By virtue of kinship and similarity and experience, Rayber was the person to save him, yet something in the boy’s very look drained him, something in his very look, something starved in it, seemed to feed on him. With Tarwater’s eyes on him, he felt subjected to a pressure that killed his energy before he had a chance to exert it. The eyes were the eyes of the crazy student father, the personality was the old man’s, and somewhere between the two, Rayber’s own image was struggling to survive and he was not able to reach it. After three days of walking, he was numb with fatigue and plagued with a sense of his own ineffectiveness. All day his sentences had not quite connected with his thought.
That night they had eaten at an Italian restaurant, dark and not crowded, and he had ordered ravioli for them because Bishop liked it. After each meal the boy removed a piece of paper and a stub of pencil from his pocket and wrote down a figure—his estimate of what the meal was worth. In time he would pay back the total sum, he had said, as he did not intend to be beholden. Rayber would have liked to see the figures and learn what his meals were valued at—the boy never asked the price. He was a finicky eater, pushing the food around on his plate before he ate it and putting each forkful in his mouth as if he suspected it was poisoned. He had pushed the ravioli about, his face drawn. He ate a little of it and then put the fork down.
“Don’t you like that?” Rayber had asked. “You can have something else if you don’t.”
“It all come out the same slop bucket,” the boy said.
“Bishop is eating his,” Rayber said. Bishop had it smeared all over his face. Occasionally he would feed a spoonful into the sugar bowl or touch the tip of his tongue to the dish.
“That’s what I said,” Tarwater said, and his glance grazed the top of the child’s head, “—a hog might like it.”
The schoolteacher put his fork down.
Tarwater was glaring at the dark walls of the room.
“He’s like a hog,” he said. “He eats like a hog and he don’t think no more than a hog and when he dies, he’ll rot like a hog. Me and you too,” he said, looking back at the schoolteacher’s mottled face, “will rot like hogs. The only difference between me and you and a hog is me and you can calculate, but there ain’t any difference between him and one.”
Rayber appeared to be gritting his teeth. Finally he said, “Just forget Bishop exists. You haven’t been asked to have anything to do with him. He’s just a mistake of nature. Try not even to be aware of him.”
“He ain’t my mistake.” the boy muttered. “I ain’t having a thing to do with him.”
“Forget him,” Rayber said in a short harsh voice. The boy looked at him oddly as if he were beginning to perceive his secret affliction. What he saw or thought he saw seemed grimly to amuse him. “Let’s leave out of here,” he said, “and get to walking again.”
“We are not going to walk tonight,” Rayber said. “We are going home and go to bed.” He said it with a firmness and finality he had not used before. The boy had only shrugged.
As Rayber lay watching the window darken, he felt that all his nerves were stretched through him like high tension wire. He began trying to relax one muscle at a time as the books recommended, beginning with those in the back of his neck. He emptied his mind of everything but the just visible pattern of the hedge against the screen. Still he was alert for any sound. Long after he lay in complete darkness, he was still alert, unrelaxed, ready to spring up at the least creak of a floor board in the hall. All at once he sat up, wide awake. A door opened and closed. He leapt up and ran across the hall into the opposite room. The boy was gone. He ran back to his own room and pulled his trousers on over his pajamas. Then grabbing his coat, he went out the house by way of the kitchen, barefooted, his jaw set.
V
KEEPING close to his side of the hedge, he crept through the dark damp grass toward the street. The night was close and very still. A light went on in a window of the next house and revealed, at the end of the hedge, the hat. It turned slightly and Rayber saw the sharp profile beneath it, the set thrust of a jaw very like his own. The boy was stopped still, most likely taking his bearings, deciding which direction to walk in.
He turned again and again Rayber saw only the hat, intransigently ground upon his head, fierce-looking even in the dim light. It had the boy’s own defiant quality, as if its shape had been formed over the years by his personality. It had been the first thing that Rayber had seen must go. It suddenly moved out of the light and vanished.
Rayber slipped through the hedge and followed, soundless on his bare feet. Nothing cast a shadow. He could barely make out the boy a quarter of a block in front of him, except when occasionally light from a window outlined him briefly. Since Rayber didn’t know whether he thought he was leaving for good or only going for a walk on his own, he decided not to shout and stop him but to follow silently and observe. He turned off his hearing aid and pursued the dim figure as if in a dream. The boy walked even faster at night than in the day time and was always on the verge of vanishing.
Rayber felt the accelerated beat of his heart. He took a handkerchief out of his pocket and wiped his forehead and inside the neck of his pajama top. He walked over something sticky on the sidewalk and shifted hurriedly to the other side, cursing under his breath. Tarwater was heading toward town. Rayber thought it likely he was returning to see something that had secretly interested him. He might discover tonight what he would have found by testing if the boy had not been so pig-headed. He felt the insidious pleasure of revenge and checked it.
A patch of sky blanched, revealing for a moment the outlines of the housetops. Tarwater turned suddenly to the right. Rayber cursed himself for not stopping long enough to get his shoes. They had come into a neighborhood of large ramshackle boarding houses with porches that abutted the sidewalks. On some of them late sitters were rocking and watching the street. He felt eyes in the darkness move on him and he turned on the hearing aid again. On one porch a woman rose and leaned over the banister. She stood with her hands on her hips, looking him over, taking in his bare feet, the striped pajama coat under his seersucker suit. Irritated, he glanced back at her. The thrust of her neck indicated a conclusion formed. He buttoned his coat and hurried on.
The boy stopped on the next corner. His lean shadow made by a street light slanted to the side of him. The hat’s shadow, like a knob at the top of it, turned to the right and then the left. He appeared to be considering his direction. Rayber’s muscles felt suddenly weighted. He was not conscious of his fatigue until the pace slackened.
Tarwater turned to the left and Rayber began angrily to move again. They went down a street of dilapidated stores. When Rayber turned the next corner, the gaudy cave of a movie house yawned to the side of him. A knot of small boys stood in front of it. “Forgot yer shoes!” one of them chirruped. “Forgot yer shirt!”
He began a kind of limping lope.
The chorus followed him down the block. “Hi yo Silverwear, Tonto’s lost his underwear! What in the heck do we care?”
He kept his eye wrathfully on Tarwater who was turning to the right. When he reached the corner and turned, he saw the boy stopped in the middle of the block, looking in a store window. He slipped into a narrow entrance a few yards farther on where a flight of steps led upward into darkness. Then he looked out.