All the King's Men - Robert Penn Warren [31]
Little Jackie made it stick, all right
Chapter Two
The last time I saw Mason City I went up there in that big black Cadillac with the Boss and the gang, and we burned up that new concrete slab, and it was a long time ago–nearly three years, for it is now into 1939, but it seems like forever. But the first time I went up there it was a lot longer time ago, back in 1922, and I went there in my Model-T, hanging on to the steering post to stay in the saddle when I sideslipped in the gray dust, which plumed out behind for a mile and settled on the cotton leaves to make them gray too, or when I hit a section of gravel, holding my jaws clamped tight to keep the vibration from the washboard from chipping the enamel off my teeth. You’ll have to say this for the Boss: when he got through you could drive out for a breath of air and still keep your bridgework in place. But you couldn’t that first time I went to Mason City.
The managing editor of the Chronicle called me in and said, “Jack, get in your car and go up to Mason City and see who the hell that fellow Stark is who thinks he is Jesus Christ scourging the money-changers out of that shinplaster courthouse up there.”
“He married a school-teacher,” I said.
“Well, it must have gone to his head,” Jim Madison, who was managing editor of the Chronicle, said. “Does he think he is the first one ever popped a school-teacher?”
“The bond issue was for building a schoolhouse,” I said, “and it looks like Lucy figures they might keep some of it for that purpose.”
“Who the hell is Lucy?”
“Lucy is the school-teacher,” I said.
“She won’t be a school-teacher long,” he said. “Not on the Mason County payroll if she keeps that up. Not if I know Mason County.”
“Lucy don’t favor drinking either,” I said.
“Was it you or the other guy popped Lucy?” he demanded. “You know so much about Lucy.”
“I just know what Willie told me.”
“Who the hell is Willie?”
“Willie is the fellow with the Christmas tie,” I said. “He is Cousin Willie from the country. He is Willie Stark, the teacher’s pet, and I met him in the back room of Slade’s place a couple of months ago and he told me Lucy didn’t favor drinking. I’m just guessing about her not favoring stealing.”
“She don’t favor Willie being County Treasurer either,” Jim Madison allowed, “if she is the one putting him up to what he is doing. Doesn’t she know they run things up in Mason County?”
“They run ’em up there just like they run ’em down here,” I said.
“Yeah,” Jim Madison said, and took the foul, chewed, and spit-bright butt of what had been a two-bit cigar out of the corner of his mouth and inspected it and reached out at arm’s length and let it fall into the big brass spittoon which stood on the clover-deep, Kelly-green carpet which bloomed like an oasis of elegance in the four floors of squalor of the Chronicle Building. He watched it fall, and said again, “Yeah, but you leave down here and go on up there.”
So I went up to Mason City in the Model-T, and kept my jaws clamped tight when I went over the washboard and hung to the steering post when I went over the sideslipping dust, and that was a very long time ago.
I got to Mason City early in the afternoon and went to the Mason City Café, Home-Cooked Meals for Ladies and Gents, facing the square, and sampled the mashed potatoes and fried ham and greens with pot-likker with one hand while with the other I competed with seven or eight flies for the possession of a piece of custard pie.
I went out into the street, where the dogs lay on the shady side under the corrugated iron awnings, and walked down the block till I came to the harness shop. There was one vacant seat out front, so I said howdy-do, and joined the club. I was the junior member by forty years, but I thought I was going to have liver spots on my swollen old hands crooked on the head of the hickory stick like the rest of them before anybody was going to say anything. In a town like Mason City the bench in front of the harness shop is