All the King's Men (18 page)

MacMurfee was in, and Willie went back to Mason City and practiced law. He must have dragged on for a year or so, handling chicken-stealing cases and stray-hog cases and cutting scrapes (which are part of the entertainment at Saturday-night square dances in Mason County). Then a gang of workmen got hurt when some of the rig collapsed on a bridge the state was building over the Ackamulgee River, and two or three got killed. A lot of the workmen were from Mason County and they got Willie for their lawyer. He got all over the papers for that. And he won the case. Then they struck oil just west of mason County over in Ackamulgee County, and in that section Willie got mixed up in the litigation between an oil company and some independent leaseholders. Willie’s side won, and he saw folding money for the first time in his life. He saw quite a lot of it.

During all that time I didn’t see Willie. I didn’t see him again until he announced in the Democratic primary in 1930. But it wasn’t a primary. It was hell among the yearlings and the Charge of the Light Brigade and Saturday night in the back room of Casey’s saloon rolled into one, and when the smoke cleared away not a picture still hung on the walls. And there wasn’t any Democratic party. There was just Willie, with his hair in his eyes and his shirt sticking to his stomach with sweat. And he had a meat ax in his hand and was screaming for blood. In the background of the picture, under a purplish tumbled sky flecked with sinister white like driven foam, flanking Willie, one on each side, were two figures, Sadie Burke and a tallish, stooped, slow-spoken man with a sad, tanned face and what they call the eyes of a dreamer. The man was Hugh Miller, Harvard Law School, Lafayette Escadrille, Croix de Guerre, clean hands, pure heart, and no political past. He was a fellow who had sat still for years, and then somebody (Willie Stark) handed him a baseball bat and he felt his fingers close on the tape. He was a man and was Attorney General. And Sadie Burke was just Sadie Burke.

Over the brow of the hill, there were, of course, some other people. There were, for instance, certain gentlemen who had once been devoted to Joe Harrison, but who, when they discovered that there wasn’t going to be any more Joe Harrison politically speaking, had had to hunt up a new friend. The new friend happened to be Willie. He was the only place for them to go. They figured they would sign on with Willie and grow up with the country. Willie signed them on, all right, and as a result got quiet a few votes not of the wool-hat and cocklebur variety. After a while, Willie even signed on Tiny Duffy, who became Highway Commissioner and, later Lieutenant Governor in Willie’s last term. I used to wonder why Willie kept him around. Sometimes I used to ask the Boss, “What do you keep that lunk-head for?” Sometimes he would just laugh and say nothing. Sometimes he would say, “Hell, somebody’s got to be Lieutenant Governor, and they all look alike.” But once he said: “I keep him because he reminds me of something.”

“What?”

“Something I don’t ever want to forget,” he said.

“What’s that?”

“That when they come to you sweet talking you better not listen to anything they say. I don’t aim to forget that.”

So that was it. Tiny was the fellow who had come in a big automobile and had talked sweet to Willie back when Willie was a little country lawyer.

But was that it? Or rather, was that all of it? I figured there was another reason. The Boss must have taken a kind pride in the fact that he could make Tiny Duffy a success, He had busted Tiny Duffy and then he had picked up the pieces and put him back together again as his own creation. He must have taken a lot of pleasure in looking at Tiny’s glittering rig and diamond ring, and thinking that it was all hollow, that it was a sham, that if he should crook his little finger Tiny Duffy would disappear like a whiff of smoke. In a way, the very success which the Boss laid on Tiny was his revenge on Tiny, for every time the Boss put his meditative, sleepy, distant gaze on Tiny, Tiny would know, with a cold clutch at his fat heart, that if the Boss should crook a finger there wouldn’t be anything but the whiff of smoke. In a way, Tiny’s success was a final index of the Boss’s own success.

But was that it? In the end, I decided that there was one more reason behind the other reasons. This: Tiny Duffy became, in a crazy kind of way, the other self of Willie Stark, and all the contempt and insult which Willie Stark was to heap on Tiny Duffy was nothing but what one self of Willie Stark did to the other self because of a blind, in ward necessity. But I came to that conclusion only at the very end, a long time afterwards.

But now Willie had just become Governor and nobody knew what would come afterwards.

And meanwhile–while the campaign was on–I was out of a job.

My job had been political reporting for the
Chronicle
_. I had a column, too. I was a pundit.

One day Jim Madison had me in to stand on the Kelly-green carpet which surrounded his desk like a pasture. “Jack,” he said, “you know what the
Chronicle
_ line is in this election.”

“Sure,” I replied, “it wants to elect Sam MacMurfee again because of his brilliant record as an administrator and his high integrity as a statesman.”

He grinned a little sourly and said, “It wants to elect Sam MacMurfee.”

“I’m sorry I forgot we were in the bosom of the family. I thought I was writing my column.”

The grin went off his face. He played with a pencil on his desk. “It’s about the column I wanted to see you,” he said.

“O. K.,” I replied.

“Can’t you put some more steam in it? This is an election and not a meeting of the Epworth League.”

“It is an election, all right.”

“Can’t you give it a little more?”

“When what you got to work with is Sam MacMurfee,” I said, “you haven’t even got a sow’s ear to make a silk purse out of. I’m doing what I can.”

He brooded over that for a minute. Then he began, “Now just because the Stark happens to be a friend of yours, you–”

“He’s no friend of mine,” I snapped. “I didn’t even see him between last election and this one. Personally, I don’t care who is ever Governor of this state or how big a son-of-a-bitch he is. But I am a hired hand, and I do my best to suppress in my column my burning conviction that Sam MacMurfee is one of the fanciest sons-of–”

“You know the
Chronicle
_ line,” Jim Madison said heavily and studied the spit-slick, chewed butt of his cigar.

It was a hot day, and the breeze from the electric fan was on Jim Madison and not on me, and there was a little thread of acid, yellow-feeling saliva down in my throat, the kind you get when your stomach is sour, and my head felt like a dried gourd with a couple of seeds rattling around in it. So I looked at Jim Madison, and said, “All right.”

“What do you mean?” he asked.

“I mean in the way I said it,” I said, and started for the door.

“Look here, Jack, I’m–” he began, and laid the cigar butt down on the ash tray.

“I know,” I said, “you got a wife and kids and your boy’s in Princeton.”

I said that and kept on walking.

There was a water cooler outside the door, in the hall, and I stopped by it and took one of the little cone-shaped cups and drank about ten of them full of ice water to wash the yellow thing out of my throat. Then I stood there in the hall with my stomach full of the water like a cold bulb inside me.

I could sleep late, and then wake up and not move, just watching the hot, melted-butter-colored sunlight pour through the cracks in the shade, for my hotel was not the best in town and my room was not the best in the hotel. As my chest rose and fell with my breathing, the sheet would stick damply to my bare hide, for that is the way you sleep there in the summertime. I could hear the streetcars and the blatting of automobile horns off yonder, not too loud but variegated and unremitting, a kind of coarse, hoarse tweedy mixture of sounds to your nerve ends, and occasionally the clatter of dishes, for my room gave on the kitchen area. And now and then a nigger would sing a snatch down there.

I could lie there as long as I wanted, and let all the pictures of things a man might want to run through my head, coffee, a girl, money, a drink, white sand and blue water, and let them all slide off, one after another, like a deck of cards slewing slowly off your hand. Maybe the things you want are like cards. You don’t want them for themselves, really, though you think you do. You don’t want a card because you want a card, but because in a perfectly arbitrary system of rules and values and in a special combination of which you already hold a part the card has meaning. But suppose you aren’t sitting in a game. Then, even if you do know the rules, a card doesn’t mean a thing. They all look alike.

So I could lie there, though I knew that I would get up after a spell–not deciding to get up but just all at once finding myself standing in the middle of the floor just as later on I would find myself, with a mild shock of recognition, taking coffee, changing a bill, handling a girl, drawing on a drink, floating in the water. Like an amnesia case playing solitaire in a hospital. I would get up and deal myself a hand, all right. Later on. But for the present I would lie there and know I didn’t have to get up, and feel the holy emptiness and blessed fatigue of a saint after the dark night of the soul. For God and Nothing have a lot in common. You look either one of Them straight in the eye for a second and the immediate effect on the human constitution is the same.

Lots of nights I would go the bed early, too. Sometimes sleep gets to be a serious and complete thing. You stop going to sleep in order that you may be able to get up, but get up in order that you may be able to go back to sleep. You get so during the day you catch yourself suddenly standing still and waiting and listening. You are like a little boy at the railroad station, ready to go away on the train, which hasn’t come yet. You look way up the track, but can’t see the little patch of black smoke yet. You fidget around, but all at once you stop in the middle of you fidgeting, and listen. You can’t hear it yet. Then you go and kneel down in your Sunday clothes in the cinders, for which your mother is going to snatch you bald-headed, and put your ear to the rail and listen for the first soundless rustle which will come in the rail long before the little black patch begins to grow on the sky. You get so you listen for night, long before it comes over the horizon, and long, long before it comes charging and stewing and thundering to you like a big black locomotive and the black cars grind to a momentary stop and the porter with the black, shining face helps you up the steps, and says, “Yassuh, little boss, yassuh.”

You don’t dream in that kind of sleep, but you are aware of it every minute you are asleep, as though were having a long dream of sleep itself, and in that sleep you were dreaming of sleep, sleeping and dreaming of sleep infinitely inward into the center.

That was the way it was for a while after I didn’t have any job. It wasn’t new. It had been like that before, twice before. I had even given a name to it–The Great Sleep. The time before I quit the University, just a few months before I was supposed to finish my dissertation for the Ph. D. in American History. It was almost finished, and they said it was O. K. The sheets of typed-on paper were stacked up on the table by the typewriter. The boxes f cards were there. I would get up late in the morning and see them there, the top sheet of paper beginning to curl up around the paperweight. And I’d see them there when I came in after supper to go to bed. Finally, one morning I got up late and went out the door and didn’t come back and left them there. And the other time the Great Sleep had come was the time before I walked out the apartment and Lois started to get the divorce.

But this time there wasn’t any American History and there wasn’t any Lois. But there was the Great Sleep.

When I did get up I just piddled around. I went to movies and hung around speakeasies and went swimming or went out to the country club and lay on the grass and watched a couple of hot bastards swing rackets at a little white ball that flashed in the sun. Or perhaps one of the players would be a girl and the short white skirt would swirl and whip about her brown thighs, and flash in the sun, too.

A few times I went to see Adam Stanton at his apartment, the fellow I had grown up with at Burden’s Landing. He was a hot-shot surgeon now, with more folks screaming for him to cut on them than he had time to cut on, and a professor at the University Medical School, and busy grinding out the papers he published in the scientific journals or took off to read at meetings in New York and Baltimore and London. He wasn’t married. He didn’t have time, he said. He didn’t have time for anything. But he’d take a little time to let me sit in a shabby overstuffed chair in his shabby apartment, where papers were stacked around and the colored girl had streaked the dust on the furniture. I used to wonder why he lived the way he did when he must have been having quite a handsome take, but I finally got it through my head that he didn’t ask anything from a lot of the folks he cut on. He had the name of a softy in the trade. And after he got money, people took him for it if they had a story that would halfway wash. The only thing in his apartment that was worth a plugged nickel was the piano, and it was the best money could buy.

Most of the time when I was at Adam’s apartment he would be at the piano. I have heard it said that he was pretty good, but I wouldn’t know. But I didn’t mind listening, not if the chair was good and comfortable. Adam must have heard me say one time or another that music didn’t mean much to me, but I suppose that he’d forgotten it or couldn’t believe that it was true for anybody. Anyway, he would turn his head at me and say, “This–now listen to this–my God, this now is sure a–” But his voice would trail off and the words which were going to tell what the thing sure and eternally was in its blessed truth would not ever get said. He would just leave the sentence hanging and twisting slowly in the air like a piece of frayed rope, and would look at me out of his clear, deep-set, ice-water-blue, abstract eyes–the kind of eyes and the kind of look your conscience has about three o’clock in the morning–and then, unlike your conscience, he would begin to smile, not much, just a sort of tentative, almost apologetic smile that took the curse off that straight mouth and square jaw, and seemed to say, “Hell, I can’t help it if I look at you that way, buddy, it’s just the way I look at things.” Then the smile would be gone, and he would turn his face to the piano and set his hands to the keys.