The Heart is a Lonely Hunter - Carson McCullers [28]
Jake’s face was flushed and dark and his lips trembled. The three men looked at him warily. Then the man in the straw hat began to laugh.
‘Go on and snicker. Sit there and bust your sides open.’
The men laughed in the slow and easy way that three men laugh at one. Jake brushed the dirt from the soles of his feet and put on his shoes. His fists were closed tight and his mouth was contorted with an angry sneer. ‘Laugh--that’s all you’re good for. I hope you sit there and snicker ‘til you rot!’ As he walked stiffly down the street, the sound of their laughter and catcalls still followed him.
The main street was brightly lighted. Jake loitered on a corner, fondling the change in his pocket. His head throbbed, and although the night was hot a chill passed through his body. He thought of the mute and he wanted urgently to go back and sit with him awhile. In the fruit and candy store where he had bought the newspaper that afternoon he selected a basket of fruit wrapped in cellophane. The Greek behind the counter said the price was sixty cents, so that when he had paid he was left with only a nickel. As soon as he had come out of the store the present seemed a funny one to take a healthy man. A few grapes hung down below, the cellophane, and he picked them off hungrily.
Singer was at home when he arrived. He sat by the window with the chess game laid out before him on the table. The room was just as Jake had left it, with the fan turned on and the pitcher of ice water beside the table. There was a panama hat on the bed and a paper parcel, so it seemed that the mute had just come in. He jerked his head toward the chair across from him at the table and pushed the chessboard to one side.
He leaned back with his hands in his pockets, and his face seemed to question Jake about what had happened since he had left. Jake put the fruit on the table. ‘For this afternoon,’ he said.
‘The motto has been: Go out and find an octopus and put socks on it.’
The mute smiled, but Jake could not tell if he had caught what he had said. The mute looked at the fruit with surprise and then undid the cellophane wrappings. As he handled the fruits there was something very peculiar in the fellow’s face. Jake tried to understand this look and was stumped. Then Singer smiled brightly.
‘I got a job this afternoon with a sort of show. I’m to run the flying-jinny.’
The mute seemed not at all surprised. He went into the closet and brought out a bottle of wine and two glasses. They drank in silence. Jake felt that he had never been in such a quiet room. The light above his head made a queer reflection of himself in the glowing wineglass he held before him--the same caricature of himself he had noticed many times before on the curved surfaces of pitchers or tin mugs--with his face egg-shaped and dumpy and his mustache straggling almost up to his ears. Across from him the mute held his glass in both hands. The wine began to hum through Jake’s veins and he felt himself entering again the kaleidoscope of drunkenness.
Excitement made his mustache tremble jerkily. He leaned forward with his elbows on his knees and fastened a wide, searching gaze on Singer.
‘I bet I’m the only man in this town that’s been mad--I’m talking about really mean mad--for ten solid long years. I damn near got in a fight just a little while ago. Sometimes it seems to me like I might even be crazy. I just don’t know.’
Singer pushed the wine toward his guest. Jake drank from the bottle and rubbed the top of his head.
‘You see, it’s like I’m two people. One of me is an educated man. I been in some of the biggest libraries in the country. I read. I read all the time. I read books that tell the pure honest truth. Over there in my suitcase I have books by Karl Marx and Thorstein Veblen and such writers as them. I read them over and over, and the more I study the madder I get. I know every word printed on every page. To begin with I like words.