William Faulkner - The Reivers

"Where you taking him?" he said. "Did you steal him?"

"Borrowed him," Sam said. They didn't stop. "We rode him to prayer meeting tonight and now we're taking him back home." We went on. Otis said Twenty-three skiddoo again.

"I never seen that before," he said. "Every policeman I ever seen before speaking to anybody, they give him something. Like Minnie and Miss Reba already having a bottle of beer waiting for him before he could even get his foot inside, even if Miss Reba cussed him before he come and cussed him again after he left. And ever since I got here last summer and found out about it, every day I go up to Court Square where that I-talian wop has got that fruit and peanut stand and, sho enough, here the policeman comes and without even noticing it, takes a apple or a handful of peanuts." He was almost trotting to keep up with us; he was that much smaller than me. I mean, he didn't seem so much smaller until you saw him trotting to keep up. There was something wrong about him. When it's you, you say to yourself Next year I'm going to be bigger than I am now simply because being bigger is not only natural, it's inevitable; it doesn't even matter that you cant imagine to yourself how or what you will look like then. And the same with other children; they cant help it either. But Otis looked like two or three years ago he had already reached where you wont be until next year, and since then he had been going backward. He was still talking. "So what I thought back then was that the only thing to be was a policeman. But I never taken long to get over that. It's too limited."

"Limited to what?" Ned said.

"To beer and apples and peanuts," Otis said. "Who's going to waste his time on beer and apples and peanuts?" He said Twenty-three skiddoo three times now. "This town is where the jack's at."

"Jacks?" Ned said. "In course they has jacks here. Dont Memphis need mules the same as anybody else?"

"Jack," Otis said. "Spondulicks. Cash. When I think about all that time I wasted in Arkansas before anybody ever told me about Memphis. That tooth. How much do you reckon that tooth by itself is worth? if she just walked into the bank and taken it out and laid it on the counter and said, Gimme change for it?"

"Yes," Ned said. "I mind a boy like you back there in Jefferson used to keep his mind on money all the time too. You know where he's at now?"

"Here in Memphis, if he's got any sense," Otis said. "He never got that far," Ned said. "The most he could get was into the state penitentiary at Parchman. And at the rate you sounds like going, that's where youll wind up too."

"But not tomorrow," Otis said. "Maybe not the next day neither. Twenty-three skiddoo, where even a durn policeman cant even pass by without a bottle of beer or a apple or a handful of peanuts put right in his hand before he can even ask for it. Them eighty-five cents them folks give me last night for pumping the pee a noler that that son of a bitch taken away from me this evening. That I might a even pumped that pee a noler free for nothing if I hadn't found out by pure accident that they was aiming to pay me for it; if I had just happened to step out the door a minute, I might a missed it. And if I hadn't even been there, they would still a give it to somebody, anybody that just happened to pass by. See what I mean? Sometime just thinking about it, I feel like just giving up, just quitting."

"Quitting what?" Ned said. "Quitting for what?"

"Just quitting," Otis said. "When I think of all them years I spent over there on a durn farm in Arkansas with Memphis right here across the river and I never even knowed it. How if I had just knowed when I was four or five years old, what I had to wait until just last year to find out about, sometimes I just want to give up and quit. But I reckon I wont. I reckon maybe I can make it up. How much you folks figger on making out of that horse?"

"Never you mind about that horse," Ned said. "And the making up you needs to do is to make back up that street to wherever it is you gonter sleep tonight, and go to bed." He even paused, half turning. "Do you know the way back?"

"There aint nothing there," Otis said. "I already tried it. They watch too close. It aint like over in Arkansas, when Aunt Corrie was still at Aunt Fittie's and I had that peep-hole. If you swapped that automobile for him, you must be figgering on at least two hundred—" This time Ned turned completely around. Otis sprang, leaped away, cursing Ned, calling him nigger—something Father and Grandfather must have been teaching me before I could remember because I dont know when it began, I just knew it was so: that no gentleman ever referred to anyone by his race or religion.

"Go on," I said. "They're leaving us." They were: almost two blocks ahead now and already turning a corner; we ran, trotted, Ned too, to catch up and barely did so: the depot was in front of us and Sam was talking to another man, in greasy overalls, with a lantern—a switchman, a railroad man anyway.

"See what I mean?" Ned said. "Can you imagine police sending out a man with a lantern to show us the way?" And you see what I mean too: all the world (I mean about a stolen race horse); who serves Virtue works alone, unaided, in a chilly vacuum of reserved judgment; where, pledge yourself to Non-virtue and the whole countryside boils with volunteers to help you. It seems that Sam was trying to persuade Miss Corrie to wait in the depot with Otis and me while they located the boxcar and loaded the horse into it, even voluntarily suggesting that Boon attend us with the protection of his size and age and sex: proving that Sam's half anyway of the polyandrous stalemate was amicable and trusting. But Miss Corrie would have no part of it, speaking for all of us. So we turned aside, following the lantern, through a gate into a maze of loading platforms and tracks; now Ned himself had to come forward and take the halter and quiet the horse to where we could move again in the aura now of the horse's hot ammoniac reek (you never smelled a frightened horse, did you?) and the steady murmur of Ned's voice talking to it, both of them—murmur and smell—thickened, dense, concentrated now between the loom of lightless baggage cars and passenger coaches among the green-and-ruby gleams of switch points; on until we were clear of the passenger yard and were now following a cinder path beside a spur track leading to a big dark warehouse with a loading platform in front of it. And there was the boxcar too, with a good twenty-five feet of moonlit (that's right. We were in moonlight now. Free of the street- and depot-lights, we—I —could see it now) vacancy between it and the nearest point of the platform—a good big jump for even a jumping horse, let alone a three-year-old flat racer that (according to Ned) had a little trouble running anyway. Sam cursed quietly the entire depot establishment: switchmen, yard crews, ticket sellers and all.

"I'll go get the goat," the man with the lantern said. "We dont need no goat," Ned said. "No matter how far he can jump. What we needs is to either move that flat-form or that boxcar."

"He means the switch engine," Sam told Ned. "No," he told the man with the lantern. "I expected this. For a switching crew to miss just twenty-five feet is practically zero. That's why I told you to bring the key to the section house. Get the crowbars. Maybe Mr Boon wont mind helping you."

"Why dont you go yourself?" Boon said. "It's your railroad. I'm a stranger here."

"Why dont you take these boys on back home to bed, if you're all that timid around strangers?" Miss Corrie said.

"Why dont you take them back home yourself?" Boon said. "Your old buddy-boy there has already told you once you aint got no business here."

"I'll go with him to get the crowbars," Miss Corrie told Sam. "Will you keep your eye on the boys?"