All the King's Men - Robert Penn Warren [225]
The little game the Boss was playing was not over. But I had nearly forgotten all about it. I had forgotten that the story of Judge Irwin, which seemed so complete in itself, was only a chapter in the longer story of the Boss, which was not over and which was itself merely a chapter in another bigger story.
The Boss looked across the desk at me as I walked in, and said, “God damn it, so the bastard crawled out on me.”
I didn’t say anything
“I didn’t tell you to scare him to death, I just told you to scare him.”
“He wasn’t scared,” I said
“What the hell did he do it for then?”
“I told you a long time back when the mess started he wouldn’t scare.”
“Well, why did he do it?”
“I don’t want to discuss it.”
“Well, why did he do it?”
“God damn it,” I said, “didn’t I tell you I didn’t want to discuss it?”
He looked at me with some surprise, got up from his chair and came around the desk. “I’m sorry,” he said, and put his heavy hand on my shoulder.
I moved out under the hand.
“I’m sorry,” he repeated. “He had been quite a pal of yours at one time, hadn’t he?”
“Yeah,” I said
He sat back on the desk and raised one big knee to clasp his hands around it.
“There is still MacMurfee,” he said reflectively.
“Yes, there is MacMurfee, but if you want any blackmailing done, get somebody else to do it.”
“Even on MacMurfee?” he asked, with a hint of jocularity, to which I didn’t respond.
“Even on MacMurfee.” I said.
“Hey,” he demanded, “you aren’t quitting me?”
“No, I’m just quitting certain things.”
“Well, it was true, wasn’t it?”
“What?”
“What the Judge did, whatever the hell it was.”
I couldn’t deny that. I had to say yes. So I nodded and said, “Yes, he did it.”
“Well? he demanded.
“I aid what I said.”
He was studying me drowsily from under the shagged-down forelock. “Boy,” he said then, soberly, “we been together a long time. I hope we’ll be in it together all the way. We been in it up to the ears, both of us, you and me, boy.”
I didn’t answer.
He continued to study me. Then he said, “Don’t you worry. It’ll all come out all right.”
“Yeah,” I said sourly, “you’ll be Senator.”
“I didn’t mean that. I could be Senator right now if that was all.”
“What did you mean?”
He didn’t answer for a moment, not even looking at me but down at the hands clasped around the crooked knee. “Hell,” he said suddenly, “forget it.” Suddenly, he released the knee, the leg dropped, the foot struck the floor heavily, and he lunged off the desk. “But nobody had better forget–MacMurfee and nobody else–that I’ll do what I’ve got to do. By God, I’ll do it if I’ve got to break their bones with my bare hands.” And he held the hands before him with spread fingers, crooked and tense as though to seize.
He sank back against the support of the desk then, and said, half as though to himself, “That Frey, now. That Frey.”
Then he fell into a brooding silence, which, had Frey been able to see it, would have made him very happy to be way off there on the Arkansas farm with no forwarding address left behind.
So the story of the Boss and MacMurfee, of which the story of Judge Irwin had been a part, went on, but I had no hand in it. I went back to my own innocent little chores and sat in my office as the fall drew imperceptibly on and the earth leaned on its axis and shouldered the spot I occupied a little out of the direct, billowing, crystalline, consuming blaze of the enormous sun. The leaves rattled dryly on the live oaks when a breeze sprang up in the evenings, the matted jungles of sugar cane in the country beyond the concrete walks and trolley lines were felled now by the heavy knife and in the evenings the great high-wheeled carts groaned along the rutted tracks, piled high with the