing for nothing a nigger son of a bitch that would get me in a jam with clodhopper police.
At a clodhopper dance!”
Perhaps he heard only the long wind, as, swinging his hand as though it still clutched the chair, he sprang forward upon the two men.
Very likely he did not even know that they were already moving toward him.