Nothing irritated the boy so much as this. “I take my orders from the Lord,” he would say in an ugly voice, trying to pry the fingers out of his shoulder. “Not from you.”
“The Lord will give them to you,” the old man said, gripping his shoulder tighter.
“He had to change that one’s pants and he done it,” Tarwater muttered.
“He had the welfare-woman to do it for him,” his uncle said. “She had to be good for something, but you can bet she ain’t still around there. Bernice Bishop!” he said as if he found this the most idiotic name in the language. “Bernice Bishop!”
The boy had sense enough to know that he had been betrayed by the schoolteacher and he did not mean to go to his house until daylight, when he could see behind and before him. “I ain’t going there until daylight,” he said suddenly to Meeks. “You needn’t to stop there because I ain’t getting out there.”
Meeks leaned casually against the door of the car, driving with half his attention and giving the other half to Tarwater. “Son,” he said, “I’m not going to be a preacher to you. I’m not going to tell you not to lie. I ain’t going to tell you nothing impossible. All I’m going to tell you is this: don’t lie when you don’t have to. Else when you do have to, nobody’ll believe you. You don’t have to lie to me. I know exactly what you done.” A shaft of light plunged through the car window and he looked to the side and saw the white face beside him, staring up with soot-colored eyes.
“How do you know?” the boy asked.
Meeks smiled with pleasure. “Because I done the same thing myself once,” he said.
Tarwater caught hold of the sleeve of the salesman’s coat and gave it a quick pull. “On the Day of Judgment,” he said, “me and you will rise and say we done it!”
Meeks looked at him again with one eyebrow cocked at the same angle he wore his hat. “Will we?’” he asked. Then he said, “What line you gonna get into, boy?’”
“What line?”
“What you going to do? What kind of work?”
“I know everything but the machines,” Tarwater said, sitting back again. “My great-uncle learnt me everything but first I have to find out how much of it is true.” They were entering the dilapidated outskirts of the city where wooden buildings leaned together and an occasional dim light lit up a faded sign advertising some remedy or other.
“What line was your great-uncle in?” Meeks asked.
“He was a prophet,” the boy said.
“Is that right?” Meeks asked and his shoulders jumped several times as if they were going to leap over his head. “Who’d he prophesy to?”
“To me,” Tarwater said. “Nobody else would listen to him and there wasn’t anybody else for me to listen to. He grabbed me away from this other uncle, my only blood connection now, so as to save me from running to doom.”
“You were a captive audience,” Meeks said. “And now you’re coming to town to run to doom with the rest of us, huh?”
The boy didn’t answer at once. Then he said in a guarded tone, “I ain’t said what I’m going to do.”
“You ain’t sure about what all this great-uncle of yours told you, are you?” Meeks asked. “You figure he might have got aholt to some misinformation.”
Tarwater looked away, out the window, at the brittle forms of the houses. He was holding both arms close to his sides as if he were cold. “I’ll find out,” he said.
“Well how now?” Meeks asked.
The dark city was unfolding on either side of them and they were approaching a low circle of light in the distance. “I mean to wait and see what happens,” he said after a moment.
“And suppose nothing don’t happen?’ Meeks asked. The circle of light became huge and they swung into the center of it and stopped. It was a gaping concrete mouth with two red gas pumps set in front of it and a small glass office toward the back. “I say suppose nothing don’t happen?” Meeks repeated.
The boy looked at him darkly, remembering the silence after his great uncle’s death.
“Well?’ Meeks said.
“Then I’ll make it happen,” he said. “I can act.”
“Attaboy,” Meeks said. He opened the car door and put his leg out while he continued to observe his rider. Then he said, “Wait a minute. I got to call my girl.”
A man was asleep in a chair tilted against the outside wall of the glass office and Meeks went inside without waking him up. For a minute Tarwater only craned his neck out the window. Then he got out and went to the office door to watch Meeks use the machine. It sat, small and black, in the center of a cluttered desk which Meeks sat down on as if it had been his own. The room was lined with automobile tires and had a concrete and rubber smell. Meeks took the machine in two parts and held one part to his head while he circled with his finger on the other part. Then he sat waiting, swinging his foot, while the horn buzzed in his ear. After a minute an acid smile began to eat at the corners of his mouth and he said, drawing in his breath, “Heythere, Sugar, hyer you?” and Tarwater, from where he stood in the door, heard an actual woman’s voice, like one coming from beyond the grave, say, “Why Sugar, is that reely you?” and Meeks said it was him in the same old flesh and made an appointment with her in ten minutes.
Tarwater stood awestruck in the doorway. Meeks put the telephone together and then he said in a sly voice, “Now why don’t you call your uncle?” and watched the boy’s face change, the eyes swerve suspiciously to the side and the flesh drop around the boney mouth.
“I’ll speak with him soon enough,” he muttered, but he kept looking at the black coiled machine, fascinated. “How do you use it?” he asked.
“You dial it like I did. Call your uncle,” Meeks urged.
“No, that woman is waiting on you,” Tarwater said.
“Let ‘er wait,” Meeks said. “That’s what she knows how to do best.”
The boy approached it, taking out the card he had written the number on. He put his finger on the dial and began gingerly to turn it.
“Great God,” Meeks said and took the receiver off the hook and put it in his hand and thrust his hand to his ear. He dialed the number for him and then pushed him down in the office chair to wait but Tarwater stood up again, slightly crouched, holding the buzzing horn to his head, while his heart began to kick viciously at his chest wall.
“It don’t speak,” he murmured.
“Give him time,” Meeks said, “maybe he don’t like to get up in the middle of the night.”
The buzzing continued for a minute and then stopped abruptly. Tarwater stood speechless, holding the earpiece tight against his head, his face rigid as if he were afraid that the Lord might be about to speak to him over the machine. All at once he heard what sounded like heavy breathing in his ear.
“Ask for your party,” Meeks prompted. “How do you expect to get your party if you don’t ask for him?”
The boy remained exactly as he was, saying nothing.
“I told you to ask for your party,” Meeks said irritably. “Ain’t you got good sense?”
“I want to speak with my uncle,” Tarwater whispered.
There was a silence over the telephone but it was not a silence that seemed to be empty. It was the kind where the breath is drawn in and held. Suddenly the boy realized that it was the schoolteacher’s child on the other side of the machine. The white-haired, blunted face rose before him. He said in a furious shaking voice, “I want to speak with my uncle. Not you!”