All the King's Men - Robert Penn Warren [123]
I stood on the pavement, in front of the Mexican restaurant, where the juke box made the jellylike air palpitate, and paid my taxi and turned to look up at the third floor of the building which vibrated around the juke box. The signs were still up there, hung by wire from the little iron balcony, nailed to the wall, wooden boards painted different colors, some white, some red, some black, some green, with lettering in contrasted colors. A big sign hanging from the balcony said: God is not mocked. Another sign said: Now is the Day of Salvation.
Yeah, I said to myself, he still lives here. He lived there above a spick restaurant, and nigger children played naked in the next block among starving cats, and nigger women sat on the steps after the sun got low and fanned right slow with palm-leaf fans. I reached for a cigarette as I prepared to enter the doorway of the stairs, but found I had none. So I went into the restaurant, where the juke box was grinding to a halt.
To the old woman who stood behind the beer bar squatly like a leg and whose eyebrows were very thorny and white against the brown Mexican skin and black rebozo, I said, “Cigarrillos?”
“Que tipo?” she asked.
“Lucky,” I said, and as she laid them before me, I pointed upward, and asked, “The old man, is he upstairs?” But she looked blank, so I said, “Esta arriba el viejo?” And felt pleased with myself for getting it off.
“Quien sabe?” she replied. “Viene y va.”
So he came and went. Upon the Lord’s business.
The a voice said in tolerable English, from the shadows at the end of the bar, “The old man has gone out.”
“Thank you,” I replied to the old man, a Mexican, who was propped there in a chair. I turned back to the old woman, and said, “Give me a beer,” and pointed to the spigot.
While I drank the beer I looked up above the counter and saw another one of the signs, painted on a big slab of plywood, or something of the sort, hanging from a nail. The background of the sign was bright red, there were blue scrolls of flowers in relief in the upper corner, the lettering was in black, high-lighted in white. It said: Repent ye; for the Kingdom of Heaven is at hand. Matt., iii,2.
I pointed to the sign. “De el? I asked. “The old man’s huh?”
“Si, señor,” the old woman said. Then added irrelevantly, “Es como un santito.”
“He may be a saint,” I agreed, “but he is also nuts.”
“Nutz?”
She said nothing to that, and I continued with the beer until the old Mexican at the end of the bar suddenly said, “Look, here comes the old one!”
Turning, I saw the black-clothed figure through the dingy glass of the door; then the door pushed open and he entered, older than I remember, the white patches of hair hanging damply from under the old Panama hat, the steel-rimmed spectacles dangerously loose on the nose and the pale eyes behind, the shoulders stooped and drawn together as though pulled by the obscene, disjunctive, careful weight of the belly, as though it were the heavy tray, or satchel, worn by some hawker on a street corner. The black coat did not button across the belly.
He stood there, blinking gravely to me, apparently not recognizing me, for he had come from the last sunshine into the dimness of the restaurant.
“Good evening, señor,” the old Mexican said to the Scholarly Attorney.
“Buenas tardes,” the woman said.
The Scholarly Attorney took off his Panama and turned to the woman, and bowed slightly, with a motion of the head which stirred suddenly in my mind the picture of the long room in the white house by the sea, the picture of a man, the same but different, younger, the hair not gray, in that room. “Good evening,” he said to the woman, and then turning to the old Mexican, repeated, “Good evening, sir.”
The old Mexican pointed at me, and said, “He waits.”
At that the Scholarly Attorney first, I believe, really observed me. But he did not recognize me, blinking at me in the dimness. Certainly he had no reason to expect to find me there.
“Hello,” I said, “don’t you know me?”
“Yes,” he said, and continued to peer at me. He offered me his hand, and I took