Miss Reba emerged from behind the screen with three glasses of gin. “This’ll put some heart into us,” she said. “We’re setting here like three old sick cats.” They bowed formally and drank, patting their lips. Then they began to talk. They were all talking at once, again in half-completed sentences, but without pauses for agreement or affirmation.
“It’s us girls,” Miss Myrtle said. “Men just cant seem to take us and leave us for what we are. They make us what we are, then they expect us to be different. Expect us not to never look at another man, while they come and go as they please.”
“A woman that wants to fool with more than one man at a time is a fool,” Miss Reba said. “They’re all trouble, and why do you want to double your trouble? And the woman that cant stay true to a good man when she gets him, a free-hearted spender that never give her a hour’s uneasiness or a hard word . . .” looking at them, her eyes began to fill with a sad, unutterable expression, of baffled and patient despair.
“Now, now,” Miss Myrtle said. She leaned forward and patted Miss Reba’s huge hand. Miss Lorraine made a faint clucking sound with her tongue. “You’ll get yourself started.”
“He was such a good man,” Miss Reba said. “We was like two doves. For twenty-five years we was like two doves.”
“Now, dearie; now, dearie,” Miss Myrtle said.
“It’s when it comes over me like this,” Miss Reba said. “Seeing that boy laying there under them flowers.”
“He never had no more than Mr Binford had,” Miss Myrtle said. “Now, now. Drink a little beer.”
Miss Reba brushed her sleeve across her eyes. She drank some beer.
“He ought to known better than to take a chance with Popeye’s girl,” Miss Lorraine said.
“Men dont never learn better than that, dearie,” Miss Myrtle said. “Where you reckon they went, Miss Reba?”
“I dont know and I dont care,” Miss Reba said. “And how soon they catch him and burn him for killing that boy, I dont care neither. I dont care none.”
“He goes all the way to Pensacola every summer to see his mother,” Miss Myrtle said. “A man that’ll do that cant be all bad.”
“I dont know how bad you like them, then,” Miss Reba said. “Me trying to run a respectable house, that’s been running a shooting-gallery for thirty years, and him trying to turn it into a peep-show.”
“It’s us poor girls,” Miss Myrtle said, “causes all the trouble and gets all the suffering.”
“I heard two years ago he wasn’t no good that way,” Miss Lorraine said.
“I knew it all the time,” Miss Reba said. “A young man spending his money like water on girls and not never going to bed with one. It’s against nature. All the girls thought it was because he had a little woman out in town somewhere, but I says mark my words, there’s something funny about him. There’s a funny business somewhere.”
“He was a free spender, all right,” Miss Lorraine said.
“The clothes and jewelry that girl bought, it was a shame,” Miss Reba said. “There was a Chinee robe she paid a hundred dollars for—imported, it was—and perfume at ten dollars an ounce; next morning when I went up there, they was all wadded in the corner and the perfume and rouge busted all over them like a cyclone. That’s what she’d do when she got mad at him, when he’d beat her. After he shut her up and wouldn’t let her leave the house. Having the front of my house watched like it was a . . .” She raised the tankard from the table to her lips. Then she halted it, blinking. “Where’s my—”
“Uncle Bud!” Miss Myrtle said. She grasped the boy by the arm and snatched him out from behind Miss Reba’s chair and shook him, his round head bobbing on his shoulders with an expression of equable idiocy. “Aint you ashamed? Aint you ashamed? Why cant you stay out of these ladies’ beer? I’m a good mind to take that dollar back and make you buy Miss Reba a can of beer, I am for a fact. Now, you go over there by that window and stay there, you hear?”
“Nonsense,” Miss Reba said. “There wasn’t much left. You ladies are about ready too, aint you? Minnie!”
Miss Lorraine touched her mouth with her handkerchief. Behind her glasses her eyes rolled aside in a veiled, secret look. She laid the other hand to her flat spinster’s breast.
“We forgot about your heart, honey,” Miss Myrtle said. “Dont you reckon you better take gin this time?”
“Reely, I—” Miss Lorraine said.
“Yes; do,” Miss Reba said. She rose heavily and fetched three more glasses of gin from behind the screen. Minnie entered and refilled the tankards. They drank, patting their lips.
“That’s what was going on, was it?” Miss Lorraine said.
“First I knowed was when Minnie told me there was something funny going on,” Miss Reba said. “How he wasn’t here hardly at all, gone about every other night, and that when he was here, there wasn’t no signs at all the next morning when she cleaned up. She’d hear them quarrelling, and she said it was her wanting to get out and he wouldn’t let her. With all them clothes he was buying her, mind, he didn’t want her to leave the house, and she’d get mad and lock the door and wouldn’t even let him in.”
“Maybe he went off and got fixed up with one of these glands, these monkey glands, and it quit on him,” Miss Myrtle said.
“Then one morning he come in with Red and took him up there. They stayed about an hour and left, and Popeye didn’t show up again until next morning. Then him and Red come back and stayed up there about an hour. When they left, Minnie come and told me what was going on, so next day I waited for them. I called him in here and I says ‘Look here, you son of a buh—’ ” She ceased. For an instant the three of them sat motionless, a little forward. Then slowly their heads turned and they looked at the boy leaning against the table.
“Uncle Bud, honey,” Miss Myrtle said, “dont you want to go and play in the yard with Reba and Mr Binford?”
“Yessum,” the boy said. He went toward the door. They watched him until the door closed upon him. Miss Lorraine drew her chair up; they leaned together.
“And that’s what they was doing?” Miss Myrtle said.
“I says ‘I been running a house for thirty years, but this is the first time I ever had anything like this going on in it. If you want to turn a stud in to your girl’ I says ‘go somewhere else to do it. I aint going to have my house turned into no French joint.’ ”
“The son of a bitch,” Miss Lorraine said.
“He’d ought to’ve had sense enough to got a old ugly man,” Miss Myrtle said. “Tempting us poor girls like that.”
“Men always expects us to resist temptation,” Miss Lorraine said. She was sitting upright like a schoolteacher. “The lousy son of a bitch.”
“Except what they offers themselves,” Miss Reba said. “Then watch them. . . . Every morning for four days that was going on, then they didn’t come back. For a week Popeye didn’t show up at all, and that girl wild as a young mare. I thought he was out of town on business maybe, until Minnie told me he wasn’t and that he give her five dollars a day not to let that girl out of the house nor use the telephone. And me trying to get word to him to come and take her out of my house because I didn’t want nuttin like that going on in it. Yes, sir, Minnie said the two of them would be nekkid as two snakes, and Popeye hanging over the foot of the bed without even his hat off, making a kind of whinnying sound.”
“Maybe he was cheering for them,” Miss Lorraine said. “The lousy son of a bitch.”
Feet came up the hall; they could hear Minnie’s voice lifted in adjuration. The door opened. She entered, holding Uncle Bud erect by one hand. Limp-kneed he dangled, his face fixed in an expression of glassy idiocy. “Miss Reba,” Minnie said, “this boy done broke in the icebox and drunk a whole bottle of beer. You, boy!” she said, shaking him, “stan up!” Limply he dangled, his face rigid in a slobbering grin. Then upon it came an expression of concern, consternation; Minnie swung him sharply away from her as he began to vomit.
XXVI
When the sun rose, Horace had not been to bed nor even undressed. He was just finishing a letter to his wife, addressed to her at her father’s in Kentucky, asking for a divorce. He sat at the table, looking down at the single page written neatly and illegibly over, feeling quiet and empty for the first time since he had found Popeye watching him across the spring four weeks ago. While he was sitting there he began to smell coffee from somewhere. “I’ll finish this business and then I’ll go to Europe. I am sick. I am too old for this. I was born too old for it, and so I am sick to death for quiet.”
He shaved and made coffee
