“No,” Stevens said. “Not yet anyway.”
“I still think you have found a booger where there wasn’t one,” the Sheriff said. “If he comes back here at all, it’ll just be out at Frenchman’s Bend. Then all we’ll have to do is pick him up the first time we notice him in town and have a talk with him.”
“Notice, hell,” Stevens said. “Ain’t that what I’m trying to tell you? that you don’t notice him. That was the mistake Jack Houston made thirty-eight years ago: he didn’t notice him either until he stepped out from behind that bush that morning with that shotgun — if he even stepped out of the bushes before he shot, which I doubt.”
He recrossed the Square rapidly, thinking Yes, I really am a coward, after all when that quantity, entity with which he had spent a great deal of his life talking or rather having to listen to (his skeleton perhaps, which would outlast the rest of him by a few months or years — and without doubt would spend that time moralising at him while he would be helpless to answer back) answered immediately Did anyone ever say you were not? Then he But I am not a coward: I am a humanitarian. Then the other You are not even an original; that word is customarily used as a euphemism for it.
The bank would be closed now. But when he crossed the Square to the sheriff’s office the car with Linda behind the wheel had not been waiting so this was not the day of the weekly whiskey run. The shades were drawn but after some knob-rattling at the side door one of the bookkeepers peered out and recognised him and let him in; he passed on through the machine-clatter of the day’s recapitulation — the machines themselves sounding immune and even inattentive to the astronomical sums they reduced to staccato trivia — and knocked at the door on which Colonel Sartoris had had the word PRIVATE lettered by hand forty years ago, and opened it.
Snopes was sitting not at the desk but with his back to it, facing the cold now empty fireplace, his feet raised and crossed against the same heel scratches whose initial inscribing Colonel Sartoris had begun. He was not reading, he was not doing anything: just sitting there with his black planter’s hat on, his lower jaw moving faintly and steadily as though he were chewing something, which as the town knew also he was not; he didn’t even lower his feet when Stevens came to the desk (it was a broad flat table littered with papers in a sort of neat, almost orderly way) and said almost in one breath:
“Mink left Parchman at eight o’clock this morning.
I don’t know whether you know it or not but we — I had some money waiting to be given to him at the gate, under condition that in accepting it he had passed his oath to leave Mississippi without returning to Jefferson and never cross the state line again. He didn’t take the money; I don’t know yet how since he was not to be given the pardon until he did. He caught a ride in a passin’ truck and has disappeared. The truck was headed north.”
“How much was it?” Snopes said.
“What?” Stevens said.
“The money,” Snopes said.
“Two hundred and fifty dollars,” Stevens said.
“Much obliged,” Snopes said.
“Good God, man,” Stevens said. “I tell you a man left Parchman at eight o’clock this morning on his way here to murder you and all you say is Much obliged?”
The other didn’t move save for the faint chewing motion; Stevens thought with a kind of composed and seething rage If he would only spit now and then. “Then all he had was that ten dollars they give them when they turn them loose,” Snopes said.
“Yes,” Stevens said. “As far as we — I know. But yes.” Or even just go through the motions of spitting now and then he thought.
“Say a man thought he had a grudge against you,” Snopes said. “A man sixty-three years old now with thirty-eight of that spent in the penitentiary and even before that wasn’t much, bigger than a twelve-year-old boy—”
That had to use a shotgun from behind a bush even then Stevens thought. Oh yes, I know exactly what you mean: too small and frail even then, even without thirty-eight years in jail, to have risked a mere knife or bludgeon. And he can’t go out to Frenchman’s Bend, the only place on earth where someone might remember him enough to lend him one because even though nobody in Frenchman’s Bend would knock up the muzzle aimed at you, they wouldn’t lend him theirs to aim with.
So he will either have to buy a gun for ten dollars, or steal one. In which case, you might even be safe: the ten-dollar one won’t shoot and in the other some policeman might save you honestly. He thought rapidly Of course. North. He went to Memphis. He would have to. He wouldn’t think of anywhere else to go to buy a gun with ten dollars.
And, since Mink had only the ten dollars, he would have to hitchhike all the way, first to Memphis, provided he got there before the pawnshops closed, then back to Jefferson. Which could not be before tomorrow, since anything else would leave simple destiny and fate too topheavy with outrageous hope and coincidence for even Ratliff’s sanguine nature to pass. “Yes,” he said. “So do I.
You have at least until tomorrow night.” He thought rapidly And now for it. How to persuade him not to tell her without letting him know that was what he agreed to, promised, and that it was me who put it into his mind. So suddenly he heard himself say: “Are you going to tell Linda?”
“Why?” Snopes said.
“Yes,” Stevens said. Then heard himself say in his turn: “Much obliged.” Then, suddenly indeed this time: “I’m responsible for this, even if I probably couldn’t have stopped it. I just talked to Eef Bishop. What else do you want me to do?” If he would just spit once he thought.
“Nothing,” Snopes said.
“What?” Stevens said.
“Yes,” Snopes said. “Much obliged.”
At least he knew where to start. Only, he didn’t know how. Even if — when — he called the Memphis police, what would — could — he tell them: a city police force a hundred miles away, who had never heard of Mink and Flem Snopes and Jack Houston, dead these forty years now, either.
When he, Stevens, had already failed to move very much the local sheriff who at least had inherited the old facts. How to explain what he himself was convinced Mink wanted in Memphis, let alone convince them that Mink was or would be in Memphis.
And even if he managed to shake them that much, how to describe whom they were supposed to look for: whose victim forty years ago had got himself murdered mainly for the reason that the murderer was the sort of creature whom nobody, even his victim, noticed enough in time to pay any attention to what he was or might do.
Except Ratliff. Ratliff alone out of Yoknapatawpha County would know Mink on sight. To be unschooled, untravelled, and to an extent unread, Ratliff had a terrifying capacity for knowledge or local information or acquaintanceship to match the need of any local crisis.
Stevens admitted to himself now what he was waiting, dallying, really wasting time for: for Ratliff to drive back to his pickup truck from Parchman, to be hurried on to Memphis without even stopping, cutting the engine, to reveal Mink to the Memphis police and so save Mink’s cousin, kinsman, whatever Flem was, from that just fate; knowing — Stevens — better all the while: that what he really wanted with Ratliff was to find out how Mink had not only got past the Parchman gate without that absolute contingent money, but had managed it in such a way that apparently only the absolutely unpredicted and unwarranted presence of Ratliff at a place and time that he had no business whatever being, revealed the fact that he hadn’t taken it.
It was not three o’clock when Ratliff phoned; it would be almost nine before he reached Jefferson. It was not that the pickup truck wouldn’t have covered the distance faster. It was that no vehicle owned by Ratliff (provided he was in it and conscious, let alone driving it) was going to cover it faster.
Besides, at some moment not too long after six o’clock he was going to stop to eat at the next dreary repetitive little cotton-gin hamlet, or (nowadays) on the highway itself, drawing neatly in and neatly parking before the repetitive Dixie Cafés or Mac’s or Lorraine’s, to eat, solitary, neatly and without haste the meat a little too stringy to chew properly and too overcooked to taste at all, the stereotyped fried potatoes and the bread you didn’t chew but mumbled, like one of the paper napkins, the machine-chopped prefrozen lettuce and tomatoes like (except for the tense inviolate colour) something exhumed by paleontologists from tundras, the machine-made prefrozen pie and what they would call coffee — the food perfectly pure and perfectly tasteless except for the dousing of machine-made tomato ketchup.
He (Stevens) could, perhaps should, have had plenty of time to drive out to Rose Hill and eat his own decent evening meal. Instead, he telephoned his wife.
“I’ll come in and we can eat at the Holston House,” she said.
“No, honey. I’ve got to see Ratliff as soon
