All the King's Men - Robert Penn Warren [28]
Judge Irwin didn’t answer him. He turned to me, and I said, “I didn’t realize, Jack, that your duties included those of a body servant, but, of course, if I am mistaken–”
I could have slapped his face. I could have slapped that God-damned handsome, eagle-beaked, strong-boned, rubiginous-hided, high old face, in which the eyes weren’t old but were hard and bright without any depth to them and were an insult to look into. And the Boss laughed, and I could have slapped his God-damned face. I could have walked right out and felt the two of them there, alone in that cheese-smelling room together till hell froze over, and just kept on walking. But I didn’t, and perhaps it was just as well, for maybe you cannot ever really walk away from the things you want most to walk away from.
“Oh, nuts,” the Boss said, and stopped laughing, and heaved himself up out of the leather chair, and made a pass at the bottle and sloshed out some whisky into a glass and poured in some water. Then he turned round, and grinning up to the Judge, stepped toward me and held out the glass. “Here, Jack,” he said, “have a drink.”
I can’t say that I took the drink. It got shoved into my hand, and I stood there holding it, not drinking it, and watched the Boss look up at the Judge Irwin and say, “Sometimes Jack pours me a drink, and sometimes I pour him a drink and–” he stepped toward the desk again–“sometimes I pour myself a drink.”
He poured the drink, added water, and looked again at the Judge, leering with a kind of comic cunning. “Whether I’m asked or not,” he said. And added, “There’s lots of things you never get, Judge, if you wait till you are asked. And I am an impatient man. I am a very impatient man, Judge. That is why I am not a gentleman, Judge.”
“Really?” replied the Judge. He stood in the middle of the floor and studied the scene beneath him.
From my spot by the wall, I looked at both of them. To hell with them, I thought, to hell with both of them. When they talked like that, it was to hell with both of them.
“Yeah,” the Boss was saying, “you’re a gent, and so you don’t ever get impatient. Not even for your likker. You aren’t even impatient for your drink right now and it’s likker your money paid for. But you’ll get a drink, Judge. I’m asking you to have one. Have a drink with me, Judge.”
Judge Irwin didn’t answer a word. He stood very erect in the middle of the floor.
“Aw, have a drink,” the Boss said, and laughed, and sat again in the big chair and stuck out his legs on the red carpet.
The Judge didn’t pour himself a drink. And he didn’t sit down.
The Boss looked up at him from the chair and said, “Judge, you happen to have an evening paper round here?”
The paper was lying over on another chair by the fireplace, with the Judge’s collar and tie on top of it, and his white jacket hung on the back of the chair. I saw the Judge’s eyes snap over there to it, and then back at the Boss.
“Yes,” the Judge said, “as a matter of fact, I have.”
“I haven’t had a chance to see one, rushing around the country today. Mind if I take a look?”
“Not in the slightest,” Judge Irwin said, and the sound was the file scraping on that cold tin again, “but perhaps I can relieve your curiosity on one point. The paper publishes my endorsement of Callahan for the Senate nomination. If that is of interest to you.”
“Just wanted to hear you say it, Judge. Somebody told me, but you know how rumor hath a thousand tongues, and how the newspaper boys tend to exaggeration, and the truth ain’t in ’em.”
“There was no exaggeration in this case,” the Judge said.
“Just wanted to hear you say it. With your own silver tongue.”
“Well, you’ve heard it,” the Judge said, standing straight in the middle of the floor, “an in that case, at your leisure–” the Judge’s face was the color of calf’s liver again, even if the word did come