All the King's Men - Robert Penn Warren [8]
Duffy and I had been in the back room of Slade’s place waiting for Alex, with whom I had the hope of transacting a little business. I was a newspaperman and Alex knew something I wanted to know. Duffy had called him in, for Duffy was a friend of mine. At least, he knew that I worked for the Chronicle, which at that time was supporting the Joe Harrison outfit. Joe Harrison was Governor then. And Duffy was one of Joe Harrison’ boys.
So I was sitting in the back room of Slade’s place, one hot morning in June or July, back in 1922, waiting for Alex Michel to turn up and listening to the silence in the back room of Slade’s place. A funeral parlor at midnight is ear-splitting compared to the effect you get in the middle of the morning in the back room of a place like Slade’s if you are the first man there. You sit there and think how cozy it was last night, with the effluvium of brotherly bodies and the haw-haw of camaraderie, and you look at the floor where now there are little parallel trails of damp sawdust the old broom left this morning when the unenthusiastic old Negro man cleaned up, and the general impression is that you are alone with the Alone and it is his move. So I sat there in silence (Duffy was never talkative in the morning before he had worried down two or three drinks), and listened to my tissues break down and the beads of perspiration explode delicately out of the ducts embedded in the ample flesh of my companion.
Alex came in with a fellow with him, and I knew my little conversation was not promising. My mission was of some delicacy, not fit for the ear of a stranger. I figured that might be the reason Alex had his friend in tow. Maybe it was, foe Alex was cagey in an amateurish sort of way. In any case, he had the Boss with him.
Only it was not the Boss. Not to the crude eye of the homme sensuel. Metaphysically it was the Boss, but how was I to know? Fate come walking through the door, and it is five feet eleven inches tall and heavyish in the chest and shortish in the leg and is wearing a seven-fifty seersucker suit which is too long in the pants so the cuffs crumple down over the high black shoes, which could do with a polishing, and a stiff high collar like a Sunday-school superintendent and a blue-stripe tie which you know his wife gave him last Christmas and which he has kept in tissue paper with the holly card (“Merry Xmas to my Darling Willie from your Loving Wife”) until he got ready to go up the city, and a gray felt hat with the sweat stains showing through the band. It comes in just like that, and how are you to know? It comes in, trailing behind Alex Michel, who is, or was before the piano player got him, six-feet-two of beautifully articulated bone and gristle with a hard, bony, baked-looking face and two little quick brown eyes which don’t belong above that classic torso and in that face and which keep fidgeting around like a brace of Mexican jumping beans. So Fate trails modestly along behind Alex Michel, who approaches the table with an air of command which would deceive no one.
Alex shook my hand and said, “Hi, pal,” and slapped me on the shoulder with a palm that was tough enough to crack a black walnut, and paid proper obeisance to Mr. Duffy, who extended a hand without rising; and then, as a sort of afterthought, Alex jerked a thumb toward his trailing companion and said, “This is Willie Stark, gents. From up home at Mason City. Me and Willie was in school together. Yeah, and Willie, and he was a bookworm, he was teacher’s pet. Wuzn’t you, Willie?” And Alex whickered like a stallion in full appreciation of his own delicious humor and nudged the teacher’s pet in the ribs. Then, controlling himself, he added, “And he’s still teacher’s pet, ain’t you, Willie, ain’t you?”
And he turned to Duffy and me, and explained, before mirth again took him and Slade’s back room again resounded with the cheerful note of the breeding paddock, “Willie–Willie–he married a school-teacher!”
That idea seemed monstrously funny to Alex. Meanwhile, Willie, unable to complete the amenities of the situation, bowed to the blast and stood there with the old gray felt hat in his hand, with the sweat showing around the band outside where it had soaked through. Willie