All the King's Men

by Robert Penn Warren

  As for me I am getting out of here. I don’t mean just getting out of this cross between an old folks’ home and a booby-hatch, but out of this town and out of this state. I can’t stand it round here and I’m pulling out. I’ll be gone a long way and I’ll be gone a long time and maybe somewhere the climate will be better. But my cousin (Mrs. Sill Larkin, 2331 Rousseau Ave.) who is the nearest thing to a relative I got will have some kind of address for me sometime, and if you ever want to contact me just write me care of her. Wherever I am I’ll do what you say. I’ll come if you say come. I don’t want you thinking I am going to welch. I don’t care who knows anything. I’ll do anything you say about that piece of business.

  But if you take my advice about that piece of business you will let it drop. This is not because I love Duffy. I hope you will give him an earful and let him wet his pants. But my advice is to let it drop. First, you cannot do anything in law. Second, if you use it politically the best you can get will be to keep Duffy from being reelected, and you know as well as I do he will never get nominated even. The boys will never nominate him for they know he is a dummy even by their standards. He was just something the Boss kept around. Springing this stuff won’t hurt the gang any. I will just give them an excuse to get rid of Duffy. If you want to get the gang you got to let them dig their own grave like they sure will now the Boss is gone. But third, it is sure going to be rough on that Stanton dame if you break this stuff. She may be so noble and high-toned like you said that she will want you to do it, but you are a sap if you do. She has maybe had plenty to put up with already in her way, and you would be a sap to crucify her just because you got some high-faluting idea you are an Eagle Scout and she is Joan of Arc. You would be a sap to tell her even. Unless you are so blabber mouthed you have done it already. Like you maybe have. I am not going on to say she is my best friend but she has had her troubles like I said and you might give her a break.

  Remember I am not welching. I am just giving you my advice.

  Keep your tail over the dashboard.

  Sincerely yours,

  SADIE BURKE

  I read through Sadie’s statement. It said everything there was to say, and each page was signed and witnessed. Then I folded up. It was no good to me. Not because of the advice which Sadie had given me. Her letter made sense, all right. That is, the part about Duffy and the gang. But something had happened. To hell with them all, I thought. I was sick of it all.

  I looked down at the letter again. So Sadie had called me an Eagle Scout. But that wasn’t news, either. I had called myself worse names than that the night after I had seen Duffy and was walking down the street under the stars. But it touched the sore place and made it throb. It throbbed the worse because I knew that it wasn’t a secret sore place. Sadie had known about it. She had seen through me. She had read me like a book.

  There was only one wry piece of consolation in the thought. At least, I had not had to wait for her to read me. I had read myself to myself that night walking down the street, full of beans and being an Eagle Scout, when the yellow, acid taste had all at once crawled up to the back of my mouth.

  What had I read? I had read this: When I found out about Duffy’s killing the Boss and Adam I had felt clean and pure, and when I kicked Duffy around I felt like a million because I thought it let me out. Duffy was the villain and I was the avenging hero. I had kicked Duffy around and my head was big as a balloon with grandeur. Then all at once something happened and the yellow taste was in the back of my mouth.

  This happened: I suddenly asked myself why Duffy had been so sure I would work for him. And suddenly I saw the eyes of the little squirt-face newspaperman at the cemetery gate on me, and all the eyes that had looked at me that way, and suddenly I knew that I had tried to make Duffy into a scapegoat for me and to set myself off from Duffy, and my million-dollar meal of heroism backfired that yellow taste into my gullet and I felt caught and tangled and mired and stuck like an ox in a bog and a cat in flypaper. It wasn’t simply that I again saw myself as party to that conspiracy with Anne Stanton which had committed Willie Stark and Adam Stanton to each other and to their death. It was more than that. It was as though I were caught in a more monstrous conspiracy whose meaning I could not fathom. It was as though the scene through which I had just lived had been a monstrous and comic miming for ends I could not conceive and for an audience I could not see but which I knew was leering from the shadow. It was as though in the midst of the scene Tiny Duffy had slowly and like a brother winked at me with his oyster eye and I had known he knew the nightmare truth, which was that we were twins bound together more intimately and disastrously than the poor freaks of the midway who are bound by the common stitch of flesh and gristle and the seepage of blood. We were bound together forever and I could never hate him without hating myself or love myself without loving him. We were bound together under the unwinking eye of Eternity and by the Holy Grace of the Great Twitch whom we must all adore.

  And I heaved and writhed like the ox or the cat, and the acid burned my gullet and that was all there was to it and I had everything and everybody and myself and tiny Duffy and Willie Stark and Adam Stanton. To hell with them all, I said impartially under the stars. They all looked alike to me then. And I looked like them.

  That was the way it was for quite a while.

  I did not go back to the Landing. I did not want to see Anne Stanton. I did not even open a letter she wrote me. It lay on my bureau where I saw it every morning. I did not want to see anybody I knew. I hung around town and sat in my room or sat in bars which I had never frequented and sat in movies in the front row, where I could admire the enormous and distorted shadows which gesticulated and struck or clutched or clung and uttered asseverations which reminded you of everything which you had ever remembered. And I sat for hours in the newspaper room of the public library, the place like railway stations and missions and public latrines is where the catarrhal old men and bums go and where they sit to thumb the papers which tell about the world in which they live for a certain number of years or to sit and wheeze and stare while the gray rain slides down the big windowpanes above them.

  It was in the newspaper room of the library that I saw Sugar-Boy. It was such an improbable place to encounter him that at first I scarcely accepted the evidence of my eyes. But there he was. The rather largish head hung forward as though its weight were too much for the little stem of a neck, and I could see how thin and pink like a baby’s the skin was over the skull in the areas where the hair had prematurely gone. His short arms in sleeves of wrinkled blue serge lay symmetrically out before him on the table, like a brace of stuffed sacks of country sausage laid on a butcher’s counter. The pale, chubby hands curled innocently on the varnished yellow oak of the table. He was looking at a picture magazine.

  Then one of the hands, the right hand, with the quick, flickering motion which I remembered, dropped below the level of the table–to the side pocket of his coat, I presumed–and returned with a cube of sugar which he popped into his mouth. The flickering motion of the hand reminded me, and I wonder if he was still carrying a gun. I looked at the left side toward the shoulder, but I couldn’t tell. Sugar-Boy’s blue serge coat was always a size too big for him.

  It was Sugar-Boy all right, and I didn’t want to see him. If he should raise his head he would look right at me. Now while he was sunk in the picture magazine I tried for the door. I edged over to one side easy and was almost past his natural area of vision when he lifted his head and our eyes met. He rose from the chair and came toward me.

  I gave an ambiguous nod which might have served merely for recognition, a rather chilly and discouraging recognition, or for a signal to follow me out to the hall where we could talk. He took the latter interpretation, and followed me. I didn’t wait just outside the door, but move some distance across the hall to the steps (those newspaper rooms in public libraries are always in a half basement, next to the men’s latrine) which led up to the main lobby. Maybe he would read some
thing into that extra distance. But he didn’t. He came padding over to me, with his blue serge trousers bagging down low of his can and the tops crumpling over his black, soft-leather box-toed shoes.

  “How-how-how–” he began, and the face began its pained, apologetic contortions, and the spit flew.

  “I’m making out,” I said, “How’re you making out?”

  “Aw-aw-aw-right.”

  He stood there in the dingy, dimly lit basement hall of the public library with the cigarette butts on the cement floor around us and the door of the men’s latrine behind us and the air smelling of dry paper and dust and disinfectant. It was eleven-thirty in the morning and outside the gray sky dripped steadily like a sogged old awning. We looked at each other. Each one knew the other was there out of the rain because he had no other place to go.

  He shuffled his feet on the floor, looked down to the floor, then back up at me. “I-I-I could-a had a-a-a-a job,” he declared earnestly.

  “Sure,” I said, without much interest.

  “I-I-I-I just didn’t wa-wa-wa-want one. Not yet,” he said. “I didn’t fee-fee-feel like no job yet.”

  “Sure,” I repeated.

  “I-I-I got me some mo-mo-money saved up,” he said apologetically.

  “Sure.”

  He looked searchingly at me. “Y-y-y-you got a job?” he asked.

  I shook my head, but was about to say in my defense what he had just said, that I could have had one if I had wanted. I could have been sitting up in a nice office next door to Tint Duffy’s office with my feet on a mahogany desk. If I had wanted. And as that crossed my mind, with the momentary flicker of weary self-irony, I suddenly saw like a blaze of lightening and a clap of thunder what the Lord had put before me. Duffy, I thought, Duffy.

  And there was Sugar-Boy standing before me.

  “Listen,” I said, and leaned toward him in the empty hall, “listen, do you know who killed the Boss?”

  The biggish head rolled a little to one side on the little stem of a neck as he looked up at me and the face began its painful twitching. “Yeah,” he said, “yeah–the son-of-a-bi-bi-bitch and I-I-I shot him.”

  “Yeah,” I said, “you shot Stanton–” and I thought with an instantaneous stab of Adam Stanton alive a long time back and now dead, and I hated the malformed, sad little creature before me–”yeah, you shot him.

  The head rolled slightly and tiredly on the neck, and he repeated, “I-I-I shot him.”

  But suppose you don’t know,” I said, leaning, “suppose there was somebody behind Stanton, somebody who framed him to do it.”

  I let that sink in, and watched his face twitch while no sound came.

  “Suppose,” I continued, “suppose I could tell you who–suppose I could prove it–what would you do?”

  Suddenly his face wasn’t twitching. It was smooth as a baby’s and peaceful, but peaceful in the way that intensity can sometimes momentarily make a face look peaceful and pure.

  “What would you do?” I demanded “I’d kill the son-of-a-bitch,” he said. And he had not stuttered at all.

  “They’d hang you,” I said.

  “I’d k-k-k-kill him. They couldn’t h-h-h-hang me before I killed him.”

  “Remember,” I whispered, leaning closer, “they’d hang you.”

  He stared up at me, prying into my face. “Who-who-who is it?”

  “They’d hang you. Are you sure you’d kill him?”

  “Who-who-who–” he began. Then he clutched my coat. “Y-y-you know–” he said, “y-y-you know something you ain’t t-t-t-telling me.”

  I could tell him. I could say to him, meet me here at three o’clock, I want to show you something. I could bring the stuff from Sadie, the stuff that lay up in my room in a desk, and he would take one look. One look. It would be like touching a trigger.

  His hands were clutching and clawing at my coat. “T-t-tell me,” he was saying.

  One look. It was perfect. I could meet him here in the afternoon. We could step into the latrine and he could take one look, and I would go home and burn the stuff. Hell, why burn it? What had I done? I even warned the little burger they’d hang him. They had nothing on me.

  He was clawing at me, importunately and feebly, saying, “T-t-tell me, you better t-t-tell me now.”

  It would be too easy. It was perfect. And the perfect mathematical irony of it–the perfect duplication of what Duffy had done–struck me, and I felt like laughing out loud. “Listen here,” I said to Sugar-Boy. “Stop clawing on me and listen here and I’ll–”

  He stopped clawing and stood meekly before me.

  He would do it, I knew he would do it. And it was such a joke on Duffy I almost laughed out loud. And as the name of Duffy flashed across my mind I saw Duffy’s face, large and lunar and sebaceous, nodding at me as at the covert and brotherly appreciation of a joke, and even s I opened my lips to speak the syllables of his name, he winked. He winked right at me like a brother.

  I stood there stock-still.

  Sugar-Boy’ face began to twitch again. He was going to ask again. I stared down at him. “I was kidding,” I said.

  There was absolute blankness on his face, and then an absolute murderousness. There wasn’t any flare of fury. It was a cold and innocent and murderous certainty. It was as though his face had suddenly frozen in a split second in that certainty, and it looked like the face of a man who had been trapped and had died in the snow long ago, centuries ago–back in the ice age, perhaps–and the glacier brings it down all those centuries, inch by inch, and suddenly, with its primitive purity and lethal innocent, it stares at you through the last preserving glaze of ice.

  I stood there for what seemed forever. I couldn’t move. I was sure I was a goner.

  Then the ice face wasn’t there. It was just Sugar-Boy’s face on a head to big for the neck, and it was saying, “I-I-I durn near d-d-done it.”

  I ran my tongue over my dry lips. “I know it,” I said.

  “Y-y-you oughtn’t d-d-d-done me that way,” he said in humble complaint.

  “I’m sorry.”

  “Y-y-you know h-h-how I feel, and y-y-you oughtn’t d-d-done me like that.”

  “I know how you feel,” I said. “And I’m sorry. I really am.”

  “F-f-ferget it,” he said. He stood there, seeming smaller than before, slumped and forlorn as though he were a doll that had lost some of his sawdust.

  I studied him. Then I said, as much to myself as him, I suppose, “You really would have done it.”

  “It w-w-was the B-B-Boss,” he said.

  “Even if they’d hang you.”

  “They w-w-wasn’t n-n-nobody like the B-B-Boss. And they k-k-killed him. They h-h-had to go and k-k-kill him.”

  He shuffled his feet on the cement floor and looked down at them. “He could t-t-talk so good,” he half-mumbled with his stuttering. “The B-B-Boss could. Couldn’t nobody t-t-talk like him. When he m-m-made a speech and ev-ev-everybody y-y-yelled, it looked l-l-like something was gonna b-b-bust inside y-y-you.” He touched his chest with his hand to indicate where something looked like it might bust inside you. Then he looked questioningly at me.

  “Sure,” I agreed, “he was a great talker.”

  We stood there for half minute more without anything to say to each other. He looked at me and then down at his feet. Then back at me, and said, “W-w-well, I reckon I’ll b-b-be getting on.”

  He put out one of his hands to me and I took it and gave it a shake.

  “Well, good luck,” I said.

  And he went up the stairs, bending his knees excessively for the stairs, for his legs were stumpy. When he used to drive the big black Cadillac he always had a couple of flat cushions–the kind you take with you on picnics or in a canoe–to prop behind him so he could properly work the clutch and break pedals.

  So that was the last I saw of Sugar-Boy. He had been born over in Irish Town. He had been the runt the big boys shoved around in the vacant lot. They had played baseball,
but he hadn’t been good enough to play. “Hey, Sawed-Off,” they’d say, “go git me that bat.” Or, “Hey, Sawed-Off, go git me a coke.” And he had gone to get the bat or the coke. Or they’d say, “Aw, dry up, Mush-Mouth, write me a letter.” And he had dried up. But somehow, sometimes, he had learned what he could do. Those stubby arms could flip the steering wheel of a car as clean as a bee martin whips around the corner of a barn. Those pale-blue eyes, which didn’t have any depth, could look down the barrel of a.38 and see, really see for one frozen and apocalyptic instant, what was over yonder. So he had found himself one day in the big black Cadillac with a couple of tons of expensive machinery pulsing under his fingers and the blue-steel.38 riding in the dark under his left armpit like a tumor. And the Boss was by his side, who could talk so good.

  “Well, good look,” I had said to him, but I knew what his luck would be. Some morning I would pick up the paper and see that a certain Robert (or it was Roger?) O’Sheean had been killed in an automobile crash. Or had been shot to death by unidentified assailants while he sat in the shadow outside the Love-Me-and-Leave-Me roadhouse and gambling hell operated by his employer. Or had that morning walked unassisted to the scaffold as a result of having been quicker on the draw than a policeman named, no doubt, Murphy. Or perhaps that was romantic. Perhaps he would live forever and outlive everything and his nerve would go (likker, dope, or just plain time) and he would sit, morning after morning while the gray winter rain sluiced down the high windows, in the newspaper room of the public library, a scrawny bald little old man in greasy, tattered clothes bent over a picture magazine.

  So perhaps I hadn’t done Sugar-Boy any favor after all in not telling him about Duffy and the Boss and allowing him to whang straight to his mark and be finished like a bullet when it strikes in.. Perhaps I had robbed Sugar-Boy of the one thing which he had earned out of the years he had lived and which was truly himself, and everything else to come after, no matter what it was, would be waste and accident and the sour and stinking curdle of truth like what you find in the half-full bottle of milk you had left in the ice-box when you went away for your six-week vacation.