But let one of ’em get a belly ache,” he added proudly, “and you’ll see how quick they come running to me.
Isn’t that right, Ben?” he said, turning to him.
“Oh, listen to this!” said Ben, laughing irritably and burying his peaked face in his coffee mug.
His bitter savor filled the place with life, with tenderness, with beauty.
They looked on him with drunken, kindly eyes — at his gray scornful face and the lonely demon flicker of his smile.
“And I tell you something else,” said McGuire, ponderously wheeling around on Coker, “if one of them’s got to be cut open, see who gets the job.
What about it, Ben?” he asked.
“By God, if you ever cut me open, McGuire,” said Ben,
“I’m going to be damned sure you can walk straight before you do.”
“Come on, Hugh,” said Coker, prodding McGuire under his shoulder.
“Stop chasing those beans around the plate.
Crawl off or fall off that damned stool — I don’t care which.”
McGuire, drunkenly lost in revery, stared witlessly down at his bean plate and sighed.
“Come on, you damned fool,” said Coker, getting up, “you’ve got to operate in forty-five minutes.”
“Oh, for God’s sake,” said Ben, lifting his face from the stained mug, “who’s the victim?
I’ll send flowers.”
“ . . . all of us sooner or later,” McGuire mumbled puffily through his puff-lips.
“Rich and poor alike.
Here today and gone tomorrow.
Doesn’t matter . . . doesn’t matter at all.”
“In heaven’s name,” Ben burst out irritably to Coker.
“Are you going to let him operate like that?
Why don’t you shoot them instead?”
Coker plucked the cigar from his long malarial grinning face:
“Why, he’s just getting hot, son,” said he.
Nacreous pearl light swam faintly about the hem of the lilac darkness; the edges of light and darkness were stitched upon the hills.
Morning moved like a pearl-gray tide across the fields and up the hill-flanks, flowing rapidly down into the soluble dark.
At the curb now, young Dr. Jefferson Spaugh brought his Buick roadster to a halt, and got out, foppishly drawing off his gloves and flicking the silk lapels of his dinner jacket.
His face, whisky-red, was highboned and handsome; his mouth was straightlipped, cruel, and sensual.
An inherited aura of mountain-cornfield sweat hung scentlessly but telepathically about him; he was a smartened-up mountaineer with country-club and University of Pennsylvania glossings.
Four years in Philly change a man.
Thrusting his gloves carelessly into his coat, he entered. McGuire slid bearishly off his stool and gazed him into focus.
Then he made beckoning round-arm gestures with his fat hands.
“Look at it, will you,” he said.
“Does any one know what it is?”
“It’s Percy,” said Coker.
“You know Percy Van der Gould, don’t you?”
“I’ve been dancing all night at the Hilliards,” said Spaugh elegantly.
“Damn!
These new patent-leather pumps have ruined my feet.”
He sat upon a stool, and elegantly displayed his large country feet, indecently broad and angular in the shoes.
“What’s he been doing?” said McGuire doubtfully, turning to Coker for enlightenment.
“He’s been dancing all night at the Hilliards,” said Coker in a mincing voice.
McGuire shielded his bloated face coyly with his hand.
“O crush me!” he said,
“I’m a grape!
Dancing at the Hilliards, were you, you damned Mountain Grill.
You’ve been on a Poon–Tang Picnic in Niggertown.
You can’t load that bunk on us.”
Bull-lunged, their laughter filled the nacreous dawn.