All the King's Men: Chapters 5–6

Tom Talos had made quarterback on the mythical All Southern Eleven and had celebrated by wrapping an expensive yellow sport job around a culvert on one of the numerous new speedways which bore his father’s name.

Fortunately, a Highway Patrol car, and not some garrulous citizen, discovered the wreck, and the half-empty bottle of evidence was, no doubt, flung into the night to fall in the dark waters of the swamp.

He stamped and swore that he was going to have blood, and breathed indictments, jail, publicity, and law suits.

The Boss knew all about the so-called fallacy of the Argumentum ad hominem. “It may be a fallacy,” he said, “but it is shore-God useful. If you use the right kind of argumentum you can always scare the hominem into a laundry bill he didn’t expect.”

And he swung the double-barrel round to cover Tiny, who stood at the hearth rug before him and seemed to be melting the tallow down faster than even the log fire on the bricks would have warranted.

He sees in his mind a face which does not exist anymore, speaks a name—Spike, Bud, Snip, Red, Rusty, Jack, Dave—which belongs to that now non-existent face but which by some inane and doddering confusion of the universe is for the moment attached to a not too happily met and boring stranger.

But he humors the drooling doddering confusion of the universe and continues to address politely that dull stranger by the name which properly belongs to the boy-face and to the time when the boy-voice called thinly across the late afternoon water or murmured by a campfire at night or in the middle of a crowded street said, “Gee, listen to this—on Wenlock Edge the woods in trouble, his forest fleece the Wrekin heaves—”

Friendship was something he suddenly discovered and had to give away as a recognition of and payment for the breathlessly opening world which momently divulged itself like a moon flower.

But there wasn’t any big side-wheeler there now, white as a wedding cake, cranky and improbable, with red and gilt decorations, and no calliope was playing “Dixie” and no whistles blowing.

“I can’t imagine to what particular thing you are referring,” she whispered in mock sweetness, underscoring the particular, setting it meticulously in my hide like a banderilla.

Sugar-Boy sneaked one of his lumps of sugar out of the side pocket of his coat, put it into his mouth, and began to suck it, with his fey Irish cheeks drawn in and his eyes blurred with bliss.

I could look down from my office window on the great bolls and tufts and swollen globes of green which were the trees of the Capitol grounds seen from the height of my window, and think of the deep inner maze of green in one of the big trees and of the hollow shadowy chambers near the trunk, where maybe a big cantankerous jay would be perched for a moment like a barbarous potentate staring with black, glittering, beady eyes into the green tangle.

I could look down from my office window on the great bolls and tufts and swollen globes of green which were the trees of the Capitol grounds seen from the height of my window, and think of the deep inner maze of green in one of the big trees and of the hollow shadowy chambers near the trunk, where maybe a big cantankerous jay would be perched for a moment like a barbarous potentate staring with black, glittering, beady eyes into the green tangle.

The juicy epithets had long since lost their fine savor and a strident mechanical quality had crept into the rendering of the scene.

It was a source of perpetual surprise to find how well the legs worked carrying me down the white concrete of the drive, and how even if it was forever down the drive and past the trees I was finally past them and moving down the street as though sustained in a runnel of crystalline lava.

You cross the Mojave at night and even at night your breath rasps your gullet as though you were a sword swallower who had got hold of a hack-saw blade by mistake, and in the darkness the hunched rock and towering cactus loom at you with the shapes of a visceral, Freudian nightmare.

The moonlight lay on the slightly ruffling water like a swath of brilliant white, cold fire.

And how her hands lay supine on her lap, the fingers curling a little as though to receive a gift.

I was surprised, and a little bit awed by the fact, like a person who learns unexpectedly that he has inherited a million dollars, all lying up there in the bank for him to draw on, or who learns that the little stitch in the side is cancer and that he is carrying around inside himself that mysterious, apocalyptic, burgeoning thing which is part of himself but is, at the same time, not part of himself but the enemy.

A few paces up the drive she hesitated for me to come abreast of her. Then she took my hand, and that way, hand in hand, we proceeded toward the gallery where back in the shadow Adam would be sitting.

It was remarkable then how that little seat of a roadster gave as much room for deployment and manoeuvre as the classic plains of Flanders and how a creature who could lie in your clutch as lissome as willow and soft as silk and cuddly as a kitten could suddenly develop that appalling number of cunning, needle-pointed elbows and astute knees.

It was drifting, all right, but not drifting in any nasty pejorative sense, like a water-logged old skiff drifting in a horse-pond or a cake of soap in the gray water before you pull the plug in the bath tub.

She was young—she seemed younger to me then than she did later on looking back, for that summer I was so sure that I was old and jaded—and she was timid and sensitive and shy, but it wasn’t any squealing, squeaking, pullet-squawking, teasing, twitching, oh-that’s-not-nice-and-I-never-let-anybody-do-that-before-oh kind of shyness.

She liked the school fine, she had told me, but I hadn’t been overwhelmed by tales of midnight snacks and memory books and that darling teacher of French, and her vocabulary wasn’t slimed up with offensive bits of esoteric finishing-school slang.

“Don’t be silly,” I said, for the language of all our nights in the roadster and in the porch swing suddenly seemed, in the glare of morning and with the desperation in me, fatuous and loathsome.

We would no doubt have gone that night too, if the rain had been a different kind of rain, if it had been a light sweet rain, falling out of a high sky, the kind that barely whispers with a silky sound on the surface of the water you are swimming in, or if it had been a driven, needle-pointed cold cathartic rain to make you want to run along the beach and yell before you took refuge in the sea...

When my mother came on back to the kitchen, right away, followed by her gang, there I was and there was a nice pile of toothsome sandwiches and they weren’t going to La Grange because of the storm and kidded me about being a mind reader and having the sandwiches and coffee all ready for them, and I was charming and gracious to them all.

I had been to a drug store, too, and came equipped for all contingencies.

So I went back to the law school and by dint of consistent effort succeeded in busting out before the end of the year.

I knew this despite the very expert and sustained histrionics of which Lois was capable.

Or it resembled a greedy, avid, delicious quagmire which would swallow up the lost, benighted traveller with a last tired, liquid, contented sigh.

Yes, in that greedy, delicious quagmire, the solemn temples, the gorgeous palaces, towers, battlements, libraries, museums, huts, hospitals, houses, cities, and all the works of man might be swallowed up, with that last luxurious sigh.

More and more often accustomed objects of my wardrobe disappeared, to be replaced by proclaimed or surreptitious gifts.

The crisis came when I polished a shoe with a new tie. A row ensued, the first of many occasioned by the divergence of our tastes in haberdashery.

Sometimes I would capitulate and apologize.

I was at that time on the evening edition, and finished my stint about two in the afternoon.

I finally grew so adept at it that I could hear her voice, if it was one of her vituperative and not sullen evenings, as though it were coming from a great distance and were not, as a matter of fact, even addressed to me.

Even these devices, however, began to pall. They were a phase. Then came the final phase, the phase of the Great Sleep.

And while the chocolate is yet in midair, the lower lip drops open and beyond the purplish tint of the microscopically scaling veneer of lipstick, one sees the damp, paler red, expectant membranes of the mouth, and the faint glitter of a gold filling in the dark, hot orifice.

At first, it is always a nightmare and horrible, but in the end it may be, in a special way, rather bracing and tonic.