“Does it matter?” Stevens said.
“That’s right,” Ratliff said. “The main thing is not to jar or otherwise startle that-ere thread.” Then the courthouse clock struck its three heavy mellow blows into the Sabbath somnolence and for the first time Stevens realised how absolutely he had not just expected, but known, that his telephone would not ring before that hour. Then in that same second, instant, he knew why it had not rung; the fact that it had not rung was more proof of what it would have conveyed than the message itself would have been.
“All right,” he said. “Mink is dead.”
“What?” Ratliff said.
“I don’t know where, and it doesn’t matter. Because we should have known from the first that three hours of being free would kill him, let alone three days of it.” He was talking rapidly, not babbling: “Don’t you see? a little kinless tieless frail alien animal that never really belonged to the human race to start with, let alone belonged in it, then locked up in a cage for thirty-eight years and now at sixty-three years old suddenly set free, shoved, flung out of safety and security into freedom like a krait or a fer-de-lance that is quick and deadly dangerous as long as it can stay inside the man-made man-tended tropic immunity of its glass box, but wouldn’t live even through the first hour set free, flung, hoicked on a pitchfork or a pair of long-handled tongs into a city street?”
“Wait,” Ratliff said, “wait.”
But Stevens didn’t even pause. “Of course we haven’t heard yet where he was found or how or by whom identified because nobody cares; maybe nobody has even noticed him yet. Because he’s free. He can even die wherever he wants to now. For thirty-eight years until last Thursday morning he couldn’t have had a pimple or a hangnail without it being in a record five minutes later. But he’s free now. Nobody cares when or where or how he dies provided his carrion doesn’t get under somebody’s feet. So we can go home now, until somebody does telephone and you and Flem can go and identify him.”
“Yes,” Ratliff said. “Well—”
“Give it up,” Stevens said. “Come on out home with me and have a drink.”
“We could go by first and kind of bring Flem up to date,” Ratliff said. “Maybe even he might take a dram then.”
“I’m not really an evil man,” Stevens said. “I wouldn’t have loaned Mink a gun to shoot Flem with; I might not even have just turned my head while Mink used his own. But neither am I going to lift my hand to interfere with Flem spending another day or two expecting any moment that Mink will.”
He didn’t even tell the Sheriff his conviction that Mink was dead. The fact was, the Sheriff told him; he found the Sheriff in his courthouse office and told him his and Ratliff’s theory of Mink’s first objective and the reason for it and that the Memphis police would still check daily the places where Mink might try to buy a weapon.
“So evidently he’s not in Memphis,” the Sheriff said. “That’s how many days now?”
“Since Thursday.”
“And he’s not in Frenchman’s Bend.”
“How do you know?”
“I drove out yesterday and looked around a little.”
“So you did believe me, after all,” Stevens said.
“I get per diem on my car,” the Sheriff said. “Yesterday was a nice day for a country drive. So he’s had four days now, to come a hundred miles. And he don’t seem to be in Memphis. And I know he ain’t in Frenchman’s Bend. And according to you, Mr Snopes knows he ain’t in Jefferson here. Maybe he’s dead.”
Whereupon, now that another had stated it, spoke it aloud, Stevens knew that he himself had never believed it, hearing without listening while the Sheriff went on: “A damned little rattlesnake that they say never had any friends to begin with and nobody out at the Bend knows what became of his wife and his two girls or even when they disappeared. To be locked up for thirty-eight years and then suddenly turned out like you do a cat at night, with nowhere to go and nobody really wanting him out. Maybe he couldn’t stand being free. Maybe just freedom killed him. I’ve known it to happen.”
“Yes,” Stevens said, “you’re probably right,” thinking quietly We won’t stop him. We can’t stop him — not all of us together, Memphis police and all. Maybe even a rattlesnake with destiny on his side don’t even need luck, let alone friends. He said: “Only we don’t know yet. We can’t count on that.”
“I know,” the Sheriff said. “I deputised two men at Varner’s store yesterday that claim they remember him, would know him again. And I can have Mr Snopes followed, watched back and forth to the bank. But dammit, watch for who, what, when, where? I can’t put a man inside his house until he asks for it, can I? His daughter. Mrs Kohl. Maybe she could do something. You still don’t want her to know?”
“You must give me your word,” Stevens said.
“All right,” the Sheriff said. “I suppose your Jackson buddy will let you know the minute the Memphis police get any sort of a line, won’t he?”
“Yes,” Stevens said. Though the call didn’t come until Wednesday. Ratliff had rung him up a little after ten Tuesday night and told him the news, and on his way to the office this morning he passed the bank whose drawn shades would not be raised today, and as he stood at his desk with the telephone in his hand he could see through his front window the sombre black-and-white-and-violet convolutions of tulle and ribbon and waxen asphodels fastened to the locked front door.
“He found a ten-dollar pistol,” the classmate’s voice said. “Early Monday morning. It wasn’t really a properly licensed pawnshop, so they almost missed it. But under a little . . . persuasion the proprietor recalled the sale. But he said not to worry, the pistol was only technically still a pistol and it would require a good deal more nourishment than the three rounds of ammunition they threw in with it to make it function.”
“Ha,” Stevens said without mirth. “Tell the proprietor from me he doesn’t know his own strength. The pistol was here last night. It functioned.”
Seventeen
WHEN HE REACHED the Junction a little before eleven o’clock Monday morning, he was in the cab of another cattle truck.
The truck was going on east into Alabama, but even if it had turned south here actually to pass through Jefferson, he would have left it at this point. If it had been a Yoknapatawpha County truck or driven by someone from the county or Jefferson, he would not have been in it at all.
Until he stepped out of the store this morning with the pistol actually in his pocket, it had all seemed simple; he had only one problem: to get the weapon; after that, only geography stood between him and the moment when he would walk up to the man who had seen him sent to the penitentiary without raising a finger, who had not even had the decency and courage to say No to his bloodcry for help from kin to kin, and say, “Look at me, Flem,” and kill him.
But now he was going to have to do what he called “figger” a little. It seemed to him that he was confronted by an almost insurmountable diffusion of obstacles. He was in thirty miles of Jefferson now, home, one same mutual north Mississippi hill-country people even if there was still a trivial county line to cross; it seemed to him that from now on anyone, everyone he met or who saw him, without even needing to recognise or remember his specific face and name, would know at once who he was and where he was going and what he intended to do.
On second thought — an immediate, flashing, almost simultaneous second thought — he knew this to be a physical impossibility, yet he dared not risk it; that the thirty-eight years of being locked up in Parchman had atrophied, destroyed some quality in him which in people who has not been locked up had very likely got even sharper, and they would recognise, know, divine who he was without his even knowing it had happened. It’s because I done had to been away so long he thought. Like now I’m fixing to have to learn to talk all over again.
He meant not talk, but think. As he walked along the highway (blacktop now, following a graded survey line, on which automobiles sped, which he remembered as winding dirt along which slow mules and wagons, or at best a saddle horse, followed the arbitrary and random ridges) it would be impossible to disguise his appearance — change his face, his expression, alter his familiar regional clothes or the way he walked; he entertained for a desperate and bizarre moment then dismissed it the idea of perhaps walking backward, at least whenever he heard a car or truck approaching, to give the impression that he was going the other way.
So he would have to change his thinking, as you change the colour of the bulb inside
