All the King's Men (2 page)

Then a second later a little bald-headed fellow wearing a white coat which ought to have been in the week’s wash came plunging through the crowd from the back of the store, waving his hand and bumping the customers and yelling, “It’s Willie!” The fellow ran up to the Boss, and the Boss took a couple of steps to meet him, and the fellow with the white coat grabbed Willie’s hand as though he were drowning. He didn’t shake Willie’s hand, not by ordinary standards. He just hung into it and twitched all over and gargled the sacred syllables of
Willie
_. Then, when the attack had passed, he turned to the crowd, which was ringing around at a polite distance and staring, and announced, “My God, folks, it’s Willie!”

The remark was superfluous. One look at the faces rallied around and you knew that if any citizen over the age of three didn’t know that the strong-set man standing there in the Palm Beach suit was Willie Stark, that citizen was a half-wit. In the first place, all he would have to do would be to lift his eyes to the big picture high up there above the soda fountain, a picture about six times life size, which showed the same face, the big eyes, which in the picture had the suggestion of a sleepy and inward look (the eyes of the man in the Palm Beach suit didn’t have that look now, but I’ve seen it), the pouches under the eyes and the jowls beginning to sag off, and the meaty lips, which didn’t sag but if you looked very close were laid one on top of the other like a couple of bricks, and the tousle of hair hanging down on the not very high squarish forehead. Under the picture was the legend:
Mt study is the heart of the people.
_ In quotation marks, and signed,
Willie Stark
_. I had seen that picture in a thousand places, pool halls to palaces.

Somebody back in the crowd yelled, “Hi, Willie!” The Boss lifted his right hand and waved in acknowledgment to the unknown admirer. Then the Boss spied a fellow at the far end of the soda fountain, a tall, gaunt-shanked, malarial, leather-faced side of jerked venison, wearing jean pants and a brace of mustaches hanging off the kind of face see in photographs of General Forrest’s cavalrymen, and the Boss started toward him and put out his hand. Old Leather-Face didn’t show. Maybe he shuffled one of his broken brogans on the tiles, and his Adam’s apple jerked one or twice, and the eyes were watchful out of that face which resembled the seat of an old saddle left out in the weather, but when the Boss got close, his hand came up from the elbow, as though it didn’t belong to Old Leather-Face but was operating on its own, and the Boss took it.

“How you making it, Malaciah?” the Boss asked.

The Adam’s apple worked a couple of times, and the Boss shook the hand which was hanging out there in the air as if it didn’t belong to anybody, and Old leather-Face said, “We’s grabblen.”

“How’s your boy?” the Boss asked.

“Ain’t doen so good,” Old Leather-Face allowed.

“Sick?”

“Naw,” Old Leather-Face allowed, “jail.”

“My God,” the Boss said, “what they doing round here, putting good boys in jail?”

“He’s a good boy,” Old Leather-Face allowed. “Hit wuz a fahr fight, but he had a leetle bad luck.”

“Huh?”

“Hit wuz fahr and squahr, but he had a leetle bad luck. he stobbed the feller and he died.”

“Tough tiddy,” the Boss said. Then: “Tried yet?”

“Not yit.”

“Tough tiddy,” the Boss said.

“I ain’t complainen,” Old Leather-Face said. “Hit wuz fit fahr and squahr.”

“Glad to seen you,” the Boss said. “Tell your boy to keep his tail over the dashboard.”

“He ain’t complainen,” Old Leather-Face said.

The Boss started to turn away to the rest of us who after a hundred miles in the dazzle were looking at that soda fountain as though it were a mirage, but Old Leather-Face said, “Willie.”

“Huh?” the Boss answered.

“Yore pitcher,” Old Leather-Face allowed, and jerked his head creakily toward the six-times-life-size photograph over the soda fountain.. “Yore pitcher,” he said, “hit don’t do you no credit, Willie.”

“Hell, no,” the Boss said, studying the picture, cocking his head to one side and squinting at it, “but I was porely when they took it. It was like I’d had the cholera morbus. Get in there busting some sense into that Legislature, and it leaves a man worse’n the summer complaint.”

“Git in thar and bust ‘em, Willie!” somebody yelled from back in the crowd, which was thickening out now, for folks were trying to get in from the street “I’ll bust ‘em,” Willie said, and turned around to the little man with the white coat. “Give us some cokes, Doc,” he said, “for God’s sake.”

It looked as if Doc would have heart failure getting around to the other side of the sofa fountain. The tail of that white coat was flat on the air behind him when he switched the corner and started clawing past the couple of girls in the lettuce-green smocks so he could do the drawing. He got the first one set up, and passed it to the Boss, who handed it to his wife. The he started drawing the next one, and kept on saying, “It’s on the house, Willie, it’s on the house.” The Boss took that one himself, and Doc kept on drawing them and saying, “It’s on the house, Willie it’s on the house.” He kept on drawing them till he got about five too many.

By that time folks were packed outside the door solid to the middle of the street. Faces were pressed up against the screen door, the way you do when you try to see through a screen into a dim room. Outside, they kept yelling, “Speech, Willie, Speech!”

“My God,” the Boss said, in the direction of Doc, who was hanging on to one of the nickel-plated spouts of the fountain and watching every drop of the coke go down the Boss’s gullet. “My God,” the Boss said, “I didn’t come here to make a speech. I came here to go out and see my pappy.”

“Speech, Willie, speech!” they were yelling out there.

The Boss set his little glass on the marble.

“It’s on the house,” Doc uttered croakingly with what strength was left in him after the rapture.

“Thanks, Doc,” the Boss said. He turned away to head toward the door, then looked back. “You better get back in here and sell a lot of aspirin, Doc,” he said, “to make up for the charity.”

Then he plowed out the door, and the crowd fell back, and we tailed after him.

Mr. Duffy stepped up beside the Boss and asked him was he going to make a speech, but the Boss didn’t even look at him. He kept walking slow and steady right on across the street into the crowd, as though the crowd hadn’t been there. The red, long faces with the eyes in them watching like something wary and wild and watchful in a thicket fell back, and there wasn’t a sound. The crowd creamed back from his passage, and we followed in his wake, all of us who had been in the Cadillac, and the others who had been in the second car. The crowd closed behind.

The Boss kept walking straight ahead, his head bowed a little, the way a man bows his head when he is out walking by himself and has something on his mind. His hair fell down over his forehead, for he was carrying his hat in his hand. I knew his hair was down over his forehead, for I saw him give his head a quick jerk once or twice, the way he always did when he was walking alone and it fell down toward his eyes, the kind of motion a horse gives just after the bit is in and he’s full of beans.

He walked straight across the street and across the patch of grass roots and up the steps of the courthouse. Nobody else followed him up the steps. At the top he turned around, slow, to face the crowd. He simply looked at them, blinking his big eyes a little, jus as though he had just stepped out of the open doors and the dark hall of the courthouse behind him and was blinking to get his eyes adjusted to the light. He stood up there blinking, the hair down on his forehead, and the dark sweat patch showing under each arm of his Palm Beach coat. The he gave his head a twitch, and his eyes bulged wide suddenly, even if the light was hitting him full in the face, and you could see the glitter in them.

It’s coming
_, I thought.

You saw the eyes bulge suddenly like that, as tough something had happened inside him, and there was the glitter. You knew something had happened inside him, and thought:
It’s coming
_. It was always that way. There was the bulge and the glitter, and there was the cold grip way down in the stomach as though somebody had laid hold of something in there, in the dark which is you, with a cold hand in a cold rubber glove. It was like the second when you come home late at night and see the yellow envelope of the telegram sticking out from under your door and you lean and pick it up, but don’t open it yet, not for a second. While you stand there in the hall, with the envelope in your hand, you feel there’s an eye on you, a great big eye looking straight at you from miles and dark and through walls and houses and through your coat and vest and hide and sees you huddled up way inside, in the dark which is you, inside yourself, like a clammy, sad little fetus you carry around inside yourself. The eye knows what’s in the envelope, and it is watching you to see you when you open it and know, too. But the clammy, sad little fetus which is you way down in the dark which is you too lifts up its sad little face and its eyes are blind, and it shivers cold inside you for it doesn’t want to know what is in that envelope. It wants to lie in the dark and not know, and be warm in its not-knowing. The end of man is knowledge, but there is one thing he can’t know. He can’t know whether knowledge will save him or kill him. He will be killed, all right, but he can’t know whether he is killed because of the knowledge which he has got or because the knowledge which he hasn’t got and which if he had it, would save him. There’s the cold in your stomach, but you open the envelope, for the end of man is to know.

The Boss stood up there quiet, with the bulge and glitter in the eyes, and there wasn’t sound in the crowd. You could hear one insane and irrelevant July fly sawing away up in one of the catalpa trees in the square. Then that sound stopped, and there wasn’t anything but the waiting. Then the Boss lounged a step forward, easy and soft-footed.

“I’m not going to make any speech,” the Boss said, and grinned. But the eyes were still big and the glitter was in them. “I didn’t come here to make any speech. I came up here to go out and see my pappy, and see if he’s got anything left in the smokehouse fit to eat. I’m gonna say: Pappy, now what about all that smoked sausage you wuz bragging about, what about all that ham you wuz bragging about all last winter, what about–” That’s what he was saying, but the voice was different, going up in his nose and coming flat with that little break they’ve got in the red hills, saying, “Pappy, now what about–”

But the glitter was still there, and I thought:
Maybe it’s coming
_. Maybe it was not too late. You never could tell. Suddenly, it might be there, he might say it.

But he was saying, “–and so I’, not going to make any speech–” In his old voice, his own voice. Or was that his voice? Which was his true voice, which one of all the voices, you would wonder.

He was saying, “And I didn’t come here to ask you to give me anything, not even a vote. The Good Book says, ‘There are three things that are never satisfied, yea, four things say not, it is enough–’ ” and the voice was different now– ” ‘the grave, and the barren womb, the earth that is not filled with water, and the fire that saith not, it is enough.’ But Solomon might have added just one little item. He might have just made his little list complete, and added, the politician who never stops saying, Gimme.”

He was lounging back on himself now, and his head was cocked a little to one side, and his eyes blinked. The he grinned, and said, “If they had politicians back in those days, they said, Gimme, just like all of us politician do. Gimme, gimme, my name’s Jimmie. But I’m not a politician today. I’m taking the day off. I’m not even going to ask you to vote for me. To tell the God’s unvarnished and unbuckled truth, I don’t have to ask you. Not today. I still got quite a little hitch up there in the big house with the white columns two stories high on the front porch and peach ice cream for breakfast. Not that a passel of those statesmen wouldn’t like to throw me out. You know–” and he leaned forward a little now, as if to tell them a secret–”it’s funny how I just can’t make friend with some folks. No matter how hard I try. I been just as polite. I said, Please. But
please
_ didn’t do any good. But it looks like they got to put up with me a spell longer. And you have. Before you get shet of me. So you better just grin and bear it. It’s not any worse’n boils. Now, is it?

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.”