All the King's Men - Robert Penn Warren [96]
Jack Burden lived with them, in the slatternly apartment among the unwashed dishes in the sink and on the table, the odor of stale tobacco smoke, the dirty shirts and underwear piled in corners. He even took a relish in the squalor, in the privilege of letting a last crust of buttered toast fall to the floor to be undisturbed until the random heel should grind it into the mud-colored carpet, in the spectacle of the fat roach moving across the cracked linoleum of the bathroom floor while he steamed in the tub. Once he had brought his mother to the apartment for tea, and she had sat on the edge of the overstuffed chair, holding a cracked cup and talking with a brittle and calculated charm out of a face which was obviously being held in shape by a profound exercise of will. She saw a roach venture out from the kitchen door. She saw one of Jack Burden’s friends crush an ant on the inner lip of the sugar bowl and flick the carcass from his finger. The nail of the finger itself was not very clean. But she kept right on delivering the charm, out of the rigid face. He had to say that for her.
But afterward, as they walked down the street, she had said, “Why do you live like that?”
“It’s what I’m built for, I reckon,” Jack Burden said.
“With those people,” she said.
“They’re all right,” he said, and wondered if they were, and wondered if he was.
His mother didn’t say anything for a minute, making a sharp, bright clicking on the pavement with her heels as she walked along, holding her small shoulders trimly back, carrying her famished-cheeked, blue-eyed, absolutely innocent face slightly lifted to the pulsing sunset world of April like a very expensive present the world ought to be glad even to have a look at.
Walking along beside him she said meditatively, “That dark-haired one–if he’d get cleaned up–he wouldn’t be bad looking.”
“That’s what a lot of other women think,” Jack Burden said, and suddenly felt a nauseated hatred of the dark-haired one, the one who had killed the ant on the sugar bowl, who had the dirty nails. But he had to go on, something in him made him go on, “Yes, and a lot of them don’t even care about cleaning him up. They’ll take him like he is. He’s the great lover of the apartment. He put the sag in the springs of that divan we got.”
“Don’t be vulgar,” she said, because she definitely did not like what id known as vulgarity in conversation.
“It’s the truth,” he said.
She didn’t answer, and her heels did the bright clicking. Then she said, “If he’d throw those awful clothes away–and get something decent.”
“Yeah,” Jack Burden said, “on his seventy-five dollars a month.”
She looked at him now, down at his clothes. “Yours are pretty awful, too,” she said.
“Are they?” Jack Burden demanded.
“I’ll send you money for some decent clothes,” she said.
A few days later the check came and a note telling him to get a “couple of decent suits and accessories.” The check was for two hundred and fifty dollars. He did not even buy a necktie. But he and the two other men in the apartment had a wonderful blowout, which lasted for five days, and as a result of which the industrious and unlucky one lost his job and the idle and lucky one got too sociable, and despite his luck, contracted a social disease. But nothing happened to Jack Burden, for nothing ever happened to Jack Burden, who was invulnerable. Perhaps this was the curse of Jack Burden: he was invulnerable.