“Get your head out my car door, Holy,” Haze said.
“My name is Hoover Shoats,” the man with his head in the door growled. “I known when I first seen you that you wasn’t nothing but a crackpot.”
Haze opened the door enough to be able to slam it. Hoover Shoats got his head out the way but not his thumb. A howl arose that would have rended almost any heart. Haze opened the door and released the thumb and then slammed the door again. He pulled down the front shades and lay down in the back of the car on the army blanket. Outside he could hear Hoover Shoats jumping around on the pavement and howling. When the howls died down, Haze heard a few steps up to the car and then an impassioned, breathless voice say through the tin, “You watch out, friend. I’m going to run you out of business. I can get my own new jesus and I can get Prophets for peanuts, you hear? Do you hear me, friend?” the hoarse voice said.
Haze didn’t answer.
“Yeah and I’ll be out there doing my own preaching tomorrow night. What you need is a little competition,” the voice said. “Do you hear me, friend?”
Haze got up and leaned over the front seat and banged his hand down on the horn of the Essex. It made a sound like a goat’s laugh cut off with a buzz saw. Hoover Shoats jumped back as if a charge of electricity had gone through him. “All right, friend/1 he said, standing about fifteen feet away, trembling, “you just wait, you ain’t heard the last of me yet,” and he turned and went off down the quiet street.
Haze stayed in his car about an hour and had a bad experience in it: he dreamed he was not dead but only buried. He was not waiting on the Judgment because there was no Judgment, he was waiting on nothing. Various eyes looked through the back oval window at his situation, some with considerable reverence, like the boy from the zoo, and some only to see what they could see. There were three women with paper sacks who looked at him critically as if he were something—a piece of fish—they might buy, but they passed on after a minute. A man in a canvas hat looked in and put his thumb to his nose and wiggled his fingers. Then a woman with two little boys on either side of her stopped and looked in, grinning. After a second, she pushed the boys out of view and indicated that she would climb in and keep him company for a while, but she couldn’t get through the glass and finally she went off. All this time Haze was bent on getting out but since there was no use to try, he didn’t make any move one way or the other. He kept expecting Hawks to appear at the oval window with a wrench, but the blind man didn’t come.
Finally he shook off the dream and woke up. He thought it should be morning but it was only midnight. He pulled himself over into the front of the car and eased his foot on the starter and the Essex rolled off quietly as if nothing were the matter with it. He drove back to the house and let himself in but instead of going upstairs to his room, he stood in the hall, looking at the blind man’s door. He went over to it and put his ear to the keyhole and heard the sound of snoring; he turned the knob gently but the door didn’t move.
For the first time, the idea of picking the lock occurred to him. He felt in his pockets for an instrument and came on a small piece of wire that he sometimes used for a toothpick. There was only a dim light in the hall but it was enough for him to work by and he knelt down at the keyhole and inserted the wire into it carefully, trying not to make a noise.
After a while when he had tried the wire five or six different ways, there was a slight click in the lock. He stood up, trembling, and opened the door. His breath came short and his heart was palpitating as if he had run all the way here from a great distance. He stood just inside the room until his eyes got accustomed to the darkness and then he moved slowly over to the iron bed and stood there. Hawks was lying across it. His head was hanging over the edge. Haze squatted down by him and struck a match close to his face and he opened his eyes. The two sets of eyes looked at each other as long as the match lasted; Haze’s expression seemed to open onto a deeper blankness and reflect something and then close again.
“Now you can get out,” Hawks said in a short thick voice, “now you can leave me alone/’ and he made a jab at the face over him without touching it. It moved back, expressionless under the white hat, and was gone in a second.
CHAPTER 10
The next night, Haze parked the Essex in front of the Odeon Theater and climbed up on it and began to preach. “Let me tell you what I and this church stand forl” he called from the nose of the car. “Stop one minute to listen to the truth because you may never hear it again.” He stood there with his neck thrust forward, moving one arm upward in a vague arc. Two women and a boy stopped.
“I preach there are all kinds of truth, your truth and somebody else’s, but behind all of them, there’s only one truth and that is that there’s no truth,” he called. “No truth behind all truths is what I and this church preach! Where you come from is gone, where you thought you were going to never was there, and where you are is no good unless you can get away from it. Where is there a place for you to be? No place.
“Nothing outside you can give you any place,” he said. “You needn’t to look at the sky because it’s not going to open up and show no place behind it. You needn’t to search for any hole in the ground to look through into somewhere else. You can’t go neither forwards nor backwards into your daddy’s time nor your children’s if you have them. In yourself right now is all the place you’ve got. If there was any Fall, look there, if there was any Redemption, look there, and if you expect any Judgment, look there, because they all three will have to be in your time and your body and where in your time and your body can they be?
“Where in your time and your body has Jesus redeemed you?” he cried. “Show me where because I don’t see the place. If there was a place where Jesus had redeemed you that would be the place for you to be, but which of you can find it?”
Another trickle of people came out of the Odeon and two stopped to look at him. “Who is that that says it’s your conscience?” he cried, looking around with a constricted face as if he could smell the particular person who thought that. “Your conscience is a trick,” he said, “it don’t exist though you may think it does, and if you think it does, you had best get it out in the open and hunt it down and kill it, because it’s no more than your face in the mirror is or your shadow behind you.”
He was preaching with such concentration that he didn’t notice a high rat-colored car that had been driven around the block three times already, while the two men in it hunted a place to park. He didn’t see it when it pulled in two cars over from him in a space that another car had just pulled out of, and he didn’t see Hoover Shoats and a man in a glare-blue suit and white hat get out of it, but after a few seconds, his head turned that way and he saw the man in the glare-blue suit and white hat up on the nose of it. He was so struck with how gaunt and thin he looked in the illusion that he stopped preaching. He had never pictured himself that way before. The man he saw was hollow-chested and carried his neck thrust forward and his arms down by his side; he stood there as if he were waiting for some signal he was afraid he might not catch.
Hoover Shoats was walking about on the sidewalk, striking a few chords on his guitar. “Friends/* he called, “I want to innerduce you to the True Prophet here and I want you all to listen to his words because I think they’re going to make you happy like they’ve made mel” If Haze had noticed Hoover he might have been impressed by how
