The Heart is a Lonely Hunter - Carson McCullers [25]
Jake noticed that they glanced at each other as he came in.
‘Afternoon,’ said Brannon.
Jake felt something in the air. Maybe the fellow was laughing because he remembered things that had happened when he was drunk. Jake stood wooden and resentful. ‘Package of Target, please.’ As Brannon reached beneath the counter for the tobacco Jake decided that he was not laughing. In the daytime the fellow’s face was not as hard-looking as it was at night He was pale as though he had not slept, and his eyes had the look of a weary buzzard’s.
‘Speak up,’ Jake said. ‘How much do I owe you?’
Brannon opened a drawer and put on the counter a public-school tablet. Slowly he turned over the pages and Jake watched him. The tablet looked more like a private notebook than the place where he kept his regular accounts. There were long lines of figures, added, divided, and subtracted, and little drawings. He stopped at a certain page and Jake saw his last name written at the corner. On the page there were no figures--only small checks and crosses. At random across the page were drawn little round, seated cats with long curved lines for tails. Jake stared. The faces of the little cats were human and female. The faces of the little cats were Mrs. Brannon.
‘I have checks here for the beers,’ Brannon said. ‘And crosses for dinners and straight lines for the whiskey. Let me see--’ Brannon rubbed his nose and his eyelids drooped down. Then he shut the tablet. ‘Approximately twenty dollars.’
‘It’ll take me a long time,’ Jake said. ‘But maybe you’ll get it’
‘There’s no big hurry.’
Jake leaned against the counter. ‘Say, what kind of a place is this town?’
‘Ordinary,’ Brannon said. ‘About like any other place the same size.’
‘What population?’
‘Around thirty thousand.’
Jake opened the package of tobacco and rolled himself a cigarette. His hands were shaking. ‘Mostly mills?’
That’s right. Four big cotton mills--those are the main ones. A hosiery factory. Some gins and sawmills.’
‘What kind of wages?’
‘I’d say around ten or eleven a week on the average--but then of course they get laid off now and then. What makes you ask all this? You mean to try to get a job in a mill?’
Jake dug his fist into his eye and rubbed it sleepily. ‘Don’t know. I might and I might not.’ He laid the newspaper on the counter and pointed out the advertisement he had just read. ‘I think I’ll go around and look into this.’
Brannon read and considered. ‘Yeah,’ he said finally. ‘I’ve seen that show. It’s not much--just a couple of contraptions such as a flying-jinny and swings. It corrals the colored people and mill hands and kids. They move around to different vacant lots in town.’
‘Show me how to get there.’
Brannon went with him to the door and pointed out the direction. ‘Did you go on home with Singer this morning?’
Jake nodded.
‘What do you think of him?’
Jake bit his lips. The mute’s face was in his mind very clearly.
It was like the face of a friend he had known for a long time.
He had been thinking of the man ever since he had left his room. ‘I didn’t even know he was a dummy,’ he said finally.
He began walking again down the hot, deserted street. He did not walk as a stranger in a strange town. He seemed to be looking for someone. Soon he entered one of the mill districts bordering the river. The streets became narrow and unpaved and they were not empty any longer. Groups of dingy, hungry-looking children called to each other and played games. The two-room shacks, each one like the other, were rotten and unpainted. The stink of food and sewage mingled with the dust in the air. The falls up the river made a faint rushing sound. People stood silently in doorways or lounged on steps.
They looked at Jake with yellow, expressionless faces. He stared back at them with wide, brown eyes. He walked jerkily, and now and then he wiped his mouth with the hairy back of his hand.
At the end of Weavers Lane there was a vacant block. It had once been used as a junk yard for old automobiles. Rusted pieces of machinery and torn inner tubes still littered the ground. A trailer was parked in one corner of the lot, and nearby was a flying-jinny partly covered with canvas.