“Yes’m, the office is open, but I reckon yo’ won’t find any hands to move yo’ car,” was the accurate prediction of the official to whom I applied. “Pretty nearly lunch time, yo’ know.”
So I waited, filling in time by answering the guarded questions the watchman put to me. I was almost as fascinating an object of attention to him as his Bull Durham, though I must admit that when there was a conflict between us, I never won, except once, when he asked where the car and I came from.
“Massachusetts?” Bull Durham lost.
A great idea struggled for expression. I could see him searching for the right, the inevitable word. I could see it born, as triumph and amusement played over his features. Then caution—should he spring it all at once or save it for a climax? Nonchalantly, as if such epigrams were likely to occur to him any time, he got it off.
“You’re a long ways from home, ain’t yo’?”
With the air of saying something equally witty, I replied, “I surely am.”
Like “When did you stop beating your wife,” his question was one of those which has all the repartee its own way. For six months, we were to hear it several times daily, but it always came as a shock, and as if hypnotized, we were never to alter our response. And it was so true! We were a long ways from home, further than we then realized. At times we seemed so long that we wondered if we should ever see home again. But we were never too far to meet some man, wittier than his fellows, who defined our location accurately.
After his diagnosis and my acceptance of it, further conversation became anticlimactic. The “hands” were still absent at lunch, so I followed their example, and returning at two, found them still at lunch. But at last the agent drifted in, and three or four interested and willing colored boys. Everybody was pleasant, nobody was hurried, we exchanged courtesies, and signed papers, and after we really got down to business, in a surprisingly few minutes the car was rolled across the street by five-man power, while I lolled behind the steering wheel like Cleopatra in her galley. At the doorway the agent halted me.
“Massachusetts car?” he asked.
“Yes, sir,” said I. Were there to be complications?