Wise Blood (12 page)

Naturally, his blood was not going to put up with any attitude like this. He was at
the zoo by nine-thirty, only a half-hour later than he was supposed to be. All morning
his mind was not on the gate he was supposed to guard but was chasing around after
his blood, like a boy with a mop and a bucket, beating something here and sloshing
down something there, without a second’s rest. As soon as the second-shift guard came,
Enoch headed toward town.

Town was the last place he wanted to be because anything could happen there. All the
time his mind had been chasing around it had been thinking how as soon as he got off
duty he was going to sneak off home and go to bed.

By the time he got into the center of the business district he was exhausted and he
had to lean against Walgreen’s window and cool off. Sweat crept down his back and
provoked him to itch so that in just a few minutes he appeared to be working his way
across the glass by his muscles, against a background of alarm clocks, toilet waters,
candies, sanitary pads, fountain pens, and pocket flashlights, displayed in all colors
to twice his height. He appeared to be working his way to a rumbling noise which came
from the center of a small alcove that formed the entrance to the drug store. Here
was a yellow and blue, glass and steel machine, belching popcorn into a cauldron of
butter and salt. Enoch approached, already with his purse out, sorting his money.
His purse was a long gray leather pouch, tied at the top with a drawstring. It was
one he had stolen from his daddy and he treasured it because it was the only thing
he owned now that his daddy had touched (besides himself). He sorted out two nickels
and handed them to a pasty boy in a white apron who was there to serve the machine.
The boy felt around in its vitals and filled a white paper bag with the corn, not
taking his eye off Enoch’s purse the while. On any other day Enoch would have tried
to make friends with him but today he was too preoccupied even to see him. He took
the bag and began stuffing the pouch back where it had come from. The youth’s eye
followed to the very edge of the pocket. “That thang looks like a hawg bladder,” he
observed enviously.

“I got to go now,” Enoch murmured and hurried into the drug store. Inside, he walked
abstractedly to the back of the store, and then up to the front again by the other
aisle as if he wanted any person who might be looking for him to see he was there.
He paused in front of the soda fountain to see if he would sit down and have something
to eat. The fountain counter was pink and green marble linoleum and behind it there
was a red-headed waitress in a lime-colored uniform and a pink apron. She had green
eyes set in pink and they resembled a picture behind her of a Lime-Cherry Surprise,
a special that day for ten cents. She confronted Enoch while he studied the information
over her head. After a minute she laid her chest on the counter and surrounded it
by her folded arms, to wait. Enoch couldn’t decide which of several concoctions was
the one for him to have until she ended it by moving one arm under the counter and
bringing out a Lime-Cherry Surprise. “It’s okay,” she said, “I fixed it this morning
after breakfast.”

“Something’s going to happen to me today,” Enoch said.

“I told you it was okay,” she said. “I fixed it today.”

“I seen it this morning when I woke up,” he said, with the look of a visionary.

“God,” she said, and jerked it from under his face. She turned around and began slapping
things together; in a second she slammed another—exactly like it, but fresh—in front
of him.

“I got to go now,” Enoch said, and hurried out. An eye caught at his pocket as he
passed the popcorn machine but he didn’t stop. I don’t want to do it, he was saying
to himself. Whatever it is, I don’t want to do it. I’m going home. It’ll be something
I don’t want to do. It’ll be something I ain’t got no business doing. And he thought
of how he had had to spend all his money on drapes and gilt when he could have bought
him a shirt and a phosphorescent tie. It’ll be something against the law, he said.
It’s always something against the law. I ain’t going to do it, he said, and stopped.
He had stopped in front of a movie house where there was a large illustration of a
monster stuffing a young woman into an incinerator.

I ain’t going in no picture show like that, he said, giving it a nervous look. I’m
going home. I ain’t going to wait around in no picture show. I ain’t got the money
to buy a ticket, he said, taking out his purse again. I ain’t even going to count
thisyer change.

It ain’t but forty-three cent here, he said, that ain’t enough. A sign said the price
of a ticket for adults was forty-five cents, balcony, thirty-five. I ain’t going to
sit in no balcony, he said, buying a thirty-five cent ticket.

I ain’t going in, he said.

Two doors flew open and he found himself moving down a long red foyer and then up
a darker tunnel and then up a higher, still darker tunnel. In a few minutes he was
up in a high part of the maw, feeling around, like Jonah, for a seat. I ain’t going
to look at it, he said furiously. He didn’t like any picture shows but colored musical
ones.

The first picture was about a scientist named The Eye who performed operations by
remote control. You would wake up in the morning and find a slit in your chest or
head or stomach and something you couldn’t do without would be gone. Enoch pulled
his hat down very low and drew his knees up in front of his face; only his eyes looked
at the screen. That picture lasted an hour.

The second picture was about life at Devil’s Island Penitentiary. After a while, Enoch
had to grip the two arms of his seat to keep himself from falling over the rail in
front of him.

The third picture was called, “Lonnie Comes Home Again.” It was about a baboon named
Lonnie who rescued attractive children from a burning orphanage. Enoch kept hoping
Lonnie would get burned up but he didn’t appear to get even hot. In the end a nice-looking
girl gave him a medal. It was more than Enoch could stand. He made a dive for the
aisle, fell down the two higher tunnels, and raced out the red foyer and into the
street. He collapsed as soon as the air hit him.

When he recovered himself, he was sitting against the wall of the picture show building
and he was not thinking any more about escaping his duty. It was night and he had
the feeling that the knowledge he couldn’t avoid was almost on him. His resignation
was perfect. He leaned against the wall for about twenty minutes and then he got up
and began to walk down the street as if he were led by a silent melody or by one of
those whistles that only dogs hear. At the end of two blocks he stopped, his attention
directed across the street. There, facing him under a street light, was a high rat-colored
car and up on the nose of it, a dark figure with a fierce white hat on. The figure’s
arms were working up and down and he had thin, gesticulating hands, almost as pale
as the hat. “Hazel Motes!” Enoch breathed, and his heart began to slam from side to
side like a wild bell clapper.

There were a few people standing on the sidewalk near the car. Enoch didn’t know that
Hazel Motes had started the Church Without Christ and was preaching it every night
on the street; he hadn’t seen him since that day at the park when he had showed him
the shriveled man in the glass case.

“If you had been redeemed,” Hazel Motes was shouting, “you would care about redemption
but you don’t. Look inside yourselves and see if you hadn’t rather it wasn’t if it
was. There’s no peace for the redeemed,” he shouted, “and I preach peace, I preach
the Church Without Christ, the church peaceful and satisfied!”

Two or three people who had stopped near the car started walking off the other way.
“Leave!” Hazel Motes cried. “Go ahead and leave! The truth don’t matter to you. Listen,”
he said, pointing his finger at the rest of them, “the truth don’t matter to you.
If Jesus had redeemed you, what difference would it make to you? You wouldn’t do nothing
about it. Your faces wouldn’t move, neither this way nor that, and if it was three
crosses there and Him hung on the middle one, that one wouldn’t mean no more to you
and me than the other two. Listen here. What you need is something to take the place
of Jesus, something that would speak plain. The Church Without Christ don’t have a
Jesus but it needs one! It needs a new jesus! It needs one that’s all man, without
blood to waste, and it needs one that don’t look like any other man so you’ll look
at him. Give me such a jesus, you people. Give me such a new jesus and you’ll see
how far the Church Without Christ can go!”

One of the people watching walked off so there were only two left. Enoch was standing
in the middle of the street, paralyzed.

“Show me where this new jesus is,” Hazel Motes cried, “and I’ll set him up in the
Church Without Christ and then you’ll see the truth. Then you’ll know once and for
all that you haven’t been redeemed. Give me this new jesus, somebody, so we’ll all
be saved by the sight of him!”

Enoch began shouting without a sound. He shouted that way for a full minute while
Hazel Motes went on.

“Look at me!” Hazel Motes cried, with a tare in his throat, “and you look at a peaceful
man! Peaceful because my blood has set me free. Take counsel from your blood and come
into the Church Without Christ and maybe somebody will bring us a new jesus and we’ll
all be saved by the sight of him!”

An unintelligible sound spluttered out of Enoch. He tried to bellow, but his blood
held him back. He whispered, “Listenhere, I got him! I mean I can get him! You know!
Him! Him I shown you to. You seen him yourself!”

His blood reminded him that the last time he had seen Haze Motes was when Haze Motes
had hit him over the head with a rock. And he didn’t even know yet how he would steal
it out of the glass case. The only thing he knew was that he had a place in his room
prepared to keep it in until Haze was ready to take it. His blood suggested he just
let it come as a surprise to Haze Motes. He began to back away. He backed across the
street and over a piece of sidewalk and out into the other street and a taxi had to
stop short to keep from hitting him. The driver put his head out the window and asked
him how he got around so well when God had made him by putting two backs together
instead of a back and a front.

Enoch was too preoccupied to think about it. “I got to go now,” he murmured, and hurried
off.

CHAPTER
9

Hawks kept his door bolted and whenever Haze knocked on it, which he did two or three
times a day, the ex-evangelist sent his child out to him and bolted the door again
behind her. It infuriated him to have Haze lurking in the house, thinking up some
excuse to get in and look at his face; and he was often drunk and didn’t want to be
discovered that way.

Haze couldn’t understand why the preacher didn’t welcome him and act like a preacher
should when he sees what he believes is a lost soul. He kept trying to get into the
room again; the window he could have reached was kept locked and the shade pulled
down. He wanted to see, if he could,
behind
the black glasses.

Every time he went to the door, the girl came out and the bolt shut inside; then he
couldn’t get rid of her. She followed him out to his car and climbed in and spoiled
his rides or she followed him up to his room and sat. He abandoned the notion of seducing
her and tried to protect himself. He hadn’t been in the house a week before she appeared
in his room one night after he had gone to bed. She was holding a candle burning in
a jelly glass and wore, hanging onto her thin shoulders, a woman’s nightgown that
dragged on the floor behind her. Haze didn’t wake up until she was almost up to his
bed, and when he did, he sprang from under his cover into the middle of the room.

“What you want?” he said.

She didn’t say anything and her grin widened in the candle light. He stood glowering
at her for an instant and then he picked up the straight chair and raised it as if
he were going to bring it down on her. She lingered only a fraction of a second. His
door didn’t bolt so he propped the chair under the knob before he went back to bed.

“Listen,” she said when she got back to their room, “nothing works. He would have
hit me with a chair.”

“I’m leaving out of here in a couple of days,” Hawks said, “you better make it work
if you want to eat after I’m gone.” He was drunk but he meant it.

Nothing was working the way Haze had expected it to. He had spent every evening preaching,
but the membership of the Church Without Christ was still only one person: himself.
He had wanted to have a large following quickly to impress the blind man with his
powers, but no one had followed him. There had been a sort of follower but that had
been a mistake. That had been a boy about sixteen years old who had wanted someone
to go to a whorehouse with him because he had never been to one before. He knew where
the place was but he didn’t want to go without a person of experience, and when he
heard Haze, he hung around until he stopped preaching and then asked him to go. But
it was all a mistake because after they had gone and got out again and Haze had asked
him to be a member of the Church Without Christ, or more than that, a disciple, an
apostle, the boy said he was sorry but he couldn’t be a member of that church because
he was a Lapsed Catholic. He said that what they had just done was a mortal sin, and
that should they die unrepentant of it they would suffer eternal punishment and never
see God. Haze had not enjoyed the whorehouse anywhere near as much as the boy had
and he had wasted half his evening. He shouted that there was no such thing as sin
or judgment, but the boy only shook his head and asked him if he would like to go
again the next night.

If Haze had believed in praying, he would have prayed for a disciple, but as it was
all he could do was worry about it a lot. Then two nights after the boy, the disciple
appeared.