have got aholt to some misinformation.”
Tarwater looked away, out the window, at the brittle forms of the houses. He was holding both arms close to his sides as if he were cold. “I’ll find out,” he said.
“Well how now?” Meeks asked.
The dark city was unfolding on either side of them and they were approaching a low circle of light in the distance. “I mean to wait and see what happens,” he said after a moment.
“And suppose nothing don’t happen?’ Meeks asked. The circle of light became huge and they swung into the center of it and stopped. It was a gaping concrete mouth with two red gas pumps set in front of it and a small glass office toward the back. “I say suppose nothing don’t happen?” Meeks repeated.
The boy looked at him darkly, remembering the silence after his great uncle’s death.
“Well?’ Meeks said.
“Then I’ll make it happen,” he said. “I can act.”
“Attaboy,” Meeks said. He opened the car door and put his leg out while he continued to observe his rider. Then he said, “Wait a minute. I got to call my girl.”
A man was asleep in a chair tilted against the outside wall of the glass office and Meeks went inside without waking him up. For a minute Tarwater only craned his neck out the window. Then he got out and went to the office door to watch Meeks use the machine. It sat, small and black, in the center of a cluttered desk which Meeks sat down on as if it had been his own. The room was lined with automobile tires and had a concrete and rubber smell. Meeks took the machine in two parts and held one part to his head while he circled with his finger on the other part. Then he sat waiting, swinging his foot, while the horn buzzed in his ear. After a minute an acid smile began to eat at the corners of his mouth and he said, drawing in his breath, “Heythere, Sugar, hyer you?” and Tarwater, from where he stood in the door, heard an actual woman’s voice, like one coming from beyond the grave, say, “Why Sugar, is that reely you?” and Meeks said it was him in the same old flesh and made an appointment with her in ten minutes.
Tarwater stood awestruck in the doorway. Meeks put the telephone together and then he said in a sly voice, “Now why don’t you call your uncle?” and watched the boy’s face change, the eyes swerve suspiciously to the side and the flesh drop around the boney mouth.
“I’ll speak with him soon enough,” he muttered, but he kept looking at the black coiled machine, fascinated. “How do you use it?” he asked.
“You dial it like I did. Call your uncle,” Meeks urged.
“No, that woman is waiting on you,” Tarwater said.
“Let ‘er wait,” Meeks said. “That’s what she knows how to do best.”
The boy approached it, taking out the card he had written the number on. He put his finger on the dial and began gingerly to turn it.
“Great God,” Meeks said and took the receiver off the hook and put it in his hand and thrust his hand to his ear. He dialed the number for him and then pushed him down in the office chair to wait but Tarwater stood up again, slightly crouched, holding the buzzing horn to his head, while his heart began to kick viciously at his chest wall.
“It don’t speak,” he murmured.
“Give him time,” Meeks said, “maybe he don’t like to get up in the middle of the night.”
The buzzing continued for a minute and then stopped abruptly. Tarwater stood speechless, holding the earpiece tight against his head, his face rigid as if he were afraid that the Lord might be about to speak to him over the machine. All at once he heard what sounded like heavy breathing in his ear.
“Ask for your party,” Meeks prompted. “How do you expect to get your party if you don’t ask for him?”
The boy remained exactly as he was, saying nothing.
“I told you to ask for your party,” Meeks said irritably. “Ain’t you got good sense?”
“I want to speak with my uncle,” Tarwater whispered.
There was a silence over the telephone but it was not a silence that seemed to be empty. It was the kind where the breath is drawn in and held. Suddenly the boy realized that it was the schoolteacher’s child on the other side of the machine. The white-haired, blunted face rose before him. He said in a furious shaking voice, “I want to speak with my uncle. Not you!”
The heavy breathing began again as if in answer.
It was a kind of bubbling noise, the kind of noise someone would make who was struggling to breathe in water. In a second it faded away. The horn of the machine dropped out of Tarwater’s hand. He stood there blankly as if he had received a revelation he could not yet decipher. He seemed to have been stunned by some deep internal blow that had not yet made its way to the surface of his mind.
Meeks picked up the earpiece and listened but there was no sound. He put it back on the hook and said, “Come on. I ain’t got this kind of time.” He gave the stupefied boy a shove and they left, driving off into the city again. Meeks told him to learn to work every machine he saw. The greatest invention of man, he said, was the wheel and he asked Tarwater if he had ever thought how things were before it was a wheel, but the boy didn’t answer him. He didn’t even appear to be listening. He sat slightly forward and from time to time his lips moved as if he were speaking silently with himself.
“Well, it was terrible,” Meeks said sourly. He knew the boy didn’t have any uncle at any such respectable address and to prove it, he turned down the street the uncle was supposed to live on and drove slowly past the small shapes of squat houses until he found the number, visible in phosphorescent letters on a small stick set on the edge of the grass plot. He stopped the car and said, “Okay, kiddo, that’s it.”
“That’s what?” Tarwater mumbled.
“That’s your uncle’s house,” Meeks said.
The boy grabbed the edge of the window with both hands and stared out at what appeared to be only a black
