Трумэн Капоте - Other Voices, Other Rooms

That night sleep was like an enemy; dreams, a winged avenging fish, swam rising and diving until light, drawing toward daybreak, opened his eyes. Hurriedly buttoning his breeches, he crept down through the quiet house and out the kitchen door. Above, the moon paled like a stone receding below water, tangled morning color rushed up the sky, trembled there in pastel uncertainty.

"Ain't I gotta donkey's load?" cried Zoo, as he crossed the yard to where she stood on the cabin porch. A quilt stuffed fat with belongings bulged on her back; the accordion was tied to her belt and hung there like a caterpillar; aside from this she had quite a large jellyjar box. "Time I gets to Washington D. C. gonna be a humpback," she said, sounding as though she'd swallowed a gallon of wine, and her joy, in the dimness of sunup, was to him disgusting: what right had she to be so happy?

"You can't carry all that. You look like a fool, for one thing."

But Zoo just flexed her arms, and stamped her foot. "Honey, I feels like ninety-nine locomotives; gonna light outa here going licketysplit: why, I figures to be in Washington D. C. fore dark." She drew back into a kind of pose, and, as if she were about to curtsey, held out her starched calico skirt: "Pretty, huh?"

Joel squinted critically. Her face was powdered with flour, a sort of reddish oil inflamed her cheeks, she'd scented herself with vanilla flavoring, and greased her hair shiny. About her neck she sported a lemon silk scarf. "Turn around," he said; then, after she'd done so, he moved away, pointedly suppressing comment.

She placidly accepted this affront, but said: "How come you gotta go pull such a long face, and take on in any such way? Do seem to me like you'd be glad on my account, us bein friends and all."

He yanked loose a trailing arm of ivy, and this set swinging all the porch-eave pots: bumping against each other they raised a noise like a series of closing doors. "Oh, you're awful funny. Ha ha ha." He gave her one of Randolph's cool arched looks. "You were never my friend. But after all why should anyone such as me have anything in common with such as you?"

"Baby, baby… " said Zoo, her voice rocking in a tender way"… baby, I make you a promise: whenever I gets all fixed… I'm gonna send for you and take care you all the resta your years. Before the Almighty may He strike me dead if this promise ain't made."

Joel jerked away, flung himself against a porch-pole, embraced it, clung there as though it alone understood and loved him.

"Hold on there now," she told him firmly. "You is almost a growed man; idea, takin on like some little ol gal! Why, you mortify me, I declare. Here was bout to give you Papa-daddy's fine handsome sword… see now you is not man enough for to own it."

Parting the curtain of ivy, Joel stepped through and into the yard; to walk straight off, and not look back, that would punish her. But when he reached the tree stump, and still she had not relented, not called him back, he stopped, retraced his steps onto the porch, and, looking seriously into her African eyes, said: "You will send for me?"

Zoo smiled and half picked him up. "Time I gets a place to put our heads." She reached down into her quilt-covered bundle, and brought out the sword. "This here was Papa-daddy's proudest thing," she said. "Now don't you bring it no disgrace."

He strapped it to his waist. It was a weapon against the world, and he tensed with the cold grandeur of its sheath along his leg: suddenly he was most powerful, and unafraid. "I thank you kindly, Zoo," he said.

Gathering the quilt, and jellyjar box, she staggered down the steps. Her breath came in grunts, and with every loping movement the accordion, bouncing up and down, sprinkled a rainfall of discordant notes. They walked through the garden wilderness, and to the road. The sun was traveling the green-rimmed distance: as far as you could see daybreak blueness lifted over trees, layers of light unrolled across the land. "I spec to be down past Paradise Chapel fore dew's off the ground: good I got my quilt handy, may be lotsa snow around Washington D. C." And that was the last she said. Joel stopped by the mailbox. "Goodbye," he called, and stood there watching until she grew pinpoint small, lost, and the accordion soundless, gone.

"… no gratitude," Amy sniffed. "Good and kind, that's how we were, always, and what does she do? Runs off, God knows where, leaving me with a houseful of sick people, not one of whom has sense enough to empty a slopjar. Furthermore, whatever else I may be, I'm a lady: I was brought up to be a lady, and I had my full four years at the Normal School. And if Randolph thinks I'm going to play nursemaid to orphans and idiots… damn Missouri!" Her mouth worked in a furious ugly way. "Niggers! Angela Lee warned me time and again, said never trust a nigger: their minds and hair are full of kinks in equal measure. Still, does seem like she could've stayed to fix breakfast." She took a pan of biscuits from the oven, and, along with a bowl of grits, a pot of coffee, arranged them on a tray. "Here now, trot this up to Cousin Randolph and trot right back: poor Mr Sansom has to be fed too, heaven help us; yes, may the Lord in His wisdom…"

Randolph was propped up in bed, naked, and with the covers stripped back; his skin seemed translucently pink in the morning light, his round smooth face bizarrely youthful. There was a small Japanese table set across his legs, and on it were a mound of bluejay feathers, a paste pot, a sheet of cardboard. "Isn't this delightful?" he said, smiling up at Joel. "Now put down the tray and have a visit."

"There isn't time," said Joel a little mysteriously.

"Time?" Randolph repeated. "Dear me, I thought that was where we were overstocked."

Pausing between words, Joel said: "Zoo's gone." He was anxious that the announcement should have a dramatic effect. Randolph, however, gave him no satisfaction, for, contrary to Amy, he seemed not at all upset, even surprised. "How tiresome of her," he sighed, "and how absurd, too. Because she can't come back, one never can."

"She wouldn't want to anyway," answered Joel impertinently. "She wasn't happy here; I don't think nothing would make her come back."

"Darling child," said Randolph, dipping a bluejay feather in the paste, "happiness is relative, and," he continued, fitting the feather on the cardboard, "Missouri Fever will discover that all she has deserted is her proper place in a rather general puzzle. Like this." He held up the cardboard in order that Joel could see: there feathers were so arranged the effect was of a living bird transfixed. "Each feather has, according to size and color, a particular position, and if one were the slightest awry, why, it would not look at all real."

A memory floated like a feather in the air; Joel's mental eye saw the bluejay beating its wings up the wall, and Amy's ladylike lifting of a poker. "What good is a bird that can't fly?" he said.

"I beg your pardon?"

Joel was himself uncertain what he meant. "The other one, the real one, it could fly. But this one can't do anything… except maybe look like it was alive."

Tossing the cardboard aside, Randolph lay drumming his fingers on his chest. He lowered his eyelids, and with his eyes closed he looked peculiarly defenseless. "It is pleasanter in the dark," he said, as if talking in his sleep. "Would it inconvenience you, my dear, to bring from the cabinet a bottle of sherry? And then, on tiptoe, mind you, draw all the shades, and then, oh very quietly please, shut the door." As Joel fulfilled the last of these requests, he rose up to say: "You are quite right: my bird can't fly."

Some while later, Joel, his stomach still jittery from having fed Mr Sansom's breakfast to him mouthful by mouthful, sat reading aloud in rapid flat tones. The story, such as it was, involved a blonde lady and a brunette man who lived in a house sixteen floors high; most of the stuff the lady said was embarrassing to repeat: "Darling," he read, "I love you as no woman ever loved, but Lance, my dearest, leave me now while our love is still a shining thing." And Mr Sansom smiled continuously through even the saddest parts; glancing at him, his son remembered a threat Ellen had delivered whenever he'd made an ugly face: "Mark my word," she'd say, "it's going to freeze that way." Such a fate had apparently descended upon Mr Sansom, for his ordinarily expressionless face had been grinning now no less than eight days. Finishing off the beautiful lady and lovely man, who were left honeymooning in Bermuda, Joel went on to a recipe for banana custard pie: it was all the same to Mr Sansom, romance or recipe, he gave each of them staring unequaled attention.