Страница 35 из 38
"It's Zoo… I hear her," he said: through the evening windows came an accordion refrain. "Really I do."
Randolph was a
"But she's gone." And Joel sat up on his knees. "Zoo walked away to Washington…"
"I thought you knew," said Randolph, fingering the ribbon which marked the pages of Macbeth. "During the worst of it, when you were the most sick, she sat beside you with a fan: can't you remember at all?"
So Zoo was back; it was not long before he saw her for himself: at noon the next day she brought his broth; no greetings passed between them, nor smiles, it was as if each felt too much the fatigued embarrassment of anticlimax. Only with her it was still something more: she seemed not to know him, but stood there as if waiting to be introduced. "Randolph told me you couldn't come back," he said. "I'm glad he was wrong."
In answer there came a sigh so stricken it seemed to have heaved up from the pits of her being. She leaned her forehead on the bed-post, and it was then that with a twinge he realized her neckerchief was missing: exposed, her slanted scar leered like crooked lips, and her neck, divided this way, had lost its giraffe-like grandeur. How small she seemed, cramped, as if some reduction of the spirit had taken double toll and made demands upon the flesh: with that illusion of height was gone the animal grace, arrow-like dignity, defiant emblem of her separate heart.
"Zoo," he said, "did you see snow?"
She looked at him, but her eyes appeared not to make a co
"Like Mr. Sansom's eyes," said Joel, off thinking by himself.
"Is a nigger sun," she said, "an my soul, it's black." She took the broth bowl, and looked down into it, as if she were a gypsy reading tea-leaves. "I rested by the road; the sun poked down my eyes till I'm near-bout blind…"
And Joel said: "But Zoo, if there wasn't any snow, what was it you saw in Washington, D. C.? I mean now, didn't you meet up with any of those men from the newsreels?"
"… an was holes in my shoes where the rocks done cut through the jackodiamonds and the aceohearts; walked all day, an here it seem like I ain't come no ways, and here I'm sittin by the road with my feets afire an ain't a soul in sight. " Two tears, following the bony edges of her face, faded, leaving silver stains. "I'm so tired ain't no feelin what tells me iffen I pinch myself, and I go on sittin there in that lonesome place till I looks up an see the Big Dipper: right about now along come a red truck with big bug lights coverin me head to toe. " There were four men in the truck, she said, three white boys, and a Negro who rode in back squatting on top of a mountain of watermelons. The driver of the truck got out: "A real low man puffin a cigar like a bull; he ain't wearin no shirt an all this red hair growin even on his shoulders an hands; so quiet he walks through the grass, an looks at me so sweet I reckon maybe he sorry my feets is cut an maybe's go
Joel plugged his ears; what Zoo said was ugly, he was sick-sorry she'd ever come back, she ought to be punished. "Stop that, Zoo," he said, "I won't listen, I won't…" but Zoo's lips quivered, her eyes blindly twisted toward the i
They were sure John Brown would never make it up the hill: "If he simply lay down and rolled over on us, I wouldn't blame him," said Randolph, and Joel tightened his muscles, hoping this might make the mule's load lighter. They had a croquet sack for saddle and rope for reins, nevertheless they managed to stay astride, though Randolph wobbled perilously, grunting all the while, and eating endless hardboiled eggs which Joel handed him from a picnic basket he held. "Another egg, my dear, I'm feeling most frightfully seasick again: if you feel something coming up always put something down."
It was a smoky day, the sky like a rained-on tinroof, the sun, when you saw it, fishbelly pale, and Joel, who had been routed out of bed and rushed away with such inconsiderate haste, he'd not had time in which to dress decently, was goosepimpled with cold, for he wore a thin T-shirt (turned inside out), and a pair of summer knickers with most of the buttons busted off the fly. At least he had on regular shoes, whereas Randolph wore only carpet slippers. "My feet have expanded so ominously it's all I can do to squeeze them into these; really, in the light of day what a ghoul I must look: I have the damnedest sensation that every time this sad beast moves my hair falls in floods, and my eyes: are they spi