All the King's Men (56 page)

You can put your throttle to the floor and let the sixty-horse-power mystery whine like a wolfhound straining on leash.

I passed the man who was walking toward me, and his face whirled away like a scrap of paper in a gale or boyhood hopes. And I laughed out loud.

I saw the people walking in the plaza of little towns in the desert. I saw the waitress in the restaurant wave in feeble protest at the fly while the electric fan needled the air which was as thin and hot as the breath of a blast furnace. I saw the traveling salesman who stood at the hotel desk just ahead of me and said, “You call this a hotel, bud, and me wiring for a room and bath and you ain’t held it. It’s a wonder you got a room and bath in a burg like this.” I saw the sheepherder standing alone on an enormous mesa. I saw the Indian woman with eyes the color of blackstrap molasses looking at me over a pile of pottery decorated with the tribal symbols of life and fertility and eminently designed for the five-and-tencent-store trade. As I looked at all these people I felt great strength in my secret knowledge.

I remembered how once, long back when Willie Stark had been the dummy and the sap, at the time when he was Cousin Willie from the country and was running for governor the first time, I had gone over to the flea-bitten west part of the state to cover the barbecue and speaking at Upton. I had gone on the local, which had yawed and puffed for hours across the cotton fields and then across the sagebrush. At one little town where it stopped, I had looked out of the window and thought how the board or wire fences around the little board houses were inadequate to keep out the openness of the humped and sage-furred country which seemed ready to slide in and eat up the houses. I had though how the houses didn’t look as though they belonged there, improvised, flung down, ready to be abandoned, with the scraps of washing still on the line, for there wouldn’t be time to grab it off when the people finally realized they had to go and go quick. I had had that thought, but just as the train was pulling out, a woman had come to the back door of one of the nearest houses to fling out a pan of water. She flings the water out, then looks a moment at the train drawing away. She is going into the house to some secret which is there, some knowledge. And as the train pulled away, I had had the notion that I was the one running away and had better run fast for it was going to be dark soon. I had thought of that woman as having a secret knowledge, and had envied her. I had often envied people. People I had seen fleetingly, or some people I had known a long time, a man driving a long, straight furrow across a black field in April, or Adam Stanton. I had, at moments, envied the people who seemed to have a secret knowledge.

But now, as I whirled eastward, over desert, under the shadow of mountains, by mesas, across plateaus, and saw the people in that magnificent empty country, I did not think that I would ever have to envy anybody again, for I was sure that now I had the secret knowledge, and with knowledge you can face up to anything, for knowledge is power.

In a settlement named Don Jon, New Mexico, I talked to a man propped against the shady side of the filling station, enjoying the only patch of shade in a hundred miles due east. He was an old fellow, seventy-five if a day, with a face like sun-brittled leather and pale-blue eyes under the brim of a felt hat which had once been black. The only thing remarkable about him was the fact that while you looked into the sun-brittled leather of the face, which seemed as stiff and devitalized as the hide on a mummy’s jaw, you would suddenly see a twitch in the left cheek, up toward the pale-blue eye. You would think he was going to wink, but he wasn’t going to wink. The twitch was simply an independent phenomenon, unrelated to the face or to what was behind the face or to anything in the whole tissue of phenomena which is the world we are lost in. It was remarkable, in that face, the twitch which lived that little life all its own. I squatted by his side, where he sat on a bundle of rags from which the handle of a tin skillet protruded, and listened to him talk. But the words were not alive. What was alive was the twitch, of which he was no longer aware.

After my tank had been filled, I continued to watch that twitch, with glances stolen from the highway, as we sat side by side in the car and hurtled eastward. He was going east, too, going back. That was back in the days when the dust storms were blowing half the country away and folks headed west like the lemmings on a rampage. Only, the folks who got there lacked the fine ecstasy of the lemmings. They did not start swimming in teeming, obsessed hordes straight out to the middle of the blue Pacific. That would have been the logical thing for them to do, just start swimming, pa and ma, grandpa and grandma, and baby Rosebud with the running sore on her little chin, the whole kit and kaboodle of ‘em, flailing the water to a froth and heading out. But, no, they were not like the lemmings, and so they just sat down and starved slowly in California. But this old fellow didn’t. He was going back to north Arkansas to starve where he had come from. “Californy,” he said, “hit is jes lak the rest of the world, only it is more of hit.”

“Yeah,” I replied, “that is a fact.”

“You been thar?” he demanded.

I told him I had been there.

“You goen back home?” he asked I told him I was going home.

We rode across Texas to Shreveport, Louisiana, where he left me to try for north Arkansas. I did not ask him if he had learned the truth in California. His face had learned it anyway, and wore the final wisdom under the left eye. The face knew that the twitch was the live thing. Was all. But, having left that otherwise unremarkable man, it occurred to me, as I reflected upon the thing which made him remarkable, that if the twitch was all, what was it that could know that the twitch was all? Did the leg of the dead frog in the laboratory know that the twitch was all when you put the electric current through it? Did the man’s face know about the twitch, and how it was all? And if I was all twitch how did the twitch which was me know that the twitch was all? Ah, I decided, that is the mystery. That is the secret knowledge. That is what you have to go to California to have a mystic vision to find out. That the twitch can know that the twitch is all. Then, having found that out, in the mystic vision, you feel clean and free. You are at one with the Great Twitch.

So I kept on riding east, and after long enough I was home.

I got back, late at night, and went to bed. The next morning I turned up at the office, well rested and well shaved, and strolled in to say howdy-do to the Boss. I had a great desire to see him, to observe him closely and find if there was anything in his make-up which I had previously missed. I had to look at him very closely, for he was the man who had everything now, and I had nothing. Or rather, I corrected myself, he had everything, except the thing that I had, the great thing, the secret. So I corrected myself, and in much the mood of a priest who looks down with benign pity on the sweat and striving, I entered the Governor’s office, and walked past the receptionist and, with a perfunctory knock, into the inside.

There he was, and he hadn’t changed a bit.

“Hello, Jack,” he said, and swiped the forelock out of his eyes and swung his feet off the desk and came toward me, putting out his hand, “where the hell you been, boy?”

“Out West,” I said, with elaborate casualness, taking the proffered hand. “Just drove out West. I got sort of fed up round here, so I took me a little vacation.”

“Have a good time?”

“I had a wonderful time,” I said.

“Fine,” he said.

“How you been making out?” I asked.

“Fine,” he said, “everything is fine.”

And so I had come home to the place where everything was fine. Everything was fine just the way it had been before I left, except that now I knew the secret. And my secret knowledge cut me off. If you have the secret, you cannot really communicate any more with somebody who has not got it, any more that you can really communicate with a bustling vitamin-crammed brat who is busy with his building blocks or a tin drum. And you can’t take somebody off to one side and tell him the secret. If you do that, then the fellow, or female, you are trying to tell the truth to thinks you are feeling sorry for yourself and asking for sympathy, when the real case is that you are not asking for sympathy but for congratulations. So I did my daily tasks and ate my daily bread and saw the old familiar faces, and smiled benignly like a priest.

It was June, and hot. Every night, except those nights when I went to sit in an air-conditioned movie, I went to my room after dinner and stripped buck-naked and lay on the bed, with an electric fan burring and burrowing away into my brain, and read a book until the time when I would become aware that the sound of the city had sunk off to almost nothing but the single hoot of a taxis far off or the single lost clang and grind of a streetcar, an owl car heading out. Then I would reach up and switch off the light and roll over and go to sleep with the fan still burring and burrowing.

I did see Adam a few times in June. He was more deeply involved than before in the work of the medical center, more grimly and icily driving himself. There was, of course, some letup in the work at the University with the end of term, but whatever relief was there, was more than made up for by an increase in his private practice and work at the clinic. He said he was glad to see me when I went to his apartment, and maybe he was, but he didn’t have much to say, and as I sat there he would seem to be drawing deeper and deeper into himself until I had the feeling that I was trying to talk to somebody down a well and had better holler if I wanted to be understood. The only time he perked up was one night when, after he had remarked on the fact that he was to perform an operation the next morning, I asked about the case.

It was a case of catatonic schizophrenia, he said.

“You mean he is a nut?” I asked Adam grinned and allowed that that wasn’t too far wrong.

“I didn’t know you cut on folks for being nutty,” I said. “I thought you just humored and gave them cold baths and let them make raffia baskets and got them to tell you their dreams.”

“No,” he said, “you can cut on them.” Then he added, almost apologetically, “A prefrontal lobectomy.”

“What’s that?”

“You remove a piece of the frontal lobe of the brain on each side,” he said.

I asked would the fellow live. He said you never could tell for sure, but if he did live he would be different.

I asked how did he mean, different.

“Oh, a different personality,” he replied.

“Like after you get converted and baptized?”

“That doesn’t give you a different personality,” he said. “When you get converted you still have the same personality. You merely exercise it in terms of a different set of values.”

“But this fellow will have a different personality?”

“Yes,” Adam said. “The way he is now he simply sits on a chair or lies in his back on a bed and stares into space. His brow is creased and furrowed. Occasionally he utters a low moan or an exclamation. In some such cases we discover the presence of delusions of persecution. But always the patient seems to experience a numbing, grinding misery. But after we are through with him he will be different. He will be relaxed and cheerful and friendly. He will smooth his brow. He will sleep well and eat well and will love to hang over the back fence and compliment the neighbors on their nasturtiums and cabbages. He will be perfectly happy.”

“If you can guarantee results like that,” I said, “you ought to do a land-office business. As soon as the news gets around.”

“You can’t ever guarantee anything,” Adam said.

“What happens if it doesn’t come out according to Hoyle?”

“Well,” he said, “there have been cases–not mine, thank God–where the patient didn’t come cheerfully extroverted but became completely and cheerfully amoral.”

“You mean he would throw the nurses down right on the floor in broad daylight?”

“About that,” Adam said. “If you’d let him. All the ordinary inhibitions disappeared.”

“Well, if your guy tomorrow comes out like that he will certainly be an asset to society.”

Adam grinned sourly, and said, “He won’t be any worse than a lot of other people who haven’t been cut on.”

“Can I see the cutting” I asked. I felt all of a sudden that I had to see it. I had never seen an operation. As a newspaperman, I had seen three hangings and one electrocution, but they are different. In a hanging you do not change a man’s personality. You just change the length of his neck and give him a quizzical expression, and in an electrocution you just cook some bouncing meat in a wholesale lot. But this operation was going to be more radical even than what happened to Saul on the road to Damascus. So I asked could I see the operation.

“Why?” Adam asked, studying my face.

I told him it was plain curiosity.

He said, all right, but it wouldn’t be pretty.

“It will be as pretty as a hanging, I guess,” I replied.

Then He started to tell me about the case. He drew me pictures and he got down books. He perked up considerably and almost talked my ear off. He was so interesting that I forgot to ask him a question which had flitted though my mind earlier in our conversation. He had said that in the case of a religious conversion the personality does not change, that it is merely exercised in terms of a different set of values. Well, I had meant to ask him how, if there was no change in personality, how did the person get a different set of values to exercise his personality in terms of? But it slipped my mind at the time.

Anyway, I saw the operation.

Adam got me rigged up so I could go right down in the pit with him. They brought in the patient and put him on the table. He was a hook-nosed, sour-faced, gaunt individual who reminded me vaguely of Andrew Jackson or a back-country evangelist despite the white turban on his head made out of sterile towels. But that turban was pushed pretty far back at a jaunty angle, for the front part of his head was exposed. It had been shaved. They put the mask on him and knocked him out. Then Adam took a scalpel and cut a neat little cut across the top of the head and down at each temple, and then just peeled the skin off the bone in a neat flap forward. He did a job that would have made a Comanche brave look like a tyro with a scalping knife. Meanwhile, they were sopping up the blood, which was considerable.