Роберт Уоррен - All the king's men

I went on down the lot, past a row of gable-shaped chicken coops made of wood which had been split out like shingles, and set on cypress chunks to keep them out of the wet. I went on down to the barn and stable lot, where a couple of able-bodied but moth-eaten mules hung their heads in the unflagging shame of their species beside a big iron pot, the kind they use for cooking up molasses. The pot was a water trough now. There was a pipe sticking up beside it with a faucet on it. One of the Boss's modern improvements you couldn't see from the road.

I went on past the stables, which were built of log, but with a good tin roof, and leaned on the fence, looking off down the rise. Back of the barn the ground was washed and gullied somewhat, with piles of brush chucked into the washes here and there to stop the process. As though it ever would. A hundred yards off, at the foot of the rise, there was a patch of woods, scrub oak and such. The ground must have been swampy down there, for the grass and weeds at the edge of the trees were lush and tropical green. Against the bare ground beyond it looked too green to be natural. I could see a couple of hogs lounging down there on their sides, like big gray blisters popped up out of the ground.

It was getting toward sunset now. I leaned on the fence and looked off west across the country where the light was stretching out, and breathed in that dry, clean, ammoniac smell you get around stables at sunset on a summer day. I figured they would find me when they wanted me. I didn't have the slightest notion when that would be. The Boss and his family, I reckoned, would spend the night at his pappy's place. The reporters and the photographer and Sadie would get on back to the city. Mr. Duffy–maybe he was supposed to put up in Mason City at the hotel. Or maybe he and I were supposed to stay at Pappy's place too. If they put us in the same bed though, I was just going to start walking in to Mason City. Then there was Sugar-Boy. But I quit thinking about it. I didn't give a damn what they did.

I leaned on the fence, and the posture bowed my tail out so that the cloth of my pants pulled tight and pressed the pint against my left hip. I thought about that for a minute and admired the sunset colorations and breathed the dry, clean, ammoniac smell, and then I pulled out the bottle. I took a drink and put it back. I leaned on the fence and waited for the sunset colorations to explode in my stomach, which they did.

I heard somebody open and shut the gate to the barn lot, but I didn't look around. If I didn't look around it would not be true that somebody opened the gate with the creaky hinges, and that is a wonderful principle for a man to get hold of. I had got hold of the principle out of a book when I was in college, and I had hung on to it for grim death. I owed my success in life to that principle. It had put me where I was. What you don't know don't hurt you, for it ain't real. They called that Idealism in my book I had when I was in college, and after I got hold of that principle I became an Idealist. I was a brass-bound Idealist in those days. If you are an Idealist it does not matter what you do or what goes on around you because it isn't real anyway.

The steps came closer and closer, padded in the soft dust. I didn't look up. Then I felt the wire of the fence creak and give because somebody else was leaning against it and admiring the sunset. Mr. X and I admired the sunset together for a couple of minutes, and nothing said. Except for the sound of his breathing I wouldn't have known he was there.

Then there was a moment and the wire shifted when Mr. X took his weight off it. Then the hand patted my left hip, and the voice said, "Gimme a slug." It was the Boss's voice.

"Take it," I said. "You know where it lives."

He lifted up my coattail and pulled out the bottle. I could hear the gurgle as he did the damage. The wire shifted again as he leaned against it.

"I figured you'd come down here," he said.

"And you wanted a drink," I replied without bitterness.

"Yeah," he said, "and Pappy doesn't favor drinking. Never did." I looked up at him. He was leaning on the fence, bearing down on the wire in a way not to do it any good, with the bottle held in both hands, corked, and his forearms propped over the wire.

"It used to be Lucy didn't favor it either," I said.

"Things change," he said. He uncorked the bottle and took another pull, and corked it again. "But Lucy," he said, "I don't know whether she changed or not. I don't know whether she favors it or not now. She never touches it herself. Maybe she sees it eases a man's nerves."

I laughed. "You haven't any nerves," I told him.

"I'm a bundle of nerves," he said, and grinned.

We kept leaning against the fence, watching the light lying across the country and hitting the clump of trees down the rise. The Boss leaned his head a little forward and let a big globule of spit form at his lips and let it fall through the space between his forearms down to the board hog through just over the fence from us. The trough was dry, with a few odd red grains of corn and a few shreds of shucks lying in it and on the ground by it.

"Things don't change much around here, though," the Boss said.

That didn't seem to demand any response, and so I didn't give it any.

"I bet I dumped ten thousand gallons of swill into that trough," he said, "one time and another." He let another glob of spit fall into the trough. "I bet I slopped five hundred head of hogs out of this trough," he said. "And," he said, "by God, I'm still doing it. Pouring swill."

"Well," I said, "swill is what they live on, isn't it?"

He didn't say anything to that.

The hinges of the gate up the lot creaked again, and I looked around. There wasn't any reason not to now. It was Sadie Burke. She was plowing her white oxfords through the dust as though she meant business, and every time she took a stride it looked as though she were going to pop the skirt of her blue-striped seersucker suit, she was in such a rush. The Boss turned around, looked at the bottle in his hand, then passed it to me. "What's up?" he asked her when she got within ten feet.

She didn't answer right away, but came up close. She was breathing hard from the rush. The light hit her on her slightly pock-marked face, which was damp now with perspiration, and her chopped-off black hair was wild and electric on her head, and her big, deep, powerful black eyes burned right out of her face into the sunlight.

"What's up?" the Boss demanded again.

"Judge Irwin," she managed to get out with what breath she had after the rush.

"Yeah?" the Boss said. He was still lounging against the wire, but he was looking at Sadie as though she might draw a gun and he was planning on beating her to the draw.

"Matlock called up–long distance from town–and he said the afternoon paper–"

"Spill it," the Boss said, "spill it."

"Damn it," Sadie said, "I'll spill it when I get good and ready. I'll spill it when I get my breath. If I'm good and ready, and if you–"

"You're using up a lot of breath right now," the Boss said with a tone of voice which made you think of rubbing your hand down a cat's back, just as soft.

"It's my breath," Sadie snapped at him, "and nobody's bought it. I damned near break myself down running out here to tell you something and then you say spill it, spill it. Before I can get my breath. And I'll just tell you when I get my breath and–"

"You don't sound exactly wind-broke," the Boss observed, leaning back on the hog wire and grinning.

"You think it's so damned funny," Sadie said, "oh, yeah, so damned funny."

The Boss didn't answer that. He just kept leaning on the wire as though he had all day before him, and kept on grinning. When he grinned like that it didn't do much to soothe Sadie's feelings, I had observed in the past. And the symptoms seemed to be running true to form.