All the King's Men - Robert Penn Warren [227]
The figure was not cheap. It was not peanuts. It was the medical-center contract, the general contract. It would be arranged that Larson would get the contract.
But I had nothing to do with the arranging. Duffy did that, for he had been pulling all along for such an arrangement, and I suppose that he must have got some sort of private kickback or sweetening from Larson. Well, I don’t begrudge him that. He had worked for it. He had cringed and sweated and felt the baleful speculative stare of the Boss on him in the long silence after he had tried to sell the idea of Gummy Larson. It wasn’t his fault that an accident now made the deal possible and not his own conscientious efforts. So I don’t begrudge him his sweetening.
All of this went on behind my back, or perhaps even under my eyes, for in those days as fall came on I felt as though I were gradually withdrawing from the world around me. It could go its way and I would go mine. Or I would have gone my way if I had known what it was. I toyed with the thought of going away, of saying to the Boss, “Boss, I’m getting the hell away from here and never coming back.” I could afford to do it, I thought. I didn’t have to lift a finger for my morning sinker and Java. Maybe I wouldn’t be rich-rich, but I figured I was going to be rich in a nice, genteel, Southern way. Nobody down here ever wants to be rich-rich, for that, of course, would be crass and vulgar. So I was going to be just genteel rich. As soon as they wound up the Judge’s estate. (If they ever did, for his affairs were complicated and it was going to take some time.)
I was going to be genteel rich, for I had inherited the fruits of the Judge’s crime, just as some day I would inherit from my mother the fruit of the Scholarly Attorney’s weakness, the money he had left with her when he learned the truth and just walked away. On the proceeds of the Judge’s old crime I would be able to go away and lead a nice, clean, blameless life in some place where you sit under a striped awning beside a marble-topped table and drink vermouth, cassis and soda and look out over the wimpling, dimpling, famous sunlit blue of the sea. But I didn’t go. True, since I had lost my fathers, I felt as though I could float effortless away like a balloon when the last cord is cut. But I would have to go on the money from Judge Irwin. And that particular money, which would have made the trip possible, was at the same time, paradoxically enough a bond that held me there. To change the image, it was a long cable to an anchor, and the anchor flukes clung and bit way down there in the seaweed and ooze of a long time past. Perhaps I was a fool to feel that way about my little inheritance. Perhaps it was no different from any other inheritance anybody had. Perhaps the Emperor Vespasian was right when, jingling in his jeans the money which had been derived from a tax on urinals, he wittily remarked: “Pecunia non olet.”
I didn’t go away, but I was out of the swim of things, and sat in my office or out at the University library and read books and monographs on taxation, for I now had a nice clean assignment to work on: a tax bill. I knew so little of what was going on that it wasn’t until the arrangement was an accomplished fact that I knew anything about it.
I went up to the Mansion one night with my brief case full of notes and charts to have a session with the Boss. The Boss was not alone. Back there in the library with him were Tiny Duffy, Sugar-Boy, and, to my surprise, Gummy Larson. Sugar-Boy sat over in a corner, hunched in a chair and holding