Роберт Уоррен - All the king's men

We had done about a mile, and not a word spoken, when the Boss turned around from the front sea and looked at me and said, "Jack, make a note to find out something about Malaciah's boy and the killing."

"What's his name?" I asked.

"Hell, I don't know, but he's a good boy."

"Malaciah's name, I mean," I said.

"Malaciah Wynn," the Boss said.

I had my notebook out now and wrote it down, and wrote down, _stabbing__.

"Find out when the trial is set and get a lawyer down. A good one, and I mean a good one that'll know how to handle it and let him know he God-damn well better handle it, but don't get a guy that wants his name in lights."

"Albert Evans," I said, "he ought to do."

"Uses hair oil," the Boss said. "Uses hair oil and slicks it back till the top of his head looks like the black ball on a pool table. Get somebody looks like he didn't sing with a dance band. You losing your mind?"

"All right," I said, and wrote in my notebook, _Abe Lincoln type__. I didn't have to remind myself about that. I just wrote because I had got in the habit. You can build up an awful lot of habits in six years, and you can fill an awful lot of little black books in that time and put them in a safety-deposit box when they get full because they aren't something to leave around and because they would be worth their weight in gold to some parties to get their hands on. Not that they ever got their hands on them. A man's got to carry something besides a corroded liver with him out of that dark backward and abysm of time, and it might as well be the little black books. The little black books lie up there in the safety-deposit box, and there are your works of days and hands all cozy in the dark in the little box and the world's great axis grinds.

"You pick him," the Boss said, "but keep out of sight. Put one of your pals on him, and pick your pal."

"I got you," I replied, for I got him.

The Boss was just about to turn around and divide his attention between the highway and Sugar-Boy's speedometer, when Duffy cleared this throat and said, "Boss."

"Yeah?" the Boss said.

"You know who it was got cut?"

"No," the Boss said, getting ready to turn around, "and I don't care if it was the sainted uncut maiden aunt of the Apostle Paul."

Mr. Duffy cleared his throat, the way he always did in late years when he was congested with phlegm and an idea. "I happened to notice in the paper," he began. "I happened to notice back when it happened, and the feller got cut was the son of a doctor up in this neighborhood. I don't recall what his name was but he was a doctor. The paper said so. Now–" Mr. Duffy was going right on talking to the back of the Boss's head. The Boss hadn't paid any mind, it seemed. "Now, it would appear to me," Mr. Duffy said, and cleared his pipes again, "it would appear to me maybe that doctor might be pretty big around here. You know how a doctor is in the country. They think he is somebody. And maybe it got out how you was mixed up with trying to get the feller Wynn's boy off, and it wouldn't do you any good. You know, politics," he explained, "you know how politics is. Now it–"

The Boss whipped his head around to look at Mr. Duffy so fast all of a sudden there wasn't anything but a blur. It was as though his big brown pop eyes were looking out the back of his head through the hair, everything blurred up together. That is slightly hyperbolic, but you get what I mean. The Boss was like that. He gave you the impression of being a slow and deliberate man to look at him, and he had a way of sitting loose as though he had sunk inside himself and was going down for the third time and his eyes would blink like an owl's in a cage. Then all of a sudden he would make a move. It might just be to reach out and grab a fly out of the air that was bothering him, that trick I saw an old broken-down pug do once who hung around a saloon. He would make bets he could catch a fly out of the air with his fingers, and he could. The Boss could do that. Or he would whip his head at you when you said something he hadn't seemed to be listening to. He whipped his head round now to Duffy and fixed his gaze on him for an instant before he said quite simply and expressively, "Jesus." Then he said, "Tiny, you don't know a God-damned thing. In the first place, I've known Malaciah Wynn all my life, and his boy is a good boy and I don't care who he cut. In the second place, it was a fair fight and he had bad luck and when it's like that by the time the trial comes up folks are always feeling for the feller who's being tried for murder when he just had bad luck because the fellow died. In the third place, if you had picked the wax out of your ears you'd heard me tell Jack to prime the lawyer through a pal and to get one didn't want his name in lights. As far as that lawyer knows or anybody else knows, he's been sent by the Pope. And all he wants to know anyway is whether the foliage he gets out of it has those little silk threads in it. Is all that clear or do you want me to draw a picture?"

"I get you," Mr. Duffy said, and wet his lips.

But the Boss wasn't listening now. He had turned back to the highway and the speedometer and had said to Sugar-Boy, "God's sake, you think we want to admire the landscape? We're late now."

Then you felt Sugar-Boy take up that last extra stitch.

But not for long. In about half a mile, we hit the turn-off. Sugar-Boy turned off on the gravel and we sprayed along with the rocks crunching and popping up against the underside of the fender like grease in a skillet. We left a tail of dust for the other car to ride into.

Then we saw the house.

It was set on a little rise, a biggish box of a house, two-story, rectangular, gray, and unpainted, with a tin roof, unpainted too and giving off blazes under the sun for it was new and the rust hadn't bitten down into it yet, and a big chimney at each end. We pulled up to the gate. The house was set up close to the road, with a good hog-wire fence around the not very big yard, and with some crepe myrtles in bloom the color of raspberry ice cream and looking cool in the heat in the corner of the yard and one live oak, nothing to brag on and dying on one side, in front of the house, and a couple of magnolias off to one side with rusty-looking tinny leaves. There wasn't much grass in the yard, and a half dozen hens wallowed and fluffed and cuck-cucked in the dust under the magnolia trees. A big white hairy dog like a collie or a shepherd was lying on the front porch, a little one-story front porch that looked stuck on the box of the house, like an afterthought.

It looked like those farmhouses you ride by in the country in the middle of the afternoon, with the chickens under the trees and the dog asleep, and you know the only person in the house is the woman who has finished washing up the dishes and has swept the kitchen and has gone upstairs to lie down for half an hour and has pulled off her dress and kicked off her shoes and is lying there on her back on the bed in the shadowy room with her eyes closed and a strand of her hair still matted down on her forehead with the perspiration. She listens to the flies cruising around the room, then she listens to your motor getting big out on the road, then it shrinks off into the distance and she listens to the flies. That was the kind of house it was.

One time I had wondered why the Boss never had the house painted after he got his front feet in the trough and a dollar wasn't the reason you got up in the morning any more. Then I figured the Boss knew best. Suppose he had painted it up, then the next fellow down the road would be saying to the next one, "Seen Old man Stark got his house painted? Yeah, putten on airs. Hit looks lak hit wuz good enuff fer him to live in all his life lak hit wuz, and his boy gits up thar in the cappy-tell, and hit ain't good enuff no more. Fust thing you know and Old Man Stark'll be going to be privy in the house and maken 'em cook cabbige out behind the barn." (As a matter of fact, Old Man Stark was going to the privy in the house, for the Boss had put in running water and a bathroom. Water pumped by a little automatic electric pump. But you can't see a commode from the road when you pass by. It doesn't hit you in the eye or run out and bite you in the leg. And what the voter doesn't know doesn't prey on his mind.)