Роберт Уоррен: All the king's men

He stopped, and looked all around, right down at them, moving his head slow, so that he seemed to look right in a face here and stop for just a split second, and then to move on to another one a little further. Then he grinned, and his eyes blinked, and he said, "Huh? What's the matter? Can got yore tongue?"

"Boils on the tail!" somebody yelled back in the crowd.

"Dammit," Willie yelled back, "lie on yore stummick and go to sleep!"

Somebody laughed.

"And," yelled Willie, "thank the good Lord who in his everlasting mercy saw fit to make something with a back side and a front side to it out of the skimpy little piece of material provided in your case!"

"You tell em, Willie!" somebody yelled back in the crowd. Then they started to laugh.

The Boss lifted up his right hand about as high as his head, out in front of him, palm down, and waited till they stopped laughing and whistling. Then he said: "No, I'm not here to ask you for anything. A vote or anything else. I reckon I'll be back later for that. If I keep on relishing that peach ice cream for breakfast in the big house. But I don't expect all of you to vote for me. My God, if all of you went and voted for Willie, what the hell would you find to argue about? There wouldn't be anything left but the weather, and you can't vote on that.

"No," he said, and it was another voice, quiet and easy and coming slow and from a distance, "I'm not here to ask for anything today. I'm taking the day off, and I've come home. A man goes away from his home and it is in him to do it. He lies in strange beds in the dark, and the wind is different in the trees. He walks in the street and there are the faces in front of his eyes, but there are no names for the faces. The voices he hears are not the voices he carried away in his ears a long time back when he went away. The voices he hears are loud. They are so loud he does not hear for a long time at a stretch those voices he carried away in his ears. But there comes a minute when it is quiet and he can hear those voices he carried away in his ears a long time back. He can make out what they say, and they say: Come back. They say: Come back, boy. So he comes back."

His voice just stopped. It didn't trail off like a voice coming to a stop. One second it was there, going on, word by word, in the stillness which filled the square and the crowd in front of the courthouse and was stiller for the grinding of the July flies in the two catalpas rising above the heads of the people who had crowded up on the patch of grass roots. The voice was going there, word by word, then suddenly it was not there. There was only the sound of the July flies, which seems to be inside your head as though it were the grind and whir of the springs and cogs which are you and which will not stop no matter what you say until they are good and ready.

He stood there a half minute, not saying a word, and not moving. He didn't even seem to be noticing the crowd down there. Then he seemed, all at once, to discover them, and grinned. "So he comes back," he said, grinning now. "When he gets half a day off. And he says, Hello, folks, how you making it? And that's what I'm saying."

That's what he said. He looked down, grinning, and his head turned as his eyes went down in the crowd, and seemed to stop a face there, and then go on to stop on another face.

Then he started walking down the steps, as if he had just come out of that dusky-dark hallway beyond the big open doors behind him and was walking down the steps by himself, with nobody there in front of him and no eyes on him. He came straight down the steps toward where his gang was standing, Lucy Stark and the rest of us, and nodded at us as though he were simply passing us on the street and didn't know us any too well anyway, and kept right on walking, straight into the crowd as though the crowd weren't there. The people fell back a little to make a passage for him, with their eyes looking right at him, and the rest of us in his gang followed behind him, and the crowd closed up behind us.

People were clapping now, and yelling. Somebody kept yelling, "Hi, Willie!"

The Boss walked straight across the street, through the crowd, and got into the Cadillac and sat down. We got in with him and the photographer and the others went back to their car. Sugar-Boy started up and nosed out into the street. People didn't get out of the way very fast. They couldn't, they were so jammed in. When we nosed out into the crowd, the faces were right there outside the car, not more that a foot or so away. The faces looked right in at us. But they were out there and we were inside now. The eyes in the red, slick-skinned long faces, or the brown, crinkled faces, looked in at us.

Sugar-Boy kept pecking at his horn. The words were piling up inside him. His lips started to work. I could see his face in the driver's mirror, and the lips were working. "The b-b-b-b-as-tuds," he said, and the spit flew.

The Boss Had sunk in on himself now.

"The b-b-b-b-as-tuds," Sugar-Boy said, and pecked at his horn, but we were easing out of the square now to a side street where there weren't any people. We were doing forty by the time we passed the brick schoolhouse on the outskirts of town. Seeing the schoolhouse made me remember how I first met Willie, about fourteen years before, back in 1922, when he wasn't anything but the County Treasurer of Mason County and had come down to the city to see about the bound issue to build that schoolhouse. Then I remembered how I had met him, in the back room of Slade's pool hall, where Slade sold the needle beer, and we were sitting at one of those little marble-topped tables with wirework legs, the kind they used to have in drugstores when you were a boy and took your high-school sweeties down on Saturday night to get that chocolate banana split and rub knees under the table and the wirework would always get in the way.

There were four of us. There was Tiny Duffy, who was almost as big back then as he was to get to be. He didn't need any sign to let you know what he was. If the wind was right, you knew he was a city-hall slob long before you could see the whites of his eyes. He had the belly and he sweated through his shirt just above the belt buckle, and he had the face, which was creamed and curded like a cow patty in a spring pasture, only it was the color of biscuit dough, and in the middle was his grin with the gold teeth. He was Tax assessor, and he wore a flat hard straw on the back of his head. There was a striped band on the hat.

Then there was Alex Michel, who was a country boy from up in Mason County but who was learning fast. He had learned fast enough to get to be a deputy sheriff. But he wasn't that long. He wasn't anything, for he got in the gut by a coke-frisky piano player in a cribhouse where he had gone to take out a little in trade on his protection account. Alex was, as I have said, from up in Mason County.

Duffy and I had been in the back room of Slade's place waiting for Alex, with whom I had the hope of transacting a little business. I was a newspaperman and Alex knew something I wanted to know. Duffy had called him in, for Duffy was a friend of mine. At least, he knew that I worked for the _Chronicle__, which at that time was supporting the Joe Harrison outfit. Joe Harrison was Governor then. And Duffy was one of Joe Harrison' boys.

So I was sitting in the back room of Slade's place, one hot morning in June or July, back in 1922, waiting for Alex Michel to turn up and listening to the silence in the back room of Slade's place. A funeral parlor at midnight is ear-splitting compared to the effect you get in the middle of the morning in the back room of a place like Slade's if you are the first man there. You sit there and think how cozy it was last night, with the effluvium of brotherly bodies and the haw-haw of camaraderie, and you look at the floor where now there are little parallel trails of damp sawdust the old broom left this morning when the unenthusiastic old Negro man cleaned up, and the general impression is that you are alone with the Alone and it is his move. So I sat there in silence (Duffy was never talkative in the morning before he had worried down two or three drinks), and listened to my tissues break down and the beads of perspiration explode delicately out of the ducts embedded in the ample flesh of my companion.