All the King's Men - Robert Penn Warren [89]
I would wait for a roar. You can’t help it. I knew it would come, but I would wait for it, and every time it would seem intolerably long before it came. It was like a deep dive. You start up toward the light but you know you can’t breathe yet, not yet, and all you are aware of is the blood beating in your own head in the intolerable timelessness. Then the roar would come and I would feel the way you do when you pop out of the water from a deep dive and the air bursts out of your lungs and everything reels in the light. There is nothing like the roar of as crowd when it swells up, all of a sudden at the same time, out of the thing is in every an in the crowd but is not himself. The roar would swell and rise and fall and swell again, with the Boss standing with his right arm raised straight to Heaven and his red eyes bulging.
And when the roar fell away, he said, with his arm up, “I have looked in your faces!”
And they would yell.
And he said, “O Lord, and I have seen a sign!”
And they would yell again.
And he said, “I have seen dew on the fleece and the ground dry!”
Then the yell.
Then, “I have seen blood on the moon!” Then, “Buckets of blood, and boy! I know whose blood it will be.” Then, leaning forward, grabbing out with his right hand as tough to seize something in the air before him, “Gimme that meat ax!”
It was always that way, or like that. And charging across the state with the horns screaming and blatting, and Sugar-Boy shaving the gasoline truck on the highway and the spit flaying from his mouth while the lips worked soundlessly and words piled up inside him before he could get them out, “The b-b-b-bas-tud!” And the Boss standing up on something with his arm against the sky (it might be raining, it might be bright sun, it might be night and the red light from sizzling gasoline flares set on the porch of a country store), and the crowd yelling. And me so light-headed from no sleep that my head felt big as the sky and when I walked I seemed to be tiptoeing on clouds of cotton batting.
All of that.
But this too: the Boss sitting in the Cadillac, all lights off, in the side street by a house, the time long past midnight. Or in the country, by a gate. The Boss leaning to a man, Sugar-Boy or one of Sugar-Boy’s pals, Heavy Harris or Al Perkins, saying low and fast, “Tell him to come out. I know he’s there. Tell him better come out and talk to me. If he won’t come, just say you’re a friend of Ella Lou. That’ll bring him.” Or, “Ask him if he ever heard of Slick Wilson.” Or something of the kind. And then there would be a man standing there with pajama tops stuck in pants, shivering, with face white in the darkness.
And this: the Boss sitting in a room full of smoke, a pot of coffee on the floor, or a bottle, saying, “Bring the bastard in. Bring him in.”
And when they had brought the bastard in, the Boss would look him over slow, from head to foot, and then he would say, “This is your last chance.” He would say that slow and easy. Then he would lean suddenly forward, at the man, and say, not slow and easy now, “God damn you, do you know what I can do to you?”
And he could do it, too. For he had the goods.
On the afternoon of the fourth of April, 1933, the streets leading to the Capitol were full of people, and they weren’t the kind of people you usually saw on those streets. Not in those numbers, anyway. The Chronicle that night referred to the rumor of a march on the Capitol, but affirmed that justice would not be intimidated. Before noon of the fifth of April there were a lot more wool-hats and red-necks and Mother Hubbards and crepe-de-Chine dresses with red-clay dust about the uneven bottom hem, and a lot of clothes and faces which weren’t cocklebur and crossroads, but county-seat and filling-station. The crowd moved up toward the Capitol, not singing or yelling, and spread out over the big lawn where the statues were.
Men with tripods and cameras were scurrying about on the edges of the crowd, setting up their rigs on the Capitol steps, climbing on the bases of the frock-coated statues to get shots. Here and there around the edge of the crowd you could see the blue coat of a mounted cop up above the crowd, and in the open space of lawn between the crowd and the Capitol there were more cops, just standing, and a few highway patrolmen, very slick and businesslike in their bright-green uniforms and black boots and black Sam Browne belts and dangling holsters.