FOURTEEN
“Forming her mind,” Mother said.
It was like he could stand just anything except getting knocked down or getting his nose bloodied. Like if Mr de Spain hadn’t knocked him down in the alley behind that Christmas dance, he could have got over Mrs Snopes without having to form Linda’s mind. And like if Matt Levitt hadn’t come into the office that afternoon and bloodied his nose again, he could have stopped there with Linda’s mind without having to do any more to it.
So he didn’t stop because he couldn’t. But at least he got rid of Matt Levitt. That was in the spring. It was her last year in high school; she would graduate in May and any school afternoon I could see her walking along the street from school with a few books under her arm. But if any of them was poetry now I didn’t know it, because when she came to Christian’s drugstore now she wouldn’t even look toward the door, just walking on past with her face straight in front and her head up a little like the pointer just a step or two from freezing on the game; walking on like she saw people, saw Jefferson, saw the Square all right because at the moment, at any moment she had to walk on and among and through something and it might as well be Jefferson and Jefferson people and the Jefferson square as anything else, but that was all.
Because Uncle Gavin wasn’t there somewhere around like an accident any more now. But then, if Uncle Gavin wasn’t sitting on the opposite side of that marble-topped table in Christian’s watching her eating something out of a tall glass that cost every bit of fifteen or twenty cents, Matt Levitt wasn’t there either. Him and his cut-down racer both because the racer was empty now except for Matt himself after the garage closed on week days, creeping along the streets and across the Square in low gear, paralleling but a little behind where she would be walking to the picture show now with another girl or maybe two or three of them, her head still high and not once looking at him while the racer crept along at her elbow almost, the cut-out going chuckle-chuckle-chuckle, right up to the picture show and the two or three or four girls had gone into it. Then the racer would dash off at full speed around the block, to come rushing back with the cut-out as loud as he could make it, up the alley beside the picture show and then across in front of it and around the block and up the alley again, this time with Otis Harker, who had succeeded Gver Cleveland Winbush as night marshal after Grover Cleveland retired after what Ratliff called his eye trouble, waiting at the corner yelling at Matt at the same time he was jumping far enough back not to be run over.
And on Sunday through the Square, the cut-out going full blast and Mr Buck Connors, the day marshal, hollering after him. And now he—Matt—had a girl with him, a country girl he had found somewhere, the racer rushing and roaring through the back streets into the last one, to rush slow and loud past Linda’s house, as if the sole single symbol of frustrated love or anyway desire or maybe just frustration possible in Jefferson was an automobile cut- out; the sole single manifestation which love or anyway desire was capable of assuming in Jefferson, was rushing slow past the specific house with the cut-out wide open, so that he or she would have to know who was passing no matter how hard they worked at not looking out the window.
Though by that time Mr Connors had sent for the sheriff himself. He—Mr Connors—said his first idea was to wake up Otis Harker to come back to town and help him but when Otis heard that what Mr Connors wanted was to stop that racer, Otis wouldn’t even get out of bed. Later, afterward, somebody asked Matt if he would have run over Mr Hampton too and Matt said—he was crying then, he was so mad—“Hit him? Hub Hampton? Have all them goddamn guts splashed over my paint job?” Though by then even Mr Hampton wasn’t needed for the cut-out because Matt went right on out of town, maybe taking the girl back home; anyway about midnight that night they telephoned in for Mr Hampton to send somebody out to Caledonia where Matt had had a bad fight with Anse McCallum, one of Mr Buddy McCallum’s boys, until Anse snatched up a fence rail or something and would have killed Matt except that folks caught and held them both while they telephoned for the sheriff and brought them both in to town and locked them in the jail and the next morning Mr Buddy McCallum came in on his cork leg and paid them both out and took them down to the lot behind I.O. Snopes’s mule barn and told Anse:
“All right. If you cant be licked fair without picking up a fence rail, I’m going to take my leg off and whip you with it myself.”
So they fought again, without the fence rail this time, with Mr Buddy and a few more men watching them now, and Anse still wasn’t as good as Matt’s Golden Gloves but he never quit until at last Mr Buddy himself said, “All right. That’s enough,” and told Anse to wash his face at the trough and then go and get in the car and then said to Matt: “And I reckon the time has come for you to be moving on too.” Except that wasn’t necessary now either; the garage said Matt was already fired and Matt said,
“Fired, hell. I quit. Tell that bastard to come down here and say that to my face.” And Mr Hampton was there too by then, tall, with his big belly and his little hard eyes looking down at Matt. “Where the hell is my car?” Matt said.
“It’s at my house,” Mr Hampton said. “I had it brought in this morning.”
“Well well,” Matt said. “Too bad, aint it? McCallum came in and sprung me before you had time to sell it and stick the money in your pocket, huh? What are you going to say when I walk over there and get in it and start the engine?”
“Nothing, son,” Mr Hampton said. “Whenever you want to leave.”
“Which is right now,” Matt said. “And when I leave your.…ing town, my foot’ll be right down to the floor board on that cut-out too. And you can stick that too, but not in your pocket. What do you think of that?”
“Nothing, son,” Mr Hampton said. “I’ll make a trade with you. Run that cut-out wide open all the way to the county line and then ten feet past it, and I wont let anybody bother you if you’ll promise never to cross it again.”
And that was all. That was Monday, trade day; it was like the whole county was there, had come to town just to stand quiet around the Square and watch Matt cross it for the last time, the paper suitcase he had come to Jefferson with on the seat by him and the cutout clattering and popping; nobody waving good-bye to him and Matt not looking at any of us: just that quiet and silent suspension for the little gaudy car to rush slowly and loudly through, blatant and noisy and defiant yet at the same time looking as ephemeral and innocent and fragile as a child’s toy, a birthday favor, so that looking at it you knew it would probably never get as far as Memphis, let alone Ohio; on across the Square and into the street which would become the Memphis highway at the edge of town, the sound of the cut-out banging and clattering and echoing between the walls, magnified a thousand times now beyond the mere size and bulk of the frail little machine which produced it; and we—some of us—thinking how surely now he would rush slow and roaring for the last time at least past Linda Snopes’s house. But he didn’t. He
