All the King's Men - Robert Penn Warren [191]
But now, as I whirled eastward, over desert, under the shadow of mountains, by mesas, across plateaus, and saw the people in that magnificent empty country, I did not think that I would ever have to envy anybody again, for I was sure that now I had the secret knowledge, and with knowledge you can face up to anything, for knowledge is power.
In a settlement named Don Jon, New Mexico, I talked to a man propped against the shady side of the filling station, enjoying the only patch of shade in a hundred miles due east. He was an old fellow, seventy-five if a day, with a face like sun-brittled leather and pale-blue eyes under the brim of a felt hat which had once been black. The only thing remarkable about him was the fact that while you looked into the sun-brittled leather of the face, which seemed as stiff and devitalized as the hide on a mummy’s jaw, you would suddenly see a twitch in the left cheek, up toward the pale-blue eye. You would think he was going to wink, but he wasn’t going to wink. The twitch was simply an independent phenomenon, unrelated to the face or to what was behind the face or to anything in the whole tissue of phenomena which is the world we are lost in. It was remarkable, in that face, the twitch which lived that little life all its own. I squatted by his side, where he sat on a bundle of rags from which the handle of a tin skillet protruded, and listened to him talk. But the words were not alive. What was alive was the twitch, of which he was no longer aware.
After my tank had been filled, I continued to watch that twitch, with glances stolen from the highway, as we sat side by side in the car and hurtled eastward. He was going east, too, going back. That was back in the days when the dust storms were blowing half the country away and folks headed west like the lemmings on a rampage. Only, the folks who got there lacked the fine ecstasy of the lemmings. They did not start swimming in teeming, obsessed hordes straight out to the middle of the blue Pacific. That would have been the logical thing for them to do, just start swimming, pa and ma, grandpa and grandma, and baby Rosebud with the running sore on her little chin, the whole kit and kaboodle of ’em, flailing the water to a froth and heading out. But, no, they were not like the lemmings, and so they just sat down and starved slowly in California. But this old fellow didn’t. He was going back to north Arkansas to starve where he had come from. “Californy,” he said, “hit is jes lak the rest of the world, only it is more of hit.”
“Yeah,” I replied, “that is a fact.”
“You been thar?” he demanded.
I told him I had been there.
“You goen back home?” he asked
I told him I was going home.
We rode across Texas to Shreveport, Louisiana, where he left me to try for north Arkansas. I did not ask him if he had learned the truth in California. His face had learned it anyway, and wore the final wisdom under the left eye. The face knew that the twitch was the live thing. Was all. But, having left that otherwise unremarkable man, it occurred to me, as I reflected upon the thing which made him remarkable, that if the twitch was all, what was it that could know that the twitch was all? Did the leg of the dead frog in the laboratory know that the twitch was all when you put the electric current through it? Did the man’s face know about the twitch, and how it was all? And if I was all twitch how did the twitch which was me know that the twitch was all? Ah, I decided, that is the mystery. That is the secret knowledge. That is what you have to go to California to have a mystic vision to find out. That the twitch can know that the twitch is all. Then, having found that out, in the mystic vision, you feel clean and free. You are at one with the Great Twitch.
So I kept on riding east, and after long enough I was home.
I got back, late at night, and went to bed. The next morning I turned up at the office, well rested and well shaved, and strolled in to say howdy-do to the Boss. I had a great desire to see him, to observe him closely and find if there was anything in his make-up which I had previously missed. I had to look at him very closely, for he was the man who had everything now, and I had nothing. Or rather, I corrected myself, he had everything, except the thing that I had, the great thing, the secret. So I corrected myself, and in much the mood of a priest who looks down with benign pity on the sweat and striving, I entered the Governor