"Other Voices, Other Rooms" - читать интересную книгу автора (Капоте Трумэн)

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Falling… falling… falling! a knifelike shaft, an underground corridor, and he was spinning like a fan blade through metal spirals; at the bottom a yawning-jawed crocodile followed his downward whirl with hooded eyes: as always, rescue came with wakefulness. The crocodile exploded in sunshine. Joel blinked and tasted his bitter tongue and did not move; the bed, an immense four-poster with different rosewood fruits carved crudely on its high headboard, was suffocatingly soft and his body had sunk deep in its feathery center. Although he'd slept naked, the light sheet covering him felt like a wool blanket.

The whisper of a dress warned him that someone was in the room. And another sound, dry and wind-rushed, very much like the beat of bird wings; it was this sound, he realized while rolling over, which had wakened him.

An expanse of pale yellow wall separated two harshly sunlit windows which faced the bed. Between these windows stood the woman. She did not notice Joel, for she was staring across the room at an ancient bureau: there, on top a lacquered box, was a bird, a bluejay perched so motionless it looked like a trophy. The woman turned and closed the only open window; then, with prissy little sidling steps, she started forward.

Joel was wide awake, but for an instant it seemed as if the bluejay and its pursuer were a curious fragment of his dream. His stomach muscles tightened as he watched her near the bureau and the bird's innocent agitation: it hopped around bobbing its blue-brilliant head; suddenly, just as she came within striking distance, it fluttered its wings and flew across the bed and lighted on a chair where Joel had flung his clothes the night before. And remembrance of the night flooded over him: the wagon, the twins, and the little Negro in the derby hat. And the woman, his father's wife: Miss Amy, as she was called. He remembered entering the house, and stumbling through an odd chamber of a hall where the walls were alive with the tossing shadows of candleflames; and Miss Amy, her finger pressed against her lips, leading him with robber stealth up a curving, carpeted stairway and along a second corridor to the door of this room; all a sleepwalker's pattern of jigsaw incidents; and so, as Miss Amy stood by the bureau regarding the bluejay on its new perch, it was more or less the same as seeing her for the first time. Her dress was of an almost transparent grey material; on her left hand, for no clear reason, she wore a matching grey silk glove, and she kept the hand cupped daintily, as if it were crippled. A wispy streak of white zigzagged through the dowdy plaits of her brownish, rather colorless hair. She was slight, and fragile-boned, and her eyes were like two raisins embedded in the softness of her narrow face.

Instead of following the bird directly, as before, she tiptoed over to a fireplace at the opposite end of the huge room, and, artfully twisting her hand, seized hold of an iron poker. The bluejay hopped down the arm of the chair, pecking at Joel's discarded shirt. Miss Amy pursed her lips, and took five rapid, lilting, ladylike steps…

The poker caught the bird across the back, and pinioned it for the fraction of a moment; breaking loose, it flew wildly to the window and cawed and flapped against the pane, at last dropping to the floor where it scrambled along dazedly, scraping the rug with its outspread wings.

Miss Amy trapped it in a corner, and scooped it up against her breast.

Joel pressed his face into the pillow, knowing that she would look in his direction, if only to see how the racket had affected him. He listened to her footsteps cross the room, and the gentle closing of the door.

He dressed in the same clothes he'd worn the previous day: a blue shirt, and bedraggled linen trousers. He could not find his suitcase anywhere, and wondered whether he'd left it in the wagon. He combed his hair, and doused his face with water from a washbasin that sat on a marble-topped table beside the rosewood four-poster. The rug, which was bald in spots and of an intricately oriental design, felt grimy and rough under his bare feet. The stifling room was musty; it smelled of old furniture and the burned-out fires of wintertime; gnat-like motes of dust circulated in the sunny air, and Joel left a dusty imprint on whatever he touched: the bureau, the chiffonier, the washstand. This room had not been used in many years certainly; the only fresh things here were the bedsheets, and even these had a yellowed look.

He was lacing up his shoes when he spied the bluejay feather. It was floating above his head, as if held by a spider's thread. He plucked it out of the air, carried it to the bureau, and deposited it in the lacquered box, which was lined with red plush; it also occurred to him that this would be a good place to store Sam Radclif's bullet. Joel loved any kind of souvenir, and it was his nature to keep and catalogue trifles. He'd had many grand collections, and it pained him sorely that Ellen persuaded him to leave them in New Orleans. There had been magazine photos and foreign coins, books and no-two-alike rocks, and a wonderful conglomeration he'd labeled simply Miscellany: the feather and bullet would've made good items for that. But maybe Ellen would mail his stuff on, or maybe he could start all over again, maybe…

There was a rap at the door.

It was his father, of that he was sure. It must be. And what should he say: hello, Dad, Father, Mr Sansom? Howdyado, hello? Hug, or shake hands, or kiss? oh why hadn't he brushed his teeth, why couldn't he find the Major's suitcase and a clean shirt? He whipped a bow into his shoelace, called, "Yeah?" and straightened up erect, prepared to make the best, most manly impression possible.

The door opened. Miss Amy, her gloved hand cradled, waited on the threshold; she nodded sweetly, and, as she advanced, Joel noticed the vague suggestion of a mustache fuzzing her upper lip.

"Good morning," he said, and, smiling, held out his hand. He was of course disappointed, but somehow relieved, too. She stared at his outstretched hand, a puzzled look contracting her puny face. She shook her head, and skirted past him to a window where she stood with her back turned. "It's after twelve," she said.

Joel's smile felt suddenly stiff and awkward. He hid his hands in his pockets.

"Such a pity you arrived last night at so late an hour: Randolph had planned a merrier welcome." Her voice had a weary, simpering tone; it struck the ear like the deflating whoosh of a toy balloon. "But it's just as well, the poor child suffers with asthma, you know: had. a wretched attack yesterday. He'll be ever so peeved I haven't let him know you're here, but I think it best he stay in his room, at least till supper."

Joel rummaged around for something to say. He recalled Sam Radclif having spoken of a cousin, and one of the twins, Florabel, of a Cousin Randolph. At any rate, from the way she talked, he supposed this person to be a kid near his own age.

"Randolph is our first cousin, and a great admirer of yours," she said, turning to face him. The hard sunshine emphasized the pallor of her skin, and her tiny eyes, now fixing him shrewdly, were alert. There was lack of focus in her face, as though, beneath the uningratiating veneer of fatuous refinement, another personality, quite different, was demanding attention; the lack of focus gave her, at unguarded moments, a panicky, dismayed expression, and when she spoke it was as if she were never precisely certain what every word signified. "Have you money left from the check my husband sent Mrs. Kendall?"

"About a dollar, I guess," he said, and reluctantly offered his change purse. "It cost a good bit to stay at that cafй."

"Please, it's yours," she said. "I was merely interested in whether you are a wise, thrifty boy." She appeared suddenly irritated. "Why are you so fidgety? Must you use the bathroom?"

"Oh, no." He felt all at once as though he'd wet his pants in public. "Oh, no."

"Unfortunately, we haven't modern plumbing facilities. Randolph is opposed to contrivances of that sort. However," and she nodded toward the washstand, "you'll find a chamber pot in there… in the compartment below."

"Yes'm," said Joel, mortified.

"And of course the house has never been wired for electricity. We have candles and lamps; they both draw bugs, but which would you prefer?"

"Whichever you've got the most of," he said, really wanting candles, for they brought to mind the St. Deval Street Secret Nine, a neighborhood detective club of which he'd been both treasurer and Official Historian. And he recalled club get-togethers where tall candles, snitched from the five 'n' dime, flamed in Coca-Cola bottles, and how Exalted Operative Number One, Sammy Silverstein, had used for a gavel an old cow bone.

She glanced at the firepoker which had rolled halfway under a wing chair. "Would you mind picking that up and putting it over by the hearth? I was in here earlier," she explained, while he carried out her order, "and a bird flew in the window; such a nuisance: you weren't disturbed?"

Joel hesitated. "I thought I heard something," he said. "It woke me up."

"Well, twelve hours sleep should be sufficient." She lowered herself into the chair, and crossed her toothpick legs; her shoes were low-heeled and white, like those worn by nurses. "Yes, the morning's gone and everything's all hot again. Summer is so unpleasant." Now despite her impersonal manner, Joel was not antagonized, just a little uncomfortable. Females in Miss Amy's age bracket, somewhere between forty-five and fifty, generally displayed a certain tenderness toward him, and he took their sympathy for granted; if, as had infrequently happened, this affection was withheld, he knew with what ease it could be guaranteed: a smile, a wistful glance, a courtly compliment: "I want to say how pretty I think your hair is: anice color."

The bribe received no clear-cut appreciation, therefore: "And how much I like my room."

And this time he hit his mark. "I've always considered it the finest room in the house. Cousin Randolph was born here: in that very bed. And Angela Lee… Randolph's mother: a beautiful woman, originally from Memphis… died here, oh, not many years ago. We've never used it since." She perked her head suddenly, as if to hear some distant sound; her eyes squinted, then closed altogether. But presently she relaxed and eased back into the chair. "I suppose you've noticed the view?"

Joel confessed that no, he hadn't, and went obligingly to a window. Below, under a fiery surface of sun waves, a garden, a jumbled wreckage of zebrawood and lilac, elephant-ear plant and weeping willow, the lace-leafed limp branches shimmering delicately, and dwarfed cherry trees, like those in oriental prints, sprawled raw and green in the noon heat. It was not a result of simple neglect, this tangled oblong area, but rather the outcome, it appeared, of someone having, in a riotous moment, scattered about it a wild assortment of seed. Grass and bush and vine and flower were all crushed together. Massive chinaberry and waterbay formed a rigidly enclosing wall. Now at the far end, opposite the house, was an unusual sight: like a set of fingers, a row of five white fluted columns lent the garden the primitive, haunted look of a lost ruin: Judas vine snaked up their toppling slenderness, and a yellow tabby cat was sharpening its claws against the middle column. Miss Amy, having risen, now stood beside him. She was an inch or so shorter than Joel.

"In ancient history class at school, we had to draw pictures of some pillars like those. Miss Radinsky said mine were the best, and she put them on the bulletin board," he bragged.

"The pillars… Randolph adores them, too; they were once part of the old side porch," she told him in a reminiscing voice. "Angela Lee was a young bride, just down from Memphis, and I was a child younger than you. In the evening we would sit on the side porch, sipping cherryade and listen to the crickets and wait for the moonrise. Angela Lee crocheted a shawl for me: you must see it sometime, Randolph uses it in his room as a tablescarf: a waste and a shame." She spoke so quietly it was as though she intended only herself to hear.

"Did the porch just blow away?" asked Joel.

"Burned," she said, rubbing a clear circle on the dusty glass with her gloved hand. "It was in December, the week before Christmas, and at a time when there was no man on the place but Jesus Fever, and he was even then very old. No one knows how the fire started or ended; it simply rose out of nothing, burned away the dining room, the music room, the library… and went out. No one knows."

"And this garden is where the part that burned up was?" said Joel. "Gee, it must've been an awful big house."

She said: "There, by the willows and goldenrod… that is the site of the music room where the dances were held; small dances, to be sure, for there were few around here Angela Lee cared to entertain… And they are all dead now, those who came to her little evenings; Mr. Casey, I understand, passed on last year, and he was the last."

Joel gazed down on the jumbled green, trying to picture the music room and the dancers ("Angela Lee played the harp," Miss Amy was saying, "and Mr. Casey the piano, and Jesus Fever, though he'd never studied, the violin, and Randolph the Elder sang; had the finest male voice in the state, everyone said so"), but the willows were willows and the goldenrod goldenrod and the dancers dead and lost. The yellow tabby slunk through the lilac into tall, concealing grass, and the garden was glazed and secret and still.

Miss Amy sighed as she slipped back into the shade of the room. "Your suitcase is in the kitchen," she said. "If you'll come downstairs, we'll see what Missouri has to feed you."

A dormer window of frost glass illuminated the long top-floor hall with the kind of pearly light that drenches a room when rain is falling. The wallpaper had once, you could tell, been blood red, but now was faded to a mural of crimson blisters and maplike stains. Including Joel's, there were four doors in the hall, impressive oak doors with massive brass knobs, and Joel wondered which of them, if opened, might lead to his father.

"Miss Amy," he said, as they started down the stairs, "where is my dad? I mean, couldn't I see him, please, ma'am?"

She did not answer. She walked a few steps below him, her gloved hand sliding along the dark, curving bannister, and each stairstep remarked the delicacy of her footfall. The strand of grey winding in her mousy hair was like a streak of lightning.

"Miss Amy, about my father…"

What in hell was the matter with her? Was she a little deaf, like his cousin Louise? The stairs sloped down to the circular chamber he remembered from the night, and here a full-length mirror caught his reflection bluely; it was like the comedy mirrors in carnival houses; he swayed shapelessly in its distorted depth. Except for a cedar chest supporting a kerosene lantern, the chamber was bleak and unfurnished. At the left was an archway, and a large crowded parlor yawned dimly beyond; to the right hung a curtain of lavender velvet that gleamed in various rubbed places like frozen dew on winter grass. She pushed through the parted folds. Another hall, another door.

The kitchen was empty. Joel sat down in a cane-bottom chair at a large table spread with checkered oilcloth, while Miss Amy went out on the backstops and stood there calling, "Yoo hoo, Missouri, yoo hoo," like an old screech owl.

A rusty alarm clock, lying face over on the table, ticktucked, ticktucked. The kitchen was fair-sized, but shadowed, for there was a single window, and by it the furry leaves of a fig tree met darkly; also, the planked walls were the somber bluegray of an overcast sky, and the stove, a woodburning relic with a fire pulsing in it now, was black with a black chimney flute rising to the low ceiling. Worn linoleum covered the floor, as it had in Ellen's kitchen, but this was all that reminded Joel of home.

And then, sitting alone in the quiet kitchen, he was taken with a terrible idea: what if his father had seen him already? Indeed, had been spying on him ever since he arrived, was, in fact, watching him at this very moment? An old house like this would most likely be riddled with hidden passages, and picture-eyes that were not eyes at all, but peepholes. And his father thought: that runt is an imposter; my son would be taller and stronger and handsomer and smarter-looking. Suppose he'd told Miss Amy: give the little faker something to eat and send him on his way. And dear sweet Lord, where would he go? Off to foreign lands where he'd set himself up as an organ grinder with a little doll-clothed monkey, or a blind-boy street singer, or a beggar selling pencils.

"Confound it, Missouri, why can't you learn to light in one place longer than five seconds?"

"I gotta chop the wood, Aint' I gotta chop the wood?"

"Don't sass me."

"I ain't sassin nobody, Miss Amy."

"If that isn't sass, what is it?"

"Whew!"

Up the steps they came, and through the back screen door, Miss Amy, vexation souring her white face, and a graceful Negro girl toting a load of kindling which she dropped in a crib next to the stove. The Major's suitcase, Joel saw, was jammed behind this crib.

Smoothing the fingers of her silk glove, Miss Amy said: "Missouri belongs to Jesus Fever; she's his grandchild."

"Delighted to make your acquaintance," said Joel, in his very best dancing-class style.

"Me, too," rejoined the colored girl, going about her business. "Welcome to," she dropped a frying pan, "the Landin."

"If we aren't more careful," stage-whispered Miss Amy, "we're liable to find ourselves in serious difficulty. All this racket: Randolph will have a conniption."

"Sometime I get so tired," mumbled Missouri.

"She's a good cook… when she feels like it," said Miss Amy. "You'll be taken care of. But don't stuff, we have early supper on Sundays."

Missouri said: "You comin to Service, Ma'am?"

"Not today," Miss Amy replied distractedly. "He's worse, much worse."

Missouri placed the pan on a rack and nodded knowingly. Then, looking square at Joel: "We countin on you, young fella."

It was like the exasperating code-dialogue which, for the benefit and bewilderment of outsiders, had often passed between members of the St. Deval Street Secret Nine.

"Missouri and Jesus hold their own prayer meeting Sunday afternoons," explained Miss Amy.

"I plays the accordion and us sings," said Missouri. "It's a whole lota fun."

But Joel, seeing Miss Amy was preparing to depart, ignored the colored girl, for there were certain urgent matters he wanted settled. "About my father…"

"Yes?" Miss Amy paused in the doorway.

Joel felt tongue-tied. "Well, I'd like to… to see him," he finished lamely.

She fiddled with the doorknob. "He isn't well, you know," she said. "I don't think it advisable he see you just yet; it's so hard for him to talk." She made a helpless gesture. "But if you want, I'll ask."

With a cut of cornbread, Joel mopped bone-dry the steaming plate of fried eggs and grits, sopping rich with sausage gravy, that Missouri had set before him.

"It sure do gimme pleasure to see a boy relish his vittels," she said. "Only don't spec no refills cause I gotta pain lickin my back like to kill me: didn't sleep a blessed wink last night; been sufferin with this pain off and on since I'm a wee child, and done took enough medicine to float the whole entire United States Navy: ain't nona it done me a bita good nohow. There was a witch woman lived a piece down the road (Miz Gus Hulie) usta make a fine magic brew, and that helped some. Poor white lady. Mis Gus Hulie. Met a terrible accident: fell into an ol Injun grave and was too feeble for to climb out." Tall, powerful, barefoot, graceful, soundless, Missouri Fever was like a supple black cat as she paraded serenely about the kitchen, the casual flow of her walk beautifully sensuous and haughty. She was slant-eyed, and darker than the charred stove; her crooked hair stood straight on end, as if she'd seen a ghost, and her lips were thick and purple. The length of her neck was something to ponder upon, for she was almost a freak, a human giraffe, and Joel recalled photos, which he'd scissored once from the pages of a National Geographic, of curious African ladies with countless silver chokers stretching their necks to improbable heights. Though she wore no silver bands, naturally, there was a sweat-stained blue polka-dot bandanna wrapped round the middle of her soaring neck. "Papa-daddy and me's countin on you for our Service," she said, after filling two coffee cups and mannishly straddling a chair at the table. "We got our own little place backa the garden, so you scoot over later on, and we'll have us a real good ol time."

"I'll come if I can, but this being my first day and all, Dad will most likely expect me to visit with him," said Joel hopefully.

Missouri emptied her coffee into a saucer, blew on it, dumped it back into the cup, sucked up a swallow, and smacked her lips. "This here's the Lord's day," she announced. "You believe in Him? You got faith in His healin power?"

Joel said: "I go to church."

"Now that ain't what I'm speaking of. Take for instance, when you thinks bout the Lord, what is it passes in your mind?"

"Oh, stuff," he said, though actually, whenever he had occasion to remember that a God in heaven supposedly kept his record, one thing he thought of was money: quarters his mother had given him for each Bible stanza memorized, dimes diverted from the Sunday School collection plate to Gabaldoni's Soda Fountain, the tinkling rain of coins as the cashiers of the church solicited among the congregation. But Joel didn't much like God, for He had betrayed him too many times. "Just stuff like saying my prayers."

"When I thinks bout Him, I thinks bout what I'm gonna do when Papadaddy goes to his rest," said Missouri, and rinsed her mouth with a big swallow of coffee. "Well, I'm gonna spread my wings and fly way to some swell city up north like Washington, D. C."

"Aren't you happy here?"

"Honey, there's things you too young to unnerstand."

"I'm thirteen," he declared. "And you'd be surprised how much I know."

"Shoot, boy, the country's just fulla folks what knows everythin, and don't unnerstand nothin, just fullofem," she said, and began to prod her upper teeth: she had a flashy gold tooth, and it occurred to Joel that the prodding was designed for attracting his attention to it. "Now one reason is, I get lonesome: what I all the time say is, you ain't got no notion what lonesome is till you stayed a spell at the Landin. And there ain't no mens round here I'm innerested in, leastwise not at the present: one time there was this mean buzzard name of Keg, but he did a crime to me and landed hisself on the chain gang, which is sweet justice considerin the lowdown kinda trash he was. I'm only a girl of fourteen when he did this bad thing to me. " A fist-like knot of flies, hovering over a sugar jar, dispersed every whichaway as she swung an irritated hand. "Yessir, Keg Brown, that's the name he go by. " With a fingertip she shined her gold tooth to a brighter luster while her slanted eyes scrutinized Joel; these eyes were like wild foxgrapes, or two discs of black porcelain, and they looked out intelligently from their almond slits. "I gotta longin for city life poisonin my blood cause I was brung up in St. Louis till Papadaddy fetched me here for to nurse him in his dyin days. Papadaddy was past ninety then, and they say he ain't long for this world, so I come. That be thirteen year ago, and now it look to me like Papadaddy gonna outlive Methusaleh. Make no mistake, I love Papadaddy, but when he gone I sure aimin to light out for Washington, D. C., or Boston, Coneckikut. And that's what I thinks bout when I thinks bout God."

"Why not New Orleans?" said Joel. "There are all kinds of good-looking fellows in New Orleans."

"Aw, I ain't studyin no New Orleans. It ain't only the mens, honey: I wants to be where they got snow, and not all this sunshine. I wants to walk around in snow up to my hips: watch it come outa the sky in gret big globs. Oh, pretty… pretty. You ever see the snow?"

Rather breathlessly, Joel lied and claimed that he most certainly had; it was a pardonable deception, for he had a great yearning to see bona fide snow: next to owning the Koh-i-noor diamond, that was his ultimate secret wish. Sometimes, on flat boring afternoons, he'd squatted on the curb of St. Deval Street and daydreamed silent pearly snowclouds into sifting coldly through the boughs of the dry, dirty trees. Snow falling in August and silvering the glassy pavement, the ghostly flakes icing his hair, coating rooftops, changing the grimy old neighborhood into a hushed frozen white wasteland uninhabited except for himself and a menagerie of wonder-beasts: albino antelopes, and ivory-breasted snowbirds; and occasionally there were humans, such fantastic folk as Mr. Mystery, the vaudeville hypnotist, and Lucky Rogers, the movie star, and Madame Veronica, who read fortunes in a Vieux Carrй tearoom. "It was one stormy night in Canada that I saw the snow," he said, though the farthest north he'd ever set foot was Richmond, Virginia. "We were lost in the mountains, Mother and me, and snow, tons and tons of it, was piling up all around us. And we lived in an ice-cold cave for a solid week, and we kept slapping each other to stay awake: if you fall asleep in snow, chances are you'll never see the light of day again."

"Then what happened?" said Missouri, disbelief subtly narrowing her eyes.

"Well, things got worse and worse. Mama cried, and the tears froze on her face like little BB bullets, and she was always cold…" Nothing had warmed her, not the fine wool blankets, not the mugs of hot toddy Ellen fixed. "Each night hungry wolves howled in the mountains, and I prayed…" In the darkness of the garage he'd prayed, and in the lavatory at school, and in the first row of the Nemo Theatre while duelling gangsters went unnoticed on the magic screen. "The snow kept falling, and heavy drifts blocked the entrance to the cave, but uh…" Stuck. It was the end of a Saturday serial that leaves the hero locked in a slowly filling gas chamber.

"And?"

"And a man in a red coat, a Canadian Mountie, rescued us… only me, really: Mama had already frozen to death."

Missouri denounced him with considerable disgust. "You is a gret big story."

"Honest, cross my heart," and he exed his chest.

"Uh uh. You Mama die in the sick bed. Mister Randolph say so."

Somehow, spinning the tale, Joel had believed every word; the cave, the howling wolves, these had seemed more real than Missouri and her long neck, or Miss Amy, or the shadowy kitchen. "You won't tattle, will you, Missouri? About what a liar I am."

She patted his arm gently. "Course not, honey. Come to think, I wish I had me a two-bit piece for every story I done told. Sides, you tell good lies, the kind I likes to hear. We gonna get along just elegant: me, I ain't but eight years older'n you, and you been to the school." Her voice, which was like melted chocolate, was warm and tender. "Les us be friends."

"O. K.," said Joel, toasting her with his coffee cup, "friends."

"And somethin else is, you call me Zoo. Zoo's my rightful name, and I always been called by that till Papadaddy let on it stood for Missouri, which is the state where is located the city of St. Louis. Then, Miss Amy 'n Mister Randolph, they so proper: Missouri this 'n Missouri t'other, day in, day out. Huh! You call me Zoo."

Joel saw an opening. "Does my father call you Zoo?"

She dipped down into the blouse of her gingham dress, and withdrew a silver compact. Opening it, she took a pinch of snuff, and sniffed it up her wide nose. "Happy Dip, that's the bestest brand."

"Is he awful sick-Mister Sansom?" Joel persisted.

"Take a pinch," she said, extending her compact.

And he accepted, anxious not to offend her. The ginger-colored powder had a scalding, miserable taste, like devil's pepper; he sneezed, and when water sprang up in his eyes he covered his face ashamedly with his hands.

"You laughin or cryin, boy?"

"Cryin," he whimpered, and this came close to truth. "Everybody in the house is stone deaf."

"I ain't deaf, honey," said Zoo, sounding sincerely concerned. "Have the backache and stomach jitters, but I ain't deaf."

"Then why does everybody act so queer? Gee whiz, every time I mention Mister Sansom you'd think… you'd think… and in the town…" He rubbed his eyes and peeked at Zoo. "Like just now, when I asked if he was really ill…"

Zoo glanced worriedly at the window where fig leaves pressed against the glass like green listening ears. "Miss Amy done tol you he ain't the healthiest man."

The flies buzzed back to the sugar jar, and the ticktuck of the defective clock was loud. "Is he going to die?" said Joel.

The scrape of a chair. Zoo was up and rinsing pans in a tub with water from a well-bucket. "We friends, that's fine," she said, talking over her shoulder. "Only don't never ax me nothin bout Mister Sansom. Miss Amy the one take care of him. Ax her. Ax Mister Randolph. I ain't in noways messed up with Mister Sansom; don't even fix him his vittels. Me and Papadaddy, us got our own troubles."

Joel snapped shut the snuff compact, and revolved it in his hands, examining the unique design. It was round and the silver was cut like a turtle's shell; a real butterfly, arranged under a film of lime glass, figured the lid; the butterfly wings were the luminously misty orange of a full moon. So elegant a case, he reasoned, was never meant for ordinary snuff, but rare golden powders, precious witch potions, love sand.

"Yessir, us got our own troubles."

"Zoo," he said, "where'd you get this?"

She was kneeling on the floor cursing quietly as she shoveled ashes out of the stove. The firelight rippled over her black face and danced a yellow light in her foxgrape eyes which now cut sideways questioningly. "My box?" she said. "Mister Randolph gimme it one Christmas way long ago. He make it hisself, makes lotsa pretty dodads long that line."

Joel studied the compact with awed respect; he would've sworn it was store-bought. Distastefully he recalled his own attempts at hand-made gifts: necktie racks, tool kits, and the like; they were mighty sorry by comparison. He comforted himself with the thought that Cousin Randolph must be older than he'd supposed.

"I usta been usin it for cheek-red," said Zoo, advancing to claim her treasure. She dipped more snuff before redepositing it down her dress-front. "But seein as I don't go over to Noon City no more (ain't been in two years), I reckoned it'd do to keep my Happy Dip good 'n dry. Sides, no sense paintin up less there's mens round a lady is innerested in… which there ain't." A mean expression pinched her face as she gazed at the sunspots freckling the linoleum. "That Keg Brown, the one what landed on the chain gang cause he did me a bad turn, I hope they got him out swingin a ninety-pound pick under this hot sun." And, as if it were sore, she touched her long neck lightly. "Well," she sighed, "spec I best get to tendin Papadaddy: I'm gonna take him some hoecake and molasses: he must be powerful hungry."

Joel watched apathetically while she broke off a cold slab of cornbread, and poured a preserve jar half-full of thick molasses. "How come you don't fix yourself a slingshot, and go out and kill a mess of birds?" she suggested.

"Dad will probably want me in a minute," he told her. "Miss Amy said she'd see, so I guess I'd better stick around here."

"Mister Randolph likes the dead birds, the kinds with pretty feathers. Won't do you no good squattin in this dark ol kitchen." Her naked feet were soundless as she moved away. "You be at the Service, you hear?"

The fire had waned to ashes, and, while the old broken clock ticked like an invalid heart, the sunspots on the floor spread and darkened; the shadows of the fig leaves trellising the walls swelled to an enormous quivering shape, like the crystal flesh of a jellyfish. Flies skittered along the table, rubbing their restless hair-feet, and zoomed and sang round Joel's ears. When, two hours later, two that seemed five, he raised the clock off its battered face it promptly stopped beating and all sense of life faded from the kitchen; three-twenty its bent hands recorded: three, the empty, middle hour of an endless afternoon. She was not coming. Joel plowed his fingers through his hair. She was not coming, and it was all some crazy trick.

His leg had gone numb from resting so long in one position, and it tingled bloodlessly as he got up and limped out of the kitchen, and down the hall, calling plaintively: "Miss Amy. Miss Amy."

He swished the lavender curtains apart, and moved into the bleak light filling the barren, polished chamber towards his image floating on the watery-surfaced looking glass; his formless reflected face was wide-lipped and one-eyed, as if it were a heat-softened wax effigy; the lips were a gauzy line, the eyes a glaring bubble. "Miss Amy… anybody!"

Somewhere in a school textbook of Joel's was a statement contending that the earth at one time was probably a white hot sphere, like the sun; now, standing in the scorched garden, he remembered it. He had reached the garden by following a path which led round from the front of the house through the rampart of interlacing trees. And here, in the overgrown confusion, were some plants taller than his head, and others razor-sharp with thorns; brittle sun-curled leaves crackled under his cautious step. The dry, tangled weeds grew waist high. The sultry smells of summer and sweet shrub and dark earth were heavy, and the itchy whirr of bumblebees stung the silence. He could hardly raise his eyes upward, for the sky was pure blue fire. The wall of the house rising above the garden was like a great yellow cliff, and patches of Virginia creeper greenly framed all its eight overlooking windows.

Joel tramped down the tough undergrowth till he came up flat against the house. He was bored, and figured he might as well play Blackmail, a kind of peeping-tom game members of the Secret Nine had fooled around with when there was absolutely nothing else to do. Blackmail was practiced in New Orleans only after sunset, inasmuch as daylight could be fatal for a player, the idea being to approach a strange house and peer invisibly through its windows. On these dangerous evening patrols, Joel had witnessed many peculiar spectacles, like the night he'd watched a young girl waltzing stark naked to victrola music; and again, an old lady drop dead while puffing at a fairyland of candles burning on a birthday cake; and most puzzling of all, two grown men standing in an ugly little room kissing each other.

The parlor of Skully's Landing ran the ground-floor's length; gold draperies tied with satin tassels obscured the greater part of its dusky, deserted interior, but Joel, his nose mashed against a pane, could make out a group of heavy chairs clustered like fat dowagers round a tea-table. And a gilded loveseat of lilac velvet, an Empire sofa next to a marble fireplace, and a cabinet, one of three, the others of which were indistinct, gleaming with china figurines and ivory fans and curios. On top of a table directly before him were a Japanese pagoda, and an ornate shepherd lamp, chandelier prisms dangling from its geranium globe like jeweled icicles.

He slipped away from the window and crossed the garden to the slanting shade of a willow. The diamond glitter of the afternoon hurt his eyes, and he was as slippery with sweat as a greased wrestler; it stood to reason such weather would have to break. A rooster crowed beyond the garden, and it had for him the same sad, woebegone sound as a train whistle wailing late at night. A train. He sure wished he were aboard one headed far from here. If he could get to see his father! Miss Amy, she was a mean old bitch. Stepmothers always were. Well, just let her try and lay a hand on him. He'd tell her off soon as look at her, by God. He was pretty brave. Who was it licked Sammy Silverstein to a frazzle a year ago come next October? But gee, Sammy was a good kid, kind of. And he wondered what devilment old Sammy was up to right this minute. Probably sitting in the Nemo Theatre stuffing his belly with popcorn; yeah, that's where you'd find him, because this was the matinee they were going to show that spook picture about a batty scientist changing Lucky Rogers into a murderous gorilla. Of all the pictures he would have to miss that one. Hell! Now supposing he did suddenly decide to make dust tracks on the road? Maybe it would be fun to own a barrel organ and a monkey. And there was always the soda-jerking business: anybody that liked ice-cream sodas as much as he did ought to be able to make one. Hell!

"Ra ta ta ta," went his machine gun as he charged toward the five broken porch columns. And then, midway between the pillars and a clump of goldenrod, he discovered the bell. It was a bell like those used in slavedays to summon field-hands from work; the metal had turned a mildewed green, and the platform on which it rested was rotten. Fascinated, Joel squatted Indian-style and poked his head inside the bell's flared mouth; the lint of withered spider webs hung everywhere, and a delicate green lizard, racing liquidly round the rusty hollow, swerved, flicked its tongue, and nailed its pinpoint eyes on Joel, who withdrew in disordered haste.

Rising, he glanced up at the yellow wall of the house, and speculated as to which of the top-floor windows belonged to him, his father, Cousin Randolph. It was at this point that he saw the queer lady. She was holding aside the curtains of the left corner window, and smiling and nodding at him, as if in greeting or approval; but she was no one Joel had ever known: the hazy substance of her face, the suffused marshmallow features, brought to mind his own vaporish reflection in the wavy chamber mirror. And her white hair was like the wig of a character from history: a towering pale pompadour with fat dribbling curls. Whoever she was, and Joel could not imagine, her sudden appearance seemed to throw a trance across the garden: a butterfly, poised on a dahlia stem, ceased winking its wings, and the rasping F of the bumblebees droned into nothing.

When the curtain fell abruptly closed, and the window was again empty, Joel, reawakening, took a backward step and stumbled against the bell: one raucous, cracked note rang out, shattering the hot stillness.