All the King's Men - Robert Penn Warren [207]
Too long, I thought then, too long to know him. For maybe the time had blinded me, or rather I had not been aware of the passing of time and always the round face of Cousin Willie had come between me and the other face so that I had never really seen the other face. Except perhaps in those moments when it had leaned forward to the crowds and the forelock had fallen and the eyes had bulged, and the crowd had roared and I had felt the surge in me and had felt that I was on the verge of the truth. But always the face of Cousin Willie above the Christmas tie had come again.
But it did not come now. I saw the face. Enormous. Bigger than a billboard. The forelock shagged down like a mane. The big jaw. The heavy lips laid together like masonry. The eyes burning and bulging powerfully.
Funny, I had never seen it before. Not really.
That night I telephoned the Boss, told him what had happened and how Anne had told me, and made my suggestion about getting Adam to swear out a warrant for Coffee. He said to do it. To do anything that would nail Adam. So I went to the hotel, where I lat on my bed under the electric fan until the desk called me to get up at about six o’clock. Then by seven I was on Adam’s doorstep, with a single cup of java sloshing about in my insides and a fresh razor cut on my chin and sleep like sand under my eyelids.
I worked it. It was a hard little job I had cut out for me. First, I had to enlist Adam on the side of righteousness by getting him to agree to swear out a warrant for Coffee. My method was to assume, of course, that he was aching for the opportunity to nail Coffee, and to indicate that the Boss was cheering on the glorious exploit. Then I had to lead him to the discovery, which had to be all his own, that this would involve Anne as a witness. Then I had played the half-wit and imply that this had never occurred to me before. The danger was, with a fellow like Adam, that he would get so set on seeing justice done that he would let Anne testify, hell and high water. He almost did that, but I painted a gory picture of the courtroom scene (but not as gory by half as it would have been in truth), refused to be party to the business, hinted that he was an unnatural brother, and wound up with a vague notion of another way to get Coffee for a similar attempt in another quarter–a vague notion of laying myself open for Coffee to approach me. I could put out a feeler for him, and all that. So Adam dropped the idea of the charge, but retained the implied idea that he and the Boss had teamed up to keep things clean for the hospital.
Just as we were ready to walk out of the apartment, he stepped to the mantelpiece and picked up the stamped letters waiting there to be mailed. I had spotted the top envelope already, the one address to the Boss. So as he turned around with the letters in his hand, I simply lifted that one out of his grasp, said with my best smile, “Hell, you haven’t got any use for this in the daylight,” and tore it across and put the pieces into my pocket.
Then we went out back and got into his car. I rode with him all the way to his office. I would have sat with him all day to keep an eye on him if it had been possible. Anyway, I chatted briskly all the way down-town to keep his mind clear. My chatter was as gay and sprightly as bird song.
So the summer moved on, swelling slowly like a great fruit, and everything was as it had been before. I went to my office. I went back to my hotel and sometimes ate a meal and sometimes did not and lay under the fan and read till late. I saw the same faces, Duffy, the Boss, Sadie Burke, all the faces I had known for a long time and saw so often I didn’t notice the changes in them. But I did not see Adam and Anne for a while. And I had not seen Lucy Stark for a long time. She was living out in the country now. The Boss would still go out to see her now and then, to keep up appearances, and have his picture taken among the white leghorns. Sometimes Tom Stark would stand there with him and, perhaps,