All the King's Men (23 page)

There wasn’t a sound for half a minute. Mr. Patton’s granite visage seemed to lean toward me like a monument about to fall, and the satchel under Mr. Patton’s chin quivered like a tow sack full of kittens, and the sound of the Young Executive’s adenoids was plainly audible, and the Judge just sat, with his yellow eyes working over the crowd, and my mother’s hands turned in her lap. Then she said, “Why, Son. I didn’t know you–you felt that–that way!”

“Why–er–no,” Mr. Patton said, “I didn’t realize you–er–”

“I didn’t say I felt any way,” I said. “I just offered a proposition for the sake of argument.”

“Argument! Argument!” burst out Mr. Patton, himself again. “It doesn’t matter what kind of government this state’s had in the past. They never had this kind. Nobody ever tried to grab te whole damned state. Nobody ever–”

“It’s a very interesting proposition,” the Judge said, and sipped his brandy.

And they were at it again, all except my mother, whose hands kept turning slow in her lap, with the firelight exploding in the big diamond which never came from the Scholarly Attorney. They kept at it until it was time to do.

“Who is that Miss Dumode?” I asked my mother late the next afternoon, sitting in front of the fire.

“Mr. Orton’s sister’s child,” she said, “and she’ll inherit his money.”

“Well,” I said, “somebody ought to wait till she gets the dough and then marry her and drown her in the bathtub.”

“Don’t talk that way,” my mother was saying.

“Don’t worry,” I said. “I’d like to drown her but I don’t want her money. I’m not interested in money. If I wanted to I could reach out any day and knock off ten thousand. Twenty thousand. I–”

“Oh, Son–what Mr. Patton said–those people you’re with–Son, now don’t get mixed up in any graft, now–”

“Graft is what it calls it when the fellows do it who don’t know which fork to use.”

“It’s the same thing, Son–those people–”

“I don’t know what those people, as you call them, do. I’m very careful not to ever know what anybody anywhere does any time.”

“Now, Son, don’t you, please don’t–”

“Don’t what?”

“Don’t get mixed up in–in anything.”

“All I aid was I
could
_ reach out and knock off ten thousand. And not graft. Information. Information is money. But I told you I’m not interested in money. Not the slightest. Willie isn’t either.”

“Willie?” she asked.

“The Boss. The Boss isn’t interested in money.”

“What’s he interested in, the”

“He’s interested in Willie. Quite simply and directly. And when anybody is interested in himself quite simply and directly the way Willie is interested in Willie you call it genius. It’s only the half-baked people like Mr. Patton who are interested in money. Even the big boys who make a real lot of money aren’t interested in money. Henry Ford isn’t interested in money. He is interested in Henry Ford and therefore he is a genius.”

She reached over and took my hand, and spoke earnestly to me. “Don’t, Son, don’t talk that way,” she said.

“What way?”

“When you talk that way I don’t know what to think. I just don’t know.” And she looked imploringly at me, with the firelight striking across her cheek to make the hollow there hollower and hungrier. She laid her free hand on the hand of mine she held, and when a woman makes that kind of a sandwich out of one of your hands it is always a prelude to something. Which, in this case, was: “Why don’t you, Son–why don’t you–settle down–why don’t you marry some nice girl and–”

“I tried that,” I offered. “And if you tried to rig anything for me which that Dumonde you sure rang the lemons.”

She was looking at me with a growing, searching, discovering look from her too bright eyes, like somebody puzzling something out of distance. Then she said, “Son–Son, you were sort of funny last night–you didn’t enter into things–then the tone you took– “All right,” I said.

“You weren’t like yourself, like you used to be, you–”

“If I’m ever like I used to be I’ll shoot myself,” I said, “and if I embarrassed you before those half-wit Pattons and that half-wit Dumonde, I’m sorry.”

“Judge Irwin–” she began.

“Leave him out of it,” I said. “He’s different.”

“Oh, Son,” she exclaimed, “what makes you be that way? You didn’t embarrass me but what makes you that way? It’s those people–what you do–why don’t you settle down–get a decent job–Judge Irwin, Theodore, they could get you a–”

I snatched my hand out of the sandwich she had made, and said, “I don’t want anything in God’s world out of them. Or anybody. And I don’t want to settle down, and I don’t want to get married, and I don’t want any other job, and as for the money–”

“Son–Son–” she said, and turned her hand together on her lap.

“And as for money, I don’t want any more than I’ve got. And besides I don’t have to worry about that. You’ve got enough–” I got up from the couch and lighted a cigarette and flung the match stub into the fire– “enough to leave both Theodore and me pretty well fixed.”

She didn’t move or say anything. She just looked up at me, and I saw that her eyes had tears coming into them, and that she loved me, for I was her son. And that Time didn’t mean anything, but that the lifted face with the bright, too large eyes was an old face. The skin lanked down from the cheek hollows under the bright eyes.

“Not that I want your money,” I said.

She reached out with one hand, in a tentative, humble way, and took my right hand, not by my hand itself but just by the fingers, crumpling then together.

“Son,” she said “you know whatever I’ve got is yours. Don’t you know that?”

I didn’t say anything.

“Don’t you know that?” she said, and swung on to my fingers as though they were the end of a rope somebody had tossed in the water to her.

“All right,” I heard my voice say, and left my fingers twitching to get away, but at the same time I felt my heart suddenly go soft and fluid in my chest like a melting snowball you squash in your hand. “I’m sorry I talked that way,” I said, “but, damn it, why can’t we just stop talking? Why can’t I just come home for a day or two and us not talk, not open our mouths?”

She didn’t answer, but kept on holding my fingers. So I released my fingers, and said, “I’m going up and take a bath before dinner,” and started toward the door. I knew that she didn’t turn her head to watch me go out of the room, but as I crossed the room I felt as though they had forgotten to ring down the curtain at the end of something and a thousand eyes were on my back and the clapping hadn’t started. Maybe the bastards didn’t know it was over. Maybe they didn’t know it was time to clap.

I went upstairs and lay in the bathtub with the hot water up to my ears and knew that it was over. It was over again. I would get in my car, right after dinner, and drive like hell toward town over the new concrete slab between the black, mist streaked fields, and get to town about midnight and go up to my hotel room where nothing was mine and nothing knew my name and nothing had a thing to say to me about anything that had ever happened.

I lay in the tub and heard a car drive up and knew that it was the Young Executive and knew that he would come in the front door and that the woman in the couch would get up and with a quick step and small, squared, gallant shoulders carry the old face to him like a present.

And, by God, he’d better look grateful.

Two hours later I was in my car and Burden’s Landing was behind me, and the bay, and the windshield wipers were making their little busy gasp and click like something inside you which had better not stop. For it was raining again. The drops swung and swayed down out of the dark into my headlights like a bead portiere of bright metal beads which the car kept shouldering through.

There is nothing more alone than being in the car at night in the rain. I was in the car. And I was glad of it. Between one point on the map and another point on the map, there was the being alone in the car in the rain. They say you are not you except in terms of relation to other people. If there weren’t any other people there wouldn’t be any you because what you do, which is what you are, only has meaning in relation to other people. That is a very comforting thought when you are in the car in the rain at night alone, for when you aren’t you, and not being you or anything, you can really lie back and get some rest. It is a vacation from being you. There is only the flow of the motor under your foot spinning that frail thread of sound out of its metal gut like a spider, that filament, that nexus, which isn’t really there, between the you which you have just left in one place and the you which you will be when you get to the other place.

You ought to invite those two you’s the same party, some time. Or you might have a family reunion for all the you’s with barbecue under the trees. It would be amusing to know what they would say to each other.

But meanwhile, there isn’t either one of them, and I am in the car in the rain at night. This is why I am in the car: Thirty-seven years before, about 1896, the stocky, sober, fortyish man, with the steel-rimmed spectacles and the dark suit, who was the Scholarly Attorney, had gone up to a lumber town in south Arkansas to interview witnesses and conduct an investigation for a big timberland litigation. It was not much of a town, I guess. Shacks, a boarding house for the bosses and engineers, a post office, a company commissary–all rising out of the red mud–and around them the stumps stretching off, and off yonder a cow standing among the stumps, and the scream of saws like a violated nerve in the center of your head, and in the air and in your nostrils the damp, sweet-sick smell of sawn timber.

I have not seen the town. I had never even set foot inside the State of Arkansas. But I have seen the town in my head. And standing on the steps of the commissary is a girl with yellow hair hanging in two heavy braids and with large blue eyes and with the hint of a delicate, famished hollow in each cheek. Let us say that she is wearing a lettuce-green gingham dress, for lettuce-green is nice, fresh color for a blond girl to be wearing as she stands in the morning sunlight on the commissary steps and listens to the saws scream and watches a stocky man in a dark suit come picking his way soberly through the red mud left by the last big spring rain.

The girl is standing on the commissary steps because her father clerks in the commissary for the company. That is what I know about her father.

The man in the dark suit stays in the town for two months transacting his legal business. In the evening, toward sunset, he and the girl walk down the street of the town, now dusty, and move out beyond the houses, where the stumps are. I can see them standing in the middle of the ruined land, against the background of the brass-and-blood-colored summer sunset of Arkansas. I cannot make out what they say to each other.

When the man has finished his business and leaves the town, he takes the girl with him. He is a kind, innocent, shy man, and as he sits beside the girl on the red plush of the train seat, he holds her hand in his, stiffly and carefully as though he might drop and break something valuable.

He puts her in a big white house, which his grandfather had built. In front of it is the sea. That is new to her. Everyday she spends a great deal of time looking at it. Sometimes she goes down to the beach and stands there, alone, looking out at the lift of the horizon.

I know that that is true, the business of looking at the sea, for my mother once, years later when I was a big boy, said to me, “When I first came here I used to stand down at the gate and just look out over the water. I spent hours doing it, and didn’t know why. But it wore off. It wore off a long time before you were born, Son.”

The Scholarly Attorney went to Arkansas and the girl was on the steps of the commissary, and that is why I was in the car, in the rain, at night.

I entered the lobby of my hotel just about midnight. The clerk saw me enter, beckoned to me, and gave me a number to call. “They been giving the operator prostration,” he said. I didn’t recognize the number. “Said ask for a party named Miss Burke,” the clerk added.

So I didn’t bother to go upstairs before calling, but stepped into one of the lobby booths. “Markheim Hotel,” the crisp voice answered, and I asked for Miss Burke, and there was Sadie’s voice saying, “Well, by God, it’s time you got here. I called Burden’s Landing God knows when and they said you’d left. What did you do, walk?”

“I’m not Sugar-Boy,” I said.

“Well, get on over here. Suite 905. Hell has popped.”

I hung the receiver up very deliberately, walked over to the desk and asked the clerk to give my bag to a bellhop, got a drink out of the lobby cooler, bought a couple of packs of cigarettes from the sleepy sister at the lobby stand, opened a package and lighted myself one, and stood there to take a long drag and look at the blank lobby, as though there weren’t any place in the world where I had to go.

But there was such a place. And I went there. Quick, once I started.

Sadie was sitting in the outside room of Suite 905, over by the telephone stand, with a tray full of cigarette butts in front of her and a coronal of smoke revolving slowly about hr head of hacked-off black hair.

“Well,” she said in the tone of the matron of a home for wayward girls from inside the smoke screen, but I didn’t answer. I walked straight over to her, past the form of Sugar-Boy, who snored in a chair, and grabbed a handful of that wild black Irish hair to steady her and kissed her smack on the forehead before she could God-damn me.

Which she did.

“You have no idea why I did that,” I said.

“I don’t care, just so it isn’t a habit.”

“It was nothing personal,” I said. “It was just because your name is not Dumonde.”

“Your name is going to be mud if you don’t get on in here,” she said, and twitched her head in the direction of a door.

“Maybe I’ll resign,” I said in my whimsey, then for a split second, with a surprising flash in my head like the flash of a photographer’s bulb, I thought maybe I would.

Sadie was just about to say something, when the telephone rang and she sprang at it as though she’d strangle it with her bare hands and snatched up the receiver. As I walked toward the inner door, I heard her saying, “So you got him. All right, get him to town here…. To hell with his wife. Tell him he’ll be sicker’n she is if he don’t come…. Yeah, tell him–”