• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 14516 0

“I’m dining with your mother this week. Shall I tell her you still like your work?” But that didn’t last, and I saw him sitting in the long room in the white house by the sea, leaning over a chessboard, facing the Scholarly Attorney, and he wasn’t an old man, he was a young man, and the high aquiline florid face was brooding over the board. But that didn’t last, and the face leaned toward me among the stems of the tall gray marsh grass, in the damp gray wintry dawn, and said, “You ought to have led that duck more, Jack. You got to lead a duck, son. But, son, I’ll make a duck hunter out of you yet.” And the face smiled. And I wanted to speak out and demand, “Is there anything, Judge? Will I find anything?” But the face only smile, and I went to sleep. Before I could say anything, I went to sleep in the middle of the smile.

Then it was another day, and I set out to dig up the dead cat, to excavate the maggot from the cheese, to locate the canker in the rose, to find the deceased fly among the raising in the rice pudding.

I found it.

But not all at once. You do not find it all at once if you are hunting for it. It is buried under the sad detritus of time, where, no doubt, it belongs. And you do not want to find it all at once, not if you are a student of history. If you find it all at once, there would be no opportunity to use your technique. But I had an opportunity to use my technique.

I took the first step the next afternoon while I sat in a beer parlor in the city, surrounded by a barricade of empty beer bottles. I lighted a fresh cigarette from the butt of the last one and asked myself the following question: “For what reason, barring Original Sin, is a man most likely to step over the line?”

I answered: “Ambition, love, fear, money.”

I asked: “Is the Judge ambitious?”

I answered: No. An ambitious man is a man who wants other people to thing he is great. The Judge knows he is great and doesn’t care what other people think.”

I asked: “What about love?”

I was perfectly sure that the Judge had had his innings, but I was also perfectly sure that nobody around the Landing had anything on him in that respect. For if anybody in a small town has anything on anybody it isn’t long before everybody knows it.

I asked: “Is the Judge a man to scare easy?”

I answered: “He does not scare easy.”

That left money.

So I asked: “Does the Judge love money?”

“All the money the Judge wants is just enough money the make the Judge happy.”

I asked: “Was there ever a time when the Judge didn’t have enough money to make the Judge happy?” But naturally that wouldn’t be chicken feed.

I lighted another cigarette and turned that question over in my mind. I did not know the answer. Some voice out of my childhood whispered, but I could not catch what it said. I had the vague sense, rising from a depth of time, and of myself, of being a child, of entering the room where the grown people were, of knowing that they had just that instant stopping talking because I had come into the room and was not supposed to know what they were talking about. Had I overheard what they had been talking about? I listened for the voice whispering out of my childhood, but that voice was a long way off. It could not give me the answer. So I rose from the table, and left the empty beer bottles and the cigarette butts, and went out into the street, which still steamed from the late afternoon shower like a Turkish bath, and where now the tires of automobiles hissed hotly through the film of moisture on the asphalt. If we were lucky there might be a breeze of the Gulf later. If we were lucky.

I got a taxi finally, and said, “Corner South Fifth and Saint-Etienne Street,” and fell back on the leather to listen to the tires hiss through the wetness like something frying in a skillet. I was riding to the answer about the Judge. If the man who had the answer would tell me.

The man was the man who had been the Judge’s close friend for many a year, his other self, his Damon, his Jonathan, his brother. That man was the man who had been the Scholarly Attorney. He would know.