Page:The Peeler.pdf/8

 “You ain’t gonna know none neither. This is one more hard place to make friends in. I been here two months and I don’t know nobody, look like all they want to do is knock you down. I reckon you got a right heap of money,” he said. “I ain’t got none. Had, I’d sho know what to do with it.” The man and the girl stopped on the corner and turned up the left side of the street. “We catching up,” he said. “I bet we’ll be at some meeting singing hymns with her and her daddy if we don’t watch out.”

Up in the next block there was a large building with columns and a dome. The blind man and the child were going toward it. There was a car parked in every space around the building and on the other side the street and up and down the streets near it. “That ain’t no picture show,” Enoch said. The blind man and the girl turned up the steps to the building. The steps went all the way across the front, and on either side there were stone lions sitting on pedestals. “Ain’t no church,” Enoch said. Haze stopped at the steps. He looked as if he were trying to settle his face into an expression. He pulled the black hat forward at a nasty angle and started toward the two, who had sat down in the corner by one of the lions.

As they came nearer the blind man leaned forward as if he were listening to the footsteps, then he stood up, holding a tract out in his hand.

“Sit down,” the child said in a loud voice. “It ain’t nobody but them two boys.”

“Nobody but us,” Enoch Emery said. “Me and him been follerin you all about a mile.”

“I knew somebody was following me,” the blind man said. “Sit down.”

“They ain’t here for nothing but to make fun,” the child said. She looked as if she smelled something bad. The blind man was feeling out to touch them. Haze stood just out of reach of his hands, squinting at him as if he were trying to see the empty eye sockets under the green glasses.

“It ain’t me, it’s him,” Enoch said. “He’s been running after yawl ever since back yonder by them potato peelers. He bought one of em.”

“I knew somebody was following me!” the blind man said. “I felt it all the way from back yonder.”