“Why don’t you lie down and rest yourself?” she inquired.
Haze moved a few feet away and lay down. He put his hat over his face and folded his arms across his chest. She lifted herself up on her hands and knees and crawled over to him and gazed at the top of his hat. Then she lifted it off like a lid and peered into his eyes. They stared straight upward. “It don’t make any difference to me,” she said softly, “how much you like me.”
He trained his eyes into her neck. Gradually she lowered her head until the tips of their noses almost touched but still he didn’t look at her. “I see you,” she said in a playful voice.
“Git away!” he said, jumping violently.
She scrambled up and ran around behind the tree. Haze put his hat back on and stood up, shaken. He wanted to get back in the Essex. He realized suddenly that it was parked on a country road, unlocked, and that the first person passing would drive off in it.
“I see you,” a voice said from behind the tree.
He walked off quickly in the opposite direction toward the car. The jubilant expression on the face that looked from around the tree, flattened.
He got in his car and went through the motions of starting it but it only made a noise like water lost somewhere in the pipes. A panic took him and he began to pound the starter. There were two instruments on the dashboard with needles that pointed dizzily in first one direction and then another, but they worked on a private system, independent of the whole car. He couldn’t tell if it was out of gas or not. Sabbath Hawks came running up to the fence. She got down on the ground and rolled under the barbed wire and then stood at the window of the car, looking in at him. He turned his head at her fiercely and said, “What did you do to my car?” Then he got out and started walking down the road, without waiting for her to answer. After a second, she followed him, keeping her distance.
Where the highway had forked off onto the dirt road, there had been a store with a gas pump in front of it. It was about a half-mile back; Haze kept up a steady fast pace until he reached it. It had a deserted look, but after a few minutes a man appeared from out of the woods behind it, and Haze told him what he wanted. While the man got out his pick-up truck to drive them back to the Essex, Sabbath Hawks arrived and went over to a cage about six feet high that was at the side of the shack. Haze had not noticed it until she came up. He saw that there was something alive in it, and went near enough to read a sign that said, Two DEADLY ENEMIES. HAVE A LOOK FREE.
There was a black bear about four feet long and very thin, resting on the floor of the cage; his back was spotted with bird lime that had been shot down on him by a small chicken hawk that was sitting on a perch in the upper part of the same apartment. Most of the hawk’s tail was gone; the bear had only one eye.
“Come on here if you don’t want to get left,” Haze said roughly, grabbing her by the arm. The man had his truck ready and the three of them drove back in it to the Essex. On the way Haze told him about the Church Without Christ; he explained its principles and said there was no such thing as a bastard in it. The man didn’t comment. When they got out at the Essex, he put a can of gas in the tank and Haze got in and tried to start it but nothing happened. The man opened up the hood and studied the inside for a while. He was a one-armed man with two sandy-colored teeth and eyes that were slate-blue and thoughtful. He had not spoken more than two words yet. He looked for a long time under the hood while Haze stood by, but he didn’t touch anything. After a while he shut it and blew his nose.
“What’s wrong in there?” Haze asked in an agitated voice. “It’s a good car, ain’t it?”
The man didn’t answer him. He sat down on the ground and eased under the Essex. He wore hightop shoes and gray socks. He stayed under the car a long time. Haze got down on his hands and knees and looked under to see what he was doing but he wasn’t doing anything. He was just lying there, looking up, as if he were contemplating; his good arm was folded on his chest. After a while, he eased himself out and wiped his face and neck with a piece of flannel rag he had in his pocket.
“Listenhere,” Haze said, “that’s a good car. You just give me a push, that’s all. That car’ll get me anywhere I want to go.”
The man didn’t say anything but he got back in the truck and Haze and Sabbath Hawks got in the Essex and he pushed them. After a few hundred yards the Essex began to belch and gasp and jiggle. Haze stuck his head out the window and motioned for the truck to come alongside. “Ha!” he said. “I told you, didn’t I? This car’ll get me anywhere I want to go. It may stop here and there but it won’t stop permanent. What do I owe you?”
“Nothing,” the man said, “not a thing.”
“But the gas,” Haze said, “how much for the gas?”
“Nothing,” the man said with the same level look. “Not a thing.”
“All right, I thank you,” Haze said and drove on. “I don’t need no favors from him,” he said.
“It’s a grand auto,” Sabbath Hawks said. “It goes as smooth as honey.”
“It ain’t been built by a bunch of foreigners or niggers or one-arm men,” Haze said. “It was built by people with their eyes open that knew where they were at.”
When they came to the end of the dirt road and were facing the paved one, the pick-up truck pulled alongside again and while the two cars paused side by side, Haze and the slate-eyed man looked at each other out of their two windows. “I told you this car would get me anywhere I wanted to go,” Haze said sourly.
“Some things,” the man said, ” ‘11 get some folks somewheres,” and he turned the truck up the highway.
Haze drove on. The blinding white cloud had turned into a bird with long thin wings and was disappearing in the opposite direction.
CHAPTER 8
Enoch Emery knew now that his life would never be the same again, because the thing that was going to happen to him had started to happen. He had always known that something was going to happen but he hadn’t known what. If he had been much given to thought, he might have thought that now was the time for him to justify his daddy’s blood, but he didn’t think in broad sweeps like that, he thought what he would do next. Sometimes he didn’t think, he only wondered; then before long he would find himself doing this or that, like a bird finds itself building a nest when it hasn’t actually been planning to. What was going to happen to him had started to happen when he showed what was in the glass case to Haze Motes. That was a mystery beyond his understanding, but he
