All the King's Men - Robert Penn Warren [198]
You can put your throttle to the floor and let the sixty-horse-power mystery whine like a wolfhound straining on leash.
I passed the man who was walking toward me, and his face whirled away like a scrap of paper in a gale or boyhood hopes. And I laughed out loud.
I saw the people walking in the plaza of little towns in the desert. I saw the waitress in the restaurant wave in feeble protest at the fly while the electric fan needled the air which was as thin and hot as the breath of a blast furnace. I saw the traveling salesman who stood at the hotel desk just ahead of me and said, “You call this a hotel, bud, and me wiring for a room and bath and you ain’t held it. It’s a wonder you got a room and bath in a burg like this.” I saw the sheepherder standing alone on an enormous mesa. I saw the Indian woman with eyes the color of blackstrap molasses looking at me over a pile of pottery decorated with the tribal symbols of life and fertility and eminently designed for the five-and-ten-cent-store trade. As I looked at all these people I felt great strength in my secret knowledge.
I remembered how once, long back when Willie Stark had been the dummy and the sap, at the time when he was Cousin Willie from the country and was running for governor the first time, I had gone over to the flea-bitten west part of the state to cover the barbecue and speaking at Upton. I had gone on the local, which had yawed and puffed for hours across the cotton fields and then across the sagebrush. At one little town where it stopped, I had looked out of the window and thought how the board or wire fences around the little board houses were inadequate to keep out the openness of the humped and sage-furred country which seemed ready to slide in and eat up the houses. I had though how the houses didn’t look as though they belonged there, improvised, flung down, ready to be abandoned, with the scraps of washing still on the line, for there wouldn’t be time to grab it off when the people finally realized they had to go and go quick. I had had that thought, but just as the train was pulling out, a woman had come to the back door of one of the nearest houses to fling out a pan of water. She flings the water out, then looks a moment at the train drawing away. She is going into the house to some secret which is there, some knowledge. And as the train pulled away, I had had the notion that I was the one running away and had better run fast for it was going to be dark soon. I had thought of that woman as having a secret knowledge, and had envied her. I had often envied people. People I had seen fleetingly, or some people I had known a long time, a man driving a long, straight furrow across a black field in April, or Adam Stanton. I had, at moments, envied the people who seemed to have a secret knowledge.
But now, as I whirled eastward, over desert, under the shadow of mountains, by mesas, across plateaus, and saw the people in that magnificent empty country, I did not think that I would ever have to envy anybody again, for I was sure that now I had the secret knowledge, and with knowledge you can face up to anything, for knowledge is power.
In a settlement named Don Jon, New Mexico, I talked to a man propped against the shady side of the filling station, enjoying the only patch of shade in a hundred miles due east. He was an old fellow, seventy-five if a day, with a face like sun-brittled leather and pale-blue eyes under the brim of a felt hat which had once been black. The only thing remarkable about him was the fact that while you looked into the sun-brittled leather of the face, which seemed as stiff and devitalized as the hide on a mummy’s jaw, you would suddenly see a twitch in the left cheek, up toward the pale-blue eye. You would think he was going to wink, but he wasn’t going to wink. The twitch was simply an independent phenomenon, unrelated to the face or to what was behind