Other Voices, Other Rooms Read Online Free PDF Page B

impertinent; a network of big ugly freckles spanned her nose. Her eyes, squinty and bright green, moved swiftly from face to face, but showed none a sign of recognition; they paused a cool instant on Joel, then traveled elsewhere.
    Hi, Idabel—Whatchasay, Idabel?
    “I’m hunting sister,” she said. “Anybody seen her?” Her voice was boy-husky, sounding as though strained through some rough material: it made Joel clear his throat.
    “Seen her sitting on the porch a while back,” said a chin-less young man.
    The redhead leaned against the wall, and crossed her pencil-thin, bony-kneed legs. A ragged bandage stained with mercurochrome covered her left knee. She pulled out a blue yo-yo and let it unwind slowly to the floor and spin back. “Who’s that?” she asked, jerking her head towards Joel. When nobody answered, she looptylooped the yo-yo, shrugged and said: “Who cares, pray tell?” But she continued to watch him cagily from the corners of her eyes. “Hey, hows about a dope on credit, Roberta?” she called.
    “
Miss
Roberta,” said the woman, momentarily interrupting her confab with Romeo. “I don’t need to tell you you have a right smart tongue, Idabel Thompkins, and always did have. And till such time as you learn a few ladylike manners, I’d be obliged if you’d keep outa my place, hear? Besides, since when have you got all this big credit? Ha! March now . . . and don’t come back till you put on some decent female clothes.”
    “You know what you can do,” sassed the girl, stomping out the door. “This old dive’ll have a mighty long wait before I bring my trade here again, you betcha.” Once outside, her silhouette darkened the screen as she paused to peer in at Joel.
    And now dusk was coming on. A sea of deepening green spread the sky like some queer wine, and across this vast green, shadowed clouds were pushed sluggishly by a mild breeze. Presently the trek homeward would commence, and afterwards the stillness of Noon City would be almost a sound itself: the sound a footfall might make among the mossy tombs on the dark ledge. Miss Roberta had lent Romeo as Joel’s guide. The two kept duplicate pace; the Negro boy carried Joel’s bag; wordlessly they turned the corner by the jail, and there was the stable, a barnlike structure of faded red which Joel had noticed earlier that day. A number of men who looked like a gang of desperadoes in a Western picture-show were congregated near the hitching post, passing a whiskey bottle from hand to hand; a second group, less boisterous, played a game with a jackknife under the dark area of an oak tree. Swarms of dragonflies quivered above a slime-coated water trough; and a scabby hound dog padded back and forth, sniffing the bellies of tied-up mules. One of the whiskey drinkers, an old man with long white hair and a long white beard, was feeling pretty good evidently, for he was clapping his hands and doing a little shuffle-dance to a tune that was probably singing in his head.
    The colored boy escorted Joel round the side of the stable to a backlot where wagons and saddled horses were packed so close a swinging tail was certain to strike something. “That’s him,” said Romeo, pointing his finger, “there’s Jesus Fever.”
    But Joel had seen at once the pygmy figure huddled atop the seatplank of a grey wagon parked on the lot’s further rim: a kind of gnomish little Negro whose primitive face was sharp against the drowning green sky. “Don’t less us be fraid,” said Romeo, leading Joel through the maze of wagons and animals with timid caution. “You best hold tight to my hand, white boy: Jesus Fever, he the oldest ol buzzard you ever put eyes on.”
    Joel said, “But I’m not afraid,” and this was true.
    “Shhh!”
    As the boys approached, the little pygmy cocked his head at a wary angle; then slowly, with the staccato movements of a mechanical doll, he turned sideways till his eyes, yellow feeble eyes dotted with milky specks, looked