“A—” Horace said. “Oh,” he said. “Yes. You’d better tell me about it.”
XVIII
Popeye drove swiftly but without any quality of haste or of flight, down the clay road and into the sand. Temple was beside him. Her hat was jammed onto the back of her head, her hair escaping beneath the crumpled brim in matted clots. Her face looked like a sleepwalker’s as she swayed limply to the lurching of the car. She lurched against Popeye, lifting her hand in limp reflex. Without releasing the wheel he thrust her back with his elbow. “Brace yourself,” he said. “Come on, now.”
Before they came to the tree they passed the woman. She stood beside the road, carrying the child, the hem of her dress folded back over its face, and she looked at them quietly from beneath the faded sunbonnet, flicking swiftly in and out of Temple’s vision without any motion, any sign.
When they reached the tree Popeye swung the car out of the road and drove it crashing into the undergrowth and through the prone tree-top and back into the road again in a running popping of cane-stalks like musketry along a trench, without any diminution of speed. Beside the tree Gowan’s car lay on its side. Temple looked vaguely and stupidly at it as it too shot behind.
Popeye swung back into the sandy ruts. Yet there was no flight in the action: he performed it with a certain vicious petulance, that was all. It was a powerful car. Even in the sand it held forty miles an hour, and up the narrow gulch to the highroad, where he turned north. Sitting beside him, braced against jolts that had already given way to a smooth increasing hiss of gravel, Temple gazed dully forward as the road she had traversed yesterday began to flee backward under the wheels as onto a spool, feeling her blood seeping slowly inside her loins.
She sat limp in the corner of the seat, watching the steady backward rush of the land—pines in opening vistas splashed with fading dogwood; sedge; fields green with new cotton and empty of any movement, peaceful, as though Sunday were a quality of atmosphere, of light and shade—sitting with her legs close together, listening to the hot minute seeping of her blood, saying dully to herself, I’m still bleeding. I’m still bleeding.
It was a bright, soft day, a wanton morning filled with that unbelievable soft radiance of May, rife with a promise of noon and of heat, with high fat clouds like gobs of whipped cream floating lightly as reflections in a mirror, their shadows scudding sedately across the road. It had been a lavender spring. The fruit trees, the white ones, had been in small leaf when the blooms matured; they had never attained that brilliant whiteness of last spring, and the dogwood had come into full bloom after the leaf also, in green retrograde before crescendo.
But lilac and wistaria and redbud, even the shabby heaven-trees, had never been finer, fulgent, with a burning scent blowing for a hundred yards along the vagrant air of April and May. The bougainvillaea against the veranda would be large as basketballs and lightly poised as balloons, and looking vacantly and stupidly at the rushing roadside Temple began to scream.
It started as a wail, raising, cut suddenly off by Popeye’s hand. With her hands lying on her lap, sitting erect, she screamed, tasting the gritty acridity of his fingers while the car slewed squealing in the gravel, feeling her secret blood. Then he gripped her by the back of the neck and she sat motionless, her mouth round and open like a small empty cave. He shook her head.
“Shut it,” he said, “shut it”; gripping her silent. “Look at yourself. Here.” With the other hand he swung the mirror on the windshield around and she looked at her image, at the uptilted hat and her matted hair and her round mouth. She began to fumble at her coat pockets, looking at her reflection. He released her and she produced the compact and opened it and peered into the mirror, whimpering a little. She powdered her face and rouged her mouth and straightened her hat, whimpering into the tiny mirror on her lap while Popeye watched her. He lit a cigarette. “Aint you ashamed of yourself?” he said.
“It’s still running,” she whimpered. “I can feel it.” With the lipstick poised she looked at him and opened her mouth again. He gripped her by the back of the neck.
“Stop it, now. You going to shut it?”
“Yes,” she whimpered.
“See you do, then. Come on. Get yourself fixed.”
She put the compact away. He started the car again.
The road began to thicken with pleasure cars Sunday-bent—small, clay-crusted Fords and Chevrolets; an occasional larger car moving swiftly, with swathed women, and dust-covered hampers; trucks filled with wooden-faced country people in garments like a colored wood meticulously carved; now and then a wagon or a buggy. Before a weathered frame church on a hill the grove was full of tethered teams and battered cars and trucks. The woods gave away to fields; houses became more frequent. Low above the skyline, above roofs and a spire or two, smoke hung. The gravel became asphalt and they entered Dumfries.
Temple began to look about, like one waking from sleep. “Not here!” she said. “I cant—”
“Hush it, now,” Popeye said.
“I cant—I might—” she whimpered. “I’m hungry,” she said. “I haven’t eaten since . . .”
“Ah, you aint hungry. Wait till we get to town.”
She looked about with dazed, glassy eyes. “There might be people here . . .” He swung in toward a filling station. “I cant get out,” she whimpered. “It’s still running, I tell you!”
“Who told you to get out?” He descended and looked at her across the wheel. “Dont you move.” She watched him go up the street and enter a door. It was a dingy confectionery. He bought a pack of cigarettes and put one in his mouth. “Gimme a couple of bars of candy,” he said.
“What kind?”
“Candy,” he said. Under a glass bell on the counter a plate of sandwiches sat. He took one and flipped a dollar on the counter and turned toward the door.
“Here’s your change,” the clerk said.
“Keep it,” he said. “You’ll get rich faster.”
When he saw the car it was empty. He stopped ten feet away and changed the sandwich to his left hand, the unlighted cigarette slanted beneath his chin. The mechanic, hanging the hose up, saw him and jerked his thumb toward the corner of the building.
Beyond the corner the wall made an offset. In the niche was a greasy barrel half full of scraps of metal and rubber. Between the barrel and the wall Temple crouched. “He nearly saw me!” she whispered. “He was almost looking right at me!”
“Who?” Popeye said. He looked back up the street. “Who saw you?”
“He was coming right toward me! A boy. At school. He was looking right toward—”
“Come on. Come out of it.”
“He was look—” Popeye took her by the arm. She crouched in the corner, jerking at the arm he held, her wan face craned around the corner.
“Come on, now.” Then his hand was at the back of her neck, gripping it.
“Oh,” she wailed in a choked voice. It was as though he were lifting her slowly erect by that one hand. Excepting that, there was no movement between them. Side by side, almost of a height, they appeared as decorous as two acquaintances stopped to pass the time of day before entering church.
“Are you coming?” he said. “Are you?”
“I cant. It’s down to my stocking now. Look.” She lifted her skirt away in a shrinking gesture, then she dropped the skirt and rose again, her torso arching backward, her soundless mouth open as he gripped her. He released her.
“Will you come now?”
She came out from behind the barrel. He took her arm.
“It’s all over the back of my coat,” she whimpered. “Look and see.”
“You’re all right. I’ll get you another coat tomorrow. Come on.”
They returned to the car. At the corner she hung back again. “You want some more of it, do you?” he whispered, not touching her. “Do you?” She went on and got in the car quietly. He took the wheel. “Here, I got you a sandwich.” He took it from his pocket and put it in her hand. “Come on, now. Eat it.” She took a bite obediently. He started the car and took the Memphis road. Again, the bitten sandwich in her hand, she ceased chewing and opened her mouth in that round, hopeless expression of a child; again his hand left the wheel and gripped the back of her neck and she sat motionless, gazing straight at him, her mouth open and the half chewed mass of bread and meat lying upon her tongue.
They reached Memphis in midafternoon. At the foot of the bluff below Main Street Popeye turned into a narrow street of smoke-grimed frame houses with tiers of wooden galleries, set a little back in grassless plots, with now and then a forlorn and hardy tree of some shabby species—gaunt, lopbranched magnolias, a stunted elm or a locust in grayish, cadaverous bloom—interspersed by
