"What," I says.
"I just thought something was wrong."
"Not in here," I says. "You've come to the wrong place."
"I dont mean to worry you," she says.
"I'm glad to hear that," I says. "I wasn't sure.
I thought I might have been mistaken.
Do you want anything?"
After a while she says, "No. Not any thing."
Then she went away.
I took the box down and counted out the money and hid the box again and unlocked the door and went out.
I thought about the camphor, but it would be too late now, anyway.
And I'd just have one more round trip.
She was at her door, waiting.
"You want anything from town?" I says.
"No," she says. "I dont mean to meddle in your affairs.
But I dont know what I'd do if anything happened to you, Jason."
"I'm all right," I says. "Just a headache."
"I wish you'd take some aspirin," she says. "I know you're not going to stop using the car."
"What's the car got to do with it?" I says. "How can a car give a man a headache?"
"You know gasoline always made you sick," she says. "Ever since you were a child. I wish you'd take some aspirin."
"Keep on wishing it," I says. "It wont hurt you."
I got in the car and started back to town.
I had just turned onto the street when I saw a ford coming helling toward me.
All of a sudden it stopped. I could hear the wheels sliding and it slewed around and backed and whirled and just as I was thinking what the hell they were up to, I saw that red tie.
Then I recognised her face looking back through the window.
It whirled into the alley.
I saw it turn again, but when I got to the back street it was just disappearing, running like hell.
I saw red.
When I recognised that red tie, after all I had told her, I forgot about everything.
I never thought about my head even until I came to the first forks and had to stop.
Yet we spend money and spend money on roads and dam if it isn't like trying to drive over a sheet of corrugated iron roofing.
I'd like to know how a man could be expected to keep up with even a wheelbarrow.
I think too much of my car; I'm not going to hammer it to pieces like it was a ford.
Chances were they had stolen it, anyway, so why should they give a dam.
Like I say blood always tells.
If you've got blood like that in you, you'll do anything.
I says whatever claim you believe she has on you has already been discharged; I says from now on you have only yourself to blame because you know what any sensible person would do.
I says if I've got to spend half my time being a dam detective, at least I'll go where I can get paid for it.
So I had to stop there at the forks.
Then I remembered it.
It felt like somebody was inside with a hammer, beating on it.
I says I've tried to keep you from being worried by her; I says far as I'm concerned, let her go to hell as fast as she pleases and the sooner the better.
I says what else do you expect except every dam drummer and cheap show that comes to town because even these town jellybeans give her the go-by now.
You dont know what goes on I says, you dont hear the talk that I hear and you can just bet I shut them up too.
I says my people owned slaves here when you all were running little shirt tail country stores and farming land no nigger would look at on shares.
If they ever farmed it.
It's a good thing the Lord did something for this country; the folks that live on it never have.
Friday afternoon, and from right here I could see three miles of land that hadn't even been broken, and every able bodied man in the county in town at that show.
I might have been a stranger starving to death, and there wasn't a soul in sight to ask which way to town even.
And she trying to get me to take aspirin.