“I’m going thisaway too,” Enoch said in a sullen voice. On the left there was a movie house where the electric bill was being changed. “We hadn’t got tied up with them hicks, we could have gone to a show,” he muttered. He strode along at Haze’s elbow, talking in a half mumble, half whine. Once he caught at his sleeve to slow him down and Haze jerked it away. “He made me come,” he said in a cracked voice. Haze looked at him and saw he was crying, his face seamed and wet and a purple-pink color. “I ain’t but eighteen year,” he cried, “and he made me come and I don’t know nobody, nobody here’ll have nothing to do with nobody else. They ain’t friendly. He done gone off with a woman and made me come but she ain’t gonna stay for long, he’s gonna beat hell out of her before she gets herself stuck to a chair. You the first familer face I seen in two months, I seen you sommers before. I know I seen you sommers before.”
Haze looked straight ahead with his face set hard, and Enoch kept up the half mumble, half blubber. They passed a church and a hotel and an antique shop and turned up a street full of brick houses, each alike in the darkness.
“If you want you a woman you don’t have to be follerin nothing looked like her,” Enoch said. “I heard about where there’s a house full of two-dollar ones. Whyn’t we go have us some fun? I could pay you back next week.”
“Look,” Haze said, “I’m going where I stay—two doors from here. I got a woman. I got a woman, you understand? I don’t need to go with you.”
“I could pay you back next week,” Enoch said. “I work at the city zoo. I guard a gate and I get paid ever week.”
“Get away from me,” Haze said.
“People ain’t friendly here. You ain’t from here but you ain’t friendly neither.”
Haze didn’t answer him. He went on with his neck drawn close to his shoulder blades as if he were cold.
“You don’t know nobody neither,” Enoch said. “You ain’t got no woman or nothing to do. I knew when I first seen you you didn’t have nobody or nothing, I seen you and I knew it.”
“This is where I live,” Haze said, and he turned up the walk of the house without looking back at Enoch.
