William Faulkner, SANCTUARY – WordPress.com - literature save 2

They reached Memphis in mid-afternoon. At the foot of the bluff below Main
Street Popeye turned into a narrow street of smoke-grimed frame houses with tiers of
wooden galleries set a little back in grassless plots, and now and then a forlorn and hardy
tree of some shabby species--gaunt, lopbranched magnolias, a stunted elm or a locust in
grayish, cadaverous bloom--interspersed by rear ends of garages; a scrap-heap in a vacant
lot; a low doored cavern of an equivocal appearance where an oilcloth-covered counter
and a row of backless stools, a metal coffee-urn and a fat man in a dirty apron with a
toothpick in his mouth, stood for an instant out of the gloom with an effect as of a sinister
and meaningless photograph poorly made. From the bluff, beyond a line of office
buildings terraced sharply against the sunfilled sky, came a sound of traffic--motor horns,
trolleys--passing high overhead on the river breeze; at the end of the street a trolley
materialised in the narrow gap with an effect as of magic and vanished with a stupendous
clatter. On a second storey gallery a young negress in her underclothes smoked a
cigarette sullenly, her arms on the balustrade.
Popeye drew up before one of the dingy three-storey houses, the entrance of
which was hidden by a dingy lattice cubicle leaning a little awry. In the grimy grassplot
before it two of those small, woolly, white, worm-like dogs, one with a pink, the other a
blue, ribbon about its neck, moved about with an air of sluggish and obscene paradox. In
the sunlight their coats looked as though they had been cleaned with gasoline.
Later Temple could hear them outside her door, whimpering and scuffing, or,
rushing thickly in when the negro maid opened the door, climbing and sprawling onto the
bed and into Miss Reba's lap with wheezy, flatulent sounds, billowing into the rich
pneumasis of her breast and tonguing along the metal tankard which she waved in one
ringed hand as she talked.
"Anybody in Memphis can tell you who Reba Rivers is. Ask any man on the
street, cop or not. I've had some of the biggest men in Memphis right here in this house,
bankers, lawyers, doctors--all of them. I've had two police captains drinking beer in my
dining-room and the commissioner himself upstairs with one of my girls. They got drunk
and crashed the door in on him and found him buck-nekkid, dancing the highland fling. A
man fifty years old, seven foot tall, with a head like a peanut. He was a fine fellow. He
knew me. They all know Reba Rivers. Spent their money here like water, they have.
They know me. I aint never double-crossed nobody, honey." She drank beer, breathing
thickly into the tankard, the other hand, ringed with yellow diamonds as large as gravel,
lost among the lush billows of her breast.
Her slightest movement appeared to be accomplished by an expenditure of breath
out of all proportion to any pleasure the movement could afford her. Almost as soon as
they entered the house she began to tell Temple about her asthma, toiling up the stairs in
front of them, planting her feet heavily in worsted bedroom slippers, a wooden rosary in
one hand and the tankard in the other. She had just returned from church, in a black silk
gown and a hat savagely flowered; the lower half of the tankard was still frosted with
inner chill. She moved heavily from big thigh to thigh, the two dogs moiling underfoot,
talking steadily back across her shoulder in a harsh, expiring, maternal voice.
"Popeye knew better than to bring you anywhere else but to my house. I been
after him for, how many years I been after you to get you a girl, honey? What I say, a
young fellow cant no more live without a girl than . . ." Panting, she fell to cursing the
dogs under her feet, stopping to shove them aside. "Get back down there," she said,