All the King's Men - Robert Penn Warren [20]
“Oh, it’s so damned funny,” Sadie was saying, “but you won’t think it’s so damned funny when I tell you.” She stopped, then said, “Judge Irwin has come out for Callahan.”
There wasn’t any sound for what must have been three seconds but seemed like a week while a mourning dove down in the clump of trees in the bottom where the hogs were gave a couple of tries at breaking his heart and mine.
Then I heard the Boss say, “The bastard.”
“It was in the afternoon paper–the endorsement,” Sadie elaborated. “Matlock telephoned from town. To let you know.”
“The two-timing bastard,” the Boss said.
Then he heaved up off the wire, and I turned around. I figured the conclave was about to break up. It was. “Come on,” the Boss said, and started moving up the hill toward the house, Sadie by his side popping her seersucker skirt to keep up with him, and I trailing.
About the time we got to the gate where the chinaberry tree was and the berries on the ground popped under your feet, the Boss said to Sadie, “Get ’em cleared out.”
“Tiny was figuring on having supper out here,” Sadie said, “and Sugar-Boy was gonna drive him to Mason City in time for the eight-o’clock train to town. You asked him.”
“I’m un-asking him,” the Boss replied. “Clear ’em all out.”
“It’ll be a privilege,” Sadie said, and I reckoned she spoke from the heart.
She cleared them out, and fast. Their car went off down the gravel road with the springs flat on the rear axle and human flesh oozing out the windows, then the evening quiet descended upon us. I went to the other side of the house where a hammock made out of wire and barrel staves, the kind they rig up in that part of the world, was swung between a post and the live oak. I took off my coat and hung it on the post, and dropped my bottle into the side pocket so it wouldn’t break my hip bone when I lay down, and climbed into the hammock.
The Boss was down at the other end of the yard where the crepe myrtles were, prowling up and down on the dusty grass stems. Well, it was all his baby, and he could give it suck. I just lay there in the hammock. I lay there and watched the undersides of the oak leaves, dry and grayish and dusty-green, and some of them I saw had rusty-corroded-looking spots on them. Those were the ones which would turn loose their grip on the branch before long–not in any breeze, the fibers would just relax, in the middle of the day maybe with the sunshine bright and the air so still it aches like the place where the tooth was on the morning after you’ve been to the dentist or aches like your heart in the bosom when you stand on the street corner waiting for the light to change and happen to recollect how things once were and how they might have been yet if what happened had not happened.
Then, while I was watching the leaves I heard a dry, cracking sound down toward the barnyard. Then it came again. Then I figured out what it was. It was Sugar-Boy off down in the lot playing with his .38 Special again. He would set up a tin can or a bottle on a post, and turn his back to the post and start walking away, carrying his baby in his left hand, by the barrel, the safety on, just walking steadily away on his stumpy little legs with his always blue serge pants bagging around his underslung behind and with the last rays of the evening sun faintly glittering on his bald spot among the scrubby patches of hair like bleached lichen. Then, al of a sudden, he would stop walking, and grab the butt of the play-pretty with his right hand, and wheel–all in a quick, awkward motion, as though a spring had exploded inside him–and the play-pretty would go bang, and the tin can would jump off the post or the bottle would spray off in all directions. Or most likely. Then Sugar-Boy would say,