All the King's Men (3 page)

His voice just stopped. It didn’t trail off like a voice coming to a stop. One second it was there, going on, word by word, in the stillness which filled the square and the crowd in front of the courthouse and was stiller for the grinding of the July flies in the two catalpas rising above the heads of the people who had crowded up on the patch of grass roots. The voice was going there, word by word, then suddenly it was not there. There was only the sound of the July flies, which seems to be inside your head as though it were the grind and whir of the springs and cogs which are you and which will not stop no matter what you say until they are good and ready.

He stood there a half minute, not saying a word, and not moving. He didn’t even seem to be noticing the crowd down there. Then he seemed, all at once, to discover them, and grinned. “So he comes back,” he said, grinning now. “When he gets half a day off. And he says, Hello, folks, how you making it? And that’s what I’m saying.”

That’s what he said. He looked down, grinning, and his head turned as his eyes went down in the crowd, and seemed to stop a face there, and then go on to stop on another face.

Then he started walking down the steps, as if he had just come out of that dusky-dark hallway beyond the big open doors behind him and was walking down the steps by himself, with nobody there in front of him and no eyes on him. He came straight down the steps toward where his gang was standing, Lucy Stark and the rest of us, and nodded at us as though he were simply passing us on the street and didn’t know us any too well anyway, and kept right on walking, straight into the crowd as though the crowd weren’t there. The people fell back a little to make a passage for him, with their eyes looking right at him, and the rest of us in his gang followed behind him, and the crowd closed up behind us.

People were clapping now, and yelling. Somebody kept yelling, “Hi, Willie!”

The Boss walked straight across the street, through the crowd, and got into the Cadillac and sat down. We got in with him and the photographer and the others went back to their car. Sugar-Boy started up and nosed out into the street. People didn’t get out of the way very fast. They couldn’t, they were so jammed in. When we nosed out into the crowd, the faces were right there outside the car, not more that a foot or so away. The faces looked right in at us. But they were out there and we were inside now. The eyes in the red, slick-skinned long faces, or the brown, crinkled faces, looked in at us.

Sugar-Boy kept pecking at his horn. The words were piling up inside him. His lips started to work. I could see his face in the driver’s mirror, and the lips were working. “The b-b-b-b-as-tuds,” he said, and the spit flew.

The Boss Had sunk in on himself now.

“The b-b-b-b-as-tuds,” Sugar-Boy said, and pecked at his horn, but we were easing out of the square now to a side street where there weren’t any people. We were doing forty by the time we passed the brick schoolhouse on the outskirts of town. Seeing the schoolhouse made me remember how I first met Willie, about fourteen years before, back in 1922, when he wasn’t anything but the County Treasurer of Mason County and had come down to the city to see about the bound issue to build that schoolhouse. Then I remembered how I had met him, in the back room of Slade’s pool hall, where Slade sold the needle beer, and we were sitting at one of those little marble-topped tables with wirework legs, the kind they used to have in drugstores when you were a boy and took your high-school sweeties down on Saturday night to get that chocolate banana split and rub knees under the table and the wirework would always get in the way.

There were four of us. There was Tiny Duffy, who was almost as big back then as he was to get to be. He didn’t need any sign to let you know what he was. If the wind was right, you knew he was a city-hall slob long before you could see the whites of his eyes. He had the belly and he sweated through his shirt just above the belt buckle, and he had the face, which was creamed and curded like a cow patty in a spring pasture, only it was the color of biscuit dough, and in the middle was his grin with the gold teeth. He was Tax assessor, and he wore a flat hard straw on the back of his head. There was a striped band on the hat.

Then there was Alex Michel, who was a country boy from up in Mason County but who was learning fast. He had learned fast enough to get to be a deputy sheriff. But he wasn’t that long. He wasn’t anything, for he got in the gut by a coke-frisky piano player in a cribhouse where he had gone to take out a little in trade on his protection account. Alex was, as I have said, from up in Mason County.

Duffy and I had been in the back room of Slade’s place waiting for Alex, with whom I had the hope of transacting a little business. I was a newspaperman and Alex knew something I wanted to know. Duffy had called him in, for Duffy was a friend of mine. At least, he knew that I worked for the
Chronicle
_, which at that time was supporting the Joe Harrison outfit. Joe Harrison was Governor then. And Duffy was one of Joe Harrison’ boys.

So I was sitting in the back room of Slade’s place, one hot morning in June or July, back in 1922, waiting for Alex Michel to turn up and listening to the silence in the back room of Slade’s place. A funeral parlor at midnight is ear-splitting compared to the effect you get in the middle of the morning in the back room of a place like Slade’s if you are the first man there. You sit there and think how cozy it was last night, with the effluvium of brotherly bodies and the haw-haw of camaraderie, and you look at the floor where now there are little parallel trails of damp sawdust the old broom left this morning when the unenthusiastic old Negro man cleaned up, and the general impression is that you are alone with the Alone and it is his move. So I sat there in silence (Duffy was never talkative in the morning before he had worried down two or three drinks), and listened to my tissues break down and the beads of perspiration explode delicately out of the ducts embedded in the ample flesh of my companion.

Alex came in with a fellow with him, and I knew my little conversation was not promising. My mission was of some delicacy, not fit for the ear of a stranger. I figured that might be the reason Alex had his friend in tow. Maybe it was, foe Alex was cagey in an amateurish sort of way. In any case, he had the Boss with him.

Only it was not the Boss. Not to the crude eye of the
homme sensuel
_. Metaphysically it was the Boss, but how was I to know? Fate come walking through the door, and it is five feet eleven inches tall and heavyish in the chest and shortish in the leg and is wearing a seven-fifty seersucker suit which is too long in the pants so the cuffs crumple down over the high black shoes, which could do with a polishing, and a stiff high collar like a Sunday-school superintendent and a blue-stripe tie which you know his wife gave him last Christmas and which he has kept in tissue paper with the holly card (“Merry Xmas to my Darling Willie from your Loving Wife”) until he got ready to go up the city, and a gray felt hat with the sweat stains showing through the band. It comes in just like that, and how are you to know? It comes in, trailing behind Alex Michel, who is, or was before the piano player got him, six-feet-two of beautifully articulated bone and gristle with a hard, bony, baked-looking face and two little quick brown eyes which don’t belong above that classic torso and in that face and which keep fidgeting around like a brace of Mexican jumping beans. So Fate trails modestly along behind Alex Michel, who approaches the table with an air of command which would deceive no one.

Alex shook my hand and said, “Hi, pal,” and slapped me on the shoulder with a palm that was tough enough to crack a black walnut, and paid proper obeisance to Mr. Duffy, who extended a hand without rising; and then, as a sort of afterthought, Alex jerked a thumb toward his trailing companion and said, “This is Willie Stark, gents. From up home at Mason City. Me and Willie was in school together. Yeah, and Willie, and he was a bookworm, he was teacher’s pet. Wuzn’t you, Willie?” And Alex whickered like a stallion in full appreciation of his own delicious humor and nudged the teacher’s pet in the ribs. Then, controlling himself, he added, “And he’s still teacher’s pet, ain’t you, Willie, ain’t you?”

And he turned to Duffy and me, and explained, before mirth again took him and Slade’s back room again resounded with the cheerful note of the breeding paddock, “Willie–Willie–he married a school-teacher!”

That idea seemed monstrously funny to Alex. Meanwhile, Willie, unable to complete the amenities of the situation, bowed to the blast and stood there with the old gray felt hat in his hand, with the sweat showing around the band outside where it had soaked through. Willie’s large face, above the stiff country collar, didn’t show a thing.

“Yeah–yeah–he married a school-teacher!” Alex reaffirmed with undiminished relish.

“Well,” said Mr. Duffy, whose experience and tact were equal to any situation, “they tells me school-teachers are made with it in the same place.” Mr. Duffy lifted his lips to expose the gold, but made no sound, for, Mr. Duffy being a man of the world and serene in confidence, his style was to put forth his sally and let it make its way on its intrinsic worth and to leave the applause to the public.

Alex provided the applause in good measure. I contributed only a grin which felt sickly on my face, and Willie was blank.

“Gawd!” Alex managed, when breath had returned to him, “Gawd, Mr. Duffy, you are a card! You shore-Gawd are.” And again he vigorously nudged the teacher’s pet in the ribs to spur his laggard humor. When he got no result, he nudged again, and demanded flatly of his ward: “Now ain’t Mr. Duffy a card?”

“Yes, Willie replied, looking at Mr. Duffy innocently, judicially, dispassionately. “Yes,” he said, “Mr. Duffy is a card.” And as the admission was made, albeit belatedly and with some ambiguity of inflection, the slight cloud which had gathered upon Mr. Duffy’s brow was dissipated with no trace of rancor left behind.

Willie took advantage of the momentary lull to wind up the ritual of introduction which Alex’s high spirits had interrupted. He transferred his old gray hat to his left hand and took the two steps necessary to bring him to the table, and gravely extended his hand to me. So much water has flowed beneath the bridges since Alex has jerked his thumb toward the stranger from the country and said. “This is Willie Stark,” that I had almost forgotten I hadn’t known Willie all my life. So I didn’t catch on right away that he was out to shake hands. I must have looked at his outstretched hand inquiringly and then given him a blank look, and he just showed me his dead pan–it was just another pan, at first glance anyway–and kept on holding his hand out. Then I came to, and not to be undone in courtesy of the old school, I hitched my chair back from the table and almost stood all the way up, and groped for his hand. It was a pretty good-sized hand. When you first took it you figured it was on the soft side, and the palm a little too moist–which is something, however, you don’t hold against a man in certain latitudes–then you discovered it has a solid substructure. It was like the hand of a farm boy who has not too recently given up the plow for a job in the crossroad store. Willie’s hand gave mine three decorous pump-handle motions, and he said, “Glad to meetcha, Mr. Burden,” like something he had memorized, and then, I could have sworn, he gave me a wink. Then looking into that dead pan, I wasn’t sure. About twelve years later, at a time when the problem of Willie’s personality more imperiously occupied my rare hours of speculation, I asked him, “Boss, do you remember the time we first got acquainted in the back room of Slade’s joint?”

He said he did, which wasn’t remarkable, for he was like the circus elephant, he never forgot anything, the fellow who gave him the peanut or the fellow who put snuff in his trunk.

“You remember when we shook hands?” I asked him.

“Yeah,” he said “Well, Boss,” I demanded, “did you or didn’t you wink at me?”

“Boy–” he said and toyed with his glass of scotch and soda and dug the heel of one of his unpolished, thirty-dollar, chastely designed bench-made shoes into the best bed-spread the St. Regis Hotel could afford. “Boy,” he said, and smiled at me paternally over his glass, “that is a mystery.”

“Don’t you remember?” I said.

“Sure,” he said, “I remember.”

“Well,” I demanded “Suppose I just had something in my eye?” he said.

“Well, damn it, you just had something in your eye ten.”

“Suppose I didn’t have anything in my eye?”

“Then maybe you winked because you figured you and me had some views in common about the tone of the gathering.”

“Maybe,” he said. “It ain’t any secret that my old schoolmate Alex was a heel. And it ain’t any secret that Tiny Duffy is as sebaceous a fat-ass as ever made the spring groan in a swivel chair.”

“He is an s. o. b.,” I affirmed.

“He is,” the Boss agreed cheerfully, “but he is a useful citizen. If you know what to do with him.”

“Yeah,” I said, “and I suppose you think you know what to do with him. You made him Lieutenant Governor.” (For that was in the Boss’s last term when Tiny was his understudy.)

“Sure,” the Boss nodded, “somebody’s got to be Lieutenant Governor.”

“Yeah,” I said, “Tiny Duffy.”

“Sure,” he said, “Tiny Duffy. The beauty about Tiny is that nobody can trust him and you know it. You get somebody somebody can trust maybe, and you got to sit up nights worrying whether you are the somebody. You get Tiny, and you can get a night’s sleep. All you got to do is keep the albumen scared out of his urine.”

“Boss, did you wink at me that time back at Slade’s?”

“Boy,” he said, “if I was to tell you, then you wouldn’t have anything to think about.”

So I never did know.

But I did see Willie shake hands that morning with Tiny Duffy and fail to wink at him. He just stood there in front of Mr. Duffy, and when the great man, not rising, finally extended his hand with the reserved air of the Pope offering his toe to the kiss of a Campbellite, Willie took it and gave it the three pumps which seemed to be regulation up in Mason City.