“Uncle Bud, honey,” Miss Myrtle said, “dont you want to go and play in the yard with Reba and Mr Binford?”
“Yessum,” the boy said. He went toward the door.
They watched him until the door closed upon him.
Miss Lorraine drew her chair up; they leaned together.
“And that’s what they was doing?” Miss Myrtle said.
“I says
‘I been running a house for twenty years, but this is the first time I ever had anything like this going on in it.
If you want to turn a stud in to your girl’ I says ‘go somewhere else to do it.
I aint going to have my house turned into no French joint.’ ”
“The son of a bitch,” Miss Lorraine said.
“He’d ought to’ve had sense enough to got a old ugly man,” Miss Myrtle said.
“Tempting us poor girls like that.”
“Men always expects us to resist temptation,” Miss Lorraine said. She was sitting upright like a school-teacher.
“The lousy son of a bitch.”
“Except what they offers themselves,” Miss Reba said.
“Then watch them.…Every morning for four days that was going on, then they didn’t come back.
For a week Popeye didn’t show up at all, and that girl wild as a young mare.
I thought he was out of town on business maybe, until Minnie told me he wasn’t and that he give her five dollars a day not to let that girl out of the house nor use the telephone.
And me trying to get word to him to come and take her out of my house because I didn’t want nuttin like that going on in it.
Yes, sir, Minnie said the two of them would be nekkid as two snakes, and Popeye hanging over the foot of the bed without even his hat took off, making a kind of whinnying sound.”
“Maybe he was cheering for them,” Miss Lorraine said.
“The lousy son of a bitch.”
Feet came up the hall; they could hear Minnie’s voice lifted in adjuration.
The door opened.
She entered, holding Uncle Bud erect by one hand.
Limp-kneed he dangled, his face fixed in an expression of glassy idiocy.
“Miss Reba,” Minnie said, “this boy done broke in the icebox and drunk a whole bottle of beer.
You, boy!” she said, shaking him, “stan up!”
Limply he dangled, his face rigid in a slobbering grin.
Then upon it came an expression of concern, consternation; Minnie swung him sharply away from her as he began to vomit.
26
When the sun rose, Horace had not been to bed nor even undressed.
He was just finishing a letter to his wife, addressed to her at her father’s in Kentucky, asking for a divorce.
He sat at the table, looking down at the single page written neatly and illegibly over, feeling quiet and empty for the first time since he had found Popeye watching him across the spring four weeks ago.
While he was sitting there he began to smell coffee from somewhere.
“I’ll finish this business and then I’ll go to Europe.
I am sick.
I am too old for this.
I was born too old for it, and so I am sick to death for quiet.”
He shaved and made coffee and drank a cup and ate some bread.
When he passed the hotel, the bus which met the morning train was at the curb, with the drummers getting into it.
Clarence Snopes was one of them, carrying a tan suit case.
“Going down to Jackson for a couple of days on a little business,” he said.
“Too bad I missed you last night.
I come on back in a car.
I reckon you was settled for the night, maybe?”
He looked down at Horace, vast, pasty, his intention unmistakable.
“I could have took you to a place most folks dont know about.
Where a man can do just whatever he is big enough to do.
But there’ll be another time, since I done got to know you better.”