Haze shook his head. His face didn’t change and he didn’t turn it toward the patrolman. It seemed to be concentrated on space.
The patrolman got up and went back to his car and stood at the door of it, staring at the back of Haze’s hat and shoulder. Then he said, “Well, I’ll be seeing you,” and got in and drove off.
After a while Haze got up and started walking back to town. It took him three hours to get inside the city again. He stopped at a supply store and bought a tin bucket and a sack of quicklime and then he went on to where he lived, carrying these. When he reached the house, he stopped outside on the sidewalk and opened the sack of lime and poured the bucket half full of it. Then he went to a water spigot by the front steps and filled up the rest of the bucket with water and started up the steps. His landlady was sitting on the porch, rocking a cat. “What you going to do with that, Mr. Motes?” she asked.
“Blind myself,” he said and went on in the house.
The landlady sat there for a while longer. She was not a woman who felt more violence in one word than in another; she took every word at its face value but all the faces were the same. Still, instead of blinding herself, if she had felt that bad, she would have killed herself and she wondered why anybody wouldn’t do that. She would simply have put her head in an oven or maybe have given herself too many painless sleeping pills and that would have been that. Perhaps Mr. Motes was only being ugly, for what possible reason could a person have for wanting to destroy their sight? A woman like her, who was so clear-sighted, could never stand to be blind. If she had to be blind she would rather be dead. It occurred to her suddenly that when she was dead she would be blind too. She stared in front of her intensely, facing this for the first time. She recalled the phrase, “eternal death/* that preachers used, but she cleared it out of her mind immediately, with no more change of expression than the cat. She was not religious or morbid, for which every day she thanked her stars. She would credit a person who had that streak with anything, though, and Mr. Motes had it or he wouldn’t be a preacher. He might put lime in his eyes and she wouldn’t doubt it a bit, because they were all, if the truth was only known, a little bit off in their heads. What possible reason could a sane person have for wanting to not enjoy himself any more?
She certainly couldn’t say.
CHAPTER 14
But she kept it in mind because after he had done it, he continued to live in her house and every day the sight of him presented her with the question. She first told him he couldn’t stay because he wouldn’t wear dark glasses and she didn’t like to look at the mess he had made in his eye sockets. At least she didn’t think she did. If she didn’t keep her mind going on something else when he was near her, she would find herself leaning forward, staring into his face as if she expected to see something she hadn’t seen before. This irritated her with him and gave her the sense that he was cheating her in some secret way. He sat on her porch a good part of every afternoon, but sitting out there with him was like sitting by yourself; he didn’t talk except when it suited him. You asked him a question in the morning and he might answer it in the afternoon, or he might never. He offered to pay her extra to let him keep his room because he knew his way in and out, and she decided to let him stay, at least until she found out how she was being cheated.
He got money from the government every month for something the war had done to his insides and so he was not obliged to work. The landlady had always been impressed with the ability to pay. When she found a stream of wealth, she followed it to its source and before long, it was not distinguishable from her own. She felt that the money she paid out in taxes returned to all the worthless pockets in the world, that the government not only sent it to foreign niggers and a-rabs, but wasted it at home on blind fools and on every idiot who could sign his name on a card. She felt justified in getting any of it back that she could. She felt justified in getting anything at all back that she could, money or anything else, as if she had once owned the earth and been dispossessed of it. She couldn’t look at anything steadily without wanting it, and what provoked her most was the thought that there might be something valuable hidden near her, something she couldn’t see.
To her, the blind man had the look of seeing something. His face had a peculiar pushing look, as if it were going forward after something it could just distinguish in the distance. Even when he was sitting motionless in a chair, his face had the look of straining toward something. But she knew he was totally blind. She had satisfied herself of that as soon as he took off the rag he used for a while as a bandage. She had got one long good look and it had been enough to tell her he had done what he’d said he was going to do. The other boarders, after he had taken off the rag, would pass him slowly in the hall, tiptoeing, and looking as long as they could, but now they didn’t pay any attention to him; some of the new ones didn’t know he had done it himself. The Hawks girl had spread it over the house as soon as it happened. She had watched him do it and then she had run to every room, yelling what he had done, and all the boarders had come running. That girl was a harpy if one ever lived, the landlady felt. She had hung around pestering him for a few days and then she had gone on off; she said she hadn’t counted on no honest-to- Jesus blind man and she was homesick for her papa; he had deserted her, gone off on a banana boat. The landlady hoped he was at the bottom of the salt sea; he had been a month behind in his rent. In two weeks, of course, she was back, ready to start pestering him again. She had the disposition of a yellow jacket and you could hear her a block away, shouting and screaming at him, and him never opening his mouth.
The landlady conducted an orderly house and she told him so. She told him that when the girl lived with him, he would have to pay double; she said there were things she didn’t mind and things she did. She left him to draw his own conclusions about what she meant by that, but she waited, with her arms folded, until he had drawn them. He didn’t say anything, he only counted out three more dollars and handed them to her. “That girl, Mr. Motes,” she said, “is only after your money.”
“If that was what she wanted she could have it,” he said. “I’d pay her to stay away.”
The thought that her tax money would go to support such trash was more than the landlady could bear. “Don’t do that,” she said quickly. “She’s got no right to it.” The next day she called the Welfare people and made arrangements to have the girl sent to a detention home; she was eligible.
She was curious to know how much he got every month from the government and with that set of eyes removed, she felt at liberty to find out. She steamed open the government envelope as soon as she found it in the mailbox the next time; in a few days she felt obliged to raise his rent. He had made arrangements with her to give him his meals and as the price of food went up, she was obliged to raise his board also; but she didn’t get rid of the feeling that she was being cheated. Why had he destroyed his eyes and saved himself unless he had some plan, unless he saw something that he couldn’t get without being blind to everything else? She meant to find out everything she could about him.
“Where were your people from, Mr. Motes?” she asked him one afternoon when they were sitting on the porch. “I don’t suppose they’re alive?”
She supposed she might suppose what she pleased; he didn’t disturb his doing nothing to answer her. “None of my people’s alive either,” she said. “All Mr. Flood’s people’s alive but him.” She was a Mrs. Flood. “They all come here when they want a hand-out,” she said, “but Mr. Flood had money. He died in the crack-up of an airplane.”
After a while he said, “My people are all dead.”
“Mr. Flood,” she said, “died in the crack-up of an airplane.”
