All the King's Men - Robert Penn Warren [23]
We would come into Burden’s Landing by the new boulevard by the bay. The air would smell salty, with maybe a taint of the fishy, sad, sweet smell of the tidelands to it, but fresh nevertheless. I would be nearly midnight then, and the light would be off in the three blocks of down-town the. Beyond the down-town and the little houses, there would be other houses along the bay, set back in the magnolias and oaks, with the white walls showing glimmeringly beyond the darkness of the trees, and the jalousies, which in the daytime would be green, looking dark against the white walls. Folks would be lying back in the rooms behind the jalousies, with nothing but a sheet over them. Well, I’d put in a good many nights behind those jalousies, from the time I was little enough to wet the bed. I’d been born in one of these rooms behind the jalousies. And behind one set of them my mother would be lying up there tonight, with a little fluting of lace on the straps of her nightgown, and her face smooth like a girl’s except for the little lines, which you wouldn’t be able to make out in the shadow anyway, at the corners of her mouth and eyes, and one bare arm laid out on the sheet with the sharp, brittle-looking, age-betraying hand showing the painted nails. Theodore Murrell would be lying there, too, breathing with a slightly adenoidal sibilance under his beautiful blonde mustache. Well, it was all legal, for she was married to Theodore Murrell, who was a lot younger than my mother and who had beautiful yellow hair scrolled on top of his round skull like taffy, and who was my stepfather. Well, he wasn’t the first the first stepfather I had had.
Then, on down the row, behind its own live oaks and magnolias, there would be the Stanton house, locked up and nobody behind the jalousies, for Anne and Adam were in town now, and grown up and never went fishing with me anymore, and the old man was dead. Then on down the row, where the open country began, would be the house of Judge Irwin. We wouldn’t stop before we got there. But we’d make a little call on the Judge.
“Boss,” I said.
The Boss turned around, and saw the chunky black shape of his head against the brightness of our headlights.
“What you gonna say to him? I asked.
“Boy, you never know till the time comes,” he said. “Hell,” he amended, “maybe I won’t say anything to him a-tall. I don’t know as I’ve got anything to say to him. I just want to look at him good.”
“The Judge won’t scare easy,” I said. No, I didn’t reckon the Judge would scare easy, thinking of the straight back of the man who used to swing off the saddle and drop the bridle over a paling on the Stanton fence and walk up the shell walk to the veranda with his Panama in his hand and the coarse dark-red hair bristling off his high skull like a mane and the hooked red nose jutting off his face and the yellow irises of his eyes bright and hard-looking as topaz. That was nearly twenty years before, all right, and maybe the back wasn’t as straight now as it had been then (a thing like that happens so slowly you don’t notice it) and maybe the yellow were a little bleary lately, but I still didn’t reckon the Judge would scare easy. That was one thing on which I figured I could bet: he wouldn’t scare. If he did, it was going to be a disappointment to me.
“No, I don’t count on him scaring easy,” the Boss said. “I just want to look at him.”
“Well, God damn it,” I popped out, and came up off my shoulder blades before I knew it, “you’re crazy to think you can scare him!”
“Take it easy,” the Boss said, and laughed. I couldn’t see his face. It was just a black blob against the glare of the headlights, with the laugh coming out of it.
“I just want to look at him,” the Boss said, “like I told you.”
“Well, you sure picked a hell of a time and a hell of a long way to go look at him,