“The dead are dead and stay that way,” he said, gaining a little strength.
“And scorns the Resurrection and the Life?”
His thirst was like a rough hand clenched in his throat. “Sell me a purple drink,” he said hoarsely.
The woman did not move.
He turned and went, his look as dark as hers. There were circles under his eyes and his skin seemed to have shrunk on the frame of his bones from dryness. The obscenity echoed sullenly in his head. The boy’s mind was too fierce to brook impurities of such a nature. He was intolerant of unspiritual evils and with those of the flesh he had never truckled. He felt his victory sullied by the remark that had come from his mouth. He thought of turning and going back and flinging the right words at her but he had still not found them. He tried to think of what the schoolteacher would have said to her but no words of his uncle’s would rise to his mind.
The sun was behind him now and his thirst had reached the point where it could not get worse. The inside of his throat felt as if it were coated with burning sand. He moved on doggedly. No cars were passing. He made up his mind that he would flag the next car that passed. He hungered now for companionship as much as food and water. He wanted to explain to someone what he had failed to explain to the woman and with the right words to wipe out the obscenity that had stained his thought.
He had gone almost two more miles when a car finally passed him and then slowed down and stopped. He had been trudging absently and had not waved it down but when he saw it stop, he began to run forward. By the time he reached it, the driver had leaned over and opened the door. It was a lavender and cream-colored car. The boy scrambled in without looking at the driver and closed the door and they drove on.
Then he turned and looked at the man and an unpleasant sensation that he could not place came over him. The person who had picked him up was a pale, lean, old-looking young man with deep hollows under his cheekbones. He had on a lavender shirt and a thin black suit and a panama hat. His lips were as white as the cigaret that hung limply from one side of his mouth. His eyes were the same color as his shirt and were ringed with heavy black lashes. A lock of yellow hair fell across his forehead from under his pushed-back hat. He was silent and Tarwater was silent. He drove at a leisurely rate and presently he turned in the seat and gave the boy a long personal look. “Live around here?” he asked.
“Not on this road,” Tarwater said. His voice was cracked from dryness.
“Going somewheres?”
“To where I live,” the boy croaked. “I’m in charge there now.”
The man said nothing else for a few minutes. The window by the boy’s side was cracked and patched with a piece of adhesive tape and the handle to lower it had been removed. There was a sweet stale odor in the car and there did not seem enough air to breathe freely. Tarwater could see a pale reflection of himself, eyeing him darkly from the window.
“Don’t live on this road, huh?” the man said.
“Where do your folks live?”
“No folks,” Tarwater said. “It’s only me. I take care of myself. Nobody tells me what to do.”
“Don’t huh?” the man said. “I see it’s no flies on you.”
“No,” the boy said, “there’s not.”
There was something familiar to him in the look of the stranger but he could not place where he had seen him before. The man put his hand in the pocket of his shirt and brought out a silver case. He snapped it open and passed it over to Tarwater. “Smoke?” he said.
The boy had never smoked anything but rabbit tobacco and he did not want a cigaret. He only looked at them.
“Special,” the man said, continuing to hold out the case. “You don’t get one of this kind every day, but maybe you ain’t had much experience smoking.”
Tarwater took the cigaret and hung it in the corner of his mouth, exactly as the man’s was hung. Out of another pocket, the man produced a silver lighter and flashed the flame over to him. The cigaret didn’t light the first time but the second time he pulled in his breath, it lit and his lungs were unpleasantly filled with smoke. The smoke had a peculiar odor.
“Got no folks, huh?” the man said again. “What road do you live on?”
“It ain’t even a road to it,” the boy said. “I lived with my great-uncle but he’s dead, burnt up, and now it’s only me.” He began to cough violently.
The man reached across the dashboard and opened the glove compartment. Inside, lying on its side was a flat bottle of whiskey. “Help yourself,” he said. “It’ll kill that cough.”
It was an old-looking stamped bottle without the paper front on it and with a bitten-off cork in the top. “I get that special too,” the man said. “If there’s flies on you, you can’t drink it.”
The boy grasped the bottle and began to pull at the cork, and simultaneously there came into his head all his great-uncle’s warnings about poisonous liquor, all his idiot restrictions about riding with strangers. The essence of all the old man’s foolishness flooded his mind like a rising tide of irritation. He grasped the bottle the more firmly and pulled at the cork, which was too far in, with his fingers. He put the bottle between his knees and took the schoolteacher’s corkscrew-bottleopener out of his pocket.
“Say, that’s nifty,” the man said.
The boy smiled. He pushed the corkscrew in the cork and pulled it out. Never a thought of the old man’s but he would change it now. “This here thing will open anything,” he said.
The stranger was driving slowly, watching him. He lifted the bottle to his lips and took a long swallow. The liquid had a deep barely concealed bitterness that he had not expected and it appeared to be thicker than any whiskey he had ever had before. It burned his throat savagely and his thirst raged anew so that he was obliged to take another and fuller swallow. The second was worse than the first and he perceived that the stranger was watching him with what might be a leer.
