the door but he didn’t open it any wider. His look was not the same as it had been two nights before; it was sour and unfriendly, and he didn’t speak, he only stood there.
Haze had got what he had to say in mind before he left his room. “I live here,” he said. “I thought if your girl wanted to give me so much eye, I might return her some of it.” He wasn’t looking at the girl; he was staring at the black glasses and the curious scars that started somewhere behind them and ran down the blind man’s cheeks.
“What I give you the other night,” she said, “was a looker indignation for what I seen you do. It was you give me the eye. You should have seen him, Papa,” she said, “looked me up and down.”
“I’ve started my own church,” Haze said. “The Church Without Christ. I preach on the street.”
“You can’t let me alone, can you?” Hawks said. His voice was flat, nothing like it had been the other time. “I didn’t ask you to come here and I ain’t asking you to hang around,” he said.
Haze had expected a secret welcome. He waited, trying to think of something to say. “What kind of a preacher are you?” he heard himself murmur, “not to see if you can save my soul?” The blind man pushed the door shut in his face. Haze stood there a second facing the blank door, and then he ran his sleeve across his mouth and went out.
Inside, Hawks took off his dark glasses and, from a hole in the window shade, watched him get in his car and drive off. The eye he put to the hole was slightly rounder and smaller than his other one, but it was obvious he could see out of both of them. The child watched from a lower crack. “Howcome you don’t like him, Papa?” she asked, “—because he’s after me?”
“If he was after you, that would be enough to make me welcome him,” he said.
“I like his eyes,” she observed. “They don’t look like they see what he’s looking at but they keep on looking.”
Their room was the same size as Haze’s but there were two cots and an oil cooking stove and a wash basin in it and a trunk that they used for a table. Hawks sat down on one of the cots and put a cigarette in his mouth. “Goddam Jesus-hog,” he muttered.
“Well, look what you used to be,” she said. “Look what you tried to do. You got over it and so will he.”
“I don’t want him hanging around/’ he said. “He makes me nervous.”
“Listen here,” she said, sitting down on the cot with him, “you help me to get him and then you go away and do what you please and I can live with him.”
“He don’t even know you exist,” Hawks said.
“Even if he don’t,” she said, “that’s all right. That’s howcome I can get him easy. I want him and you ought to help and then you could go on off like you want to.”
He lay down on the cot and finished the cigarette; his face was thoughtful and evil. Once while he was lying there, he laughed and then his expression constricted again. “Well, that might be fine,” he said after a while. “That might be the oil on Aaron’s beard.”
“Listen here,” she said, “it would be the nuts! I’m just crazy about him. I never seen a boy that I liked the looks of any better. Don’t run him off. Tell him how you blinded yourself for Jesus and show him that clipping you got.”
“Yeah, the clipping,” he said.
Haze had gone out in his car to think and he had decided that he would seduce Hawks’s child. He thought that when the blind preacher saw his daughter ruined, he would realize that he was in earnest when he said he preached The Church Without Christ. Besides this reason, there was another: he didn’t want to go back to Mrs. Watts. The night before, after he was asleep, she had got up and cut the top of his hat out in an obscene shape. He felt that he should have a woman, not for the sake of the pleasure in her, but to prove that he didn’t believe in sin since he practiced what was called it; but he had had enough of her. He wanted someone he could teach something to and he took it for granted that the blind man’s child, since she was so homely, would also be innocent.
Before he went back to his room, he went to a dry-goods store to buy a new hat. He wanted one that was completely opposite to the old one. This time he was sold a white panama with a red and green and yellow band around it.
The man said they were really the thing and particularly if he was going to Florida.
“I ain’t going to Florida,” he said. “This hat is opposite from the one I used to have is all.”
“You can use it anywheres,” the man said; “it’s new.”
“I know that,” Haze said. He went outside and took the red and green and yellow band off it and thumped out the crease in the top and turned down the brim. When he put it on, it looked just as fierce as the other one had.
He didn’t go back to the Hawkses’ door until late in the afternoon, when he thought they would be eating their supper. It opened almost at once and the child’s head appeared in the crack. He pushed the door out of her hand and went in without looking at her directly. Hawks was sitting at the trunk. The remains of his supper were in front of him but he wasn’t eating. He had barely got the black glasses on in time.
“If Jesus cured blind men, howcome you don’t get Him to cure you?” Haze asked. He had prepared this sentence in his room.
“He blinded Paul,” Hawks said.
Haze sat down on the edge of one of the cots. He looked around him and then back at Hawks. He crossed and uncrossed his knees and then he crossed them again. “Where’d you get them scars?” he asked.
The fake blind man leaned forward and smiled. “You still have a chance to save yourself if you repent,” he said. “I can’t save you but you can save yourself.”
“That’s what I’ve already done,” Haze said. “Without the repenting. I preach how I done it every night on the…”
“Look at this,” Hawks said. He took a yellow newspaper clipping from his pocket and handed it to him, and his
