Tom walked quickly away. The little cooking fires burned in front of the tents and the shacks, and the light fell on the faces of ragged men and women, on crouched children. In a few tents the light of kerosene lamps shone through the canvas and placed shadows of people hugely on the cloth.
Tom walked up the dusty road and crossed the concrete highway to the little grocery store. He stood in front of the screen door and looked in. The proprietor, a little gray man with an unkempt mustache and watery eyes, leaned on the counter reading a newspaper. His thin arms were bare and he wore a long white apron. Heaped around and in back of him were mounds, pyramids, walls of canned goods. He looked up when Tom came in, and his eyes narrowed as though he aimed a shotgun.
“Good evening,” he said. “Run out of something?”
“Run out of my uncle,” said Tom. “Or he run out, or something.”
The gray man looked puzzled and worried at the same time. He touched the tip of his nose tenderly and waggled it around to stop an itch. “Seems like you people always lost somebody,” he said. “Ten times a day or more somebody comes in here an’ says, ’If you see a man named so an’ so, an’ looks like so an’ so, will you tell ’im we went up north?’ Somepin like that all the time.”
Tom laughed. “Well, if you see a young snot-nose name’ Connie, looks a little bit like a coyote, tell ’im to go to hell. We’ve went south. But he ain’t the fella I’m lookin’ for. Did a fella ’bout sixty years ol’, black pants, sort of grayish hair, come in here an’ get some whisky?”
The eyes of the gray man brightened. “Now he sure did. I never seen anything like it. He stood out front an’ he dropped his hat an’ stepped on it. Here, I got his hat here.” He brought the dusty broken hat from under the counter.
Tom took it from him. “That’s him, all right.”
“Well, sir, he got couple pints of whisky an’ he didn’ say a thing. He pulled the cork an’ tipped up the bottle. I ain’t got a license to drink here. I says, ’Look, you can’t drink here. You got to go outside.’ Well, sir! He jes’ stepped outside the door, an’ I bet he didn’t tilt up that pint more’n four times till it was empty. He throwed it away an’ he leaned in the door. Eyes kinda dull. He says, ’Thank you, sir,’ an’ he went on. I never seen no drinkin’ like that in my life.”
“Went on? Which way? I got to get him.”