appeared to be working his way to a rumbling noise which came from the center of a small alcove that formed the entrance to the drug store. Here was a yellow and blue, glass and steel machine, belching popcorn into a cauldron of butter and salt. Enoch approached, already with his purse out, sorting his money. His purse was a long gray leather pouch, tied at the top with a drawstring. It was one he had stolen from his daddy and he treasured it because it was the only thing he owned now that his daddy had touched (besides himself). He sorted out two nickels and handed them to a pasty boy in a white apron who was there to serve the machine. The boy felt around in its vitals and filled a white paper bag with the corn, not taking his eye off Enoch’s purse the while. On any other day Enoch would have tried to make friends with him but today he was too preoccupied even to see him. He took the bag and began stuffing the pouch back where it had come from. The youth’s eye followed to the very edge of the pocket. “That thang looks like a hawg bladder,” he observed enviously.
“I got to go now,” Enoch murmured and hurried into the drug store. Inside, he walked abstractedly to the back of the store, and then up to the front again by the other aisle as if he wanted any person who might be looking for him to see he was there. He paused in front of the soda fountain to see if he would sit down and have something to eat. The fountain counter was pink and green marble linoleum and behind it there was a red-headed waitress in a lime-colored uniform and a pink apron. She had green eyes set in pink and they resembled a picture behind her of a Lime-Cherry Surprise, a special that day for ten cents.
She confronted Enoch while he studied the information over her head. After a minute she laid her chest on the counter and surrounded it by her folded arms, to wait. Enoch couldn’t decide which of several concoctions was the one for him to have until she ended it by moving one arm under the counter and bringing out a Lime-Cherry Surprise. “It’s okay,” she said, “I fixed it this morning after breakfast.”
“Something’s going to happen to me today,” Enoch said.
“I told you it was okay,” she said. “I fixed it today.”
“I seen it this morning when I woke up,” he said, with the look of a visionary.
“God,” she said, and jerked it from under his face. She turned around and began slapping things together; in a second she slammed another—exactly like it, but fresh—in front of him.
“I got to go now,” Enoch said, and hurried out. An eye caught at his pocket as he passed the popcorn machine but he didn’t stop. I don’t want to do it, he was saying to himself. Whatever it is, I don’t want to do it. I’m going home. It’ll be something I don’t want to do. It’ll be something I ain’t got no business doing. And he thought of how he had had to spend all his money on drapes and gilt when he could have bought him a shirt and a phosphorescent tie. It’ll be something against the law, he said. It’s always something against the law. I ain’t going to do it, he said, and stopped. He had stopped in front of a movie house where there was a large illustration of a monster stuffing a young woman into an incinerator.
I ain’t going in no picture show like that, he said, giving it a nervous look. I’m going home. I ain’t going to wait around in no picture show. I ain’t got the money to buy a ticket, he said, taking out his purse again. I ain’t even going to count thisyer change.
It ain’t but forty-three cent here, he said, that ain’t enough. A sign said the price of a ticket for adults was forty-five cents, balcony, thirty-five. I ain’t going to sit in no balcony, he said, buying a thirty-five cent ticket.
I ain’t going in, he said.
Two doors flew open and he found himself moving down a long red foyer and then up a darker tunnel and then up a higher, still darker tunnel. In a few minutes he was up in a high part of the maw, feeling around, like Jonah, for a seat. I ain’t going to look at it, he said furiously. He didn’t like any picture shows but colored musical ones.
The first picture was about a scientist named The Eye who performed operations by remote control. You would wake up in the morning and find a slit in your chest or head or stomach and something you couldn’t do without would be gone. Enoch pulled his hat down very low and drew his knees up in front of his face; only his eyes looked at the screen. That picture lasted an hour.
The second picture was about life at Devil’s Island Penitentiary. After a while, Enoch had to grip the two arms of his seat to keep himself from falling over the rail in front of him.
The third picture was calledt “Lonnie Comes Home Again.” It was about a baboon named Lonnie who rescued attractive children from a burning orphanage. Enoch kept hoping Lonnie would get burned up but he didn’t appear to get even hot. In the end a nice-looking girl gave him a medal. It was more than Enoch could stand. He made a dive for the aisle, fell down the two higher tunnels, and raced out the red foyer and into the street. He collapsed as soon as the air hit him.
When he recovered himself, he was sitting against the wall of the picture show building and he was not thinking any more about escaping his duty. It was night and he had the feeling that the knowledge he couldn’t avoid was almost on him. His resignation was perfect. He leaned against the wall for about twenty minutes and then he got up and began to walk down the street as if he were led by a silent melody or by one of those whistles that only dogs hear. At the end of two blocks he stopped, his attention directed across the street. There, facing him under a street light, was a high rat-colored car and up on the nose of it, a dark figure with a fierce white hat on. The figure’s arms were working up and down and he had thin, gesticulating hands, almost as pale as the hat. “Hazel Motes!” Enoch breathed, and his heart began to slam from side to side like a wild bell clapper.
There were a few people standing on the sidewalk near the car. Enoch didn’t know that Hazel Motes had started the Church Without Christ and was preaching it every night on the street; he hadn’t seen him since that day at the park when he had showed him the shriveled man in the glass case.
“If you had been redeemed,” Hazel Motes was shouting, “you would care about redemption but you don’t. Look inside yourselves and see if you hadn’t rather it wasn’t if it was. There’s no peace for the redeemed,” he shouted, “and I preach peace, I preach the Church Without Christ, the church peaceful and satisfied!”
Two or three people who had stopped near the car started walking off the other way. “Leave!” Hazel Motes cried. “Go ahead and leave! The truth don’t matter to you. Listen,” he said, pointing his finger at the rest of them, “the truth don’t matter to you. If Jesus had redeemed you, what difference would it make to you? You wouldn’t do nothing about it. Your faces wouldn’t move, neither this way nor that, and if it was three crosses there and Him hung on the middle one, that one wouldn’t mean no more to you and me than the other two. Listen here. What you need is something to take the place of Jesus, something that would speak plain. The Church Without Christ don’t have a Jesus but it needs one! It needs a new jesus! It needs one that’s all man, without blood to waste, and it needs one that don’t look like any other man so you’ll look at him. Give me such a jesus, you people. Give me such a new jesus and you’ll see how far the Church Without Christ can go!”
One of the people watching walked off so there were only two left. Enoch was standing in the middle of the street, paralyzed.
“Show me where this new jesus is,” Hazel Motes cried, “and 111 set him up in the Church Without Christ and then you’ll see the truth. Then you’ll know once and for all that you haven’t been redeemed. Give me this new
