All the King's Men - Robert Penn Warren [3]
Mr. Duffy debouched massively from the Cadillac, and we all entered the drugstore, the Boss holding the door open so Lucy Stark could go in and then following her, and the rest of us trailing in. There were a good many folks in the store, men in overalls lined up along the soda fountain, and women hanging around the counters where the junk and glory was, and kids hanging on skirts with one hand and clutching ice-cream cones with the other and staring out over their own wet noses at the world of men from eyes which resembled painted china marbles. The Boss just stood modestly back of the gang of customers at the soda fountain, with his hat in his hand and the damp hair hanging down over his forehead. He stood that way a minute maybe, and then one of the girls ladling up ice cream happened to see him, and got a look on her face as though her garter belt had busted in church, and dropped her ice cream scoop, and headed for the back of the store with her hips pumping hell-for-leather under the lettuce-green smock.
Then a second later a little bald-headed fellow wearing a white coat which ought to have been in the week’s wash came plunging through the crowd from the back of the store, waving his hand and bumping the customers and yelling, “It’s Willie!” The fellow ran up to the Boss, and the Boss took a couple of steps to meet him, and the fellow with the white coat grabbed Willie’s hand as though he were drowning. He didn’t shake Willie’s hand, not by ordinary standards. He just hung into it and twitched all over and gargled the sacred syllables of Willie. Then, when the attack had passed, he turned to the crowd, which was ringing around at a polite distance and staring, and announced, “My God, folks, it’s Willie!”
The remark was superfluous. One look at the faces rallied around and you knew that if any citizen over the age of three didn’t know that the strong-set man standing there in the Palm Beach suit was Willie Stark, that citizen was a half-wit. In the first place, all he would have to do would be to lift his eyes to the big picture high up there above the soda fountain, a picture about six times life size, which showed the same face, the big eyes, which in the picture had the suggestion of a sleepy and inward look (the eyes of the man in the Palm Beach suit didn’t have that look now, but I’ve seen it), the pouches under the eyes and the jowls beginning to sag off, and the meaty lips, which didn’t sag but if you looked very close were laid one on top of the other like a couple of bricks, and the tousle of hair hanging down on the not very high squarish forehead. Under the picture was the legend: Mt study is the heart of the people. In quotation marks, and signed, Willie Stark. I had seen that picture in a thousand places, pool halls to palaces.
Somebody back in the crowd yelled, “Hi, Willie!” The Boss lifted his right hand and waved in acknowledgment to the unknown admirer. Then the Boss spied a fellow at the far end of the soda fountain, a tall, gaunt-shanked, malarial, leather-faced side of jerked venison, wearing jean pants and a brace of mustaches hanging off the kind of face see in photographs of General Forrest’s cavalrymen, and the Boss started toward him and put out his hand. Old Leather-Face didn’t show. Maybe he shuffled one of his broken brogans on the tiles, and his Adam’s apple jerked one or twice, and the eyes were watchful out of that face which resembled the seat of an old saddle left out in the weather, but when the Boss got close, his hand came up from the elbow, as though it didn’t belong to Old Leather-Face but was operating on its own, and the Boss took it.
“How you making it, Malaciah?” the Boss asked.
The Adam’s apple worked a couple of times, and the Boss shook the hand which was hanging out there in the air as if it didn’t belong to anybody, and Old leather-Face said, “We’s grabblen.”
“How’s your boy?” the Boss asked.
“Ain’t doen so good,” Old Leather-Face allowed.
“Sick?”
“Naw,” Old Leather-Face allowed, “jail.”
“My God,” the Boss said, “what they doing round here, putting good boys in jail?