All the King's Men (8 page)

“You will go down in history,” I said.

“Boy, wouldn’t I!” And he started to laugh. He turned round to watch the lit-up road, and kept on laughing.

Then we hit a little town and beyond it a filling station and lunch stand. Sugar-Boy got some gas and brought the Boss and me a couple of cokes. Then we went on.

The Boss didn’t say another word till we hit Burden’s Landing. All he said then was, “Jack, you tell Sugar-Boy how to find the house. It’s your pals live down here.”

Yes, my pals lived down there. Or had lived down there. Adam and Anne Stanton had lived down there, in the white house where their widowed father, the Governor, lived. They had been my friends, Anne and Adam. Adam and I had fished and sailed all over that end of the Gulf of Mexico, and Anne, who was big-eyed and quiet-faced and thin, had been with us, close and never saying a word. And Adam and I had hunted and camped all over the country, and Anne had been there, a thin-legged little girl about four years younger than we were. And we had sat by the fire in the Stanton house–or in my house–and had played with toys or read books while Anne sat there. Then after a long time Anne wasn’t a little girl any more. She was a big girl and I was so much in love with her that I lived in a dream. In that dream my heart seemed to be ready to burst, for it seemed that the whole world was inside it swelling to get out and the world. But that summer came to an end. Time passed and nothing happened that we had felt so certain at one time would happen. So now Anne was an old maid living in the city, and even if she did look pretty good yet and wore clothes that didn’t hurt her any, her laugh was getting brittle and there was a drawn look on her face as though she were trying to remember something. What was Anne trying to remember? Well, I didn’t have to try to remember. I could remember but I didn’t want to remember. If the human race didn’t remember anything it would be perfectly happy. I was student of history once in a university and if I learned anything from studying history that was what I learned. Or to be more exact, that was what I thought I had learned.

We would go down the Row–the line of houses facing the bay–and that was the place where all my pals had been. Anne, who was an old maid, or damned near it. Adam, who was a famous surgeon and who was nice to me but didn’t go fishing with me any more. And Judge Irwin, who lived in the last house, and who had been a friend of my family and who used to take me hunting with him and taught me to shoot and taught me to ride and read history to me from leather-bound books in the big study in his house. After Ellis Burden went away he was more of a father to me than those men who had married my mother and come to live in Ellis Burden’s house. And the Judge was a man.

So I told Sugar-Boy how to get through town and to the Row where all my pals lived or had lived. We pulled through the town, where the lights were out except for the bulbs hanging from the telephone poles, and on out the Bay Road where the houses were bone-white back among the magnolias and live oaks.

At night you pass through a little town where you once lived, and you expect to see yourself wearing knee pants, standing all alone on the street corner under the hanging bulbs, where the bugs bang on the tin reflectors and splatter to the pavement to lie stunned. You expect to see that boy standing there under the street lamp, out too late, and you feel like telling he ought to go on home to bed or there will be hell to pay. But maybe you are home in bed and sound asleep and not dreaming and nothing has ever happened that seem to have happened. But, then, who the hell is this in the back seat of the big black Cadillac that comes ghosting through the town? Why, this is Jack Burden. Don’t you remember little Jack Burden? He used to go out in his boat in the afternoon on the bay to fish, and come home and eat his supper and kiss his beautiful mother good night and say his prayers and go to bed at nine-thirty. Oh, you mean old Ellis Burden’s boy? Yeah, and that woman he married out of Texas–or was it Arkansas?–that big-eyed thin-faced woman who lives up there in that old Burden place now with that man she got herself. What ever happened to Ellis Burden? Hell, I don’t know, nobody around here had any word going on years. He was a queer ‘un. Damn if he wasn’t queer, going off and leaving a real looker like that woman out of Arkansas. Maybe he couldn’t give her what she craved. Well, he give her that boy, that Jack Burden. Yeah.

You come into the town at night and there are the voices.

We had got to the end of the Row, and I saw the house bone-white back among the dark oak boughs.

“Here it is,” I said.

“Park out here,” the Boss said. And then to me, “There’s a light. The bugger ain’t in bed. You go on and knock on the door and tell him I want to see him.”

“Suppose he won’t open up?”

“He will,” the Boss said. “But if he won’t you make him. What the hell do I pay you for?”

I got out of the car and went in the gate and started up the shell walk under the black trees. Then I heard the Boss coming after me. We went up the walk, with him just behind me, and up the gallery steps.

The Boss stood to one side, and I pulled open the screen and knocked on the door. I knocked again; then looking in through the glass by the door I saw a door open off the hall–where the library was, I remembered–then a side light come on in the hall. He was coming to the door. I could see him through the glass while he fumbled with the lock.

“Yes?” he asked.

“Good evening, Judge,” I said.

He stood there blinking into the dark outside, trying to make out my face.

“It’s Jack Burden,” I said.

“Well, well, Jack–well I’ll be jiggered!” And he put out his hand. “Come in.” He even looked glad to see me.

I shook hands and stepped inside, where the mirrors in the peeling gold frames glimmered on the walls in the rays of the not bright side light, and the glass of the big hurricane lamps glimmered on the marble-top stands.

“What can I do for you, Jack?” he asked me, and gave me a look out of his yellow eyes. They hadn’t changed much, even if the rest of him had.

“Well,” I began, and didn’t know how I was going to end, “I just wanted to see if you were up and could talk to–”

“Sure, Jack, come on in. You aren’t in any trouble, son? Let me shut the door first, and–”

He turned to shut the door, and if his ticker hadn’t been in good shape for all his near three scores and ten he’d have dropped dead. For the Boss was standing there in the door. He hadn’t made a sound.

As it was, the Judge didn’t drop dead. And his face didn’t show a thing. But I felt him stiffen. You turn to shut a door some night and find somebody standing there out of the dark, and you’ll take a jump, too.

“No,” the Boss said, easy and grinning, taking his hat off his head and stepping inside just as though he’d been invited, which he hadn’t been, “no, Jack isn’t in any trouble. Not that I know of. Nor me either.”

The Judge was looking at me now. “I beg your pardon,” he said to me, in a voice he knew how to make cold and rasping like an old phonograph needle scraping on an old record, “I had forgotten for the moment how well your needs are provided for.”

“Oh, Jack’s making out,” the Boss said.

“And you, sir–” the Judge turned on the Boss, and slanted his yellow eyes down on him–for he was a half a head taller–and I could see the jaw muscles twitch and knot under the folds of red-rusty and seamed skin on his long jaw, “do you wish to say something to me?”

“Well, I don’t know as I do,” the Boss remarked offhand. “Not at the moment.”

“Well,” the Judge said, “in that case–”

“Oh, something might develop,” the Boss broke in. “You never can tell. If we get the weight off our arches.”

“In that case,” the Judge resumed, and it was an old needle and an old record and it was scraping like a file on cold tin and nothing human, “I may say that I was about to retire.”

“Oh, it’s early yet,” the Boss said, and took his time giving Judge Irwin the once-over from head to toe. The Judge was wearing an old-fashioned velvet smoking jacket and tuxedo pants and a boiled shirt, but he had taken off his collar and tie and the collar button was shining just under the big old red Adam’s apple. “Yeah,” the Boss went on, after he’d finished the once-over, “and you’ll sleep better if you wait before going to bed and give that fine dinner you had a chance to digest.”

And he just began walking down the hall toward the door where the light was, the door to the library.

Judge Irwin looked at the Boss’s back as the Boss just walked away, the Palm Beach coat all crumpled up where it had crawled on the Boss’s shoulders and the old sweat-stains of the afternoon showing dark at the armpits. The Judge’s yellow eyes were near to popping out of his face and the blood was up in his face till it was the color of calf’s liver in a butcher shop. Then he began to walk down the hall after the Boss.

I followed the pair of them.

The Boss was already sitting in a big old scuffed leather easy chair when I went in. I stood there against the wall, under the bookshelves that went up to the ceiling, full of old leather books, a lot of them law books, that got lost in the shadows up above and made the room smell musty like old cheese. Well, the room hadn’t changed any. I could remember that smell from the long afternoons I had spent in that room, reading by myself or hearing the Judge’s voice reading to me, while a log crackled on the hearth and the clock in the corner, a big grandfather’s clock in the corner, a big grandfather’s clock, offered us the slow, small, individual pellets of time. It was the same room. There were the big steel engravings on the wall–by Piranesi, in the heavy, scrollwork frames, the Tiber, the Colosseum, some ruined temple. And the riding crops on the mantel and on the desk, and the silver cups the Judge’s dogs had won in the field trials and the Judge had won shooting. The gun rack, over in the shadow by the door, was out of the light from the big brass reading on the desk, but I knew every gun in it, and knew the gun’s feel.

The Judge didn’t sit down. He stood in the middle of the floor and looked down at the Boss, who had his legs stuck out on the red carpet. And the Judge didn’t say anything. Something was going on inside his head. You knew that if he had a little glass window in the side of that tall skull, where the one-time thick, dark-red, mane-like hair was thinned out now and faded, you could see inside and see the wheels and springs and cogs and ratchets working away and shining like a beautiful lot of well-kept mechanism. But maybe somebody had pushed the wrong button. Maybe it was just going to run on and on till something cracked or the spring ran down, and nothing was going to happen.

But the Boss said something. He jerked his head sideways to indicate the silver tray with the bottle and the pitcher of water and a silver bowl and two used glasses and three or four clean ones which sat on the desk, and said, “Judge, I trust you don’t mind Jack pouring me a slug? You know Southern hospitality.”

Judge Irwin didn’t answer him. He turned to me, and I said, “I didn’t realize, Jack, that your duties included those of a body servant, but, of course, if I am mistaken–”

I could have slapped his face. I could have slapped that God-damned handsome, eagle-beaked, strong-boned, rubiginous-hided, high old face, in which the eyes weren’t old but were hard and bright without any depth to them and were an insult to look into. And the Boss laughed, and I could have slapped his God-damned face. I could have walked right out and felt the two of them there, alone in that cheese-smelling room together till hell froze over, and just kept on walking. But I didn’t, and perhaps it was just as well, for maybe you cannot ever really walk away from the things you want most to walk away from.

“Oh, nuts,” the Boss said, and stopped laughing, and heaved himself up out of the leather chair, and made a pass at the bottle and sloshed out some whisky into a glass and poured in some water. Then he turned round, and grinning up to the Judge, stepped toward me and held out the glass. “Here, Jack,” he said, “have a drink.”

I can’t say that I took the drink. It got shoved into my hand, and I stood there holding it, not drinking it, and watched the Boss look up at the Judge Irwin and say, “Sometimes Jack pours me a drink, and sometimes I pour him a drink and–” he stepped toward the desk again–”sometimes I pour myself a drink.”

He poured the drink, added water, and looked again at the Judge, leering with a kind of comic cunning. “Whether I’m asked or not,” he said. And added, “There’s lots of things you never get, Judge, if you wait till you are asked. And I am an impatient man. I am a very impatient man, Judge. That is why I am not a gentleman, Judge.”

“Really?” replied the Judge. He stood in the middle of the floor and studied the scene beneath him.

From my spot by the wall, I looked at both of them.
To hell with them
_, I thought,
to hell with both of them
_. When they talked like that, it was to hell with both of them.

“Yeah,” the Boss was saying, “you’re a gent, and so you don’t ever get impatient. Not even for your likker. You aren’t even impatient for your drink right now and it’s likker your money paid for. But you’ll get a drink, Judge. I’m asking you to have one. Have a drink with me, Judge.”

Judge Irwin didn’t answer a word. He stood very erect in the middle of the floor.

“Aw, have a drink,” the Boss said, and laughed, and sat again in the big chair and stuck out his legs on the red carpet.

The Judge didn’t pour himself a drink. And he didn’t sit down.

The Boss looked up at him from the chair and said, “Judge, you happen to have an evening paper round here?”

The paper was lying over on another chair by the fireplace, with the Judge’s collar and tie on top of it, and his white jacket hung on the back of the chair. I saw the Judge’s eyes snap over there to it, and then back at the Boss.

“Yes,” the Judge said, “as a matter of fact, I have.”

“I haven’t had a chance to see one, rushing around the country today. Mind if I take a look?”

“Not in the slightest,” Judge Irwin said, and the sound was the file scraping on that cold tin again, “but perhaps I can relieve your curiosity on one point. The paper publishes my endorsement of Callahan for the Senate nomination. If that is of interest to you.”