Wise Blood: Chapters 5–9

He crawled into the bushes out of a sense of propriety.

He left the second-shift guard and approached the pool from a discreet footpath that led behind the ladies' end of the bath house to a small clearing where the entire pool could be seen at once.

Anyone who parted the abelia sprigs at just that place, would think he saw a devil and would fall down the slope and into the pool.

Here he would have a chocolate malted milkshake and would make some suggestive remarks to the waitress, whom he believed to be secretly in love with him.

His face was suddenly suffused with secret knowledge.

"I reckon you ain't as uppity as you was last night," he said.

Two black bears sat in the first one, facing each other like two matrons having tea, their faces polite and self-absorbed.

There was nothing in the hall but two urns and an old man asleep in a straight chair against the wall.

The ones on the walls were full of birds tilted on varnished sticks and looking down with dried piquant expressions.

He rolled over and lay stretched out on the ground, with an exalted look on his face. He thought he was floating.

The lights around the marquee were so bright that the moon, moving overhead with a small procession of clouds behind it, looked pale and insignificant.

A thin little man with a long upper lip was at the glass ticket box, buying tickets for three portly women who were behind him.

"What I give you the other night," she said, "was a looker indignation for what I seen you do. It was you give me the eye. You should have seen him, Papa," she said, "looked me up and down."

He wanted someone he could teach something to and he took it for granted that the blind man's child, since she was so homely, would also be innocent.

The mouth had a look that might have been either holy or calculating, but there was a wildness in the eyes that suggested terror.

His jaw tightened and he entrenched himself behind it and drove on.

"How I like to walk in a field is barefooted," she said with gusto.

The jubilant expression on the face that looked from around the tree, flattened.

He had a nasty impulse to kick it to pieces, but he let it stay there, exactly in the position it had sat down in, because for the time anyway, he was not a foolhardy boy who took chances on the meanings of things.

Enoch didn't own a slop-jar but he had a certain reverence for the purpose of things and since he didn't have the right thing to put in it, he left it empty.

Directly over this place for the treasure, there was a gray marble slab and coming up from behind it was a wooden trellis-work of hearts, scrolls and flowers, extending into a hunched eagle wing on either side, and containing in the middle, just at the level of Enoch's face when he stood in front of it, a small oval mirror.

As it was, he couldn't do anything in his room but what the smug face was watching, not shocked because nothing better could be expected and not amused because nothing was funny.

Immediately after he finished with the pictures, he went out and bought chintz curtains, a bottle of gilt, and a paint brush with all the money he had saved.

He wasn't the kind of a boy who grabs at any possibility and runs off, proposing this or that preposterous thing.

His blood was rushing around like a woman who cleans up the house after the company has come, and he was surly and rebellious.

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.

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.

The figure's arms were working up and down and he had thin, gesticulating hands, almost as pale as the hat.

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.

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.

Haze put his foot on the starter a succession of times but nothing happened.

Haze moved the two-by-four off the seat frame to make more room to fix up his pallet.

A howl arose that would have rended almost any heart.

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.

His breath came short and his heart was palpitating as if he had run all the way here from a great distance.