Wise Blood (14 page)

Haze tried to start the car by forcing his weight forward on the steering wheel, but
that didn’t work. He got out and got behind it and began to push it over to the curb.
Onnie Jay got behind with him and added his weight. “I kind of have had that idear
about a new jesus myself,” he remarked. “I seen how a new one would be more up-to-date.

“Where you keeping him, friend?” he asked. “Is he somebody you see ever’ day? I certainly
would like to meet him and hear some of his idears.”

They pushed the car into a parking space. There was no way to lock it and Haze was
afraid that if he left it out all night so far away from where he lived someone would
be able to steal it. There was nothing for him to do but sleep in it. He got in the
back and began to pull down the fringed shades. Onnie Jay had his head in the front,
however. “You needn’t to be afraid that if I seen this new jesus I would cut you out
of anything,” he said. “Why friend, it would just mean a lot to me for the good of
my spirit.”

Haze moved the two-by-four off the seat frame to make more room to fix up his pallet.
He kept a pillow and an army blanket back there and he had a sterno stove and a coffee
pot up on the shelf under the back oval window. “Friend, I would even be glad to pay
you a little something to see him,” Onnie Jay suggested.

“Listen here,” Haze said, “you get away from here. I’ve seen all of you I want to.
There’s no such thing as any new jesus. That ain’t anything but a way to say something.”

The smile more or less slithered off Onnie Jay’s face. “What you mean by that?” he
asked.

“That there’s no such thing or person,” Haze said. “It wasn’t nothing but a way to
say a thing.” He put his hand on the door handle and began to close it in spite of
Onnie Jay’s head. “No such thing exists!” he shouted.

“That’s the trouble with you innerleckchuls,” Onnie Jay muttered, “you don’t never
have nothing to show for what you’re saying.”

“Get your head out my car door, Holy,” Haze said.

“My name is Hoover Shoats,” the man with his head in the door growled. “I known when
I first seen you that you wasn’t nothing but a crackpot.”

Haze opened the door enough to be able to slam it. Hoover Shoats got his head out
the way but not his thumb. A howl arose that would have rended almost any heart. Haze
opened the door and released the thumb and then slammed the door again. He pulled
down the front shades and lay down in the back of the car on the army blanket. Outside
he could hear Hoover Shoats jumping around on the pavement and howling. When the howls
died down, Haze heard a few steps up to the car and then an impassioned, breathless
voice say through the tin, “You watch out, friend. I’m going to run you out of business.
I can get my own new jesus and I can get Prophets for peanuts, you hear? Do you hear
me, friend?” the hoarse voice said.

Haze didn’t answer.

“Yeah and I’ll be out there doing my own preaching tomorrow night. What you need is
a little competition,” the voice said. “Do you hear me, friend?”

Haze got up and leaned over the front seat and banged his hand down on the horn of
the Essex. It made a sound like a goat’s laugh cut off with a buzz saw. Hoover Shoats
jumped back as if a charge of electricity had gone through him. “All right, friend,”
he said, standing about fifteen feet away, trembling, “you just wait, you ain’t heard
the last of me yet,” and he turned and went off down the quiet street.

Haze stayed in his car about an hour and had a bad experience in it: he dreamed he
was not dead but only buried. He was not waiting on the Judgment because there was
no Judgment, he was waiting on nothing. Various eyes looked through the back oval
window at his situation, some with considerable reverence, like the boy from the zoo,
and some only to see what they could see. There were three women with paper sacks
who looked at him critically as if he were something—a piece of fish—they might buy,
but they passed on after a minute. A man in a canvas hat looked in and put his thumb
to his nose and wiggled his fingers. Then a woman with two little boys on either side
of her stopped and looked in, grinning. After a second, she pushed the boys out of
view and indicated that she would climb in and keep him company for a while, but she
couldn’t get through the glass and finally she went off. All this time Haze was bent
on getting out but since there was no use to try, he didn’t make any move one way
or the other. He kept expecting Hawks to appear at the oval window with a wrench,
but the blind man didn’t come.

Finally he shook off the dream and woke up. He thought it should be morning but it
was only midnight. He pulled himself over into the front of the car and eased his
foot on the starter and the Essex rolled off quietly as if nothing were the matter
with it. He drove back to the house and let himself in but instead of going upstairs
to his room, he stood in the hall, looking at the blind man’s door. He went over to
it and put his ear to the keyhole and heard the sound of snoring; he turned the knob
gently but the door didn’t move.

For the first time, the idea of picking the lock occurred to him. He felt in his pockets
for an instrument and came on a small piece of wire that he sometimes used for a toothpick.
There was only a dim light in the hall but it was enough for him to work by and he
knelt down at the keyhole and inserted the wire into it carefully, trying not to make
a noise.

After a while when he had tried the wire five or six different ways, there was a slight
click in the lock. He stood up, trembling, and opened the door. His breath came short
and his heart was palpitating as if he had run all the way here from a great distance.
He stood just inside the room until his eyes got accustomed to the darkness and then
he moved slowly over to the iron bed and stood there. Hawks was lying across it. His
head was hanging over the edge. Haze squatted down by him and struck a match close
to his face and he opened his eyes. The two sets of eyes looked at each other as long
as the match lasted; Haze’s expression seemed to open onto a deeper blankness and
reflect something and then close again.

“Now you can get out,” Hawks said in a short thick voice, “now you can leave me alone,”
and he made a jab at the face over him without touching it. It moved back, expressionless
under the white hat, and was gone in a second.

CHAPTER
10

The next night, Haze parked the Essex in front of the Odeon Theater and climbed up
on it and began to preach. “Let me tell you what I and this church stand for!” he
called from the nose of the car. “Stop one minute to listen to the truth because you
may never hear it again.” He stood there with his neck thrust forward, moving one
arm upward in a vague arc. Two women and a boy stopped.

“I preach there are all kinds of truth, your truth and somebody else’s, but behind
all of them, there’s only one truth and that is that there’s no truth,” he called.
“No truth behind all truths is what I and this church preach! Where you come from
is gone, where you thought you were going to never was there, and where you are is
no good unless you can get away from it. Where is there a place for you to be? No
place.

“Nothing outside you can give you any place,” he said. “You needn’t to look at the
sky because it’s not going to open up and show no place behind it. You needn’t to
search for any hole in the ground to look through into somewhere else. You can’t go
neither forwards nor backwards into your daddy’s time nor your children’s if you have
them. In yourself right now is all the place you’ve got. If there was any Fall, look
there, if there was any Redemption, look there, and if you expect any Judgment, look
there, because they all three will have to be in your time and your body and where
in your time and your body can they be?

“Where in your time and your body has Jesus redeemed you?” he cried. “Show me where
because I don’t see the place. If there was a place where Jesus had redeemed you that
would be the place for you to be, but which of you can find it?”

Another trickle of people came out of the Odeon and two stopped to look at him. “Who
is that that says it’s your conscience?” he cried, looking around with a constricted
face as if he could smell the particular person who thought that. “Your conscience
is a trick,” he said, “it don’t exist though you may think it does, and if you think
it does, you had best get it out in the open and hunt it down and kill it, because
it’s no more than your face in the mirror is or your shadow behind you.”

He was preaching with such concentration that he didn’t notice a high rat-colored
car that had been driven around the block three times already, while the two men in
it hunted a place to park. He didn’t see it when it pulled in two cars over from him
in a space that another car had just pulled out of, and he didn’t see Hoover Shoats
and a man in a glare-blue suit and white hat get out of it, but after a few seconds,
his head turned that way and he saw the man in the glare-blue suit and white hat up
on the nose of it. He was so struck with how gaunt and thin he looked in the illusion
that he stopped preaching. He had never pictured himself that way before. The man
he saw was hollow-chested and carried his neck thrust forward and his arms down by
his side; he stood there as if he were waiting for some signal he was afraid he might
not catch.

Hoover Shoats was walking about on the sidewalk, striking a few chords on his guitar.
“Friends,” he called, “I want to innerduce you to the True Prophet here and I want
you all to listen to his words because I think they’re going to make you happy like
they’ve made me!” If Haze had noticed Hoover he might have been impressed by how happy
he looked, but his attention was fixed on the man on the nose of the car. He slid
down from his own car and moved up closer, never taking his eyes from the bleak figure.
Hoover Shoats raised his hand with two fingers pointed and the man suddenly cried
out in a high nasal singsong voice. “The unredeemed are redeeming theirselves and
the new jesus is at hand! Watch for this miracle! Help yourself to salvation in the
Holy Church of Christ Without Christ!” He called it over again in exactly the same
tone of voice, but faster. Then he began to cough. He had a loud consumptive cough
that started somewhere deep in him and finished with a long wheeze. He expectorated
a white fluid at the end of it.

Haze was standing next to a fat woman who after a minute turned her head and stared
at him and then turned it again and stared at the True Prophet. Finally she touched
his elbow with hers and grinned at him. “Him and you twins?” she asked.

“If you don’t hunt it down and kill it, it’ll hunt you down and kill you,” Haze answered.

“Huh? Who?” she said.

He turned away and she stared at him as he got back in his car and drove off. Then
she touched the elbow of a man on the other side of her. “He’s nuts,” she said. “I
never seen no twins that hunted each other down.”

When he got back to his room, Sabbath Hawks was in his bed. She was pushed over into
one corner of it, sitting with one arm drawn around her knees and one hand holding
onto the sheet as if she meant to hang on by it. Her face was sullen and apprehensive.
Haze sat down on the bed but he barely glanced at her. “I don’t care if you hit me
with the table,” she said. “I’m not going. There’s no place for me to go. He’s run
off on me and it was you run him off. I was watching last night and I seen you come
in and hold that match to his face. I thought anybody would have seen what he was
before that without having to strike no match. He’s just a crook. He ain’t even a
big crook, just a little one, and when he gets tired of that, he begs on the street.”

Haze leaned down and began untying his shoes. They were old army shoes that he had
painted black to get the government off. He untied them and eased his feet out and
sat there looking down, while she watched him cautiously.

“Are you going to hit me or not?” she asked. “If you are, go ahead and do it right
now because I’m not going. I ain’t got any place to go.” He didn’t look as if he were
going to hit anything; he looked as if he were going to sit there until he died. “Listen,”
she said, with a quick change of tone, “from the minute I set eyes on you I said to
myself, that’s what I got to have, just give me some of him! I said look at those
pee-can eyes and go crazy, girl! That innocent look don’t hide a thing, he’s just
pure filthy right down to the guts, like me. The only difference is I like being that
way and he don’t. Yes sir!” she said. “I like being that way, and I can teach you
how to like it. Don’t you want to learn how to like it?”

He turned his head slightly and just over his shoulder he saw a pinched homely little
face with bright green eyes and a grin. “Yeah,” he said with no change in his stony
expression, “I want to.” He stood up and took off his coat and his trousers and his
drawers and put them on the straight chair. Then he turned off the light and sat down
on the cot again and pulled off his socks. His feet were big and white and damp to
the floor and he sat there, looking at the two white shapes they made.

“Come on! Make haste,” she said, knocking his back with her knee.

He unbuttoned his shirt and took it off and wiped his face with it and dropped it
on the floor. Then he slid his legs under the cover by her and sat there as if he
were waiting to remember one more thing.

She was breathing very quickly. “Take off your hat, king of the beasts,” she said
gruffly and her hand came up behind his head and snatched the hat off and sent it
flying across the room in the dark.

CHAPTER
11

The next morning toward noon a person in a long black raincoat, with a lightish hat
pulled down low on his face and the brim of it turned down to meet the turned-up collar
of the raincoat, was moving rapidly along certain back streets, close to the walls
of the buildings. He was carrying something about the size of a baby, wrapped up in
newspapers, and he carried a dark umbrella too, as the sky was an unpredictable surly
gray like the back of an old goat. He had on a pair of dark glasses and a black beard
which a keen observer would have said was not a natural growth but was pinned onto
his hat on either side with safety pins. As he walked along, the umbrella kept slipping
from under his arm and getting tangled in his feet, as if it meant to keep him from
going anywhere.