All the King's Men - Robert Penn Warren [7]
He stood there a half minute, not saying a word, and not moving. He didn’t even seem to be noticing the crowd down there. Then he seemed, all at once, to discover them, and grinned. “So he comes back,” he said, grinning now. “When he gets half a day off. And he says, Hello, folks, how you making it? And that’s what I’m saying.”
That’s what he said. He looked down, grinning, and his head turned as his eyes went down in the crowd, and seemed to stop a face there, and then go on to stop on another face.
Then he started walking down the steps, as if he had just come out of that dusky-dark hallway beyond the big open doors behind him and was walking down the steps by himself, with nobody there in front of him and no eyes on him. He came straight down the steps toward where his gang was standing, Lucy Stark and the rest of us, and nodded at us as though he were simply passing us on the street and didn’t know us any too well anyway, and kept right on walking, straight into the crowd as though the crowd weren’t there. The people fell back a little to make a passage for him, with their eyes looking right at him, and the rest of us in his gang followed behind him, and the crowd closed up behind us.
People were clapping now, and yelling. Somebody kept yelling, “Hi, Willie!”
The Boss walked straight across the street, through the crowd, and got into the Cadillac and sat down. We got in with him and the photographer and the others went back to their car. Sugar-Boy started up and nosed out into the street. People didn’t get out of the way very fast. They couldn’t, they were so jammed in. When we nosed out into the crowd, the faces were right there outside the car, not more that a foot or so away. The faces looked right in at us. But they were out there and we were inside now. The eyes in the red, slick-skinned long faces, or the brown, crinkled faces, looked in at us.
Sugar-Boy kept pecking at his horn. The words were piling up inside him. His lips started to work. I could see his face in the driver’s mirror, and the lips were working. “The b-b-b-b-as-tuds,” he said, and the spit flew.
The Boss Had sunk in on himself now.
“The b-b-b-b-as-tuds,” Sugar-Boy said, and pecked at his horn, but we were easing out of the square now to a side street where there weren’t any people. We were doing forty by the time we passed the brick schoolhouse on the outskirts of town. Seeing the schoolhouse made me remember how I first met Willie, about fourteen years before, back in 1922, when he wasn’t anything but the County Treasurer of Mason County and had come down to the city to see about the bound issue to build that schoolhouse. Then I remembered how I had met him, in the back room of Slade’s pool hall, where Slade sold the needle beer, and we were sitting at one of those little marble-topped tables with wirework legs, the kind they used to have in drugstores when you were a boy and took your high-school sweeties down on Saturday night to get that chocolate banana split and rub knees under the table and the wirework would always get in the way.
There were four of us. There was Tiny Duffy, who was almost as big back then as he was to get to be. He didn’t need any sign to let you know what he was. If the wind was right, you knew he was a city-hall slob long before you could see the whites of his eyes. He had the belly and he sweated through his shirt just above the belt buckle, and he had the face, which was creamed and curded like a cow patty in a spring pasture, only it was the color of biscuit dough, and in the middle was his grin with the gold teeth. He was Tax assessor, and he wore a flat hard straw on the back of his head. There was a striped band on the hat.
Then there was Alex Michel, who was a country boy from up in Mason County but who was learning fast. He had learned fast enough to get to be a deputy sheriff. But he wasn’t that long. He wasn’t anything, for he got in the gut by a coke-frisky piano player in a cribhouse where he had gone to take out a little in trade on his protection account. Alex was, as I have said, from up in Mason County.