All the King's Men - Robert Penn Warren [30]
Then he looked over to me and said, “Let’s haul ass, Jack,” and started down toward the front door, out of sight.
Before I could get into lower gear, the Judge swung his face in my direction, and focused his eyes on me, and his upper lip lifted under that nose to form a smile of somewhat massive irony, and he said, “Your employer is calling you, Mr. Burden.”
“I don’t use any ear trumpet yet.” I said, and pulled off toward the door, and thought to myself: Christ, Jack, you talk like a snot, Christ, you are a smart guy.
I had just about made the door, when he said, “I’m dining with your mother this week. Shall I tell her you still like your work?”
Why won’t he lay off? I thought, but he wouldn’t, and that lip lifted up again.
So I said, “Suit yourself, Judge. But if I were you I wouldn’t go around advertising this visit to anybody. In case you changed your mind, somebody might figure you had stooped to a low political deal with the Boss. In the dark of night.”
And I went out the door and down the hall and out the hall door and left it open but let the screen door slam.
God damn him, why hadn’t he laid off me?
But he hadn’t scared.
We left the bay, and lost the salt, sad, sweet, fishy smell of the tidelands out of our nostrils. We headed north again. It was darker now. The ground mist lay heavier on the fields, and in the dips of the road the mist frayed out over the slab and blunted the headlights. Now and then a pair of eyes would burn at us out of the dark ahead. I knew that they were the eyes of a cow–a poor dear stoic old cow with a cud, standing on the highway shoulder, for there wasn’t any stock law–but her eyes burned at us out of the dark as though her skull were full of blazing molten metal like blood and we could see inside the skull into that bloody hot brightness in that moment when the reflection was right before we picked up her shape, which is so perfectly formed to be pelted with clods, and knew what she was and knew that inside that unlovely knotty head there wasn’t anything but a handful of coldly coagulated gray mess in which something slow happened as we went by. We were something slow happening inside the cold brain of a cow. That’s what the cow would say if she were a brass-bound Idealist like little Jackie Burden.
The Boss said, “Well, Jackie, it looks like you got a job cut out for you.”
And I said, “Callahan?”
And he said, “Nope, Irwin.”
And I said, “I don’t reckon you will find anything on Irwin.”
And he said, “You find it.”
We bored into the dark for another twenty miles and eighteen minutes. The ectoplasmic fingers of the mist reached out of the swamp, threading out from the blackness of the cypresses, to snag us, but didn’t have any luck. A possum came out of the swamp and started across the road and might have made it, too, if Sugar-Boy hadn’t been too quick for him. Sugar-Boy just shaded the steering wheel delicately to the left, just a fraction. There wasn’t even a jounce or twitch, but something thumped against the underside of the left front fender, and Sugar-Boy said, “The b-b-b-b-bas-tud.” Sugar-Boy could thread a needle with that Cadillac.
At about the end of that eighteen minutes and twenty miles, I said: “But suppose I don’t find anything before election day?”
The Boss said, “To hell with election day. I can deliver Masters prepaid, special handling. But if it takes ten years, you find it.”
We clocked off five miles more, and I said, “But suppose there isn’t anything to find?”
And the Boss said, “There is always something.”
And I said, “Maybe not on the Judge.”
And he said, “Man is conceived in sin and born in corruption and he passeth from the stink of the didie to the stench of the shroud. There is always something.”
Two miles more, and he said, “And make it stick.”
And that was all a good while ago. And masters is dead now, as dead as mackerel, but the Boss was right and he went to the Senate. And Callahan is not dead but he has wished he were, no doubt, for he used up his luck a long time back and being dead was not part of it. And Adam Stanton is dead now, too, who used to go fishing with me and who lay on the sand in the hot sunshine with me and with Anne Stanton. And Judge Irwin is dead, who leaned toward me among the stems of the tall gray marsh grass, in the gray damp wintry dawn, and said,