All the King's Men (7 page)

There would be a single cracking sound and a long wait. That meant he had hit it the first try, and was trudging back to the post to set up another. Then, after a spell, there would be another crack, and a wait. Then, one time, there came two cracks, close together. That meant Sugar-Boy had missed the first try and had got it on the second.

Then I must have dozed off, for I came to with the Boss standing there, saying, “Time to eat.”

So we went in and ate.

We sat down at the table, Old Man Stark at one end and Lucy at the other. Lucy wiped the perspiration-soaked wisp of hair back from her face, and gave that last-minute look around the table to see if anything was missing, like a general inspecting troops. She was in her element, all right. She had been out of it for a long time, but when you dropped her back in it she hit running, like a cat out of a sack.

The jaws got to work around the table, and she watched them work. She sat there, not eating much and keeping a sharp eye out for a vacant place on any plate and watching the jaws work, and as she sat there, her face seemed to smooth itself out and relax with an inner faith in happiness the way the face of the chief engineer does when he goes down to the engine room at night and the big wheel is blurred out with its speed and the pistons plunge and return and the big steel throws are leaping in their perfect orbits like a ballet, and the whole place, under the electric glare, hums and glitters and sings like the eternal insides of God’s head, and the ship is knocking off twenty-two knots on a glassy, starlit sea.

So the jaw muscles pumped all around the table, and Lucy Stark sat there in the bliss of self-fulfillment.

I had just managed to get down the last spoonful of chocolate ice cream, which I had had to tamp down into my gullet like wet concrete in a posthole, when the Boss, who was a powerful and systematic eater, took his last bite, lifted up his head, wiped off the lower half of his face with a napkin, and said, “Well, it looks like Jack and Sugar-Boy and me are going to take the night air down the highway.”

Lucy Stark looked up at the Boss right quick, then looked away, and straightened a salt shaker. At first guess it might have been the look any wife gives her husband when he shoves back after supper and announces he thinks he’ll step down for a minute. Then you knew it wasn’t that. It didn’t have any question, or protest, or rebuke, or command, or self-pity, or whine, or oh-so-you-don’t-love-me-any-more in it. It just didn’t have anything in it, and that was what made it remarkable. It was a feat. Any act of pure perception is a feat, and if you don’t believe it, try it sometime.

But Old Man Stark looked at the Boss, and said, “I sorta reckined–I reckined you was gonna stay out here tonight.” There wasn’t any trouble figuring out what he said, though. The child come home and the parent puts the hooks in him. The old man, or the woman, as the case may be, hasn’t got anything to say to the child. All he wants is to have that child sit in a chair for a couple of hours and then go off to bed under the same roof. It’s not love. I am not saying that there is not such a thing as love. I am merely pointing to something which is different from love but which sometimes goes by the name of love. It may well be that without this thing which I am talking about there would not be any love. But this thing in itself is not love. It is just something in the blood. It is a kind of blood greed, and it is the fate of a man. It is the thing which man has which distinguishes him from the happy brute creation. When you get born your father and mother lost something out of themselves, and they are going to bust a hame trying to get it back, and you are it. They know they can’t get it all back but they will get as big a chunk out of you as they can. And the good old family reunion, with picnic dinner under the maples, is very much like diving into the octopus tank at the aquarium. Anyway, that is what I would have said back then, that evening.

So Old Man Stark swallowed his Adam’s apple a couple of times and lifted his misty, sad old blue eyes to the Boss, who happened to be flesh of his flesh though you’d never guess it, and threw in the hook. But it didn’t snag a thing. Not on Willie.

“Nope,” the Boss said, “I gotta shove.”

“I sorta reckined–” the old man began, the surrendered, and tailed off, “but if’n it’s business–”

“It is not business,” the Boss said. “It is pure pleasure. At least I’m aiming for it to be before I’m through.” Then he laughed and got up from the table, and gave his wife a smack of a kiss on the left cheek, slapped his son on the shoulder in that awkward way fathers have of slapping their sons on the shoulder (there is always a kind of apology in it, and anybody, even the Boss, who slapped Tom Stark on the shoulder had better apologize, for he was an arrogant bastard and when his father that night slapped him on the shoulder he didn’t even bother to look up). Then the Boss said, “Don’t wait up,” and started out the door. Sugar-Boy and I followed. That was the first news I had had that I was going to take the night air. But it was all the warning you usually got from the Boss. I knew enough to know that.

The Boss already sitting up in the front by the driver’s seat when I got to the Cadillac. So I got in the back, and prepared my soul for the experience of being hurled from one side to the other when we hit the curves. Sugar-Boy crawled under the wheel, and touched the starter, and began to make a sound like “Wh-wh-wh-wh–” A sound like an owl tuning up off in the swamp at night. If he had enough time and the spit held out, he would ask, “Where to?” But the Boss didn’t wait. He said, “Burden’s Landing.”

So that was it. Burden’s Landing. Well I ought to have guessed that.

Burden’s Landing is one hundred and thirty miles from Mason City, off to the southeast. If you multiply one hundred and thirty by two it makes two hundred and sixty miles. It was near nine o’clock and the stars were out and the ground mist was beginning to show in low places. God knew what time it would be when we got back to bed, and up the next morning to face a hearty breakfast and the ride back to the capital.

I lay back in the seat and closed my eyes. The gravel sprayed on the undersides of the fenders, and then it stopped spraying and the tail of the car lurched to one side, and me with it, and I knew we were back on the slab and leveling out for the job.

We would go gusting along the slab, which would be pale in the starlight between the patches of woods and the dark fields where the mist was rising. Way off from the road a barn would stick up out of the mist like a house sticking out of the rising water when the river breaks the levee. Close to the road a cow would stand knee-deep in the mist, with horns damp enough to have a pearly shine in the starlight, and it would look at the black blur we were as we went whirling into the blazing corridor of light which we could never quite get into for it would be always splitting the dark just in front of us. The cow would stand there knee-deep in the mist and look at the black blur and the blaze and then, not turning his head, at the place where the black blur and blaze had been, with the remote, massive, unvindictive indifference of God-All-Mighty or Fate or me, if I were standing there knee-deep in the mist, and the blur and the blaze whizzed past and withered on off between the fields and the patches of woods.

But I wasn’t standing there in the field, in the dark, with the mist turning slow around my knees and the ticking no-noise of the night inside my head. I was in a car, headed back to Burden’s Landing, which was named for the people from whom I got my name, and which was the place where I had been born and raised.

We would go on between the fields until we hit a town. The houses would be lined up along the streets, under the trees, with their light going out now, until we hit the main street, where the lights would be bright around the doorway of the movie house and the bugs would be zooming against the bulbs and would ricochet off to hit the concrete pavement and make a dry crunch when somebody stepped on them. The men standing in front of the pool hall would look up and see the big black crate ghost down the street and one of them would spit on the concrete and say, “The bastard, he reckins he’s somebody,” and wish that he was in a big black car, as big as a hearse and the springs soft as mamma’s breast and the engine breathing without a rustle at seventy-five, going off into the dark somewhere. Well, I was going somewhere. I was going back to Burden’s Landing.

We would come into Burden’s Landing by the new boulevard by the bay. The air would smell salty, with maybe a taint of the fishy, sad, sweet smell of the tidelands to it, but fresh nevertheless. I would be nearly midnight then, and the light would be off in the three blocks of down-town the. Beyond the down-town and the little houses, there would be other houses along the bay, set back in the magnolias and oaks, with the white walls showing glimmeringly beyond the darkness of the trees, and the jalousies, which in the daytime would be green, looking dark against the white walls. Folks would be lying back in the rooms behind the jalousies, with nothing but a sheet over them. Well, I’d put in a good many nights behind those jalousies, from the time I was little enough to wet the bed. I’d been born in one of these rooms behind the jalousies. And behind one set of them my mother would be lying up there tonight, with a little fluting of lace on the straps of her nightgown, and her face smooth like a girl’s except for the little lines, which you wouldn’t be able to make out in the shadow anyway, at the corners of her mouth and eyes, and one bare arm laid out on the sheet with the sharp, brittle-looking, age-betraying hand showing the painted nails. Theodore Murrell would be lying there, too, breathing with a slightly adenoidal sibilance under his beautiful blonde mustache. Well, it was all legal, for she was married to Theodore Murrell, who was a lot younger than my mother and who had beautiful yellow hair scrolled on top of his round skull like taffy, and who was my stepfather. Well, he wasn’t the first the first stepfather I had had.

Then, on down the row, behind its own live oaks and magnolias, there would be the Stanton house, locked up and nobody behind the jalousies, for Anne and Adam were in town now, and grown up and never went fishing with me anymore, and the old man was dead. Then on down the row, where the open country began, would be the house of Judge Irwin. We wouldn’t stop before we got there. But we’d make a little call on the Judge.

“Boss,” I said.

The Boss turned around, and saw the chunky black shape of his head against the brightness of our headlights.

“What you gonna say to him? I asked.

“Boy, you never know till the time comes,” he said. “Hell,” he amended, “maybe I won’t say anything to him a-tall. I don’t know as I’ve got anything to say to him. I just want to look at him good.”

“The Judge won’t scare easy,” I said. No, I didn’t reckon the Judge would scare easy, thinking of the straight back of the man who used to swing off the saddle and drop the bridle over a paling on the Stanton fence and walk up the shell walk to the veranda with his Panama in his hand and the coarse dark-red hair bristling off his high skull like a mane and the hooked red nose jutting off his face and the yellow irises of his eyes bright and hard-looking as topaz. That was nearly twenty years before, all right, and maybe the back wasn’t as straight now as it had been then (a thing like that happens so slowly you don’t notice it) and maybe the yellow were a little bleary lately, but I still didn’t reckon the Judge would scare easy. That was one thing on which I figured I could bet: he wouldn’t scare. If he did, it was going to be a disappointment to me.

“No, I don’t count on him scaring easy,” the Boss said. “I just want to look at him.”

“Well, God damn it,” I popped out, and came up off my shoulder blades before I knew it, “you’re crazy to think you can scare him!”

“Take it easy,” the Boss said, and laughed. I couldn’t see his face. It was just a black blob against the glare of the headlights, with the laugh coming out of it.

“I just want to look at him,” the Boss said, “like I told you.”

“Well, you sure picked a hell of a time and a hell of a long way to go look at him,” I said, not feeling anything but peevish now, and falling back on my shoulder blades where I belonged. “Why don’t you get him to see you in town sometime?”

“_Sometime__ ain’t ever
now
_,” the Boss said.

“It’s a hell of a thing,” I said, “for you to be doing.”

“So you think it’s beneath my dignity, huh?” the Boss asked.

“Well, you’re Governor. They tell me.”

“Yeah, I’m Governor, Jack, and the trouble with Governors is they think they got to keep their dignity. But listen here, there ain’t anything worth doing a man can do and keep his dignity. Can you figure out a single thing you really please-God like to do you can do and keep your dignity? The human frame just ain’t built that way.”

“All right,” I said.

“And when I get to be President, if I want to see somebody I’m gonna right out and see ‘em.”

“Sure,” I said, “in the middle of the night, but when you do I hope you leave me at home to get a night’s sleep maybe.”

“The hell I will,” he said. “When I’m President I’m gonna take you with me. I’m gonna keep you and Sugar-Boy right in the White House so I can have you all handy. Sugar-Boy can have him a pistol range in the back hall and a brace of Republican Congressmen to be caddy for him and set up the tin cans, and you can bring your girls right in the big front door, and there’s gonna be a member of the Cabinet to hold their coats and pick up hair pins after ‘em. There’s gonna be a special member of the Cabinet to do it. He’s gonna be the Secretary of the Bedchamber of Jack Burden, and he will keep the telephone numbers straight and send back any little pink silk articles to the right address when they happen to get left behind. Tint’s got the build, so I’m gonna get him a little operation and put flowing silk pants on him and a turban and give him a tin scimitar like he was a High Grand Shriner or something, and he can sit on a tuffet outside your door and be the Secretary of the Bedchamber. And how you like that, boy, huh?” And he reached back over the back of the front seat and slapped me on the knee. He had to reach a long way back, for it was a long way from the front seat of the Cadillac to my knee even if I was lying on my shoulder blades.