“Why didn’t you push that ere button?” Virgil said. “Dont you know city folks dont answer no knock?”
“All right,” Fonzo said. He rang the bell. The door opened. It was the woman in the mother hubbard; they could hear the dogs behind her.
“Got ere extra room?” Fonzo said.
Miss Reba looked at them, at their new hats and the suit cases.
“Who sent you here?” she said.
“Didn’t nobody. We just picked it out.” Miss Reba looked at him. “Them hotels is too high.”
Miss Reba breathed harshly. “What you boys doing?”
“We come hyer on business,” Fonzo said. “We aim to stay a good spell.”
“If it aint too high,” Virgil said.
Miss Reba looked at him. “Where you from, honey?”
They told her, and their names. “We aim to be hyer a month or more, if it suits us.”
“Why, I reckon so,” she said after a while. She looked at them. “I can let you have a room, but I’ll have to charge you extra whenever you do business in it. I got my living to make like everybody else.”
“We aint,” Fonzo said. “We’ll do our business at the college.”
“What college?” Miss Reba said.
“The barber’s college,” Fonzo said.
“Look here,” Miss Reba said, “you little whipper-snapper.” Then she began to laugh, her hand at her breast. They watched her soberly while she laughed in harsh gasps. “Lord, Lord,” she said. “Come in here.”
The room was at the top of the house, at the back. Miss Reba showed them the bath. When she put her hand on the door a woman’s voice said: “Just a minute, dearie” and the door opened and she passed them, in a kimono. They watched her go up the hall, rocked a little to their young foundations by a trail of scent which she left. Fonzo nudged Virgil surreptitiously. In their room again he said:
“That was another one. She’s got two daughters. Hold me, big boy; I’m heading for the henhouse.”
They didn’t go to sleep for some time that first night, what with the strange bed and room and the voices. They could hear the city, evocative and strange, imminent and remote; threat and promise both—a deep, steady sound upon which invisible lights glittered and wavered: colored coiling shapes of splendor in which already women were beginning to move in suave attitudes of new delights and strange nostalgic promises.
Fonzo thought of himself surrounded by tier upon tier of drawn shades, rose-colored, beyond which, in a murmur of silk, in panting whispers, the apotheosis of his youth assumed a thousand avatars. Maybe it’ll begin tomorrow, he thought; maybe by tomorrow night . . . A crack of light came over the top of the shade and sprawled in a spreading fan upon the ceiling. Beneath the window he could hear a voice, a woman’s, then a man’s: they blended, murmured; a door closed. Someone came up the stairs in swishing garments, on the swift hard heels of a woman.
He began to hear sounds in the house: voices, laughter; a mechanical piano began to play. “Hear them?” he whispered.
“She’s got a big family, I reckon,” Virgil said, his voice already dull with sleep.
“Family, hell,” Fonzo said. “It’s a party. Wish I was to it.”
On the third day as they were leaving the house in the morning, Miss Reba met them at the door. She wanted to use their room in the afternoons while they were absent. There was to be a detective’s convention in town and business would look up some, she said. “Your things’ll be all right. I’ll have Minnie lock everything up beforehand. Aint nobody going to steal nothing from you in my house.”
“What business you reckon she’s in?” Fonzo said when they reached the street.
“Dont know,” Virgil said.
“Wish I worked for her, anyway,” Fonzo said. “With all them women in kimonos and such running around.”
“Wouldn’t do you no good,” Virgil said. “They’re all married. Aint you heard them?”
The next afternoon when they returned from the school they found a woman’s undergarment under the washstand . . . Fonzo picked it up. “She’s a dressmaker,” he said.
“Reckon so,” Virgil said. “Look and see if they taken anything of yourn.”
The house appeared to be filled with people who did not sleep at night at all. They could hear them at all hours, running up and down the stairs, and always Fonzo would be conscious of women, of female flesh. It got to where he seemed to lie in his celibate bed surrounded by women, and he would lie beside the steadily snoring Virgil, his ears strained for the murmurs, the whispers of silk that came through the walls and the floor, that seemed to be as much a part of both as the planks and the plaster, thinking that he had been in Memphis ten days, yet the extent of his acquaintance was a few of his fellow pupils at the school. After Virgil was asleep he would rise and unlock the door and leave it ajar, but nothing happened.
On the twelfth day he told Virgil they were going visiting, with one of the barber-students.
“Where?” Virgil said.
“That’s all right. You come on. I done found out something. And when I think I been here two weeks without knowing about it—”
“What’s it going to cost?” Virgil said.
“When’d you ever have any fun for nothing?” Fonzo said. “Come on.”
“I’ll go,” Virgil said. “But I aint going to promise to spend nothing.”
“You wait and say that when we get there,” Fonzo said.
The barber took them to a brothel. When they came out Fonzo said, “And to think I been here two weeks without never knowing about that house.”
“I wisht you hadn’t never learned,” Virgil said. “It cost three dollars.”
“Wasn’t it worth it?” Fonzo said.
“Aint nothing worth three dollars you caint tote off with you,” Virgil said.
When they reached home Fonzo stopped. “We got to sneak in, now,” he said. “If she was to find out where we been and what we been doing, she might not let us stay in the house with them ladies no more.”
“That’s so,” Virgil said. “Durn you. Hyer you done made me spend three dollars, and now you fixing to git us both throwed out.”
“You do like I do,” Fonzo said. “That’s all you got to do. Dont say nothing.”
Minnie let them in. The piano was going full blast. Miss Reba appeared in a door, with a tin cup in her hand. “Well, well,” she said, “you boys been out mighty late tonight.”
“Yessum,” Fonzo said, prodding Virgil toward the stairs. “We been to prayer-meeting.”
In bed, in the dark, they could still hear the piano.
“You made me spend three dollars,” Virgil said.
“Aw, shut up,” Fonzo said. “When I think I been here for two whole weeks almost . . .”
The next afternoon they came home through the dusk, with the lights winking on, beginning to flare and gleam, and the women on their twinkling blonde legs meeting men and getting into automobiles and such.
“How about that three dollars now?” Fonzo said.
“I reckon we better not go over tonight,” Virgil said. “It’ll cost too much.”
“That’s right,” Fonzo said. “Somebody might see us and tell her.”
They waited two nights. “Now it’ll be six dollars,” Virgil said.
“Dont come, then,” Fonzo said.
When they returned home Fonzo said: “Try to act like something, this time. She near about caught us before on account of the way you acted.”
“What if she does?” Virgil said in a sullen voice. “She caint eat us.”
They stood outside the lattice, whispering.
“How you know she caint?” Fonzo said.
“She dont want to, then.”
“How you know she dont want to?”
“Maybe she dont,” Virgil said. Fonzo opened the lattice door. “I caint eat that six dollars, noways,” Virgil said. “Wisht I could.”
Minnie let them in. She said: “Somebody huntin you all.” They waited in the hall.
“We done caught now,” Virgil said. “I told you about throwing that money away.”
“Aw, shut up,” Fonzo said.
A man emerged from a door, a big man with his hat cocked over one ear, his arm about a blonde woman in a red dress. “There’s Cla’ence,” Virgil said.
In their room Clarence said: “How’d you get into this place?”
“Just found it,” Virgil said. They told him about it. He sat on the bed, in his soiled hat, a cigar in his fingers.
“Where you been tonight?” he said. They didn’t answer. They looked at him with blank, watchful faces. “Come on. I know. Where was it?” They told him.
“Cost me three dollars, too,” Virgil said.
“I’ll be durned if you aint the biggest fool this side of Jackson,” Clarence said. “Come on here.” They followed sheepishly. He led them from the house and for three or four blocks. They crossed a street of Negro stores and theatres and turned into a narrow, dark street and stopped at a house with red shades in the lighted windows. Clarence rang the bell. They could hear music inside, and shrill voices, and feet. They were admitted into a bare hallway where two shabby Negro men argued with a drunk white man in greasy overalls. Through an open door they saw a room filled with coffee-colored women in bright dresses, with ornate hair and golden smiles.
“Them’s niggers,” Virgil said.
“’Course they’re niggers,” Clarence said. “But see this?” he waved a banknote in his cousin’s face. “This stuff is color-blind.”
XXI
On the third day of his search, Horace found a domicile for the woman and child. It was in the ramshackle house of an old half-crazed white woman who was believed to manufacture spells for Negroes. It was on the edge of town, set in a tiny plot of ground choked and massed with waist-high herbage
