All the King's Men - Robert Penn Warren [18]
I went on past the stables, which were built of log, but with a good tin roof, and leaned on the fence, looking off down the rise. Back of the barn the ground was washed and gullied somewhat, with piles of brush chucked into the washes here and there to stop the process. As though it ever would. A hundred yards off, at the foot of the rise, there was a patch of woods, scrub oak and such. The ground must have been swampy down there, for the grass and weeds at the edge of the trees were lush and tropical green. Against the bare ground beyond it looked too green to be natural. I could see a couple of hogs lounging down there on their sides, like big gray blisters popped up out of the ground.
It was getting toward sunset now. I leaned on the fence and looked off west across the country where the light was stretching out, and breathed in that dry, clean, ammoniac smell you get around stables at sunset on a summer day. I figured they would find me when they wanted me. I didn’t have the slightest notion when that would be. The Boss and his family, I reckoned, would spend the night at his pappy’s place. The reporters and the photographer and Sadie would get on back to the city. Mr. Duffy–maybe he was supposed to put up in Mason City at the hotel. Or maybe he and I were supposed to stay at Pappy’s place too. If they put us in the same bed though, I was just going to start walking in to Mason City. Then there was Sugar-Boy. But I quit thinking about it. I didn’t give a damn what they did.
I leaned on the fence, and the posture bowed my tail out so that the cloth of my pants pulled tight and pressed the pint against my left hip. I thought about that for a minute and admired the sunset colorations and breathed the dry, clean, ammoniac smell, and then I pulled out the bottle. I took a drink and put it back. I leaned on the fence and waited for the sunset colorations to explode in my stomach, which they did.
I heard somebody open and shut the gate to the barn lot, but I didn’t look around. If I didn’t look around it would not be true that somebody opened the gate with the creaky hinges, and that is a wonderful principle for a man to get hold of. I had got hold of the principle out of a book when I was in college, and I had hung on to it for grim death. I owed my success in life to that principle. It had put me where I was. What you don’t know don’t hurt you, for it ain’t real. They called that Idealism in my book I had when I was in college, and after I got hold of that principle I became an Idealist. I was a brass-bound Idealist in those days. If you are an Idealist it does not matter what you do or what goes on around you because it isn’t real anyway.
The steps came closer and closer, padded in the soft dust. I didn’t look up. Then I felt the wire of the fence creak and give because somebody else was leaning against it and admiring the sunset. Mr. X and I admired the sunset together for a couple of minutes, and nothing said. Except for the sound of his breathing I wouldn’t have known he was there.
Then there was a moment and the wire shifted when Mr. X took his weight off it. Then the hand patted my left hip, and the voice said, “Gimme a slug.” It was the Boss’s voice.
“Take it,” I said. “You know where it lives.”
He lifted up my coattail and pulled out the bottle. I could hear the gurgle as he did the damage. The wire shifted again as he leaned against it.
“I figured you’d come down here,” he said.
“And you wanted a drink,” I replied without bitterness.
“Yeah,” he said, “and Pappy doesn’t favor drinking. Never did.” I looked up at him. He was leaning on the fence, bearing down on the wire in a way not to do it any good, with the bottle held in both hands, corked, and his forearms propped over the wire.
“It used to be Lucy didn’t favor it either,” I said.
“Things change,” he said. He uncorked the bottle and took another pull, and corked it again. “But Lucy,” he said, “I don’t know whether she changed or not. I don’t know whether she favors it or not now. She never touches it herself. Maybe she sees it eases a man