It’d fix Mrs. Pendrake right if I went over there with her dollar. She hadn’t ought to have left me alone, I was thinking. I got up and went to the counter to pay my bill, realizing then that I wouldn’t have a dollar left, for that soda water was a nickel apiece and maybe that skunk would charge for them cakes though I hadn’t ate a one, and yet I was sort of relieved at not having to go to Mrs. Lizzie’s. I was a real mess at that time of my life, never having an idea but it was canceled by the next.

The skunk, however, wasn’t there; I don’t know where he went, leaving behind an old fellow with a handlebar mustache who allowed my reckoning was already taken care of. So I still had my dollar, which seemed unfortunate when I reached the street, for a great weakness hit me in the hamstrings. I looked up and down for Mrs. Pendrake, wishing I could see her so I wouldn’t have to go no further. There was nothing in the world I wanted so little as a whore at that moment, but I felt it was a challenge once I had got up instead of waiting in the soda-water place.

Then I saw the tracks of her boots in the slush. I couldn’t tell you what made them distinguishable from the other footprints; I just knowed them, for I was familiar with her every particular. I could smell a room and tell you if she had been in it during the last two days. That’s the one respect in which my senses hadn’t got blunted while living in town. Them tracks went along the walk, down to the corner, took a left, north another block, again a left-I followed them though pretending to be dawdling along like a sappy kid-and when they had took that second left onto a residential street running parallel to and behind the block of shops, I understood she had lied.

Halfway along the block was an alley that run back to the commercial street. A cart had been through it but lately, pulled by a mule led by a colored man about seventy years of age: an Indian would have knowed the age of the mule as well.

Anyway, right along this alley had gone Mrs. Pendrake’s little boots, out towards the shops again, except when they come to the back of one of the stores, they turned through a gate, crossed a short yard past the privy, up to a door, and ended.

I paused at the fence, for here come that colored fellow with his cart again, and sure enough he looked about seventy and was leading a big mule. Negroes was great for talking like Lavender of what secrets is seen in eggs and so on, but I believe the reason why they knowed everything in those days was they was always trucking things through back alleys, cleaning up bedrooms and the like, and you can pick up a lot of dirt that way without even looking for it. He bid me the time of day and went creaking past, and then a black dog begun to growl on the other side of the alley and then hushed.

There was a minute when the alley was empty and quiet, and I took it to go through the gate on Mrs. P.’s trail. O.K., I reached the door as she had, but what now? It didn’t have no keyhole and anyway probably opened into a dark hall. I put my ear against it and never heard a thing. Suppose I barged in and she was being fitted for a corset? I felt awful at the thought, but at the same time right excited. You have to recall I was fifteen years of age then and not the relic I am today. I am a dirty old man now but in that time I was only a filthy young boy, and I hope it is not so disgusting to you, for you must believe I was never before nor since in that much misery.

I certainly didn’t barge in. Over to the side of the door was a big woodbox and beyond it a window onto the porch. A person my size could scrooch down next to the one and peer into the other, through a teeny crack in the shutters closed on it, and nobody using the alley were the wiser.

For all the things I noticed on the route here, it never struck me that I was at the back of the same building in which the soda-water place occupied the front. I saw that, if nothing else, when I staggered on out a couple minutes later and somehow drug myself back home.

What I seen through the crack was that proprietor and Mrs. Pendrake. They had their clothes on, but was pressed together. And just as I peeped in, he had bared his big teeth, pulled her high collar down a little, and bit her white neck. I would have broke in and killed him, but for her look of liking it immensely.

CHAPTER 11 Hopeless

THANKSGIVING TRANSPIRED during my time of bed-bound illness, and I missed it for that reason. So Christmas was the first white holiday I was to celebrate in more than five years. I had been looking forward to it back in the fall, but by the time it come, I had seen that episode through the shutters and it was ruined for me before it started, like everything else.

I passed that winter in a blur of pain, but apparently the breaking of my heart sort of fertilized my mind and I did real well at my studies. When I was over the pneumonia Mrs. Pendrake forgot she used to tutor me afternoons and went out more and more. So I got to staying later at the school, where we had a pretty, young teacher to replace the ugly old maid who retired or died or something. I don’t want you to think I got a crush on this new woman. I was finished with that sort of thing for good: I don’t mean love and I don’t mean lust, I mean that half-witted captivity I had imposed on myself as regards Mrs. Pendrake, which come as a result of lack of decision. I had never been able to make up my mind whether she was my mother or my sweetheart, until I looked through the shutter and saw she was neither.

So if I stayed at school after hours it was because home had become hateful to me and I also took satisfaction in the company of this new teacher from the fact that I had no interest in her aside from what she could impart in the way of learning, for she was bright. Therefore I suppose it was inevitable that once she saw my immunity, so to speak, she got stuck on me, white women being nothing if not contrary. Her name was Helen Berry, and she was only about eighteen. She was real pretty, sort of plumpish with a pug nose. She’d smile at me in class, but when I was there alone with her she’d turn right shy if I looked her in the eye.

I could have kissed her any time I wanted. Reason I didn’t was the Reverend had really got to me with that talk of sin-in a sort of backhanded way, through his wife getting her neck bit by that cake-eater. I was finished with golden chalices that might get turned into slop jars, just as I had stopped seeing that purple-titted painting. The way I accomplished that was to go right to the slop jars to begin with. By the time I turned sixteen, early in February, I was a regular customer at Mrs. Lizzie’s.

Confessing I run to the whores was easy alongside of the next admission I got to make regarding my activities that winter, but there ain’t no avoiding it if you want the whole truth. I become a small-sized version of that Kane what run the soda-water place. For one, I got to being a conscious dandy. I had earlier felt uneasy wearing them fancy clothes Mrs. P. had bought me, fur-trimmed and all, but now there was nothing I cherished more than ornate attire.

In them days kids wore jeans and stuff to school, but the way I got myself up you would have thought I was the headmaster except for my size: fawn-colored pants, dark sack coat, satin vest, and patent-leather shoes. It was all right with Miss Berry, who you know was stuck on me, and if you think I had any trouble with Luke English and his bunch you are wrong. Soon as I started to dress that way and put on the supercilious manner that went with it, that crowd began to suck up to me in the most shameless fashion, with Luke foremost among them.

Of course that meant the girls of the same age as well, and they got to inviting me to their birthday parties and such, to which I’d come with a smirk and make sarcastic remarks even to their parents as they officiated, and by God if I didn’t hear more than one mother remark favorably on what a gentleman I was directly after I had to my mind insulted her.