All the King's Men: Chapter 1

...folks swarmed out of the brush for the dollar and folks came from God knows where, riding in wagons with a chest of drawers and a bedstead canted together in the wagon bed...

...he whipped around a hay-wagon in the face of an oncoming gasoline truck and went through the rapidly diminishing aperture close enough to give the truck driver heart-failure with one rear fender and wipe the snot off a mule’s nose with the other.

He wasn’t so awful big, but he was built like a man and his head sat on his shoulders like a man’s head without that gangly, craning look a kid’s head has.

Then, when the attack had passed, he turned to the crowd, which was ringing around at a polite distance and staring, and announced, “My God, folks, it’s Willie!”
The remark was superfluous.

“My God,” the Boss said, in the direction of Doc, who was supporting his ravaged frame by hanging on one of the nickel-plated spouts of the fountain and was watching every drop of the coke go down the Boss’s gullet with the enraptured attention he would have brought to bear on the miracle of the marriage feast.

Not that a passel of those statesmen wouldn’t like to throw me out.

Fate comes walking through the door, and it is five-feet ten 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...

Alex shook my hand and said, “Hi, Pal,” and slapped me on the shoulder with a palm that was tough enough to crack the American black walnut, and paid proper obeisance to Mr. Duffy, who extended a hand without rising, and then, as a sort of after-thought, he jerked a thumb toward his trailing companion and said, “This is Willie Talos, gents. From up home at Mason City. Me and Willie was in school together. Yeah, and Willie, he was a book-worm, he was teacher’s pet. Wuzn’t you, Willie?”

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!”

Mr. Duffy lifted his lip to expose the gold, but made no sound, for, Mr. Duffy being a man of the world and serene in confidence, his style was to put forth his sally and let it make its way on its intrinsic worth and to leave the applause to the public.

And as the admission was made, albeit belatedly, and with some ambiguity of inflection, the slight cloud which had gathered upon Mr. Duffy’s brow was dissipated with no trace of rancor left behind.

And as the admission was made, albeit belatedly, and with some ambiguity of inflection, the slight cloud which had gathered upon Mr. Duffy’s brow was dissipated with no trace of rancor left behind.

And as the admission was made, albeit belatedly, and with some ambiguity of inflection, the slight cloud which had gathered upon Mr. Duffy’s brow was dissipated with no trace of rancor left behind.

Then I came to, and not to be outdone in courtesy of the old school, I sort of hitched my chair back from the table and almost stood all the way up before the lassitude of the season and the effects of my evil way of life sapped my energies, and groped for his hand.

Willie’s hand gave mine three decorous pump-handle motions, and he said, “Glad to meetcha, Mr. Burden,” like it was something he had memorized, and then, I could have sworn to God, he gave me a wink.

About ten years later, at a time when the problem of Willie’s personality more imperiously occupied my rare hours of idle speculation, I asked him, “Boss, do you remember the time we first got acquainted in the back room of Slade’s joint?”

“Boy,” he said and toyed with his glass of Scotch and soda and dug the heel of one of his unpolished, thirty-dollar, chastely designed bench-made shoes into the best bed-spread the St. Regis Hotel could afford—and the St. Regis is no flop-house.

“Sure,” the Boss nodded, “somebody’s got to be Lieutenant Governor.”
“Yeah,” I said, bitterly employing the figure known in the rhetoric books as the litotes, “Tiny Duffy.”

The straws made a little despairing burble, but Willie didn’t give up. He poked them punctiliously into the last little half-moon shaped yellow puddle of orange pop in the tilted bottom, and finished the job.

And he winked ponderously with his left eye. You might call it a wink, that is. One second you were looking into that somewhat inflamed, watery, and beclouded window of Mr. Duffy’s soul, and the next you observed the puffy and slightly granulated membrane descend with deliberate emphasis, then twitch upward in its well lubricated track.

It is the same fascination you feel when you go to the aquarium and spy on the obscenely perfect organization of the octopus pulsing in its repose.

On second thought, it would be unfair to say that Alex gave a whicker. He gave what promised to be one, before the sight of Mr. Duffy’s face froze mirth and youthful jollity in their tracks.

The tone of our little gathering suffered a change. The free spirit of comradely raillery which had just prevailed gave place to a dour subjectivity.

The free spirit of comradely raillery which had just prevailed gave place to a dour subjectivity.

Duffy’s features exhibited the slightest twitch of interest, but the twitch was dissipated into the vast oleaginous blankness which was the face of Duffy in repose.

Duffy was face to face with the margin of mystery where all our calculations collapse, where the stream of time dwindles into the sands of eternity, where the formula fails in the test tube, where chaos and old night hold sway and we hear the laughter in the ether dream.

Duffy’s lips worked, and you could catch the discreet glimmer of the gold in the bridgework, but no word came forth.

The linoleum mat was newish, and the colors were still bright—reds and tans and blues slick and varnished looking—a kind of glib, impertinent, geometrical island floating there in the midst of the cornerless shadows and the acid mummy smell and the slow swell of Time which had fed into this room, day by day for a long time, as into a landlocked sea where the fish were dead and the taste was brackish on your tongue.

The linoleum mat was newish, and the colors were still bright—reds and tans and blues slick and varnished looking—a kind of glib, impertinent, geometrical island floating there in the midst of the cornerless shadows and the acid mummy smell and the slow swell of Time which had fed into this room, day by day for a long time, as into a landlocked sea where the fish were dead and the taste was brackish on your tongue.

The photographer hid his head under the black cloth, then he popped out again all agog with an idea.

“Hi, Buck, hi, Buck,” the old man wheedled without optimism.

I wandered off downstairs and left them preparing the documents for posterity.

So I decorously withdrew my gaze from the pair, and resumed my admiration of the dying day on the other side of the hog lot and the elegiac landscape.

I figured the little al fresco conclave was about to break up.

I figured the little al fresco conclave was about to break up.

Theodore Murrell would be lying there, too, breathing with a slightly adenoidal sibilance under his beautiful blonde mustache.

You knew that if he had a little glass window in the side of that tall skull, where the one-time thick, dark-red, mane-like hair was thinned out now and faded, you could see inside and see the wheels and springs and cogs and ratchets working away and shining like a beautiful lot of well kept mechanism.

“Come to think of it, there ain’t a thing but dirt on this green God’s globe except what’s under water, and that’s dirt too. It’s dirt makes the grass grow. A diamond ain’t a thing in the world but a piece of dirt that got awful hot. And God-a-Mighty picked up a handful of dirt and blew on it and made you and me and George Washington and mankind blessed in faculty and apprehension. It all depends on what you do with the dirt. That right?”

“It’s a fact,” the Boss admitted ruefully, lifting his face under the light, and shaking his head in fatalistic sadness.

Maybe somebody might give Callahan a little shovelful on somebody else and Callahan might grow a conscience all of a sudden and repudiate his endorser.