All the King's Men - Robert Penn Warren [118]
I asked: “Is the Judge ambitious?”
I answered: No. An ambitious man is a man who wants other people to thing he is great. The Judge knows he is great and doesn’t care what other people think.”
I asked: “What about love?”
I was perfectly sure that the Judge had had his innings, but I was also perfectly sure that nobody around the Landing had anything on him in that respect. For if anybody in a small town has anything on anybody it isn’t long before everybody knows it.
I asked: “Is the Judge a man to scare easy?”
I answered: “He does not scare easy.”
That left money.
So I asked: “Does the Judge love money?”
“All the money the Judge wants is just enough money the make the Judge happy.”
I asked: “Was there ever a time when the Judge didn’t have enough money to make the Judge happy?” But naturally that wouldn’t be chicken feed.
I lighted another cigarette and turned that question over in my mind. I did not know the answer. Some voice out of my childhood whispered, but I could not catch what it said. I had the vague sense, rising from a depth of time, and of myself, of being a child, of entering the room where the grown people were, of knowing that they had just that instant stopping talking because I had come into the room and was not supposed to know what they were talking about. Had I overheard what they had been talking about? I listened for the voice whispering out of my childhood, but that voice was a long way off. It could not give me the answer. So I rose from the table, and left the empty beer bottles and the cigarette butts, and went out into the street, which still steamed from the late afternoon shower like a Turkish bath, and where now the tires of automobiles hissed hotly through the film of moisture on the asphalt. If we were lucky there might be a breeze of the Gulf later. If we were lucky.
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,