man opened the door a shaft of light fell on him and Haze craned his neck to see him better. The child turned her head, slowly, as if it worked on a screwt and watched his car pass. His face was so close to the glass that it looked like a paper face pasted there. He noted the number of the house and a sign on it that said, Rooms for Rent.
Then he drove back down town and parked the Essex in front of a movie house where he could catch the drain of people coming out from the picture show. The lights around the marquee were so bright that the moon, mov* ing overhead with a small procession of clouds behind it, looked pale and insignificant. Haze got out of the Essex and climbed up on the nose of it.
A thin little man with a long upper lip was at the glass ticket box, buying tickets for three portly women who were behind him. “Gotta get these girls some refreshments too,” he said to the woman in the ticket box. “Can’t have ‘em starve right before my eyes.”
“Ain’t he a card?” one of the women hollered. “He keeps me in stitchesl”
Three boys in red satin lumberjackets came out of the foyer. Haze raised his arms. “Where has the blood you think you been redeemed by touched you?” he cried.
The women all turned around at once and stared at him.
“A wise guy,” the little thin man said, and glared as if someone were about to insult him.
The three boys moved up, pushing each other’s shoulders.
Haze waited a second and then he cried again. “Where has the blood you think you been redeemed by touched you?”
“Rabble rouser,” the little man said. “One thing I can’t stand it’s a rabble rouser.”
“What church you belong to, you boy there?” Haze asked, pointing at the tallest boy in the red satin lumberjacket.
The boy giggled.
“You then,” he said impatiently, pointing at the next one. “What church you belong to?”
“Church of Christ,” the boy said in a falsetto to hide the truth.
“Church of Christi” Haze repeated. “Well, I preach the Church Without Christ. I’m member and preacher to that church where the blind don’t see and the lame don’t walk and what’s dead stays that way. Ask me about that church and I’ll tell you it’s the church that the blood of Jesus don’t foul with redemption.”
“He’s a preacher,” one of the women said. “Let’s go.”
“Listen, you people, I’m going to take the truth with me wherever I go,” Haze called. “I’m going to preach it to whoever’ll listen at whatever place. I’m going to preach there was no Fall because there was nothing to fall from and no Redemption because there was no Fall and no Judgment because there wasn’t the first two. Nothing matters but that Jesus was a liar.”
The little man herded his girls into the picture show quickly and the three boys left but more people came out and he began over and said the same thing again. They left and some more came and he said it a third time. Then they left and no one else came out; there was no one there but the woman in the glass box. She had been glaring at him all the time but he had not noticed her. She wore glasses with rhinestones in the bows and she had white hair stacked in sausages around her head. She stuck her mouth to a hole in the glass and shouted, “Listent if you don’t have a church to do it int you don’t have to do it in front of this show/’
“My church is the Church Without Christ, lady,” he said. “If there’s no Christ, there’s no reason to have a set place to do it in.”
“Listen,” she said, “if you don’t get from in front of this show, I’ll call the police.”
“There’s plenty of shows,” he said and got down and got back in the Essex and drove off. That night he preached in front of three other picture shows before he went to Mrs. Watts.
In the morning he drove back to the house where the blind man and the child had gone in the night before. It was yellow clapboard, the second one in a block of them, all alike. He went up to the front door and rang the bell. After a few minutes a woman with a mop opened it. He said he wanted to rent a room.
“What you do?” she asked. She was a tall bony woman, resembling the mop she carried upside-down.
He said he was a preacher.
The woman looked at him thoroughly and then she looked behind him at his car. “What church?” she asked.
He said the Church Without Christ.
“Protestant?” she asked suspiciously, “or something foreign?”
He said no mam, it was Protestant.
After a minute she said, “Well, you can look at it,” and he followed her into a white plastered hall and up some steps at the side of it. She opened a door into a back room that was a little larger than his car, with a cot and a chest of drawers and a table and straight chair in it. There were two nails on the wall to hang clothes on. “Three dollars a week in advance,” she said. There was one window and another door opposite the door they had come in by. Haze opened the extra door, expecting it to be a closet. It opened out onto a drop of about thirty feet and looked down into a narrow bare back yard where the garbage was collected. There was a plank nailed across the door frame at knee level to keep anyone from falling out. “A man named Hawks lives here, don’t he?” Haze asked quickly.
“Downstairs in the front room,” she said, “him and his child.” She was looking down into the drop too. “It used to be a fireescape there,” she said, “but I don’t know what happened to it.”
He paid her three dollars and took possession of the room, and as soon as she was out of the way, he went down the stairs and knocked on the Hawkses’ door.
The blind man’s child opened it a crack and stood looking at him. She seemed at once to have to balance her face so that her expression would be the same on both sides. “It’s that boy, Papa,” she said in a low tone. “The one that keeps following me.” She held the door close to her head so he couldn’t see in past her. The blind man came to
