Enoch Emory

Ignore that date up there, I don’t know why it says it’s the same day as before because it ain’t. I been in Taukinham three days now and I still haven’t found Hazel Motes. I ask around, but that lady who sent me to the detention home must have dropped dead because her house is empty now so I can’t ask her where he’s gone. And Mrs. Watts didn’t know nothing neither.

I may not have found him, yet, but I did find someone else now. I was passing through the zoo looking and I saw this boy standing there and looking at the monkeys in the cage and he’s got his back to me but I think he looks familiar. So I go up to look him in the face and it turns out it’s that Enoch boy who gave me the potato peeler. And he don’t notice me, nor nobody around him, he’s just staring in at them chimps like he wanted to be in there with them or something. So I grab him by the arm and say, “Enoch” and give him a shake. And he don’t notice, but I done it again and this time he looked over and after a minute he recognized me. I asked him if he had seen Hazel Motes at all recently and where he was. I figured, since he used to follow him around so much, heds at least know where I could find him. Enoch looked at me for a long while like he didn’t know what I was talking about but then his eyes kind of went bright and he said yeah, yeah he knows where Hazel is, except he can’t take me there today. I told him I needed to go there today and he just said no, we would go tomorrow, and in the meantime I could stay at his house. But he said he couldn’t take me to his house right now, he’d take me there at five that evening, and he couldn’t do it any earlier because first he had to do some important things first. Then he went back to watching the monkeys.

So I left him with his monkeys and I went off to keep searching on my own for a while longer. I didn’t see him. I saw his car though, his big ratty Essex parked on the side of the road, and a man with a blue suit and a black hat just like his standing on the roof of it just like him and preaching something. I thought it was him for a second, but when I got closer I saw it wasn’t, just a guy with a big drawling voice who looked like him, and when I listened I realized it wasn’t even him who was doing the preaching, a man in front of him with a guitar was and the man on the car was just repeating what he said. I listened in on what they preached for a little while and it sounded nice, but then the man with the guitar said we had to give him money now and I didn’t have none left over so I left to keep walking. Taukinham don’t look much different now than three years ago, except the lights at the theater all got replaced so they light up right nice at night instead of blinking and going dim all the time. I asked the lady at the ticket booth if they had Wise Blood playing, thinking since I had read the book maybe I should see the movie again just to remind me some more, but she was an old crone and couldn’t hear what I was asking. So I wrote down the movie and the director on a scrap of paper and handed it over to her, and she looked at it for a second and then said she was sorry but she never heard of no Jhon Huston and so she didn’t think any of his movies were playing in the theater.

That was fine by me, though, I liked the movie but I didn’t like it that much. Jhon Huston may have done good by finding people who looked like us to act like us, but his Taukinham don’t look nothing like the real Taukinham, and his Sabbath Lily Hawks isn’t 15 but 17. I don’t know why they had to change that but I don’t like that they did. And he tried to make the story all sound funny when really it was bad for us who was in it. But I liked how he showed me with my baby before Hazel done smashed it against the wall. He had a hood over my heard like Mary and I felt like that was supposed to mean something, and it also made me think a little about Mary and her Jesus. Because her and God weren’t married when she had him, and so that makes Jesus a bastard child like me, but Jesus got into heaven ok and so maybe I can too. Maybe that’s why Jhon made it like that, so we’d have to think about things like that. Maybe if I realize that then I do have that something inside that’ll let me understand Miss O’Conner’s version of our story someday.

So at five o’clock I find Enoch again still looking at the monkeys and this time he takes me home to his apartment and I’ve been here for the past three days. He says he’s got to do some things first before he takes me, but all I ever seen him do was go stare at those monkeys some more. I think he just wants me to sleep with him first before he brings me to Hazel so maybe I’ll feel obliged to stay with him and not Hazel, but I won’t because he’s really just a plain nuisance. His tie’s such a gaudy color that it hurts my eyes to look at it, and every days he wants me to go out and see the monkeys with him and sometimes when I do for a bit he just watches them and then he looks at me with these big lighted-up eyes like he’s just seen Jesus come down from heaven and he keeps looking at me like he expects me to say something. Most for the time I just leave. One time I was looking through the things in his room while he was out and I found a big black pile of fur bunched up in a slop-jar cabinet. When I pulled it apart I found it was a big hairy monkey costume with an ugly gorilla head. I remembered he stole the thing in the book but I didn’t think he’d kept it. The man is beyond insane, and I can’t wait to find Hazel so I can be rid of him.

Tomorrow, he says he’ll finally bring to see Hazel, and I hope for his sake he’s really going to show me Hazel this time and not another chimp.