All the King's Men (35 page)

I got a taxi finally, and said, “Corner South Fifth and Saint-Etienne Street,” and fell back on the leather to listen to the tires hiss through the wetness like something frying in a skillet. I was riding to the answer about the Judge. If the man who had the answer would tell me.

The man was the man who had been the Judge’s close friend for many a year, his other self, his Damon, his Jonathan, his brother. That man was the man who had been the Scholarly Attorney. He would know.

I stood on the pavement, in front of the Mexican restaurant, where the juke box made the jellylike air palpitate, and paid my taxi and turned to look up at the third floor of the building which vibrated around the juke box. The signs were still up there, hung by wire from the little iron balcony, nailed to the wall, wooden boards painted different colors, some white, some red, some black, some green, with lettering in contrasted colors. A big sign hanging from the balcony said:
God is not mocked
_. Another sign said:
Now is the Day of Salvation
_.

Yeah
_, I said to myself,
he still lives here
_. He lived there above a spick restaurant, and nigger children played naked in the next block among starving cats, and nigger women sat on the steps after the sun got low and fanned right slow with palm-leaf fans. I reached for a cigarette as I prepared to enter the doorway of the stairs, but found I had none. So I went into the restaurant, where the juke box was grinding to a halt.

To the old woman who stood behind the beer bar squatly like a leg and whose eyebrows were very thorny and white against the brown Mexican skin and black
rebozo
_, I said, “_Cigarrillos?__”

“_Que tipo?__” she asked.

“Lucky,” I said, and as she laid them before me, I pointed upward, and asked, “The old man, is he upstairs?” But she looked blank, so I said, “_Esta arriba el viejo?__” And felt pleased with myself for getting it off.

“_Quien sabe?__” she replied. “_Viene y va__.”

So he came and went. Upon the Lord’s business.

The a voice said in tolerable English, from the shadows at the end of the bar, “The old man has gone out.”

“Thank you,” I replied to the old man, a Mexican, who was propped there in a chair. I turned back to the old woman, and said, “Give me a beer,” and pointed to the spigot.

While I drank the beer I looked up above the counter and saw another one of the signs, painted on a big slab of plywood, or something of the sort, hanging from a nail. The background of the sign was bright red, there were blue scrolls of flowers in relief in the upper corner, the lettering was in black, high-lighted in white. It said:
Repent ye; for the Kingdom of Heaven is at hand. Matt., iii,2.
_

I pointed to the sign. “_De el?__ I asked. “The old man’s huh?”

“_Si, se?or__,” the old woman said. Then added irrelevantly, “_Es como un santito__.”

“He may be a saint,” I agreed, “but he is also nuts.”

“Nutz?”

She said nothing to that, and I continued with the beer until the old Mexican at the end of the bar suddenly said, “Look, here comes the old one!”

Turning, I saw the black-clothed figure through the dingy glass of the door; then the door pushed open and he entered, older than I remember, the white patches of hair hanging damply from under the old Panama hat, the steel-rimmed spectacles dangerously loose on the nose and the pale eyes behind, the shoulders stooped and drawn together as though pulled by the obscene, disjunctive, careful weight of the belly, as though it were the heavy tray, or satchel, worn by some hawker on a street corner. The black coat did not button across the belly.

He stood there, blinking gravely to me, apparently not recognizing me, for he had come from the last sunshine into the dimness of the restaurant.

“Good evening,
se?or
_,” the old Mexican said to the Scholarly Attorney.

“_Buenas tardes__,” the woman said.

The Scholarly Attorney took off his Panama and turned to the woman, and bowed slightly, with a motion of the head which stirred suddenly in my mind the picture of the long room in the white house by the sea, the picture of a man, the same but different, younger, the hair not gray, in that room. “Good evening,” he said to the woman, and then turning to the old Mexican, repeated, “Good evening, sir.”

The old Mexican pointed at me, and said, “He waits.”

At that the Scholarly Attorney first, I believe, really observed me. But he did not recognize me, blinking at me in the dimness. Certainly he had no reason to expect to find me there.

“Hello,” I said, “don’t you know me?”

“Yes,” he said, and continued to peer at me. He offered me his hand, and I took it, It was clammy in my grasp.

“Let’s get out of here,” I said.

“Do you want the bread?” the old Mexican asked.

The Scholarly Attorney turned to him. “Yes, thank you. If it is convenient.”

The Mexican rose, went to the end of the counter, and took a largish brown paper bag full of something, and handed it to the other.

“Thank you,” the Scholarly Attorney said, “thank you very much, sir.”

“_De nada__,” the Mexican said, bowing.

“I wish you a good evening,” the Scholarly Attorney said, and bowed to the man, then to the woman, with an inclination of the head which again twitched the old recollection in me of the room in the white house by the sea.

Then I followed him out of the restaurant, into the street. Across the street lay the little park of trampled brown grass, now glistening with moisture, where the bums sat on benches and the pigeons cooed softly like an easy conscience and defecated in delicate little lime-white pinches on the cement around the fountain. I looked at the pigeons, then at the bulged-open bag, which, I observed, was full of bread crusts. “Are you going to feed the pigeons?” I asked.

“No, it is for George,” he said, moving toward the doorway that led above.

“You keeping a dog?”

“No,” he said, and led the way into the vestibule, and up the wooden stairs.

“What is George, then? A parrot?”

“No,” he said, wheezily, for the steps were steep, “George is an unfortunate.”

That meant, I remembered, a bum. An unfortunate is a bum who is fortunate enough to get his foot inside a softy’s door and stay there. If he gets a good berth he is promoted from bum to unfortunate. The Scholarly Attorney had, on several occasions before, taken in unfortunates. One unfortunate had popped the organist down at the mission where the Scholarly Attorney operated. Another unfortunate had lifted his watch and Phi Beta Kappa key.

So George was another unfortunate. I looked at the bread, and said, “Well, he must be pretty unfortunate if that’s what he’s got to eat.

“He eats some of it,” the Scholarly Attorney said, “but that is almost accidental. He uses it in his work. But some of it slips down, I am sure, and that is why he is never hungry. Except for sweets,” he added.

“How in God’s name does he use bread crusts in his work and the bread crusts slip down his throat?”

“Do not take the name of the Lord in vain,” he said. And added, “George’s work, it’s very clever. And artistic. You will see.”

I saw. We got to the top of the second flight, turned in the narrow hall under cracked skylight, and entered a door. There was what I took to be George, in one corner of the big, sparsely furnished room, sitting tailor-fashion on a piece of old blanket, with a couple of big mixing bowls in front of him., and a big piece of plywood about two feet by four lying on the floor by him.

George looked up when we came in and said, “I ain’t got any more bread.”

“Here it is,” the Scholarly Attorney said, and took the brown bag to him.

George emptied the crusts into one of the bowls, then stuck a piece into his mouth and began to chew, soberly and purposively. He was a fair-sized, muscular man, with a hell of a strong-looking neck, and the tendons in his neck worked and pulled slickly while he chewed. He had yellow hair, almost gone, and a smooth, flat face with blue eyes. While he chewed he just looked straight ahead at a spot cross the room.

“What does he do that for?” I asked.

“He’s making an angel.”

“Well,” I said. And just then George leaned forward over one of the bowls and let the thoroughly masticated bread drop from his mouth into the bowl. The he put another crust into his mouth.

“There is one he has finished,” the Scholarly Attorney said, and pointed at another corner of the room, where another piece of plywood was propped up. I went to examine it. At one end, the figure of an angel, with wings and flowing drapery, had been executed in bas-relief in what looked like putty. “That one is just drying,” the Scholarly Attorney said. “When it gets good and dry, he’ll color it. Then he’ll shellac it. Then the board will be painted and a motto put on it.”

“Very pretty,” I said.

“He makes statues of angels, too. See,” and he went to a kitchen safe, and opened it, to expose a shelf of dishes and pots and another with an array of gaudy angels.

I examined the angels. While I did so, the Scholarly Attorney took a can of soup, a loaf of bread, and some soft butter out of the safe, put them on the table in the center of the room, and lighted one of the burners on the two-burner plate in the corner. “Will you join me in my supper?” he asked.

“No, thanks,” I said, and continued to stare at the angels.

“He sometimes sells them on the street,” he said, pouring out his soup into a stewpan, “but he can’t bear to sell the best ones.”

“Are these the best ones?” I asked.

“Yes,” the Scholarly Attorney replied. And added, “They are pretty good, aren’t they?”

I said, “Yes,” for there wasn’t anything else to say. Then’ looking at the artist, asked, “Doesn’t he make anything but angels? What about Kewpie dolls and bulldogs?”

“He makes angels. Because of what happened.”

“What happened?”

“His wife,” the Scholarly Attorney said, stirring the soup in the stewpan. “On account of her he makes angels. They were in a circus, you know.”

“No, I didn’t know.”

“Yes, they were what you call aerialists. She did the angel act. She had large white wings, George said.”

“White wings,” George said through the bread, but it was a sound like
wite whungs
_, and he fluttered his big hands like wings, and smiled.

“She fell down a long way with white wings which fluttered as though she were flying,” the Scholarly Attorney continued, explaining patiently.

And one day the rope broke,” I affirmed.

“Something went wrong with the apparatus. It affected George very deeply.”

“How about the way it affected her?”

The old man ignored my wit, and said, “He got so he could not perform his act.”

“What was his act?”

“He was the man who got hanged.”

“Oh,” I said, and looked at George. That accounted for the big neck, no doubt. Then, “Did the apparatus go wrong with him and choke him or something?”

“No,” the Scholarly Attorney said, “the whole matter simply grew distasteful to him.”

“Distasteful?” I said.

“Yes, distasteful. Matter came to such a pass that he could not perform happily in his chosen profession. He dreamed of falling every time he went to sleep. And he would wet his bed like a child.”

“Falling, falling,” George said through the bread, with a sound like
fawing, fawing
_, but still smiled brightly in the midst of the chewing.

“One day when he got up on his platform with the loop around his neck, he could not jump. In fact, he could not move at all. He sank down on the platform and crouched there weeping. They had to remove him bodily, and bring him down,” the Scholarly Attorney said. “Then for some time he was completely paralyzed.”

“It sound,” I said, “like that hanging act must have got pretty distasteful to him. As you so quaintly put it.”

“He was completely paralyzed,” he repeated, ignoring my wit. “Through no physical cause–if–” he pause–”anything ever comes to pass from a physical cause. For the physical world, though it exists and it existence cannot be denied without blasphemy, is never cause, it is only result, only symptom, it is the clay under the thumb of the potter and we–” He stopped, the gleam which has started up fitfully in the pale eyes flickered out, the hands which lifted to gesticulate sank. He leaned above the gas plate and stirred the soup. He resumed, “The trouble was here,” and he laid a finger to his own forehead. “It was his spirit. Spirit is always cause–I tell you–” He stopped, shook his head, and peered at me before he said sadly, “But you do not understand.”

“I reckon not,” I agreed “He recovered from the paralysis,” he said. “But George is not exactly a well man. He cannot bear high places. He will not look out the window. He covers his eyes with his hands when I lead him downstairs to go on the street to sell his artistic work. So I take him down only rarely now. He will not sit on a chair or sleep in a bed. He must always be on the floor. He does not like to stand. His legs simply collapse and he begins to cry. It is fortunate he has always had his artistic bent. It helps him to take his mind off thing. And he prays a good deal. I taught him to pray. That helps. I get up and pray and he says the prayers after me. When he wakes at night with the dreams and cannot sleep.”

“Does he still wet the bed?” I asked.

“Sometimes,” the Scholarly Attorney replied gravely.

I looked at George. He was weeping silently, the tears running down his smooth, flat cheeks, but his jawbone was not missing a beat on the bread. “Look at him,” I said.

The Scholarly Attorney looked at him. “Stupid, stupid,” he muttered fretfully, shaking his head, so that an additional flake or two of dandruff floated down to the black serge collar, “stupid of me to be talking that way with him listening. Stupid–I’m an old man and I forget–” and clucking and muttering and shaking his head in that same fretful fashion he poured some soup into a bowl, took a spoon, and went to George. “Look, look,” he said, leaning, with a spoon of soup thrust toward George’s face, “good, it’s good soup–soup–take some soup.”