All the King's Men - Robert Penn Warren [22]
So Old Man Stark swallowed his Adam’s apple a couple of times and lifted his misty, sad old blue eyes to the Boss, who happened to be flesh of his flesh though you’d never guess it, and threw in the hook. But it didn’t snag a thing. Not on Willie.
“Nope,” the Boss said, “I gotta shove.”
“I sorta reckined–” the old man began, the surrendered, and tailed off, “but if’n it’s business–”
“It is not business,” the Boss said. “It is pure pleasure. At least I’m aiming for it to be before I’m through.” Then he laughed and got up from the table, and gave his wife a smack of a kiss on the left cheek, slapped his son on the shoulder in that awkward way fathers have of slapping their sons on the shoulder (there is always a kind of apology in it, and anybody, even the Boss, who slapped Tom Stark on the shoulder had better apologize, for he was an arrogant bastard and when his father that night slapped him on the shoulder he didn’t even bother to look up). Then the Boss said, “Don’t wait up,” and started out the door. Sugar-Boy and I followed. That was the first news I had had that I was going to take the night air. But it was all the warning you usually got from the Boss. I knew enough to know that.
The Boss already sitting up in the front by the driver’s seat when I got to the Cadillac. So I got in the back, and prepared my soul for the experience of being hurled from one side to the other when we hit the curves. Sugar-Boy crawled under the wheel, and touched the starter, and began to make a sound like “Wh-wh-wh-wh–” A sound like an owl tuning up off in the swamp at night. If he had enough time and the spit held out, he would ask, “Where to?” But the Boss didn’t wait. He said, “Burden’s Landing.”
So that was it. Burden’s Landing. Well I ought to have guessed that.
Burden’s Landing is one hundred and thirty miles from Mason City, off to the southeast. If you multiply one hundred and thirty by two it makes two hundred and sixty miles. It was near nine o’clock and the stars were out and the ground mist was beginning to show in low places. God knew what time it would be when we got back to bed, and up the next morning to face a hearty breakfast and the ride back to the capital.
I lay back in the seat and closed my eyes. The gravel sprayed on the undersides of the fenders, and then it stopped spraying and the tail of the car lurched to one side, and me with it, and I knew we were back on the slab and leveling out for the job.
We would go gusting along the slab, which would be pale in the starlight between the patches of woods and the dark fields where the mist was rising. Way off from the road a barn would stick up out of the mist like a house sticking out of the rising water when the river breaks the levee. Close to the road a cow would stand knee-deep in the mist, with horns damp enough to have a pearly shine in the starlight, and it would look at the black blur we were as we went whirling into the blazing corridor of light which we could never quite get into for it would be always splitting the dark just in front of us. The cow would stand there knee-deep in the mist and look at the black blur and the blaze and then, not turning his head, at the place where the black blur and blaze had been, with the remote, massive, unvindictive indifference of God-All-Mighty or Fate or me, if I were standing there knee-deep in the mist, and the blur and the blaze whizzed past and withered on off between the fields and the patches of woods.
But I wasn’t standing there in the field, in the dark, with the mist turning slow around my knees and the ticking no-noise of the night inside my head. I was in a car, headed back to Burden’s Landing, which was named for the people from whom I got my name, and which was the place where I had been born and raised.
We would go on between the fields until we hit a town. The houses would be lined up along the streets, under the trees, with their light going out now, until we hit the main street, where the lights would be bright around the doorway of the movie house and the bugs would be zooming against the bulbs and would ricochet off to hit the concrete pavement and make a dry crunch when somebody stepped on them. The men standing in front of the pool hall would look up and see the big black crate ghost down the street and one of them would spit on the concrete and say,