Page:Mosquitos (Faulkner).pdf/150

 presently, “Mr.— that polite man—” “Talliaferro,” the other prompted. “—Talliaferro. I wonder if he’s got a car?”

“I don’t know. You better ask him. What do you keep on asking me what people are making or what they’ve got, for?”

“Taxicabbers are best, I think,” Jenny continued, unruffled. “Sometimes when they have cars they don’t have anything else. They just take you riding.”

“I don’t know,” the niece repeated. “Say,” she said suddenly, “what was that you said to him this afternoon?”

Jenny said, “Oh.” She breathed placidly and regularly for a while. Then she remarked: “I thought you were there, around that corner.”

“Yes. What was it? Say it again.” Jenny said it again. The niece repeated it after her. “What does it mean?”

“I don’t know. I just happened to remember it. I don’t know what it means.”

“It sounds good,” the other said. “You didn’t think it up yourself, did you?”

“No. It was a fellow told it to me. There was two couples of us at the Market one night, getting coffee: me and Pete and a girl friend of mine and another fellow. We had been to Mandeville on the boat that day, swimming and dancing. Say, there was a man drownded at Mandeville that day. Pete and Thelma, my girl friend, and Roy, this girl friend of mine’s fellow, saw it. I didn’t see it because I wasn’t with them. I didn’t go in bathing with them: it was too sunny. I don’t think blondes ought to expose themselves to hot sun like brunettes, do you?”

“Why not? But what about—”

“Oh, yes. Anyway, I didn’t go in swimming where the man got drownded. I was waiting for them, and I got to talking to a funny man. A little kind of black man—”

“A nigger?”