He bought the car for forty dollars and then he paid the man extra for five gallons of gasoline. The man had the boy go in the office and bring out a five-gallon can of gas to fill up the tank with. The boy came cursing and lugging the yellow gas can, bent over almost double. “Give it here/’ Haze said, ‘Til do it myself.” He was in a terrible hurry to get away in the car. The boy jerked the can away from him and straightened up. It was only half full but he held it over the tank until five gallons would have spilled out slowly. All the time he kept saying, “Sweet Jesus, sweet Jesus, sweet Jesus.”
“Why don’t he shut up?” Haze said suddenly. “What’s he keep talking like that for?”
“I don’t never know what ails him,” the man said and shrugged.
When the car was ready the man and the boy stood by to watch him drive it off. He didn’t want anybody watching him because he hadn’t driven a car in four or five years. The man and the boy didn’t say anything while he tried to start it. They only stood there, looking in at him. “I wanted this car mostly to be a house for me,” he said to the man. “I ain’t got any place to be.”
“You ain’t took the brake off yet,” the man said.
He took off the brake and the car shot backward because the man had left it in reverse. In a second he got it going forward and he drove off crookedly, past the man and the boy still standing there watching. He kept going forward, thinking nothing and sweating. For a long time he stayed on the street he was on. He had a hard time holding the car in the road. He went past railroad yards for about a half-mile and then warehouses. When he tried to slow the car down, it stopped altogether and then he had to start it again. He went past long blocks of gray houses and then blocks of better, yellow houses. It began to drizzle rain and he turned on the windshield wipers; they made a great clatter like two idiots clapping in church. He went past blocks of white houses, each sitting with an ugly dog face on a square of grass. Finally he went over a viaduct and found the highway.
He began going very fast.
The highway was ragged with filling stations and trailer camps and madhouses. After a while there were stretches where red gulleys dropped off on either side of the road and behind them there were patches of field buttoned together with 666 posts. The sky leaked over all of it and then it began to leak into the car. The head of a string of pigs appeared snout-up over the ditch and he had to screech to a stop and watch the rear of the last pig disappear shaking into the ditch on the other side. He started the car again and went on. He had the feeling that everything he saw was a broken-off piece of some giant blank thing that he had forgotten had happened to him. A black pick-up truck turned off a side road in front of him. On the back of it an iron bed and a chair and table were tied, and on top of them, a crate of barred-rock chickens. The truck went very slowly, with a rumbling sound, and in the middle of the road. Haze started pounding his horn and he had hit it three times before he realized it didn’t make any sound. The crate was stuffed so full of wet barred-rock chickens that the ones facing him had their heads outside the bars. The truck didn’t go any faster and he was forced to drive slowly. The fields stretched sodden on either side until they hit the scrub pines.
The road turned and went down hill and a high embankment appeared on one side with pines standing on it, facing a gray boulder that jutted out of the opposite gulley wall. White letters on the boulder said, WOE TO THE BLASPHEMER AND WHOREMONGER1 WILL HELL SWALLOW YOU UP? The pick-up truck slowed even more as if it were reading the sign and Haze pounded his empty horn. He beat on it and beat on it but it didn’t make any sound. The pick-up truck went on, bumping the glum barred-rock chickens over the edge of the next hill. Haze’s car was stopped and his eyes were turned toward the two words at the bottom of the sign. They said in smaller letters, “Jesus Saves.”
He sat looking at the sign and he didn’t hear the horn. An oil truck as long as a railroad car was behind him. In a second a red square face was at his car window. It watched the back of his neck and hat for a minute and then a hand came in and sat on his shoulder. “What you doing parked in the middle of the road?” the truck driver asked.
Haze turned his fragile placed-looking face toward him. “Take your hand off me,” he said. “I’m reading the sign.”
The driver’s expression and his hand stayed exactly the way they were, as if he didn’t hear very well.
“There’s no person a whoremonger, who wasn’t something worse first,” Haze said. “That’s not the sin, nor blasphemy. The sin came before them.”
The truck driver’s face remained exactly the same.
“Jesus is a trick on niggers,” Haze said.
The driver put both his hands on the window and gripped it. He looked as if he intended to pick up the car. “Will you get your goddam outhouse off the middle of the road?” he said.
“I don’t have to run from anything because I don’t believe in anything,” Haze said. He and the driver looked at each other for about a minute. Haze’s look was the more distant; another plan was forming in his mind. “Which direction is the zoo in?” he asked.
“Back around the other way,” the driver said. “Did you exscape from there?”
“I got to see a boy that works in it,” Haze said. He started the car up and left the driver standing there, in front of the letters painted on the boulder.
CHAPTER 5
That morning Enoch Emery knew when he woke up that today the person he could show it to was going to come. He knew by his blood. He had wise blood like his daddy.
At two o’clock that afternoon, he greeted the second-shift gate guard. “You ain’t but only fifteen minutes late,” he said irritably. “But I stayed. I could of went on but I stayed.” He wore a green uniform with yellow piping on the neck and sleeves and a yellow stripe down the outside of each leg. The second-shift guard, a boy with a jutting shale-textured face and a toothpick irj, his mouth, wore the same. The gate they were standing by was made of iron bars and the concrete arch that held it was fashioned to look like two trees; branches curved to form the top of it where twisted letters said, City Forest Park. The second-shift guard leaned against one of the trunks and began prodding between his teeth with the pick.
“Ever’ day,” Enoch complained; “look like ever’ day I lose fifteen good minutes standing here waiting for you.”
Every day when he got off duty, he went into the park, and every day when he went in, he did the same things. He went first to the swimming pool. He was afraid of the water but he liked to sit up on the bank above it if there were any women in the pool, and watch them. There was one woman who came every Monday who wore a bathing suit that was split on each hip. At first he thought she didn’t know it, and instead of watching openly on the bank,
